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Archive of letters and documents from the Macartney Embassy to China.

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A remarkable and largely unpublished archive from Lord Macartney’s embassy to China of 1792–4 – a pivotal moment in relations between China and the West – including a diplomatic autograph letter signed by Macartney, autograph correspondence between him and other leading figures of the mission, and documents relating to personnel, equipment, and expenses.

Commissioned in 1792 as Britain’s first mission to the Chinese Empire, the Macartney Embassy is remembered both as a landmark in the West’s understanding of China and as an episode of failed diplomacy and misunderstanding with long-lasting repercussions. Initiated by Henry Dundas (later 1st Viscount Melville) and led by George, Viscount Macartney, its aims were to establish formal relations and an embassy in Peking (Beijing), to improve trade conditions for Britain (then suffering a trade deficit owing to its demand for Chinese tea), and to gather intelligence about China, its people, and its way of life. With a party of ninety-four, including ‘a galaxy of experts’ (ODNB), Macartney set out in September 1792, reaching Peking in August of the following year and proceeding to Jehol (Chengde) to meet the Qianlong Emperor on 14 September 1793. All of Britain’s requests were refused, Macartney was shortly dismissed, and the embassy left from Macao in March 1794.

The present group of documents spans the full length of the embassy, from its preparations to its aftermath, and contains much unpublished material on its members and activities. Two early documents sketch the personnel and expense of the embassy, showing the planning as it happened. These appear to be working copies of the tableau of the embassy drawn up by Macartney at Dundas’s request in January 1792 (see Pritchard, p. 277), and are very likely to have been used in arguing for its approval. They not only present an estimate of the total cost (£95,950) and a detailed breakdown of the proposed emissaries – from senior members to a ‘Gentleman of Science’, a person ‘from Manchester in the cotton and silk branches’, one ‘from Mr. Wedgwood in the pottery branch’ (these last two with crosses pencilled next to them), as well as painters and musicians – but preserve faint calculations and corrections in pencil and end with the assertion that the total expense is ‘a very small sum to be risked for the Benefits that will probably be derived from it’.

Also predating the voyage is an indenture dated 30 August 1792 between the East India Company and John Barrow appointing him comptroller of the embassy. Barrow ‘served with distinction’ (ODNB), his principal duty being the care of the elaborate presents sent to the emperor (see below), and he would later author both a life of Macartney (which saw the first publication of the ambassador’s journal) and Travels in China, ‘one of the best illustrated English travels on China’ (Hill). The indenture records his appointment on the eve of the embassy and, in addition to terms about pay and subordination, places strict limits on dealings with ‘natives’ and stipulates that in any such dealings Barrow will ‘conduct himself with Respect and Civility’ and not ‘commit, permit, suffer or connive at any Outrage or Violence contrary to the Laws, Usages or Customs of China’.

Among the documents from the embassy itself is a highly significant and unpublished letter, signed and in Macartney’s hand, addressed to the Governor-General of the Philippines. Dated 1 August 1793 and sent as Macartney waited to proceed inland to Peking, the letter requests that the Governor-General receive Sir Erasmus Gower, commander of the embassy, when the latter stops in Manila. This must relate to the secret, and later abandoned, mission to Japan, the Philippines, and Celebes that Gower was to undertake.

Unbeknownst to the Admiralty, Gower had planned with Dundas and Macartney to visit these islands to gain nautical knowledge, gather intelligence about Spanish rule and ‘native powers’, and ‘probably get a great part of the trade from the Spaniards and Dutch, who are extremely disliked, and in a very tottering state’ (Bates, p. 191), as he put it in a private note (not represented here). The letter also proposes a visit to the Philippines by Macartney himself after his embassy. These plans are of particular interest in light of discussions between Macartney and the East India Company prior to his voyage about a possible trade network connecting future British settlements in China with Manila and Spanish South America. The contents of a copy of this letter are summarized by Pritchard (p. 328) but the text itself is unpublished. Written in Macartney’s hand and preserved with a sealed and addressed envelope, ours appears to be the original. Also of considerable interest is a letter sent to Macartney in May 1793 by the Company’s Secret and Superintending Committee at Canton. The letter reports from the head of the Cohong, Cai Shiwen (known to Westerners as Munqua), that he is under orders to follow the Embassy up the coast, receive them, and ‘in all probability’ accompany them to court as interpreters – an arrangement that both Munqua and the Company oppose. Then follows a passage ‘in Cypher in the Original’, as noted in the margin.

The Committee refer Macartney ‘to Munqua, from whom we have derived so much information, for every explanation on points we communicated by the Wycombe [an East Indiaman that had carried a letter to Macartney in January]’. Thus the letter documents not only the close collaboration and aligned interests of the Company and the Chinese hongs but seems to record highly sensitive disclosures, perhaps amounting to espionage, on the part of the latter’s leader.

Other items include correspondence between Macartney, fellow members of the embassy, and Company men, discussing intelligence, tactics, logistics, restrictions on teaching Chinese, and ‘with how small a degree of accuracy, any information is to be attained in this country’. Also present are a list of salaries paid to the emissaries – Macartney himself; Sir George Staunton, Aeneas Anderson, and William Alexander, all of whom would publish important works about the mission; the astronomer James Dinwiddie; as well as musicians, servants, saddlers, and others – and an extensive catalogue of gifts presented to the emperor, including guns, cutlery, scientific instruments, watches, diamonds, and pocket books (in ‘Fine Morocco’). Presented with the aim of dazzling the Chinese, these gifts were famously dismissed by Qianlong as ‘ingenious articles’ of which China had no need. The archive concludes with a curious manuscript note from 1833 on Chinese harbours and rivers as described in the then just-published Report of Lindsay’s clandestine reconnaissance voyage along the Chinese coast – intelligence from which would soon play a part in the First Opium War, of which the Macartney Embassy’s failure was the ultimate progenitor.

Provenance:
This archive appears to have been part of a larger collection of manuscripts on China and Southeast Asia within the Viscount Melville Papers and may therefore derive from Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, the embassy’s originator. With the documents is a typescript list of seventeen items (including the Macartney papers) titled, in both typescript and manuscript, ‘The Viscount Melville PAPERS FOR HONG KONG’. A typed heading, crossed out in the same ink, reads ‘Copy list sent to Sir Alexander Grantham, San Francisco. March 6, 1958’. Grantham was Hong Kong’s longest-serving governor, in office from 1947 to 1957 and playing a crucial role in the colony’s stabilisation as well as the shelving of democratic reforms. The papers of Dundas and his heirs consisted of some 80,000 items which ‘formed till the 1920s one of the greatest extant archives from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’ (Fry, p. x).

They were dispersed in the earlier twentieth century, and many are now scattered across institutions in Britain, Ireland, and America.

See Bates, Champion of the Quarterdeck: Admiral Sir Erasmus Gower (1742–1814) (2017); Fry, The Dundas Despotism (1992); Peyrefitte, The Collision of two Civilisations (1993); Pritchard, The crucial years of early Anglo-Chinese relations (1936).

A full list of contents is available on request.