The above is a shot of our professor demonstrating what MacCartney refused to do in the presence of the Qing emperor. As with many polisci/history courses on China, we began  by running through all that distant history and slowed down during the Qing dynasty to talk about that whole deal with Western countries and some spat over trade openness and what not. It’s a decidedly Euro-centric approach, but to be honest, I probably couldn’t sit through a course on pre-Qing history.