Download or read book Notes of Proceedings and Occurrences during the British Embassy to Pekin in 1816 written by George Thomas Staunton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-28 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sir George Thomas Staunton (1781-1859), Sinologist and politician, was a key figure in Anglo-Chinese relations, as had been his father. In 1798 he began working for the British East India Company in Canton (Guangzhou), where he was the only Englishman who could understand Chinese, having begun learning it as a child. By 1815, British trade with China was worth over £4 million in tea duties alone, and there was immense pressure for the Chinese to relax their restrictions. In 1816, following earlier failed missions, an embassy, including Staunton as second commissioner, was organised to seek better trading conditions and to press the emperor for the opening up of a second harbour. Chinese mistrust and British arrogance led to the failure of the embassy, with no imperial audience given. This account, privately published in 1824, is a valuable document in the understanding of the historical background to Britain's relationship with China into the twentieth century.
Download or read book Notes of Proceedings and Occurences During the British Embassy to Pekin in 1816 by George Thomas Staunton written by Sir George Thomas Staunton and published by . This book was released on 1824 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Notes of Proceedings and Occurrences During the British Embassy to Pekin in 1816 For Private Circulation Only written by George Thomas Staunton and published by . This book was released on 1824 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Britain and the China Trade 1635 1842 written by and published by . This book was released on 1824 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Notes of Proceedings and Occurrences During the British Embassy to Pekin in 1816 written by Sir George Thomas Staunton and published by . This book was released on 1824 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Chinese dreams in Romantic England written by Edward Weech and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant polymath and part of the 'first wave' of British Romanticism, Thomas Manning was one of the first Englishmen to study Chinese language and culture. Like famous friends including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb, Manning was inspired by the French Revolution and had ambitious plans for making a better world. While his contemporaries turned to the poetic imagination and the English countryside, Manning looked further afield – to China, one of the world’s most ancient and sophisticated civilizations. In 1790s Britain, China was terra incognita. Manning undertook a quest to learn the secrets of its language and culture. His travels included the salons of Napoleonic Paris, a period as a prisoner of war, a dramatic shipwreck and, disguised as a Buddhist pilgrim, a trek through the Himalayas to Tibet, where he met the Dalai Lama. But when he returned to England, his ideas confronted an increasingly Sinophobic climate and he failed to publish the grand work his peers had expected for so long. After his death, his outward-looking vision was eclipsed by the English-rural poetic vision of Romanticism, and he was forgotten. Manning’s extraordinary story, here told in full for the first time using recently discovered archival sources, sheds a new light on English Romanticism and the course of cultural exchange between Britain and Asia at the dawn of the nineteenth century.
Download or read book Asian Empire and British Knowledge written by U. Hillemann and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-10-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British knowledge about China changed fundamentally in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather than treating these changes in British understanding as if Anglo-Sino relations were purely bilateral, this study looks at how British imperial networks in India and Southeast Asia were critical mediators in the British encounter of China.
Download or read book Creating the Opium War written by Hao Gao and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-20 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Creating the Opium War examines British imperial attitudes towards China during their early encounters from the Macartney embassy to the outbreak of the Opium War – a deeply consequential event which arguably reshaped relations between China and the West in the next century. It makes the first attempt to bring together the political history of Sino-western relations and the cultural studies of British representations of China, as a new way of explaining the origins of the conflict. The book focuses on a crucial period (1792–1840), which scholars such as Kitson and Markley have recently compared in importance to that of American and French Revolutions. By examining a wealth of primary materials, some in more detail than ever before, this study reveals how the idea of war against China was created out of changing British perceptions of the country.
Download or read book Early Encounters between East Asia and Europe written by Ralf Hertel and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While inquiries into early encounters between East Asia and the West have traditionally focused on successful interactions, this collection inquires into the many forms of failure, experienced on all sides, in the period before 1850. Countering a tendency in scholarship to overlook unsuccessful encounters, it starts from the assumption that failures can prove highly illuminating and provide valuable insights into both the specific shapes and limitations of East Asian and Western imaginations of the Other, as well as of the nature of East-West interaction. Interdisciplinary in outlook, this collection brings together the perspectives of sinology, Japanese and Korean studies, historical studies, literary studies, art history, religious studies, and performance studies. The subjects discussed are manifold and range from missionary accounts, travel reports, letters and trade documents to fictional texts as well as material objects (such as tea, chinaware, or nautical instruments) exchanged between East and West. In order to avoid a Eurocentric perspective, the collection balances approaches from the fields of English literature, Spanish studies, Neo-Latin studies, and art history with those of sinology, Japanese studies, and Korean studies. It includes an introduction mapping out the field of failures in early modern encounters between East Asia and Europe, as well as a theoretically minded essay on the lessons of failure and the ethics of cross-cultural understanding.
Download or read book Imperial Twilight written by Stephen R. Platt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the nineteenth-century Opium War. As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable—and mostly peaceful—meeting of civilizations that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American characters, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.
Download or read book Britain s Second Embassy to China written by Caroline Stevenson and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lord Amherst’s diplomatic mission to the Qing Court in 1816 was the second British embassy to China. The first led by Lord Macartney in 1793 had failed to achieve its goals. It was thought that Amherst had better prospects of success, but the intense diplomatic encounter that greeted his arrival ended badly. Amherst never appeared before the Jiaqing emperor and his embassy was expelled from Peking on the day it arrived. Historians have blamed Amherst for this outcome, citing his over-reliance on the advice of his Second Commissioner, Sir George Thomas Staunton, not to kowtow before the emperor. Detailed analysis of British sources reveal that Amherst was well informed on the kowtow issue and made his own decision for which he took full responsibility. Success was always unlikely because of irreconcilable differences in approach. China’s conduct of foreign relations based on the tributary system required submission to the emperor, thus relegating all foreign emissaries and the rulers they represented to vassal status, whereas British diplomatic practice was centred on negotiation and Westphalian principles of equality between nations. The Amherst embassy’s failure revised British assessments of China and led some observers to believe that force, rather than diplomacy, might be required in future to achieve British goals. The Opium War of 1840 that followed set a precedent for foreign interference in China, resulting in a century of ‘humiliation’. This resonates today in President Xi Jinping’s call for ‘National Rejuvenation’ to restore China’s historic place at the centre of a new Sino-centric global order.
Download or read book Notes of Proceedings During the British Embassy to Pekin in 1816 written by George Thomas Staunton (Sinologe, Diplomat) and published by . This book was released on 1824 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Anglo Chinese Encounters Before the Opium War written by Xin Liu and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-12 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anglo-Chinese Encounters Before the Opium War: A Tale of Two Empires Over Two Centuries studies the fascinating encounters between the two historic empires from Queen Elizabeth I’s first letter to the Ming Emperor Wanli in 1583, to Lord Palmerston’s letter to the Minister of China in 1840. Starting with Queen Elizabeth I’s letter to the Chinese Emperor and ending with the letter from Lord Palmerston to the Minister of China just before the Opium War, this book explores the long journey in between from cultural diplomacy to gunboat diplomacy. It interweaves the most known diplomatic efforts at the official level with the much unknown intellectual interactions at the people-to-people level, from missionaries to scholars, from merchants to travelers and from artists to scientists. This book adopts a novel "mirror" approach by pairing and comparing people, texts, commodities, artworks, architecture, ideologies, operating systems and world views of the two empires. Using letters, gifts and traded goods as fulcrums, and by adopting these unique lenses, it puts China into the world history narratives to contextualise Anglo-Chinese relations, thus providing a fresh analysis of the surviving evidence. Xin Liu casts a new light on understanding the Sino-centric and Anglo-centric world views in driving the complex relations between the two empires, and the reversals of power shifts that are still unfolding today. The book is not intended for specialists in history, but a general audience wishing to learn more about China’s historical engagement with the world.
Download or read book Writing China written by Peter J. Kitson and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2016 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New essays on the cultural representations of the relationship between Britain and China in the nineteenth century, focusing on the Amherst diplomatic problem.
Download or read book Canton Days written by John M. Carroll and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-02-12 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Canton Days offers the first comprehensive history of the British community in China from the mid-1700s to the end of the Opium War in 1842. During that period, Britons and other Westerners in China were restricted to trading and living in a tiny section of the city of Canton and the small Portuguese territory of Macao. At Canton, trade between China and the West was conducted through a group of Chinese merchant houses specially licensed by the Qing government. British encounters with China in this period have been seen mainly as a prelude to war, and Britons in China usually have been characterized as single-minded traders determined to open the Middle Kingdom by any means or missionaries bent on converting the Chinese “heathen” to Christianity. John M. Carroll challenges common assumptions about the British presence in China as he traces the lives and times of the expatriates at the heart of this vital center of trade and exchange. The author draws on a rich trove of archival sources to bring Canton and its leading figures to life, concluding with the deaths of three Britons, each revealing British concerns and anxieties about being in China. Written in a clear and lively style, his book will appeal to all readers interested in British imperial history, early modern Chinese history, and the worlds of expatriate and sojourning communities.
Download or read book The British Presence in Macau 1635 1793 written by Rogério Miguel Puga and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than four centuries, Macau was the centre of Portuguese trade and culture on the South China Coast. Until the founding of Hong Kong and the opening of other ports in the 1840s, it was also the main gateway to China for independent British merchants and their only place of permanent residence. Drawing extensively on Portuguese as well as British sources, The British Presence in Macau traces Anglo-Portuguese relations in South China from the first arrival of English trading ships in the 1630s to the establishment of factories at Canton, the beginnings of the opium trade, and the Macartney Embassy of 1793. The British and Portuguese—longstanding allies in the West—pursued more complex relations in the East, as trading interests clashed under a Chinese imperial system and as the British increasingly asserted their power as “a community in search of a colony”.
Download or read book The history of British India written by James Mill and published by . This book was released on 1858 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
