Jonathan Wright - The Ambassadors - From Ancient Greece to the Nation State

Outlying embassies were abandoned, and a total of 475 civilians, 450 guards and 2,300 Chinese Christians, stranded in the diplomatic quarter, began their agonizing wait for the arrival of Western troops. Mercifully, they had a good supply of fresh water and rice, as well as ample stocks of pony-meat and champagne. There was also a wealth of tobacco; as one witness remembered it, ‘even some of the women, principally Italians and Russians, found relief in the constant smoking of cigarettes.’ Conditions were terribly crowded, however, and the Dutch minister was obliged to sleep in a cupboard belonging to the Russian ambassador. Morale was bruised when a Norwegian missionary went mad, and the French ambassador infuriated everyone by wandering around the compound, announcing, ‘We are all going to die tonight, we are all lost.’ 2

The siege provided its edifying sights: professors turning their hand to butchery, Catholic and Protestant missionaries filling defensive sandbags together. And for the most part, the imperial troops showed restraint, although during a single day they did manage to discharge 20,000 rounds of ammunition in the direction of the legations. Finally, on 14 August, relief came with the arrival of Western forces: 8,000 Japanese, 4,800 Russian, 3,000 British, 2,100 American, 800 French, 58 Austrian, and 53 Italian soldiers. ‘We heard the playing of machine guns on the outside of the city,’ someone recalled; ‘never was music so sweet.’ 3

It was an invincible force, and with the lifting of the siege the Western powers set about exacting their revenge. By the terms of the Boxer Protocol of September 1901, China was to offer an abject apology, pay a huge indemnity for its outrageous behaviour, and desist from importing arms for two years. It was a burden that the tottering Manchu dynasty could hardly withstand. By 1911 imperial China had ceased to exist, and in 1912 a republic was set up in its place. As for the Western powers, they seized every opportunity to expand their political and economic stranglehold on the country. Kaiser Wilhelm offered an especially bullish assessment of the changed situation: ‘Just as the Huns a thousand years ago, under the leadership of Attila, gained a reputation by virtue of which they still live in historical tradition, so may the name of Germany become known in such a manner in China that no Chinese will ever again even dare to look askance at a German.’ 4

If the West still cherishes an image of Chinese insularity and xenophobia, one need look no further than the siege of the Peking embassies in 1900 for part of the explanation. The terror and privations suffered by ambassadors, their families and retinues would not quickly be forgotten. In truth, the Boxer Rebellion was the culmination of decades of growing alienation. As early as the end of the eighteenth century, Europe had fallen out of love with China. Heady stories of the majestic Chinese court, revered during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the most cultured and opulent place that might be imagined, were suddenly replaced by the niggardly accounts of ill-humoured diplomats – as ever, the vessels for their cultures’ prejudices.

When a Dutch ambassador travelled to Peking in 1796, there was precious little talk of silk, jade or chinoiserie. Instead, he reported back on mandarins with ‘shrill voices’ who rudely awakened visitors at three in the morning, and of ‘low and dirty’ reception rooms stocked with ‘coarse rugs…a few common chairs [and] a piece of wood with an iron spike as a candlestick’. The elaborate order and ritual of the court had apparently descended into chaos, and palaces were now ‘full of people, great and small, rich and poor intermingled, pressing and pushing without any distinction, so that we were stuck by a scene of confusion’.

The emperor’s horses were ‘shaggy and rather dirty’, and the food served at state banquets was an utter disgrace; pieces of game, ‘looking as if they were remnants of gnawed off bones’, had been unceremoniously ‘dumped on the table’. Here, the ambassador suggested, was the ‘most conclusive proof of coarseness and lack of civilization…However incredible this may seem in Europe, it is too remarkable to pass over in silence. From the reports with which the missionaries have deluded the world for a number of years, I had imagined a very civilized and enlightened people. These ideas were deeply rooted and a kind of violence was necessary to eradicate them, but this reception, joined to all our previous experiences, was a radical cure.’ 5

In fact, the Jesuits who had been tending the mission fields of China for the past two centuries had not been deluding anyone. China was in a dozen sorts of decline, but it had not suddenly become an uncivilized backwater. Europe had simply experienced a shift in fashion, a cultural backlash. The Enlightenment adoration of Confucian philosophy, ceramics and Chinese political genius had given way to talk of Chinese despotism, cruelty and backwardness. The West had decided it was superior, the cradle and guardian of authentic civilization, and China was now a place to be feared, mocked or exploited.

It was to prove a resilient perspective: one that still infects the European world-view, and one that a tragedy such as the Boxer Rebellion only served to reinforce. Millennia of Chinese history were reduced to a stereotype. China was – and always had been – odd, unwelcoming and self-satisfied. But as other stories from the history of the ambassadors reveal, the image is at best a simplistic half-truth. The Boxer Rebellion does not epitomize the history of China.

Certain negative orthodoxies regarding China cannot be gainsaid. They persist because they are accurate. The Chinese emperor was always hailed as the son of heaven, the mediator between God and mankind, the overlord of all the earth’s kings and princes, although this posture was hardly a Chinese preserve. The rulers of ancient Mesopotamia believed themselves to be gods, and Mongol khans would style themselves the lords of the universe. In 1525, when the Ottoman leader Süleyman the Magnificent sent a letter to Francis I of France, he referred to himself as, ‘by the sacred miracles of Muhammad…Sultan of Sultans, the sovereign of sovereigns, the dispenser of crowns to the monarchs of the face of the world, the shadow of God on earth…ruler of the White and the Black seas, of Rumelia and Anatolia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Persia, Damascus, Aleppo, Cairo, Mecca, Medina, Arabia and Yemen’. 6 When the client states of ancient Egypt sent their envoys to meet the pharaoh, they were expected to prostrate themselves seven times on their bellies and seven times on their backs. Whenever letters were sent to the pharaoh, diplomatic convention required these same states to refer to themselves as the dust beneath his sandals.

It is also true that China would often be sublimely uninterested in affairs beyond Southeast Asia, and Chinese diplomacy would sometimes consist almost entirely of raking in tribute from Korea, Vietnam and Japan. This proved to be a disastrous policy at the end of the eighteenth century although, in other periods, one wonders why China should have been concerned with the intricacies of Western political life. Ancient Greece and Mauryan India were also preoccupied with their own regional politics, after all. Moreover, a sense of superiority did not always imply isolation. Throughout its twenty-five dynasties, China was usually delighted to welcome the envoys of distant nations.

As soon as two Persian ambassadors crossed the Chinese border in 1420 they were greeted by imperial officials. In ‘a delectable meadow’ their hosts had set up a platform ‘with canvas awnings, over which were placed tables and chairs’. A meal of ‘geese, fowls, roasted meat’ and fruit was served and ‘after the repast various kinds of intoxicants were served up and all became tipsy’. Drink and diplomacy were combined once again.