Foreign Relations of Imperial China - Qing Dynasty

Qing Dynasty

One issue facing Western embassies to China was the act of prostration known as the kowtow. Western diplomats understood that kowtowing meant accepting the superiority of the Emperor of China over their own monarchs, an act which they found unacceptable.

In 1665, Russian explorers met the Manchus in what is today northeastern China. Using the common language of Latin, which the Chinese knew from Jesuit missionaries, the Chinese emperor, Kangxi, and Russian tsar, Peter I, negotiated the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, which delineated the borders between Russia and China, some of which exists to this day.

Russia was not dealt with through the Ministry of Tributary Affairs, but rather through the same ministry as the problematic Mongols, which served to acknowledge Russia's status as a nontributary nation. From then on, the Chinese worldview of all other nations as tributaries began to unravel.

In 1793, the Qianlong emperor rejected an offer of expanded trade and foreign relations by the British diplomat George Macartney.

Neither the Europeans nor the Chinese could have known that a Dutch embassy would turn out to be the last occasion in which any European appeared before the Chinese Court within the context of traditional Chinese imperial foreign relations.

Representing Dutch and Dutch East India Company interests, Isaac Titsingh traveled to Beijing in 1794-96 for celebrations marking the sixtieth anniversary of the Qianlong Emperor's reign. The Titsingh delegation also included the Dutch-American Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest, whose detailed description of this embassy to the Chinese court was soon after published in the U.S. and Europe. Titsingh's French translator, Chrétien-Louis-Joseph de Guignes published his own account of the Titsingh mission in 1808. Voyage a Pékin, Manille et l'Ile de France provided an alternate perspective and a counterpoint to other reports which were then circulating. Titsingh himself died before he could publish his version of events.

The Chinese world view changed very little during the Qing Dynasty as China's sinocentric perspectives continued to be informed and reinforced by deliberate policies and practices designed to minimize any evidence of its growing weakness and West's evolving power. After the Titsingh mission, no further non-Asian ambassadors were allowed even to approach the Qing capital until the consequences of the First and Second Opium Wars changed everything.