Lord George Macartney (1737-1806) was the English ambassador sent to China .  The first British Embassy to China, for the promotion of science and to secure a more favorable trade agreement and diplomatic ties, set sail from Spithead on 26 September 1792.   The embassy was given the opportunity of traversing a  part of the country beyond the Great Wall when it travelled in early September 1793 to Jehol, one of the summer residences of the Manchu Emperors.
         Macartney, along with visiting Mongols and Burmese, was then given a single imperial audience and presents for his mission and the King.  He received no state dinner.  Macartney was received only as a tribute bearer.  The 85-year-old Emperor Qianlong 's councilors had already prepared a haughtily worded edict.  It acknowledged King George III's "sincere humility and obedience" in sending a tribute mission to the Emperor.  It also absolutely rejected the proposals for changing the existing trade arrangements since they did not "conform to the Celestial Empire's ceremonial system."  This was quite possibly because the Chinese government was alarmed by news of recent great troubles in Europe and considered the inhabitants there to be of a turbulent character, conquering nations by violence and deception.  The imperial edict Macartney was to convey to George III declared that China was self-sufficient and had "not the slightest need for your Country's manufactures."  It also admonished the British monarch to "act in conformity with our wishes by strengthening your loyalty and swearing perpetual obedience..."
       After the audience there was the return to Peking in late September.  The embassy was allowed to return from the Chinese capital beginning on 7 October to Canton through the interior of China.  Reaching Canton on 19 December, the members sojourned in that city and in Macao, leaving there on 17 March 1794 and arriving in England on 6 September.   Sir George Leonard Staunton (1737-1801), Secretary to the embassy, brought home from this journey a rare collection of Chinese plants gathered by him in regions where plants had never been collected by Europeans before.  The secretary was charged with producing the official account of the Embassy after their return.  Some 400 plants are listed with their botanical names in Staunton's three-volume work, An authentic account of an embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China ... : Together with a relation of the voyage ... to the Yellow Sea, and Gulf of Pekin ... : Taken chiefly from the papers of ... the Earl of Macartney ... Embassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary ... and Sir Erasmus Gower, Commander of the Expedition, and of other gentlemen ... of the Embassy. 1



      

       "The hall of audience furnished also another [53] object of curiosity, striking at least to strangers.  On several tables were placed in frames, filled with earth, dwarf pines, oaks, and orange trees, bearing fruit.  None of them exceeded, in height, two feet.  Some of those dwarfs bore all the marks of decay from age: and upon the surface of the soil were interspersed small heaps of stones, which, in proportion to the adjoining dwarfs, might be termed rocks.  These were honeycombed and moss-grown, as if untouched for ages, which served to maintain the illusion, and to give an antique appearance to the whole.  This kind of stunted vegetation seemed to be much relished by the curious in China; and specimens of it were to be found in every considerable dwelling [sic].  To produce them formed a part of the gardner's [sic] skill, and was an art invented in that country.  Beside the mere merit of overcoming a difficulty, it had that of introducing vegetables into common apartments, from which, their natural size must otherwise have excluded them.  According to the usual course of nature, different vegetable productions attain their perfect state in different periods, and after acquiring different dimensions, and passing through different stages of growth.  Thus the cedar of Lebanon, for example, consumes some years in forming a [54] tall and woody trunk, with many horizontal branches, before it emits its colourless flowers, and small cones, for the purpose of reproduction, which is the period of its perfection; while the hyssop, capable, at most, of raising a short herbaceous stem, produces its flowers and seeds the season after it is sown.  Some trees are reproduced, indeed, from cuttings of young branches, without the necessity of sowing any seed; but such cuttings, planted in the ground, must become trunks themselves in the usual period of their respective increase, and after acquiring their ordinary size, emit new branches, before they become adult, or capable of fructification; but by the art of dwarfing, an abscinded branch committed to the earth, continues still to fructify, as if it had been grafted upon a full grown tree, with its juices ripened for reproduction.
       "The general method of obtaining vegetable dwarfs is said to be the following: a quantity of clay, or mould, is applied to the upper part of the trunk of a tree, from which a dwarf is intended to be taken, and close to its division into branches.  The mold [sic] is to be confined to the spot by coarse hempen, or cotton, cloth, and to be carefully kept moist by water.  In consequence of this application, continued sometimes above a [55] twelvermonth, small tender fibres shoot down like roots from the wood into the mould.  The part of the trunk emitting those new fibres, together with the branch rising immediately above it, is then to be carefully separated from the rest of the tree, and planted in new earth, in which the fibres become new roots, while the former branch is now the stem of the vegetable, thus transformed in some measure.  This operation does not destroy or alter the productive faculty which those parts enjoyed before their separation from their parent root.  That which, while a branch of the original tree, bore flowers and fruit, continues to produce the same, tho no longer supported upon any stock.  The terminal budsof [sic] such branches of trees as are meant to become dwarfs, are torn off; which circumstance prevents the further elongation of those branches, and forces other buds and branchlets from the sides.  These branchlets are bent by wires to whatever form the operator wishes: and when the appearance of age and decay is meant to be given to a dwarf tree, it is repeatedly smeared with treacle or molasses, which attracts multitudes of ants, who, in pursuit of those sweet juices, attack the bark, and, by a gradual corrosion of it, produce the desired effect.  These different [56] processes are sometimes attempted to be kept secret by the gardeners, and they vary designedly in the mode of carrying them on; but the principle on which they are founded is sufficiently apparent from what is related here; and the contrivance argues ingenuity and perseverance, rather than the practice does true taste, which consists in assisting nature in its most favourite works; not in counteracting its operations or distorting its productions." 2

1      Goodrich, L. Carrington and Nigel Cameron  The Face of China As Seen by Photographs & Travelers, 1860-1912 (New York: Aperture, Inc.; 1978), pg. 149;

Fessler, Loren and the Editors of LIFE  China (New York: Time Incorporated; 1963), pg. 48;

Gothein, Marie Luise  A History of Garden Art (reprinted by Hacker Art Books, New York; 1966), pg. 252 mentions "The ambassador said that the understanding of dwarf tree culture was a secret, and was very highly esteemed."  Reading Staunton's account, the secret is actually the bark aging process and not the dwarfing.

William Alexander (1767-1816) was the official artist attached to Lord Macartney's embassy.  He provided the British public with thousands of drawings to accompany both the official and non-official accounts of the diplomatic missions.  His official 1805 book contains forty-eight hand-coloured plates showing various scenes from the Embassy’s journey.  Did he ever depict any penjing?
        Per Jackson, Anna and Amin Jaffer (ed.)  Encounters, The Meeting of Asia and Europe, 1500-1800 (London: V&A Publications; 2004), pg. 359, Alexander "'made no attempt to contact Chinese counterparts or to acquire an understanding of their work' while in China.  Instead, Macartney's Britain still preferred the escapist fantasy of a tamed and lanquid Orient."  Pg. 358 also notes that after his embassy to China, "British envoy Lord Macartney likened the country to 'an old crazy first-rate man-of-war,' which had long overwhelmed her neighbours 'by her bulk and appearance,' but was doomed under inept leaders to be 'dashed to pieces on the shore.'  Fear of the East had definitely been replaced by contempt -- even in such a cultured mind as Macartney's."