Anglo-Chinese Caresses: Civility, Friendship and Trade in English Representations of China, 1760-1800

Anglo-Chinese Caresses: Civility, Friendship and Trade in EnglishRepresentations of China, 1760-1800

LAURENCE WILLIAMS

Abstract: From the late 1750s British writers, merchants and diplomats responded totrade tensions with China by imagining how cross-cultural forms of civility might bridgethe political divides between the two empires, allowing the trade demands of the East IndiaCompany to be granted as tokens of Chinese friendship. This article explores the develop-ment of this cosmopolitan and idealising perspective on Anglo-Chinese relations in tworelated literary genres: philosophical contes imagining Chinese travellers in England (byOliver Goldsmith, Charles Johnstone and Horace Walpole) and travel narratives of Cantonand Beijing (by Charles-Frederick Noble and George Macartney).

Keywords: Oriental, travel-writing, China, trade, civility, friendship, East India Company

The second half of the eighteenth century has been viewed as a period of rising tensionsin Anglo-Chinese relations, caused by entrenched cultural and political differencesbetween the two empires. Since the establishment of direct trade at Canton around 1700,East India Company merchants had struggled to navigate Chinese trade networks and toestablish a market for British goods of similar value to the luxury tea, silk and porcelainexported to Europe.1 This situation worsened from the late 1750s, as a series of Chineseedicts restricted Europeans to an ‘isolation zone’ around the warehouses at Canton,2

imposed new duties on imports3 and forced traders to deal with a monopoly of co-hongmerchants, blamed for inflating prices.4 A belated attempt by the British to improve theterms of trade with a first embassy to Beijing in 1793, led by Lord Macartney, foundered inpart on linguistic barriers and on the British refusal to perform the kowtow before theemperor.5 Macartney and his diplomats were dismissed from Beijing, their requests forlower tariffs and greater access to Chinese ports rejected: a failure which has been viewedboth as the beginning of a more hostile British stance towards China, paving the way forthe nineteenth-century Opium Wars,6 and as the inevitable result of a ‘collision’ betweentwo incompatible systems.7 In the words of J. L. Cranmer-Byng: ‘There was never anycommon ground of understanding between England and China; the two countries pos-sessed two different cultures with totally different outlooks.’8

Scholars have often suggested that these economic tensions are mirrored in the culturalsphere by a growing British sense of frustration at Chinese ‘intransigence’ or ‘obstruc-tion’.9 Peter Marshall outlines a broad narrative in which seventeenth-century Sinophiliafor an ‘imagined China’ gives way to ‘disdain for the supposedly known China that wasbecoming an object for pressure and ultimately for the coercion of the Opium Wars’.10 Acloser study of representations of trade with China during this period, however, showshow high-ranking Britons instead used discourses of civility and friendship to mould the‘known China’ into a more pleasing form, mediating against the frustrations of trade withhopes of future gain. Greg M. Thomas, in his study of intercultural interactions betweenthe Yuanming Yuan palace in Beijing and the French court at Versailles, has called for a

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. •• No. •• (2014) doi: 10.1111/1754-0208.12208

© 2014 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

new model of analysing the pre-imperial encounter with China, which does not limit itselfto studying how China was produced by Europeans as ‘exotically distinct and homoge-neous’ but examines patterns of contact between the high-ranking classes of both sides,who often ‘shared more in common with each other than with the majority of their ownpopulations’.11

Building on this insight, this article shows how a range of British literary and economicelites concerned with Chinese trade – including novelists, East India Company merchantsand diplomats – suggested that the reciprocal connections that the East India Companyhad so far failed to negotiate at Canton might be found in more genteel interactionsbetween Britons and Chinese. This idea was inspired, in large part, by the reception ofactual Chinese travellers in London, including Loum Kiqua, a Cantonese merchant whotravelled to London in 1756, where he was ‘seen by his Majesty, and the rest of theRoyal-Family: most of the Nobility &c. by whom he was much caress’d’. In the yearsfollowing Loum’s visit the philosophical idea of a more ‘civil’ relationship between Britainand China was developed in a series of fictions featuring Chinese travellers in England, bynovelists including Oliver Goldsmith, Charles Johnstone and Horace Walpole. These texts,which are shaped by the enquiring and comparative tendencies of what SrinivasAravamudan has termed ‘Enlightenment Orientalism’,12 explore – and satirise – the ideathat these two geographically distant but equally ‘polite’ empires might share commonstandards of civility.13

At the same time, the possibility of genteel Anglo-Chinese ‘friendship’ was explored byhigh-ranking British travellers in their accounts of actual interactions with Chinese mer-chants and officials at Canton and Beijing. From the late 1750s authors including the EastIndia Company trader Charles-Frederick Noble and the first English ambassador to China,George Macartney, developed a more ‘genteel’ mode of travel-writing on China, focusedless on the projection of exoticism and inferiority than on the representation of Chinesehospitality and civility.14 These travellers were well versed in British fictions of China, andtheir texts draw closely on the narrative forms and philosophical concerns of the Orientalconte. In contrast to the disinterested cosmopolitanism of Goldsmith and Johnstone,however, they present a more pragmatic model of cross-cultural friendship, in which theforging of ties with individual Chinese officials serves as a means to win tangible tradebenefits. The close connections, as well as the differences in perspective, between these twogenres are clearly demonstrated in the way that Noble’s 1762 account of Canton reworksGoldsmith’s The Citizen of the World (1760-61), substituting Goldsmith’s vision of cosmo-politan friendship for a more self-interested narrative of trade advantages gained throughintimacy with a local Chinese merchant.15 The Macartney embassy, in the final decade ofthe century, can be understood as the culmination of British hopes for a more ‘civil’relationship with China. Accounts by the embassy’s two most senior diplomats,Macartney and George Staunton, interpret this event in a strikingly different way from itssubsequent historiography: not as a ‘collision’ of civilisations but as an opportunity todevelop personal relationships with high-ranking Chinese, which would lead to thewaiving of the hitherto ‘immutable laws’ restricting trade.16 Even after the rejection ofMacartney’s demands, the British departed from Beijing confident that their ‘brilliantappearance and prudent demeanour’ had led the Chinese ‘to admire and respect us as anation and to love us as individuals’,17 and had led to advantages ‘granted through civility,which could not be demanded in a commercial treaty’.18

This interest in the possibility of cross-cultural civility with China can, of course, beviewed in the broader context of the way in which Britons during this period explored (andcritiqued) new forms of manners and sociability at home.19 This article will argue that, in

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addition to discussing the growing ‘refinement’ of the British nation, writers during thisperiod imagined how these advances in politeness might transform relations with sophis-ticated ‘Eastern’ nations such as the Chinese. These optimistic hopes were, however, rarelybased on detailed knowledge of actual Chinese etiquette and social conventions. Like theRussian diplomatic travellers of the late seventeenth century, who, as Robert Markleyargues, transposed their own ‘codes of upper-class interest and desire’ onto the Chinesecourt, eighteenth-century Britons indulged hopes of encountering Chinese who corre-sponded to their own developing standards of polite behaviour.20 The ambiguous meta-phor of the ‘caress’, first applied to Loum’s reception in London, suggests the overlappingexpectations of civility and friendship applied to the encounter. In one (now obsolete)meaning, the ‘caress’ could refer to the external gesture and the verbal compliment: theoutward parade that David Hume refers to as ‘that polite deference and respect, whichcivility obliges us either to express or counterfeit towards the persons with whom weconverse’.21 At the same time the idea of ‘caressing’ could also be understood in theincreasingly common eighteenth-century sense of the word: the physical embrace,accompanied by tears of sensibility and expressions of esteem, indicating the developmentof deeper bonds of friendship to supplement (or supplant) the ties of trade.

This essay therefore proposes ‘caressing’ as an important phase in the history of Britishencounter with China: distinct both from the Restoration and early eighteenth-centuryview of Chinese society, based largely on Jesuit sources, as a distant example of Confucianvirtue,22 and from what Peter Kitson identifies as a ‘Romantic Sinology’, based on Protes-tant empirical study and research, which envisioned a China that was ‘both knowable andsubstantial, but increasingly the locus of illegitimacy and stagnation, capable of beingunderstood and controlled’.23 The decades between Loum’s visit to London and theMacartney embassy mark a period in which, although opportunities for contact betweenthe two sides were increasing, British impressions of Chinese merchants and court officialsstill remained structured by idealising fantasy rather than revised (frequently in negativeways) by closer acquaintance. During this period the encounter with China seemed morefluid in its possibilities than it would to nineteenth-century imperialists: less determined byunbridgeable ‘barriers’ or self-fulfilling apprehensions of cultural ‘collision’. Merchantsand diplomats allowed themselves to imagine that genteel interactions with their Chinesecounterparts would compel the recognition of their nation as China’s equal in politeness(leaving aside more troubling comparisons of wealth and size), while reshaping the one-sided trade relationship into reciprocal bonds of friendship, allowing the trade privilegesthat they had been unable to win by negotiation to be granted as tokens of Chinese esteem.Unable as yet to force their demands on China through gunboat diplomacy or rhetoricalaggression, late eighteenth-century British elites engaged in a more conciliatory –although often no less calculating – form of self-presentation: representing their nation asa genteel counterpart, sincere friend or unrequited lover, standing at China’s gates extend-ing the hand in friendship.

I. A Commerce of Light: Loum Kiqua and Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World(1760-61)

For British writers in the early eighteenth century, trade at Canton seemed to be not agenteel and reciprocal encounter but a dangerously unbalanced relationship. Contempo-rary satirists, influenced by mercantilist theories, depicted the Chinese trade throughdiscourses of ‘chaos, licentiousness, and proliferation’,24 as an uncontrolled deluge of

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chinoiserie goods associated with ‘female extravagance and the morally suspect indulgenceof a debased foreign taste’.25 This failure of reciprocity is embodied in the character ofTimothy Tallapoy, a retired merchant in Nicholas Rowe’s play The Biter (1704), who hasreturned to London after being employed to ‘to negotiate and drink Tea with the mostexcellent Governor of Canton, nay with the Viceroy’.26 The one-sided results of thesenegotiations are suggested by the inundation of Tallapoy’s house with Chinese goods –even down to the dress of his servants – and by his mental preoccupation with nonsensicalfragments of Chinese culture (such as his appeals to the ‘Great Cham of Tartary’ and hiswish to father children ‘who shall drink nothing but the Divine Liquor Tea, and eatnothing but Oriental rice’).27

Conversely, early East India Company merchants at Canton blamed their struggles toestablish reciprocal trade on an uncivil refusal by the Chinese to accommodate theirrequests. One of the first English descriptions of the city, in Charles Lockyer’s Account of theTrade in India (1711), represents its inhabitants through a sustained discourse of rudenessand deceit. Lockyer complains that although ‘the better sort of People are Civil, andComplaisant to Strangers’, the ‘Commonality [are] often Rude, and Troublesome’, and theEnglishman wandering the streets often finds himself surrounded by a ‘gazing Mob’.28

Although the ‘Hoppos, Chunquans and other Officers’ who visit the English warehouseoften put on a show of courtesy, Lockyer cautions that this is a show in ‘Hopes of squeez-ing Presents more or less from you’ and advises future travellers to abstain from expensivedisplays of generosity (although he adds that ‘If your Liberality could procure an imme-diate Dispatch, there would be some Sense in it’).29

Lockyer’s complaints about the rudeness of Chinese merchants are echoed by the mostfamous eighteenth-century fictional traveller to China: Robinson Crusoe, in the FartherAdventures (1719), Defoe’s continuation of Crusoe’s original adventures. Abandoning hisSouth American island in hopes of establishing himself in the lucrative Far Eastern trade,Crusoe travels to the port of ‘Quinchang’ in southern China, planning (in anticipation ofnineteenth-century British trade practices) to sell opium to the Chinese. He is frustrated tofind it ‘a Place of very little Business’,30 compared with the ‘universal commerce ofEngland, Holland, France, and Spain’ (p.297), and its inhabitants ‘a haughty, imperious,insolent people’ (p.301), who live like beggars and delude themselves of their culturalsuperiority. Disposing of his cargo to a Japanese merchant (an ironic detail, given the evengreater isolation of Edo-period Japan under the Tokugawa shogunate),31 Crusoe leavesrailing against the Chinese for their ‘Contempt of all the World but themselves’ (p.301) andnurturing violent fantasies that an English army might return to destroy the Great Wall‘Foundation and all, so that there should be no Sign of it left’ (p.313).

A more optimistic view of the possibilities for trade and cultural accommodationbetween Britain and China was made possible in 1756, with the visit of a Cantonesemerchant named Loum Kiqua, who had originally arrived in Lisbon with a Portuguesetrading ship but travelled to London after the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Althoughit is unlikely that Loum (‘Lin’ in Mandarin) would have been regarded as an elite individualin Chinese society, in London he was received both as genteel and (in contrast to the ‘noblesavage’ Omai, brought back from the Society Islands by Captain Cook in 1774) as therepresentative of a sophisticated empire. Granted audiences with the king and aristocrats,Loum also gave the first public performance in Europe of a ‘Chinese air’, published inmusical notation in The Gentleman’s Magazine.32 His visit offers London’s elites, for the firsttime, a more personal form of ‘encounter’ with China than the exotic images on the sidesof their chinoiserie vases, and its cultural impact can be traced in a number of Britishpublications on China over the following decade, including Thomas Percy’s edition of the

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Hau Kiou Choaan (1761), the first Chinese novel available in English,33 and John Bell’sTravels (1763), containing the first eyewitness account of Beijing by a Briton.34 A numberof Chinese travellers in the succeeding decades commanded similar public attention: thesculptor Tan Chitqua (or Chet-qua), who exhibited his works at the Royal Academy,35 and‘Wang-Y-Tong’, who attracted attention from Josiah Wedgwood for his knowledge ofporcelain manufacture, and was painted by Joshua Reynolds.36

An engraving of Loum by Thomas Burford (Fig. 1), based on a portrait by DominicSerres, shows how Britons envisioned connections between civility and trade in theseChinese visits. Loum is depicted without overt exoticism, standing in front of a view of aChinese city (presumably Canton), the junks sailing along its rivers indicating the lucra-tive trade that might be unlocked by his visit. The accompanying text notes the warmth ofLoum’s ‘caressing’ in London, and distinguishes Britain from its Portuguese trade rivals asa nation more skilled in the polite arts:

after many hardships & ill treatments from the Portuguese, he [Loum] came over to England,where he met with different usage, having had the Honour to be seen by his Majesty, and therest of the Royal-Family: most of the Nobility &c. by whom he was much caress’d, [and]having made application to the Honble. the East India Company for his passage home, he waskindly received and generously accomodated [sic] on Board one of their Ships to carry him toCanton.

The philosophical idea of a shared standard of civility connecting Britain and Chinawas developed in Oliver Goldsmith’s influential and widely read Oriental conte, The Citizenof the World (1760-61). This epistolary tale, first serialised in The Public Ledger, seemsinspired by the memory of Loum’s visit two years earlier: it is mainly written in the voiceof Lien Chi, a mandarin from Canton who has travelled to London to see English society atfirst hand. If, as Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins argues, eighteenth-century fictional narrativesuse chinoiserie objects to place ‘the English self in a mutually defining relationship withthings Chinese’, Goldsmith uses the conceit of a Chinese traveller in England to exploremore intimate questions of civility and friendship, by staging encounters between Britishand Chinese individuals.37 The Citizen of the World can also be located in the broadercontext of the philosophical and comparative perspective of the eighteenth-century Ori-ental fable: a genre characterised by its ‘willingness to project outward’ into sympatheticidentification with other cultures, rather than imaginatively dividing the world into oppos-ing cultural and geographical poles of East and West.38

Goldsmith’s preface sets out his central philosophical thesis:

The truth is, the Chinese and we are pretty much alike. Different degrees of refinement, andnot of distance, mark the distinctions among mankind. Savages of the most opposite climates,have all but one character of improvidence and rapacity; and tutored nations, howeverseparate, make use of the very same methods to procure refined enjoyment.39

Here Goldsmith seems to anticipate Kant’s argument that the parallel development ofdifferent cultures will lead not just to improved communication between nations but to a‘perfect civil union of the human species’ through converging standards of politeness.40

Where Hume was to understand the ‘dawn of civility’ in eighteenth-century England as atemporal return to the sophistication of ancient Rome,41 Goldsmith presents it, moreprovocatively, as a geographical convergence with the standards of imperial China.



In a departure from previous ‘Oriental observer’ fictions such as Giovanni Marana’sLetters Writ by a Turkish Spy (1687-94) or Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), Goldsmithshows how Lien Chi’s knowledge of London comes not from the hidden position of theOriental ‘spy’ but through a polite relationship with a local informant: the ‘Man in Black’.This individual is first encountered at Westminster Abbey, when, ‘perceiving me to be astranger [he] came up, entered into conversation, and politely offered to be my instructor

1. Loum Kiqua, engraving by Thomas Burford, after Dominic Serres, April 1757

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and guide’.42 The relationship between the two men – both wandering philosophers ofindeterminate genteel status – seems to embody the possibility of cultural parallelismbetween the two nations, and the Man in Black becomes one of Goldsmith’s most fre-quently used narrative devices, appearing in a further twenty letters. In their travelsthrough London, the Man in Black corrects the tendency of the naive spectator to respondto cultural difference with extremes of idealisation or disparagement, pointing Lien Chiinstead to the sociological systems that underlie what he sees. When the two men visitVauxhall Gardens, the Man in Black is at hand to correct Lien Chi’s dazzled assessment ofthe place as a ‘Mahomet’s Paradise’ (a phrase chosen to echo Joseph Addison’s‘spectatorial’ response to the same gardens in the Spectator) by pointing to its hiddenfunction as a site of illicit liaison,43 and adding that, in contrast to the fabled Islamicparadise, virgins ‘are a fruit that don’t much abound in our gardens here’.44

Over the course of the letters this relationship guides Lien Chi to a new understandingof the British. Discarding his initial exotic understanding of them as a people of the ocean,‘who build cities upon billows that rise higher than the mountains of Tipartala’,45 hecomes to learn that ‘The polite of every country pretty nearly resemble each other’.46 Thenovel ends with parallel unions between the two men, as Lien Chi’s son Hingpo marriesthe Man in Black’s niece, and Lien Chi – in a more hopeful rewriting of the indeterminateending of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759) – announces that he will ‘spend the remain-der of life in examining the manners of different countries, and have prevailed upon theman in black to be my companion’.47

However, Goldsmith questions the idea that commerce might be included in thisbroader cosmopolitan vision of connection between Britain and China. The openingletters of the novel engage directly with the broader context of East Indies trade by estab-lishing a specific identity for Lien Chi as a former mandarin at Canton, who has gaineda reputation for treating merchants with ‘justice’ and ‘humanity’.48 Lien Chi’s travelsconvince him that the English ‘seem more polite than any of their neighbours’,although he admits that his Chinese friends may not believe this, ‘who have seen such adifferent behaviour in their merchants and seamen at home’.49 Anticipating Goldsmith’sattack on imported luxuries in The Deserted Village (1770), much of the tale’s satire isdirected against the chinoiserie trade for creating exotic fantasies of China that obscurethe mutual recognition of politeness. In Letter XIV, for example, Lien Chi visits a ‘lady ofdistinction’ who fills her house with ‘sprawling draggons [sic], squatting pagods, andclumsy mandarines’,50 and treats her Chinese guest as another exotic imported object:‘Lord how I am charmed with the outlandish cut of his face; how bewitching the exoticbreadth of his forehead.’51

Notably, the scheme Lien Chi eventually proposes for ‘connecting’ the two empires callsnot for expanded trade but for a broader cultural and scientific exchange, recallingLeibniz’s seventeenth-century call for a ‘commerce of light’ between Europe and China.52

Letter CVIII proposes that one of ‘those societies so laudably established in England for thepromotion of arts and learning’ should send a traveller ‘of a philosophical turn’, knowl-edgeable enough to survey East Asian arts and sciences and transmit the best of them backto Britain, and polite enough to ‘suit his intellectual banquet to the people with whom heconversed’: this ‘would in some measure repair the breaches made by ambition; and mightshew that there were still some who boasted a greater name than that of patriots, whoprofessed themselves lovers of men’.53 Goldsmith seems to have taken this proposal seri-ously: he had mentioned it in previous works,54 and he was later to petition Lord Bute onthe subject.55 In the event, nothing came of it, and Samuel Johnson ridiculed both thescheme and Goldsmith’s aspirations to take part in it: ‘Sir, he would bring home a



grinding-barrow, which you see in every street in London, and think that he had furnisheda wonderful improvement.’56

II. Sentimental and Romantic Connections: Chinese Fictions by Johnstone and Walpole

A more sentimental model of cross-cultural connection is advanced in a later imitation ofThe Citizen of the World, Charles Johnstone’s The Pilgrim (1775). Johnstone, a Londonlawyer and future Indian newspaper proprietor, adheres closely to Goldsmith’s successfulliterary model. His tale is an epistolary conte, told by a Chinese traveller in England, whicheven borrows the name of its protagonist, Choang, from a character in Goldsmith’s tale.57

In contrast to the eccentric and sometimes gullible Lien Chi, however, Choang is a morerefined narrator: as a mandarin from Beijing, who has exiled himself from his homelandin a gesture of delicacy after the wife of a close friend falls in love with him, he is given todigressions on the tender joys of friendship and, as Jing-Huey Hwang argues, to expres-sions of empathy for ‘the poor and the disenfranchised’, drawing on his own experience of‘the vulnerability of a solitary outsider in an alien context’.58

Where Lien Chi’s knowledge of England had been mediated through the sardonic Manin Black, Choang forges a chaste relationship with a female aristocrat who through herown sad past is able to share in the ‘same sufferings’: ‘Our sympathy was soon improvedinto friendly attachment; and imperceptibly to ourselves we chose each other’s company,in preference to that of the rest of our company.’59 Adam Smith had suggested in Theory ofMoral Sentiments (1759) that the distance between China and England would make thedevelopment of sentimental ties between the two nations impossible: although the edu-cated English observer, Smith argues, might respond to an earthquake in China with‘many melancholy reflections on the precariousness of human life’, he would soon‘pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same easeand tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened’.60 The Pilgrim, by contrast, showshow the elision of geographical distance reveals a mutual capacity for sympatheticemotion.

However, Johnstone also uses this sentimental narrator to voice scepticism aboutwhether the coercive trade practices of the East India Company are compatible with thevoluntary bonds of friendship. Visiting Greenwich, Choang marvels at the ‘the number ofthe ships collected here from every country under Heaven’ (vol. I.48-9) and puzzles atwhat attracts the world to England’s shores, wondering ‘how the number of people con-tained in this little island could possibly consume all the different kinds of merchandizebrought in such a number of ships; and whence they could procure money to purchasethem; as I well knew that the country affords no produce of equal value, to barter inexchange’ (vol. I.149-50). In reply, he is told that Britain’s status as the ‘universal mart’ iscreated not by the voluntary assembly of the world’s merchants (in contrast to Addison’sfamous description of the Royal Exchange),61 but by the threat of force, the government‘strictly prohibiting’ intra-colonial trade that did not pass through London. Choang hintsthat the enlightened Chinese emperor would be displeased to hear of this system: ‘You willjudge whether it is worthy of being laid before Him, whose wisdom governs the world’ (vol.I.150-1).62 Choang’s time in England allows him many opportunities to deplore thechanges that trade has brought to English society, including the ‘idleness and vanity’ (vol.I.100) among the upper classes and the ‘pernicious’ use of national wealth to buildwarships (vol. I.147). In concert with his aristocratic friend, much of his time is spent inprivate acts of charity, aiding those who have fallen on the wrong side of a societypolarised by foreign trade.

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By contrast, ‘Mi Li’, Horace Walpole’s ‘Chinese fairy tale’, published in Hieroglyphic Tales(1785), offers a more general satire on the possibility of mediation across the linguistic,cultural and political barriers between Britain and China. It begins with Mi Li, a Chineseprince at the imperial court at Beijing – whose name is pronounced ‘My Lie’, in anindication of Walpole’s repeated concern with the unreality of representation – receivinga prophecy that his future bride is to be found in ‘a place where there was a bridge over nowater, a tomb where nobody ever was buried nor ever would be buried, ruins that weremore than they had ever been ... and a more beautiful menagerie of Chinese pheasantsthan any in his father’s extensive gardens’.63 The ensuing quest leads him to Canton(where, reflecting continuing anxieties about the misrepresentation of the British nationby common sailors, he is misdirected by ‘honest Tom O’Bull, an Irish sailor’, and sent toIreland) and finally to General Conway’s estate at Henley-on-Thames.

Walpole uses Conway’s gardens – laid out in fashionably eclectic style with chinoiserieand Gothic features – to explore the idea of ‘common ground’ between nations. Thegardener, who knows a few words of Chinese from plant names, leads his guest on a tourthrough the gardens, describing their key features and pointing out examples of Conway’staste: but Mi Li, paying no attention to English ways of ordering and experiencing space,races ahead, (mis-)interpreting Conway’s gaudy follies as the fulfilment of his vision andcalling out (in Chinese) ‘Oh! potent Hih! my dream begins to be accomplished!’ (p.345).The tour is ended by a chance encounter with Caroline Campbell, the daughter of LordWilliam Campbell, the recent governor of Carolina, whom Mi Li claims as his prize: ‘And soshe became princess of China’ (p.347). This ending can be interpreted as an allegory oftrade, in which Caroline’s movement from the lost American colonies of her father to theembrace of the prince of China symbolises ‘Britain’s growing commercial attraction toChina’ following the American Revolution.64 As Paul Nash argues, however, the idea ofcross-cultural union is undercut by Walpole’s pervasive satire on cultural miscommuni-cation and fantasy, leaving readers to wonder whether the East India Company’s ownhopes for ‘connection’ with China are, like Mi Li’s vision, ‘at best only a fairy tale, anidealised and fleeting hope, and at worst a lie’.65

III. Opening China with Civility: Charles Noble and Timgua

The idea that trade at Canton had created an opportunity for greater intimacy with theChinese was explored not just in domestic fictions but also in ‘empirical’ travel accounts ofChina. From the late 1750s a series of texts by high-ranking merchants and diplomatscelebrated the discovery, amid the unfamiliar Chinese cultural landscape, of an elite whocorresponded to their standards of refined civility. These texts include the Swedish EastIndia Company supercargo William Chambers’s illustrations of Cantonese merchants’houses and descriptions of landscape gardens, based on conversations with ‘Lepqua’, alocal painter,66 and the Scottish physician John Bell’s description of his journey with aRussian embassy to Beijing, where he was taken on a hunting trip and saw the ‘friendlyand wholesome’ Kangxi emperor.67 Whereas Walpole and Johnstone had viewed withscepticism the idea that trade might be compatible with the bonds of friendship, Britishmerchants envisioned a more harmonious relationship between the two forces. Themutual recognition of politeness would create intimacy between European traders andtheir Chinese counterparts, allowing the restrictions on trade to be lifted or relaxed as anact of courtesy. In addition, the cultural exchange arising from these polite enquirieswould allow the Chinese to recognise the East India Company as an organisation



interested not merely in trade but in a broader ‘commerce of light’ between East and West:a ‘Great Company whose object is not confined to the pursuit of Gain but extends to thegeneral Benefits of Humanity’.68

Rather than surveying discourses of civility and friendship in late eighteenth-centurytravels to China, this section will explore their role in two East India Company accounts,one to Canton and one to Beijing. The first of these, Noble’s A Voyage to the East Indies(1762), shows how the idealising modes of the Oriental conte were adapted by the morepragmatic and empirical genre of the eighteenth-century travel account. Noble, a formermerchant and lieutenant-governor of Fort Marlborough in Sumatra, had lived in Cantonyears previously, in 1747-8. However, his account of this period was not published untilafter his retirement in 1762, two years after The Citizen of the World, and both in timing andin content it seems to exploit the popularity of Goldsmith’s work, appealing to a broadreading elite interested in ‘knowledge’ of China from both imaginative and empiricalsources.69 In contrast to Goldsmith’s idealised cosmopolitanism, Noble presents his expe-riences in Canton as a more realistic form of engagement, which blends philosophicalenquiry with commercial pragmatism. His preface argues that the travel genre shouldstrike a balance between giving information on ‘the laws, manners, and customs offoreign nations, [which] enable us to consider society in a more philosophic and compre-hensive view’, and promoting ‘a spirit of enterprize’ in its readers, through which ‘com-merce, the great source of the power and influence of these kingdoms, may be improved’.70

In an implicit riposte to Goldsmith the preface adds that, in contrast to recent books onChina, written ‘by those who never travelled beyond the limits of a country lodging’, thiswill be the work of a real traveller, whose ‘sentiments are every where liberal and manly,tinctured with that degree of humanity which ought to inspire a citizen of the world, yet notinconsistent with a proper attachment to his country as an Englishman’.71

Noble’s most important debt to Goldsmith – and his most significant departure fromprevious English accounts of Canton by Lockyer and Anson72 – is his decision to presenthis experience of the city as a narrative of deepening cultural insight, permitted by ‘anintimacy with a Chinese merchant, a man endowed with a degree of knowledge andsagacity, greatly beyond what is commonly possessed by people of that class’ (p.7-8).This individual, one ‘Timgua’, ‘The worthiest man I ever knew among them’ (p.253),was a local broker with a shop in the same street as the English factory. Noble’s sense ofTimgua’s ‘worthiness’ is based primarily on his ability to emulate English forms of hos-pitality. He has learned reasonable English – a rarity given that, as Peter Perdue argues,the English were used to communicating in ‘a mixture of Chinese, Malay, and Englishserviceable for trade, but not for the expression of high cultural ideals’73 – and ‘wasneither uncharitable nor superstitious; for he would eat and drink heartily with us, takea glass of our arrack punch, and manage our knives and forks genteely, which are heldin abomination by the generality of the Chinese’ (p.254). The function of cutlery as asignifier of liberality is underlined when Timgua hosts the British for dinner: ‘we alsotried to use their ceremonies in eating; but Timgua observing us to perform them veryawkwardly, desired us to use our own freedom, as if we were at home; and ordered theservant to bring us two small forks, instead of the chopsticks’ (p.256). The anecdoteinverts Lien Chi’s earlier meeting with a group of London literati, who, relying on Ori-ental fictions for their knowledge of ‘eastern manners’, serve him roast beef and faulthim for not using his chopsticks.74

This experience of reciprocal hospitality transforms the experience of Canton for theBritish merchant. In contrast to the alienation recorded elsewhere in the city – such as themobs of Chinese who ‘threw stones at us, calling out, Aki-o, Quy-toy, Quy-lo, and other

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diminutive names’ (p.214-15) – Timgua shows Noble ‘the rarities of the town’ (p.229) andprovides a privileged level of insight into Chinese life:

When I wanted to have any thing explained in regard to the manners or customs of thepeople, I had always recourse to my friend Timgua, who, as he was very ready to gratify mycuriosity about China and to satisfy me in my enquiries, was, at the same time, very solicitousto know the nature of the government, manners and language of Britain (p.254-5).

More significantly, Noble also shows how his relationship with Timgua allows him toovercome the restrictions placed on British trade: not through the ‘immediate Dispatch’desired by Lockyer when presenting gifts to Cantonese merchants in the first decade of thecentury, but in a more indirect manner.75 The long-standing prohibitions on Europeantravel within China – reaffirmed in an imperial edict in 175776 – are traversed when Nobleis taken two miles outside Canton to meet Timgua’s son (whom he presents with a half-crown). Ignoring the risk of capital punishment for teaching the Chinese language toforeigners,77 Timgua provides Noble with a ‘small cargo’ of words (reproduced for thebenefit of future travellers, p.264-6). Perhaps most importantly, given the preoccupation ofearlier English travellers with Chinese ‘dishonesty’, Noble shows how trade between thetwo men is regulated by civility: Timgua ‘faithfully settl[ed] all accounts between us, beforemy departure’, and

made me a present of some fine tea, and a drawing of a Chinese woman, which hung in hisown bedroom, and which he imagined I was fond of. I insisted to pay for the present, as I waswitness to his having rejected several good offers for it; yet he obstinately refused to accept anything. (p.258)

Noble ends his account of Canton by stating that he believes Timgua to be still alive –presumably having heard accounts of him from British merchants – and recommendinghis ‘acquaintance’ (p.258) to future travellers: a word that seems to bridge concerns offriendship and trade.

IV. Negotiating the Garden: The Macartney Embassy to China (1793)

The first British embassy to China in 1793 illustrates both the hopes that British diplomatsattached to ‘caressing’ as a tool for winning tangible trade benefits and the difficulty thatthey faced in shaping and interpreting events in China to correspond to their expectations.Macartney and his diplomats, arriving in China in August with a list of trade demands anda collection of expensive gifts for the Qianlong emperor, have been portrayed as secularmissionaries, convinced of ‘the rational appeal of their commercialist creed’ and confidentof their ability to prevail in their views through direct negotiation.78 In fact, in their privateand public records of this encounter, Macartney and his second-in-command, Sir GeorgeStaunton, sense the weakness of their negotiating position, and recognise that the long-standing ‘laws and usages of China’ restricting foreign trade to a single port (similar to theconditions that the Dutch faced in Japan) are unlikely to be changed immediately.79 Nev-ertheless, they also indulge the hope that ‘from the mechanism of [the Chinese] Govern-ment’, much might be gained from ‘the discretion and recommendation’ of individualofficials,80 once the poor impression of the English nation previously created by the ‘vulgarand uninstructed minds’ of British sailors at Canton has been overcome.81 This model of amore genteel ‘opening’ of China is epitomised in the frontispiece of Staunton’s Authentic



Account of the embassy (1797; Fig. 2), which shows the British delegation standing beforea doorway, through which a prospect view of China’s riches can be seen. Although Trade(represented as a European female) pulls aside the curtain, the English are courteouslyinvited over the threshold by a Chinese dressed in the pearls and robes of the imperialcourt.

The encounter that unfolds, first at Beijing and later at the emperor’s summer palace atJehol, is perhaps best understood not as a ‘collision’ between incompatible imperial

2. Frontispiece of George Staunton, An Historical Account of the Embassy to the Emperorof China, vol. I (London, 1797)



systems but as a more subtle engagement between two overlapping systems of civility. AsJames Hevia has argued, the practice of ‘guest ritual’ (binli) followed by the Chinese was ‘acontinuous and seamless process with a discernible source and culmination’, in whichtravellers were guided through a series of encounters designed to symbolise their incor-poration into the Chinese world order as a tributary power.82 The imperial notion of the‘guest’ differed sharply from English understandings of the word:83 no equality wasimplied between the two parties, and Chinese court behaviour was aimed not at thedevelopment of intimacy but at subtly guiding visitors between ‘extremes of excess anddeficiency’, while watching them for signs of sincerity and humility.84 By contrast,Macartney’s and Staunton’s accounts interpret the encounter in accordance with Britishmodels of genteel hospitality. They recognise the symbolic significance of the formalexchange of gifts with the Qianlong emperor, which, as Kitson argues, evokes for theBritish a complex symbolic ‘fantasy of mutual obligation and reciprocal friendship’.85 Inaddition, however, the embassy also created numerous opportunities for less structuredand hierarchical encounters with individual Qing officials. British diplomats invest greatsignificance in these, understanding each meeting as a separate opportunity for theexchange of compliments and the development of friendship. In this task they judge theirmission a solid success. Macartney – demonstrating British expectations of a smoothtransition from external compliments to the development of deeper affection – records that‘the principal persons of rank who, from their intercourse with us, had opportunities ofobserving our manners, tempers and discipline very soon dismissed the prejudices theyhad conceived against us, and by a generous transition grew to admire and respect us asa nation and to love us as individuals’.86

In the day-to-day record of the embassy kept by Macartney in his private journal (whichwas published in a widely read edition by John Barrow in 1807), the most prominent ofthese relationships is with Heshen (1746-1799), the grand councillor and favourite of theQianlong emperor, who personally oversaw the reception of the embassy at Beijing andJehol.87 Although Heshen is remembered by historians for his ‘systematic embezzlement atall levels of the Qing administration’ (for which he was ordered to commit suicide afterQianlong’s death), for the British he epitomised the possibility of encountering a memberof the Chinese elite who corresponded to their models of genteel authority.88 Macartneydescribes him, without markers of racial or cultural difference, as ‘a handsome, fair manabout forty to forty-five years old, quick and fluent’ and identifies him as the ‘first minister’,positioning him (apparently without irony) as the Chinese counterpart of William Pitt.89

Heshen receives the ambassador with ‘great affability’, takes him by the hand and repliesto his compliments with assurances

that, on account of the very great distance from which the Embassy had been sent, and of thevalue of the presents, some of the Chinese customs (which had hitherto been invariablyobserved) would now be relaxed, and that I might perform the ceremony after the manner ofmy own country, and deliver the King’s letter into the Emperor’s own hand.90

The kowtow debate, which in nineteenth-century discourse was often invoked as asymbol of the ‘collision’ between different systems, is thus initially interpreted by Britonsin a radically different light: as a successful reshaping of Chinese ritual into a morereciprocal encounter.91 Staunton rejoices that this demonstration of ‘esteem and respect’will ‘scarcely fail to operate to [Britain’s] advantages in every connection, commercial andpolitical, between the two countries’,92 and observes that it has led a number of courtiersto start wearing English cloth, promising a far more lucrative trade than anything for-mally requested by Macartney.93



The struggle to ‘shape’ events in China in accordance with British expectations is vividlyillustrated in an event immediately following Macartney’s audience: the tours of thegardens at Jehol on 15 and 17 September, which were attended by Heshen and a numberof other court and military officials. These, the largest imperial gardens in China, werebegun by the Kangxi emperor in 1703 and completed only under his grandson Qianlongin 1792.94 Macartney’s initial reaction to this space shows his sense of the landscapegarden as a space of ‘common ground’ between the two nations, influenced by the longhistory of material and intellectual exchange between European and Chinese gardeningpractices.95 He gives a (rather improbable) description of Jehol as identical in every respectto the landscape gardens remembered from England:

in the course of a few hours I have enjoyed such vicissitudes of rural delight as I did notconceive could be felt out of England, being at different moments enchanted by scenes per-fectly similar to those I had known there, to the magnificence of Stowe, the soft beauties ofWoburn or the fairy-land of Painshill.96

Despite the similarity of the landscape to Stowe or Woburn, however, Macartney alsosenses a puzzling failure, on the part of the Chinese, to conform to his expectations ofpolite garden conversation. Although texts such as William Gilpin’s Dialogue upon theGardens at Stowe (1748), a tour of Viscount Cobham’s gardens written in the form of adialogue between two London gentlemen, had established the eighteenth-century land-scape garden as a space for a form of refined and indirect conversation, based on literaryallusions and observations on the scenery, Macartney records that his hosts respond to hisadvances with suspicion.97 He writes of Heshen that

I am afraid I can already perceive that his heart is not with us, for, on my mentioning to himthis morning, as we rode along, that the creation of such a paradise as Jehol in so wild a spotwas a work worthy of the genius of the great K’ang-hsi [Kangxi], he seemed to be quiteastonished how I came to know that it was undertaken by K’ang-hsi, and asked me who toldme so.98

Although Macartney finds this ‘a natural and a flattering’ compliment, he is disturbedto find that ‘at bottom [Heshen] rather wonders at our curiosity than esteems us for ourknowledge’.99 In contrast to Stowe, Jehol is not a garden where the reading of guidebooksis encouraged. Macartney’s attempts to win over other members of the Chinese delegationare similarly rebuffed: an invitation to a Tartar general, Fukangan, who seems suspiciousof English military intentions in Asia, to observe the embassy guard’s exercises, is declinedwith ‘great coldness and a mixture of unreasonable vanity’.100 Macartney ends the dayregretting that he has been able to ‘gain no ground’ on the tour,101 concluding that ‘Itherefore take it for granted it has been a settled point from the beginning to do no businesswith me at Jehol’.102

By his second tour of the gardens, two days later, Macartney seems to confront thepossibility that the model of civility he has brought to China may be inadequate to explainthe behaviour of his hosts. Conversing with Heshen, he now understands Qing guestritual as a refined but deceptive form of hospitality, intended to frustrate the movementtowards closer bonds of friendship and trade:

I could not help admiring the address with which the Minister parried all my attempts tospeak to him on business this day, and how artfully he evaded every opportunity that offered



for any particular conversation with me, endeavouring to engage our attention solely by theobjects around us, directing our eyes to the prospects, and explaining the various beauties ofthe park and buildings.103

Macartney’s aesthetic response to the gardens now changes to accommodate thissense of diplomatic frustration: discarding his earlier naive equation of Jehol with Stoweand Woburn, he draws, as Nigel Leask argues, on the exotic topographical fantasies ofChambers’s Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772).104 He now describes himself as ledalong an ever increasing gradient of cultural strangeness: first a wild forest scene whichleaves him struggling to find ‘any place in England [that] can be said in any respect tohave similar features’,105 and then through scenes of terror, past ‘enormous rocks whichseem to threaten the passenger at every step with instant annihilation’.106 Finally, he istaken to a Buddhist monastery, with ‘monstrous’ statues of Tartar idols, lights whichcreate sensations of ‘religious horror’, and an inner sanctum hidden from view: ‘As weapproached it, the curtain, which had just before been drawn a little aside, was suddenlyclosed, as if on a sudden alarm, and shut out the shrine from our profane eyes’.107 Jehol’sgardens thus become a topographical embodiment of Chinese civility: a refined imperialsystem, which initially teases the English traveller with a superficial familiarity but even-tually leads him along winding paths, disoriented and helpless, with no opportunity to‘gain ground’.

V. The Individual Chinese and the ‘Vast Superstructure’

Although Macartney’s experiences in the gardens at Jehol were, as Elizabeth Changargues, crucial in developing his final understanding of the Chinese court as a space ofaesthetic and political ‘manipulation’, they did not lead him to relinquish his diplomatichopes entirely.108 In the final sections of Macartney’s diary, his hopes for civil connectionswith China are displaced into optimistic descriptions of Chinese behaviour outside theconfines of the court: ‘most of the principal people, whom I have had opportunities ofknowing, I have found sociable, conversable, good-humoured, and not at all indisposed toforeigners.’109 Bidding farewell to his attendants, Wang and Chou, he detects a privatelonging for Western intimacy, which manifests itself in tears shed on the embassy’s depar-ture: ‘Gained by our attentions, we found them capable of attachment; though in publicceremonious, in private they were frank and familiar. Tired of official formalities theyseemed often to fly to our society as a relief, and to leave it with regret.’110 Struggling toexpress his new sense of ‘a certain public system, which often supersedes private convic-tion’,111 Macartney significantly (given his experiences at Jehol) reaches for a gardeningmetaphor, imagining common Chinese people as ‘humble plants’, trapped under the arti-ficial earthworks of their rulers: ‘In my researches I often perceived the ground to behollow under a vast superstructure, and in trees of the most stately and flourishingappearance I discovered symptoms of speedy decay, whilst humbler plants were held byvigorous roots, and mean edifices rested on steady foundations.’112

Following Macartney, British writers increasingly presented the Chinese state as anunreformable structure – often expressed in metaphors of the winding garden path orflimsy chinoiserie façade – to be broken up by force rather than coaxed open by civility: anapproach that culminated in the actual looting and destruction of Jehol by Lord Elgin’sforces in 1860, during the Second Opium War.113 But this newly aggressive stance wasoften justified, politically and morally, through invocations of ‘civil Chinese’, restricted by



imperial rule in their ‘natural’ desire for sociable and economic connections with theBritish. This approach can be observed in the hostile re-evaluation of Chinese conducttowards Macartney in a later volume of Travels in China (1804) by John Barrow, theembassy’s comptroller. Later sharply criticised by William Jardine Proudfoot as a collec-tion of ‘jaundiced speculations’, which had increased public hostility towards China andcontributed indirectly to the Opium Wars, Barrow’s Travels sets out to efface memories ofthe Chinese hospitality described by Macartney and Staunton.114 Attacking ‘the pride andthe haughty insolence of the Chinese government’, Barrow finds fault with every aspect ofMacartney’s reception, from the food to the lodgings provided.115 Crucially, his text invertsthe significance of Macartney’s reception before the emperor: where Macartney andStaunton had presented the compromise reached as evidence of the ‘good sense andliberality of the Emperor’, Barrow presents the kowtow as a fundamentally unciviland ‘degrading’ symbol of the supposed ‘barriers’ between the two empires.116

It comes as a surprise, therefore, to find that the frontispiece of Barrow’s Travels (Fig. 3)records, with apparent fondness, one aspect of the diplomatic encounter. It is an image ofone of the embassy guides, ‘Van’ (Wang Wenxiong), a middle-aged man, looking patientlyat the artist, a peacock feather (indicating his rank at court) attached to the back of hiscap. Barrow personally chose this image (painted by Thomas Hickey, one of the embassyartists) for his frontispiece117 and seems to have followed Wang’s career after returning toEngland, reporting his death in battle in 1800: ‘Van, the cheerful good-humoured Van, haspaid the debt of nature, having fallen honourably in the service of his country’ (p.604).

3. Portrait of Van-ta-gin, frontispiece of John Barrow, Travels in China (London, 1804)



Barrow pays a fulsome tribute to both guides, who seem, uniquely among court officials,to correspond to his expectations of civil behaviour: ‘It is impossible to speak of those twoworthy men in terms equal to their desert. Kind, condescending, unremitting in theirattentions, they never betrayed one moment of ill-humour from the time we entered Chinauntil they took their final leave at Canton’ (p.604).

Barrow’s frontispiece might be interpreted as proof of the power of individual friend-ships to unsettle more general structures of hostility. In the overall context of the Travels,however, it seems instead to reinforce those structures, by pre-emptively defending theauthor from the charge of general prejudice against the Chinese, and by holding out thepossibility of a more ‘civil’ relationship that might flourish once the present Chinesegovernment is removed. If, in the 1760s, Lien Chi and Timgua had offered British readersan idealised vision of genteel interaction between two equal nations, Wang seems togesture towards a new imperial fantasy: the idea of the civil but oppressed Chinese subjectwho, when finally freed from the bonds of despotic government, will respond warmly toBritish caresses.

NOTES1. See P. J. Marshall, ‘Britain without America’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British

Empire, vol. II, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p.582.2. J. L. Cranmer-Byng and John E. Wills Jr, ‘Trade and Diplomacy with Maritime Europe, 1644-c.1800’, in

John E. Wills, Jr (ed.), China and Maritime Europe 1500-1800: Trade, Settlement, Diplomacy, and Missions (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p.230.

3. Paul Arthur Van Dyke, The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700-1845 (Hong Kong:Hong Kong University Press, 2005), p.[95]-97. In subsequent notes square brackets around a page numberindicate that the original page is in a numbered sequence but is itself unnumbered or misnumbered.

4. Liu Yong, The Dutch East India Company’s Tea Trade with China: 1757-1781 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), p.92.5. Peter C. Perdue, ‘Boundaries and Trade in the Early Modern World: Negotiations at Nerchinsk and

Beijing’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 43:3 (spring 2010), p.354.6. James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham,

NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p.229.7. On the metaphor of ‘collision’, see, in particular, Alain Peyrefitte, The Collision of Two Civilizations: The

British Embassy to China, 1792-4 (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1992).8. J. L. Cranmer-Byng, ‘China 1792-94’, in Peter Roebuck (ed.), Public Service and Private Fortune: The Life of

Lord Macartney (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1989), p.243.9. See, for example, David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 2001), Chapter 4.10. P. J. Marshall, ‘Britain and China in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in Robert A. Bickers (ed.), Ritual and

Diplomacy: The Macartney Mission to China, 1792-94 (London: British Association for Chinese Studies, 1993),p.[11].

11. Greg M. Thomas, ‘Yuanming Yuan / Versailles: Intercultural Interactions between Chinese and Euro-pean Palace Cultures’, Art History 32:1 (2009), p.116.

12. Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago, IL: Universityof Chicago Press, 2011).

13. Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, in Collected Works, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1966), vol. II; Charles Johnstone, The Pilgrim: or, A Picture of Life, 2 vols (London, 1775);Horace Walpole, ‘Mi Li. A Chinese Fairy Tale’, in The Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Orford, 5 vols (London,1798), vol. IV.342-7.

14. Charles-Frederick Noble, A Voyage to the East Indies (London, [1762] 1765); George Macartney, AnEmbassy to China, ed. J. L. Cranmer-Byng (London: Longman, 1962).

15. Noble, A Voyage to the East Indies.16. Macartney, Embassy to China, p.153.17. Macartney, Embassy to China, p.214.18. George Staunton, An Authentic Account of An Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of

China, 2 vols (London, 1797), vol. II.227.19. See Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Carol Stewart, The Eighteenth-Century Novel and the Seculariza-tion of Ethics (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).



20. Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600-1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2006), p.106.

21. David Hume, ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, in Political Essays, ed. KnudHaakonssen (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 2003), p.71.

22. See Chi-ming Yang, Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England,1660-1760 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).

23. Peter Kitson, Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange, 1760-1840 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2013), p.15.

24. Porter, Ideographia, p.135.25. David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2010), p.58. See also Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, ‘Women, China, and Consumer Culture in Eighteenth-CenturyEngland’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 29:2 (1996), p.153-67.

26. Nicholas Rowe, The Biter (London, 1705), p.54.27. Rowe, The Biter, p.22.28. Charles Lockyer, An Account of the Trade in India (London, 1711), p.170.29. Lockyer, Account of the Trade in India, p.141-2.30. Daniel Defoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London, 1719), p.291. Subsequent references

are to this edition, cited in parentheses within the text.31. See Michael S. Laver, Japan’s Economy by Proxy in the Seventeenth Century: China, the Netherlands, and the

Bakufu (New York: Cambria Press, 2008).32. See David Clarke, ‘An Encounter with Chinese Music in Mid-18th-Century London’, Early Music 38:4

(2010), p.543-58.33. Thomas Percy (ed.), Hau kiou choaan, or the Pleasing History. A Translation from the Chinese Language

(London, 1761).34. John Bell, Travels from St. Petersburg in Russia, to Diverse Parts of Asia, 2 vols (Glasgow, 1763).35. See Linda Barnes, Needles, Herbs, Gods and Ghosts: China, Healing, and the West to 1848 (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2007), p.142-4; David Clarke, ‘Chitqua: A Chinese Artist in Eighteenth-CenturyLondon’, in Chinese Art and its Encounter with the World (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011),p.15-85.

36. See Aubrey J. Toppin, ‘Chitqua, the Chinese Modeller, and Wang-Y-Tong, the “Chinese Boy” ’, Transac-tions of the English Ceramic Circle 2:8 (1942), p.149-52.

37. Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2013), p.3.

38. Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662-1785 (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2005), p.14.

39. Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, p.13-14.40. Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, trans. Allen Wood, ed. Amélie

Oksenberg Rorty and James Schmidt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p.21.41. David Hume, The History of England, 10 vols (London, 1793), vol. IV.153.42. Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, p.57-8 (Letter XIII).43. See Spectator 383 (20 May 1712).44. Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, p.294 (Letter LXXI).45. Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, p.19 (Letter II)46. Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, p.369 (Letter XCI).47. Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, p.476 (Letter CXXIII).48. Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, p.17 (Letter II).49. Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, p.30 (Letter IV).50. Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, p.65.51. Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, p.63-4.52. The quote comes from a letter written in 1697 to the Jesuit Antoine Verjus. See Franklin Perkins, Leibniz

and China: A Commerce of Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.42.53. Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, p.419-21.54. See Arthur Friedman, Collected Works of Goldsmith, vol. II.418, n.2.55. See John Forster, The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (London, 1848), Book 3, p.254.56. James Boswell, Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p.1081.57. See Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, p.80 (Letter XVIII).58. Jing-Huey Hwang, ‘Rethinking Britishness in the Fictional Japanese Letters of T. J. Wooler’s Black

Dwarf’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 36:1 (2013), p.61.59. Johnstone, The Pilgrim, vol. I.11-12. Subsequent references are cited in parentheses within the text.60. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2002), Part III, Chapter III, p.157. See also Eric Hayot’s discussion of this passage in The HypotheticalMandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p.3-7.

61. Spectator 69 (19 May 1711).62. Although Johnstone does not mention the ‘Tea Party’ riots in Boston the previous December, provoked

by the government’s attempts to force East India Company tea on the American colonists, these would have



added extra weight to Choang’s comments on coercive trade.63. Walpole, ‘Mi Li’, p.344-5. Subsequent references are cited in parentheses within the text.64. See Paul Nash, ‘ “Mi Li” Revisited: Horace Walpole and the Idea of China’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century

Studies 32:2 (2009), p.218. Nash argues (p.217-18) from internal evidence that the tale dates from the early1780s.

65. Nash, ‘ “Mi Li” Revisited’, p.232.66. Sir William Chambers, Designs of Chinese Buildings, furniture, dresses, machines and utensils ... To which is

annexed, a description of their temples, houses, gardens, &c. (London, 1757).67. Bell, Travels, vol. II.8.68. Letter from Lord Elphinstone to the Hoppo of Canton (1804), Letterbook of John Bruce, India Office

Records, Home Miscellaneous Series (HM), 456E, p.252.69. See, for example, the subscription lists attached to the first editions of Chambers’s Designs (1757) and

Bell’s Travels (1763), which include academics, aristocrats, literary figures, government officials and East IndiaCompany employees.

70. Noble, Voyage to the East Indies, p.[iii].71. Noble, Voyage to the East Indies, p.iv (italics added). Subsequent references are cited in parentheses

within the text.72. Lockyer, Account of the Trade in India; George Anson, A Voyage Round the World (London, 1748).73. Perdue, ‘Boundaries and Trade in the Early Modern World’, p.354.74. Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, p.142 (Letter XXXIII).75. Lockyer, Account of the Trade in India, p.141-2.76. Van Dyke, Canton Trade, p.16.77. Van Dyke, Canton Trade, p.92.78. Porter, Ideographia, p.203.79. Macartney, Embassy to China, p.168.80. Macartney, Embassy to China, p.168.81. Staunton, Authentic Account, vol. I.13.82. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, p.212.83. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, p.117.84. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, p.123.85. Kitson, Forging Romantic China, p.144. See also Cynthia Klekar, ‘ “Prisoners in Silken Bonds”: Obliga-

tion, Trade, and Diplomacy in English Voyages to Japan and China’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 6:1(2006), p.84-105.

86. Macartney, Embassy to China, p.214.87. John Barrow, Some Account of the Public Life, and A Selection from the Unpublished Writings, of the Earl of

Macartney, 2 vols (London, 1807).88. William T. Rowe, China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009),

p.154.89. Macartney, Embassy to China, p.120.90. Macartney, Embassy to China, p.120.91. See ‘The Koutou Question in Euro-American Discourse’, in Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, p.232-8.92. Staunton, Authentic Account, vol. II.219.93. Staunton, Authentic Account, vol. II.226-7.94. Philippe Forêt, Mapping Chengde: The Qing Landscape Enterprise (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2000),

p.160.95. See Thomas, ‘Yuanming Yuan / Versailles’, p.115-43; Yu Liu, Seeds of a Different Eden: Chinese Gardening

Ideas and a New English Aesthetic Ideal (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2008).96. Macartney, Embassy to China, p.126.97. William Gilpin, A Dialogue upon the Gardens of the Right Honourable the Lord Viscount Cobham at Stow in

Buckinghamshire (1748).98. Macartney, Embassy to China, p.127.99. Macartney, Embassy to China, p.127.

100. Macartney, Embassy to China, p.128.101. Macartney, Embassy to China, p.128.102. Macartney, Embassy to China, p.129.103. Macartney, Embassy to China, p.134.104. Nigel Leask, ‘Kubla Khan and Orientalism: The Road to Xanadu Revisited’, repr. in Michael O’Neill and

Mark Sandy (eds), Romanticism and History (London: Routledge, 2006), p.188.105. Macartney, Embassy to China, p.133.106. Macartney, Embassy to China, p.134.107. Macartney, Embassy to China, p.135-6.108. Elizabeth Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), p.48.109. Macartney, Embassy to China, p.153.110. Macartney, Embassy to China, p.214.



111. Macartney, Embassy to China, p.191.112. Macartney, Embassy to China, p.239.113. See Erik Ringmar, ‘Malice in Wonderland: Dreams of the Orient and the Destruction of the Palace of the

Emperor of China’, Journal of World History 22:2 (June 2011), p.273-97.114. William Jardine Proudfoot, ‘Barrow’s Travels in China’ Investigated (London, 1861), p.164.115. John Barrow, Travels in China (London, 1804), p.20.116. Barrow, Travels in China, p.11.117. Barrow, Travels in China, p.184. Subsequent references are cited in parentheses within the text.

laurence williams is a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science research fellow at the University of Tokyo.He was previously a post-doctoral fellow at the Burney Centre, McGill University, and he holds a DPhil in Englishfrom Oxford University. He is writing a monograph on British representations of Japanese and Chinese tradeduring the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.



Anglo-Chinese Caresses: Civility, Friendship and Trade in English Representations of China, 1760-1800

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