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His most sacred majesty, George III, by the grace of God, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland,

sovereign of the seas, defender of the faith, and so forth.

To the supreme emperor of China, K Qianlong, worthy to live tens of thousands

and tens of thousands thousand years, send the greeting. The natural disposition of a great

and benevolent sovereign, such as is your imperial majesty, whom Providence has seated upon

a throne for the good of mankind, is to watch over the peace and security of his dominions,

and to take pain for disseminating happiness, virtue, and knowledge among his subjects,

extending also to the same beneficence with all the peaceful

arts, as far as he is able, to the whole human race. Impressed with such sentiments

from the beginning of our reign when we found our people engaged in war, we granted to our enemies

after obtaining victories over them in the four quarters of the world,

the blessings of peace upon the most equitable conditions. Since that period, not satisfied

with promoting the propensity of our own subjects in every respect, and beyond the example of any

former times, we have taken various opportunities of fitting out ships

and sending in some of the wisest and learned of our own people for the discovery of distant and unknown regions,

not for the purpose of conquest or of enlarging our dominions, which are already sufficiently extensive for all our wishes,

not for the purpose of acquiring wealth or even of favoring the commerce of our subjects, but for the sake of increasing our

knowledge of the habitable globe, of finding out the various productions of the earth, and for

communicating the arts and comforts of life to those parts where they were hitherto

little known. And we have since sent vessels with the animals and vegetables most useful to

man, to islands and places where it appeared they had been wanting. We have been still more

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