The Perils of Interpreting is the story of two cross-cultural figures and the historical situations that both created and betrayed them. The seemingly parallel life trajectories of the two translators, one Chinese and the other British, had but one intersection: both of them served on the 1793 Macartney Embassy to Qing China. A lot of studies have been done about the embassy, which was regarded as the first—and unsuccessful—encounter between the two empires. But in her book, Henrietta Harrison chooses a very different angle and focuses on the two “supporting actors,” Li Zibiao and George Thomas Staunton. From the perspective of cross-cultural interactions, the book shows, the meeting itself was hardly a failure. But the moment of learning and negotiation eventually turned into a phase of mutual distrust, disgust, and war, making comprehensive interpretation between different cultures a dangerous job. In a way, the book is a micro-level testimony of the downturn in early globalization.

Li Zibiao and G. Thomas Staunton were born into an increasingly interconnected world. Li was a son of a Chinese Catholic family in Liangzhou, in today's Gansu Province. A historical frontier city, Liangzhou was a multiethnic and multilingual place that witnessed the coming of Christian influence in the early eighteenth century. In 1772, when he was twelve years old, Li was sent to Naples to study. He spent twenty years in Italy, becoming fluent in both Latin and Italian and cultivating lifelong friendships with some elite classmates. After completing his theological studies and preparing to return to China as a missionary, he and another Chinese student were invited by George Leonard Staunton to join the Macartney Embassy, which aimed to expand English trading privileges in China. George Leonard, Thomas's father, was an Irishman who believed in English Protestantism and had a strong link to the Catholic Church. He had extensive overseas experience, which became a base of his friendship with Macartney. Adopting an avant-garde educational philosophy, he did not teach his only son in a classical way. Instead, Thomas was trained and prepared “for a new world” (pp. 50, 58). The key to his education was observation and immersion, something quite unconventional at the time. When his father decided to take the little boy to the embassy to China, he got the chance to study a new language with the Chinese fellows on board, including Li Zibiao.

The 1793 embassy was a high point for both Li and Thomas Staunton. Some tensions emerged between the British and the Chinese sides, particularly the issue of ritual during the audience of Emperor Qianlong. In general, however, the atmosphere was peaceful and friendly. Both sides were curious about the other and tried to gather more information. Interpretation played a significant role in the process.

Li carefully chose words to convey messages in their cultural context, rather than in a strictly literal sense. For example, he translated the Chinese term gong as “gift” rather than “tribute,” and yi as “foreigner” rather than “barbarian.” As Harrison points out, “each choice is a small one, but taken together they give a certain atmosphere to the text” (pp. 137–38). During the imperial audience, Thomas Staunton not only had a brief conversation in Chinese with the emperor but also received a gift from the emperor himself. In the British accounts of the event, the twelve-year-old Staunton became the center of the narrative, while the main characters, including Macartney and George Leonard, “vanished in the background.”

Li Zibiao was more than a translator. He took part in the embassy with his own agenda: as a Christian, he hoped to persuade Qianlong to tolerate Catholic missions in China. Despite the risk, he cautiously inserted this demand into the British requests. After the embassy, Li went to Shanxi to fulfill his religious mission. In the following decades, however, the Qing government gradually came to see Christianity as a source of rebellion. Li had to hide himself while continuing his missionary work in secret. He died in 1828. Staunton, on the contrary, earned a great fortune in banking and served as an interpreter for the East India Company in Canton for many years. His translations, including the Qing legal codes, highlighted shared values rather than the differences between the two polities. When Staunton went back to Britain as the conflict between the two empires escalated, his unique China experience was not appreciated as an asset but as a political burden. For both Li and Staunton, their comprehensive understanding of and empathies with the other culture made them somewhat marginal in their own societies. In a period dominated by colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism, interpreting the other in its own context seemed useless and even dangerous.

Harrison's book is a timely reminder of the great challenge we are facing today. The globalization we are all too familiar with is in crisis. Values that we used to take for granted—multiculturalism, mutual respect, empathy with the other, and enthusiasm for learning—need to be carefully protected. Precisely at this moment, context-based translation across different cultures requires even more courage, self-reflection, and humanism to reject the infiltration of imperialist and nationalist ideologies.