British-Chinese Encounters: Changing Perceptions and Attitudes from the Macartney Mission to the Opium War (1792-1840)

This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. British-Chinese Encounters: changing perceptions and attitudes from the Macartney mission to the Opium War (1792-1840) GAO Hao Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Edinburgh 2013 Declaration I declare that this thesis has been composed by me and that the work is my own. It has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. GAO Hao i Abstract This thesis examines British-Chinese encounters in the half century before the Opium War, an under-researched medium term period that had profound consequences for both China and Britain. Unlike previous studies on China’s early relations with Britain or the West, this thesis is conducted closely from a perceptional point of view, with its principal focus on British people’s first-hand impressions of China and attitudes towards Chinese affairs as a result of these encounters. It shows that British perceptions of China, by and large, increasingly worsened throughout this period. During the two royal embassies to China, British observers from the Macartney and the Amherst missions presented similarly negative views of Chinese civilisation, but proposed conflicting measures in terms of realising Britain’s commercial and diplomatic objectives in China. In the run up to the Opium War in the 1830s, the image of a Chinese government manipulated by a capricious and despotic monarchy was gradually constructed and seen as the primary cause of China’s backwardness. China was hence increasingly envisioned as an isolated ‘other’ that could not be communicated with by appeals to reason or through normal diplomatic negotiations. In this context, a coercive line of action, supported by British naval force, was eventually regarded as a just and viable approach to promote the wellbeing of both British and Chinese common people. Although these developing unfavourable views about China did not determine the outbreak of the Opium War, they were certainly important underlying forces without which open hostilities with China would probably have been neither justifiable nor acceptable to the British parliament or people. This thesis also seeks to set this half-century of British-Chinese encounters in the context of Chinese history. It briefly describes how a changing image of Britain was developed by the Chinese government and people during this period. It shows that both local elites in the southeastern coastal areas and the elites at the imperial court in Beijing obtained credible as well as inaccurate information about Britain and its people. These early notions held in the southeast and in the Beijing sometimes had an impact on each other, but sometimes stayed distinct and unaffected. This situation partly explains why the Chinese government was caught off guard when a serious challenge from Britain occurred in the form of the Opium War. ii Acknowledgements I must, first of all, thank Professor Harry Dickinson, who has guided and inspired me since I was an undergraduate student in Beijing. Without his invaluable advice and generous help, I could not have reached this stage. I should also like to thank Harry’s wife, Mrs Elizabeth Dickinson, and others of the Dickinsons, who have made me feel at home in Edinburgh. I am sincerely grateful to the rest of my supervision team: Dr Alex Murdoch, Dr Felix Boeking and Professor Paul Bailey. Their kind support and assistance are very important to this thesis. I am much indebted to Professor Alvin Jackson and Dr Frances Dow, who have taken good care of me over the years. My appreciation also goes to the fine academic community in Edinburgh University, which has warmly received me, particularly to Professor Frank Cogliano, Dr Fabian Hilfrich, Dr Gordon Pentland, Professor Natascha Gentz and Dr Tong Shenxiao. In other parts of the UK, I would like to thank Professors Miles Taylor (IHR), Kent Deng (LSE), Andrew Thompson (Exeter) and Naomi Tadmor (Lancaster). Beyond the UK, I am grateful to Professors Antonia Finnane (Melbourne), Alfred Andrea (Vermont), James Hevia (Chicago), and Iona Man-Cheong (New York). Their support and care are truly helpful and encouraging to me. I would also like to pay tribute to Professor Qian Chengdan, my previous supervisor in Peking University, who guided me in the study of British history. Professors Xu Kai and Guo Weidong, both experts in modern Chinese history, have given me considerable assistance in setting my discoveries of British perceptions within the Chinese context. I acknowledge my appreciation to the British and Chinese governments for their generous financial support, as well as to the College of Humanities and Social Science, School of History, Classics and Archaeology, and Centre for the Study of Modern Conflict of Edinburgh University for their research and travel grants. Last but not least, I must thank my wife, soon-to-be Dr Huang Shuo (Jessie), whose love, encouragement and understanding has made the Gao Hao of today. I know that, if I succeed with my submission, this will particularly please my father, Professor Gao Dai (PKU), who pointed out to me a long time ago that it would be a great achievement to graduate from the University of Edinburgh. The unwavering support from the rest of my family was also crucial to the completion of this thesis. I dedicate this thesis to every member of my family. iii Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Preface 1 Introduction 11 Part I 1. British perceptions of China during the Macartney embassy (1792-4) 32 2. British perceptions of China during the Amherst embassy (1816-17) 74 Part II 3. The debate on the EIC’s monopoly: British perceptions of China in the early 1830s 129 4. ‘The Napier Fizzle’ and beyond: British perceptions of China in the mid-1830s 165 5. An ‘Opium’ war? British perceptions of China in the late-1830s 203 Part III 6. Britain through Chinese eyes: Chinese perceptions of Britain during the early Sino-British encounters 246 Conclusion 274 Bibliography 281 iv Preface The First Anglo-Chinese War (1840-2), also known as the ‘Opium War’, was a fateful conflict that had profound consequences for the later history of both China and Great Britain. Although the periodisation of modern Chinese history as beginning with the Opium War has been challenged, 1 research on China’s early encounters with Britain prior to the 1840s remains inadequate.2 The Opium War itself, however, has attracted considerable attention from historians, but neither the more general explanation highlighting the irreconcilable conflict between Britain’s industrial expansion and China’s containment policy3 nor some highly specific causes,4 such as the domestic political crisis facing the Whig government in the late-1830s, is convincing enough to decide the debate on what caused the Opium War. A very important reason for this phenomenon is that most of these studies are either grand narratives, which have overlooked many important historical details, or specific ‘short-term (courte durée)’ studies that, according to Fernand Braudel, ‘centred on the drama of “great 1 Philip A. Kuhn, for example, has doubted whether the modern period of China’s history can be demarcated by largely external events. Instead, Kuhn suggests that ‘we can reasonably seek the beginning of the old order’s decline ... no earlier than 1864, the year the Taiping Rebellion was destroyed’. See Philip A. Kuhn, Rebellion and its Enemies in Late Imperial China: militarization and social structure, 1796-1864 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 5, 8. 2 John K. Fairbank pointed out in 1978 that, among existing studies, the first half of the nineteenth century, largely the pre-Opium War period, has been greatly under-researched. See ‘Bibliographical essays’, The Cambridge History of China, ed. John K. Fairbank, et al. (15 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), X, 596. 3 For example, see David Owen, British Opium Policy in China and in India (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1934; reprinted, Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1968), p. 168; W.C. Costin, Great Britain and China: 1833-1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), p. 20; Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China 1800-42 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1951), p. 215; Hsin-pao Chang, Commissioner Lin and the Opium War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 2; Gerald S. Graham, The China Station: War and Diplomacy, 1830-1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. x, etc. 4 Glenn Melancon, ‘Honour in Opium? The British Declaration of War on China, 1839-1840’, International History Review, 21 (1999), 855-74; Glenn Melancon, Britain’s China Policy and the Opium Crisis: Balancing Drugs, Violence and National Honour, 1833-1840 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 5-6, 133-9. 1 events”’ only.5 For these reasons, most research on the Opium War traces the causes back no earlier than the rise of the opium trade and thus fails to explore the British-Chinese engagements over a longer time span.6 In particular, there has not been any medium-term (moyenne durée) study on what attitudes and perceptions were developed as a direct result of the early encounters between Britain and China and how, ultimately, the idea of a war against China was justified in Britain, on the basis of the perceptions and images that had been gradually constructed from these encounters.

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