“The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China” by Tonio Andrade

The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China, Tonio Andrade (Princeton University Press, June 2021)

Academic books, thank goodness, are getting better and better these days, as professors seem to have realized that readability piques interest far more than pretentiously dense, jargon-ridden prose appealing mostly to purveyors of the same product, and which dismay students who have to read it. Granted, not every academic can write decently—anyone who has struggled through Hegel’s Philosophy of Right can attest to that—but some of them don’t even try to communicate outside their learned boxes, scribbling happily away for an audience of five.

Tonio Andrade, professor of Chinese and Global History at Emory University in Atlanta, certainly isn’t one of these; The Last Embassy is, to my mind, one of the best academic studies in terms of both scholarship and writing-style I have read in ten years or more of reviewing them, and lately there have been some very good ones indeed. It is an accessible, exciting, and illuminating book, written with consummate verve and enthusiasm, but nonetheless scholarly, drawing on a rich mine of Dutch, English, Spanish, Korean and Chinese primary sources, as well as having a broad awareness of the best modern scholarship in the area.

One thing the Dutch mission agrees on, is that they don’t like Chinese food very much.

Andrade chooses to write in the present tense, something one doesn’t often see in academic works, and which some scholarly readers are likely to find either eccentric or even unacceptable. They shouldn’t; everyone likes a good story told by a good storyteller, and the adventures of Isaac Titsingh (1745-1812), Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckegeest (1739-1801) and their secretary Chrétien-Louis-Joseph de Guignes (1759-1845) in China provide just that. They are all interesting people, too, whose journals and letters tell a good story, full of detail and frequently laced with criticism or humor. Andrade, himself a splendidly-skilled raconteur, acknowledges that writing in the present tense “seemed to provide a sense of immediacy and intimacy, but also, oddly of distance.” For him, the past tense seems “authoritative”, presumably because it suggests that the historian (or his persona) is controlling the narrative like an “omniscient” narrator in a novel. The present, he tells us, “makes more apparent the historian’s act of imagining” as he constructs a past world from historical sources. The latter were permitted to “occupy my imagination,” he explains, “to find the particulars that might bring a scene alive.” The present tense, as we read this book, makes us feel we are in the pockets of the two principal protagonists as they travel hundreds of miles across unfamiliar countryside and then, exhausted by their long journey and its vicissitudes, have to end up dealing with the complex rituals and practices of Emperor Qianlong’s court.

The three principal members of the Dutch mission, moreover, often have different views of the same situations, which makes the narrative even more gripping. One thing they all agree on, at least most of the time, is that they don’t like Chinese food very much. In Beijing, the emperor often “honours” them by sending them food from his own table, which of course they must at least make a pretence of enjoying. “It’s impossible to imagine anything like this,” Titsingh writes of one such occasion:

 

Carved-off chunks, that, among us, would be thrown to the dogs, a few little cakes of white dough boiled in water, and some Chinese banket<fn>a sort of Dutch pastry</fn> prepared with pork lard … before which we were obliged to make a compliment.

 

They give it to the servants, “who greedily grabbed it and prized it greatly.” Van Braam, described by Andrade as “obsessed” with China (as Titsingh was with Japan), gets into more details, describing “a bit of the ribs, upon which was hardly the thickness of half an inch of lean flesh,” and other bones “appearing to have been already gnawed,” and “all this disgusting collection was on a dirty dish and seemed rather fitting for the meal of a dog than the repast of a man.” Unlike Titsingh, he puts a philosophical slant on it all. “Perhaps it was even the leavings of the Monarch,” he explains, “and in that case, according to the opinion of the Chinese, it was the greatest favor that could be confirmed,” concluding that “since we had it our power to gnaw the bone that his Majesty had began to clean,” it really must be meant as a great honour.

The Dutch made a much more favorable impression on Qianlong than Macartney had.

What were the Dutch doing in China? The year 1795 marked the sixtieth anniversary of the Qianlong emperor’s accession, and they were there to help celebrate it as well as strengthening diplomatic relations with China. Two years earlier, Lord Macartney, a former Governor of Madras, had been in Beijing with a British mission, but it had failed to make much of an impression, and Macartney had been packed off home quite smartly. Nevertheless, this is the European encounter with China that has received most attention, not the much more successful Dutch one, and this historiographical defect is the reason for Andrade’s book.

The Dutch, who, unlike the British, were not there primarily for trading purposes, had made a much more favorable impression on Qianlong than Macartney had, and ambassador Titsingh himself, the leader of the delegation, believed he had done exactly what his superiors in Holland (the Dutch East India Company) had asked him to do. In any case, it was not a failure at all. The English, on the other hand, wanted to present the Dutch mission as a disaster, and some of them who had been with Macartney actively sought to discredit Titsingh and van Braam. They sneered that the Dutch had been too pliant in their observing Chinese customs and rites, such as kowtowing, which Macartney claimed he had refused to do (although Chinese accounts said that he did), and that the Chinese had deliberately humiliated the gullible Dutch to show their superiority. John Barrow, for example, who had been Macartney’s “house manager,” wrote about their “tame and passive obedience to the degrading demands of this haughty court.” The British, of course, believed from the outset that they were the superior civilization; it was Macartney, after all, who boasted about “this vast empire on which the sun never sets.” His rather more prescient comment on China was that it was like “an old, crazy, first-rate man-of-war,” that would eventually fall to pieces after muddling along for a number of years.

Andrade’s point is that the English actually provoked a “culture clash” by their own haughtiness and ignorance of Chinese ways, whereas Isaac Titsingh, an expert in Eastern diplomacy and customs, knew exactly how to behave, and didn’t have any trouble kowtowing. “Titsingh and his fellow travellers accepted Qing etiquette and proved adept at negotiating court interactions,” Andrade writes. He had been twice to Japan at the court of the shogun in Edo and was a lifelong scholar of Japanese history and culture. His seminal book, Illustrations of Japan, would appear in a French translation some years after his death, followed in 1822 by an English one done from the French, but was not published in Dutch until 1824. However, its thoroughness and scholarship showed that Titsingh was no amateur, and that he was a consummate observer, as free from prejudice as his times allowed, and this attitude was carried on with his China visit, which he considered had been very successful. Van Braam, too, who loves patterns and arrangements, is often enthusiastic about what he sees; when he visits some gardens at Yangzhou, for example, demonstrating a knowledge of what the poet Robert Herrick called “delight in disorder,” or perhaps his version of Japanese wabi sabi (beauty in imperfection), he writes,

 

What plan can show the order of that which is only perfect because destitute of all order? What drawing can produce the effect of things which seem so discordant…?

 

De Guignes, for his part, “was obsessed with his own status,” and consequently provides a sort of counter-narrative, but, says Andrade, “he’s great company for a historian—his observations are sharp, bitter, and funny,” and if he does like something, he says so. And there were plenty of things not to like—accommodations were sometimes awful, officials were sometimes corrupt, transport was unreliable and uncomfortable. We hear of several instances where de Guignes and others were left stranded in their palanquins in the middle of muddy roads, or where the escorting Chinese rush in and grab the good food before the Dutch can eat. We are also told about a man they called “the screamer” who woke them up too early in the morning for imperial audiences—as de Guignes wrote,

 

he yells his head off in such a way that even those of us who aren’t obliged to go to court are woken up … He always comes two hours too early.

 

In the end, it was understood by the Dutch that in most cases the Chinese were simply treating them the way they treated each other. The (mostly) positive attitude demonstrated by the Dutch contributed much to their success, and it was noticed by the Chinese. As Andrade puts it, writing of the 1795 New Year celebrations, “the emperor and his courtiers seem to really like the Dutch, and invite them to many events during this busy holiday season.” The emperor himself is described by Andrade as “obsessed with his own worth” a little like de Guignes, but, also like him, is “good company,” as well as being “erudite and thoughtful, a lover of poetry, and a kind and generous host.” It’s unlikely that the British would wholly have agreed, although in all fairness Aeneas Anderson, Macartney’s valet, had a good deal of praise for some aspects of China; he liked some of the food, in particular the cakes, which he said were “more agreeable to the palate than any I remember to have tasted in England, or in any other country.”

Contrary to popular belief, the Chinese were not intellectually isolated from the rest of the world.

The most important aspect of Andrade’s book is the way he (via the accounts of Titsingh and his colleagues) upends a great deal of the generalizations that Europeans tended to make about China and, indeed, the way it was thought Europeans actually thought of China and the Qing rulers in particular. Contrary to popular belief, the Chinese were not intellectually isolated from the rest of the world; Qianlong in particular welcomed the idea of having foreigners attend his jubilee celebrations. The Dutch, like other Europeans, were “exotic”, and, unlike the British, they weren’t threatening. Andrade noted that Qianlong regarded Britain, and hence its delegation, as an “aggressive” power, and their attitude towards Chinese court etiquette didn’t help them at all. “The Macartney mission,” Andrade says, “became part of a story they told about Chinese intransigence,” and eventually it was felt that “China must be brought—forcibly if necessary—into the Western international system.” You couldn’t have diplomatic relations with a country which didn’t treat you as an equal and insisted formally that your delegations were “tributary”.

Andrade argues tellingly that the Qing were not by any means ignorant of the rest of the world, and that they were well aware that they needed, in an increasingly globalized context, to deal with the people they had looked upon as “barbarians”. The cosmopolitan Qianlong and his advisers knew that the Dutch weren’t the British, and in any case Titsingh was not in China to ask for trading privileges or diplomatic relations, merely to congratulate the emperor on his sixtieth regnal year, which of course appealed to the emperor’s sense of self-importance, not to mention his love of parties, but, as Andrade shows us, there’s a great deal more to the story than egotistical display. Qianlong himself worried about whether the celebrations were appropriate and wondered whether “this borders on egotism and self satisfaction,” as he wrote in an edict, but in the end, of course, he allowed the party to go on. “This book is designed to provide both an immersive narrative and a historical argument,” writes the author in a note to the reader; Andrade succeeds admirably in both his objectives, and he has brought back into focus, via the vivid narratives of both himself and his subjects, Qing China and the Dutch mission itself, its significance ably restored.


John Butler recently retired as Associate Professor of Humanities at the University College of the North in The Pas, Manitoba, Canada, and has taught at universities in Canada, Nigeria and Japan. He specializes in early modern travel-literature (especially Asian travel) and seventeenth-century intellectual history. His books include an edition of Sir Thomas Herbert’s Travels in Africa, Persia and Asia the Great (2012) and most recently an edition of Sir Paul Rycaut's Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1667) and a book of essays, Off the Beaten Track: Essays on Unknown Travel Writers.