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Writer's pictureSean Paterson

Dreams of Empire: British travellers on the fringes of the Chinese world, 1688-1826


A view of the waterfront at Canton (Guangzhou), late 18th Century (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries British merchants, diplomats and soldiers attempted to break into China by a number of routes, only to be consistently rebuffed by the Qing imperial authorities. [1] Their activities were part of a broader enterprise, of English and Scottish travellers attempting to establish a presence in eastern markets, usually but not exclusively under the aegis of the East India Company, that had been going since 1600. [2] But China, which had once been fairly open to the world - spreading its influence as far as Africa - had turned inward. [3] By the late 1750s, the Qianlong emperor had proscribed Christianity, dismissed the imperial court’s Jesuit advisors, and introduced ‘the Canton system’, limiting interactions with westerners to a short, heavily regulated trading season in the eponymous southern port (now Guangzhou). It was made illegal for foreigners to be taught Chinese, and for the Chinese to leave the country - though this last order was routinely ignored by the people of the southern coast. [4] While contact continued across terrestrial frontiers, the Qing empire had mostly turned against the maritime world, and the merchants and pirates it delivered to them. [5] Frustrated by these limitations, the British sought to establish diplomatic relations and gain favourable concessions: an embassy in Peking, access to other ports, and the freedom to trade without restriction. [6] Eventually, a delegation under Lord Macartney presented themselves to Qianlong in the summer of 1793 - without an invitation - only to be snubbed after months of awkward negotiation. [7] The fallout is sometimes thought to have led to the Opium Wars. [8]Macartney’s mission is often seen as a starting point in the Sino-British relationship; but is perhaps better thought of as an inflection point in an era of transformation, as British visitors came to demystify, criticise and eventually exploit China. Between about 1690 and 1820, we can begin to trace the emergence of an imperial ideology, as perceptions shifted from curiosity to condescension.


Histories of the British relationship with the Sinosphere often treat the Macartney Embassy as if it were the first serious encounter. [9] It could be argued that much of the attention derives from its frequent use in older literature as a supposedly instructive vignette, of a hidebound Celestial Empire ill-advisedly dismissing the very people who just fifty years later would bring it to its knees. [10] The literature has since moved on from such unsavoury triumphalism, and the finer details of the embassy have come in for recent critical attention, with scholars making use of Chinese sources to draw a fuller picture. [11]

The Anglocentrism of earlier accounts has also been challenged, as historians now routinely consider alternative perspectives, both Chinese and those of other foreigners. As Joanna Waley-Cohen has argued, the decision to turn away British overtures was perfectly logical from the Qing point of view - they had seen what the western imperial powers had done elsewhere in Asia, and were understandably anxious to avoid the same fate. [12] Meanwhile, the British were not the only foreigners knocking at the Emperor’s door: American ships had reached the Chinese coast within a year of independence, and Americans would be one of the largest, longest-lasting and most quarrelsome foreign communities in China until the revolution of 1949. [13] Just for our proposed period of study, there is a rich literature on the foreigners trading on the coast. Tonio Andrade has produced a careful study of the Dutch embassy to Qianlong that followed Macartney’s; while Alexander Afinogenov has reminded us of the importance of contacts across China’s northern frontier with Russia. [14] Lisa Hellman has brilliantly reconstructed the experiences of the merchants of the lesser-known Swedish East India Company in Canton and Macau. [15] Nor were Europeans, Americans and Russians the only ones causing headaches at the Qing court: Peter Perdue has written about the long campaigns against the northwestern steppe tribes that were finishing just as Macartney arrived, that in retrospect are now understood as being far more important to the Qing. [16]

Most importantly, contemporary Chinese scholars - increasingly writing in English to reach global audiences - have sought to reclaim Chinese history by shifting the focus away from foreigners. The missions to China, given such importance in our historiographies, were in reality a minor annoyance to imperial authorities, who were more concerned with the threats presented by the White Lotus Rebellion in the mountainous southwest, and by pirates in the South China Sea. [17] (The latter including pirate queen Zheng Yi Sao, who had risen from humble beginnings in a floating brothel to command a fleet of 500 junks and 60,000 crew). [18] Environmental concerns, particularly extreme weather and failed harvests, were equally important issues on the imperial to-do list. [19]


Nevertheless, the wider British encounter with China is worth further examination. While Macartney was the first formal diplomatic contact, British travellers had been skirting the fringes of the Chinese world for decades. Other missions would follow, with the explicit aim of finding a way around the Canton system. The plan was to establish a presence in a third country - Tibet, Vietnam and Siam (now Thailand) were all considered - and harness the existing trade networks of the Chinese world by relying on intermediaries, from the ordinary merchant sailors of the Nanyang diaspora to the Panchen Lama, the political leader of Tibet. [20] The importance of these other encounters is being recognised, and has been the subject of a recent monograph by Xin Liu. [21] However, despite Liu’s efforts, there has yet to be a study that fully integrates the different approaches British travellers took to get a foothold in the Chinese market: the Tibetan expeditions, if studied at all, are usually seen in isolation from the voyages to the southern coasts, while precious little attention is now paid to the early British attempts to establish trade relationships with Vietnam. These must be seen as part of a broader whole, an approach on many fronts over many decades, but with the same aims in mind - access to the riches of China, by hook or by crook.

More research is needed. Knowing more about British approaches to China before the Opium War adds context, challenges the over-emphasis on Macartney found in much of the literature, and improves our understanding of the reasons for his mission, the Chinese reaction to it, the causes of its failures and its ultimate consequences. This is particularly relevant today, as Britain adapts to a rising China: while most British audiences would struggle to recall the basics of the Opium Wars, they remain a live issue in China. [22] It is vital that British audiences learn to understand their own (small) role in Chinese history, and develop the historical empathy that will help constructive future engagement.


The earliest British encounters with the Chinese world took place on its fringes, and initially at the hands of privateers. The Portuguese reported English raiders off Macau in 1627, and anonymous Englishmen were undoubtedly among the crews of Dutch and Spanish ships plying eastern waters before this, but one of the first to have recorded his impressions was William Dampier - incomparably described in the National Portrait Gallery as a ‘pirate and hydrographer’ - in a popular account of one of his circumnavigations of the world. [23] Dampier had been drawn to Chinese waters by an open-ended commission from the English Admiralty to attack Spanish shipping, and had chosen to try and attack the treasure galleons en route to Manila. In 1688, while sheltering from a storm near Canton, he went ashore to mingle. His observations were necessarily limited by linguistic shortcomings, so Dampier focused primarily on appearances and clothing, both of which he was noticeably polite about, in contrast to many later commentators. Dampier speculated on the origin of porcelain, one of the most mysterious - and therefore valuable - Chinese exports of the time, but gamely admitted that he ‘forgot to enquire about it’ whilst there. [24] He closed his account with a wry commentary on what he perceived as the Chinese love of gambling: ‘[they] are very great gamesters, and they will never be tired with it, playing night and day, till they have lost all their estates; then it is usual with them to hang themselves’. [25] This somewhat jarring remark seems to be in great contrast to the rest of his commentary. In Dampier’s account, the Chinese are afforded no special attention, nor any particular criticism - they are just one of the many peoples he meets along his journey, afforded the same treatment, which is always curious and relatively tolerant, especially considering that in life, Dampier was hardly the most enlightened of men, but by all accounts a bloody-minded sea-dog, who would later sold his heavily-tattooed Filipino slave, Giolo, to a human zoo to cover his debts. [26] It is hard to square Dampier’s behaviour with the self-image presented by his book, but his sharper comments somewhat give the game away.

The next significant British traveller to China came by a rather different route. John Bell, a Scottish surgeon, had offered his services to the Russian court after graduating from Edinburgh, and was dispatched on an overland mission to Peking from 1719 to 1722. [27] However, he would not write up his travels for decades, after public opinion had begun to be shaped by more hostile accounts. [28] (Bell remained a Sinophile, and after retiring to Scotland, attracted the attention of his neighbours by dressing in a fine Chinese robe). His first sight of China proper was the Great Wall, at the sight of which, after the monotony of the steppes, ‘one of our people cried out, “Land!”, as if we had been all this while at sea’. [29] Rather than deal with freewheeling coastal merchants, as most British ‘China hands’ would, as a diplomat in the imperial capital Bell was given privileged access to the court, and even the Emperor himself. This in turn shaped his narrative: the imperial court, while undoubtedly haughty, was less given to the kind of tactics that would frustrate those who encountered the coastal communities. Bell consequently left China with a particularly positive impression.

Whereas earlier Catholic accounts of China had tended to focus on obscure spiritual questions, Bell was bluntly practical, and interested in even the smallest details, to the point of spending several paragraphs describing the design of the kettles of a cook he briefly lodged with. His mission was to record as much as possible about China, in an even-handed way, in the spirit of the Scottish Enlightenment - a theme of other travellers like George Bogle, to whom we will return. Nor was Bell overawed by the magnificence of the imperial court, as some of his Jesuit predecessors had been: he described the Kangxi emperor as simply a good-natured, grandfatherly figure, rather than praising him as the Son of Heaven. Bell politely sat through ‘several comic farces, which to me seemed very diverting, though in a language I could not understand’, which culminated in a skit he certainly could, and appears to have enjoyed - a Chinese caricature of European travellers, dressed with extravagant foppery and gawking at passerby. [30] Bell was one of the first of what Jonathan Spence has called ‘the realist voyages’ to China - but he stands out for his good humour and spirit of curiosity, especially when compared with the next significant traveller. [31]


George Anson, a naval officer who, like Dampier, had been given orders to raid Spanish shipping, nearly didn’t make it to China. His voyage around the world, between 1740 and 1744, was a disaster: only a tenth of his original crew survived, and seven of his eight ships were lost. Perhaps this, and the pressures of command, go some way to explaining the vitriol of his account of Canton. [32] His visit started inauspiciously: Anson asked passing fishermen for directions to Macao, but instead, ‘they held up fish to us; and we afterwards learned that the Chinese name for fish is somewhat similar’. [33](It is not). Anson was particularly incensed by what he perceived as the failure of the fishermen to acknowledge him. ‘A ship like ours had doubtless never been in those seas before … yet they did not appear to be at all interested’. [34] His pride wounded, his narrative becomes increasingly hostile. Anson took Chinese incuriosity as the gravest insult: ‘it is an incontestable symptom of a mean and contemptible disposition, and is alone sufficient confutation of the extravagant panegyrics which many hypothetical writers have bestowed on the ingenuity and capacity of this nation’. [35] It is easy to conclude that Anson and his blustering marks the point at which the overweening arrogance of the imperial age began to be applied to China.

Eventually reaching Canton, Anson immediately began to squabble with the local mandarinate, who demanded he leave the way he had come, and continued to heap insults on the Chinese: ‘in artifice, falsehood, and an attachment to all kinds of lucre … the Chinese are difficult to be paralleled by any other people … [they have] a fraudulent and selfish turn of temper’. [36] He took umbrage at the behaviour of unscrupulous merchants: ‘the method of buying all things in China being by weight, the tricks made use of … were almost incredible’. Ducks and chickens bought to feed his crew were found to have been fed gravel to increase their weight; already-butchered pigs had been injected with water. When Anson bought live pigs instead, he was sold a sickly herd that died quickly. Throwing them overboard, he watched fishermen hauling the carcasses up for resale. Anson sailed away in disgust, writing ‘these instances may serve as a specimen of the manners of this celebrated nation, which is often recommended to the rest of the world as a pattern of all kinds of laudable qualities’. [37] He had arrived in China in a hostile mood, and nothing that happened to him there lessened it. In his anger and disillusionment, he had chosen to single out the more tolerant Enlightenment and Jesuit accounts of China for mockery - which, he was right to point out, were often the work of those who had never set foot in China, or lived a cloistered existence at the heart of the imperial court. His own account is clearly designed as a harsh corrective.


There is, however, one intriguing incident that Anson mentions: his meetings with James Flint, a Chinese-speaking Englishman who had been left behind in Canton as a child, and learned several dialects. Anson relied heavily on Flint during his negotiations with the local government, ‘as … none of the Chinese usually employed as linguists could be relied upon.’ He admired the forward thinking of the captain who had put Flint ashore decades before, and wondered why more like him were not trained, so that the East India Company would not have ‘to carry on the vast transactions of the port of Canton either by the ridiculous jargon of broken English .. or the suspected interpretation of the linguists’. [38]However, this was not to be: Flint later made the grave error of submitting a petition to the Emperor in fluent Chinese. Qianlong was furious that his laws had been disobeyed, and ordered that whoever had taught Flint be found and beheaded. Flint was imprisoned for three years, and thereafter banished from China, never to return. [39] (He would, however, later introduce the soybean to North America, helping to establish an experimental farm in Georgia that manufactured tofu, a project that attracted the attention of Benjamin Franklin).


In response to these events, between 1774 and 1784 a more novel approach was tried - to secure a route to China through the remote Himalayan kingdoms of Bhutan and Tibet. In 1774, Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal, dispatched his young Scottish secretary, George Bogle, on a mission to the Panchen Lama, with instructions to learn as much as possible about Tibet - especially anything about their rumoured habit of polyandry. [40] Bogle, who had already prepared a report on Indian trade, was considered a natural choice. [41] ‘Mr. Bogle’s … abilities and temper rendered him every way qualified for so hazardous and uncommon a mission’, an admiring contemporary wrote. [42] Though he would die before he could produce his own book, Bogle left a wealth of letters and dispatches describing an idyllic stay in Bhutan and Tibet, where he married and fathered children with a local woman, described in family legend as a princess. [43] He also befriended the Panchen Lama, with whom he spoke in Hindustani, and shared an interest in country pursuits. While much of the recent scholarly attention paid to Bogle’s time in Tibet focuses on the challenges to his Enlightenment rationalism presented by a different order of life, the straightforwardly mercantile aims of Warren Hastings in sending him there must not be forgotten. [44] Bogle would eventually use his friendship with the Panchen Lama to have him intercede with Qianlong on behalf of Company interests (unsuccessfully). [45] Whatever he might privately conclude, and however positive his impressions of the Tibetan people, Bogle was ultimately there to investigate the possibilities of establishing a route to China.

Bogle died young, in 1781. Around the same time, so did the Panchen Lama - or rather, so did his sixth reincarnation. In accordance with Tibetan belief, the Panchen Lama was then reborn, leading to an unusual situation for the next British visitor, Samuel Turner, who arrived in 1783: diplomatic protocol demanded he pay his respects to a baby. Turner, after delivering an address to the Panchen Lama to the effect that the East India Company was glad to hear of his reincarnation and looked forward to trade negotiations when he had learned to talk, noted the child’s reactions: ‘[he] looked steadfastedly towards me with the appearance of much attention … as though he understood and approved every word, but could not utter a reply’. [46] Turner, an Enlightenment man through and through, was - like Bogle - forced to confront the possibility of a world beyond his familiar rationality, having become convinced that the Panchen Lama really had been reincarnated once he compared his experiences with the child to Bogle’s notes on meetings with his last incarnation. Yet despite this, like Bogle, Turner never lost sight of why he was in Tibet: ‘the possibility of establishing, by degrees, an immediate intercourse with the empire of China, through the intervention of a person so revered as the Lama, and by a route not obviously liable to the same suspicions as … by sea’. [47] Ultimately, political concerns, and the logistical difficulties of moving goods across the Himalayas, nixed the Tibetan approach to China.


A final alternative approach was considered: to reach China via Southeast Asia. In 1778, between Bogle and Turner’s visits to Tibet, Warren Hastings sent a mission to Vietnam under Charles Chapman. Chapman also decried the Canton system: ‘the Chinese are desirous of totally excluding all Europeans from their country … were such an event to happen the want of a settlement to the eastward would be severely felt’. Worried that such a move would leave Britain overly reliant on the Dutch and Spanish, who had alternative bases to fall back on, Chapman recommended that the Company partner with the Chinese merchants who ‘have fixed their abode [in Vietnam] and … have their correspondents in every sea port’. [48] The merchant diaspora could then run ships to and from China on Britain’s behalf. This alliance would secure cheaper products, insulate British interests from a mercurial Chinese government, and even reopen trade with Japan, which had been closed to all but the Dutch and the Chinese.

So popular was the idea of a Vietnamese port that the Macartney embassy stopped there on the way to China, with one member, John Barrow, agreeing wholeheartedly that the best option was ‘to accomplish an equalisation of the trade’ by establishing a partnership with the Chinese diaspora. Vietnam not only ‘furnishes many valuable articles suitable for the China trade’, he wrote, but ‘would open a new and very considerable vent for many of our manufactures’. [49] The dream died hard: George Finlayson, visiting Vietnam in 1821, professed similar sentiments, heaping praise on the ‘industry’ of the Chinese diaspora and identifying them as natural partners able to get around the Canton system by taking trade offshore. [50] As late as 1826, a guidebook to Southeast Asia dreamed of the possibilities of an empire of trade anchored in Vietnam: ‘in a few years, we may have a British factory at Turon [Danang], steam-boats plying the Saigon River, or ascending the unknown course of the Mekong, and a joint stock company may be formed to work the gold-mines of Tongkin!’ [51]


It was not to be. Instead, Vietnam fell victim to French imperialism, Tibet retreated from engagement, and British policy shifted. By the 1830s, hostility to China had mounted to fever pitch, and amid concerns over the balance of trade and anger at the Canton system. After a diplomatic incident in which the governor of Canton seized and burned western stocks of opium in protest at its deleterious effects on the Chinese people, the British decided to shoot their way in. In the wake of the Opium Wars, a series of ‘unequal treaties’ were imposed on China - dozens of ports, most prominently Hong Kong, were opened along the coast, while western merchants were given extraterritorial legal rights. [52] The tolerant, curious travellers of the Enlightenment, like Bogle, Turner and Bell, and even pragmatic merchants like Chapman and Barrow, who though driven by profit had little ill-will towards China, gave way: the travellers of the later nineteenth century would sound more like Anson - blustering, domineering and contemptuous. Their blunders would poison the British relationship with China for a century - even, arguably, until today.





 

Sean Paterson is currently undertaking an MLitt in Transnational, Global and Spatial History at the University of St. Andrews.



Notes: [1] Robert Markley, ‘Riches, power, trade and religion: the Far East and the English imagination, 1600-1720’, in Daniel Carey (ed), Asian Travel in the Renaissance (Oxford, 2004), pp. 169-191. [2] David Howarth, Adventurers: The Improbable Rise of the East India Company (New Haven, 2023). Scots played an outsize role: see Michael Fry, The Scottish Empire (Edinburgh, 2001), and Jessica Hanser, Mr. Smith Goes to China: Three Scots and the Making of the Britain’s Global Empire (New Haven, 2019). Not all merchants were Company men: see W.G. Miller, British Traders in the East Indies, 1770-1820 (Woodbridge, 2020). [3] China’s long relationship with Africa is unduly neglected. Philip Snow, The Star Raft: China’s Encounter with Africa (London, 1988). [4] Guo Shibao, ‘Reimagining Chinese diasporas in a transnational world : towards a new research agenda’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 48, no. 4 (October 2021), pp. 847-872. [5] Chung-yam Po, Conceptualizing the Blue Frontier: The Great Qing and the Maritime World in the Long Eighteenth Century. PhD dissertation, University of Heidelberg, 2013. [6] Robert Bickers, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire (London, 2012), pp. 18-51. [7] Two contrasting visions of the embassy are given by Alain Peyrefitte, L’empire Immobile: Ou, Le Choc de Mondes (Paris, 1989); and James Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy (Durham NC, 1995). Peyrefitte attributes the failure of the embassy largely to economic concerns, while Hevia argues that the clash was at the ritual-conceptual level. [8] Julia Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (London[8] 012), pp. 1-17; and Stephen Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age (London, 2019). [9] Christopher Hibbert, The Dragon Wakes: China and the West, 1793-1911 (London, 1988), for instance, dispenses with earlier missions, and the entire Canton system, in just four pages. Even postmodern critical literature has maintained a fixation with the Macartney embassy, particularly Lydia Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge MA, 2004). [10] The Opium Wars are commonly held in China to have marked the beginning of the ‘Century of Humiliation’. Zhang Wang, ‘National humiliation, history education, and the politics of historical memory: patriotic education campaigns in China’, International Studies Quarterly, vol. 52, no. 4 (December 2008), pp. 783-806. [11] Henrietta Harrison, The Perils of Interpreting: Two Translators Between Qing China and the British Empire (Princeton, 2021); and Hao Gao, Creating the Opium War: British Imperial Attitudes Towards China, 1792-1840 (Manchester, 2020). [12] Joanna Waley-Cohen, The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History (New York, 1998), pp. 92-93. [13] James Fichter, So Great a Profit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism (Cambridge MA, 2010), pg. 1. See also Jacques Downs, The Golden Ghetto: The American Commercial Community at Canton and the Shaping of American China Policy, 1784-1844 (Hong Kong, 2014), and Jonathan Spence, To Change China: Western Advisors in China (New York, 1969). [14] Tonio Andrade, The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China(Princeton, 2021); Alexander Afinogenov, Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power(Cambridge MA, 2020). The Sino-Russian relationship has recently received more attention: see also Chris Miller, We Shall Be Masters: Russian Pivots to East Asia (Cambridge MA, 2021), and Philip Snow, China & Russia: Four Centuries of Conflict and Concord (New Haven, 2023). [15] Lisa Hellman, Navigating the Foreign Quarters: Everyday Life of the Swedish East India Company Employees in Canton and Macao, 1730-1830. PhD dissertation, University of Stockholm, 2015. [16] Peter Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge MA, 2010). [17] Wensheng Wang, White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire (Cambridge MA, 2014). [18] Peter Lehr, Pirates: A New History (New Haven, 2019), pg. 68. [19] Robert Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk and Silk: Environment and Economy and Late Imperial South China (Cambridge, 1998); [20] John Keay, The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (London, 1991), pp. 421-435. For specific details, see: Alastair Lamb, The Mandarin Road to Old Hué: Narratives of Anglo-Vietnamese Diplomacy from the 17th Century to the Eve of the French Conquest (London, 1970), pp. 10-21; Alastair Lamb, British India and Tibet, 1766-1910(London, 1986), pp. 1-67; and Kate Teltscher, The High Road to China: George Bogle, the Panchen Lama and the First British Expedition to Tibet (London, 2006). The nature of the network is shown in Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-Chin Chang (eds), Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities and Networks in Southeast Asia (Durham NC, 2010). [21] Xin Liu, Anglo-Chinese Encounters Before the Opium War (Abingdon, 2023). Liu is not a historian, and this is evident in the text. [22] Niv Horesh, ‘One country, two histories: how PRC and western narratives of Chinese modernity diverge’, Journal of Global Faultlines, vol. 7, no. 1 (June 2020), pp. 114-126. [23] William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (London, 1697). For anonymous English sailors, see C.R. Boxer, Jan Compagnie in War and Peace, 1602-1799: A Short History of the Dutch East India Company (Hong Kong, 1979). [24] For the value of porcelain, see Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of a Global World(London, 2009), pp. 54-83. [25] Dampier, New Voyage; q.i. Gerald Norris (ed), William Dampier: Buccaneer Explorer (London, 1994), pp. 110-113. [26] Timothy Brook, Mr. Selden’s Map of China: The Spice Trade, a Lost Chart and the South China Sea (London, 2013), pp. 177-181. [27] Bell’s journey is analysed in Jonathan Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York, 1999), pp. 45-52. [28] John Bell, Travels from St Petersburg in Russia to Various Parts of Asia (Glasgow, 1763). [29] Bell, Travels, pg. 117. [30] Bell, Travels, pg. 144. [31] Spence, Chan’s Great Continent, pp. 41-61. [32] A Voyage Round the World, in the Years MDCCXL, I, II, III, IV, by George Anson, Esq (London, 1748). [33] Anson, Voyage, pg. 463. [34] Ibid. Perhaps they remembered Dampier’s visit, unlike Anson. [35] Ibid. [36] Ibid, pg. 510. [37] Ibid, pp. 524-525. [38] Ibid, pg. 532. [39] Liu, Anglo-Chinese Encounters, pg. 132. [40] ‘Memorandum on Tibet by Warren Hastings, accompanying the instructions to Mr. Bogle’, 13th May 1774. q.i. Alastair Lamb (ed), Bhutan and Tibet: The Travels of George Bogle and Alexander Hamilton, 1774-1777, vol. 1: Letters, Journals and Memoranda (Hertingfordbury, 2002), pp. 52-55. [41] George Bogle, ‘Report on the East India Company’ (1770). Mitchell Library, Glasgow: file TD1681 (Bogle Family Papers), bundle 5. [42] John Stewart, An Account of the Kingdom of Thibet (London, 1777), pg. 8. [43] Gordon Stewart, Journeys to Empire: Enlightenment, Imperialism and the British Encounter with Tibet (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 58-108. [44] ‘Minute by Warren Hastings’, 9th May 1774, q.i. Lamb (ed), Bhutan and Tibet, pg. 41. [45] Teltscher, High Road to China, pp. 1-3. [46] Samuel Turner, An Account of an Embassy to the Court of the Teshoo Lama in Tibet (London, 1800), pg. 336. [47] Ibid, pg. xiii. [48] Charles Chapman, ‘A sketch of the geography of Cochin China’ (1778), in Lamb (ed), Mandarin Road, pg. 135. The Chinese diaspora were long the partners of choice for the British in Southeast Asia; see Stan Neal, Singapore, Chinese Migration, and the Making of the British Empire, 1819-67 (Woodbridge, 2019). [49] John Barrow, A Voyage to Cochinchina in the Years 1792 and 1793 (London, 1806), pp. 338-342. [50] George Finlayson, The Mission to Siam, and Hué, the capital of Cochin China, in the Years 1821-2 (London, 1826), pg. 63. [51] Josiah Conder, The Modern Traveller: Birmah, Siam and Anam (London, 1826), pg. 367. [52] Robert Nield, China’s Foreign Places: The Foreign Presence in China in the Treaty Port Era, 1840-1943 (Hong Kong, 2015).

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