LORD AMHERST’S MISSION AND REVISIONIST SCHOLARSHIP
As Gale has applied the revolutionary Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology to the digitisation of this enormous archive, scholars around the world – especially new students and those from non-English-speaking regions – will be able to unlock the hidden value of this largely handwritten manuscript collection, allowing for new discoveries and revisionist scholarship, challenging and even subverting traditional views about some historical events like Lord Macartney’s embassy to China, the first (unsuccessful) British diplomatic attempt to open China for trade in the late 1790s.
Two decades after Lord Macartney’s failed embassy, the British government made a second attempt in February 1816 by dispatching a new mission led by Lord Amherst to “encourage and promote that [commercial] intercourse [with China].” After nearly half a year of travel, the mission arrived at Tianjin in July of the same year, where Lord Amherst and the Chinese Mandarins dispatched to receive him entered into an intense argument about the protocol to be followed for the audience with the Chinese emperor Jiaqing. To the Chinese side’s insistence that the British ambassador extraordinary should practice the ceremony of making nine prostrations, Amherst followed his predecessor Lord Macartney by firmly refusing. As a result, the Amherst mission experienced even greater failure, being refused entry into Peking, let alone having an audience with the emperor. Based on his new knowledge gained in the process of communicating with the Chinese officials, Amherst concluded that he had been misled by all the official and personal accounts of Lord Macartney’s embassy. Among Amherst's reports is one written from Batavia to Lord Canning, governor-general of British India, on February 12, 1817, on his way back to Britain, in which he questioned the authenticity of the widely believed reason behind Macartney’s embassy’s failure—refusing to kowtow to the Chinese emperor: “I have since been given to understand that on an occasion subsequent to his first audience, Lord Macartney multiplied his bow nine times in conformity to the usual number of prostrations made by the Chinese.”