Foreign Goods and
Foreign Knowledge in
the Eighteenth Century
“We have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s manufactures.”1
The Qianlong Emperor (1736–1795)
In 1792 Britain sent Lord Macartney to China in the hope of gaining the competitive edge in the China trade over other Europeans and its former American colonies. The embassy was not a success. Historians in the West have long blamed its failure on what they have surmised to be a comprehensive Chinese antagonism to trade, a rigid adherence to a hierarchical structure of foreign relations enveloped in ritual formalities, and an overall resistance to innovation and change. But when we view matters from the Chinese point of view, it immediately becomes obvious that the reality was different. Trade played a central part in the Qing empire, which represented a major political and cultural force in the region. The Qing did not wish to take a chance on allowing Europeans unlimited access to Chinese markets. In part they were anxious not to lose control of the profits, but they were also unwilling to risk the insidious effect on their overlordship that might result from the free circulation of goods emanating from altogether different cultures. In short, the Qing considered that unrestricted interchange posed a potential danger to national security.
Qing caution sprang from a much greater degree of sophistication about international affairs than has sometimes been imagined; by the eighteenth century they knew enough to be extremely wary of Europeans. They were familiar with them partly through the court missionaries, partly through periodic embassies, partly through the Canton trade, and partly as a consequence of European colonial pursuits in Asia. Macao, hard by China’s shores, had for two centuries been a Portuguese enclave, Manila had been dominated by Spain for almost as long, and Batavia was the center of the Netherlands’ by now formidable colonial power in Southeast Asia. Each was home to a sizable community of expatriate Chinese, to whom Europeans had on occasion shown great animosity. In the Philippines, in Batavia, and in Dutch-occupied Taiwan, for instance, Chinese had more than once been attacked and massacred, sometimes in vast numbers. British imperial expansion, by now impinging on the edges of Chinese territory, had not yet shown any such evidence of ill will. But even though the Qing clearly grasped the distinctions between the European countries, Britain was at least potentially tarred with the same brush.
This chapter examines the main aspects of the international exchange of goods and ideas in eighteenth-century Qing China, from the late Kangxi period down to the death of the Qianlong Emperor in 1799. Europeans were not the only foreigners with whom eighteenth-century China had dealings, but they were the newest on the scene, the most determined to disseminate their goods and ideas, and collectively the most powerful. For that reason they are the principal, though not exclusive, focus of the chapter. It is true that China did not always welcome the new arrivals with open arms. But its circumspect approach arose more out of pragmatism than out of the reactionary conservatism or primitive parochialism of which Europeans dismissively accused China.
WAR AND DIPLOMACY IN
THE HIGH QING
During the 150 or so years from the founding of the Qing empire in 1644 until the end of the eighteenth century, only four emperors reigned. These were: Shunzhi (1644–1661), Kangxi (1662–1722), Yongzheng (1723–1735), and Qianlong (1736–1795). Two ruled for more than sixty years apiece; Qianlong abdicated in 1795 in order not to appear unfilial by surpassing the sixty-one years achieved by his grandfather, Kangxi, but to all intents and purposes he continued to rule until his death four years later. These long reigns provided an era of continuity and stability after the chaotic wars of the dynastic transition. During this period the population grew to surpass three hundred million, and the Qing pursued with vigor the consolidation and expansion of their empire.
Qing emperors remained acutely conscious of their Manchu origins. At once emperors of China and khans of extensive domains in Inner and Central Asia or, to put it differently, as rulers for whom the Chinese portion of their empire constituted only a part of the whole, they represented themselves simultaneously as benevolent Confucian rulers and as martial conquerors in a newly crafted Manchu tradition. They also tried to establish their spiritual supremacy throughout the region, to compete with the threat posed to their authority by the Dalai Lama, to whom many Qing subjects in both Mongolia and Tibet looked for religious leadership. Qing rulers, in other words, employed a range of sophisticated strategies to reinforce their overlordship and to control the ways in which it was represented. They were worthy competitors for the title of imperialists with the Western powers that later all but overwhelmed them.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, with no single agency handling foreign affairs, the Qing formulated a series of policies designed to maintain control within the empire and to defend the inland and maritime frontiers. Some of these policies grew out of traditional Chinese formulations, while others were Qing innovations more attuned to the Manchus’ Inner Asian origins. Different agencies handled relations with different groups. In many ways the variety of mid-Qing institutions dealing with outsiders was a great strength because it allowed for considerable flexibility. On the other hand, decentralization made consistent policy-making followed by concerted action much more difficult to achieve. In the nineteenth century the lack of centralization in the handling of foreign affairs came to be seen as a weakness by Western countries accustomed to dealing with a single Foreign Office or Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
An Office of Border Affairs (lifan yuan) handled Qing relations with its Asian neighbors to the north and northwest, including Russia. The lifan yuan was a Qing innovation that helped transform its foreign relations. With regard to China’s traditional next-door-neighbor antagonists, such as the Mongols, the Tibetans, and others, the lifan yuan managed a series of ritual functions that, by diminishing cultural friction between China and these groups, helped incorporate them into the Qing empire. It was also charged with deterring any potential threat to Qing supremacy in continental East Asia.
In the 1680s the Qing turned their attention to the northwest frontiers of China. To settle their disputes with the Russians, they at first hoped to use either Dutch or Portuguese emissaries to carry correspondence by way of Amsterdam or Lisbon to Moscow. China had particularly high hopes of the Dutch, who had a strong commercial presence in Russia, but in the event, the Qing settled their Russian conflict themselves, concluding in 1689 the Treaty of Nerchinsk, negotiated with the aid of Jesuit interpreters using Manchu and Latin.
The Treaty of Nerchinsk and its successor, the 1727 Treaty of Kiakhta, clearly indicated Qing willingness to depart as necessary from a tributary framework in foreign relations. Together, these two treaties limited Sino-Russian trade to certain border outposts and certain times of the year. The Treaty of Kiakhta also permitted the establishment of a Russian Orthodox church to service the small Russian community living in Beijing since the termination of the Sino-Russian wars of the 1680s, the dispatch of an ecclesiastical mission every ten years, and triennial trading missions. Even though the treaties formally recognized the principle of equality between nations, China still insisted traders observe ceremonials that implied a relationship of superiority and submission.
The cessation of hostilities with Russia in the 1690s enabled the Qing to shift their attention to the task of defeating Zunghar tribes that were threatening China’s northern and northwestern borders. The wars initiated against the Zunghars continued sporadically until, in the 1750s, a series of Qing military successes ended with the extermination of the Zunghar people and the incorporation into the empire of vast tracts of land in Central Asia. This elimination of the age-old nomadic threat to their northwest frontiers, which followed the effective incorporation of both Mongolia and Tibet into the empire, meant that by 1760 the Qing had gained control over the largest empire of Chinese history. The lifan yuan’s jurisdiction expanded in proportion.
The second main agency that dealt with foreign countries was the Board of Rites (li bu), traditionally the third of the six main ministries of government. The Board of Rites was responsible for relations with neighbors whose populations were non-Chinese but whose cultures bore some resemblance to China’s, such as Korea, Burma, Siam, Vietnam, and Japan. From such countries the Qing expected formal acknowledgment of their predominance and in return offered limited trading rights, although unofficial trade often thrived side by side with formal exchanges. Europeans who sought trading privileges were encompassed in these arrangements primarily because they did not clearly fit into any other category and because unlike the contiguous states of Central Asia, they did not at first appear to harbor territorial ambitions.
A third organization supervised European missionaries working in China. This was the Imperial Household Department (neiwufu), which managed a wide range of the emperor’s affairs. Its responsibility for the missionaries reflected the view that they had little relevance to the broader scheme of international relations. But in reality missionaries’ role as interpreters for the handful of European embassies to reach China during this period gave them a considerable measure of influence that should not be underestimated. Court Jesuits, for example, natives of the Catholic countries perennially competing for power with Protestant Holland and England, tried more than once to stymie Dutch embassies to the Qing, by maligning the Dutch and by otherwise acting to impede their progress.
Religious differences, however, sometimes yielded to a sense of fellowship based on common European origins. For instance, in 1656 a Portuguese Jesuit expressed to a Dutch envoy to China the view that an invasion would not be all that difficult, but he suggested waiting until there were more Christian converts to act as a fifth column within China. On other occasions missionaries purporting to act solely as intermediaries in fact passed strategic information to Russian envoys, hoping to gain some advantage for themselves. In other words, the Jesuits were by no means politically neutral.
Commerce played a huge role in eighteenth-century Qing China, an empire at the height of its power. With sustained peace and prosperity, the network of interregional markets within the country became increasingly elaborate, while international trade thrived as perhaps never before. A booming informal trade existed side by side with, and independently of, the formal exchanges that usually were treated as tributary in nature. To the north, periodic markets permitted at treaty-specified border posts were always busy. To the west, the newly conquered region of Xinjiang provided a conduit for interchange among China proper, Russia, and Central Asia, in an echo of the ancient Silk Road. Up and down the eastern seaboard, a thriving junk trade linked the coast to Taiwan (part of the empire since 1683), Japan, and Korea and to numerous Southeast Asian states: Siam, Malaya, the Philippines, Indonesia, and beyond. The junk trade brought China such necessities as pepper, coconut oil, rice, brown sugar, copper, wood, rattan, and sea slugs and took away Chinese ceramics, textiles, and other commodities.
Much of the population of the southeastern coastal provinces—at least hundreds of thousands of people—depended for a living on the maritime trade, and there was a constant flow of both commercial and personal communication between those who remained on the China coast and the burgeoning overseas communities. Qing authorities kept a sharp eye on overseas Chinese communities, for they were always on the alert for possible collusion among Chinese, the ever-present pirates, and ill-disposed foreigners; they assumed that only bad eggs would want to leave China altogether and that one could never discount the risk that they would pass information to unspecified hostile outsiders. Concerns of this kind periodically prompted temporary bans on maritime trade, a move that drove some to smuggling and piracy, but there were never any plans to put an end to overseas trade altogether.
The Southeast Asian trade’s importance to the livelihood of coastal communities meant such bans were imposed only in extreme circumstances. The campaigns against the Taiwan-based Zheng forces, concluded in the 1680s, was an example of such extremity. Six decades later times were more secure. For example, in the aftermath of an episode in which Dutch colonists in Batavia had massacred more than ten thousand resident Chinese in 1740, the Qianlong Emperor resisted proposals for a complete ban on maritime trade precisely because of the hardship that it would cause Chinese in the coastal provinces.
Relations with Japan, with which China had no formal diplomatic ties, continued to be unfriendly. As we have seen, relations between the two countries during the late Ming had hardly been cordial. The indirect trade through Portuguese middlemen, begun in the mid-sixteenth century, had ceased in the 1630s, when Japan banned the Portuguese for fear of contamination with Christianity, but China’s constant need for Japanese silver and copper kept trade going through Nagasaki, the only Japanese port open to foreign trade and residence. Meanwhile the Tokugawa shoguns who reunited Japan after 1600 insultingly suggested that Qing rulership, imposed by force, was illegitimate and helped furnish moral and material support to the Ming loyalist resistance. In such circumstances, even if Japan had been willing, the resumption of a tributary relationship was unthinkable.
Yet despite Japan’s defiance of Chinese political overlordship, during this period Chinese Neo-Confucianism became an integral element of Japanese intellectual life. Both Korea and Vietnam had also adopted Chinese Neo-Confucianism as their ideology of state in Ming times. Hence much of East Asia, while neither politically cohesive nor culturally uniform, now operated in accordance with Neo-Confucian principles originating in China. It would be an exaggeration to describe East Asia during the Qing as a Chinese sphere of influence, but given the widespread prevalence of Neo-Confucianism, China and its culture constituted a very considerable presence in the region.
European merchants had been trading up and down the China coast since the lifting of coastal restrictions in 1683 and had gradually dropped much pretense about conforming to tributary notions. By the middle of the eighteenth century the British dominated the China trade. But they were becoming increasingly frustrated by the numerous extra exactions levied on foreign trade by local officials and by the difficulty of gaining access to higher-level authorities. In 1759, therefore, the British attempted to petition the emperor directly for redress and for the establishment of a more regularized system of foreign trade. This audacious move confirmed the already half-formed Qing view that the British were indeed a force to be reckoned with.
The Qing responded to the British initiative the following year by introducing restrictive procedures designed to safeguard the maritime frontier and to ensure that foreigners trading in China did so only on China’s terms. Like the 1727 Treaty of Kiakhta between China and Russia, these procedures, known as the Canton system, were intended to enable the Qing to consolidate coastal defense as well as to monopolize commercial profits and control the interaction with Europeans.
The Canton system limited foreign trade to the single southeastern seaport of Canton. Foreigners were permitted to live in Canton only during the October to March trading season, and their women were banned altogether. Western merchants were required to deposit all weapons from their ships with Chinese authorities until their departure. They had to conduct their trade exclusively through specially licensed merchants known as the hong merchants (from the Chinese word for “company,” hang), whom Qing authorities held responsible for the prompt payment of all customs duties and other charges and for the good conduct of foreigners. The foreigners had to use these men as their conduit to the court-appointed superintendent of the Guangdong maritime customs, known as the hoppo (from the Chinese word for the Board of Revenue, hubu). The hoppo represented Qing authority to the Europeans and helped the central government keep them at arm’s length.
The informal junk trade was for the most part not subject to these regulations because it was conducted primarily by Chinese—both residents and migrants—and hence it was not regarded as foreign. After 1760 its identification as Chinese thus took on a new importance. In other words, much of the trade with Southeast Asia—the Nanyang trade—was unaffected by the new regulations and continued to operate out of ports other than Canton.
Superficially, the Canton system served its purpose of keeping Western traders under control and monopolizing the profits of international commerce for the government. But ultimately it backfired, for two reasons. First, it was often disastrous for the hong merchants. Many amassed huge debts they were unable to repay because of the countless bribes they were obliged to pay in order to maintain official favor and because of the practice of buying on credit from European traders. Several went bankrupt. Some were banished to the far northwest for their failure to meet their obligations. The possibility of making a fortune was just not enough to outweigh these kinds of risks. As a group the merchants were extremely unstable, but they were not normally allowed to withdraw, not least because of the difficulty of finding replacements. The fact that they were in effect compelled to continue indicates clearly that Qing authorities had no intention of altogether abolishing the trade. The second reason the Canton system ultimately failed was that many of the European merchants found it totally unsatisfactory. They did not regard their demands to be allowed to operate without limitation as anything out of the ordinary and were frequently infuriated by the restrictions and inconveniences of the system.
The Chinese justice system increasingly became a source of conflict between Chinese and Europeans. As Western merchants began to come to China in ever greater numbers, the Qing became stricter about enforcing the law. In the early Qing, when incidents were relatively few, Qing authorities had usually accepted financial compensation for cases involving the accidental killing of a Chinese by a foreigner. But from the 1750s they began to take stronger measures and to assert their jurisdiction over cases involving only Westerners on Chinese soil as well as those involving Chinese and Westerners.
A well-known case from 1784 serves as an illustration. A British ship, the Lady Hughes, fired a salute near Canton that accidentally killed two Chinese bystanders. The Chinese authorities demanded that the ship’s captain give up the gunner, but the captain declared that he could not tell which gunner had fired the shot. Thereupon the Chinese arrested the ship’s manager, or supercargo, as surety for the gunner, halted all trade with Europeans, and cut off communications between the Westerners living in Canton and the European ships at anchorage—British, Dutch, French, Danish, and American. It was as though the Qing construed the Europeans as a family, despite their many rivalries; it held them all, collectively, responsible for the Lady Hughes incident. Horrified at the cessation of trade, the Europeans rallied together and sailed their well-armed merchantmen into the harbor to register their protest. The Canton governor then proposed that all Westerners except the British could resume trade. All did so except, remarkably, the Americans, who within a decade of their revolution had already sent their first China-trading ship, the Empress of China, to Canton. Shortly thereafter the British surrendered the gunner into Chinese custody.
Traditional Chinese law codes contained very specific and detailed provisions covering homicide, which normally was punishable by death subject to imperial approval. Clemency was possible in the case of an accidental killing, such as that on the Lady Hughes, and on this ground the Canton governor proposed leniency. But the emperor ordered the gunner executed.
The imperial decision stemmed from domestic political considerations. As we saw in the last chapter, Chinese sometimes confused Christians with Muslims since each group followed a foreign religion. In 1784 a group of Muslims had rebelled in the interior for the second time in five years. Although Qianlong almost certainly grasped the distinction between Muslims and Christians, he could see some similarities too; both, for example, answered to a temporal authority beyond the emperor’s control. He was also afraid that the Muslim uprising would soon lead to unrest among Christians. In addition, at the time of the Lady Hughes incident, he had recently ordered that all Christian missionaries operating in the provinces be suppressed. So far as he was concerned, he was acting entirely in accordance with Chinese law, and he saw no reason to do otherwise. But the British were scandalized. They regarded the gunner’s execution as proof of an arbitrary and unusually cruel system of justice perpetrated by barbaric authorities. For some, at least, the Chinese system of justice was worthy only of human beings of very low caliber; later such an opinion made it easier to justify the opium trade.
Despite all the mutual difficulties and frustrations of the Canton system, foreign trade there flourished, in part because of a growing passion in Europe for things Chinese: porcelain, for which a growing export market developed; the perennially popular silk; and, above all, tea. Tea came to be the most important commodity that Europeans imported from China. The rapidly increasing demand was met virtually entirely from a small mountainous area of northwestern Fujian province, where extraordinary commercial stimulation marked one of the more positive impacts for China of European economic expansion.
Apart from substantial tea exports to Russia by way of the frontier trading post at Kiakhta, the primary market for Chinese tea was Britain, where it had become all the rage. The British East India Company imported tea in vast quantities, and although the Company’s monopoly kept British competitors at bay, its various continental European counterparts also smuggled large amounts into Britain. The problem was how to pay for it because before the Industrial Revolution Europe produced very little it could trade with China. Only silver was marketable to China on a scale even nearly comparable to its tea imports.
By the early 1780s the East India Company faced financial ruin because of the tea trade. It had to find an alternative to silver, for it was taking out of China more than three times what it was bringing in. American independence had already deprived the Company of some of its market for tea and increased the competition. The passage, a few years later, of legislation reducing import duties in Britain, which helped the Company by making smuggling unprofitable, was insufficient to retrieve its fortunes because trade between China and Britain had continued to expand.
The alternative it seized on was opium. Opium grew in Britain’s Indian colonies and could be sold in Canton for three times the initial cost. Opium had been known in China since the early seventeenth century and had begun to spread in the 1720s and 1730s. By the 1760s British merchants had begun smuggling it into China on a relatively small scale. Out of financial desperation, they now systematically stepped up the sales of Indian opium to China. Its addictiveness ensured a steady demand despite Qing efforts at prohibition.
The Company’s opium policy was extraordinarily successful. The concerted effort to substitute opium for silver, to pay for the English tea-drinking habit, began in the late 1780s. In the next half century until the eve of the Anglo-Chinese Opium War, the British East India Company, through its licensees in the so-called country trade between India and China—conducted by a mixture of Britons, Indians, Armenians and Parsees—smuggled a total of almost 443,000 chests of opium into China, at a total cost of 230 million taels or Chinese ounces of silver.2 The Company preferred to use these middlemen to conduct the trade with China in order to keep up the appearance that it was not violating the Qing ban on the opium trade, since it had no desire to jeopardize its legal trade in tea and other commodities. The British policy of using opium instead of silver to pay for Chinese tea was just beginning to take off at the time of the Macartney embassy in 1792 and 1793.
The Macartney embassy was the first concerted attempt by a West European power to establish a relationship with China based on equality and to “open up the China trade.” It had two main goals. The first was to request the relaxation of restrictions on commerce, both because the British government perceived an expansion of trade to be in the national interest and because in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution newly powerful manufacturing interests in Britain, jealous of the East India Company’s domination of the China trade, were extremely anxious to find new markets for their products. Thus the Company, which the government induced to finance the embassy, experienced ambivalent feelings about it, recognizing the possibility that success might mean the end of its own valuable monopoly on the China trade.
The second goal was to seek permission to establish a permanent British embassy in Beijing that would enable direct communication with the emperor instead of through the Hong merchants and officials in Canton, thereby presumably making it easier to protect British interests in China. In short, the conclusion of a commercial treaty that would, among other things, allow British trade to operate beyond just Canton, seemed a promising solution to all the problems they had encountered.
Accompanied by a substantial retinue of courtiers, scientists, linguists, and others and equipped with elaborate gifts, Macartney reached China in the summer of 1793 after a long sea voyage. Since officially his purpose was not to conduct trade but to pay official British respects to the emperor of China, his ships were exempt from the requirement that Western traders be confined to Canton. Sailing as far north as Tianjin, the port of Beijing, the embassy disembarked to complete its journey by land.
The gifts the embassy brought, including a fine planetarium accompanied by telescopes and other astronomical instruments, exact replicas of British warships, textiles, and weapons, were of the finest quality, intended to vaunt British scientific and manufacturing skills at their best. As Sir George Staunton, secretary of the embassy, put it, “Specimens of the best British manufactures, and all the late inventions for adding to the conveniences and comforts of social life, might answer the double purpose of gratifying those to whom they were to be presented, and of exciting a more general demand for the purchase of similar articles.”3 In this respect, the British resembled the Jesuit missionaries. Just as the missionaries hoped that European arts and sciences would prove to be the key that would open the door to Chinese tolerance, if not embrace, of Christianity, so the British hoped that the same key would open up the China market to much more trade.
Leaving the gifts on display at the Yuan Ming Yuan palace complex in Beijing for fear that transporting them any farther might damage their delicate mechanisms, the embassy journeyed on to Rehe (present-day Chengde), the summer residence of the Qianlong court. At Rehe the Qianlong Emperor received Macartney with considerable signs of favor, together with emissaries from some of his Inner Asian dominions who were in Rehe to pay their respects in the time-honored way. With graciousness and condescension, the emperor bestowed valuable gifts upon Macartney but denied his requests, courteously dispatched him under escort back to his ships, and sent him on his way. He instructed his officials in Canton to keep a particularly sharp eye on traders in general and on the British in particular.
Most accounts of Macartney’s embassy place great emphasis on the envoy’s refusal to prostrate himself as expected before the emperor as the immediate source of its failure, but the reality, not surprisingly, was more complicated. The whole episode was fraught with mutual misunderstanding. Generally Macartney assumed that diplomatic relations could be conducted in China in the same way that they were in Europe, and on the same premises, while Qianlong assumed that Macartney would fall in with Qing ritual practices surrounding the reception of foreign dignitaries. Both were simply mistaken. The exchange of gifts was similarly beset by mutual confusion. Macartney, for instance, unaware that the golden scepter Qianlong handed him was valued as a symbol of peace and prosperity, dismissed it as inadequate and of little intrinsic worth. Qianlong, on the other hand, thought the lavish presents brought by the British to lubricate diplomatic machinery were not substantially different from or better than what he had already seen of European products. Then Macartney’s constant shifting of ground, intended to show a spirit of accommodation, only provoked a growing conviction that the British were concealing their true purpose. It made the Qing extremely edgy, and in the circumstances they were in no rush to make any concessions.
To the Qing, in any event, British requests seemed illogical. They wanted an embassy in Beijing, but foreigners resident in the capital would be too far away from their fellow countrymen trading in Canton to serve much purpose; they would simply be another group requiring supervision. They wanted more trade out of more ports, but Chinese authorities saw no reason for the British to be treated differently from other foreigners. The goods the British required were readily available through the hong system based in Canton, which ensured equal treatment of all Westerners. From China’s point of view, Qianlong suggested, unmediated trade was just too risky; it threatened social order because too often greed led to conflict or at least to divided loyalties.
In retrospect the Macartney embassy was probably doomed from the outset. Certainly the British had an unfavorable advance billing in China as the result of their own overseas activities and from insinuations almost certainly made by Catholic missionaries at the Qianlong court, a majority of whom were French, about the untrustworthiness of their longtime national enemy, the Protestant British. In any event, whatever Qianlong’s misgivings prior to the embassy’s arrival, the actual encounter with Macartney further diminished Chinese confidence in British good faith and fueled British prejudices about Chinese reluctance to engage with the wider world. It was altogether an inauspicious beginning.
CHINA AND EUROPEAN ARTS
AND SCIENCES
Notwithstanding his outward expression of uninterest in British manufactures, Qianlong and many others in China displayed considerable interest in all manner of things foreign, as is evident from a series of conversations he held in 1773 with the missionary Michel Benoist (1715–1774). Qianlong quizzed Benoist about Western science, philosophy, warfare, cartography, shipping, and navigational practices. In one such conversation he gravely asked Benoist whether “your Western philosophers have solved a problem that has much exercised our philosophers here: which came first, the chicken or the egg?”—an inquiry to which Benoist did his best to respond. Benoist was one of a number of Jesuit missionaries who lived and worked at the court of the Qianlong Emperor throughout his long reign, in the process also providing detailed information about China to Europe.
The technical skill and versatility of the Jesuit missionaries at the court of the great Qing emperors were astonishing. Missionaries built several astronomical instruments, including a quadrant, a sextant, a celestial globe, a theodolite, an azimuth, and several armillae, to equip an observatory that can still be visited in Beijing. They constructed fountains and a working windmill for the imperial palace. They designed a new summer palace near Beijing, at which they installed European-style fountains and plantings to surround elaborate structures adorned with European facades and interior decoration. They transplanted nasturtiums, bluebells, and other European plants and explained to courtiers how to cultivate them. They made elaborate clocks and mechanical toys. They built a harpsichord and gave music lessons. They provided technical advice on glassmaking and supervised its production, constructing furnaces of their own design. They taught themselves the art of enameling so as to be able to satisfy the imperial passion for this type of decoration. They built complicated hydraulic and other machinery, for the operation and function of which they provided detailed explanations in response to Chinese requests. They designed artillery pieces and supervised the foundries that produced them. They operated medical dispensaries and, with the help of traders down in Canton, supplied the emperor with rare European medicines: quinine for malaria and antimonic sulfide to counter parasitic diseases. They assembled devices for applying electroconvulsive shock treatment for nervous illness, which by the late eighteenth century they were administering with some success to Chinese ready and willing to take the risk. They surveyed the entire empire, traveling to take measurements in newly conquered areas as soon as possible after hostilities ceased. Finally, they worked as court painters, producing portraits and, in particular under Qianlong, detailed records of the triumphs of Qing rule. In short, they worked extremely hard and with considerable success to satisfy imperial demands for both aesthetic pleasure and practical science and technology.
The spheres of Western knowledge in which Qing emperors showed the greatest interest were those capable of supporting Qing efforts to reconfirm their legitimacy as rulers of China, their military exploits, their imperial aspirations, and their efforts to control the historical record. Among these areas of interest, astronomy and the associated science of mathematics had the most intimate connection to Qing efforts to justify their political authority.
European astronomy was the mainstay of the secular knowledge that the Jesuits brought to China. Many Jesuits trained in astronomy before they embarked. Moreover, during the six months’ sea voyage from Lisbon to Goa and the three more it took to get to Macao, they had ample opportunity to further their familiarity with the stars. Calendrical reform had been subject to extended debate in China not long before Ricci’s arrival, so that Jesuit astronomers entered an existing fray; they did not initiate it.
In 1629 missionaries won a court-sponsored competition for the most accurate prediction of an eclipse, defeating existing officials, including Muslims using imported methods. As a result, and through the intercession of the Pillar Xu Guangqi, they were appointed to the Ming Imperial Bureau of Astronomy. As well as their superior eclipse prediction, their geometrical analysis of planetary motion, their concept of a spherical earth, and their ways of measuring its divisions consistently produced more accurate calculations than did the methods then in use in China.
Chinese acceptance of European astronomy’s greater accuracy showed a proper caution, as the following statement, signed by ten officials of the Bureau of Astronomy in 1629, indicates:
At first we had our doubts about the astronomy from Europe when it was used in [1629], but after having read many clear explanations our doubts diminished by half. Finally by participating in precise observations of the stars, and of the positions of the sun and moon, our hesitations were altogether overcome. Recently we received the imperial order to study these sciences, and every day we have been discussing them with the Europeans. Truth must be sought not only in books, but in making actual experiments with instruments; it is not enough to listen with one’s ears, one must also carry out manipulations with one’s hands. All [the new astronomy] is found to be correct.4
During the 1630s European Jesuits and Chinese scholars published a huge collection of translations of Western works on calendrical methods, mathematics, surveying techniques, and other broadly scientific topics.
As we saw in the last chapter, Jesuit missionaries offered their services to the new Qing regime very shortly after the transfer of power in 1644. Their skills in astronomy were particularly useful to an alien group seeking ways to legitimate their rule. One of their number was appointed director of the Imperial Bureau of Astronomy, an important office of state charged with regulating the imperial calendar. This position, held by Jesuits for the next 150 years, both brought them prestige and offered the opportunity to influence the entire direction of astronomy in China.
At the outset of the two centuries or so of the Jesuit China mission, Europe was making extraordinary scientific advances, most notably in Copernicus’s theory of heliocentrism, according to which the sun was the center of the universe and the earth and other planets all revolved around it, and Galileo’s invention of the telescope. Although missionaries did tell their Chinese counterparts about the telescope and eventually produced one, they kept quiet about heliocentrism because the Church had condemned it as heretical; the Church considered that if the earth and the humans who inhabited it were not the center of the universe, the theological implications would be simply too terrible to contemplate. Instead missionaries, who felt unable to oppose Rome in public, propounded the system of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), who placed the earth at the center of the universe and the sun at the center of the other planets’ circular orbit.
Jesuit missionaries were reticent for so long because they feared that belated revelation would create inexplicable contradictions. Such fears proved justified. By 1760, when the missionary Michel Benoist finally brought heliocentric theory to the Qianlong Emperor’s attention, Chinese scholars had, not surprisingly, become extremely skeptical about European astronomy, because of all the inconsistencies and inaccuracies they had noticed. What they now learned about heliocentrism seemed to fit into a discernible pattern of disclosure followed by contradiction. As a result, by the late eighteenth century imperial confidence in European knowledge was somewhat shaken, and the general view among Chinese astronomers was that their European counterparts had little to offer.
Conventional wisdom in the West has attributed Chinese skepticism about European science to an ingrained hostility to foreign ideas, but this assumption thus failed to reflect the true sequence of events. Indeed, one may question whether the incomplete way in which the Jesuits relayed some of the new knowledge to China may not actually have interfered with scientific progress in China. Moreover, by fatally damaging their credibility as scientists, their reticence also cast doubt on the integrity of their religion and hence interfered with their ability to make conversions.
The theories of the universe Europeans transmitted into China required the introduction of new elements of mathematics. These included Euclidean geometry, practical astronomy, written arithmetic, and plane and spherical trigonometry. As in the case of astronomy, the Jesuits withheld information about all the new mathematical discoveries of the age. They did not refer to the creation of the calculation of probabilities, analytical geometry, infinitesimal calculus, the rebirth of numbers theory, or the evolution of symbolic algebra. They presented only such new ideas as were necessary to keep their astronomy accurate. The reality, after all, was that the Jesuits had not gone to China to spread European science but to spread Christianity.
Despite its limitations, the Jesuit introduction of Western science into China had a huge impact on Chinese scholars and on the whole tenor of Chinese mathematics and astronomy. As a distinguished historian of Chinese science has written:
Wang Xishan (1628–1682), Mei Wending (1633–1721) and Xue Fengzuo (d. 1680) were the first scholars in China to respond to the new exact sciences and to shape their influence on their successors. They were, in short, responsible for a scientific revolution. They radically reoriented how one goes about comprehending the celestial motions. They shifted from using numerical procedures for generating successive angular orientations to using geometric models of successive locations in space. They changed the sense of which concepts, tools and methods are centrally important, so that geometry and trigonometry largely replaced numerical algebra, and such issues as the absolute sense of rotation of a planet and its relative distance from the earth became important for the first time. They convinced Chinese astronomers that mathematical models can have the power to explain the phenomena as well as to predict them.5
The introduction of Western science also resuscitated interest in indigenous Chinese science. The fall of the Ming demonstrated that running a government on abstract principles alone simply did not work, and it renewed scholarly interest in classical wisdom and practical statecraft. Intellectuals now turned their attention to such more utilitarian topics as astronomy, geography, and surveying, in addition to moral philosophy.
Part of this movement involved a repackaging of the sages of antiquity as initiators of Chinese technology as well as models of moral virtue. A leading example was that of the legendary king Yu, who was now praised as much for his role as “tamer of the floods”—a reference to his success in channeling China’s major rivers—as for his outstanding moral caliber. At the same time, Chinese scientists such as Mei Wending asserted that scientific truth, including recent discoveries, transcended even the authority of the ancient sages. All these intellectual trends led to the growth of an important scholarly movement known askaozheng, or evidentiary research—that is, a search for knowledge that could be verified empirically.
The goal of kaozheng scholars, at its simplest, was to seek truth from facts. They sought precision and accuracy in all aspects of scholarly enterprise, including not only the more technological subjects but also historical research, philology, and textual criticism, which enabled scholars to analyze ancient texts for authenticity and hence to rediscover true Confucian ideas at the source. In all these projects, the exact sciences, the revival of whose popularity derived from the Jesuits’ introduction of Western scientific knowledge, provided fresh impetus. In other words, Western scientific knowledge, in addition to its intrinsic value, slotted into an ongoing reevaluation of the entire classical tradition and brought scientific methodology into the mainstream of intellectual endeavor.
To encourage serious attention to the new knowledge, eminent scholars created a myth that Western mathematics had evolved out of ancient Chinese ideas. This device did not spring from cultural chauvinism but from a desire to assure the acceptance of the foreign methods in China, where innovation gained quicker acceptance with the sanction of antiquity. Declaring a Chinese origin for Western science both gave the foreign knowledge legitimacy and made the study of mathematics and astronomy part of the scholarly movement to return to original Confucianism.
Chinese scholars worked systematically to recover their indigenous science. In the 1770s and 1780s, as many participated in a massive imperially sponsored project to collate all of China’s most famous literary and historical works into a single anthology, they rediscovered and critically examined ancient works of Chinese mathematics and science. Scholars commented repeatedly on the importance of this work of recovery for current evidential research.
In 1799 a leading scholar published a collection of biographies of astronomers and mathematicians, thirty-seven of whom were Westerners, that brought together traditional Chinese and Western astronomy and drew attention to the latter. This work was influential because of the prominence of its principal compiler, Ruan Yuan (1764–1849), the director of an important academy where budding scholar-officials were trained to study science as part of the Confucian curriculum. Ruan encouraged students to think about such questions as the date and timing of the transmission of mathematics and astronomy to China from India and Persia, the source of most of the Muslim knowledge on which China had largely relied from the thirteenth century until the advent of the Jesuits; the relative merits of European and Chinese astronomy; and the possible Chinese origin of both European and Muslim astronomy.
The reaffirmation of mathematics and astronomy as an integral part of a proper Confucian education reached its height in the eighteenth century. Despite the skepticism to which Jesuit inconsistencies had led, Chinese scholars did not discard Western knowledge. Scholars attributed the lag in Chinese science to Song Neo-Confucianism’s preference for metaphysics over mathematics; such a preference was no longer acceptable. As Qian Daxin (1728–1804), a leading mid-eighteenth-century kaozheng scholar, put it:
Comparing lands of the Eastern seas with those of the Western, we note that their spoken languages are mutually unintelligible and that their written forms are each different. Nonetheless, once a computation has been completed, [no matter where,] there will not be the most minute discrepancy when it is checked. This result can be for no other reason than the identity of human minds, the identity of patterns of phenomena, and the identity of numbers [everywhere]. It is not possible that the ingenuity of Europeans surpasses that of China. It is only that Europeans have transmitted [their findings] systematically from father to son and from master to disciple for generations. Hence, after a long period [of progress] their knowledge has become increasingly precise. Confucian scholars have, on the other hand, usually denigrated those who were good mathematicians as petty technicians. . . . In ancient times, no one could be a Confucian who did not know mathematics. . . . Chinese methods [now] lag behind Europe’s because Confucians do not know mathematics.6
In sum, there is no question that the introduction of Western astronomy and mathematics enormously affected the direction of intellectual activity in China. The scope of its influence extended well beyond the immediate fields of what we think of as science. To suggest that Chinese intellectuals resisted this type of Western knowledge, for whatever reason, is wrong. To the contrary. On the one hand, they paid close attention to European astronomy and mathematics to the extent that what they learned from the Jesuits made sense. On the other hand, their creative incorporation of Western scientific knowledge and its methods into preexisting scholarly debates dramatically shifted the direction and the parameters of intellectual endeavor in China.
Unlike mathematics and astronomy, Jesuit cartography in China took great account of the strong Chinese tradition of cartography and geographical description. It also represented a cooperative rather than a competitive effort between Jesuits and their Chinese colleagues. Jesuits used maps to show where they had come from and to clarify Europe’s geographical relationship with China. Their first major work of cartography was Ricci’s world map, produced in 1584. It was a Chinese version of a European map of the world that he had brought with him from Europe and hung on his wall. This map attracted the attention of at least one of the late Ming emperors and intrigued Ricci’s Chinese contacts, although not all the information it provided was as much of a revelation as Ricci supposed. In any event, he supervised the production of thousands of copies, and many more were pirated without his authority.
More Jesuit cartography followed. In 1623 Fujian-based missionary Giulio Aleni produced an illustrated geographical treatise that brought together European maps with information derived from Chinese sources; the geographer and Catholic convert Li Zhizao wrote a preface. In 1674 Ferdinand Verbiest, by then director of the Imperial Bureau of Astronomy, produced an updated world map that synthesized new knowledge, accompanied by an expanded version of Aleni’s work, and in the mid-eighteenth century Michel Benoist also drew a new world map for the Qianlong Emperor.
The most extensive Jesuit cartographical work in China was a survey of the Qing empire undertaken at the behest of the Kangxi Emperor. With the steady expansion of imperial territory, the Qing required accurate maps of the empire as well as accurate maps of the heavens. At first Kangxi authorized court missionaries to carry out relatively limited surveys of the Great Wall and of the environs of Beijing; pleased with the result, he soon sponsored a Jesuit-supervised survey of the entire empire.
The Kangxi survey took ten years, from 1708 to 1718. Missionaries traveled far and wide, taking advantage of their imperially authorized journeys into the interior for evangelistic as well as cartographical purposes. They plotted points by triangulation and did their best to fix latitudes and longitudes by carefully making astronomical and geographical measurements. Whenever possible, they gathered information from local officials and studied indigenous works and maps. They often used Chinese assistants, whom they trained in Western cartographical methods. These native sources and informants were all they had to go on when they produced maps of places they never visited, such as Tibet and Korea. The great Jesuit survey’s reliance on Chinese cartographical experience was played down by its Jesuit publisher in Europe, who for political reasons gave all the credit to the missionaries.
In China the resulting maps were printed in four different editions during the period 1717–1726 and later were engraved on forty-four copper plates by the missionary abbé Matteo Ripa. The survey formed the foundation for subsequent geographical study of China for more than a century, both in Europe and in China, where partial reprints appeared in encyclopedias and subsequent atlases.
Jesuit surveying for the Qing continued with little interruption after the completion of the Kangxi project. In 1759 the Qianlong Emperor selected two missionaries to survey the newly conquered expanses of Central Asia known as Xinjiang. The maps they produced were kept in the palace and apparently were not made generally available probably because, then as now, maps of frontier regions were too sensitive to circulate. But the great Qianlong atlas that appeared in 1764 undoubtedly was based on their work and on other cartographical work that Jesuits and Chinese scholars worked on together. In 1776 Qianlong sent one of the missionaries who had done the Xinjiang survey to western Sichuan, once again to survey a newly pacified region.
The Jesuits’ work did gradually enter the public domain. It was almost certainly the basis for maps that appeared in published gazetteers of Xinjiang from the 1770s on and in works on Tibet of the same period. Many of the new maps were engraved in copper by the missionary Michel Benoist, a self-taught craftsman who trained Chinese in the art of copper engraving. So the results of Jesuit cartography did eventually become more generally known in China and in some cases remained for some time the most reliable sources of information available. In addition, for Chinese scholars, especially the many exponents of evidential research who collaborated in these mapmaking enterprises, Jesuit cartography represented another important way in which European knowledge contributed to their work of seeking truth from facts. It also marked a departure from the traditional wariness about giving foreigners access to cartographical information.
Jesuit missionary artists at the imperial court introduced Western artistic techniques, including perspective and the use of chiaroscuro, and learned to incorporate Chinese styles in their own work. Among the Jesuits’ most famous paintings are their portraits of the emperors and their favorites and family members. In one example the Yongzheng Emperor wears a long flowing Western-style wig, while another depicts a woman, possibly the imperial concubine Xiangfei, dressed in armor in the manner of a Joan of Arc.
Artists of the Qianlong painting academy, both European and Chinese, became deeply involved in documenting the triumphs of the age, especially military victories. These pictorial records included, for instance, depictions of newly conquered areas (often based on information gleaned from the missionary surveyors), heroic action paintings, portraits of meritorious generals and officials, and highlights of military victory, as well as portraits of the emperor in numerous guises. Often such works were collaborative Jesuit-Chinese efforts. Qianlong preferred the European style of portraiture to the flatter, less subtly shaded Chinese method and had missionaries depict the most important figures, while Chinese artists painted the backgrounds and the less important figures. Most of these paintings adorned halls and pavilions within the imperial palace complex. They formed part of a comprehensive historical record, compiled on imperial orders, of Qing imperial power.
Of Jesuit court art, some of the most famous was the series of battle paintings prepared to adorn a military hall of fame newly refurbished to celebrate the conquest of Xinjiang. In 1760 Qianlong commissioned four missionary artists to produce sixteen scenes depicting important battles and events in the conquest of Xinjiang. What prompted this commission? Through the missionaries the emperor was certainly aware of European depictions of war; he once questioned Michel Benoist: “There are a number of European prints that represent military victories won by your sovereigns. Who are they defeating, what enemies have they had to fight?”7
Perhaps too, through the missionaries at his court, Qianlong was aware of the battle paintings produced in Europe, such as those displayed at Versailles in France and at El Escorial in Spain. Although the court limited access to the originals to a select few, Qianlong wanted to broadcast his military successes; the propaganda value was too good to squander. Spurred on by some engravings of original battle paintings done by the German painter Rugendas (1666–1742) that he saw, he decided to have mass reproductions of these war illustrations made. Since at that time no one in China recalled the techniques of engraving, the emperor decided, with strong missionary encouragement, to have the work done in France. Perhaps too Qianlong had heard enough of France’s considerable power that he wished to take advantage of this opportunity to let his military might become known to the French king.
Copies of the sixteen war paintings were sent to Paris on French East India Company ships with orders for two hundred sets of copper engravings. In France the project was delegated to the celebrated printmaker Charles-Nicolas Cochin (1715–1790), who in turn arranged for eight of France’s best-known artists to do the engravings. Although, in theory, the contract drawn up with the French East India Company preserved copyright for the Qing Emperor, the French made a few extra copies for their king and his ministers. As a result, a few complete sets are found today in Western collections. Qianlong had Father Benoist and his Chinese assistants produce further copies, which bedecked public buildings all over the empire and were distributed to deserving officials as a mark of official favor. Later Qianlong commissioned further portraits and battle paintings series to mark new victories, but these were drawn and engraved in China by Chinese artists and craftsmen.
Emperors also employed Europeans as architects. In 1747 Qianlong ordered the Italian missionary Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766) to design him an entire European palace complex, just as his grandfather Kangxi had once had missionaries build him a windmill and a fountain. In Qianlong’s case this use of European architectural styles may perhaps have been intended to express a wishful mastery of the nations where these originated, as was the thinking behind the reproduction of Tibetan architecture at other Qing palaces.
The buildings of the Yuan Ming Yuan palace complex, on the northwestern outskirts of Beijing, exemplified European and Chinese collaboration in terms of both building techniques and decorative styles. Chinese-style tile roofs were combined with baroque pilasters and cornices that were European. Moreover, whereas in the West the gray stone walls of such a palace would have remained unadorned, the Beijing palace was brightly colored, with walls of vermilion; roof tiles of imperial yellow, blue, green, red, and purple; and elaborate ornamentation in porcelain or gilded bronze. The interiors were decorated with paintings, engravings, tapestries, and painted wallpaper in the European style, given by foreign embassies or acquired through the merchants in Canton. Used to display Qianlong’s large collection of European scientific instruments and decorative arts, the palaces were appointed with European-style furniture, probably made by Chinese craftsmen from engravings shown them by the Jesuits. The gardens also displayed a blending of Chinese and European styles, combining rockeries and plantings in the Chinese taste with European-type fountains and topiary.
These palaces were not destined to last long. The fountains ran dry before Qianlong’s death in 1799, and in 1860 the whole complex was sacked by British and French troops under Lord Elgin. Before the Qing fell from power in 1911, successive depredations had reduced the Qianlong Emperor’s European-style showpiece to little more than rubble.
Even shorter-lived than the Yuan Ming Yuan were the Western-style festive pavilions, galleries, and gateways often erected for specific occasions along the processional routes between the summer palaces and the Forbidden City in the center of Beijing. On such occasions it was de rigueur for every prince and high-ranking metropolitan official to have a special structure put up at his own expense. Once the occasion was over, these structures were dismantled; we know of them now through paintings that recorded the events they were built to celebrate. For example, in 1752 several structures showing distinctly Western features were erected along the route of a procession from a palace northwest of Beijing to the empress dowager’s palace on the occasion of her birthday. One had Corinthian columns and a series of enameled plaques depicting figures with wavy brown hair looking up to heaven against a background of radiant light and clouds, looking, in fact, distinctly Christian. Another had a Western clock face in its gable, set with Roman numerals at five to eleven. Whether these were actually built by Jesuits is unknown, but whoever the artisans were, they clearly were familiar with many basic features of European architecture.
Like European chinoiserie, however, which faded as Europeans became disillusioned with the partly imaginary China they had once so admired, the Qing passion for European-style architectural features had worn off by the end of the eighteenth century. Not so their interest in European artillery.
European artillery played a part in China’s many wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Gunpowder had found its way with the Mongols from China to Europe. There, spurred by the constant warfare between the European states, the use of artillery had developed to a more advanced stage than was the case in China. However, while Western cannon was relatively lighter and more mobile, the evidence suggests that China still retained the edge in the technology of gunpowder, as distinct from that of weapons construction. In the early sixteenth century European traders had brought their armaments and their casting techniques back across the world to China by way of Japan, India, and Southeast Asia. Ming China had begun importing Dutch cannon by no later than 1604. By the 1620s Chinese workmen were casting cannon in Macao under the direction of Portuguese gun founders, whose work was already greatly in demand throughout colonial Asia. At the suggestion of high-ranking Chinese converts, Ming supporters more than once either purchased Macao-made cannon or invited Portuguese artillery technicians to bring their weapons to use against the Manchus. The Manchus also used European artillery against the Ming.
By 1642 the Ming were desperate. The missionary Adam Schall (1591–1666) had already made a large number of converts at court and shown his proficiency in astronomy, so that many people held him in great respect. His lucidity on the subject of cannon, in a discussion about defending the capital, led to an imperial order that he direct the casting of cannon for the failing dynasty. Schall’s principal improvement over the indigenous cannon lay in the ability to produce smaller and less unwieldy siege guns. He reduced their size from seventy-five–pounders to forty-pounders, and produced more than five hundred pieces. With a Chinese colleague, he also wrote a work on gunnery, Huo Gong Jie Yao (“Essentials of Gunnery”), that is still extant.
After the Ming fall European weapons continued to find favor with the Manchus. In 1673 the Kangxi Emperor, beset by rebellion, ordered his director of the Imperial Bureau of Astronomy, Ferdinand Verbiest, to establish another cannon foundry. Reluctant to comply, as Schall had been before him, Verbiest tried to insist that priests were men of peace with little knowledge of the affairs of war. But the emperor threatened to expel all Christians from China unless Verbiest complied, so the missionary felt obliged to yield. Not surprisingly, these activities were virulently attacked by the Jesuits’ critics in Europe, but the pope took the view that Jesuit arms founding in China came into the category of “using the profane sciences for the safety of the people and the advancement of the Faith.”8
Verbiest’s task, much as Schall’s had been, was to cast lighter and more mobile artillery than the Manchus already had—including the cannon imported earlier—for Qing troops badly needed cannon that would be capable of traversing mountains and rivers. From his designs, Chinese craftsmen produced imported Western types and improved on Chinese cannon, chiefly by lengthening the barrel. Some were made from bronze, including recycled metal melted down from old and damaged cannon. Others were made of iron with a bronze ring around the mouth and a bronze ball at the rear, the whole being covered by painted wood. Many were beautifully decorated. There were various types, all of them front-loading.
The emperor took a personal interest in the production of cannon. Usually Verbiest would produce a blueprint and build a sample cannon with which trials would be made at the Lugouqiao (Marco Polo Bridge) testing site near Beijing. Provided these proved successful, the emperor, who sometimes personally attended test firing sessions, would order several cannon of that type to be cast. The emperor’s observation of the testing led him to realize the importance of aligning the sights and the target. He then ordered that soldiers attend the experimental firings so that they could learn the principles of aiming more accurately. He was so pleased with Verbiest’s work that he offered the missionary his own sable coat, a rare gesture indeed.
Over a fifteen-year period Verbiest’s foundry produced over five hundred cannon, more than half the total number of cannon cast during the entire Kangxi reign (1663-1722). Chinese records give some of their names, including shenwei (“wonderful and terrible”) and chongtianpao (“gun for attacking heaven,” a type of trench mortar popularly called xigua pao, “watermelon gun,” after its bulbous shape). Verbiest, as had sometimes been the practice in medieval Europe, gave each cannon the name of a saint and blessed it before sending it out. A number of these weapons are now to be found in European museums, having been captured by Western troops during the numerous conflicts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Verbiest wrote a work on artillery, now lost, that he entitled Shenwei Tushuo (“Explanations and Illustrations of [the Cannon Named] Wonderful and Terrible”). In this work he wrote on the importance of uniformity in the weight of cannonballs and of knowing that weight and on the critical difference that a cannon’s angle of elevation could make to its accuracy in firing. Among other things, this meant that if soldiers knew the exact distance between their targets and their guns, their cannonballs would accurately hit those targets. The unmistakable implication was that good cannon could be used to best effect only when accurate land surveys were available.
The cannon made by Schall and Verbiest remained an important part of the imperial arsenal until the end of the dynasty. Verbiest’s cannon foundry continued in operation after his death in 1688, and his designs continued to be used in China at least until the Opium War (1839–1842).
Although immediate acquaintance with this work was relatively limited, news of the Westerners’ skills spread. In the 1740s, when beleaguered Qing armies were fighting rebels in Sichuan province near the Tibetan border, there was some idea among the troops that a Jesuit cannon founder might come to the rescue, although there is no evidence that any such plans existed. Thirty years later Qing forces fighting a resurgence of the same groups were horrified by a rumor—unsubstantiated—that Catherine the Great of Russia had sent an army that was about to enter the fray on the rebels’ side.
Although Russian troops did not materialize to fight for the insurgents in that war, the Qianlong Emperor followed his grandfather’s precedent of exploiting missionaries’ military knowledge to the full, as we can see from a 1772 account sent from Beijing to Rome: “By [the emperor’s] order, the fathers of our tribunal are sometimes called to go and assist at artillery practice; at other times we are called to figure out the usage of the different arms brought by European merchants, that the mandarins in Canton present to his Majesty. Finally . . . our fathers were . . . questioned as to whether they could, as in the past, cast pieces of artillery, to which they replied that at present there was no one who knew how to do it.”9 In other words, by no later than the 1770s Jesuit missionaries, possibly against their will, had become accomplices not just in arms manufacture but also in arms sales to the Qing empire. Certainly the Qianlong Emperor regarded them as armaments experts, a view the missionaries appear to have done little to discourage. To judge from a contemporary account, the emperor had been interested in a missionary plan for the defense of Beijing, but it had encountered resentment on the part of Chinese and Westerners alike: “He offered to make [the plan] in relief . . . the emperor took the plan and resolved to have it explained to him, and perhaps to have it executed on the spot. But his ministers sought to find fault with it; they criticized every part of it. Moreover, we [Jesuits] were afraid that in Europe we would be accused of ‘teaching the infidels the art of war.’”10
Nonetheless, soon after this episode a Jesuit missionary again helped the Qing cast cannon to use against insurgents in their war against indigenous peoples rebelling near the Tibetan border. The Qing, hampered by the difficulty of transporting heavy cannon along precipitous paths, were unable to destroy the rebels’ stone forts, deep in the mountains. They solved this problem in part by the expedient of carrying thousands of metal ingots that artisans attached to the army forged into cannon when and where needed. With a view to building cannon mobile enough to use in the mountains but powerful and accurate enough to destroy the enemies’ forts, the Qianlong Emperor ordered the Portuguese director of the Imperial Bureau of Astronomy, Father Felix da Rocha (1731–1781), to proceed to the war front in 1774 both to bring out and probably to explain designs for cannon and to take measurements, as we can see from the emperor’s order: “Previously we used mortars to attack [the rebels’ stone forts], thus accelerating our victory. We dispatch A-mi-ta to transport the cannonballs, cannon designs, and surveyors to the front. If their surveying is very accurate, it may help us. We think that the Westerners are expert in surveying, more so than [Chinese] surveyors. . . .”11
The designs most likely were those of Verbiest, which had recently been republished with detailed specifications. Shortly after da Rocha’s arrival at the front, he made various measurements, relating mainly to the angle at which the cannon was fired, just as Verbiest had discussed in his treatise. It then became possible to fire the cannon with a far narrower margin of error, so that bombardment of the rebel fortresses became considerably more effective. Not long afterward Qing artisans also built a new cannon, based presumably on the designs da Rocha had brought with him and perhaps produced under his actual supervision. Like his grandfather Kangxi, then, the Qianlong Emperor had no compunction about using foreign science and technology, and when he thought it would help him win a war, he showed no hesitation whatsoever.
For we must bear in mind, as eighteenth-century Europeans sometimes did not, that imperial power—domestic control and national security—were the driving concerns of the Qing at its height. As one of the imperial princes commented to a Jesuit missionary extolling the virtues of the Montgolfiers’ hot-air balloon, which had just made its first flight, “Only in war do we have no regard for expense, difficulty or danger; we are ready to try anything.”12
Qing concern for security issues underlay their restrictions on emigration and overseas travel. But increasingly, Chinese went abroad anyway, in most cases drawn by the prospect of making a fortune but in some instances attracted to the entourage of a foreign missionary returning home.
Chinese from coastal areas had long been traveling overseas for business and pleasure, and by the seventeenth century sizable communities had sprung up all over Southeast Asia, forming the nucleus of a vast diaspora. Some went even farther afield. In the 1630s, for example, Chinese barbers, having traveled to the New World on returning Manila galleons, aroused local ire in Mexico City by undercutting prices, and to this day a style of embroidered women’s blouse found in central Mexico bears the name china poblana.
Not many Chinese visited the world beyond Asia before 1800. In the eighteenth century, a few, perhaps sailors who had found work on foreign ships, surfaced in European or American ports, where they were something of a curiosity for the local inhabitants. Some found their way to Rome, where they worked with the Chinese books and manuscripts that missionaries had brought back and deposited in the Vatican library. Some, mainly convicts shipped on from Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia, appeared in colonial Africa and Ceylon, while others were recorded at a Jesuit college in Portuguese Goa, on the west coast of India.
One of the first Chinese visitors to Europe was Michael Shen Fuzong, who in the late seventeenth century traveled with the Jesuit Father Couplet (1624–1692). Shen was received by the French king Louis XIV and the English Catholic king James II. He worked at Oxford for a few years and died on his way back to China. Not much later a Fujianese named Arcadio Huang made his way via Rome to Paris. Huang had been adopted by a Frenchman from the Society of Foreign Missions after the death of his convert father. In Paris he found employment helping to catalog the Chinese books in the royal library. Huang met the French Enlightenment philosopher Charles de Montesquieu (1689–1755), with whom he held a series of conversations that, through Montesquieu’s influential writings, indirectly played a part in the formation of European views of China. Huang died in Paris, predeceased by his French wife; their young daughter did not long survive him.
One Chinese traveler who did return home was Louis Fan Shouyi (1682–1753), who himself became a priest. He accompanied the Jesuit missionary Joseph-Antoine Provana (1662–1720), whom Kangxi had sent on a mission to the pope. Provana died on the journey back to China, but Fan returned to brief the emperor on his meetings with the pope and on the customs and geography of the lands he had visited, including Portugal and Italy. Fan spent the rest of his life in missionary work in China. Another who returned, but with less éclat, was John Hu, who accompanied the Jesuit missionary Jean-François Foucquet (1663–1740) to France. Hu was confined to a French lunatic asylum—possibly because of cultural difference rather than actual insanity—before eventually returning to his native Canton.
When Abbé Matteo Ripa prepared to return home from China, the emperor officially permitted him to take four young Chinese to Europe with him, in recognition of services rendered. They enrolled at the Jesuit College in Naples, founded by Ripa in 1732 and run by the Society of the Propaganda of the Faith, based in Rome. Perhaps the most famous graduate of the Naples Jesuit College was Jacob Li, who earned his passage back to China by serving the Macartney embassy as an interpreter. Members of the embassy sometimes referred to Li as Mr. Plumb, presumably because the character li of his name means “plum.”
A few Chinese went to France as the result of the extraordinary interest in China of the secretary of state Henri Bertin (1720–1792). Most famous of these were two young men, Stephen Yang Dewang (1733–1798?) and Aloysius Gao Leisi (1733–1790?), who lived in France from 1751 to 1766. In 1759, after a period of study, they entered the Society of Jesus. After the Society was suppressed in France in 1762, the two Chinese came under Bertin’s special protection, eventually receiving a royal stipend of twelve hundred livres apiece and other official bounties. Once their Jesuit training was completed, they remained in France for another couple of years. The two Chinese formed part of a project conceived by French sinophiles such as Bertin and his colleague Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727–1781) to establish a special intellectual relationship with China, in part by impressing upon China France’s role as Europe’s cultural pacemaker. Under French auspices Gao and Yang studied physics, natural history, and chemistry with two members of the Academy of Sciences, who proclaimed themselves deeply impressed by the Chinese men’s aptitude. Gao and Yang also learned the art of engraving; they visited brocade manufactures in Lyons and toured artillery factories at St.-Étienne. Eventually the two Chinese returned to China, carrying gifts to the emperor from King Louis and a host of messages for the French missionaries from Henri Bertin. The two Chinese spent the rest of their lives spreading the Christian faith in China and did little to further their foreign patrons’ broader cause.
By the time of the Macartney embassy, the balance of European opinion had tilted against China. Westerners, earlier in the century almost uncritical in their admiration of China, were coming to the conclusion that Chinese seemed unwilling, or unable, to improve on their earlier inventions, such as gunpowder and the compass, which formed part of the foundation for Western development. The Qianlong Emperor’s famous assertion, that China was self-sufficient (quoted at the beginning of this chapter), came to epitomize Chinese aloofness to the potential offered by Western knowledge, and this inference in turn became broadened to a supposition that Chinese disliked anything foreign.
When in 1793 Qianlong pretended disdain for things Western, he was not speaking the whole truth. He and many others found European arts and sciences, and just about everything Europe had to offer, fascinating and useful. Even in 1793 the emperor’s response to his British visitors belied the assumption of his indifference, for he had them demonstrate several of the instruments with which they presented him. The single gift that most intrigued him was a 110-gun model of the warship Royal Sovereign, and he impressed his European audience with the technical knowledge his many questions revealed.
In short, Qianlong’s assertion of self-sufficiency and his public diffidence to European achievements were, to say the least, disingenuous. They were primarily prompted by domestic political agendas and did not reflect objective reality. The same was true of European readiness to accept his statement at face value in spite of readily available evidence to the contrary.
The Chinese background to this misunderstanding was essentially as follows. Qianlong’s public declaration was intended for a multiple audience. For a variety of reasons he preferred not to admit publicly his interest in and awareness of the potential of foreign technology. His motivation becomes clearer when we place the whole episode within the context of late-eighteenth-century Chinese politics. The Manchu Qing dynasty imposed and ultimately maintained its rule over China by military means. At the same time, it sought to present to its Chinese subjects and the world at large an image that was both thoroughly Confucian and ethnically evenhanded. For the Qianlong Emperor these somewhat contradictory goals meant, among other things, that he made a virtue of his own civilian accomplishments, yet simultaneously leaned toward military culture by, for example, promoting the martial traditions of the Manchus. He awarded high civil office, normally the prize of scholars successful in a series of highly competitive examinations based on classical Chinese texts, to successful generals, almost all of whom were Manchus. He prohibited the private possession of any weapon and jealously guarded access to all information, especially any that smacked of technology, conceivably of use to would-be rebels.
No less important, it was wholly out of the question for the emperor to suggest a need for outside help. To the contrary, Qianlong realized there was considerable propaganda value, domestic and international, to be gained from declaring China’s self-sufficiency to a foreign state of whose potential menace against Chinese national security China was quite conscious. This emperor, with his pretensions to universal monarchy, was hardly likely to admit openly to the representative of a foreign ruler an interest that, in Chinese minds, was susceptible of unfavorable interpretation as an intimation of inferiority. The imperial declaration may well also have been subtly intended to remind Qianlong’s Chinese subjects that their Manchu rulers remained faithful to the traditional public Chinese attitude of superiority toward foreigners. The best explanation for the apparently general Chinese uninterest in the gifts the Macartney embassy brought, so disparaged at the time by the British, is that Chinese officials, schooled in caution, were simply taking their lead from the emperor.
The expression of Chinese uninterest also had to do with the intensely factionalized world of late-eighteenth-century Chinese politics. In 1793 there were two principal factions at the Qing court, one clustered around a general named Agui (1717–1797) and the other associated with the imperial favorite, Heshen (1750–1795). Agui had participated in a number of the major military campaigns of the middle and later eighteenth century, but it was the war in which the advice of the Jesuit missionary Rocha on cannon had rescued his faltering campaign that really made his reputation. Much admired by the Jesuits, Agui was said to be deeply intrigued by Western knowledge, and it is reasonable to attribute his interest at least partly to his wartime experience. His opponent, Heshen, was in charge of embassy liaison in 1793. Heshen had little experience and absolutely no aptitude for military affairs; on Heshen’s only—and disastrous—military venture Agui, arriving at the crucial moment, saved his life and subsequently put in a good word for him with the emperor. Heshen offset the potential political disadvantage of lacking military qualifications, however, by his close association with one of the most successful of late-eighteenth-century generals, Fukang’an (d. 1796). In 1793 Fukang’an had recently returned from Tibet to take up the governor-generalship of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces. That is, he was in the probably unique position of having encountered the British in both places—as unruly traders on the southeast coast and, as he rightly suspected, allies of his enemies the Gurkhas in Tibet. Macartney vehemently denied any such British involvement, which he learned of only later, but Fukang’an’s experience led him to consider the British troublemakers. As a result, he was not only extremely and overtly hostile toward them but also actively sought to dissuade Heshen from helping them or promoting their interests in any way. It is more than likely that Heshen and his associates hoped that by displaying disdain for the embassy’s gifts, they would undermine any advantage that might accrue to Agui through his contacts with the missionaries and that they found the emperor susceptible to persuasion on this score.
On the other hand, Qianlong’s statement was of course directed at the king of England through his envoy Macartney. By extension it applied to any other foreigners who might individually or collectively seek to alter the structure of China’s foreign relations to the disadvantage of ultimate Qing control. In this context we can better account for the emperor’s remarks when we realize that they conform to a pattern, according to which China has consistently sought to absorb Western practical technical skills while remaining inimical to Western ideologies. In the modern era this disparity originated with the attempted exploitation by Christian missionaries of their scientific and technical expertise as a means of arousing Chinese interest in their religion. Many Chinese, although they fully grasped the utility of the practical knowledge, were hesitant to adopt it because it seemed inseparable from Christianity. As we have seen, they were accustomed to a political system in which ideology specifically either served orthodox authority or opposed it, and for that reason they sensed that the foreign religion was imbued with subversive potential.
Thus in the late seventeenth century, although the Kangxi Emperor clearly recognized the actual and symbolic threat that papal authority over Chinese Christians would pose and rejected it absolutely, he was nonetheless thankful to improve his arsenal under Jesuit direction when rebels threatened his still fledgling dynasty. Almost a century later, under Qianlong, Western missionaries’ efforts to proselytize in the provinces met with persecution at almost the precise moment that their colleagues’ technical advice helped save Qing armies and that members of the elite vied to acquire examples of the new European technology, whether purely decorative or serving a practical purpose. Also, as we shall see, in the late nineteenth century certain Chinese reformers sought to acquire the Western technology that would bring their nation wealth and power without abandoning the indigenous intellectual tradition. The pattern is still discernible in our own time, notwithstanding the changed configurations of global power.
The point is that the Chinese and their rulers have uniformly displayed a powerful reluctance to surrender authority or autonomy to any outsider or even to take a chance on doing so. This attitude must be distinguished from the isolationism, the hostility to innovation, especially when of foreign origin, and the immutable sense of superiority for which it has often been mistaken.
Responsibility for the late-eighteenth-century miscommunication cannot, however, be laid entirely on the Chinese. Like the Chinese denial of interest in Europe and what it had to offer, the shift in European views of China, from admiration to scorn, tended to reflect internal, subjective conditions rather than any change in China itself. The eyewitnesses who made note of Chinese interest in the West and what it had to offer included, on the one hand, Jesuit missionaries, whose correspondence was published and widely read in Europe at the time and, on the other, members of Macartney’s mission, who recorded it in their memoirs of the embassy. The problem was that these observations came to be superseded in Western minds by the impression, recorded in other such accounts, that found Chinese sorely deficient in the inquiring and progressive spirit that Europeans were beginning to consider one of their own culture’s most enviable characteristics.
There were a number of reasons for this disparagement. One was the steady decline of the Society of Jesus, whose members had once held a virtual monopoly on the interpretation of China to Europe. The triumph of those who opposed the Jesuits, represented by the abolition of the Society of Jesus in 1773, seemed to confirm the unreliability of Jesuit accounts. At least as important an influence on changing European views of China was a series of momentous developments in Europe, in particular industrialization and the new focus on political liberty, with all the profound intellectual shifts that accompanied these metamorphoses. China’s great agrarian accomplishments, once vaunted by Europeans as evidence of its most admirable characteristics, seemed less laudable in a budding industrial age. The restrictive Canton system of trade went directly against the free world market advocated by Adam Smith in 1776. Moreover, the absence of political liberty or consensus in China sat ill with the French and American revolutionaries who dominated the latter part of the century. Finally, the increasing predominance of negative Western attitudes toward other cultures at this time also partly reflected the disdain felt by Westerners when they compared the relatively class-bound societies of traditional Asia and Africa with the dynamic social changes of their own postrevolutionary, industrializing societies.
From the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century, then, Chinese were extremely interested in Europe and all it had to offer. The evidence was readily available to Europeans who chose to grasp it. Yet when in public Chinese denied such an interest, primarily for reasons of domestic politics, Europeans, similarly influenced by developments at home, took that denial as evidence of an entire mental attitude: ingrained xenophobia and a concomitant resistance to progress. In the age of progress such an attitude led automatically to the assumption that the Chinese were inferior beings. The repercussions of this assumption have reverberated to leave a profound impact on relations between China and the West in our own time.