Eastern promises: the long and troubled history of Britain's relations with China

Often unappreciated and sometimes tucked out of sight, China’s contributions to British life today are nonetheless tangible – and largely positive. As these examples show, links between the two nations go back centuries. And, despite the fractious tone of the political relationship today, coloured by arguments about Hong Kong, human rights and espionage, much of that history involved people from both places discovering, appreciating and learning from each other.

When did the English first make contact with China?

The first English efforts to make formal contact with China came during the reign of Elizabeth I, who sent letters to the Chinese imperial court proposing trade. “We are borne and made to have need one of another, and that we are bound to aide one another,” the queen wrote in one missive.

None of her letters ever arrived, but China remained on the minds of English traders and merchants. And the East India Company, established in 1599–1600, made launching trade with the far east a key priority.

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One of the earliest recorded incidents between the nations relates to an argument in Bantam, west of what’s now Jakarta on the island of Java. A disgruntled trader, Edmund Scott, blamed his Chinese neighbour for a fire that blazed in his warehouse in May 1604. In a horrific description, he recounts how he took hot irons and pincers to the accused man, who nonetheless refused to confess – and was executed. “Between our men and the Hollanders, they shot him almost all to pieces before they left him,” Scott declared.

Unfortunately, such violence was the norm in that early era of contact. Britain, seeking new sources of wealth in the 17th and early 18th centuries, was eager to muscle in on the eastern markets and mysterious ancient lands of the Ming and, from 1644, Qing empires. These great realms were known to be places where spices, silk and other great riches might be found. However, China was largely closed to outsiders.

Who was allowed to work in China?

The only Europeans permitted to work there were Jesuits, and even they were ordered to leave in the 1720s. Most who engaged with China were not scholars or statespeople but sailors, traders and adventurers who had little time for the niceties of cultural empathy or building trust.

In 1637, English captain John Weddell sailed to the south China coast, where he was met with resistance, which turned violent. Eventually, local officials ordered Weddell and his ships to leave and never return. Peter Mundy, a trader and diarist on that voyage, left accounts of people using chopsticks and drinking a strange infusion he called ‘chaa’ (tea); he also wrote that “there are more people on the water than in the land”.

In 1720, Scottish surgeon and diplomat John Bell tagged along with a Russian delegation to “the celestial empire” of Qing. There he encountered a stretch of the Great Wall of China, reporting that: “Running from one high rock to another, with square towers at certain intervals, even at this distance, [it] is most magnificent.”

After an audience with the Kangxi Emperor – who had been on the Chinese throne for almost six decades since 1661, when he was just six years old – Bell commented on “the good nature and affability of this ancient monarch”.

How much business did the Chinese permit?

In the mid-18th century, East India Company merchants were finally allowed to conduct business in China, but in only one place: the port of Canton, today’s Guangzhou, on the Pearl river delta in the far south near Hong Kong. The British were frustrated by this restriction, because the goods they felt would be most worthwhile trading in China – woollen garments – were more suitable to the distant northern regions, and not so readily saleable in the balmy south.

In 1759, James Flint was sent on an illegal mission to Qing authorities in Tianjin, aiming to get restrictions lifted to allow British merchants to trade in other locations in China. He delivered a translation of his request to government offices – an act that was viewed dimly by Chinese authorities. Flint was arrested, sent back to Canton, imprisoned in Macau for three years and then ordered to leave the country, never to return.

It could have been worse; the Chinese man who translated his request was executed. Clearly, dialogue in those early decades of contact and trade was not always straightforward. But the enquiring nature of some Britons drove them to seek pathways into even the most remote areas.

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Having heard reports of trade possibilities with Tibet, then essentially under the control of Qing China, in 1774 Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal, despatched a young Scottish official, George Bogle, to investigate. Bogle’s wonderful account provides a superb example of benevolent curiosity, cultural understanding and empathy.

He wondered, for example, at the system of polyandry – in which a woman may have several husbands – practised by the Tibetans: men, he commented, “club together in matrimony as merchants do in trade”. He also built a warm relationship with the Panchen Lama – the second most senior religious leader in Tibet, after the Dalai Lama – who promised to intercede for the British on an imminent visit to Beijing.

The mission achieved some limited and temporary commercial gains, but it was another century and a quarter before Britain finally gained trading access to Tibet – using force, not diplomacy, during the British expedition of 1903/04.

How important was tea to British and Chinese relations?

By the end of the 18th century, Britain was importing vast quantities of tea from China. At first, most was sourced from secondary markets; it was heavily taxed, and smuggling was rife, so more formal connections were needed. In the 1780s, prime minister Pitt the Younger asked his chief confidant, Henry Dundas, to arrange the first-ever government-led mission to China.

An initial attempt in 1788 under Charles Allan Cathcart ended prematurely when he died soon after his ship left Britain. Then, in 1792, George Macartney – formerly an ambassador to the Russian court of Catherine the Great and a colonial governor in India – was selected to lead another delegation. He set off with a fleet of ships, one of them laden with gifts to impress the Chinese.

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Macartney’s mission marked one of the great moments of modern history. Described by some as a clash of civilisations, it brought the world’s fastest-industrialising and modernising country face to face with one of the oldest continuous cultures. Macartney was joined by William Alexander, an artist from Kent who produced beautiful sketches of the Chinese coast, and George Staunton, whose young son learned Chinese over the course of the mission and charmed the Qianlong Emperor with a few words in Mandarin. Botanists and scientists were also on board.

Macartney’s venture failed in its main aim – opening up trade across China. But it did accrue a vast amount of knowledge about a realm the British had been trying to penetrate for almost two centuries, but about which they understood little.

Macartney was just one of several men who wrote accounts about the trip. Another complained bitterly about the food, much like grumbling tourists today do worldwide. Some were amazed by Chinese architecture: the account of the overland journey back from Beijing to Canton by John Barrow, Macartney’s secretary, includes descriptions of the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing and the old bridges of Suzhou. Indeed, the antiquity of China impressed many.

What attempts were made to understand the Chinese language?

The language and writing, so different from European scripts, represented another source of fascination. Members of the Royal Society tasked the Macartney delegation with trying to establish whether Chinese was similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics – an idea that had first surfaced in a 1660s work claiming Noah’s Ark had landed in China after the biblical floods.

British understanding of Chinese languages was improved hugely thanks to the work of the greatest sinologist Britain has ever produced. Robert Morrison was a Protestant missionary sent to China in 1807 to convert the so-called ‘heathens’ to Christianity, but he proved more successful in linguistics. He compiled the first Chinese-to-English dictionary, published from 1815, then translated the Bible into Chinese. These extraordinary achievements were, of course, possibly only in collaboration with Chinese people who helped him despite stern edicts forbidding such cooperation.

Morrison’s work demonstrated the potential for a deeper kind of understanding and appreciation of China. Yet the century that followed reinforced the old adage: familiarity tended to breed contempt rather than deeper affinity.

How did the British react to Chinese culture?

In the second half of the 18th century, Britain had been in the thrall of all things Chinese, from wallpaper to building design; a new word, ‘chinoiserie’, was even coined to describe such fashions. That fascination was then replaced by a view of China as a backward country – buried in tradition, isolated from the wider world and unwilling to engage.

This perception of a fading empire was reinforced by the writing of John Barrow, who had been attached to the first British embassy to China. He suggested sourly in his 1804 account that it was a nation “worn out with old age and disease”.

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Still, Britain made efforts to grow closer to China, in 1834 sending its first formal representative, the unfortunate Lord Napier, appointed chief superintendent of trade at Canton. At the time, the relationship between China and Britain was largely dominated by traders such as Scotsmen William Jardine and James Matheson, who gleefully set out to exploit the opportunity that opened up when the East India Company’s monopoly on British-Chinese trade was ended in 1833.

Napier proved unpopular with the British residents in China, who felt that he was too soft on the locals, but also the Chinese, who resolutely opposed his attempts to speak not just to the designated traders but also to officials directly. His situation was typical of those experienced by many emissaries and diplomats since then. Napier was turfed out of Canton only a few months after his arrival, and died soon afterwards.

Did Britain and China go to war?

It wasn’t long before Sino-British relations deteriorated into full-scale conflict. Known to the Chinese as the Opium Wars, these were in fact not primarily about the drug, though vast quantities were being imported into China from India by the British with the aim of correcting the trade imbalance created by the export of tea and other goods.

The first war, fought 1839–42, was sparked by the arrival in Canton of an assertive official, Lin Zexu, sent from Beijing – to the horror of Napier’s successor, Charles Elliot. Lin’s mandate was to stop the contraband trade in opium, and he proceeded to impound goods, imprison foreign merchants associated with the trade, and generally rid the country of what was regarded as a debilitating scourge.

Plenty of people in Britain were sympathetic to this Chinese response to the trade. These included William Gladstone, who made a rousing speech in the House of Commons defending the Chinese for their actions.

• Read more | What caused the First Opium War?

Elliot himself was dismissed for what was perceived as a lack of aggression and decisiveness. His dispatches from the final weeks of his time in post often acknowledged that, in some respects at least, the Chinese may have had the right to take the actions they did. However, Britain had the will – and the means – to gain what it wanted. That, in the end, dictated everything else.

This war – really a series of skirmishes that ended in total victory for Britain, thanks to the superiority of its military technology and navy – left a searing mark on the Chinese. It is remembered in China today as the start of the so-called ‘century of humiliation’.

The Treaty of Nanjing that ended the war achieved the real aims of figures such as the British foreign secretary, Viscount Palmerston. Their concerns were not so much about the drug trade per se, but the general lack of access for British business in China; barriers preventing foreign officials from speaking directly to the Chinese government; and, primarily, the sense that Britain’s status as a great power was not being recognised by China. As well as addressing these issues, the treaty ceded Hong Kong to the British.

Who were key figures in Sino-British relations in the 19th century?

British involvement in China reached its peak in the mid-19th century, an era encapsulated in the actions of three figures. The first was maverick botanist Robert Fortune, who was involved in perhaps the most audacious act of intellectual property theft ever committed. Masquerading as a Chinese traveller, in the 1850s he stole tea plants and devised a way to grow them in British-run India – which is why so much tea drunk in Britain today originates from India.

The second key character at that time was the strange mystic Charles Gordon, who had participated in the looting of the Summer Palace by British and French forces in 1860, during the Second Opium War. He turned up again in 1863 to lead a group of foreign mercenaries, nicknamed the Ever Victorious Army, during the so-called Taiping Rebellion, a civil war that had been convulsing the country for 13 years.

The third of these influential British figures, Robert Hart, achieved a different kind of fame. From 1863, he ran the Imperial Maritime Customs – a unique system responsible not just for collecting import duties for the Chinese government, but also for establishing infrastructure such as lighthouses and for collecting statistics. Hart, the highest-ranking British person to serve as a Chinese official, maintained that position till 1911, by which time he was responsible for close to a third of the Qing’s revenue.

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Just as Britain has been influenced by these interactions, so too was China. It was introduced to key technologies, belief systems and processes of modernity, from railways to ideas around administration and finance, largely through British companies, officials or individuals.

Neither country would be the kind of place it is today without these three centuries of early engagement. That needs to be more wider recognised today, particularly in a time when there are such sharp disagreements between the two over values, rights and ideas of global order.

The situation changed as China became open on the world stage throughout the 20th century. The US, Japan and other powers grew more influential, and Britain’s role slowly receded. Hong Kong became the key focus, with colonial rule there maintained till 1997. Yet even today, in the 21st century, China ranks as among Britain’s largest and most important trading and economic partners. As we’ve seen, links between the two go back centuries – and their impacts on one another have been profound.

Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies at King’s College London, and author of The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power (Yale University Press, 2024)

This article was first published in the September 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine