Western Encroachment on China

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 immedi

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other's existence. After the fall of Rome, the West again faced a challenge from a more powerful and sophisticated civilization, that of Islam. A brief period of Western imperialism in the Middle Ages, the Crusades, was brought to an end by Saladin. By the sixteenth century--just when, in the conventional view, Europeans were starting on the road to global dominance--the Ottoman Empire in fact loomed over Europe, and its power was narrowly turned back at the siege of Vienna (1529) and the battle of Lepanto (1571). Europeans of that age were also in awe of their own distant past, as embodied by Greece and Rome. As late as the eighteenth century, intellectuals still debated the relative virtues of the "Ancients" and the "Moderns." Thus, when King George's emissaries reached Beijing in 1793, they were only a few generations removed from a time when Westerners had been far from certain of their standing in the world. Indeed, the prevailing European view of China was an idealized one; to the Enlightenment mind "China offered a model of government in which men ruled themselves and man was ruled by reason." Two generations later, the aggressive self-confidence and sense of superiority of the Victorians who confronted China

Category: History - W