Two hundred years ago, in the early hours of the morning of 29 August 1816, William Pitt, Lord Amherst, unrested after travelling overnight, was apparently unceremoniously manhandled in an attempt to usher him physically with his two deputies, George Thomas Staunton and Henry Ellis, into the presence of the Jiaqing Emperor at the Summer Palace of Yuanming Yuan. Fatigued, separated from his diplomatic credentials and ambassadorial robes, Amherst and his deputies resisted, and left the palace in anger. It was reported to the emperor that Amherst's inability to attend was occasioned by illness, as was that of his two deputies. The emperor, discovering the ambassador was not ill, immediately dismissed the embassy without granting an imperial audience and rejected its ‘tribute’ of gifts. Amherst's party then began its long overland journey south to Canton (Guangzhou) where it embarked for home.

British accounts of the embassy lay its ostensible ‘failure’ to secure an audience not on the emperor, but on the scheming of senior court officials who had unwisely assured him that Amherst was preparing to perform the problematic ceremony of the full imperial koutou or ‘kowtow’ with its three kneelings accompanied by three knockings of the forehead for each prostration. After a process of negotiation Amherst instead offered to perform the compromised version of the ceremony that his more famous predecessor, Viscount George Macartney, had agreed to undertake for the Qianlong Emperor at Jehol in September 1793, kneeling on one knee and bowing his head thrice as he would before his royal master, George III. Indeed in an extension of the compromise the ambassador offered to perform this kneeling not once but three times with the full complement of nine bows of the head in total. The Qianlong Emperor had accepted a compromise in 1793; his fifth son and successor would not. The expensive items brought by the British as ‘presents’ for the Jiaqing Emperor, costing some £20,000, were not accepted, though afterwards, the emperor agreed to a very limited and symbolic exchange of a few items in his apparent recognition of the sincerity and obedience of the Prince Regent in sending this tribute. The embassy left Canton for home on 28 January 1817, suffering shipwreck and pirate attack on the return voyage, and visiting the deposed emperor Napoleon on St Helena (who told Amherst he was very foolish not to kowtow), arriving back in Britain on 17 August 1817.