Peter Auber was secretary of the East India Company in the 1820s to 1836. In 1834, he wrote an account of China, largely from the viewpoint of the Company. This included accounts of the Macartney and Amherst embassies, and much else accessed from the Company’s documents. Within the book, he refers to the English sinophile Thomas Manning, friend of Charles Lamb and the English Romantics early in the century, and determined to get into the interior of China, preferably meeting the Emperor. In one of his attempts to do this, he became the first Englishman to enter Lhasa and have an audience with the Dalai Lama. He was also the ‘M’  Charles Lamb referred to in his fanciful essay ‘A Dissertation on Roast Pork‘. You can read all about it in the attached article.