Closely Observed China: from William Alexander's Sketches to His Published Work
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CLOSELY OBSERVED CHINA: FROM WILLIAM ALEXANDER'S SKETCHES TO HIS PUBLISHED WORK FRANCES WOOD WHEN Lord Macartney led the first British Embassy to China from 1792 to 1794, he and his entourage travelled largely by boat, even after their arrival in China. They proceeded up the coast in their flotilla and disembarked at the mouth of the Bei river, to transfer to smaller, flat-bottomed Chinese barges for the trip upriver to Tongzhou and only travelled by road for the last twenty miles to Peking. When the Embassy was dismissed by the Emperor just over a month later in early October 1793, Lord Macartney and his party proceeded south by barge along the length of the Grand Canal to Hangzhou. There, the party split, with one group travelling south to Canton (mainly by water) and the others following the river to Ningbo on the coast and the Zhoushan archipelago where their brigs and East Indiamen waited.^ The slow passage along canals and rivers allowed members of the Embassy time to write their diaries, botanize and watch China slip slowly by. William Alexander (1767-1816), the junior draughtsman to the Embassy, made endless sketches and drawings, of which some 870 survive.'^ These, which provided the raw material for the two books of engravings that he published subsequently,^ contributed greatly to the one achievement of Lord Macartney's Embassy, which was the gathering of as much information as possible about China. The fundamental reason for the fact-finding aspect of the Embassy was the urgent need for the East India Company to discover more about the Chinese economy and way of life in order to ascertain her potential as a market for Lancashire cottons and Indian manufactures to redress the imbalance of trade in tea. Lord Macartney attempted to centralize the gathering of information and had 'conditioned with the different persons who went with him to China, not to keep separate journals of what passed, but that each should contribute what he could to a general book which should be revised and published.'"^ Macartney's condition was ignored on a grand scale. Apart from Sir George Leonard Staunton's official account of the voyage, published in 1797, no less than four members of the party published their own memoirs and the Embassy's Comptroller, Sir John Barrow, managed to squeeze two books out of it, though he did wait until after Staunton's account had appeared,^ William Alexander also wrote a diary, with regular entries from Sunday, 23 September 1792: 'Set sail', to 28 August 1793. It was on the latter date that he discovered he would not be one of the party to go to see the Emperor of China in his summer retreat at Chengde but was to be left behind in Peking. 'To have been within 50 miles of the famous Great Wall, to have seen that which might have been the boast of a man's grandson I have to regret forever that the artist should be doomed to remain immured at Peking. '^ From that day, Alexander's diary entries became shorter and less frequent, suggesting that he was compelled to abandon any idea of publishing a written account of the Embassy as he had been denied access to the crucial moment.^ His excitement at the thought of returning to Canton overland from Hangzhou, 'by this decision we shall have a wide field of observation laid open to us' (6 November 1793) was also short-lived, for he was informed that he and Dr Dinwiddie, the 'machinist' in charge of the latest scientific instruments, a diving bell and a hot-air balloon for demonstration to the Chinese court, were to proceed directly to the Zhoushan archipelago and thence along the coast thus 'preventing the exercise of my pencil in passing through such an extent of the country as from hence to Canton myself (7 November).^ When he worked on watercolours of the major events of the Embassy such as the meeting between Lord Macartney and the Qianlong emperor or made drawings of significant scenes or machines, Alexander worked at second-hand, relying mainly on the technical drawings made by Lieutenant Henry William Parish, an artillery officer accompanying the Embassy who drew plans and elevations of the imperial buildings at Chengde and the Great Wall, and possibly to a lesser extent on the amateur watercolours of John Barrow.^ Though his second-hand work on the Great Wall, for instance, is very impressive, Alexander's contribution lay above all in the direct communication of the China he saw from the boats on which he travelled,^*' His views of waterside life, of crowds of villagers and curly-tailed dogs gathered to watch the passage of barges full of foreigners, of rice fields and graves, of buildings and canal constructions like bridges, locks and 'inclined planes' with winches and capstans, offer a unique view of ordinary life in China at the time. His interest in the variety of the clothing, accoutrements and hair-styles of ordinary people, whether young or old, male or female, rich or poor, provides a wealth of detail that was not included in Chinese sources (see fig. i). Such Chinese evidence as there is for the physical appearance of eighteenth-century China occurs in paintings and illustrated printed albums. An example is the Gengzhi tu ('Pictures of Tilling and Weaving'), where the processes of rice production from ploughing to stacking the hay, and the creation of silk cloth from the egg to the loom, are depicted in fine woodblock illustrations. The agricultural scenes are small and intimate and both the rearing of silkworms and the weaving of cloth took place within the courtyard house whose depiction afforded much everyday detail of interest. The baskets, from the flat trays where the silkworms were reared and the small baskets with handles used for collecting mulberry leaves to the large storage baskets for husked rice, are clearly differentiated. The processes of silk production, with the exception of dyeing and tailoring, are depicted as women's work. The (male) tailors cut cloth with large- handled Chinese scissors and squint to thread needles in an open room with a kettle on 99 cn n XJ s --•-^T-^•K- ^' : '• ,,,'^..^^^•^; t^: I-; >,^.-,- r..,-.,,. .-'. , ••• 100 a small brazier and teapot and four little cups on a stool beside them. Yet there is much that is missing in such Chinese sources. Clothing and hairstyles are sketchily depicted and uniform; details of shoes are absent, much of the house is hidden and the life of the street not seen at all.^^ Much of the missing material can be found in Alexander's drawings. The small, closely-observed sketches made on scraps of paper as the Embassy's barges drifted on the current or were pulled along canals were his notes of the physical appearance of China and its people. The survival of sketches is of particular importance in the light of Alexander's method of work, for after his return from China he supported himself for almost eight years through the production of illustrations, watercolours and vignettes of 'Chinese' scenes created from combinations of figures, buildings and landscapes seen on the voyage. ^^ He was still producing engravings for publication more than a decade after he left China, by which time the accuracy of some of the combinations was rather doubtful. Alexander's long captions to the published engravings of his work, particularly those in his Costume of China (1805), are as informative as the original paintings. The captions were written from a combination of memory, diary entries and brief descriptions often added to the sketches. Hired to draw for the Embassy yet excluded from many of its most important moments, Alexander's involvement was as tortuous as the history of the Embassy itself. The Directors and merchants of the East India Company had been exercised for decades over the difficulties of trading with China. The restrictions placed by the Chinese government upon foreign traders at the end of the eighteenth century are well known. ^^ Some of them were rehearsed in the East India Company's instructions to Lieutenant- Colonel Charles Cathcart, M.P., in November 1787 as he prepared to lead an Embassy to China. Great Britain...has long been obliged to pursue this Trade under Circumstances the most discouraging, hazardous to its Agents employed in conducting it, and precarious to the various interests involved in it. At Canton, the only Place where His Majesty's Subjects have the Privilege of a Factory... the fair competition of the Market is destroyed by associations of the Chinese, our Supercargoes are denied open access to the tribunals of the Country and the fair Execution of its Laws, and are kept altogether in a most arbitrary and cruel State of depression incompatible with the very important concerns which are intrusted to them as such as one hardly supposes could be exercised in any country that pretends to Civilisation... Cathcart was instructed to try and obtain ' a place of Security as a Depot for our Goods' and to assure the Emperor of the ' mutual benefits to be derived from a Trade between the Two nations '.^^ Cathcart set off on the frigate Vestal on 21 December 1787 but died of consumption off Java on 10 June 1788. His grave was marked by an elegant wooden headboard made by Julius Caesar Ibbetson, an artist in his suite,^^ and the Embassy returned home. For Ibbetson, named for his caesarean birth in 1759 (which killed his mother), the failure of the Embassy was one of a series of set-backs in his career. Seeing that his son was set IOI on becoming an artist, his father apprenticed him to a ship's painter by mistake.