British Government under the Qianlong Emperor’s Gaze: Satire, Imperialism, and the Macartney Embassy to China, 1792–1804

The Qianlong Emperor’s Letter to George III and the Early-Twentieth-Century Origins of Ideas about Traditional China’s Foreign Relations

“…46 Laurence Williams has recently argued that this reflected a broader process in which contemporary British satire influenced later depictions of the embassy through defensive writings that inverted the satirical critiques. 47 These concerns were carried down through the nineteenth-century Englishlanguage literature on the embassy because diplomatic protocol continued to be an 10 issue for the European powers in China. The Westerners saw acceptable protocol as essential to their relations with China and their representatives refused to conform to standard forms of Qing court ettiquette on the grounds that they were not the representatives of tributary states.…”

A ‘Most Interesting Subject for the Investigation of the Philosopher’: Conjectural History in John Barrow's Travels in China

“…Using a wide collection of satirical works that criticised the British elite's 'one-sided' accounts of the mission, he demonstrates that contemporary public debate 'resist[ed] the movement towards a more imperialist vision of China' even in the late 1790s. 9 Greg Clingham, on the other hand, takes a more direct approach by re-evaluating the ambassador's private journal, which was edited and published after his death in 1807. He illustrates that Macartney, despite his well-known comparison of the empire to 'an old, crazy, First rate man-of-war' that is on the verge of capsizing, 10 also reflected on 'the relativity of cultural forms', enabling him to consider China's cultural particularities without resorting to a one-dimensional narrative about Chinese inferiority.…”