Legendarily 2,200 years old and 4,300 miles long, the Great Wall of China seems to make an overwhelmingly confident physical statement about the country it spans: about China's age-old sense of itself being an advanced civilization anxious to draw a clear line between itself and the “barbarians” at its borders. But behind the wall's intimidating exterior—and the myths that have built up around it—is a complex history that has both defined and undermined China. Author Julia Lovell has written a new and important history of the Great Wall that guides the reader through the conquests and cataclysms of the Chinese empire, from the second millennium BC to the present day.
In recent years, the Wall has become an ever more potent symbol of Chinese nationalism, of a determination to resist foreign domination. But how successful was the Wall in reality, and what was its real purpose? Was it a precursor, albeit on a huge scale, of the Berlin Wall—a barrier designed to keep its population in as much as undesirables out? Lovell looks behind the modern mythology of the Great Wall, uncovering a three-thousand-year history far more fragmented and less illustrious than its crowds of visitors imagine today. The story of the Wall winds through that of the Chinese state and the frontier policy that defined it, through the lives of the millions of individuals who supported, criticized, built, and attacked it. Now acclaimed as a symbol of Chinese self-definition, of cultural greatness, of the technical genius and fortitude required to build it, the Wall has also carried a range of far more negative connotations: the bleakness of the frontier, thousands of miles from the centre of Chinese civilization, of suffering and sacrifice of its builders, of costly colonial expansionism, and of suffocating cultural conservatism and the control and repression of those kept within.
The Great Wall is an epic tale that stretches over two millennia as it follows the rise and fall of the great Chinese ruling dynasties. Full of astonishing details and extraordinary characters—from emperors to engineers, statesmen to soldiers—this is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand China's past, present, and future.
Introduction
Who Made the Great Wall of China?
On 26 September 1792, King George III dispatched the first British trade mission to China, a 700-strong party that included diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, scientists, painters, a watchmaker, a gardener, five German musicians, two Neapolitan Chinese priests and a hot-air-balloon pilot. Packed into three substantial ships, they brought with them the most impressive fruits of recent Western scientific progress – telescopes, clocks, barometers, airguns and, naturally, a hot-air balloon – all intended to dazzle the Chinese emperor, Qianlong, into opening trade with the West, by convincing him that he and his 313 million people needed Britain’s technological marvels.
For the past decade, Britain had been running up a serious trade deficit with China: while the Chinese were quite happy to service the growing British tea addiction, they wanted nothing, except copious amounts of silver, in return. The few British merchants – employees of the East India Company – allowed to operate in China were contained in the city of Canton, as far away as possible from the political capital, Beijing. There, they were restricted to rat-infested warehouses and residences, denied all contact with the Chinese or instruction in their language, and forced to trade through local officials, who entertained themselves by extracting large customs duties from their foreign guests. Every level of the economic hierarchy, it seemed, was dedicated to cheating Westerners, from the provincial Superintendent of Maritime Customs down to local shopkeepers, who filled foreign sailors with perniciously strong liquor in order to ‘rob them of what money they have about them’.1 With East India Company profits in China failing to offset the costs of rule in India and British tea-drinkers pushing trade figures further into the red, Asia was rapidly becoming a British money sink.
It was in this potentially ruinous context that Henry Dundas, Home Secretary and former president of the East India Company, approached Lord Macartney, an experienced and canny diplomat, and asked him to lead the embassy to China. Macartney stated his terms for accepting the mission: £15,000 for every year he was out of Britain and an earldom. In exchange, Dundas stipulated, Macartney would spread the gospel of free trade, open new ports and new markets for Britain in China, establish a permanent embassy in Beijing and conduct industrial and military espionage. The deal was struck.
In June 1793, after nine months at sea and pauses in Rio de Janeiro and Madeira, where the ships’ wine stocks were replenished, the British mission reached Macao, the Portuguese enclave off the southern coast of China whose tropical humidity daubed the island’s buildings with green mould. For the next four months, the British and their extensive cargo crawled up the coast towards an audience with the emperor in his northern capital, Beijing. They were observed at all times by a suspicious imperial bureaucracy, which deluged the British party with hospitality – on one day alone, the British were provided with 200 items of poultry – while managing to avoid helping further the cause of the embassy in any material way. On finally completing their pilgrimage to Beijing, the British were told the emperor would only receive them even further north, at his summer retreat in cool, mountainous Jehol.
When the British – almost a year after leaving Portsmouth and with their accompanying band wearing loaned green and gold fancy dress already used at least once previously by a French embassy – were at last ushered into the celestial imperial presence on the occasion of His birthday and presented George III’s written requests in a jewel-encrusted box, the emperor received them with no more than reserved cordiality. Perhaps because he had read too many excitable rumours about the British presents in the Chinese press, which speculated that the British had brought foot-high dwarfs and an elephant the size of a cat, the emperor was underwhelmed by the reality of telescopes, planetariums and carriages. The presents assembled by Dinwiddie, the embassy’s astronomer, in the summer palace at Beijing, Qianlong commented, were useful merely for the amusement of children.2 The only reaction provoked by a Parker lens was hilarity when a playful eunuch received a scorch after sticking out a finger under it. The spring-suspension coach the British brought, hoping to open the door to exports, was immediately deemed impossible for the emperor to use, on the grounds that Qianlong could never ‘suffer any man to sit higher than himself, and to turn his back towards him’.3
Qianlong made his formal reply to British requests in a special edict presented to Macartney on 3 October but actually composed on 30 July, more than six weeks before the British had met the emperor and handed over their gifts. The mission, in other words, had been doomed long before it neared its destination. ‘We have never valued ingenious articles,’ Qianlong made clear, ‘nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s manufactures.’4 He was true to his words: seventy years later, when British and French soldiers destroyed the imperial Summer Palace just outside Beijing, Macartney’s presents were discovered, untouched, in a stable. It was, it would seem, members of the embassy who made most use of their technological wonders while in China: Macartney travelled to Jehol in a British coach, while Dinwiddie tested the range and precision of a telescope by focusing it on the pleasure boats and scantily clad singsong girls of Suzhou, a canal city on China’s east coast.
For all the trials the British tolerated to ingratiate themselves with the Chinese – suffering hours of Chinese theatre, being laughed at during public banquets for their ineptitude with chopsticks – the embassy failed in every single one of its objectives. Language was a substantial barrier. After the Neapolitan Chinese priests originally brought along as interpreters had jumped ship at Macao, terrified of political retribution from the imperial court for having left China without authorization, the only member of the party who could speak a little Chinese – picked up from the escaped priests – was Thomas Staunton, the twelve-year-old son of Macartney’s second-in-command, George Staunton. This left the embassy largely dependent on the translating efforts of Portuguese and French missionaries stationed at the Chinese court, whom Macartney respectively found ‘false and crafty’ and ‘restless and intriguing’.5 The impressive list of presents submitted to the emperor was rendered into gibberish: the planetarium, for example, was merely phonetically transcribed, then described for the emperor in flowery classical Chinese by court interpreters as a ‘geographical and astronomical musical clock’.6
But the greatest stumbling block was that of diplomatic etiquette. Late Qing China was locked into the traditional Chinese vision of international relations, in which all foreigners were backward barbarians with little or nothing to offer Chinese civilization and whose rightful relationship with the imperial court was one of respectful subordination. According to idealized Chinese diplomatic conventions over one and a half millennia old, foreigners were (theoretically at least) allowed to visit China only as inferior vassals bringing tribute, not as political equals and certainly not as representatives of ‘the most powerful nation of the globe’ – as Macartney and the British confidently saw themselves.7 Instead of a ministry of foreign affairs, Qing China possessed a (Tribute) Reception Department, fully equipped with a complex range of regulations governing the frequency, length, size and number of prostrations required of tributary envoys. The Chinese and the British would never be able to agree on terms for trade while they couldn’t even agree on terms for each other’s existence. To call the Sino-British encounter of 1793 a clash of civilizations is an overstatement: neither side found enough common diplomatic ground even to get within a whiff of a collision.
As a pragmatic envoy but also a proud Briton, Macartney spent weeks wrangling over diplomatic protocol. A particular sticking point was his refusal to perform the kowtow, the obligatory gesture of deference to the emperor: a set of three genuflections, each containing three full prostrations with the head touching the ground. Macartney was prepared to tip his hat, go down on one knee and even kiss the emperor’s hand (this third option, horrified Chinese officials quickly made clear, was quite out of the question), but he would not kowtow unless a Chinese official of equal rank to him kneeled before a portrait of George III. This last proposal was even more inappropriate than hand-kissing: Qianlong was the ruler of ‘all under heaven’ (tianxia, a traditional Chinese usage for China) – his subjects could never admit the equal authority of another sovereign. The idea of China as the centre of the civilized world, to whom all other peoples owe allegiance, is one of the most resilient threads running through Chinese history. Even today, 160 years after the Opium Wars began forcing China out of the tributary system and into modern international trade and diplomacy, some Chinese historians still cannot believe that Macartney never kowtowed to the emperor.8
Chinese pressure on Macartney to submit to the kowtow started in August, a full six weeks before the British audience with Qianlong, and steadily intensified. The strategies of persuasion employed by the Chinese ranged from the ingeniously roundabout to the viscerally direct. In mid-August, officials conversationally observed to the ambassador that Chinese clothing was better than Western, ‘on account of its not impeding or obstructing … genuflexions and prostrations … They therefore apprehended much inconvenience to us from our knee-buckles and garters, and hinted to us that it would be better to disencumber ourselves of them before we should go to Court.’9 By the beginning of September, with no solution to British intransigence in sight, the emperor himself ordered a reduction in the rations offered to the British to ‘persuade’ them to comply with imperial ritual.10 When Macartney and the mandarins were not arguing about the major issue of whether the British would kowtow to the emperor, they nitpicked over whether Macartney’s offerings to Qianlong were ‘presents’ or ‘tribute’. Macartney insisted they were presents from the ambassador of a diplomatic equal; just as firmly, Qianlong maintained that Macartney was no more than a subordinate ‘conveyor of tribute’.11
Even if the British had submitted to Chinese protocol, however, it is far from certain they would have obtained anything more from Qianlong than they did (namely, a few auspiciously shaped lumps of jade, boxes of china and lengths of cloth, some of which appeared to be recycled items of tribute from Korean, Muslim and Burmese vassals). Two years later, a far more tractable Dutch embassy visited China whose members kowtowed at the drop of a hat, or rather a wig (the Dutch ambassador van Braam elicited hoots of Chinese laughter when his wig fell off as he kowtowed to the emperor on a frosty roadside). Although the truculently unbending British were, according to the mission’s comptroller, John Barrow, given accommodation in Beijing ‘fitter for hogs than for human creatures’, the complaisant Dutch fared little better, housed in a stable, with carthorses for company.12 True, the British embassy had their rations cut after the kowtow row heightened, but they at least were never insulted with meat on bones that looked to have been already gnawed, as were the Dutch, who speculated that they were perhaps the emperor’s leftovers. The Dutch kowtowed on thirty separate occasions, often at unseasonable hours in freezing temperatures, without, a gloating Barrow noted, ‘gaining … one earthly thing’ except for some ‘little purses, flimsey silks, and a coarse stuff somewhat similar to that known by seamen under the name of bunting’.13 Worse still, bored Chinese officials appear to have taken cynical advantage of Dutch willingness to kowtow to the imperial presence, making their visitors prostrate themselves in turn to some pastry, a few raisins and a premasticated sheep’s leg, on the grounds that they were gifts sent by the emperor himself.
After this spectacular diplomatic failure, it should come as no surprise that the travel memoirs of members of the British embassy were less than complimentary towards China. Travels in China by Barrow, later founder of the Royal Geographical Society, strikes the typically peevish tone of the discontented Briton abroad. Chinese dramas were ‘gross and vulgar’, Chinese music ‘an aggregation of harsh sounds’, Chinese acrobatics disappointing: ‘A boy climbed up a pole or bamboo 30 or 40 feet high, played several gambols, and balanced himself on the top of it in various attitudes,’ he reported a curmudgeonly Macartney as commenting, ‘but his performance fell far short of what I have often met with in India of the same kind.’14 And as for sanitary facilities, ‘There is not a water closet, nor a decent place of retirement in all China.’15 Only one thing met with universal British approval: the Great Wall.
Macartney and his company made use of their lengthy waiting time in China to undertake a little tourism. En route in his neat English postchaise to meet the emperor in Jehol, Macartney stopped at the Gubeikou pass north-east of Beijing to have a closer look at the wall. This is exhibition Great Wall country, providing the kind of vistas that had even the haughty British filling their journals with superlatives: walls and towers snaking over the spines of cloud-dappled mountains, brushed with green scrub in summer (as Macartney would have witnessed), dusted with snow in winter. Arriving at a breach in the construction, Macartney observed it to be of ‘blueish coloured brick’, twenty-six feet high, about five feet thick and strengthened by square towers built at 150- to 200-foot intervals. Altogether, he used up two whole pages of his journal (as it now stands in modern published form) precisely recording the depth of its foundations, the number of rows of bricks counted, the thickness of the mortar, and so on. ‘It is carried on in a curvilinear direction often over the steepest highest and craggiest mountains as I observed in several places, and measures upwards of one thousand five hundred miles in length.’ Staggered by what he saw, Macartney proclaimed the whole thing ‘the most stupendous work of human hands’.16 His fellow visitor Barrow, who clearly had too little to keep him otherwise occupied, racked his brains for spurious and unverified comparisons to evoke the grandiosity of the construction. The amount of stone in the wall, Barrow asserted, was equivalent to ‘all the dwelling-houses of England and Scotland’:
Nor are the projecting massy towers of stone and brick included in this calculation. These alone, supposing them to continue throughout at bow-shot distance, were calculated to contain as much masonry and brickwork as all London. To give another idea of the mass of matter in this stupendous fabric, it may be observed, that it is more than sufficient to surround the circumference of the earth on two of its great circles, with two walls, each six feet high and two feet thick!17
Another member of the party, Lieutenant Henry William Parish, busied himself producing equally fanciful and romantic paintings of the wall festooning bosomy hills as far as the horizon stretched, interrupted by artistically ruined towers, their square stone edges becomingly frayed.18 All the British tourists were unhesitatingly unanimous in dating the wall they saw as 2,000 years old; given the presence of small holes apparently designed for wall-mounted firearms, they marvelled at the early Chinese use of gunpowder, ‘for all their writing agree that this wall was built above two hundred years before the Christian era’.19 ‘At the remote period of its building,’ gushed Macartney in conclusion, ‘China must have been not only a very powerful empire, but a very wise and virtuous nation, or at least to have had such foresight and such regard for posterity as to establish at once what was then thought a perpetual security for them against future invasion…’20
Macartney’s visit marks a crucial episode in the modern history of both China and the Great Wall, his experiences and reactions helping to construct the view of the wall that is still widely, if erroneously, held today. Macartney encountered and identified two Great Walls: the physical, bricks-and-mortar version now familiar to millions of appreciative tourists, built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries AD, and the mental wall that the Chinese state had built around itself to repel foreign influences and to control and encircle the Chinese people within. His admiration for China’s physical wall, together with his frustration at the mental wall, were to become typical of nineteenth-century Western politicians, merchants and adventurers eager to trade with China. Macartney and his fellow tourists helped begin the construction of the Great Wall of China as we now see it.
When the Chinese empire’s disdain for trading with the West underwent very little change of its own accord in the half-century following Macartney’s visit, Western resentment of the invisible wall erupted into gunboat diplomacy: the Opium Wars of 1840–42. By 1800, the British thought they had found a perfect solution to their tea-trade deficit, the ideal product to give China something to do with all its British silver: Indian opium. The Chinese government thought otherwise, banning opium in 1829 and, when drug-smuggling increased, dispatching a commissioner, Lin Zexu, to Canton to stop the illegal trade. After neither Chinese nor British merchants took any notice of his order to destroy opium stocks, he took action himself and flushed a year’s supply of opium into the sea. The British retaliated by shelling Canton; war was declared. Forty-seven years after Macartney’s failed approach, Sir Thomas Staunton, the son of his second-in-command – in 1793 a twelve-year-old whose fluency in Chinese had charmed the emperor into personally presenting him with a yellow silk purse from his own belt, in 1840 MP for Portsmouth – stood up in Parliament and argued for blowing open the gates to trade with China by force. The Opium War, he argued, ‘is absolutely just and necessary under existing conditions’.21
The Chinese emperor was hubristically underprepared for the conflict, firmly believing that if Westerners were ‘deprived of China’s tea and rhubarb for a few days, they would suffer constipation and a loss of vision that would endanger their lives’.22 In the event, despite the war’s interruption of three years’ tea-trading, the British remained sufficiently robust in health to bombard south China into submission, and to negotiate the Chinese out of 27 million silver dollars and Hong Kong. The Opium War was the prelude to further nineteenth-century acts of aggression against China in the name of free trade and openness: the sack of Beijing by French and English soldiers, the annexation of north China by the Russians, the cessation of the New Territories to Hong Kong.
Notes
1 J. L. Cranmer-Byng (ed.), An Embassy to China Being the Journal Kept by Lord Macartney during his Embassy to the Emperor Ch’ien-lung, 1793–94 (London: Longmans, 1962), p. 10.
2 Alain Peyrefitte, The Collision of Two Civilisations: The British Expedition to China in 1792–4, trans. Jon Rothschild (London: Harvill, 1993), p. 275.
3 Ibid., p. 150.
4 Ibid., p. 291.
5 Cranmer-Byng, An Embassy, pp. 103–4.
6 Peyrefitte, The Collision, p. 76.
7 Ibid., p. 13.
8 Ibid., p. 210.
9 Cranmer-Byng, An Embassy, p. 84.
10 Peyrefitte, The Collision, p. 207.
11 Ibid., p. 88.
12 Sir John Barrow, Travels in China (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1806), pp. 107, 11 respectively.
13 Ibid., pp. 214–17.
14 Ibid., pp. 224, 315, 204.
15 Ibid., p. 333.
16 Cranmer-Byng, An Embassy, pp. 111–12.
17 Barrow, Travels, pp. 334–45.
18 See folio edition of Sir George Leonard Staunton, An authentic account of an embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China … (London: G. Nicol, 1798).
19 Cranmer-Byng, An Embassy, p. 112.
20 Ibid.
21 Peyrefitte, The Collision, p. xxxi.
22 Ibid., p. 526.
“Julia Lovell has built a watch tower which looks over the Great Wall and views China's past and present, image and reality, national pride and national losses with fresh understanding.”
—Xinran, author of The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices
“Lovell tells the gripping, colorful story of the wall up to the present day, including a perceptive discussion of the 'Great Firewall'—the Internet, which has replaced nomadic raiders as the most threatening of China's attackers.”
—Publishers Weekly
