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A formal interview granted by one official personage to another. A notable instance is the audience given to a head of mission by a head of state, typically for the presentation of credentials, and perhaps also to mark the termination of a tour of duty. In the latter case it has been generally known as the farewell call and is a more private occasion.
Initial audiences are now rather routine affairs but this was not always the case. Ambassadors newly appointed to the court of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire could sometimes wait months for their initial audience, and thus be in official limbo. They might then be subjected to varying degrees of humiliation at the ceremony itself. One of the most legendary audiences in the history of diplomacy, however, was that granted in September 1793 by Qianlong, Manchu Emperor of China, to the experienced British envoy, Lord Macartney, who hoped to establish the first resident embassy on Chinese soil. Macartney, however, refused to kowtow and in consequence it was to be the middle of the next century before a British embassy was opened in Peking. The scene which the caricaturist James Gillray envisaged as Lord Macartney\'s audience was immortalized in his cartoon entitled ‘The Reception of the Diplomatique & his Suite, at the Court of Pekin’ (it was actually held at the cooler summer retreat of the emperor at Jehol). Less well known is Gillray\'s equally if not more remarkable cartoon of the audience granted early in the following year by King George III to Jusuf Aga Efendi, the first permanent Ottoman ambassador ever sent abroad by the Sultan. This is called ‘Presentation of the Mahometan Credentials – or – The final resource of French Atheists’. See also orator; tribute. |
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