“Is there one single thing about the experience of visiting China that has changed in the last two centuries?” asks Tim Clissold in “Chinese Rules,” a new volume of anecdotes about his commercial misadventures in China.

He’s referring to the experience of Britain’s Lord Macartney, who arrived in 1793 to negotiate a trade relationship between King George III and the Manchu Qianlong emperor, but who left empty-handed. The delays and general obfuscation that the envoy experienced continue to be common in China trade today.

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