When Britain sent its first formal diplomatic mission to China in 1793, one of the participants from London, Peter Auber, remarked that the group had been “received with the utmost politeness, treated with the utmost hospitality, watched with the utmost vigilance and dismissed with the utmost civility”. The mission, which aimed to open trade and establish a permanent British embassy in Beijing, involved great pomp – but it led to no tangible return. Auber’s quote came back to me as I watched Do