The Dark Gift: Opium, John Francis Davis, Thomas De Quincey, and the Amherst Embassy to China of 1816

Summary

There has been a great deal of historical and cultural criticism relating to the first British embassy to arrive in China, led by Viscount Macartney, of 1792–94, including three substantial historical accounts, but comparatively little has been written about its successor, either from the British or the Chinese viewpoints, which has tended to be largely viewed, when it is noted at all, as a farcical repetition of, or postscript to, its more famous predecessor. This is unfair. The embassy, along with the two earlier British attempts to take possession of the Portuguese enclave of Macao in 1802 and 1808, urgently demand the serious attention of both historians and critics of the cultural relations between China and Britain in the nineteenth century. This essay, along with that of Robert Markley, argues for the importance of the embassy as well as its crucial significance to British understandings of China and the accounts to which it gave rise. They make a case for the significance of the still largely unexplored accounts produced by the embassy and the extensive knowledge they contained. With the publication in 2014 of Wensheng Wang's major reappraisal of the reforming reign of the Jiaqing Emperor (1796–1820), we are now presented with a more complex and nuanced account of this crucial period in Chinese history. Whereas H. B. Morse referred to ‘the degenerate and corrupt court’ of 1816, Wang instead describes a frugal, thoughtful, selfcritical and reforming monarch, keenly aware of the British attempts to take over Macao and nervous about their power. The Jiaqing Emperor emerges not as a ruler imprisoned in an ossified ritualistic ceremonialism but one capable of reacting pragmatically to the complex and challenging political events that faced him.

Contemporary responses to the earlier Macartney embassy were certainly mixed. Macartney and his admirers regarded his embassy as, on the whole, something of a success. He purred about how his mission had ‘laid a foundation of amity, good offices, and immediate intercourse with the Imperial Court’. Contemporary views of the Amherst embassy generally viewed it as a failure; John Crawfurd, reviewing Henry Ellis's Journal of the Proceedings of the late Embassy to China for the Edinburgh Review, commented: ‘everybody who knew anything of the matter, we believe, was prepared for that catastrophe of this new Chinese mission, which actually ensued’. Historian Patrick Tuck has claimed that the embassy ‘was not merely a failure, it was a fiasco’.