The Stauntons of Galway: Links between Ireland and China in the 18th and early 19th Centuries
Prof. Henrietta Harrison (Oxford)
George Leonard Staunton, a Gaelic speaking, Jesuit educated, English Protestant from Galway accompanied Lord Macartney on the first British embassy to China in 1793. His son George Thomas Staunton, who spent his earliest years in Galway and later regained an estate there, learned Chinese as a child during the embassy and went on to become a Chinese interpreter. This paper looks at the political, social and financial impact of connections between China and Ireland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It pays particular attention to the complex interactions between the Catholic church and the British empire as global institutions in these relations.
The Staunton family’s complex position in a Galway society that was on the periphery of the British state led George Leonard Staunton into a career that took him from Caribbean to India, to China. As an Irishman he was a passionate supporter of the French revolution, but he was also a slave-owner and made a career in the expanding British empire. His Catholic connections enabled him to find a Chinese priest who was willing to act as interpreter for the Macartney embassy and to persuade the Propaganda Fide to give its support. Having realised the importance of interpreting, he raised his son for a career as an interpreter of Chinese, and obtained for him a position in the lucrative China trade. George Thomas Staunton went on to interpret repeatedly for the British in Guangzhou. Since this required him to act as negotiator and mediator, it was a powerful and dangerous role which caused the Jiaqing emperor to issue a most unusual edict threatening him personally with deportation. He took part in the Amherst Embassy to Beijing in 1816, and was the first person to publish a translation made directly from Chinese into English. While George Thomas Staunton in later life was determined to remake himself as an Englishman living in England, the financial rewards of his participation in the China trade, which almost certainly included opium trading, flowed back into the purchase of property in Galway, and were ultimately left to his Catholic Lynch relatives.