The Amherst Embassy () was the second British mission sent to China after the Macartney Embassy, led by Lord Amherst. The immediate reason for dispatching the embassy was to resolve the trade dispute caused by the Doris incident, while its broader purpose was to improve Sino-British relations and promote British trading interests in China by seeking an audience with the Jiaqing Emperor. The embassy departed in February 1816, arrived in Guangdong in early July and joined the British East India Company Guangzhou factory, and reached Tianjin in early August. Because the Amherst Embassy still upheld the Macartney Embassy's diplomatic equality principle, it refused from beginning to end to perform the kowtow () before the emperor. This led to several days of disputes with Qing court and officials. As a result, on the day it arrived in Beijing, 29 August, the embassy was sent back by Jiaqing; after the embassy left, Jiaqing further issued an edict requiring Britain to "henceforth not send envoys from afar, which only causes unnecessary travel and hardship."
Accompanied by Qing official Guanghui, the embassy traveled southward roughly along the route of Macartney's time through China's interior to Guangzhou. What was seen and heard en route further led the British to recognize the . If the Macartney Embassy returned without achieving anything, then the Amherst Embassy ended in discord and was even more of a failure than the Macartney Embassy.... The Jiaqing court and officials became more vigilant afterward toward British schemes, but their understanding of British national strength and conditions remained limited, still using trade as leverage in policy toward Britain. After experiencing the successive failures of the Macartney Embassy and the Amherst Embassy, Britain more deeply recognized the current situation of Qing society and economy, and that relations with China could no longer be changed through diplomatic channels. Therefore, it no longer blindly complied with the various restrictions set by the Qing, and leaned more toward using force to safeguard its own trading interests. This also laid the groundwork for the later Opium War.
Background
Qing national power and foreign trade
Qing national power turned from prosperity to decline in the later Qianlong reign. Ordinary people generally faced poverty and hunger; the decline in people's livelihood further led to social unrest, with popular uprisings occurring one after another, and finances also becoming unsustainable. However, from the mid-to-late Qianlong period, the entire ruling class, driven by the emperor himself, began to shift from frugality to extravagance. Officials headed by Heshen engaged in rampant corruption, vigorously pursuing material enjoyment while being conservative and unenterprising in national politics, ignoring the increasingly severe social crisis. The succeeding Jiaqing, as a "ruler preserving the achievements," although he exhausted every means to clean up officialdom, still could not reverse the situation of gradually declining national power and an emptying treasury. Officials often complied in public but opposed in private or perfunctorily handled court orders. Lower-level clerks, with the indulgence of superiors and driven by interests, acted lawlessly and wantonly.
At the same time, Western powers were also gradually eroding the Qing's external environment: Russia had already invaded Manchuria and was expanding in Central Asia, and in 1806 (Jiaqing 11) even sent troops to invade Sakhalin; the British East India Company controlled vast areas of India in 1763 and further expanded toward China's borders, controlling Nepal by 1816 and then coveting Tibet—as external tributaries were successively pruned away, the former tributary system in which all nations came to court gradually became deserted, and the Qing itself was also in peril. However, the Jiaqing court's understanding of the world situation and its own diplomatic environment still remained at the level of the Qianlong period, still holding a Celestial Empire mentality and believing that Britain was merely a remote small country prospering through the tea trade. At the same time, after experiencing the failure of the 1793 Macartney visit to China, Britain's attitude toward China quietly changed—Macartney himself claimed: "The Qing Empire is like a dilapidated first-rate warship. It has not sunk in the past one hundred and fifty years only due to the support of a succession of fortunate, capable, and vigilant officers, and it surpasses other neighboring ships only in its size and appearance. But once an incompetent person takes command on deck, there will no longer be discipline or safety."
Specifically in Guangzhou under the single port trading system, officials of the Guangdong Customs imposed excessive and arbitrary levies and demands. Despite repeated prohibitions from the Qing court, they brazenly extorted and demanded from foreign merchants and Hong merchants: foreign merchants, according to the system at the time, could only communicate with Guangzhou authorities through Hong merchants; even when encountering obvious injustices in trade or law enforcement, they had nowhere to appeal; there were not a few cases of Hong merchants going bankrupt due to official extortion, so merchants resisted joining the Thirteen Factories, and the decreasing number of Hong merchants made the Thirteen Factories system increasingly unable to cope with the growing Sino-foreign trade. On the other hand, the sharp increase in Sino-British tea trade caused large outflows of British silver to China. To compensate for losses, the East India Company allowed its sailors and supercargoes to collude with private merchants in smuggling opium to China, and more and more merchants bypassed the monopoly privileges of the East India Company and the Thirteen Factories to engage in illegal trade. In this context, the East India Company used its legal status in China to cover the private merchants' opium trade, and contradictions with Guangzhou authorities also deepened daily, with constant friction between the two sides over trade and legal issues.
Macartney Embassy
In 1792, Britain sent the Macartney Embassy to visit China. Although the embassy was nominally for congratulating Qianlong on his birthday, its actual mission was to expand Sino-British trade. Although both Chinese and British sides held different views on ceremonial issues, and even had differing accounts of the etiquette Macartney used when meeting Qianlong, the embassy ultimately gained the opportunity for an audience: in addition to the collective audience for tributaries, Qianlong separately met with Macartney and the Staunton father and son. After Macartney's audience, Heshen arranged for Qianlong to converse with the only Englishman in the embassy who could speak Chinese, young Staunton, and young Staunton also received a purse as a gift from Qianlong. However, Qianlong rejected all the requests proposed by Macartney and became wary of Britain, "precautions must be taken in advance." All the embassy's hopes of expanding trade through the audience came to nothing.
After the Macartney Embassy returned home, discussions about its failure were intense. Because Europe was then in the midst of China fever, many people still believed the descriptions of Chinese superiority by Enlightenment thinkers, and many people, out of national pride in the British Empire, suspected that the British had been insulted in China. Therefore, under public opinion pressure, the embassy had to write An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China to calm public opinion. As these materials were successively published, more and more people learned about China's actual situation. For example, after reading the and An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China, Hegel evaluated China as "nothing but a magnificent ruin... no progress can be achieved there." China's image in Europe changed from an admirable ideal state to a "semi-barbaric" country that needed lessons.
Old Staunton, who visited as deputy envoy, originally hoped to stay in Beijing as a permanent envoy after the visit but had to return disappointed.; subsequently, in 1796 when Qianlong abdicated, he invited Britain to send an envoy to visit China, but old Staunton was unable to participate due to illness. Young Staunton was also influenced by his father old Staunton and teacher John Barrow, and aspired to the unfinished cause of his elders. After dropping out of Trinity College, Cambridge at University of Cambridge, he obtained a position in the East India Company Guangzhou factory in 1798 through nepotism, becoming the youngest employee in the factory at only 19 years old. During his service in Guangzhou, young Staunton devoted himself to studying Chinese language and culture, spending 10 years from 1800 translating the *Great Qing Legal Code*, becoming a well-known China Hands, but the envoy plans he proposed in 1800 and 1810 were both rejected by the company's senior management.
Continued deterioration of Sino-British relations
After the Industrial Revolution, British national power increased day by day, attempting to expand its trading interests in the East through colonial expansion. After the failure of the Macartney Embassy, Britain shelved plans to send another embassy due to the Napoleonic Wars, turning its attention to ally Portugal's Macau, and sent troops twice in 1802 and 1808 in attempts to occupy Macau, but both failed. In 1802, when Britain first attempted to occupy Macau, Portuguese missionaries and , serving in Beijing's , memorialized Jiaqing, requesting the Chinese government to pay attention to the matter. The two pointed out that the Macartney Embassy's ambitions were not limited to increasing trading ports but also hoped to obtain islands along China's coast as residences, and that Britain began with leased land to gradually encroach, ultimately annexing Bengal Subah in 1798. However, Jiaqing referred what the two said to officials for verification, and Qing court officials determined the matter was a rumor. In 1808, British troops took advantage of Portugal's homeland falling to send troops to Macau again. Macau authorities refused British troops entry into the city and sought help from the Qing. The British not only ignored Chinese warnings but took over Macau and dispatched a fleet to Guangzhou. The British actions greatly angered Jiaqing, who ordered a blockade of Macau traffic and suspension of Sino-British trade. This led Britain to have to abandon the occupation of Macau, withdraw troops at the end of the year, and the East India Company Guangzhou factory also assured the Chinese government that British warships would no longer come to China. Afterward, Sino-British trade was restored.