In September 1792, Lord Macartney was sent on a mission to China to negotiate a treaty of trade and friendship. As Frances Wood has pointed out, ‘Macartney's was not the first embassy … to China’. Colonel Charles Cathcart had been despatched in 1788, but the expedition had to turn back when he died of tuberculosis off Sumatra. The East India Company (EIC) had lobbied the government for the two missions in the hope of further expanding its already enormous China trade. Apart from instructions to open more ports to British merchants (who were restricted to Canton) and to establish an ambassador in Beijing, Macartney also carried with him the offer of a military alliance against France. That three ships (the Lion, a 64-gun warship; the 1,200-ton Hindostan, owned by the EIC; and the Jackall, a brig) were committed to the expedition, despite the impending war, was ‘proof’ – in Alain Peyrefitte's words – ‘of its importance’.

Lord Macartney had an entourage of ninety-five, including

The expedition lasted two years, when China, heretofore largely closed to Britain, was suddenly open to direct observation by a veritable microcosm of British society. I offer a close reading of the body of texts generated by the British embassy, focusing on the observations of Yuanming Yuan (the Garden of Perfect Brightness) in Beijing as well as of Bishu Shanzhuang (the Mountain Resort) in Chengde (Jehol), where Wanshu Yuan (the Garden of Ten Thousand Trees) is located. Things Chinese were the rage then: Chinese pagodas were erected in aristocratic estates, Chinese ceramics decorated middle-class homes, and tea was replacing beer as the drink of choice at breakfast for the labouring classes.4 A Narrative of the British Embassy to China (1795), the first book-length narrative of the expedition, was avidly consumed. It was written by Macartney's valet, Aeneas Anderson.