Qianlong Emperor accepts MaCartney mission

The Macartney mission was Great Britain's initial attempt to gain commercial access to China in 1793, however the Qianlong Emperor rejected the envoy, saying that China already had everything that it needed and basically told Macartney to shove it.

China paid dearly for this years later, as it turned out China did not have everything that it needed, mainly, modern military technology.

Anyhow, the premise of this POD is what if the Qianlong Emperor accepted Lord Macartney's mission, and full trade relations were established with Britain? Would open trade have prevented or at least moderated the decline of the Qing and that China would not have had to suffer the embarassments of the Opium War and Imperialist encroachment?
 
I don't know much about it, but I suppose that China could handle being economically dependent on the British if it meant not having to suffer adventurers and missionaries from every Western nation there is, could it not?

The question would be, could Britain resist sending/allowing adventurers to (try) to pull an India (though I guess given the POD that isn't a good way to phrase it!) on China? If it could and exchanged order for economic exploitation, then it would probably a relationship that would last to this day, wouldn't it?
 
One of our members is getting a command performance by Paul McCartney!? :eek:

...Er...

It's really hard to do, though; the problem isn't that Europe doesn't have things China needs. If nothing else, it has precious metals, which the Chinese were always happy to trade their produce for. The problem is that the Imperial Chinese mindset doesn't include "normal relations" in the European sense of the word. All states on earth are more-or-less rebellious tributaries of the Dragon Throne, full stop. There's this pretty much unbridgeable gap in worldview there which isn't going to go away until one thrashes the other in a war - and given the way things were going in the 18th C, the winner sooner or later was always going to be the Europeans. Qianlong Emperor has to not only be a different person, he has to have a whole different cultural milieu around him to "accept" McCartney's mission, as you so blithely put it.
 

Thande

Donor
What Captain Zed said. Oddly enough I was reading MacCartney's journal of his expedition just the other day...
 
What Captain Zed said. Oddly enough I was reading MacCartney's journal of his expedition just the other day...

Which half of what I said? ;)

MacCartney was the one who refused to kowtow, right? I read this funny story about the Dutch mission that came a couple of years later - they took the opposite tack, kowtowing every chance they got. One of the junior members kept a diary and recorded, somewhat annoyedly, that they kowtowed something like 84 times (I forget the exact figure) in the week they were near the emperor. Didn't avail them any more, obviously.
 

Thande

Donor
MacCartney was the one who refused to kowtow, right? I read this funny story about the Dutch mission that came a couple of years later - they took the opposite tack, kowtowing every chance they got. One of the junior members kept a diary and recorded, somewhat annoyedly, that they kowtowed something like 84 times (I forget the exact figure) in the week they were near the emperor. Didn't avail them any more, obviously.

Exactly. As you say, there was simply this gulf in worldviews that could not have been solved by anything other than a war or perhaps a revolution in China.
 
Perhaps China would have to be less successful in its large conquests of land in Asia, and thus perhaps after the Qing armies have been humbled a bit, it might force them to reevaluate its military technology. Thus, once Macartney or some other European diplomat arrives, Qianlong would be more open to trade, and get his hands on some western technology.

Its still a long shot to be sure, but its the only thing I can think of thus far.
 
Perhaps China would have to be less successful in its large conquests of land in Asia, and thus perhaps after the Qing armies have been humbled a bit, it might force them to reevaluate its military technology. Thus, once Macartney or some other European diplomat arrives, Qianlong would be more open to trade, and get his hands on some western technology.

Its still a long shot to be sure, but its the only thing I can think of thus far.

Unfortunately I think you'd rather have to rewrite about 1-2,000 years of Chinese history to make them humble enough to accept the Europeans as equals.

I'm reminded of something I read that said the Macartney mission was as much about forming some kind of military agreement due to the French Revolutionary Wars ongoing at the time as it was about trade, though that was a long time ago and not necessarily accurate. Still, the idea of a million Chinese soldiers fighting under Wellesley in India is a rather humorous thought...
 
Unfortunately I think you'd rather have to rewrite about 1-2,000 years of Chinese history to make them humble enough to accept the Europeans as equals.
Not necessarily. More like the Chinese never took people who arrived by the sea seriously. The Manchus treated the Russians as equals in the Treaty of Nerchinsk. The Manchus even made embassies to Moscow, but these were pre-Peter the Great. If the Russian-Manchu conflicts had widened we might see more exchanges. The Qing Emperors would be kept abreast with Peter's reforms and perhaps learn some lessons from it. After all if a peer competitor took the British seriously enough for the Czar to go there in cognito to learn ship building, that would certainly be noted in the Qing court.
 
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