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# In 1793 the first British diplomatic mission arrived in China, with the aim of opening new ports to British trade, establishing a permanent embassy in Peking, obtaining a small island for British use and…
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/v-1793-godu-v-kitai-pribyla-pervaia-britanskaia-diplomaticheskaia-missiia-s-tseliu-otkrytiia-novykh-portov-dlia-britanskoi-torgovli-v-kitae-uchrezhdeniia-postoiannogo-posolstva-v-pekine/
- Published: 2025-11-27T18:02:10.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:27:53.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: The East, Monarchies, Observations, Society

Among other things, the British envoy was to persuade China to buy British goods. The Emperor Qianlong's reply was original:

“We possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufactures.”

On the remaining points, too, the British received a refusal.

The Emperor, however, simply had no notion of how far the Western countries had advanced in the making of curious trinkets and much else besides. Although Qianlong's grandfather, Kangxi, had corresponded with Louis XIV from 1681 and could not have been ignorant of Europe's achievements.

China was to learn a far from pleasant lesson over the following 100 years. In the 1830s Britain, which had run out of everything the Chinese wanted except silver, discovered by chance that the one commodity an ingenious people cannot resist is Bengal opium, and flooded the Celestial Empire with it. The result: the Opium War, and a China broken into pieces. Britain would call it a lesson in free trade.

But now matters stand precisely the other way round. China produces the greater part of the goods the world needs, and some things of which other countries have no real idea. As the saying goes, let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.