The Kowtow and the Crowd: The Macartney Embassy and the Doubling of China

Act I: The Kowtow (Review Question 6)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, "Contacts with Europe," pp. 280–281. Reading-guide sentence (p. 280): "Macartney was instructed to secure a place for British traders near the tea-producing areas, negotiate a commercial treaty, create a desire for British products, arrange for diplomatic representation in Beijing, and open Japan and Southeast Asia to British commerce as well."

A world of tribute

The deck begins with the Ming inheritance (slide B). The Qing, like the Ming, treated foreign relations as a matter of hierarchy: foreign rulers sent envoys with "tribute," received gifts and calendars in return, and traded at set places and times. Ebrey lists Korea, Ryukyu, Japan, Vietnam and much of Southeast Asia as states that "sent envoys to the court at Beijing" (p. 280). Japan should come off that list, and the deck's notes now leave it off. The Tokugawa shogunate sent no embassies to the Qing; Chinese merchants traded at Nagasaki under Japanese licenses, on Japan's terms. Korea, Ryukyu and Vietnam were the model tributaries. Historians also warn against treating the "tribute system" as a single, rigid machine. It was a set of rituals and practices the court applied flexibly, and much trade, especially on the coast and the inner Asian frontier, happened outside it.¹

Tea, Canton and silver

Britain came for tea (slide C). In the eighteenth century the East India Company's China trade grew from a sideline into one of its largest businesses, and tea became a British national habit. After 1757 the Qing confined European trade to Guangzhou (Canton) (slide D). Foreign merchants lived in the "factories" outside the city walls during the trading season, could not enter the city, dealt only with a licensed guild of Chinese firms (the Cohong), and were forbidden to hire Chinese teachers. When the English trader James Flint sailed north to Ningbo and then to Tianjin in 1759 to protest, he was jailed for three years, and the Chinese who had helped him write his petition was executed.

Slide E's concept, a lopsided balance of trade, explains why the system frustrated the British. China bought little that Britain made, so the Company paid for tea largely in silver. By the end of the century, Ebrey notes, "tea made up 80 percent of Chinese exports to Europe" (p. 280). The Canton system was not a refusal to trade. It was a way of managing a very profitable trade under the control of a few accountable people, far from the capital, and it brought the Qing a steady inflow of silver.²

Macartney's goals and gifts

The British government was also suspicious of the Company itself, which "had made great fortunes from its trade with China" (Ebrey, p. 280), and wanted direct relations with the Qing (slide F). George III sent George, Lord Macartney (1737–1806), an experienced diplomat who had negotiated a commercial treaty with Russia in the 1760s and governed Madras in 1781–1785. His instructions are the reading-guide sentence: a trading base near the tea districts, a commercial treaty, a market for British manufactures, a resident envoy in Beijing, and access to Japan and Southeast Asia. Macartney also hoped for a small island where British traders could live under their own rules, and for a fixed, published tariff.

The embassy sailed in September 1792 in HMS Lion and the Company ship Hindostan, with an entourage of eighty-four and six hundred cases of gifts: clocks, a planetarium, telescopes, globes, Wedgwood, glass, carpets and woolens (slide G). Ebrey says that "the only member of the British party able to speak Chinese" was a twelve-year-old boy (p. 280). The boy was George Thomas Staunton, son of the embassy's secretary, who learned Chinese on the voyage and later became Britain's leading Sinologist. But he was not the embassy's only Chinese speaker. Macartney had recruited two Chinese Catholic priests trained at the Chinese College in Naples to serve as interpreters. One left the embassy at Macao. The other, Li Zibiao (known to the British as Jacobus Ly or Plumb), did the interpreting all the way to Rehe, at considerable risk to himself. The boy's role was to copy Chinese documents, and at the audience he spoke a few words to the emperor. Slide G's headline now says that he was the only Briton who could speak Chinese, and the slide names Li Zibiao.³

The audience

The embassy did not land at Guangzhou. It sailed north and reached the mouth of the Beihe, near Tianjin, in late July and August 1793, and went up to Beijing by river and road. Ebrey's "After Lord Macartney arrived in Guangzhou in 1793" (p. 280) is a slip; Macartney left China through Guangzhou, after traveling overland from Beijing, and sailed from Macao in March 1794. Ebrey's "letter to him from George II" is a misprint for George III. The deck gets both right (slide H).

The kowtow, three kneelings and nine knockings of the head on the ground, became the most famous issue. Macartney refused to perform it unless a Qing official of equal rank kowtowed to a portrait of George III. In the end, on 14 September 1793, he was received by Qianlong, then eighty-one, in a great tent at the summer palace at Rehe (Chengde), beyond the Great Wall, and knelt on one knee, as he would to his own king. Some Chinese records and later accounts say he did more. James Hevia argues that the quarrel was not a misunderstanding but a clash of two coherent ritual systems, each of which expressed a theory of how sovereigns related.⁴ The deck's slide H image is William Alexander's watercolor of the emperor's arrival at the tent. Alexander, the embassy's draftsman, did not go to Rehe and worked from a fellow officer's sketches; the slide says so.

The answer

Ebrey writes: "No negotiations followed this meeting, however, because the Qing court saw no merit in Macartney's requests. It was as interested in maintaining its existing system of regulated trade as Britain was in doing away with it" (p. 280; slide I). The deck's notes now quote the sentence with "however" restored.

Qianlong replied in two edicts to George III. The first answered the king's letter. The second, written after Macartney set out his specific requests, rejected them one by one: no resident envoy, no new ports, no island, no special tariff. The most quoted line, "I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufactures," comes from the 1914 translation by Edmund Backhouse and J. O. P. Bland, and it is freer than the Chinese. Henrietta Harrison has shown that the edicts were part of a larger response. While the court wrote with calm superiority, Qianlong privately ordered coastal officials to strengthen defenses and watch the British closely. He knew that Britain ruled much of India, and the court suspected the British of having helped the Gurkhas of Nepal, against whom the Qing had just fought a war in Tibet (1788–1792). The edict's tone of indifference was diplomatic, not ignorant. Harrison also shows that the image of a China uninterested in the outside world owes much to how the edict was translated and read in the early twentieth century.⁵

Ebrey's conclusion, that "the Chinese did not learn much about Europe or Britain from this encounter" (p. 281), is fair for the court as a whole. It is less true of the emperor and his frontier officials, who learned enough to worry.

Act II: The Crowd (Review Question 7)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, "The Qing at Its Height," pp. 273–274, and "The Less Advantaged and the Disaffected," pp. 283–284. Reading-guide sentence (p. 273): "Population growth during the course of the eighteenth century has been attributed to many factors: global warming that extended the growing season; expanded use of New World crops; slowing of the spread of new diseases that had accompanied the sixteenth-century expansion of global traffic; and the efficiency of the Qing government in providing relief in times of famine."

How many people?

China's population rose from about 150–175 million in 1700 to about 300–325 million by 1800, by Ebrey's estimate (p. 273; slide K). The figures rest on Qing registration data, which improved after the 1740s, and on modern reconstructions. They are estimates, but the doubling is not in doubt. By 1800 something like one person in three on earth lived under the Qing.⁶

Why?

Slide L presents Ebrey's four causes, with the first now worded as a milder climate. Each needs a sentence of explanation.

• Climate. Ebrey's "global warming" does not mean modern climate change. The seventeenth century was one of the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age, with droughts and famines that helped bring down the Ming. The eighteenth century was milder, with longer growing seasons. "A milder climate" is the safer phrase.⁷
• American crops. Maize, sweet potatoes, white potatoes and peanuts, all brought from the Americas in the sixteenth century, let farmers cultivate hills and sandy soils "previously rejected as too hilly or infertile" (p. 283).
• Disease. The waves of new epidemics that accompanied the first age of global contact slowed, and Qing elites practiced smallpox inoculation.
• Famine relief. The eighteenth-century state ran a large network of "ever-normal" granaries and relief campaigns. Pierre-Étienne Will's study of the great drought in Zhili in 1743–1744 shows a bureaucracy capable of feeding millions.⁸

To these, add the long peace after 1683, the opening of frontier land in the southwest, Taiwan and Manchuria, and commercial growth. James Lee and Wang Feng add a demographic point. Chinese families limited births, through late weaning, low marital fertility and, above all, female infanticide, so the growth was not a Malthusian explosion of uncontrolled breeding. It was the product of families making choices within limits.⁹

Consequences in the village

Slide M's concept is partible inheritance: land was divided equally among sons. With more sons surviving, farms shrank in each generation, until many were "too small to support a family" (Ebrey, p. 284). Ebrey adds that Chinese villages were "open": they held no common land and could not control who bought or sold there, so land passed quickly between families.

The second consequence was a shortage of brides (slide N). The rich took concubines, and poor families practiced "sex-selective infanticide" (Ebrey, p. 284), letting newborn girls die. The result was a large surplus of men who would never marry; by some estimates, as many as one man in five. These men, the "bare sticks" (guanggun), worked as boat haulers, porters, chair bearers and miners, moved from job to job and were viewed with fear by officials (slide O). Matthew Sommer's studies of Qing legal cases show how the state tried to police them, through harsher laws against rape and male homosexuality, and how poor families sometimes shared or sold wives to survive.¹⁰

The third consequence was movement (slide P). Settlers pushed into the hills of the Yangzi highlands, the southwest, Taiwan and, against official prohibitions, Manchuria. Hillside farming of maize and sweet potatoes caused erosion and silting downstream. And the hills were not empty. They were the homes of the Miao, Yao, Zhuang and other peoples, the subject of the Pierian Spring.

Pierian Spring: The Southern Hills (Review Question 11)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 284–286. Reading-guide sentence (p. 286): "As the Han Chinese population swelled, more and more settlers moved into Miao territories, often expropriating Miao land."

Peoples of the hills

Ebrey describes the indigenous peoples of the south as "called Miao, Yao, Zhuang, and many other names" (p. 284; slides T–U). The Qing state knew them through "Miao albums," illustrated guides that sorted the peoples of the southwest into dozens of categories by dress and custom (slide U image). Laura Hostetler reads these albums as a form of early modern colonial ethnography, comparable to European works of the same period.¹¹

Under Yongzheng, the governor-general Ortai carried out a large campaign in the late 1720s and early 1730s to replace hereditary native chieftains with regular Qing officials (gaitu guiliu), opening Miao country in Guizhou to administration, taxation and settlement. That campaign provoked major Miao risings in the 1730s (slide V, "from the 1720s"). Officials then tried to separate the Miao and Han, forbidding land sales and intermarriage and building walls and forts on the Hunan–Guizhou border (slide W). The rules were not enforced. Settlers lent money at high interest, took land for debts, and bought it outright.

The uprising of 1795–1797

The great rising of 1795 began in the Miao districts on the Hunan–Guizhou border (slide X). Donald Sutton's reexamination, based on the rebels' confessions, shows that their leaders were acculturated men, some literate, and that their grievance was land. The one known handbill said: "The Miao fields are now completely occupied by the Han people. If you help us to burn and kill the guests we can recover our lands." The "guests" were kemin, Han settlers of every kind. The Qing sent its best commanders; two of them, Fuk'anggan and Heliin, died during the campaign, and the main fighting lasted into 1797.¹²

Ebrey says the revolt broke out where "a Han ethnic group called the Hakka had recently been moving in" (p. 286). This seems to be a misreading of the sources' term for the settlers. "Guest people" can be written in Chinese both as kemin and as kejia, and the second word is the name of the Hakka, a distinct Han group with its own dialect, concentrated in Guangdong, Fujian and Jiangxi. But the newcomers in western Hunan were Han migrants in general, not the Hakka in particular. Slide U's names box and slide X now speak of Han settlers, the "guest people," and keep the textbook's "Hakka" for the instructor notes. The Hakka belong to a later chapter: they were central to the Hakka–Punti wars and the Taiping movement of the nineteenth century.¹³

More to explore: the embassy's books and the living-standard debate

Slide Z returns to the embassy. Several of its members wrote illustrated books on their return. George Staunton's official account appeared in 1797, and William Alexander's Costume of China in 1805. Ebrey calls them "less rosy than the reports of the Jesuits" (p. 280). They shaped British views of China for decades, and almost none of their authors could read Chinese.

Slide AA raises Kenneth Pomeranz's question. Ebrey reports the argument that China's "overall standard of living in the mid-eighteenth century was comparable to Europe's," and that Jiangnan compared well with England and the Netherlands (pp. 273–274). Pomeranz argues that the "great divergence" between Europe and China came only after 1800, and that it owed much to England's coal and its access to the land and resources of the Americas. The thesis remains debated; wage studies by economic historians have found Jiangnan living standards closer to those of central and southern Europe than to England's.¹⁴

Corrections and Cautions

Corrections and Sources Behind the Slide Notes

The deck's speaker notes are written for students. The instructor-level detail behind them, where a slide departs from Ebrey and the scholarship it relies on, is collected here, slide by slide.

• Slide A (title). Moved from the notes: the Gillray cartoon and its date (September 1792) come from outside the textbook.
• Slide B (rc-tribute). Correction: Ebrey's list of tributary states includes Japan (p. 280). Tokugawa Japan sent no envoys to the Qing; Chinese merchants traded at Nagasaki under Japanese licenses. The notes omit Japan. Source: Ronald P. Toby, State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan (1984).
• Slide D (guangzhou-rules). Moved from the notes: the term "Canton system," the date 1757, and the 1806 factory painting come from outside the textbook.
• Slide E (concept-balance). Moved from the notes: the point that the British paid for tea in silver comes from outside the textbook, which says only that the balance of trade "became more lopsided" (p. 280).
• Slide F (macartney-goals). Moved from the notes: the Hickey portrait and its date come from outside the textbook.
• Slide G (gifts-interpreter). Correction: Ebrey calls the twelve-year-old George Thomas Staunton the party's only Chinese speaker (p. 280). Macartney hired two Chinese Catholic priests from the college in Naples; one, Li Zibiao, interpreted all the way to the emperor. The notes give this version. Source: Henrietta Harrison, The Perils of Interpreting (2021). Staunton's later career comes from outside the textbook.
• Slide H (kowtow). Correction: Ebrey says Macartney "arrived in Guangzhou" and names George II (p. 280). He landed near Tianjin, and the king was George III; the notes give the corrected version. The audience at Rehe (Chengde) on 14 September 1793 and Macartney's one-knee compromise come from outside the textbook.
• Slide I (no-merit). Moved from the notes: the court's fears about British India and the Gurkhas, its orders to strengthen coast defenses, and the 1914 translation of the edict come from outside the textbook. On the translation, see Henrietta Harrison, "The Qianlong Emperor's Letter to George III and the Early-Twentieth-Century Origins of Ideas about Traditional China's Foreign Relations," American Historical Review 122 (2017); James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar (1995).
• Slide K (doubled). Moved from the notes: the estimate that a third of the world's people lived in China around 1800, and the Xu Yang scroll (1759), come from outside the textbook.
• Slide L (why-growth). Moved from the notes: Ebrey's "global warming" (p. 273) means the milder climate after the coldest decades of the Little Ice Age, not modern warming. Source: James Z. Lee and Wang Feng, One Quarter of Humanity (1999).
• Slide N (missing-women). Moved from the notes: the trade in women (sale of daughters, bride price, wife-selling, trafficking) comes from Matthew H. Sommer, Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China (2015), based on more than a thousand Qing legal cases; Ebrey does not discuss it.
• Slide O (rootless). Moved from the notes: the date of the canal crossing (November 1793) comes from the embassy accounts, not from Ebrey.
• Slide U (ps-peoples). Correction: Ebrey calls the newcomers "a Han ethnic group called the Hakka" (p. 286). The sources say kemin, "guest people," Han settlers in general; the Hakka are a separate group centered in Guangdong, Fujian and Jiangxi. The notes give this version. Source: Donald S. Sutton, "Ethnic Revolt in the Qing Empire: The 'Miao Uprising' of 1795–1797 Reexamined," Asia Major 16 (2003). The Miao albums come from outside the textbook.
• Slide V (ps-land-taken). Moved from the notes: the replacement of native chieftains (gaitu guiliu) under Yongzheng comes from outside the textbook.
• Slide W (ps-separation). Moved from the notes: the separation rules and the border walls and forts come from outside the textbook.
• Slide X (ps-1795). Correction: Ebrey names the settlers as Hakka (p. 286); they were Han settlers in general (Sutton, 2003). The rebels' call to drive out the "guest people," the generals who died, and the end of the main fighting in 1797 come from outside the textbook.
• Slide Z (ps-staunton). Moved from the notes: Ebrey says the embassy's books showed "more of the complexity of China" (p. 281). The notes instead stress their limits: the authors could not read Chinese, were kept to a fixed route, and replaced the Jesuits' idealized China with a stagnant one. George Thomas Staunton's translation of the Qing code (1810) comes from outside the textbook.
• Slide AA (ps-living-standards). Moved from the notes: the best-known of the "some scholars" Ebrey mentions (pp. 273–274) is Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (2000).

Notes

1. On Tokugawa Japan's separate order, see Ronald P. Toby, State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the Tokugawa Bakufu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). On the Qing practice of tribute and the Dutch and Portuguese embassies, see John E. Wills Jr., Embassies and Illusions: Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to K'ang-hsi, 1666–1687 (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984). ↩

2. Paul A. Van Dyke, The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700–1845 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005). ↩

3. Henrietta Harrison, The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), tells the story of Li Zibiao and George Thomas Staunton. ↩

4. James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995). Macartney's own journal is J. L. Cranmer-Byng, ed., An Embassy to China: Being the Journal Kept by Lord Macartney during His Embassy to the Emperor Ch'ien-lung, 1793–1794 (London: Longmans, 1962). ↩

5. Henrietta Harrison, "The Qianlong Emperor's Letter to George III and the Early-Twentieth-Century Origins of Ideas about Traditional China's Foreign Relations," American Historical Review 122, no. 3 (2017): 680–701. For the older interpretation of the embassy as a clash of civilizations, see Alain Peyrefitte, The Immobile Empire, trans. Jon Rothschild (New York: Knopf, 1992). ↩

6. Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), remains the foundation for the population figures. ↩

7. Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), on the cold seventeenth century in China and elsewhere. ↩

8. Pierre-Étienne Will, Bureaucracy and Famine in Eighteenth-Century China, trans. Elborg Forster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Pierre-Étienne Will and R. Bin Wong, Nourish the People: The State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650–1850 (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1991). ↩

9. James Z. Lee and Wang Feng, One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities, 1700–2000 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). ↩

10. Matthew H. Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); and Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China: Survival Strategies and Judicial Interventions (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). ↩

11. Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). ↩

12. Donald S. Sutton, "Ethnic Revolt in the Qing Empire: The 'Miao Uprising' of 1795–1797 Reexamined," Asia Major, 3rd ser., 16, no. 2 (2003): 105–152. See also Sutton, "Ethnicity and the Miao Frontier in the Eighteenth Century," in Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F. Siu and Donald S. Sutton, eds., Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). ↩

13. On Hakka identity, see Nicole Constable, ed., Guest People: Hakka Identity in China and Abroad (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996). ↩

14. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). For a critique based on wages, see Robert C. Allen, Jean-Pascal Bassino, Debin Ma, Christine Moll-Murata and Jan Luiten van Zanden, "Wages, Prices, and Living Standards in China, 1738–1925: In Comparison with Europe, Japan, and India," Economic History Review 64, suppl. 1 (2011): 8–38. ↩

Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation

Henrietta Harrison, The Perils of Interpreting (2021). The Macartney embassy through the lives of its two interpreters; vivid and revisionist.

Henrietta Harrison, "The Qianlong Emperor's Letter to George III" (2017). How the edict was written, translated and misread; the best short article on the subject.

James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar (1995). The embassy as a clash of two ritual systems.

Paul A. Van Dyke, The Canton Trade (2005). How the Canton system actually worked.

James Z. Lee and Wang Feng, One Quarter of Humanity (1999). Population growth without Malthusian clichés.

Matthew H. Sommer, Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China (2015). The lives of the poor and unmarried, from legal cases.

Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise (2001). The Miao albums and Qing expansion in the southwest.

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (2000). The book behind slide AA's question.