Antiques.(China and Western world)

 
As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no 
value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your 
country's manufactures.... I do not forget the lonely remoteness of your 
island, cut off from the world by intervening wastes of sea.... My 
capital is the hub and centre about which all quarters of the globe 
revolve. 
Letter from the Qianlong emperor to George III of England, 1793 

For Westerners, China has long been, and still remains, enigmatic, inscrutable. Many in the West entirely dismissed the first full report of China given in the mid-fourteenth century by Marco Polo, whose tales of the vast wealth, power, and strange customs of the country appeared so fantastic as to be fiction. Following the collapse of the Mongol Empire and the disruption of known trade routes, China faded in European memory until the mid-sixteenth century, when European traders and missionaries once again began to travel to the East in search of wealth or with aspirations of converting the Chinese to Christianity. This renewed encounter between East and West brought together two cultures, each assured of its own cosmological superiority and historical destiny.

Lord Macartney's embassy to China in 1792 was the first attempt by Britain to establish diplomatic contact with the Celestial Empire. For almost a century the East India Company merchants had traded regularly at Guangzhou (Canton), but they were denied any direct access to Chinese officials. Segregated as uncouth barbarian traders, they were forced to make their requests and complaints through an officially appointed body of Chinese merchants known as the hongs. Macartney's tasks were to establish diplomatic relations with China; to obtain a treaty of friendship in order to improve the conditions of trade in Guangzhou and if possible to open up new markets for British manufactures in northern China; and, it was hoped, to prepare the way for a representative of the king of England to reside permanently in Beijing.

But in seeking to establish diplomatic relations as if between two countries of equal status, the British government was instructing its ambassador to achieve the impossible. Other European nations had sent embassies to China, and their rulers had been summarily enrolled as "tributary princes," and their ambassadors recorded as having performed the ceremonial kowtow before the mighty Qianlong emperor. Indeed, the emperor was a revelation to ...