The Qianlong emperor’s letter to George III and the early-twentieth-century origins of ideas about traditional China’s foreign relations

This article examines the famous edict in which the Qianlong emperor responded to the British embassy led by Lord Macartney to China in 1793, which has often been interpreted as a symbol of the Qing dynasty’s ignorance and narrow-mindedness. An examination of a wider range of archival documents suggests that the quotation does not reflect the Qianlong emperor’s response to the British embassy, which was primarily to see it as a security threat, but rather eighteenth-century British concerns with protocol and their influence on Chinese and Western scholars in the early twentieth century, when the letter first began to circulate widely. The focus here is on Chen Yuan, Shen Jianshi, Xu Baoheng, and other scholars who edited the first volumes of published materials to emerge from the Qing archives, as well as Jiang Tingfu, Deng Siyu, and John K. Fairbank, who used these materials to create a lasting narrative of the Qing. Looking at how the letter has been interpreted illustrates both the role of archivists as co-creators of history and the extent to which many of our ideas about Qing history are still shaped by the tumultuous politics of China’s early twentieth century