When The Embassy Had Been Detained Some Time At Pekin, And After It Looked As If A Period Of Vexatious Delay Was To Herald The Discomfiture Of The Mission, Such Positive Orders Were Sent By Keen Lung For The Embassy To Proceed To Jehol That No One Dared To Disobey Him.

Lord Macartney proceeded to Jehol with his suite and a Chinese guard of honor, and he accomplished the journey, about one hundred miles, in an English carriage.

The details of the journey and reception are given in Sir George Staunton's excellent narrative; but here it may be said that the emperor twice received the British embassador in personal audience in a tent specially erected for the ceremony in the gardens of the palace. The embassy then returned to Pekin, and, as the Gulf of Pechihli was frozen, it was escorted by the land route to Canton. On this journey Lord Macartney and his party suffered considerable inconvenience and annoyance from the spite and animosity of the Chinese inferior officials; but nothing serious occurred to mar what was on the whole a successful mission. Keen Lung is said to have wished to go further, but his official utterance was limited to the reciprocation of "the friendly sentiments of His Britannic Majesty." His advanced age and his abdication already contemplated left him neither the inclination nor the power to go very closely into the question of the policy of cultivating closer relations with the foreign people who asserted their supremacy on the sea and who had already subjugated one great Asiatic empire.

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Words from 84937 to 85197 of 191255