249. Victorian Narcos: Doomed Envoy to China (Ep 3)

0:00If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to Empire Club at www.empirepoduk.com.

0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Duripo. Previously on this podcast, we did an episode with Nandili Das about a mission that was sent from Great Britain to the Great Mughals. And in this mission, Britain wanted to impress upon the Great Mughal Empire just how great it was. And they sent these presents that they thought were fabulous to the Mughal court. And well, frankly, poor Thomas Rowe found out very quickly that all his presents were crap. And the Mughals just couldn't get in there. It's making worse than Portuguese to come up with really good ones. Really good presents.

1:04And I mean, half of them were broken. There was a carriage that got shattered on the way over. And this has got echoes of that. But we're not talking about India today. We continue to talk about China because, Willie, we are concerned with opium and the opium war. So just tell us where we're picking up the baton from last time. So we had two episodes at the start of our Victorian narco series, and we set up the fact that in the 18th century, the British discovered tea and that it went from something that a few smart ass sort of courtiers in London were sipping as a fashionable item to being the mainstay of the entire British public.

1:38and this had dramatic effects geopolitically around the world it led horrifically to the caribbean slave trade in order to grow enough sugar for people to put in their tea in the caribbean slave plantations but and this is the focus of what we're doing on this series it also led to a massive trade deficit with china the chinese were receiving all the gold that the east india company was making in india plus more to pay for the tea that they wanted then to sell to the British and then on to the colonies. Remember, this is the same time as the Boston Tea Party and its East India Company tea that's being dumped in Boston Harbour because of, and this is obviously very topical at the moment, because of tariffs and tax on that tea.

2:22Anyway, the way that the British solved this problem was a characteristically dodgy way for the imperial times, the East India Company began to force farmers in Bihar and parts of Bengal to plant large quantities of opium poppies. And while they couldn't themselves sell the opium to the Chinese, because then the Chinese would ban them from trading in the tea trade, they auctioned off their opium at the Keys in Calcutta. And leaving it for private traders, many of them Indian, and a lot of them Parsi. And we're going to hear more about that in the next episode. So suddenly, in the course of the 18th century, China moves from being a place on the very peripheral of British consciousness to its main trading partner.

3:11And it's very important for Britain that it has good relations with China, not least because the British government has found that it can tax tea very heavily and that it's gaining a great deal of its revenue from the tea tax. So if something goes wrong with the tea trade, not only do the British not get a cup of tea, but more worryingly for the government, they haven't got any revenue or a great chunk of their revenue disappears. So with all this in mind, the British decide to send a mission to the Qing court in China to open, for the very first time, diplomatic relations with China, which sounds like a relatively straightforward thing to do.

3:50Well, they've done it before. They've done it successfully before. They're very good at missions. They're very good at ambassadorial visits, the brocade and the epaulettes and all of that stuff has managed to impress many foreign potentate around the world. And so that's the playbook that they intend to go with here. That's the playbook they intend to go with. But what they haven't taken in is that the Chinese for 3 ,000 years have a very particular way of dealing with diplomatic missions, which the Chinese regard as begging missions to be admitted to their presence and all ambassadors, not representatives of potential trading partners who must be treated with respect and care, but instead as barbarians coming to offer felty at the heart of the world, which is the Chinese court.

4:36But I mean, partially as well, talking about sort of the kind of relationships between these countries, China stands alone as a country that has been long respected by the British. I mean, they've kind of been in awe of them. And there's a wonderful quote you pinged over to me by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, which describes China as one of the richest, that is one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, most populous countries in the world. And he, Adam Smith, you know, who is sort of a hero to many economists or, you know, sort of, what's the word I'm trying to... Fellow Lolan Scott?

5:10Was that what you were looking for? No, never that. Never, ever that. But free marketeers, that's right. That's the phrase I was looking for. But for him, China is the model. And I'd really think it'd be really helpful to our listeners and our viewers, hello, to describe the Qing Empire, because it is sort of China at the height of her powers. I mean, how wealthy, how influential is the Qing dynasty at this time? The first thing I'd like to do is just complete that thought that you opened up there about the European attitudes to China. Because it was surprising to me, I have to say, because I spent a lot of the last 20 years reading about European attitudes to India, which are almost from the beginning, resolutely racist and derogatory.

5:53There are occasionally travellers who say nice things about Mughal buildings and Mughal architecture and so on. And diamonds and rubies and spinels. I mean, they like the bling. They like the bling. But in general, you know, you get what you expect from 18th and 19th century travelers, which is, you know, Europe is the model of all things and everything else should conform to it. And where India is different from Europe, they criticize it. what is fascinating is that partly because none of them have ever really been to China, and they're just imagining it, because the Chinese very sensibly, like the Japanese, throughout the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, have stopped people coming, except in the case of China, for one small waterfront in Canton, which is where foreigners are meant to come if they want to trade with China.

6:36And they're locked, and we'll hear more about this in a second, they're locked into these, what they call factories, that these tindy company term for a trading station. It doesn't mean a sort of dark satanic mill churning out cloth or anything. It means a place where factors live, in other words, members of the East India Company, brotherhood. And when Europeans are writing about China, at the same time as they're writing about degenerate oriental despots in Istanbul or Delhi, they imagine to themselves an Eden in China. And And so characters like Voltaire, for example, in his philosophical dictionary of 1765, writes, Confucius had no interest in falsehood.

7:16He did not pretend to be a prophet. He claimed no inspiration. He taught no new religion. He used no delusions. And so they see an image of themselves, the kind of philosophers of the Enlightenment, in the great philosopher of ancient China. I find this fascinating as well, because, you know, again, like you, I've looked of early accounts of what they think Indians are like. And there is a moral bankruptcy that's always associated with being a native from everywhere else. Basically, if you're not English, you're not as good. And I wonder if that stark gulf is because they don't go, they're not allowed in.

7:49But what they get back is the art of China. So, chinoiserie and the beautiful paintings and silks and the porcelains. So, in their heads, anyone who could have produced this must be like us. The fact we can't do it, let's just put a pin in that for a second. But they're worthy of us. And that certainly seems reflected in Western Europe at the time. And just to complete that Voltaire thought and echo exactly what you're saying, quite contrary to the idea of an Oriental despot or the choice epithets they call the Mughals and the Ottomans, Voltaire says, I have found in the Chinese nothing but the purest morality without the slightest tinge of charlatanism.

8:29There is no house in Europe, he observed, the integrity of which is so well proved as that of the empire of China. Now, in actual fact, that's, of course, wrong. That like in Europe and like in India, there are successive dynasties who are all quite different from each other. There are crap people everywhere, as Voltaire might have written today. Very much. I think I'm very much channeling. Yes, for my inner Voltaire. Inner Voltaire there. You go good, you go bad. I mean, you know, that's what happens. This is the background. So not only are they dealing with a world that they have imagined as a sort of ancient version of the philosophers of 18th century Europe, they're now finding themselves heavily in debt to this place and that they are buying a product which is, you know, the ancient drink of China.

9:15teas is a deeply embedded part of Chinese literary culture. And there's a whole, as we discussed in the last episode, there's a whole Buddhist and literary and Mandarin world built around tea ceremonies and so on. So the British decide that they really need to open up an embassy in Beijing, they need to have good relations with the emperor, and perhaps remembering, because I was thinking exactly the same thing, we haven't discussed this affair, that the failure of the initial East India company embassies to Jahangir because they didn't have enough bling and didn't have enough forges. They brought rubbish.

9:50They brought rubbish and pound land. I mean, honestly, that stuff wasn't, they thought it'd be very impressive. Exactly. So in this case, they go to quite incredible lengths to get the embassy out. And should I go into the presents? Would you like to know? Absolutely. Because that shopping list is gorgeous. I mean, I'd not be disappointed if this arrived. So there's a huge research sort of effort put into this embassy to make sure they don't mess it up. And the first problem is there's virtually no one in Europe that speaks Chinese or has ever been to China. So they've got a problem. But they then discover from somewhere that in actual fact, the Jesuits opened up relations with the Chinese court.

10:32And that even at this moment, I don't know whether the British are aware of this, but there are Jesuits at the court in China. In Beijing, which is a place where foreigners are not allowed to go. So the Jesuits have this extraordinary pass to get into a place, you know, forbidden city, which it does what it says on the tin. You really can't go there at all, but the Jesuits are allowed in. And the Jesuits are informing the Chinese, although the British don't know this, about Western discoveries in astronomy. They're having philosophical discussions with Chinese astronomers and all this sort of stuff.

11:03But the British realize that there must be people in Italy, at least, who speak some Chinese. And they send off an expedition there. And they find not only other people, there are some Chinese people in Italy who were brought back. And so they bring them over to England. And the ambassador, Lord McCartney, who we're going to hear about in a second, plus several in his entourage start trying to learn a bit of basic Chinese. And they plan, having talked to these people, the sort of things that they think that the Chinese will like. And they create this gigantic planetarium, which has taken nearly 30 years to build, and was deemed the most wonderful piece of mechanism ever emanating from human hands by the salesman who sold it to the embassy.

11:45Well, I mean, but the thing is, they're not wrong. I mean, it is an impressive bit of kit. I mean, to people who viewed the protein planetariums in Europe at the time, this was nothing short of magic. It suddenly opened up a world that had only belonged to science. And actually, when it comes to innovation and science, Britain has a reason to puff out its chest. It is very, very good at lenses, lens grinding, all of these things. You know, they have good stuff to give here. What else? What else? Apart from the planetarium? Chemical and philosophical apparatus. I love that. Several brass field guns, a sampling of muskets and swords, howitz and mortars, two magnificent lusters, which seem to be elaborate chandeliers, vases, which you think is slightly cold to Newcastle to China.

12:32Well, I mean, they do good vases in China, but you know. Clocks, an air pump, Wedgwood, China, and artworks depicting everyday life in England. Just what they want. But you missed my favourite thing. My favourite thing was a hot air balloon. The hot air, I mean, again, these things which not, you know, in Europe, again, this stuff of magic, you know, Mongolia and, you know, sort of taking off into the heavens, defying the gods, suddenly, you know, making the sky a highway that you can travel. This stuff in Europe was seriously impressive. And what this British embassy thought is that if we show them this stuff, we could be friends.

13:13We should be friends. We like them. We think they're brilliant. Now, you just mentioned Lord McCartney. Before we go to Lord McCartney, we've got to tell you about this wonderful Scotsman, another of my co-nationals. Okay. Scotsman first. Scotsman first. Surprise. Shocker. Yes, go on. And his name is James Dinwiddie. And he's an astronomer and a natural philosopher. And he's responsible for the planetarium and the whole air balloon. But that's not all. He's also responsible for bringing a diving bell. Yes. I forgot about that. It was sea and air. That's right. Sort of, you know, that we've got command over both of those realms.

13:47Is Dinwiddie perhaps a distant uncle or something? Do we need to cover that off very quickly before we meet now? There are other relations turning up later in the series, but not all this one. And thank God, says the entire listenership of Empire. Now, can we talk about McCartney? I'm surprised you didn't want to talk about him. There is a bit of a Scots thing here because although born in Ireland, George Lord McCartney was of Scots-Irish heritage. Was he a posho? He was a posho and he's also been the ambassador to Russia. But he realises the importance of this. Not only will it be the first ever time the Brits have gone to Beijing, gone to the Chinese court, no one has ever done that before.

14:23But on top of that, this is now the country which is the most important economic partner of Britain. It's like Peter Mandelson trying to go and sort out Trump in Washington. Although Mandelson knows it's a tricky job, McCartney doesn't know this yet. But you said something to me before when you were talking about this, is that it was tantamount to a mission to Mars because it was the undiscovered planet. And it was the one that, you know, sort of inhabits a huge part of the romantic brain of Europe. But to be there, to be the first person to set foot on Chinese soil is deeply intoxicating for McCartney.

14:55Now, what he does is he wants to look good for the Martians. Oh, I love this. So, he tries to imagine himself, what will really impress the Chinese? And so, he designs himself a sort of peacock outfit, which he thinks is, you know, what ambassadors to China should wear. and there's a lovely quote. It's a suit of spotted mulberry velvet. Oh, dreamy. Spotted mulberry velvet. Dreamy. I like the spots. I mean, dreamy. It's Anna Wintour tearing her hair out from the root. Spotted mulberry, you say? Yes. With a diamond star and a ribbon over which he won the full habit of the Order of the Bath, which was like the kind of OBE or the CBE or something much grander, the KCBE of its day, with the hat and the plume of feathers which form part of it.

15:42dressed up like a peacock he felt certain to be able to make a grand impression in the country that he and most of his entourage to say nothing of his countrymen had only ever encountered in his imaginations now that is a lovely quote from I should quickly say the wonderful Imperial Twilight by Stephen Platt can I just say it is in a deeply scholarly book but Stephen is also a deeply funny man so he has a very sort of straight delivery and then he'll sort of say something like you know McCartney turned up and you'll ask a question like wasn't he a bit hot He's going to Asia in a mulberry suit And he goes, yes, bloody hot, sweating like a pig Hot in mulberry velvet I love it Okay, so he's got his bags packed He's got his suit ready He's got his presents, his diving bell His hot air balloon Who are the personnel that he's taking with him?

16:29And you mentioned in Woody But that's only one person It's a father and son combo I'm quite obsessed with There's a father and son combo They're very good This is Sir George Staunton and his son also helpfully called George. So George Senior and George Junior. But George Junior is very junior. He's only 11, isn't he? He's just a kid. He's just a baby, isn't he? But he's a kind of wunderkind. And George Senior clearly thinks he's even more of a genius than he actually is. And so I think he starts his Chinese lessons at eight or so. Sounds like an Indian dad. My son is a genius. Yes. Okay. It's exactly that.

17:02So Sir George Staunton is actually only McCartney's secretary. That's his official job. But he assumes a larger than life part in this because his son George will go on to become, and we will meet him in subsequent episodes, or certainly he will appoint himself as the great British expert on China because he's one of the very few people in Britain that speaks Chinese and even fewer that have been to China after this expedition. Just very briefly, because being the mother of boys in that postcode, George Very Jr. has the distinction of he's been trained by the Jesuits. So that's where he gets his knowledge of China.

17:34Age 11, he can't be very fluent, surely. Not at all. That's one of the great things. Dad clearly thinks that he's completely fluent in Chinese. And as we will see, that turns out not to be the case at all. Can I just tell you, every parent who has a child doing GCSE French, as I do, will know this. No, mum, I'm on top of it. I'm completely fluent. I can converse. You've just come back from holiday. I have, and we tested that theory. And let me tell you, it doesn't stand up to great scrutiny. Send the boy in for a baguette. Comes back with a beanstalk. Anyway, on you go. So the thing that they're most proud of in this expedition is, of course, the letter from King George III, who is the king at this time.

18:15King George, for those who are not British and haven't sat watching the wonderful Alan Bennett play or movie of the madness of King George, was the famous king who both went mad and lost America, which is too unfortunate. You'll be back.

18:32It's indeed in Hamilton. That's it. But he has recently been resuscitated by Andrew Roberts, my contemporary at Cambridge, of a slightly different political persuasion to me. And Andrew, actually, I thought made a very good case. I enjoyed his book on George III for all the political differences. And he makes a very good case that George is an underrated king. Anyway. That's another time. Yes, another time for that. I mean, he is just for those who don't know, he is in Britain always written off because of the madness of King George as somebody who just completely doolally. But actually, he was, in brief, marshalling a very difficult situation with an impossible son, who really was the bonkers member of the family.

19:11So, this King George, who has been much maligned for mental health issues, does understand better than most people how to smother somebody in diplomatic love, lovebomb them diplomatically. So, he writes a letter where he refers to the Chinese emperor. Can I read a bit of it? Because it's just so good. I won't do it justice if I appreciate it. It's addressed to the Supreme Emperor of China, worthy to live tens of thousands and tens of thousands of years. Not just one tens of thousands, but tens and tens. It's not enough, one. And he says why the English are coming over and why the mission was for the sake of discovery to better their own civilization and our own.

19:50It's all such a good thing. And he talks about China in the most glowing terms, which we've already discussed, is pretty sincere. And above all, King George insists, our ardent wish has been to become acquainted with those celebrated institutions of Your Majesty's populace, an extensive empire which have carried its prosperity to such a height as to be the admiration of all surrounding nations. So again, you know, a tone taken with China that is pretty unique. We're going to take a break. Join us after the break, where we find out who the letter, who McCartney and who the diving bell and balloon are going to be visiting.

20:42Flatex. Besser richtig handeln. Investieren birgt Verlustrisiken. Bedingungen gelten. Externe Kosten fallen an.

20:52Welcome back. So before the break, we were talking about the prep, the mulberry spotted suit. They're good to go. They are good to go. Tell us about who they're going to visit, because I don't feel we've really done justice to the man who is going to live for tens of thousands and tens of thousands of years. the Qing emperor. Name him and describe him for us. So the Qianlong emperor is one of the longest ruling figures in Chinese history, in fact, and rules from 1735 to 1796, which is almost a record. Now, he's a Manchu, which is important. He is not ethnic Chinese. There are various points in Chinese history when the Chinese get conquered, first by for example the mongols the yuan um and you have the yuan dynasty and this is the manchu dynasty and the manchus are from of course manchuria over the great wall they are a military elite um they don't share the top ranks of their kingdom with the ethnic chinese who are kept under but they're very successful and it's important to recognize this in the story of the opium wars which we're going to be looking at for the next few episodes.

22:04And you can't understand, in a sense, why the Chinese court behaves the way it does unless you realize that this is also an empire at the peak of its power. And they've conquered great chunks of the area around China. So they've conquered Shenzhen, which hasn't been in Chinese hands since the Tang period. And they conquered Tibet, which within, not living memory, but several centuries earlier, had been raiding into the heart of China. So they've done very well militarily. And they are a military elite who are very proud of their military traditions. The Qianlong Emperor himself is a remarkable man.

22:43He's a calligrapher, a man of parts. And so it's the meeting. And this is what we have to keep in mind because we know that the open war is coming and this is going to be the century of humiliation. But this is actually when this interaction begins, the meeting of the two greatest empires in the world. And also very, I'm really glad you mentioned the foreshadowing. Normally, I get cross with you when you say. You get cross with me, even when I don't spoil the plot. I mean, about everything. But the century of humiliation, it really is important to know the height from which the Chinese fell. Because they feel it, they know it, and they talk about it even today.

23:23And you know, on Empire, what we try and do is we try and explain what's going on in the world today through the lens of history. Like, look at what happened before. Might this be why people feel the way they do today? And that certainly is the case here. Before we get to the actual meeting, we haven't really done the voyage because it's not a hop, skip and a jump to China, is it? It takes a long, long time and it takes big, big ships, especially if you're taking the kind of kit they're taking. So, I mean, tell us about their months and months at sea trying to get to China. It's quite important to take in that this is not just a British voyage to China and a British embassy.

24:03it's a joint British Crown embassy with the East India Company and people get very muddled by this at this point in history in the 1780s everything all British interests east of the Cape Good Hope are controlled by a London company the East India Company which has an office in Leadenhall Street it has a share price on the London Stock Exchange and you can buy shares in it and it has at this point a larger army than the british army they've actually got an army twice the size of the british army the british army is about 100 000 men the east india company army is 200 000 men so there are two ships which set off one is hms lion which is a government ship from the royal navy and the other is the east india company merchant ship hindustan so so perhaps the hindustan is the one that's got all the uh all the diving bells and uh and so on on it but this is a big embassy There are 400 passengers on HMS Lion before you include the crew.

25:04And Hindustan carries 66 East India Company officials. This is huge. It's a really big. And this should be something, again, I mean, I don't think that's why they do it, because the East India Company have the best knowledge of merchant seaways. And, you know, they're very good at navigating this kind of water. But it is also, I wonder, a sort of a way of actually being incredibly impressive. that you sort of turn up with these two extraordinary ships because Britain's very proud, quite rightly, of its ships. We're talking 1792, big fluttering pennants coming towards China, the harbour on the horizon.

25:41This should be a really impressive entry to great fanfare with these two ships, they think. Because we've talked about this before, the Chinese have never really bothered themselves with sea. You know, they haven't. Other than that one moment, we did that nice episode last Christmas, not this Christmas, but one Christmas ago, by the great admiral. Yes, but one admiral, William. I mean, but ships and sort of seas, and because they are a very self-contained empire and they sort of have everything that they want. So notionally, the Brits are right. You know, you send these two great galleons over, it should be impressive.