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A Background Sketch: the Burdens of
History
ever
since the
When this story opens, in the early nineteen sixties, Britain
and China had been engaged in diplomatic converse, or, more
accurately, struggle, for some one hundred and seventy years,
Anglo-Irish nobleman. Lord Macartney,
despatched by the government of Pitt the Younger, arrived at
the court of the Emperor Qian Long in 1793. There had been
earlier attempts to open official communications: as far back
as 1596, when Queen Elizabeth had addressed a letter in Latin
to the Chinese Emperor of the day; and as recently as 1787,
when the British government had sent a mission to China under
Charles Cathcart, an officer with distinguished
Indian experience. Unhappily the colonel died en route and
the expedition was abandoned.
Colonel
There had been private travellers and, since the
seventeenth century, commercial contacts, carefully
regulated by the Chinese, in Canton. But Macartney's embassy
was the first formal British mission to arrive, to
communicate and, of course, to be rebuffed
No two nations, or governments, could have been more
unlike. The Chinese were the inheritors of two thousand years
of continuous civilisation. Under the rule of a Son of Heaven,
assisted by a corps of highly, if narrowly, educated scholar-
officials, they felt that they enjoyed a unique system and