250. Victorian Narcos: Banished From Beijing (Ep 4)

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durrumpole. Yes. So the last cliffhanger we left you on. Yes. It's you again. No, yay, it's you again. So look, the last episode we left you on the cliff edge or rather mountain crag. The British ambassador to China, would-be British ambassador to China, Lord McCartney, has finally made it to the summer kingdom of the great emperor, the great Qing emperor. And they'd been, how many months have they been on the road? You said something extraordinary. A year, 12 whole months on the road to try and get to see this man. And if you have not listened to the last episode, go back and listen to it.

1:16It's very funny. But all these gifts, which were really important to impress the emperor, they've had to leave behind in the capital capital of Beijing because it's a trek into mountainous territory and everything would have been smashed to pieces. And they've learned their lessons from previous embassies where lovely gifts, they think, are smashed to pieces in bumpy rides. So, they leave all their stuff in the capital, Beijing. They have just gone a small group to go and greet the emperor. They have it in their minds that they're going to turn up and they're going to be embraced and it's going to be fabulous and a brave new world is going to open up of trade links and everybody getting very, very rich.

1:56Not quite. We left it on a big but. There is indeed a very big but. And the but is the kowtow. Now, in Chinese diplomatic protocol, there is no such thing as an ambassador to the court of China. There's merely submissive barbarians bringing tribute. And the first thing they have to do before they can be allowed to trade with the Middle Kingdom or to open diplomatic relations of any sort. They have to show their submission. And this is made very clear to the British Embassy by the officials who have been delegated to teach them civilised behaviour. And I need to explain what the kowtow is. So the kowtow, actually, it's passed into common parlance, you know, don't kowtow to his bullying behaviour.

2:46It means don't sort of give in completely and acquiesce completely. But the actual kowtow is the lowest, humblest sort of bow. So, you're on your knees. So, you know, your big butt or your bottom in between your legs and on your knees and you lean down to the ground with your hands in front of you. How can you put a bottom between your legs? If you're sitting on your heels, that kind of thing. Or, you know, if you're limber, in between. So, look, and then you go down. So, your head touches the ground, hands either side, and you touch the ground a number of times. That is the cow tower. It's basically, it's as low as you can go in front of the great emperor, to show that you are basically dust between his toes.

3:28That's what it is. And that is why it's not easy for a man representing Great Britain to do that, is it, William? In the 18th century, no. They absolutely are forbidden from doing that by diplomatic protocols. So, before anything else happens, who have two completely immovable and irreconcilable diplomatic protocols. The Chinese demand that you go flat on your face and worship the emperor. And George III has commanded that absolutely not. So McCartney initially tries to negotiate, and there's a lot of haggling with the officials. Is it okay if he goes down on one knee rather than two? Does he have to put his face on the ground?

4:08They spend a week knocking these ideas backwards and forwards. and they are completely unaware that this is absolutely the worst possible behaviour in Chinese eyes. It's really annoying them. It's like, what are you talking about? What are you talking about this one knee thing? And McCartney comes back and goes, look, no, no, this is how we do it where I come from. In front of our king, that's what we do. It's like a great humbling thing, go down on one knee, take the knee in front of the king. But the Chinese are having none of it. What's interesting, William, is that the Brits do not know how angry the Chinese are getting about this.

4:46They think they're having a reasonable conversation. They're very polite to your face. But back in the back rooms of the imperial palace, they're like, what the hell are they doing? Who's ever heard of going down on one knee? This is not negotiable. And particularly the emperor is incredibly angry and is about to cancel all the audiences. As far and all diplomatic protocol already. And maybe they do sense this a bit because what happens, we only learn much later when young George Thornton is advising a future diplomatic mission, is they basically decide to lie to their own bosses and to agree to kowtow, but not to tell the British that they've done it.

5:31Say we never done it. And this only emerges in the Amherst mission, the next attempt to open diplomatic relations, when the Chinese say, but the last lot did it in the end. And they say, no, no, no, they absolutely didn't. We've got his book here. Young George Staunton, who is now a middle-aged MP or even a now rather senior MP, admits that there was fibbing going on. That he did do it. They did do it, but didn't include it in the official record of what went on. so having without realizing it completely pissed off every official in the chinese court and made the emperor um irate with with fury um they finally get their audience and go down on the go down flat on their faces as they've been asked to do i think they have a few gifts that maybe maybe the weaponry or something they have they've really got a few swords and things whatever that you know you can carry yeah but not the biggies not the big ticket items they're not there and they give what the chinese regard as their tribute and they and also of course the chinese as jahangia had been centuries earlier in the mogul court were incredibly disappointed by the presents because they were not only had they left the best ones behind but rumors of how wonderful these presents were going to be had gone ahead of them and everyone is slightly like christmas where you You know, you find that everyone's given you the present you don't want.

6:53They brought the equivalent of socks. They brought socks to the emperor. Oh, no. Okay. Exactly. Oh, you shouldn't have. I never understood how socks became a thing anyway to give. Right up to this point, McCartney has no idea of how offended the emperor is. We know because the Chinese records survive. and four days before the audience, the Qianlong Emperor was already so furious about McCartney's dithering that he had issued an edict to his ministers expressing great displeasure with the British and declaring that he would no longer show them any extra favours. And I think the officials just don't communicate this.

7:35So there's a lot of fibbing going on on both sides. The British are not telling their bosses what they're actually doing and the Chinese officials are not carrying the message from the emperor. Right. So, I mean, when you say that the emperor has pretty much cut them off, what has he said exactly that's not being transmitted, that he's not going to do a deal, he's not going to meet them again, they can do one with their socks and leave? I mean, how angry is he? The message that the emperor gives to his officials is that he had originally planned to let McCartney stay for a while and enjoy the sights of Jeho, which I can witness from personal experience are well worth seeing this most gorgeous place and it's a place that takes several days to see and and i've been to the audience hall there um which is this gorgeous sort of wooden miniature of the forbidden city moved to this hill station the midwoods okay describe it in words because there are people who've not been to the forbidden city me and there are people who haven't been to this one in general so what does it look like the forbidden city is is sort of spectacular and vast and it's like a you know it's like something sort of five or six times the size of buckingham palace with a whole succession of court charts finally reach the final audience hall.

8:43This in Jehol is a miniature version of that. And these lovely little wooden pavilions in woods, it's utterly heavenly. And when you go there today, you see all the Chinlong Emperor's robes and all that sort of stuff on display there. It's wonderful. So anyway, the message goes out from the Emperor to the officials that the British embassy has caused His Majesty great displeasure. They're told that they can keep the gifts that were planned for them, he says, and hold the meetings that had been promised, but otherwise they were cut off. Now, this isn't clearly passed on, or certainly if it is passed on, it's done in such diplomatically oleaginous way that the British just missed the point of it.

9:26And they don't realize that the emperor has ticked them off for, as he puts it, their presumption and self-importance. Right. Which is quite strong stuff. No, no. But doesn't it get stronger with him? Because he says, you know, when they say, look, these aren't actually the proper gifts. The socks are not. They're just a token. We've got better things than the socks. And he says, look, strange and costly objects do not interest me. We possess all the things. I set no value on objects, strange or ingenious, and I have no use for your country's manufacture. I mean, that is a stinging rebuke. This also is relayed back to Britain because they can't sort of avoid saying that.

10:05But they can't trade. You've got no trade deal because he says he doesn't like any of your stuff. And then he adds, just to sort of add insult to injury, he says, when foreigners come seeking audience with me and when they are sincere and submissive, then I always treat them with kindness, says the emperor. But if they come in arrogance, they get nothing. They get nothing. So it's slightly like going to see Trump at the moment if he was Zelensky. He gets a diplomatic ticking off. But again, with the kind of bullheadedness of the British in this period, are completely unaware that they have completely failed, even before they got their audience.

10:42In the edict, which the Qianlong Emperor issues, the official edict to George III, he says that China has no need for increased trade with Britain, or indeed has no use for the establishment of a permanent British embassy. It's a total failure. A total failure. But because there's no one that can actually properly read Chinese with the exhibition, amazingly, they don't know that they've been given sort of null point. Can I just dwell on this for one second? Because they took 11-year-old little George with them, little George Staunton, who says, yes, Daddy, I speak fluent Chinese. I did. I've done all my homework.

11:19No one can read the rebuke. No one. So they must open this scroll. And just assume. And wave happily. Thank you, sir. This is great. We'll take this back. This is lovely. This must only say, love the socks. Can't wait to see the rest of it. That's what it says. They're happy. They think it's gone well. I mean, they imagine that they're now going to go down to Beijing, that everyone's going to see the presence and it's all going to carry on. It's all going to be lovely. In fact, the scroll that they've been getting says emphatically that the request for a British ambassador to remain in the capital is, quote, not consistent with the customs of this, our empire, and therefore cannot be allowed.

12:01And he acknowledges, the emperor, that foreign missionaries have on occasion been allowed to live in Beijing. And in fact, at this moment, Dinwiddie is hanging out with some foreign missionaries, some Jesuits in Beijing who are interested in his lenses and not air beliefs. Because they're good. They're good lenses. Dinwiddie's brought really good stuff. Yeah. But he says very clearly that these missionaries and anyone else who desires to live in the capital must adopt such a position that he must immediately put on Chinese dress, dwell with the society assigned to him and cannot return to his country.

12:40So these guys are there for life. Wow. Can anyone read that out to them? Did they understand that? Did he understand it? No, he didn't even understand it. And I think it's when they get to Beijing, we're going to come to that in a minute, that the penny begins to drop. Okay. Quite possibly because they meet someone who can read Chinese. All right. So then what happens next? Because this is all just unfolding in a terrible way. And so the final paragraph of this edict, he lets it be known that he has given the British embassy already an abundance of gifts and that they should simply be grateful and go home.

13:17Wow. All these gifts which McCartney has been worrying about, the Qianlong Emperor merely notes that he'd accepted them not because he actually wanted them, but merely as, quotes, tokens of your own affectionate regard for me. So the two most arrogant nations in the world with the two biggest empires have met, completely misunderstood each other, and the whole thing has been a spectacular famer. And his final words are, In truth, as the greatness and splendor of the Chinese empire have spread its fame far and wide, and as foreign nations from a thousand parts of the world crowd hither over the mountains and seas to pay us homage and to bring us the rarest and most precious offerings, what is it that we can want with you here?

14:03And then this final word that you've already said, strange and costly objects do not interest me. We possess all things. I set no value on objects, stranger or ingenious, and we have not the slightest use for your country's matter. So can I just say it is the answer. It's meant to be a rhetorical question. What do you buy for the man who has everything? And the emperor answers it. Nothing. Nothing that you've got. I've already got it. I don't care. But lovely Din Woody, who I have a soft spot for because he's a scientist. I like a scientist. As anyone who listens to this podcast will know, he's just beavering away, putting up his stuff, putting up his lenses, putting up his planetarium.

14:43because he's brought it thousands and thousands of miles. And they are still thinking that these lustres and these globes and the clocks, I mean, clocks are really special in Britain. And he's setting everything up, putting it all in the right places to make, as he puts it, a very beautiful appearance, which he thinks is, again, quote, much admired by the Chinese because the polite Chinese people around him are going, oh, no, it's terrific. It's good effort. Everyone's going to love this. Well done, Dinwiddie. Oh, this is going to be fabulous. Oh, well done you. However, the emperor does then deign to look at this stuff, doesn't he, when he comes back from jail?

15:25He first of all issues a second edict, which is even more damning than the first. Oh, no. He indicates, just because I think now, you know, the penny is not fully dropping. But the embassy is beginning to realize that they're not being treated with the, they haven't been given the second audience. They haven't seen the emperor again. They were thinking they were going to come and stay for at least a year and make a great study and make friends. Clearly, they're upset that the British are not left already. The emperor then, to make it even more clear, and not realizing that the British can't read the edicts that he's giving them, sends the second one.

16:00And he says that he has complete satisfaction with the existing trade arrangements. In other words, the Brits are just stuck on one little stretch of river in Canton and can't move even into Canton, never mind anywhere else in the empire. He says, and this is a wonderful assertion of self-confidence, the products of our empire are abundant and there is nothing we do not have. So we have never needed trade with foreign countries to give us anything we lacked. However, he went on, tea, porcelain and silk that China produced, he understood were essential needs for countries like England that did not have them.

16:36So patronizing. So out of the great good of our dynasty, we have long permitted foreign merchants to come to Canton and purchase such goods to satisfy your needs and allow you to benefit from our surplus. Trade, in other words, he's saying, had always been a favor on China's side to lesser nations. And he then ends that by telling the King of England, George III, that England is just one of many countries that come to trade with us. And if I give Britain special treatment, then they will all want to have it as well. Yes. I mean, yeah. We let you. Everyone else is going to want some. So this is crushing for McCartney.

17:17This must because he must know he's going to have to go back with nothing. And after all this fuss, it's just going to be a disaster. They're still holding out for Dinwiddie to save the day. Only one hot air balloon ride will really - Balloon over Beijing. I mean, they're going to love it. It's going to be amazing. They will love it. Exactly. That's what they're still hoping for. But on October the 1st, the emperor who has come down from Jehol back to the capital, because it's now cold up in the capital. October is the beginning of the cold weather in Manchuria, comes down and he does a two-minute tour of this planetarium.

17:55Which should have taken hours. Which Dunwiddie has set this up so it takes hours and he can give lectures and teach them things that, you know, he spent a lifetime learning. Oh, poor Dunwiddie. And his comment, which he gives as he's leaving, is it is good enough to amuse children. That's the Emperor's final crushing comment. There's another really gorgeous thing because Dunwoody, who's only sort of a minor apparatchik in the scheme of things, if you're dealing with the great emperor, he has to watch and he's watching from sort of almost around a corner with a mirror, the reflection, because you can't look directly at the emperor.

18:33so you know like when you've got this little pocket watch you want to see if the boy in the class really does like you and he's looking he's looking into this mirror and he sees the emperor doing this two minute dash around the stuff that has literally taken him a lifetime 30 years 30 years to put together two minutes and what he says is that he just has this inscrutable face that shows absolutely no emotion imagine how crushing that is to poor Dunwiddie who you know stayed behind to make it all perfect and all lovely. And 30 years of his life have gone into this for two minutes. A man is just clearly bored.

19:11So that's October the 1st. And on October the 6th, the emperor notices that these barbarians are still there. He's dismissed them in Jehovah. Told you to go away. Told you to go. And so finally, on the 6th, they're literally kicked out. So look, I mean, with what ostensibly feels very much like an Airbnb overstay, where you've been told, right? You were told to go. You were told to go six days ago. Why are you still here? Let's help you with your bags. Let's take a break. When we come back after the break, find out what happens next.

19:51Welcome back. So we are in Beijing and the first ever British embassy to China has just been kicked out. Of their Airbnb. They were told to leave six days earlier, where they didn't realise. Because no one can read what they're being told. No one can understand it. And so the penny finally drops. Poor old Dinwiddie is not going to be able to float in a hot air balloon over the Chinese emperor. They're not going to be able to show their mastery of pyrotechnics and artillery. They brought a diving bell. They were going to go underwater. None of that's going to happen. And despite the protests of now completely hysterical Dinwiddie, The Chinese start packing everything up because the British are not doing it themselves.

20:35Yeah, let's help you. Let's help you out here. They just start throwing all these lenses into boxes. And Dinwiddie's screaming, no, no, let me put the wool and the cotton wool and everything else. In the journal, McCartney is still trying to put a good spin on it. But as one of his servants puts it in his diary, we entered Beijing like paupers. we remained in it like prisoners and we quitted it like vagrants. Oh, now they understand. It's pretty good, isn't it? Yeah. It is. And for a man, again, I describe it as a posh, but he comes from a dignified family. He's the man who served in Russia. It is not like he's some hick off the boat.

21:18He knows about diplomacy or he thinks he knows about diplomacy. And this was meant to be his one foot on Mars. He was meant to be that pioneer. and instead he's sort of chased off with his tail between his legs. Right, so then what happens to a proud man like that? So, McCartney initially doesn't really, I mean, obviously tries to put as good a spin. As he's heading back to England, he's trying to put as good a spin in it. But it's Staunton, George Staunton, who writes an honest account. The elder or the 11-year-old or the blabby 11-year-old who's spinning his pockets with the wall of China. His dad, okay, right.

21:53And Staunton's account, which comes out a few months after McCartney's the following year, reveals in the fullness the complete and utter diplomatic failure and humiliation that this entire embassy has been. And McCartney becomes a standing joke. I mean, so Staunton has written an account. However, I thought actually the one who really spills the beans is his valet. He's got a slightly sort of sober version that it didn't go very well. Whereas McCartney might want to say, no, no, it went as well as can be expected. Staunton takes that expectation down to a realistic level that it wasn't as great as we thought it would be.

22:29And maybe next time don't send socks. But it is his valet who goes and says, basically, we were booted around the kingdom we were told to get out it was all awful and that is the thing the valet's account of this trip is what hits the papers and the papers then start making absolute merriment at McCartney's expense he becomes a figure of fun they start doing cartoons of McCartney where he's a he's really awkward and kind of all angular and trying to sort of kowtow in front of the emperor, which he was told not to do. He's surrounded by these cartoons, these visual depictions with these over bloated Chinese officials who were just looking at him with nothing but disdain.

23:13For a man who has already had the stress of almost two years of trying to prepare for, take, try and meet the emperor with all of these high promises of, I'm the man who can do this, is now absolutely debased as a diplomat. I mean, his whole world comes crashing down. And kind of there's something rather neat that it's a kiss and tell from the valet that kind of does for him. It's rather like some Lady Diana story. Or a butler doing their own account. Because even Staunton's account, and you're right, Staunton lowers the expectations that it didn't go as quite as well as we hoped it would. and little George, it turns out, needs to do a bit more work on his Chinese.

23:55But, you know, it's the valet what's done it. I mean, it feels like it's total and complete humiliation with the caricatures and, you know, the laughter. Once people are laughing at you, it's like nowhere else to go. Or does he manage to save some, or does this embassy manage to save some shreds of dignity? The embassy doesn't, but you can say that in one way, the British or certainly the East India Company get the last laugh. because although the emperor is simply not interested in opening diplomatic relations, having an embassy in Beijing, giving any more access to the British than they've already got, they don't actually cancel the existing arrangements.

24:36It isn't like they're so angry at the bad and barbaric behavior that they close down Canton. And even as the embassy is being sent home in disgrace, and even as the poor Dinwiddie's telescopes are being packed, the trade in opium is growing and growing. What had been a major deficit of the British with giving all their gold to the Chinese to buy the tea and having nothing to sell in return, that is being eroded by the sheer quantity of opium which is being sold, even as the McCartney embassy is heading back to London. So, I mean, you're suggesting that balance of payment is not as completely out of whack as it was.

25:20I mean, tell me about the scale. I mean, what kind of money and what kind of import are we talking about? So what's happening is that the Chinese are consuming more and more opium. There's been this change in the way it's consumed. It used to be drunk or swallowed as pills. But the innovation that began in Java of smoking opium, what you do is take a little ball of opium and an expert in this rolls it around in a flame so that it nearly catches fire but doesn't. And then you put it into an opium pipe and smoke it. And this is highly intoxicating and highly addictive. And this is apparent in the sales of opium to China, which are increasing even as the embassy is retreating.

26:09So when the McCartney embassy is originally planned in the late 1760s and early 1770s, there's only about 200 chests of East India Company opium, which is being sold to China. But by the time that the embassy is heading away, it's increased to 1 ,000. In other words, it's gone up five times. That continues so that by 1800, just 20 years later, the figure grows up to about 5 ,000 chests of opium. In other whereas it increases again five more times. So this is the beginnings of the undermining of Qing China. So this great edifice of a proud empire, which was so self-confident that they could say they had no interest in the gi-gors that the British were showing to them, is being undermined in multiple ways.

27:01First of all, the balance of payments. The Chinese have been very rich on the tea trade, but now Spanish silver, which is the currency that they use, is now beginning to flow out of China rather than into it. Secondly, there's a major problem of addiction, particularly in the upper classes, particularly in the Mandarin classes and the urban rich. It's now not only addictive, but fashionable and addictive. And it's making more and more of the population, putting them out of work, really, because all they want to do is lie back each day and horizontal and smoke their pipe of opium. But also, crucially, it's beginning to create a whole wave of criminality and violence associated with the cells.

27:44Because like a modern cocaine trade, you need to bribe officials. You need to deal through gangsters because it's illegal. And the gangsters are becoming richer and the officials are becoming more and more corrupt. So there's a crime where I mean, because you need thugs to get it in. You need thugs to try and trade it. And we'll be seeing more of this in the next episode. But while the British have left with their tail behind their legs in one way, the traders are still there. And remember that the traders are, and we'll be dealing with this more in the next episode, but the traders are actually not East India Company.