On the (Paper) Trail of Lord Macartney

A significant strand in any history of China under the Qing dynasty must be the development of the relations between the Celestial Empire and the ‘outside world’ from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. Particularly important for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are the contacts with Europe, contacts which had a major impact on China, and have often left their mark, and their scars, on the history and fabric of the imperial palaces. In the broad sweep, for the dynasty and for the Chinese people, Europeans began as mere barbarians, and became foreign devils; for the Europeans, the evolving contacts smashed romantic notions of distant ‘Cathay’, and China came to be dealt with as just another piece on the world’s political chessboard.[1]

The mission of Lord Macartney in 1793 as ambassador from King George III of Great Britain traditionally holds a pivotal place in analysis of these evolutions. Macartney’s visit to the court of the Qianlong emperor is rightly seen as a turning point in the political relationships not merely between China and Britain, but more broadly between China and Europe. The lack of understanding on both sides is often seen as a ‘collision of two civilisations’;[2] it should more correctly be considered a clash of fundamental political views and world pictures, which were almost impossible to reconcile.[3]

Macartney’s visit occurred at the end of a long period of gradually increasing Western awareness of China, and it is important to recall that trading contacts between Europe and Qing China had been growing throughout the eighteenth century, as the English East India Company built up its power in India and sought to expand its activities more widely.[4] Indeed, it is perhaps odd that Lord Macartney’s mission occurred at so late a date, given that English fashion (together with that of mainland Europe) had been stimulating imports of increasing amounts of Chinese consumer goods for decades. If anything, the mission comes towards the end of a period of English fascination with China, when tea had become a major import, stately homes were decorated with imported Chinese wallpaper, and Chinese porcelain was widely used (even if adapted for Western tastes). The fashion for Chinese goods even led English eighteenth-century culture to develop its own versions of Chinese style, with ‘Chinese’ gardens, the appearance of the so-called ‘willow pattern’ for crockery, and the creation of ‘Chinese Chippendale’ furniture; while in 1761 a Chinese pagoda had been built in the grounds of Kew Palace — and still survives among the landmarks of Kew Botanical Gardens.[5] However, there are suggestions that in some quarters this fascination with China may already have been past its peak in the 1780s.[6]

Even so, it is hardly surprising that Lord Macartney’s embassy had a cultural as well as a political impact when he returned to England in 1794. Reports of the embassy soon appeared in print. Publications included both an authorised account and several diaries compiled by members of the party; while the sketches of William Alexander were soon transformed into engravings and extensively printed. Fascination with the mission has proved long-lasting: the tale of the visit as a meeting of closed minds is regularly retold; the mission has even become the subject of an American play for school-children.[7]

As a major international embassy, the mission generated extensive records, from conception to completion. These included administrative documents, personal letters and diaries, and official correspondence. This material is now widely scattered, and has never been systematically collated. The only attempt at a survey is a brief discussion offered by Alain Peyrefitte in his book on the embassy. He recounts his attempts to collect up all the available evidence, calculating that ‘The published and unpublished texts I was able to assemble came to about twelve thousand pages’.[8] This paper attempts to go further in assessing the documentary survival, and the reasons for the current worldwide dispersal of the material. Nevertheless it remains incomplete, dealing primarily with preliminary records produced by the British, or created or retained by the members of the mission. In particular, no attempt has yet been made to search for ancillary material that may lurk in continental European archives or libraries.

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While the surviving documentation is extensive, there is a good deal of duplication in the total archive. As well as the surviving original documents, many also exist in contemporary copies made for official purposes, or as duplicates to ensure that at least one copy reached its intended destination.[9]

The documents as a whole can probably be divided into three separate categories, two of them ‘official’, the third ‘private’ — although this distinction is based more on provenances and current locations than the actual nature of the records. ‘Official’ papers would be those preserved by the British government or with the East India Company, the two main sponsors of the mission. The material considered here as ‘personal’ or ‘private’ is that retained by the members of the embassy, of which the great collection gathered and kept by Macartney himself is clearly most significant.[10] Many of these documents were ‘official’ in origin and purpose, but given the uncertainties of the definition of ‘official papers’ in the late eighteenth century, perhaps especially in the contexts of the East India Company and general diplomatic business, the documents produced during an individual’s term in office or period of state employment were, in fact, treated and considered as being personal property, and, therefore, did not pass into the state archives. Consequently, Macartney’s papers, like those of many other officials, remained among his own possessions, and had their own complicated later history.

The distinction between ‘official’ and ‘private’ records has further significance in the particular context of the mission. Once he left England, it was extremely difficult for Macartney to maintain contact and communication with London. This also meant that his party did not create administrative documents like those which were produced at the Chinese imperial court, where ministers and agents had to deal immediately with the difficulties and problems that developed during the mission.[11] Although Macartney clearly did produce documents whilst in China, most of the formally ‘official’ material had to be created either before the mission set out, or on its return. Once Macartney left England, it was effectively impossible for him to receive further instructions or guidance; he had to deal with developments on his own initiative. This only heightens the significance of the journals (and particularly Macartney’s own) as records of what actually happened in China.

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The mission was sent with the approval of the British government, as part of a grand scheme whereby ‘through diplomacy rather than force of arms, British commercial and strategic power would be extended over the whole Indian Ocean and Pacific’.[12] Indeed, the government was more enthusiastic for the embassy than was the East India Company, even though it was the Company which had to cover the costs.[13] Yet, despite this governmental support, there are disappointingly few traces of the mission in the British National Archives. Indeed, its holdings contain only one slim file specifically identified as relating to the embassy, and which actually turns out to contain little of value.[14] There are occasional relevant documents elsewhere in the National Archives, including logbooks from officers of the Lion, the naval vessel assigned to the mission, but seemingly no significant deposit of records.[15]

The second and larger collection of ‘official’ records is found among the archives of the East India Company, which are now preserved in the British Library in London (relocated from the India Office Library in 1982). Material directly relevant to the embassy now comprises three volumes of correspondence and background papers.[16] Some of this consists of original documents; there are also several duplicates and copies. The holdings were once more extensive, with some material now missing.[17] These India Office papers include material specifically about Macartney’s mission, notably copies of the correspondence, and contain considerable evidence for the background in the trading activities of the English in Canton. The continuity of the more extensive East India Company archive is important for setting Macartney’s mission in the longer context of the evolution of trading relations between Britain and China. It also, perhaps oddly, highlights the status of the mission as a distinct and self-contained event, one which makes little visible impact on the records actually generated and maintained at Canton in 1793–94.[18]

To turn to the private or personal documents is to turn chiefly to the great accumulation of material that Macartney retained among his own papers. The tale of their fate is almost as interesting in itself as the story of the 1793 mission.

In this regard, it must be noted that while Macartney is probably now chiefly remembered for his role in the Chinese embassy of 1792-94, that was only one episode in a lengthy political, military, and diplomatic career that also took him to India, the West Indies, South Africa, and on diplomatic postings in Russia and elsewhere in Europe.[19] The documents for the China mission therefore formed only part of his extensive personal archive, which, as well as the diplomatic material, also included records of his landholding in Ireland, and considerable other correspondence. As private papers, these were not under state control, and could be disposed of at will. They were.[20] After his death in 1806, the papers seem to have been divided among members of his family, with the main collection (including most of the Chinese material) passing to his niece and her heirs. In 1854, most of these documents were sold. As a result, a significant quantity of material produced in relation to the China mission passed into the hands of Sir Thomas Phillipps, a collector whose almost obsessive and indiscriminate acquisitions of manuscripts have made him legendary in the history of European bibliography.[21] Unfortunately, after his death Phillipps’s collection was, in turn, divided up, and mainly sold at auction, with the final sale of manuscripts occurring as late as 1947. The main dispersal of material concerning Macartney’s China mission took place in 1913, but subsequent sales may well have included relevant documents, without their being specifically identified. The 1913 sale included a run of twenty-one volumes of background papers recording activities of the East India Company between 1622 and 1791, which are now in the Wason Collection of Cornell University Library.[22] Other volumes sold on that occasion have also joined the Wason Collection, including one of many logbooks produced on the Lion.[23] A major prize that has not ended up in the Wason Collection is Macartney’s own journal of the journey to China and the events of the mission, with notes and appendices. The overall history of these manuscripts is not yet clear. Three volumes — the journal of events in China, and two copies of the notes and appendices — were sold from the Phillipps collection in 1913 and, after intermediary transactions, acquired by the Toyo Bunko Library in Tokyo, together with a number of other relevant records. Unfortunately, only one of the original volumes, of appendices, now remains there, the other two having disappeared in the 1990s — luckily, after photocopies had been taken of all three volumes.[24] A companion volume, in which Macartney recorded events on the voyage before reaching China, went a separate route, and in 1930 was acquired by the Wellcome Library in London.[25] These were the only volumes known to J.L. Cranmer-Byng when he published his edition of Macartney’s journal in 1962. However, a further copy of the journal, in two volumes which from the covering dates deal with the journey out and events in China, exists in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University, and has, so far, escaped scholarly notice and attention.[26] The history of these two volumes has not yet been clarified, but it can be suggested (subject to possible revision when the Yale volumes are examined) that Macartney prepared at least two sets of ‘journal’ volumes (one volume recording the voyage to China, a second detailing his experiences there, and the third of notes and appendices) that became separated and mixed up in the sales after his death.

While Macartney’s heirs disposed of a great quantity of papers in 1854, not everything had been sold. The next major dispersal by the family occurred in 1915, when a collection of 448 documents relating to the China mission was sold to Charles Wason, to be reunited at Cornell with the volumes acquired from the earlier Phillipps sale. These acquisitions included a large amount of correspondence, as well as other documents.[27] Overall, the Wason Collection contains the largest accumulation of material associated with the mission. Much of it, however, relates to the preliminaries of the mission rather than to the embassy itself.[28]

A further batch of papers was sold by Macartney’s heirs in 1947, including ‘7 volumes of correspondence when Earl Macartney was in China and Madras’, but details of the contents are obscure. At that sale, some 2,250 letters were bought for the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland in Belfast, but very few of these seem to relate to the China mission. Similarly, while the Northern Ireland Public Record Office now holds a large collection of records relating to Macartney’s estates in Ireland (he was born in Ireland, and most of his noble titles were in the Irish peerage), it catalogues only three other documents as deriving from the embassy of 1792–94.[29]

The successive sales in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries mean that the papers Macartney had preserved together as a complete record of his whole career were scattered across the globe — for Indian, South African, and other documents were also sold, and can now be found in archives and libraries in those countries and elsewhere. The overall fate of the collection has still not been fully determined: as late as 1985 it was said that ‘many of the items in the 1913 and 1915 sales [from the Phillipps collection, and by Macartney’s heirs] have not been traced’.[30] In some cases, the parcels from the original sales may have been divided into smaller lots as they passed onto the market; in 1931, one small packet of unrecorded provenance was bought from a London bookseller by the historian Earl H. Pritchard, containing thirty-four documents given to Macartney in September 1792, and including what is, apparently, the only complete copy of his original instructions from the East India Company. This small collection is now deposited in America in the library of Washington State University.[31] Other small caches and individual stray documents also appear in scattered locations. The Bodleian Library in Oxford acquired two commonplace books that include notes on China as part of a much larger deposit made in the late 1950s.[32] A few further papers were among material purchased in 1979-80, being described in the catalogue only as ‘papers relating to China, 1793–5’.[33] Somehow or other, a copy of the instructions given by Henry Dundas to Macartney just before the mission departed in September 1792 was acquired by an alumnus of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and was subsequently donated to the library there.[34]

While Macartney’s papers dominate the surviving sources, they are by no means the only private records. Macartney’s original intention had been that all of the major participants in the voyage should contribute to a collective work on the mission, rather than produce their own personal accounts. An ‘approved’ record was produced shortly after the embassy returned to England, under the authorship of Sir George Staunton. However, Macartney’s wish ‘was ignored on a grand scale’ by some of the less prominent members of the mission,[35] several of whom published their own ‘unauthorised’ versions of events, based on their own diaries.[36] Perhaps, suprisingly, the full publication of Macartney’s own journal of the mission was delayed until 1962.[37] How much more unprinted personal material is available is not clear. The papers of the two Stauntons who were on the mission — father and son — are now deposited in the Perkins Library at Duke University, North Carolina, and include the two volumes of diaries maintained by the young George Thomas Staunton. He became the only member of the party to learn Chinese, and his record combines the insights derived from his linguistic abilities with the directness of a schoolboy’s comment.[38]

While most accounts of the mission quite naturally concentrate attention on the experiences of those members of the party who journeyed from Tianjin to the imperial court, and then to Canton, there were several others who remained with the vessels that had transported the embassy, and who have left their own notes of events. Each of the officers of the Lion would have been required to maintain his own logbook to provide a record of the voyage, and several of these have survived. The compilers range from Sir Erasmus Gower, the ship’s commander, down to young Philip Carteret Silvester, a midshipman just a few years older than the younger Staunton, who compiled his log as part of his naval training.[39] Silvester also wrote letters home during the journey, which are preserved at Britain’s National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.[40]

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Besides the range of written material, one of the most striking aspects of the Macartney mission is its extensive pictorial record, covering the entire period from leaving England through to the return. The pictures of China are, obviously, most important for immediate purposes, providing a significant and appealing record of scenes and events. Indeed, in some respects the pictures are as important as the words — in some ways, possibly more so, for they seem to offer less opportunity for misunderstanding, even if there is still the danger of misrepresentation.

Misrepresentation is, indeed, a real danger, and the illustrations certainly cannot always be taken as a true record of what was actually seen. The pictures were clearly produced for Western eyes, and, in some cases, are imaginary rather than eyewitness records. One such is the picture produced by William Alexander of the audience with the emperor: Alexander was not among the people present on that occasion, although he did base his pictures on the reports of those who were. Alexander’s original pictures were created as part of a narrative for the English, which could not be generally checked, and which, in the process, would create English perceptions of the nature of the mission, and of China. Alexander is the most widely known and most proflific of the illustrators of the voyage; his pictures to some extent provide a pictorial diary.[41] Indeed, although many of Alexander’s sketches ‘offer a unique view of ordinary life in China at the time’, catching details apparently absent from the Chinese artistic tradition;[42] he used them very much as raw material, later worked up and recombined into different pictures. The material actually produced in China may be treated for the most part — but not totally — as a reliable record, but the compositions produced in England are more questionable. While they may be correct in their physical details, to the degree that they were based on the sketches made in China (a dependence that may have decreased as time passed and either memories faded or the demands and expectations of the English market affected the composition), the details were sometimes copied in new combinations to construct scenes which were more or less fictional.[43] Most of the material produced in China in 1793 is held in the British Library;[44] but some pictures, especially the later derivative works, are now widely scattered in art galleries and private collections.[45] These later productions ‘involved considerable invention and helped to create a penny-dreadful image of China’,[46] so it is hardly surprising that Alexander’s pictures should have provided some of the decorative sources for King George IV’s Royal Pavilion at Brighton, built between 1815 and 1822.[47]

While Alexander is the best known of the artists on the mission, he was not the only person to contribute to the pictorial record. Some of his works draw explicitly on the work of others, notably sketches by Lieutenant Henry Parish. Other members of the party also produced sketches and drawings, which survive in the album of pictures presented to King George III when the embassy returned to Britain, and elsewhere.[48]

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With its extensive records in words and pictures, Lord Macartney’s mission is extremely well documented, although the fact that the papers are now scattered across the world makes it hard to collate information, or to be sure that the embassy’s full archive has been identified and recorded. Nevertheless, the events of 1792–94 are still probably the best-known episode in Macartney’s active and eventful career. That the embassy failed in its aims (at least from the points of view of the East India Company and the British government) is secondary to its longer term significance for British and European — and perhaps American — appreciations of China. The now-scattered documents of the Macartney mission record a significant point in the history of the Qing dynasty — a meeting that, even if it did not have an immediate effect in or on the palace, did set off a lengthy chain of events with significant repercussions for China during the nineteenth century, and through to the fall of the empire.