BOOK REVIEWS
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again draw back the curtain and look at what lay concealed behind it" (p.11). “At this point we must take another look behind the scenes" (p.29). On Anson's seizure of the Spanish galleon bringing treasure from Acapulco to Manila he writes that "to the weird, unreal mandarinate of China it appeared horrific". "Weird' and 'unreal' to whom? To the English at that time, or to the Chinese people, or to the author alone? There is no evidence on which to base these epithets. They have meaning only in the author's own mind. On the same page he writes of the "dastardly" opinion which the Chinese were forming of Anson, But dastardly from whose point of view? Who is justified in calling it dastardly? Next an example of the author's jocular style: "The failure of the Amherst embassy and we enter the final straight". Finally an example of the author's oracular style: “A sense that there was no turning back seeped into the till then strangely changeless atmosphere, and in the extraordinary way in which one thing led to another, both in England and China, soon practically nothing was the same.”
It would be tedious to challenge the author on the many dubious statements and judgments which mar this book - it would also require a very long review. But any reader with an enquiring mind and a regard for historical accuracy will constantly find himself irritated into asking "Where is the evidence for this statement?" In some places the author is simply inaccurate. Thus, in one of his rare footnotes, he states: "Governors usually, but not always, ruled two provinces, in this case Kwangtung and Kwangsi, the Eastern and Western Kwangs; thus the Governor of the Two Kwangs". In fact there was a Governor-General (tsung-tu) for the two Kwangs and a Governor (hsün-fu) for each province. This is an elementary mistake which a knowledge of the Chinese sources would have corrected. Similarly, a greater familiarity with the Chinese scene would have saved him from writing "the Summer Palace in the Western Hills near Peking", when in fact it lies in the plain between Peking and the Western Hills. Also in the brief chapter on Lord Macartney's embassy to China he mentions that Macartney "presented to the Grand Secretary a short memorandum of the points he was authorized to raise. But which Grand Secretary? There were six members of the Grand Secretariat when Macartney was in Peking in 1793. Clearly he means Ho-shen, the favourite minister of the Emperor Ch'ien-
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