2025 story: What did Emperor Qianlong do to the English presents
To find out what happened to the English objects that Macartney took to China in 1792 proved to be more difficult than finding out what happened to the Chinese objects that he brought back to England in 1794. To begin with there is no single list to use as reference point.
When the Chinese state officials came on board the English warship the Lion in the Gulf of Beizhili (present-day Bohaiwan) in July 1793 the Chinese officials immediately asked for “the English king’s letter, a list of the tribute goods and a list of the persons who would proceed to Beijing with the Chief Envoy”. Macartney was caught unprepared, so the Deputy Ambassador, George Leonard Staunton, had to make a “tribute list” in a hurry. The list was then translated into Chinese by Mr Li (aka Mr Plumb), the interpreter Staunton brought along from Naples, with the assistance from two Jesuit missionaries who happened to be on board the Lion. Staunton also very wisely supplied a translation in Latin, because he knew that the missionaries serving in the Qing court did not read English.
However, Staunton did not draw up a simple list. He was of the opinion that “a common catalogue containing the names of the articles would not convey any idea of their qualities or intrinsic worth”. So he decided to write “a general description of the nature of the articles”. Unfortunately that “general description” was nine-pages long. From those nine pages one can see that the presents include a planetarium, a Herschel telescope, an orrery, a celestial globe, a terrestrial globe, several instruments for measuring time, a moondial, a barometer, an air pump, two gout chairs, a number of cannons, Howitzer mortars, muskets, pistols and sword blades, a model of a warship, British-made vases, a burning glass, two magnificent lustres, British-made woollens and prints depicting British people and places.
Macartney himself, in his diary, mentioned "Vulliamy clocks and two chariots made at Long Acre, London".
Aeneas Anderson, Macartney’s valet, gave a detailed list of the things taken to Rehe (old-style romanisation “Jehol”) in September 1793:
Two hundred pieces of narrow coarse cloth,
Two large telescopes,
Two air guns,
Two beautiful fowling pieces; one inlaid with gold and the other with silver,
Two pair of saddle pistols, enriched and ornamented in the same manner,
Two boxes, each containing seven pieces of Irish tabinets,
Two elegant saddles complete with furniture,
Two large boxes containing the finest carpets of British manufactory.
It appears that Macartney’s fellow-countrymen had their own opinions as to what kind of presents the British embassy should take to China. In September 1792, the same month when the embassy set sail from Spithead, the caricaturist James Gillray conjured up an imaginary scene showing members of the embassy offering a variety of English products to the Chinese emperor. The cartoon, entitled The reception of the diplomatique & his suite at the court of Pekin, shows the Chinese emperor being presented with an air balloon; a bird in a wicker cage; model of a coach complete with horses and drivers; a rocking-horse; a weathercock; a volume of “Boydell's Shakespeare” and a rat-trap; a bat, trap, and ball; dice-box and dice; a battledore and shuttlecock; a miniature of King George III, to which is attached a child's coral and bells; a windmill; a magic-lantern with a “slider” which projects at each side showing devils, in the lantern is a figure of Punch; a model of a man-of-war; and an E.O. table.
The reception of the diplomatique & his suite at the court of Pekin, by James Gillray, 1792, © British Museum, Inv. No. 1868,0808.6228
Of the articles featured in the cartoon only the coach and the model of warship came close to the truth. As regards the air balloon, Macartney did write in his diary that “he had taken care to provide one at Pekin with a person to go up in it, but Heshen the First Minister discouraged that experiment”. One can only presume that Macartney felt so utterly cold-shouldered that he did not offer the air balloon as a diplomatic gift.
to be continued .....
2024 story: What happened to the Macartney gifts (Part 1)
I began my quest to track down “the Macartney gifts” in 2013. The subject has been on my mind for many years, but it was in 2013 that I took some definite actions.
The illustrious John Ayers, the first Keeper of the Far Eastern Department of the V&A, had been cataloguing the Queen’s Chinese works of arts for some years. Whether because of that, or for some other reasons I knew not, but I discovered that the Royal Collection Trust had put a large number of images of Chinese artefacts on their website. I remember keying in the word “Chinese” as search criteria and got a result of 100 pages.
I had a fairly good idea of what to look for. So I went through the 100 pages one by one.
To my delight I saw a photo of a blue and white lidded jar. The Chinese have a specific name for jars of that shape - they are called “zhuang guan”. Then I checked the list of things given to the King of England by Emperor Qianlong in 1793. Sure enough, one entry says “blue and white porcelain zhuang-jar with lid, one pair”.
to be continued .....
Blue and white zhuang-jar with lid, Qianlong reign period (1736-1795),
© Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 45222
What happened to the Macartney gifts
Part 2: The gift list
The list I worked with is a Chinese document. A total of 783 Chinese documents had been generated as a result of the Macartney embassy, which were filed away in the Forbidden City by Qing court officials. When China became a Republic in 1912 the custodian of those documents was initially the Palace Museum (established in 1925) and then the First Historical Archives of China (established in 1951). In 1996 the First Historical Archives of China published the 783 documents to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Macartney embassy.
In addition to the zhuang-jars Emperor Qianlong also gave the English King a gu-shaped vase with jun glaze and two blue and white meiping. Since I saw no gu-shaped vase nor meiping on the Royal Collection Trust website I asked John Ayers whether he had come across those pieces during the course of his cataloguing. He told me to write to the Director of the Royal Collection if I wanted more information about the Chinese works of art.
Well, writing to the Director of the Royal Collection was a rather daunting business. Why should the exalted Director bother to reply to a mere curator at the V&A? Here I was enormously indebted to another illustrious former Keeper of the V&A - Philippa Glanville. “Do write to him”, she said, “I’ll give you his email address”. So I wrote to Sir Jonathan Marsden, and he did reply. He put me in touch with Melanie Wilson, the researcher working with John Ayers on the Chinese and Japanese collection catalogue.
Melanie and I emailed each other during the spring of 2014. By May we knew roughly, of the 176 imperial gifts brought back to England by Macartney in 1794, what are still in the Royal Collection and what are not. It then occurred to her that some of the imperial gifts might have been sold as part of Queen Charlotte’s estate after her death in 1818. A careful examination of the Christies auction catalogue proved she was right.
As a result I was able to produce some statistics, as follows:
Given to the King of England by Emperor Qianlong 176 items
Edibles and perishables (such as ink and incense) 30 “
Textile or paper items that might have been put to other use 47 “
Sold in 1819 38 “
Still in the Royal Collection today 19 “
Those without sufficient description to allow identification 9 “
Those not yet traced 33 “
While Melanie and I were going through old records her colleagues dug out the original gift list that accompanied the objects, a magnificent horizontal scroll 180cm long, that had been sitting in the royal archive since 1794. It had occurred to Emperor Qianlong that the English King might not read Chinese, so the list is written in Chinese and Latin. It is of such great historic interest that it is included in the Chinese and Japanese collection catalogue, despite the fact that only 19 items are still in the Royal Collection today.
List of objects bestowed on the King of England (detail to show the Chinese section and the Latin section), 1793
© Royal Collection Trust, GEO/ADD/31/21d
I subsequently learned that Emperor Qianlong had given a similar gift list to the King of Portugal in 1753. That document is housed in the Ajuda Library, Lisbon. I have never seen an image of it, but according to a book review in 2001, it “had been displayed in several international exhibitions”.
Chinese and Japanese Works of Art in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, in three volumes, was published in 2016. One year prior to that, according to the media, President Xi Jinping was shown some of the imperial gifts during his state visit to the UK in October 2015.
to be continued .....
What happened to the Macartney gifts
Part 3: Language and vocabulary
Looking at the Chinese and Latin scripts that appear on Emperor Qianlong’s gift list I wonder who today can read both languages. I suppose a Catholic priest of Chinese origin would be able to do that. Latin, though now a dead language, might have formed part of the curriculum of a member of the Catholic clergy.
At Qianlong’s court linguistic matters were handled by the Catholic missionaries. However, the missionaries were employed mainly to perform other duties, and translation of Chinese documents was something that happened once in a blue moon. In August 1793 Macartney met several of them when he was in Yuanming Yuan. Louis de Poirot (French) and Giuseppe Panzi (Italian) were painters. Peter Adeodato (Italian) and Joseph Paris (French) were mechanists taking care of the clocks and automations in the Inner Palace. Nicolas Joseph Raux (French) was a mathematician, and Jean Joseph de Grammont (French) was a musician. Two Portuguese, Joseph Bernard d’Almedia and André Rodrigues, were serving in the Qintianjian, or the Directorate of Astronomy. As can be expected a certain degree of jealousy and enmity existed amongst these religious men.
Macartney brought back to England four scrolls, namely one list of gifts to the King of England, one list of gifts to members of the embassy, plus two edicts. Emperor Qianlong wrote two edicts to the English King because Macartney sent in a written request after receiving the first edict.
During the hundred years between the 1890s and 1990s several English translations of the two edicts have been made by “China experts”. Linguists, in particular, placed much emphasis on what they considered to be Chinese arrogance. A few catchy phrases have been quoted and re-quoted so many times that in the end they drown all other things poor old Qianlong had said. On the other hand, curiously, nobody seemed interested in translating the gift lists until the Royal Collection Trust began cataloguing their Chinese artefacts in the 21st century.
Edict from Emperor Qianlong to the King of England, 1793, © Royal Collection Trust, GEO/ADD/31/21a
Readers might be surprised to hear me say that the way Chinese artefacts are described today remains more or less the same as it was done two centuries ago. Conversely, the English vocabulary for art has undergone a number of changes since 1793. Macartney was given a jade ruyi by Emperor Qianlong, but he did not use the word “jade”, describing instead the ruyi as “agate-looking stone”. Aeneas Anderson, Macartney’s valet, did not use the word “lacquer” either when he caught a glimpse of the imperial gifts in Rehe (old-style romanisation “Jehol”). He described the lacquerware as “a number of callibash boxes of exquisite workmanship, beautifully carved on the outside, and stained with a scarlet colour, of the utmost softness and delicacy: the inside of them was black, and shone like japan”.
Red carved lacquer box, Qianlong reign period (1736-1795),© Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 10821
Christies was the auction house entrusted with the sales of Queen Charlotte’s estate in 1819. Going through the related sales catalogues one does see the words "jad" (spelt without an "e") and "lacquer", but one also comes across descriptive terms such as “sea-green crackle bottles”, “crimson jar”, “mazarine blue”, “rich ornotto red”, that are no longer in common use nowadays. Yet the Chinese vocabulary for artefacts has continued unchanged up to the present moment, despite the fact that China has gone through two revolutions in the 20th century. If one visits any museum in China, or Hong Kong, or Taiwan, one will see the labels for the exhibits written with the same vocabulary as that in Qianlong times.
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What happened to the Macartney gifts
Part 4: Imperial gifts and “Chinese style rooms”
The Chinese made a big fuss about the gifts given by the Emperor to the English King, something that Macartney could not understand why. To him the objects were of little significance. On 14th September, 1793, when he and George Staunton, the Deputy Ambassador, were presented to Emperor Qianlong, and the latter gave a jade ruyi to the King of England, Macartney described the ruyi thus:
It is a whitish, agate-looking stone about a foot and a half long, curiously carved, and highly prized by the Chinese, but to me it does not appear in itself to be of any great value.
Again, on 20th September, Macartney wrote in his diary:
The Emperor’s presents for the King, consisting of lanterns, pieces of silk and porcelain, balls of tea, some drawings, etc., were finally packed up this morning … They don’t appear to me to be very fine, although our conductors affect to consider them as of great value.
When the imperial gifts eventually arrived in England King George III showed a far greater enthusiasm for them than Macartney did. He displayed some of the Chinese artefacts in his private residence, Frogmore House. Joseph Farington, an English landscape painter, noted “some presents from the Emperor of China” during his visit there in November 1797. The red carved lacquer objects, in particular, must have been a novelty in England in the 1790s. A small red cabinet carved with dragons rising from a sea of breaking waves was displayed in the Green Closet, and can be clearly seen in a watercolour by Charles Wild painted circa 1819.
Red carved lacquer cabinet, Qianlong reign period (1736-1795), © Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 26016
Frogmore House: The Green Closet, watercolour by Charles Wild, circa 1819, © Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 922123
The Green Closet was furnished “in the Chinese style”, but the other objects that adorned the room, such as the porcelain vases, the bamboo chairs, and the green floral wallpapers were not imperial gifts, although they were doubtlessly of Chinese manufacture.
Chinese wallpapers were widely used to decorate British country houses from the 1780s onwards, and some of the papers were given an imperial provenance that was fictitious. The royal physician Dr John Turton (1736-1806), who delivered several royal babies for Queen Charlotte, had reputedly received “a wallpaper which had originally been sent by the Emperor of China as a present to King George III and was bestowed on Dr Turton by the Queen”. This story appeared in the Star on 23rd October, 1909. The story-teller had probably read about the Emperor of China having given some rolls of Chinese paper to King George III, and he, quite logically, assumed that they were the kind of wallpapers so popular in Britain in the previous 150 years.
In fact the papers brought back from China by Macartney were not painted with any floral or figural pattern in polychrome. The Chinese gift list simply calls them “five-colour writing paper”. They were sold as part of Queen Charlotte’s estate after her death in 1818, and thanks to the Christies sales catalogue one knows that they were “with pencilled gold ornaments, on differently coloured ground, 6 ft 8 in long, and of different widths”.
A sheet of paper six feet long was not for writing ordinary letters. It was more likely for a calligrapher to exercise his skill, and the finished product would be given pride of place in his house.
At the auction 20 sheets of such papers were sold for £5 and 10 shillings. To what use the buyer put those papers is not known. The Prince of Wales, the future King George IV, began transforming his Brighton pavilion into an oriental palace in 1815. Yet the Prince did not use any of the Chinese papers brought back by Macartney either. Today, one can only form an idea of the appearance of those papers by looking at Emperor Qianlong’s two edicts and the two gift lists. The paper on which the gift list was written is of a yellow colour, and is indeed “with pencilled gold ornaments” as the Christies catalogue specifies.