ABSTRACT
The embassy originated in an attempt to address a series of specific grievances about the Canton system and the trade with China. The first official British mission to attempt to approach China was organised in Calcutta, not London, by Warren Hastings, Governor-general of Bengal. The controversy over the embassy's dismissal thus came to feature prominently in accounts of the embassy's apparent failure as symbolising the Chinese court's despotic and condescending attitude to other nations. James L. Hevia has influentially argued that European and Americans fetishised the kowtow embedding the ceremonial in the context of a European discourse of humiliation and abasement familiar to them but entirely foreign to Chinese understanding of the ritual. Viscount George Macartney's embassy was aware of the issue of the kowtow, and the imperial court also understood, to an extent, British sensibilities. The kowtow was only one facet of the very complex but also routine ceremony of Qing government.
