Chinese dreams in Romantic England: The life and times of Thomas Manning

By Edward Weech

A brilliant polymath and part of the 'first wave' of British Romanticism, Thomas Manning was one of the first Englishmen to study Chinese language and culture. Like famous friends including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb, Manning was inspired by the French Revolution and had ambitious plans for making a better world.

While his contemporaries turned to the poetic imagination and the English countryside, Manning looked further afield – to China, one of the world’s most ancient and sophisticated civilizations. In 1790s Britain, China was terra incognita. Manning undertook a quest to learn the secrets of its language and culture. His travels included the salons of Napoleonic Paris, a period as a prisoner of war, a dramatic shipwreck and, disguised as a Buddhist pilgrim, a trek through the Himalayas to Tibet, where he met the Dalai Lama. But when he returned to England, his ideas confronted an increasingly Sinophobic climate and he failed to publish the grand work his peers had expected for so long. After his death, his outward-looking vision was eclipsed by the English-rural poetic vision of Romanticism, and he was forgotten.

Manning’s extraordinary story, here told in full for the first time using recently discovered archival sources, sheds a new light on English Romanticism and the course of cultural exchange between Britain and Asia at the dawn of the nineteenth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526164544

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Chinese dreams in Romantic England

Chinese dreams in Romantic England

The life and times of Thomas Manning

Edward Weech

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Edward Weech 2022

The right of Edward Weech to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 6455 1 hardback

First published 2022

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover Image: Portrait of Thomas Manning, c. 1805. Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

Cover Designer: Arsh Raziuddin

Typeset

by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire

Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1Early life

2Romantic, 1798–1801

3France, 1802

4Delay and departure, 1803–1806

5Canton, 1807–1809

6On the skirts of creation, 1810–1816

7Home again

Conclusion: Why did Thomas Manning want to learn about China?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1Portrait of Thomas Manning. Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).

2‘Approach of the Emperor of China to his Tent in Tartary to receive the British Ambassador’, by William Alexander (1799). Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

3Portrait of Thomas Manning as a child, with two of his sisters. Private collection.

4Charles Lloyd, by John Constable (early 1800s). Reproduced from Charles Lamb and the Lloyds , ed. E. V. Lucas (London: Smith, Elder, 1898).

5Sophia Lloyd and child, by John Constable (early 1800s). Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, USA © Worcester Art Museum/Bridgeman Images.

6Charles Lamb, aged 30, by William Hazlitt. Reproduced from Charles Lamb and the Lloyds , ed. E. V. Lucas (London: Smith, Elder, 1898).

7Samuel Taylor Coleridge, aged 42, by Washington Allston; engraved by Samuel Cousins, 1854, published by E. Moxon. Library of Congress.

8Portrait of Thomas Manning, c. 1805. Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

9Portrait of Louise Charlotte de Rigaud de Vaudreuil. Collection du château de Serrant.

10 Sir Joseph Banks. Line engraving by N. Schiavonetti, 1812, after T. Phillips. Wellcome Collection.

11 Chinese Court of Justice in the hall of the British Factory at Canton, 9 April 1807. Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

12 Thomas Manning’s Chinese–Latin manuscript dictionary. Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

13 The Potala Palace at Lhasa, from Athanasius Kircher’s China Illustrata (1667), reproduced in Clements R. Markham, ed., Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet and of the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa (London: Trubner, 1876).

14 Sketches of Lungtok Gyatso, Ninth Dalai Lama, by Thomas Manning, December 1811. Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

15 Sir George Thomas Staunton, c. 1823. Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

16 Sketch of portrait of Thomas Manning, by Edward Roworth, c. 1907. Private collection.

17 Bust of Thomas Manning as a young man. Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

Acknowledgements

I first learned about Thomas Manning after becoming Librarian at the Royal Asiatic Society in 2014, and I am indebted to all my friends and colleagues at the RAS for the opportunity to pursue my interest in this remarkable man. I am particularly grateful to Alison Ohta, Nancy Charley, and Gordon Johnson, who have each played a key role in supporting my professional and academic journey.

Much of the research for this book was completed during my doctoral studies. I was extremely fortunate that Bernhard Fuehrer, Felicity James, Lars Laamann, Peter J. Kitson, and Gregory Dart agreed to serve as doctoral supervisors and examiners, and helped me make the most of my return to formal education. I am also deeply indebted to the kindness of Tim Barrett, Lawrence Wang-chi Wong, and Anne Lonsdale: leading scholars who have each worked on Manning, and who selflessly shared knowledge, advice, and encouragement. Other authors, academics, and editors who contributed to this book through conversation and correspondence include Stephen Platt, Eric G. Wilson, William Wilkins, James Stourton, David Stifler, Séamas Weech, David G. Hughes, James Watt, Caroline Warman, Nick and Cecilia Powell, David Chandler, Peter Newbon, Graham Davidson, David Duff, Marc Porée, Laurent Folliot, Tim Fulford, Nick Hartley and many others.

It has been a great honour to meet and correspond with members of Thomas Manning’s extended family, who have maintained a close interest in their illustrious ancestor and helped keep his memory alive. I am particularly grateful to Deborah, Byron, Julian, Carolyn, and Vicky. Two of my chief informants during the early stages of research were Robert Manning (who lived in Diss, the family’s ancestral hometown) and Mike Manning. I regret that they are not here to see the publication of this biography, but hope it does some justice to their support.

My research involved long hours at numerous libraries and archives including SOAS Library, Senate House Library, the British Library, Birkbeck Library, Cambridge University Library, and the Library of the Natural History Museum. I am grateful to all the staff who assisted me at these and other institutions, and to Joy Wheeler, Christiane Vialelle, and Sian Phillips for their help with images.

I am indebted to the staff at Manchester University Press, especially Emma Brennan and Paul Clarke. Emma’s vision was absolutely fundamental to the development of this book, and it has been an enormous privilege to work with such a creative, insightful, and inspiring editor. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their important feedback.

For years now, my research on Thomas Manning has featured in conversations with my own family and friends. Several of those who listened, advised, and encouraged me along the way are no longer here, including my mother, Theresa, mother-in-law, Charity, and two of my closest friends, Tom and Eddie. Throughout all this time, the love and support of my wife, Trinity, has sustained me: and this book is dedicated to her.

Introduction

It is 17 December 1811: a week before Christmas. The scene is Lhasa, situated in the Tibetan plateau on the ‘Roof of the World’. Almost 4,000 metres above sea level, the air here contains only two-thirds of the oxygen it does in the lowlands. Anyone not acclimatized is liable to suffer from altitude sickness, developing symptoms akin to a bad hangover – dizziness, nausea, headaches. At night, the temperatures are freezing, but now, during the day, it is bright and cool.

In England, the Luddite rebellions have begun, protesting the introduction of new industrial machinery amid the economic depression caused by the Napoleonic Wars, which rage endlessly on the Iberian Peninsula. These events are far from the mind of the tall, lean Englishman, aged 39, who dismounts at the foot of an enormous, fortress-like building – the Potala Palace – which seems to grow out of the mountain before him. The palace is the residence of the Dalai Lama: it is more than a dozen storeys tall, contains over a thousand rooms, and the outside walls of its central quarters are painted a deep crimson. The path to the entrance must be ascended on foot; it promises to be a long and tedious climb of about four hundred steps, some cut from the mountain itself.

Someone who looked closely might be surprised to discover that this Englishman is strikingly handsome. His nondescript robes and hat, along with his spectacles and long beard, go some way to disguising his singular looks and, more importantly, his nationality – a subject about which he has remained strangely evasive during the few days since he arrived in Lhasa. Anyone familiar with the English would quickly identify his face and manners as belonging to that nation. Few in Lhasa have such experience: no Englishman has ever visited the city before, and no others will pass its walls for almost a hundred years. He is accompanied by a much shorter and somewhat younger man, who is Chinese. All communication with the strange traveller is conducted by way of this assistant, who claims that his master is a pilgrim anxious to pay homage to the Grand Lama. Yet the traveller shows no knowledge of the ways of the religion about which he has professed such interest, and his assistant, when pressed, makes only vague answers about which of the Western lands his master is from – lands where, at this time, there are few Buddhists at all.

One who might recognize the Englishman is Yangcun, one of Lhasa’s senior Ambans – a Chinese imperial functionary reporting directly to the Emperor in Peking. He is intimately acquainted with the English: several years earlier they had landed troops on the island of Macao, near China’s southern coast, fearing the Portuguese colony might otherwise be captured by Napoleonic France. These unseemly shenanigans caused a diplomatic incident, during which Yangcun had represented the Chinese authorities. But the controversy occasioned Yangcun’s fall from grace, leading to virtual exile in this remote posting on the fringes of the Qing Empire. While he had every reason to suspect and resent the traveller, Yangcun is old and almost blind. If he could see better, he might do more than recognize this man as an Englishman. He might identify him as Thomas Manning, one of the few Englishmen able to speak Chinese, and the very man responsible for translating imperial edicts into English during that dispute in Macao.

But these are matters for another day. Now, Thomas Manning, the disguised Englishman on a purported pilgrimage to the Dalai Lama, works his way up the steps of the Potala Palace. He is pondering his forthcoming meeting with the young Lama, Lobzang Tenpai Wangchuk Lungtok Gyatso, or Lungtok Gyatso for short. The Dalai Lama will be accompanied by the Regent, another senior Lama who has been identified to Manning as the ‘Ti-mu-fu’. Completing their ascent, Manning and his assistant, who is called Zhao Jinxiu, are ushered inside, where they prepare the humble presents that Manning has selected for the occasion. He has arrived in Lhasa not as an ambassador, but as a private individual; he has no glamorous gifts, and carries only what could fit in the personal belongings he has lugged with him during the long and lonely trek through the Himalayas. He has some fine Nanking tea, purchased in Canton, the port in south China where all trade with Europeans is conducted. Also acquired in Canton were two brass candlesticks: illicitly acquired, in fact, having been accidentally packed with Manning’s things eighteen months earlier when he quit his rooms to go to Calcutta. They are the property of the East India Company, and in his diary Manning expresses the hope that, if the Company knew the fate of its candlesticks, it would be pleased with such ‘high and honourable use’. He has inserted wax candles into them in an attempt to make them look more impressive. He has a piece of fine cloth, the remnant of a much larger parcel he had brought to trade and help pay his way, but which had been ransacked from his belongings in Bhutan. He has also carried to Lhasa a bottle of Smith’s genuine aromatic lavender water – valued in England for household purposes and as a skin cleanser – and has decanted enough to fill two large phials, one each for the Grand Lama and the Regent. The highlight among these eccentric offerings are twenty silver dollars and as many pieces of zinc, brought for the purpose of making galvanic experiments – a popular craze in Europe that would soon help inspire Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Manning has discovered that, in Tibet, they are highly prized for their potential as jewellery.

In the antechamber, Manning is greeted by the Lama’s polite but melancholy Chinese interpreter, who has previously visited him in his personal rooms. The son of a Chinese father and Tibetan mother, the interpreter has lived in Peking, and can speak many languages but is literate in none. He quickly explains the protocol for the imminent interview, but when Manning enters the Lama’s chamber, he is thrown into self-doubt. He realizes that, with both the Dalai Lama and Regent in attendance, he has no idea how much ceremony to perform in front of one, before paying his respects to the other. He begins to kowtow, performing the ritual prostration that, in other contexts, would occasion such anxiety and consternation for official British visitors to China. He touches his head to the floor three times before the Grand Lama, and once before the Regent. As he does so, the precious phial intended for the Regent is dropped by an attendant. It smashes on the hard floor, and Manning makes no noise or gesture of irritation as the odoriferous stream trickles into his line of sight, its fragrant scent wafting through the chamber. Once the surviving gifts have been presented, he finally removes his hat and offers his freshly shaved scalp to the young Lama to lay his hands upon. Manning and Zhao then withdraw to sit on cushions close by, where they are offered wine. Unimpressed by the quality of the alcohol he has sampled in the country so far, Manning is delighted by its exquisite flavour; but, engrossed in watching the Grand Lama, he neglects his cup, and is crestfallen when it is suddenly whisked away before he can finish.

Manning had received his passport to visit Lhasa on the pretence that he was a learned religious devotee wishing to pay his respects to the holy child. His real motive was, in fact, to continue onwards from Lhasa and enter China, whose borders were strictly closed to Europeans. He had already spent several years in the port of Canton, where he had tried various schemes to see the interior of the country, including applying to become the Emperor’s personal astronomer. But now that the occasion so pragmatically arranged is actually upon him, he realizes it has a power of its own. Manning has no children, and he is captivated by the small boy, who he guesses might be seven years old. In fact, his sixth birthday has just passed. He finds the child’s face, cheerful expressions, and simple and unaffected mannerisms to be fascinating: ‘poetically and affectingly beautiful’, he later writes in his diary. Whenever the child smiles – which he does perpetually – his whole face is illuminated. In particular, he seems ready to burst into laughter whenever he looks at the Englishman, perhaps amused by his grim beard and glasses. He also seems genuinely curious, and asks the traveller about his journey. His questions are put by way of double translation. Here, Chinese is the lingua franca, and the Lama speaks in Tibetan to his interpreter, who speaks in Chinese to Zhao, who then translates for Manning into the Latin which Zhao had learned as part of his Catholic education. During their travels, Manning and Zhao have grown used to speaking in Latin, so that communication is quick and fluent, despite its roundabout nature.

To maintain his improbable persona as a simple pilgrim who wants to learn about Buddhism, Manning has determined to conceal the fact that he can speak Chinese. For the same reason, his answers can only pertain to his recent journey: unfortunately, any word of his true homeland, thousands of miles away, is off limits. Manning might otherwise have tried to explain that, in the country where he came from, he was a published mathematician and scholar who knew some of the most famous people in Europe: the renowned naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, the French statesmen Talleyrand and Lazare Carnot, and the acclaimed poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Five years from now – by which time Lungtok Gyatso will have died from illness before reaching his tenth birthday – Manning will describe this encounter to Napoleon, imprisoned on St Helena and desperate for news of the outside world.

As the interview draws to a close, Manning is presented with a small parcel of dried fruits before being escorted out of the palace. Returning to his rooms nearby, this learned scholar and religious sceptic finds himself overtaken by strange feelings, becoming absorbed in reflection. As he remembers his meeting with the ‘beautiful youth’, he struggles to hold back tears. Desperate to preserve the memory of the meeting, he sketches the Lama in one of the small diaries he has carried with him through the Himalayas. He has no talent for drawing, yet, he feels, captures a pleasing likeness. But it is missing something, so he tries again. His second attempt is technically inferior, but more expressive, and better evokes the child’s good-natured playfulness and humour. Manning thinks the two drawings give a good account of the child’s features. Surviving Tibetan woodblock prints of Lungtok Gyatso suggest that he is right.

In a few months’ time, when the snows melt, Manning will be deported, by order of the Emperor, under suspicion of being a Catholic spy. He is neither a spy nor a Catholic; in fact, he wants to learn about China because he thinks that doing so will provide new ideas to inspire the social reforms that are desperately needed back home. Zhao, his assistant, will be exiled to Xinjiang. Manning’s dream of seeing the interior of China will have to wait. Several years later, he will eventually reach Peking, as translator for the Amherst Embassy. That, however, will prove to be something of an anti-climax. This meeting with the Dalai Lama, which had been conceived as a simple ruse, a means to an end, will instead become the defining moment of his career. To bring it about had taken all his linguistic skills, ambition, independence, physical boldness, and all the modest wealth at his disposal.

Back in England, his associates were busy raising families and focusing on conventional careers or literary pursuits. Manning’s best friend, the essayist Charles Lamb, had just published a book of children’s poetry, followed by a volume on Shakespeare, which argued that the plays were better suited to reading than production on the stage. Not to be outdone, Coleridge, amid the agonizing throes of opium addiction, was in London struggling to deliver a series of groundbreaking public lectures on the Bard, revolutionizing the critical reputation of Hamlet in the process. And while Manning was preparing to explore the Himalayas, another acquaintance, William Wordsworth, was writing a seminal guide to the Lake District. Wordsworth had just moved into Grasmere’s Old Rectory, near the lake: a cold and damp house where two of his young children would die the following year. But Thomas Manning was in Lhasa, talking to the six-year-old Dalai Lama. What drove him to pursue this mission, so far removed from the interests of his peers?

This book is the first full-length biography of Thomas Manning. A scholar and explorer, Manning was among the first Englishmen to study Chinese language and culture. While a student at Cambridge, he became inspired by the intoxicating idealism of the French Revolution. Coming so soon after the American War of Independence, the events in France encouraged progressive-minded youth to think about possibilities for a better and brighter future. Manning developed a singular vision for social and cultural reform, pursuing a completely different strategy than close friends at the heart of the Romantic movement. Manning wanted to uncover the secrets of Chinese civilization, the world’s largest and most ancient society, but one which, in 1800, remained completely closed to outsiders. This led him to reside in Asia for over a decade, where he became the best China scholar of his generation; and it inspired his unprecedented independent trek through the Himalayas to Lhasa, where he met the Dalai Lama.

But after his death, Manning’s legacy was forgotten. This was partly his own doing. Manning never published the ambitious works he planned in his younger days, and his true motives and research remained closely guarded secrets. He spent over a decade away from Britain, during which he was completely cut off from the country’s intellectual life. He had no children, cultivated no disciples, and in later years made few efforts to secure his legacy. In the twentieth century, scholarly attempts to revisit his career were scuppered by the fact that his archive disappeared for generations.

This biography was made possible by the rediscovery of Manning’s archive in 2014. Now, for the first time, we can begin to understand the true nature of his project, and what his story means for our understanding of Romantic Britain. For Manning, the spirit of the age was involved with the world’s most distant and ancient civilization. And instead of conquest and colonization, he imagined reform and cooperation.

Before Manning went to China, he was an active participant in the ‘first wave’ of British Romanticism, and his letters, diaries, and research notes reveal his engagement with the Romantic zeitgeist. The Romantic motif of ‘one life’ in nature and the soul underpinned his commitment to intercultural communication. He felt compelled by unconscious, intuitive, creative impulses, and he reflected on their role in the formation of genius and obsession. His project was explicitly secular, but it was nevertheless underpinned by a deep spirituality, and even mysticism. His complex religious views reflected youthful interests in Deism and Unitarianism,¹ while lifelong readings in Neoplatonism prompted the idea that an ineffable, unifying spirit – ‘the Great Disembodied ONE’ – was the governing influence over human and natural affairs.² This universalism inspired his faith that the study of Chinese culture could inspire the reform of British social life. Rather than seeing a world divided into civilizational silos that were destined to clash, Manning believed that widely divergent cultures shared an underlying unity.

Manning was a contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge, but he was part of a wider tendency within Romanticism which was in tension – artistically, politically, and temperamentally – with the outlook of the Lake School. In the early 1800s, Manning was an enthusiast for Napoleon, and his politics were closer to the radical William Hazlitt than the Lakers. His freewheeling individualism and swashbuckling cosmopolitanism anticipated the attitudes of the second-generation Romantics, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, with whose poetry and artistic outlook Manning was more in sympathy. During his long years in Asia, Manning even assumed the characteristics of a Byronic hero. Disdainful of worldly success and fame, he displayed uncommon zeal for life and experience, but seemed to brood over a great secret. He was tall, dark, and handsome; but he was also lonely, lovelorn, tortured, defiant, and misunderstood. Against all odds, he maintained an unshakable faith in the importance of his mission, reflecting his Romantic confidence in the creative visionary.

Romanticism was an extraordinarily rich and diverse movement, which could encompass everything from the visionary world of William Blake to the sensuality of John Keats. But the defining vision of ‘first-wave’ Romanticism which emerged in the later nineteenth century (and which remains influential today) was one of nature, the English countryside, and the poet’s contemplation of his own memory and mind – what Keats called ‘the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime’. This partly resulted from a process of simplification, which is unavoidable when considering such a diverse and multifaceted phenomenon. It was also a legitimate reflection of the power and coherence of the vision of William Wordsworth – the Romantic movement’s literary colossus, and one of the greatest figures in English literature. However, oversimplification suppresses alternative voices, and the creation, or ‘curation’, of this version of Romanticism meant that other perspectives were inevitably excluded. This book contributes to a wider ongoing process of reclaiming marginalized perspectives – in this case, the Sinocentric Romanticism of Thomas Manning.

While this is the first biography of Thomas Manning, historians have long recognized that he was an exceptional figure among Britain’s first generation of ‘China experts’.³ The socialist scientist Joseph Needham – still probably Britain’s most famous Sinologist – considered Manning to be ‘romantically strange in destiny’, and praised his ‘unprejudiced generous acceptance of all human culture as [his] own’.⁴ In the standard account of British Sinology, Singular Listlessness, T. H. Barrett described Manning as ‘one of the most farsighted men of his age’: ‘a man of the highest intellectual calibre, motivated neither by commercial nor religious interests, but by a profound spirit of intellectual enquiry’.⁵

In recent decades, Manning’s sympathetic attitude towards China – and foreign cultures generally – has been seen to contradict popular academic models that tend to interpret every European effort to study Asia as part of a campaign for cultural domination.⁶ There has been growing scholarly interest in Manning’s life and legacy among those concerned with both the history of Anglo-Chinese relations and the place of China within English literary studies.⁷ The ensuing account is indebted to other scholars whose previous comments on Manning have established much of the contextual background.⁸ But this book provides the first dedicated study of Manning’s career, based on the large collection of his rediscovered letters and notebooks which are now available at the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.⁹ Before that discovery, only a few series of Manning’s letters, chiefly those to Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd, were known to have survived. These are now complemented by a new series of fifty letters from Manning to his father, in addition to other correspondence and, crucially, a trove of private notebooks in which Manning detailed his reading and research.

Figure 1 Portrait of Thomas Manning as a young man

Archives and other primary sources are key to any historical research, but in Manning’s case they are especially important. The ambitious works on Chinese culture which he projected in his youth never materialized. Moreover, Manning was reluctant to discuss his reasons for studying China before a wider public, and he divulged such information rarely. Letters to family and friends, examined here for the first time, contain hints which help us piece together Manning’s hidden purpose. This has surprising implications for our understanding of the historical, literary, and religious environment of late Georgian England.

This book shows just how little Manning’s Chinese studies had to do with advancing Britain’s political, economic, or cultural interests. It reveals instead his conviction that the study of Chinese language and society could provide new philosophical insights, which he believed would have practical applications in Britain. Manning projected an observational study of Chinese manners and customs – a primitive form of sociological research – which he imagined would supply the raw material to inspire moral reform in his own country. And in his linguistic research, he sought to compare the uses of prepositions and particles between Chinese and ancient Greek. He hoped this might help him discover common rules governing the use of language in different cultures.

Manning neither idealized nor denigrated Chinese society. He believed that its real merits deserved to be learned and understood, and that cultural practices should be appreciated on their own terms, with respect to specific considerations of place and local patterns of development. And while there was a spiritual side to Manning’s quest for Eastern wisdom, his practical studies remained firmly based on Enlightenment principles and the British traditions of empiricism and scepticism. Manning was a polymath who believed his research had implications across broad fields of knowledge, and at one time or another he could have made a justifiable claim on being one of Europe’s most knowledgeable figures in such diverse subjects as Chinese, mathematics, and ancient Greek. Relatively few people alive today could match Manning’s erudition in just one of these fields, let alone all three. Manning’s research reflected the conditions and priorities of scholarship in Romantic Britain, and some of it seems obscure and arcane by contemporary standards. There may be more yet to discover, but we already know enough to grasp why his project was so significant – in his time and our own.

The intellectual culture of eighteenth-century Britain was shaped by the philosophy of empiricism – the belief that the only reliable knowledge is that which has been derived from sensory experience. Receiving impetus from the scientific revolution begun by Sir Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth century, British empiricism was most famously associated with John Locke and then David Hume, leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. Where the natural world was concerned, it came to be accepted that knowledge derived from direct observation was superior to that resulting from speculation and abstract reasoning. This principle, first developed in the realm of the ‘hard’ sciences, gradually came to be applied in the humanities, until eventually ‘the superiority of eyewitness evidence over hearsay and book learning stood beyond dispute’.¹⁰

But in late eighteenth-century Britain, knowledge about China was almost all based on hearsay and book learning. There was still little in the way of eyewitness testimony, notwithstanding the scale of the country’s vast trade with China. Tea had become a staple of the British diet, and enormous quantities were shipped to London alongside Chinese silk and export ceramics, which were the height of fashion among Britain’s monied classes. Throughout the century, European artists had experimented with Chinese-inspired motifs in the chinoiserie style, which had become especially popular for home furnishings. The vagueness and sense of mystery that surrounded China formed part of its aesthetic appeal; and where China’s authentic culture was concerned, few Europeans understood anything at all. When Britain sent a diplomatic embassy to China in 1792 under Lord Macartney, most of the available information on the country was contained in translations of much earlier accounts by Jesuit missionaries, all of whom were long since dead. A few British merchants based in the trading port of Canton picked up a smattering of local words and phrases, but nobody in Britain could understand any Chinese whatsoever. If this reflected British insularity, then it was a trait that China’s ruling Qing dynasty was keen to preserve. When Manning started learning Chinese in Canton, local law prohibited Chinese people from teaching the language to Europeans.

Nevertheless, on the basis of the scant knowledge that was available, some came to think favourably