Most people wrongly assume the Macartney Embassy of 1792-94 gave the Western world its first glimpse of the secretive Middle Kingdom.
In fact, there were four embassies—two Dutch and two Portuguese—to the court of Kang-hsi from 1666 to 1687. All four embassies are narrated in Embassies and Illusions by John E. Wills, Jr. (1984).
These embassies had no issue doing the kowtow, unlike the Macartney Embassy, where Lord Macartney, as reported in subsequent narratives, refused to do the kowtow.
However, in the most recent book on this issue, Stephen R. Platt (one of the best young American historians on imperial China) in Imperial Twilight (2018) contends that Lord Macartney did do the kowtow. (See pages 167 to 172.)