In the fifty-eighth year of the reign of the Emperor Qianlong, emissaries from a remote and obscure princeling somewhere off across the South Sea were politely received at the Imperial Court in what is now Beijing. Such embassages were not common, but they were not entirely unknown. If it was judged convenient to do so, a foreign ruler might acknowledge the formal overlordship of the Emperor as ruler of All Under Heaven, in turn for which his people would be permitted to enter trade relations, and encouraged to learn the arts and manners of civilization from an empire that had been the supreme embodiment of these things for three thousand years.
The princeling's emissaries offered examples of their own manufactures and other products. The manufactures were acknowledged to be ingenious, but it was less obvious that they were of practical use. Worse, there was some concern that an influx of new and strange trade goods might disrupt the delicate balance of life in the central empire of the world. Moreover, and most immediately, the emissaries refused to perform the customary obesiance to the Emperor in the form of a kowtow, but instead knelt on one knee, a halfhearted and insulting gesture. In light of all this, the scholars who advised the Emperor recommended that the emissaries be turned away empty-handed.
Half a century later, another group of foreign emissaries were received by an imperial official at Canton. They came this time on a darker mission. The immediate issues were complex, but the underlying reality was that the foreigners were representatives of a South Seas piratical queen, whose subjects were also notorious drug dealers, and they came with a demand that the dealers be allowed to sell their drugs with impunity from the authority of the law. When their demands were refused, the pirate queen's well-armed ships attacked, sweeping away the junks that guarded the port. In the course of the war that foll...