The overwhelming majority of people believe that the blind rejection of all foreign affairs by the oriental civilization represented by the Qianlong Emperor is embodied in the fact that when Ma Garni visited China, he said that "the heavenly dynasty is a country, the products are abundant, and there is no need to communicate with the foreign yi", thus losing the last opportunity to communicate with the world on an equal footing.
Many people simply do not believe that the closed and backward ancient parliament of the East has any understanding of the foreign world.
However, when we raked through the historical data, we found a more surprising new knowledge: the Qianlong Emperor may have known about the French Revolution and was wary of it.
Although this new knowledge cannot negate the results of historical development, it gives a completely new perspective, that is, the Qianlong Emperor's refusal to open up and refuse to accept the West may be because he sees a world full of turmoil and irrationality.
In September 1794, when Macartney returned to Beijing from the summer resort in frustration, a mysterious "personal friend" came to Macartney's residence, explained the special traditional system of the Heavenly Dynasty, and gave Macartney some suggestions for continuing to communicate, including "first send an envoy to greet and lay a strong foundation... It should be done step by step, section by section, and not in too much haste".
Then he said something intriguing: "The unrest in France has prompted Chinese officials to step up their vigilance." If the envoy had carried gifts in France since there had been no riots, he would have encountered far fewer difficulties than they do now. ”
This passage is recorded in the "Record of the Ying Envoy Yuan's Seeing Qianlong" written by Stendon.
Who is this friend? Is it Chinese or missionary? Where did he learn that the French Revolution had an impact on China?
We don't know, but it's hard to say that Staunton left such an account out of thin air. Based on this, we have reason to suspect that the outbreak of the French Revolution had a certain impact on the Qianlong Emperor.
Under the influence of textbooks, many people believe that the French Revolution represented the advanced direction of historical development, and thus drew absolute praise. However, in the European world at that time, people saw an extremely chaotic order. When the French Revolution first broke out, what brought france was not a burst of productive forces, but a disorder of the order of life and a decline in living standards.
In the long course of revolution, the French Revolution was often considered a bad choice, based on which we will see many restorations of the monarchy in the coming decades, and such reactions also reflect the pursuit of a stable order.
If this information had really been passed on to the Qianlong Emperor, and if we had not looked at it from the perspective of a future god, the Qianlong Emperor would probably have come to the same understanding as the vast majority of Europeans at that time, that is, the turbulent ideological trends and movements in Europe were extremely dangerous and should be fully vigilant.
Before Macartney's visit to China, it was possible that the Qianlong Emperor had the idea of sending an envoy to France.
Generations of emperors in the early Qing Dynasty were somewhat welcoming to Western missionaries, albeit with great restrictions on missionary work. Under the influence of a group of missionaries, the Qianlong Emperor's view of the world may be beyond the imagination of many people in modern times.
Jiang Youren, the missionary and designer of the Yuanmingyuan "Great Water Law", once answered a series of questions from Qianlong, including: Is there a hegemon among European countries that can dominate the ups and downs? In France and which countries in Europe can women inherit the throne? How many countries are there in Europe? How many troops? What are the methods and strategies of combat? Does France have diplomatic relations with Russia? Why has Russia been able to make so much progress in science and art over the years? Which European country controlled Batavia (Jakarta, the capital of present-day Indonesia)? What country were the Europeans in Luzon (now Manila, the capital of the Philippines)? These areas are so far away from Europe, how can they be effectively controlled? On the map (which is the world map seen by Qianlong), some places far away from Europe are marked with "New Spain", "New Netherlands", "New France", what do these new kingdoms refer to?
About a few years before Macartney's visit to China, the French missionary Qian Deming wrote a letter to his sister with the following sentence: "The Qianlong Emperor has a plan to send envoys to France to see Louis XVI, and Deming will accompany the envoys." The French royal family seems to be looking forward to the arrival of envoys. ”
But for what reason was it stranded? In fact, it is easy to understand, that is, the Outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 seriously affected the exchanges between the two empires, and it is difficult to know that the new French Republic is difficult to accept the envoys of another imperial country, and this country is the "Oriental Autocracy Dynasty" that was black and black at that time.
On 21 January 1793, Louis XVI was killed. On October 6 of that year, when bad news reached the city of Beijing, Qian Deming knelt down to pray for the unfortunate monarch and hold Mass for his king. And the time when Chandmin learned that the king was beheaded was exactly the time when Macartney's front foot had just left.
Based on this, we should judge that the Qianlong Emperor could not have known about the beheading of Louis XVI at the point in time when Macartney visited China.
At the same time, the speed of information exchange in 9 months made people wonder quite a bit: Did these missionaries tell the Qianlong Emperor the news of the outbreak of the French Revolution early on? And because they were originally so-called "conservatives", they also profoundly affected the judgment of the Qianlong Emperor?
This is just a guess based on time.
Although the evidence of the above two materials seems conclusive, they are guilty of the fact that historians do not prove it alone. It's even hard to say whether Macartney's friend was his fiction. Is this person getting reliable information? And is the news that Qian Deming learned because of his hearsay or misunderstanding?
I wanted to investigate this further, but I found it meaningless.
Whether the Qianlong Emperor knew about the French Revolution or not, the modern history of the decline and humiliation of the Qing court could not be changed. The inertia of history has enabled the entire empire to maintain its resistance and blindness to foreign things for a long time, and even after the Second Opium War, the government and the public have not had a clear and effective understanding of Western countries, so that China has missed the opportunity for development again and again in the process of aggression by the great powers, and finally become the "sick man of East Asia" that the world laughs at.
What the Qianlong Emperor left behind for his children and grandchildren was not an iron-clad country, and the culprit also had his own responsibility. He regarded the new knowledge of the West as a trick of entertainment, and the Empire's consistent policy of ignorance made him feel that it was a scourge to spread such new knowledge to the common people.
Although his understanding of the West may have exceeded that of most Chinese at that time, this erroneous thinking caused by the Manchu and Han Dynasties made it impossible for him to spread such new knowledge to scholars and even ordinary people, which eventually led to a strange historical phenomenon:
In the era of Wei Yuan and Lin Zexu, they tirelessly translated and drew world maps, and such world maps had long been lying quietly in the archives of the Forbidden City, and even the successive emperors had never known about them.