Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China Read Online Free PDF Page B

times to the emperor and touching the ground with his forehead nine times. Macartney did so with great reluctance and after much resistance, knowing that otherwise Emperor Qianlong would not see him. fn1
    Emperor Qianlong treated Lord Macartney with what the Englishman called ‘every external mark of favour and regard’, but he would absolutely not consider more trade. To show him what Britain could offer, Lord Macartney had brought with him, among other gifts, two mountain-howitzers, complete with carriages, limbers and ammunition. The emperor left them untouched in storage in the Old Summer Palace. In his reply to a letter from King George III, he carefully rejected the British king’s requests point by point. To open up more ports for trading was ‘impossible’; Britain acquiring a small island off China’s coast for its merchants to stay and store goods was not allowed; and the stationing of an envoy in the capital, Beijing, was ‘absolutely out of the question’. Lord Macartney had also requested that Christian missions be allowed into the country, to which the emperor’s answer was: ‘Christianity is the religion of the West, and this Celestial Dynasty has its own beliefs bestowed by our sacred and wise monarchs, which have enabled our 400 million subjects to be led in an orderly fashion. Our people’s minds must not be confused by heresy . . . The Chinese and the foreigners must be strictly separated.’
    The emperor claimed that his ‘Celestial Dynasty possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders’, and that it therefore had no need for anything from the outside world. He asserted that he only allowed trade at one port out of generous consideration for the foreigners, who could not do without Chinese goods. These swaggering words were neither true, nor what the emperor really thought. Customs duty from Canton contributed substantially to the state coffers – more than1.1 million taels of silver in 1790, three years before Lord Macartney’s mission. A large tranche of the money went to the court, whose annual expenses stood at 600,000 taels. Emperor Qianlong was well aware of this, as he regularly went through the books of transactions. Nor was he ignorant of the advancement of European science and technology. As vital a thing as the Chinese calendar, which guided agricultural production of the empire, had been definitively devised in the seventeenth century by European Jesuits – notably Ferdinand Verbiest – who had been employed by Emperor Kangxi (1661–1722), Qianlong’s grandfather. Since then, European Jesuits had been continuously manning the Imperial Observatory in Beijing, using European equipment. Currently they were working for Emperor Qianlong himself. Even the map of China under Qianlong (as well as under Kangxi) was drawn up by missionaries who surveyed the territory of the empire using European methods.
    It was in fact his sense of insecurity regarding the control of China that prompted Qianlong’s emphatic rejection of the Macartney mission, just like his closing the door of the country. The emperor’s control over his vast empire was built on total and unquestioning submission from the population. Any foreign contact that might disturb this blind obedience was dangerous to the throne. From Qianlong’s point of view, the empire could well run out of control if it was not sealed off and if foreign elements were near the population – especially when the grass roots were already restive. The Qing dynasty, which had been enjoying considerable prosperity, blessed bygood weather for long stretches of time (some fifty years under Emperor Kangxi) was beginning to decline by the late eighteenth century. This was largely due topopulation explosion, partly the result of the introduction to China of high-productivity foods like potato and corn from the American continent. By the time of Lord Macartney’s visit, China’s population had more than