A soldier's diary of the Macartney embassy to China and Tartary
Sergeant Samuel Holmes's plain diary of the 1792 to 1794 British embassy, including the march through the Great Wall to the emperor's summer town of Jehol.
Full title Journal … on Lord Macartney’s Embassy to China and Tartary
Samuel Holmes was a trooper (later serjeant-major) of the 11th Light Dragoons who served in Lord Macartney's guard on the 1792 to 1794 embassy to the Qianlong emperor. His diary was printed in London in 1798, the publisher claiming it was 'without addition, abridgment, or amendment'. It is short and practical: the voyage, soldiers' impressions of Beijing, the four-day ride through the Great Wall into 'Tartary' to Jehol (Chengde), and the return. Holmes was kept outside the palace gates, so his Tartary is what an ordinary soldier saw from the road.
How they knew
Eyewitness
Who “Tartar” means here
The Manchu rulers of China and their people ('the Tartars' who inhabit Beijing's inner city) and 'Tartary' as the land north of the Great Wall; also the historic northern raiders the Wall was built against.
Why read it
A rank-and-file counterpoint to Staunton's official account (W059): the same Great Wall and Jehol seen by a soldier who measured the wall and pocketed its bricks.
Watch out
Very brief on Tartary; Holmes saw little of the court and repeats what he was told. Same expedition as Staunton and Barrow, so not an independent source on the court.
Editorial contextShut in covered carts, the soldiers saw little of Beijing except high brick walls and low, rather shabby brick houses. Holmes notes the division of the capital: the Chinese lived in the suburbs, the Tartars in the city proper. He found the suburb's buildings and shops elegant.
we then entered the suburbs, which the Chinese inhabit, as the Tartars do the city. The buildings here were truly elegant, and the shops of the tradesmen well stocked with all kinds of goods.
Editorial contextThe guard marched through Jehol ('Gehor'), a town about three miles long, to the palace with the presents, but only the ambassador and gentlemen were allowed in. The soldiers went back disappointed, though Holmes says the palace's extent and elegance against the mountains, lit by the rising sun, were beyond description.
none, except his Excellency and the gentlemen, were suffered to enter the gates ; all the others returned mortified and terribly disappointed … the extent and elegance of it was beyond description, and contrasted with the adjacent mountains and precipices, the scene was great and beautiful indeed
Editorial contextHolmes reports what the soldiers were told on the spot: the Wall was built about 1,500 years earlier against Tartar raids on the northern provinces and ran about 1,400 miles. They measured it at 25 feet high and 36 paces thick at the gate, saw it was built of brick, and everyone from the ambassador to the privates collected pieces as souvenirs.
That part of it which we measured and examined, with uncommon pains, was in height 25 feet, and in breadth, through the gate, 36 regular paces, which breadth it carried to the summit. … It was built of brick; many pieces of which were as anxiously collected as if they were wedges of the most precious metal, by all ranks, from his Excellency to the private soldier
Editorial contextFrom the Wall it was four days' hard travel through hills and valleys to Jehol. Holmes found the country fertile and good pasture for immense herds of sheep and cattle, but thinly peopled, with only scattered houses in the valleys and no place of note until Jehol.
The country appeared fertile, though so rugged, and afforded good pasturage for immense herds of sheep and bullocks. It was but thinly peopled; here and there a few scattered houses in