A Scotsman on the road to Cathay: John Bell's journey to China (1719–1722)

Abstract

In 1763 John Bell, a Scottish physician and traveller, published an account of his overland journey to China across a system of ancient caravan trails known as the Silk Road, made some 40 years earlier (1719–1722) in the suite of a Russian embassy sent by Peter the Great to the Kangxi emperor. Bell's earthy, well-tempered narrative, which forms a part of his Travels from St Petersburg in Russia to Diverse Parts of Asia, appeared at a time when Britain had come to fix its attention on sensational sea voyages of discovery. While British merchant adventurers, whom Chinese officialdom treated with caution and contempt, were confined to a trading compound at Canton and denied access to China's interior, Bell throws open the gated splendours of the Imperial Palace at Peking, which for over a century had been refracted mainly through Jesuit reports. In Peking he witnesses the honours lavished upon a Russian ambassador, the kind of reception that still evaded the British after six decades of desultory efforts to expand trade and establish diplomatic relations with China, and one that Lord Macartney could only hope for 30 years later during his embassy to Peking (1792–1794).

Keywords:

• British literature
• travel writing
• China
• John Bell
• Peking
• Kangxi emperor
• Silk Road

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Aalto (1996) has examined the accuracy of some of Bell's comments on Siberia and Mongolia.

2. For a discussion of this subject from the perspective of a later British civil servant in China, see Eames ([1909] 1974, 122–124).

3. For a discussion of Horace Walpole's satirical use of the Chinese gardening aesthetic in “Mi Li. A Chinese Fairy Tale”, see Nash (2009).

4. For a discussion of this subject, see Porter (2010, 133–153).

5. In Britain, the Chinese origin of the magnetic compass was still in doubt. See, for example, the entry for “Magnet” in Chambers ([1778–1788] 1781, n.p.).

6. In 1759, Flint, a merchant employed by the East India company who had learned Chinese in contravention of an Imperial Court edict prohibiting foreigners from studying the language, was imprisoned at Macao for three years after translating the Company's grievances into Chinese and presenting them directly to Chinese officials at Peking. The Chinese translator who assisted him was beheaded.