Chinese Rules: Five Timeless Lessons for Succeeding in China

Georgius R

This was not the first embassy to tackle China; Portugal, the Netherlands and Russia had all sent ambassadors on more than one occasion, but they had each returned empty-handed. The gates to the Celestial Empire, it seemed, remained hermetically sealed. France had sent missionaries, and a handful of Jesuit priests had lived in Beijing for a number of years, but none had ever returned. In fact, Macartney’s was the sixteenth embassy sent to pry open the gates, but it was the first worthy of the name. Supremely confident, possessed of the world’s most powerful navy, and poised on the threshold of the Industrial Revolution, the British were fixed upon impressing the ancient Middle Kingdom with gifts that displayed the most ingenious inventions of the modern European age; but more important – as George III stated in his letter – they were determined to open the channels of trade.

Macartney’s first problem was finding translators; there weren’t any. He eventually recruited two Chinese priests who had been living at the Collegium Sinicum in Naples. Although they knew no English, they could communicate with passable Latin. Father Li’s teeth had been ruined by smoking and Father Zhou had that somewhat familiar passion for crunching dried melon pips, which Macartney described as ‘a habit not easily tolerated by a gentleman.’ Impressed by Li’s single-minded commitment to smoking, Macartney was later less surprised than he might have been to find out that everyone smoked in China – even the children, who came running out of houses with pipes between their teeth. In fact, smoking was so prevalent that if someone was deathly ill and on his last legs, the Chinese would say, ‘He’s so ill he can’t even smoke any more.’

After leaving the English Channel, the embassy was blown off course in the Atlantic and the ships became separated. They only regrouped the following March at Batavia – now Jakarta – in what was then known as the Dutch East Indies. Eleven days later, they set sail northwards. After more than nine months at sea, the embassy finally caught sight of the Chinese mainland and dropped anchor at Macao. Terrified of being caught assisting the embassy, one of the translators skipped ship and disappeared – Macartney had heard that Chinese were forbidden to leave China and that the punishment for teaching Mandarin to a foreigner was death. The other, a Tatar whose Chinese was less fluent, took the more imaginative option of disguising himself as a foreigner.

The embassy, meanwhile, was under strict surveillance by the watchful mandarins onshore. Prior to his arrival, Macartney had requested permission to visit Beijing from the customs house in Canton, not through the provincial governor as required by the Celestial Regulations. The governor, unsettled by this ignorance of court etiquette, had sent an anxious memorial to the emperor seeking further instructions:

Upon their arrival in Canton, the English barbarians asked to be taken to the Customs Office to present a request. We immediately granted them an audience. Their report states that the King of England … has dispatched an envoy. The Rites require that barbarians, once granted permission to enter a port, present a copy of their sovereign’s request, along with a list of the articles of tribute. The king of England, however, has supplied us with neither of these two documents. We have only the letter submitted by the English merchants. Your humble slave dare not present such a document to Your Majesty.

The memorial was returned with annotations in vermillion brushstrokes from the emperor’s own hand: ‘We will transmit instructions to you.’ The countless cogs of the state’s vast bureaucratic machinery had glided silently into motion. From that moment, every step of the embassy was monitored and logged, every act recorded and transmitted to the emperor by special runners who worked in relays that could cover as much as six hundred li in a day. Edicts from Beijing were dispatched back to the provinces, copied, given a response and returned. The emperor added his final marginal notes in red ink before the runners headed back posthaste to the provinces. The system had operated for centuries and had been overhauled by Qianlong’s father, the Yongzheng Emperor. In Qianlong’s reign, hundreds of documents could be on the road at any one time, connecting the centre through a web of highly trained mandarin officials across vast distances to the daily affairs of every far-flung corner of the empire.

The embassy cast off from Macau to the sound of church bells calling the faithful to Mass. It proceeded up the coast and stopped at the Zhoushan Islands, off the coast of Zhejiang, just south of modern-day Shanghai. It was here that the embassy had its first inkling that protocol was to become a major obstacle to its success.

The mandarin official sent to accompany the embassy to Beijing refused to step on board the ship. Imperial regulations required imperial officials to ‘descend onto the barbarian vessel,’ but the ship was too large for the Chinese to construct the customary bamboo walkway downward from the quay towards the boat. It was simply inconceivable that the mandarin would contemplate clambering upward onto the decks, so he refused to go on board at all. Instead he sent provisions including some twenty steers, more than a hundred sheep and hogs, a hundred ducks, and 160 sacks of flour as the first, emphatic demonstration of the excesses of Chinese hospitality.

Confusion over the gifts brought for the emperor from England was the next difficulty; etiquette required Macartney to understate their value but he couldn’t bring himself to describe them as ‘mere trinkets from our poor country’, as the mandarin had suggested. Next he discovered that the Chinese version of the list of gifts was riddled with translation errors. Passing from English to Latin, then to Chinese and finally into official court language, it had been converted into gibberish. Macartney had brought a planetarium to demonstrate Europe’s achievements in combining an understanding of the motion of celestial bodies – including the four moons of Jupiter – with the latest in precision engineering. But the Chinese had no idea what it was. Planetarium had been translated phonetically and rendered meaningless. After much discussion it was listed as a ‘geographical and astronomical musical clock’. In the end, the Chinese never read the list or even wondered what the articles might be; all that mattered was that the number of individual items was correct and that the list was complete.

These translation difficulties propelled an unlikely character to the fore. Macartney’s deputy had brought along his son, a boy named Thomas Staunton, who had picked up some Chinese language from the two priests on the long voyage. The youth, whose ‘senses were more acute and organs more flexible, proved to be a tolerably good interpreter’, so he took over much of the translation.

Once the gifts had been properly categorized, the ships moved farther up the coast towards Tianjin, where they were to be packed into crates, loaded onto junks, and transported to the docks at Dagu. There they would be transferred onto smaller junks and taken inland by canal before finally going ashore for the twelve-mile journey to Beijing. A memorial to the emperor read:

In all, there are 590 pieces to be transferred from the barbarian ships to the port. The handling operation is proceeding without interruption but is not yet complete. The passengers of the ships will enter the port only after the tribute has been fully unloaded.

‘This is excellent and we fully approve,’ wrote the vermillion brush.

It was at Dagu that the embassy first encountered Chinese delaying tactics. They had been travelling for almost a year and were impatient to see the emperor. But now they were told that a viceroy had suddenly arrived to greet them. Ushered into a large hall in a temple, surrounded by tents with streamers and guarded by horsemen with bows and arrows, they were entertained with elaborate tea ceremonies, enquiries about their health, and explanations of ‘the emperor’s satisfaction with their arrival’. Macartney fumed quietly and fidgeted throughout the banquet until the viceroy suddenly announced that the embassy would only be granted an audience in Jehol, the emperor’s summer retreat, rather than in Beijing as previously planned. This sudden change in destination presented a major complication; many of the delicate instruments would be damaged on such a long overland journey to Jehol. But before Macartney could respond, the viceroy announced that he would be leaving the next day and planned to return only after six weeks.

Around this time, the central problem of the embassy became clear. For a foreigner to meet the emperor, or even receive an edict from him, he had to perform the ke-tou, or kow-tow. This ‘head-bumping ceremony’ consisted of first standing upright, then grovelling on the floor, banging one’s head against the ground three times, standing up, then going back down on all fours, banging the forehead again, and repeating the whole procedure three times so that nine head bumps were performed in all. It never occurred to the Chinese that Macartney might object. As far as they were concerned, the kow-tow was simply a formality by which a barbarian submitted to the perfection of the Celestial Empire in order to prepare himself for the benefits of civilization. Anyway, there was no precedent for doing anything else. But Macartney was having none of it; as representative of George III, he only agreed to go down on one knee. He only went down on two knees for the Almighty, so grovelling on all fours in front of some Oriental despot was entirely out of the question. So the two sides entered a phase of protracted negotiations. The Chinese addressed the matter obliquely – first by suggesting that the Englishmen might like to change their clothes, since the kow-tow would be easier to perform without garters and knee buckles. Macartney made a counterproposal: he would produce a portrait of George III and whatever ceremony he performed in front of the emperor, a mandarin of equivalent rank would perform in front of the portrait of the English king.

Meanwhile, Macartney had been informed that the characters on the banners on boats escorting the embassy had been quietly changed from

– envoy bringing gifts – to

– envoy paying tribute. But appearances were maintained; the embassy set off from the docks to the rousing sounds of a military band, while the Chinese responded with earsplitting hammering on copper gongs. After seven days on the canal, deafened by cicadas and tormented by mosquitoes, the embassy alighted at the port and set off overland for Beijing.

On 21 August 1793, a little short of a year after leaving Portsmouth, the embassy passed by the great corner watchtowers of the Imperial City. Guards of honour fired salvos from the ramparts while three thousand porters passed through the enormous double gateways carrying nearly six hundred packages, some so large they needed thirty-six men to carry them. They were followed by eighty-five wagons and thirty-nine handcarts filled with wine, beer, and other European produce. Eight pieces of artillery brought up the rear. Inside, the visitors were confronted by a human anthill. Brides went to their future husbands with squalling music and gongs; mourners dressed in white wailed over the departed. Wheelbarrows groaned under stacks of watermelons next to pots of live eels while, under the swooping eaves of the great gateways to the Imperial City, long lines of dromedaries brought coal from Tartary.

The embassy settled into the quarters near the Old Summer Palace, the Garden of Perfect Brightness, and awaited instructions to proceed to Jehol for the audience with the emperor. The accommodation was adequate, although one member of the expedition couldn’t help noticing the smell of ‘putrefying garlic and over-used blankets’.

By this time, Macartney had begun to realize that China had the most ritualized society on earth. Ceremonial rites formed one of the key foundations of Confucianism, and Confucianism underpinned the Chinese sense of identity. The Celestial bureaucracy consisted of six tribunals, equivalent to ministries, and the Tribunal of Rites enforced strict observation of court ritual. It also supervised the imperial examination system, which had first been conceived by the Han as a way of selecting and promoting civil servants. Introduced properly by the Sui in the sixth century, the exam system had been perfected four hundred years later under the Song and it had been in use for centuries by the time it was abolished by the Qing in 1905. The tribunal also controlled the movements of envoys and receipt of tribute.

Macartney, however, knew little of this as he haggled about the kow-tow. After several rounds of unsuccessful negotiations, he noticed that the old mandarin who had refused to board the ship at Zhoushan had vanished. Apparently he’d been replaced by another official. Macartney was delighted with the change, as he had heard that the new official was a cousin of the emperor and so assumed that he had more power at court. But there were hundreds of ‘cousins’; all it meant was that he was related to one of the emperor’s numerous concubines. In fact, the old mandarin had been a salt tax commissioner and his replacement had at one time been in charge of the Ming Tombs. Both were quite junior and hopelessly out of their depth. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the vermillion brushstrokes moved across the pages – silently, alone, in secret – directing every move.

Finally, the embassy was allowed to travel to Jehol, where the emperor spent the summer, some hundred miles northeast of Beijing. They travelled through hills and patches of dense farmland, finally passing under the Great Wall and out into a fallow, wilder landscape. In places, the road was so steep that extra horses were needed to pull up the carts. The smooth imperial roadway was off-limits to the British; for eight days the horses limped and stumbled along the rocky pathways.

During an overnight stop, one of the mandarin officials asked to see the ‘admirable rarities brought for the Emperor’, explaining that he’d heard they were carrying fowl that ate coal, an elephant the size of a cat, and a ‘magic pillow’. All this, said the mandarin, was ‘surely true’ because ‘he had read about it in the newspapers’. Macartney noted in his diary a few days later that the interpreter ‘had amused us’ with a newspaper report of similar idiocies, including a ‘horse the size of a mouse’.

By the time that the embassy reached Jehol, many of the saddles had lost stirrups, but the atmosphere was jovial. Perhaps it was the clear mountain air, the almost Alpine scenery, or just the thrill of finally seeing the glazed yellow tiles and vermillion walls of the imperial palaces lying in the valley below. The British marched in a procession through the gates of Jehol to the strains of ‘God Save the King’ from a military band. While the aristocrats may have been smartly dressed, one of the lower members of the party recorded that ‘the rest of the company exhibited a very awkward appearance: some wore round hats, some cocked hats, and others straw hats: some were in whole boots, some in half boots, and others in shoes with coloured stockings. In second-hand coats and waistcoats, [we] did not enjoy even the appearance of shabby uniformity.’

The embassy was to remain in Jehol for nearly two weeks, from 8 to 21 September, during which time the British, still refusing to kow-tow, felt the atmosphere become hostile. Macartney had presented a copy of George III’s letter, but there was no response; a cold silence reigned. There was no word from the mandarins and nothing to do but wait.

On the day appointed for the imperial audience, Macartney was woken up at three in the morning. The emperor was to receive him in a large tent about three miles from their lodgings. No lamps were sent and they stumbled around in the dark, at one point finding themselves ‘intermingled with a cohort of pigs, asses and dogs, which broke our ranks and put us into irrecoverable confusion’. They arrived at four o’clock and were kept waiting for nearly three hours. A huge throng of people had assembled there – Tatar princes, viceroys, governors of cities and districts, mandarins of all types and ranks, soldiers, acrobats and musicians – several thousand people all waiting for the simultaneous appearance of the emperor and the morning sun. Eventually Emperor Qianlong arrived, preceded by ministers in yellow robes, and carried on an immense open chair by sixteen men. According to the ambassador, all but the British threw themselves to the ground. Qianlong was dressed in brown silk and wore a velvet cap with a single large pearl. Although he was more than eighty and hard of hearing, the British gained the brief impression of a man much younger in years before he quickly disappeared into the tent. Some time later, Macartney, his deputy and the boy translator were ushered inside.

It’s not clear exactly what happened next, and scholars still argue about it. Macartney insisted that instead of performing the kow-tow, he only went down on one knee before the emperor. But the boy noted that as the emperor passed the crowd on the way to the tent, ‘[we] bowed our heads to the ground’. One of the other members noted that ‘we paid our respect in the usual form of the country, by kneeling nine times to the ground’ – all of which sound suspiciously like a kow-tow. The boy Staunton records that, inside the tent, they went up to the emperor’s platform and ‘made the same ceremony as before’. Whatever really happened, Macartney presented the emperor with the letter and there was a short exchange of pleasantries before the emperor enquired whether anyone in the embassy could speak Mandarin. The boy was brought forward and spoke a few words, to the obvious delight of the emperor, who took a small purse off his belt and gave it to him. Next they were taken to an enormous banquet and returned to their residences before nightfall, having eaten too much and accomplished precisely nothing.

Following the audience, there was no response to George III’s letter. Whenever Macartney attempted to raise it with the mandarins, he was parried with a new round of gifts or treated to unwanted entertainments, including on one occasion a four-hour theatre performance. At the end of the play, the stage was filled with imitation dolphins, sea monsters, rocks and sponges before an enormous whale appeared and disgorged several tons of water from its mouth, which drained away through perforations in the floor. As soon as the play was finished, a circus appeared with jugglers on their backs using their feet to throw ceramic urns high into the air with children inside. Next there was an enormous firework display, which concluded ‘with a volcano or general discharge of suns and stars, squibs, bouncers, crackers, rockets, and grenadoes, which involved the gardens for above an hour after in a cloud of intolerable smoke’. Finally Qianlong personally sent yet more food, consisting of ‘a variety of refreshments, all of which, as coming from him, the etiquette of the court required us to partake of, although we had dined but a short time before’.

Several days later, the embassy was again woken well before dawn and escorted to a pavilion, where they were kept waiting for the usual three hours. This time the emperor never even appeared but instead sat behind an enormous screen. Muffled drums and bells were heard in the distance, before silence fell once more. Suddenly the whole court fell flat on their faces and a concealed orchestra erupted with the wails of strange stringed instruments and the deafening hammering of gongs. An immense red cloth was spread on the ground. At each of its four corners stood a man with a whip and, at the moment that the emperor was supposed to have mounted his throne, the cloth was whipped nine times in sets of three strokes each. Before they knew what was happening, the ceremony was over and everyone left. The embassy went back to the lodgings having no idea of what they had witnessed and it was never mentioned again.

On 21 September, still waiting for a response to the letter, the embassy took the same stony route back to Beijing. Just before leaving, the atmosphere darkened after a minor diplomatic incident when one of the men from the Royal Artillery died, ‘having eaten no less than forty apples at breakfast’. The mandarins were indignant; it was against regulations to die in one of the emperor’s palaces.

Macartney’s final meeting took place in the Forbidden City. Summoned once more without warning and crippled with rheumatism, he hauled himself out of bed and donned the required ceremonial dress, only to be kept waiting yet again for the customary three hours. Almost fainting with fatigue, he was finally asked to kow-tow to a letter addressed to George III that had been placed on a yellow chair in the gateway of the Hall of Supreme Harmony. He wasn’t allowed to read it for several days. When it was translated, it was heavily edited to avoid offending the king’s sensibilities. In fact, it was to be years before a full translation revealed the extent of the embassy’s failure. Every one of George III’s requests had been refused. Qianlong’s letter began:

We, by the Grace of Heaven, Emperor, instruct the King of England to take note of our charge.

Although your country, O King, lies in the far oceans, yet inclining your heart towards civilization, you have specially sent an envoy respectfully to present a state message, and sailing the seas, he has come to our court to kow-tow and present congratulations for the imperial birthday, and to present local products, thereby showing your sincerity. We have perused the text of your state message and the wording expresses your earnestness. From it your sincere humility and obedience can clearly be seen. This is admirable and we fully approve …