1796 Barrow Map of the Grand Canal, China, during the Macartney Mission

This important 1796 John Barrow map of China traces the course of the British Macartney Mission after its unsuccessful meeting with the Qing Emperor Qianlong. As a diplomatic effort, the embassy failed completely, the result of mutual misunderstanding and mistrust between the Qing Court and the British. But, as this map demonstrates, the mission did allow the British to gain a much better direct understanding China's geography

A Closer Look

The map traces the route taken by Macartney following his embassy's meetings with the Qianlong Emperor at the Qing Summer Palace at Chengde. The location of the meeting - at the Summer Palace instead of Beijing - was one of the early warning signs that the embassy was off to a bad start. After leaving Chengde, the British mission traveled southwest through the Great Wall to Beijing, and then down the Hai River (also known as White River or Baihe, transliterated here as 'Pei Ho') to Tianjin. From there, the mission traversed the Grand Canal through Shandong Province to Jinan (Tsin-jin-tchoo) and on to the great trading cities of Jiangnan: Yangzhou, Zhenjiang, Changzhou, Suzhou, and eventually Hangzhou, where the Grand Canal ends.

Along the way, Barrow notes the dates and notes on the terrain and economy. A small legend at left indicates symbols for cities of different sizes with transliterations of their Chinese terms (foo 府, tchoo 州, shien 縣) as well as features along the canal. Mountains, rivers, lakes, and other features are noted throughout, including the Great Wall and the course of the embassy's ships (the Lion and Hindostan), which were too large to travel along the canal.

The Macartney Mission

The Macartney Mission, or the Macartney Embassy, was a diplomatic mission by Great Britain to the Qianlong Emperor of the Qing Dynasty meant to expand British trading rights in China and establish a permanent embassy in Beijing. Thirty-five years earlier, British traders of the East India Company (EIC) were confined to trading with an officially sanctioned set of Chinese traders in Guangzhou (Canton). Although the Canton System was profitable, the EIC found it too cumbersome and restrictive while also feeling that a direct line to Beijing was necessary to resolve disputes (rather than working through several layers of intermediaries and bureaucrats). A mission led by Charles Cathcart had been sent to Beijing in 1787, but Cathcart died before reaching China and the embassy was abandoned.

George Macartney's mission left Britain in September 1792 with a retinue of translators (including Chinese Catholic priests trained in Italy), painters, secretaries, scholars, and scientists. The well-equipped and impressive embassy traveled via Madeira, Tenerife, Rio de Janeiro, the Cape of Good Hope, Indonesia, and Macau, before moving up the Chinese coast and reaching Beijing on August 21, 1793. Macartney's second in command was George Leonard Staunton who served as the expedition's secretary and chronicler. Staunton's 11-year-old son, George Thomas Staunton, nominally the ambassador's page, learned Chinese during the voyage and served as a translator for the mission alongside the Catholic priests Paolo Zhou (周保羅) and Jacobus Li Zibiao (李自標). The younger Staunton later became chief of the East India Company's factory at Guangzhou, translated works between Chinese and English, and helped found the Royal Asiatic Society (Barrow, who had been the younger Staunton's mathematics teacher, also picked up enough Chinese to help translate and became something of a Sinologist in the years after the embassy's return).

The embassy was poorly managed from the beginning and, despite considerable pomp from the English perspective, appeared poor and rag-tag to the Qianlong Emperor. Partly through lack of preparation, partly through arrogance, and partly due to the Emperor's distaste for the British, the embassy failed in all its primary objectives. This disappointing result was compounded by a now-famous letter from Qianlong to King George III that chided the British monarch for his audacity in making demands of the Qing and his ignorance of the Chinese system, ending with a reminder not to treat Chinese laws and regulations lightly, punctuated with the memorable phrase 'Tremblingly obey and show no negligence!' In the British and Western accounts of the mission, this letter and the protracted dispute on whether Macartney would kowtow to the Emperor, as was standard, or simply kneel, as he would to his own monarch, was seen as evidence of the Qing's obsession with spectacle and ritual over practicality and substance.

Macartney's Mission highlighted cultural misunderstandings between China and the West, and has often been taken as a turning point in Chinese history. Qianlong's dismissal of foreign objects as mere toys and his insistence of the centrality of China in the world's hierarchy of kingdoms have been seen as sign of Chinese intransigence and a harbinger of China's decline in the 19th century. After the British left, Qianlong commented on the quality of their weapons, but showed no interest in a small model steam engine or other technically complex gifts the Brits had brought (Barrow, along with the scientist James Dinwiddie, was tasked with managing and delivering these gifts to the Emperor).

At the time the embassy visited, Qianlong had been in power for nearly sixty years and increasingly turned over management of the empire to a small group of self-serving officials, particularly Heshen, remembered as the most corrupt official in Chinese history. In the countryside, overpopulation and famine provoked millenarian religious movements and uprisings. On the southern coast, the British East India Company began importing opium in larger and larger quantities, eventually causing a severe social and economic crisis in southern China. In retrospect, both Chinese and foreign historians of every ideological bent have seen the Macartney Mission as a missed opportunity for the Qing to recognize the tremendous changes taking place in Europe and address underlying problems that would eventually sink the empire.

For their part, the British gained considerable direct knowledge of the country (earlier knowledge was usually second-hand from Catholic missionaries) and began to perceive the Qing Court as sclerotic and intransigent, the narrative which has come to define them in most subsequent histories. Although Macartney and his retinue witnessed an extremely wealthy and productive empire, they also correctly sensed that it was tottering and could be defeated by British forces in a military conflict (which Macartney nonetheless advised against).

Publication History and Census

This map was drawn by John Barrow, engraved by Benjamin Baker, and printed in 1796 to accompany George Staunton's 1797 An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China, published by G. Nicol in London. It is only cataloged at the University of California Berkeley, the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, and the National Library of Australia, while the entire Account is listed among the holdings of 13 institutions in North America and Europe in the OCLC.