The Shugborough Dinner Service and Its Significance for S ino‐ B ritish History

Tradition has it that the Shugborough dinner service was presented to Commodore Anson (1697‐1762) by the European merchants of C anton in gratitude for his crew's part in extinguishing a fire that threatened the city in 1743, and the service has come to symbolise the ultimate triumph of this courageous and determined commodore over dithering and obstructive C hinese mandarins. This article argues that the link between the dinner service and the fire is actually a twentieth‐century invention, and that its story, as currently presented to us, distorts our understanding both of C anton in 1743 and of mid‐eighteenth‐century Sino‐British relations more generally.