99
Chapter 2.
HISTORY.
Before 1841 the island now known as Hong Kong was inhabited by a few fishermen, stone-cutters and farmers, and provided a notorious retreat for smugglers and pirates. In that year it was occupied by British forces partly as a reprisal for the treatment fo British merchants in Canton, and partly to provide a secure base from which trading might be con- tinued with the merchants of South China.
Foreign intercourse with China dates from the sixteenth century when expeditions from the maritime states of Europe -Portugal, Spain, Holland and England-penetrated into Far Eastern waters in the hope of establishing a direct trade by sea with the Moluccas or Spice Islands. At the end of the century, Queen Elizabeth herself addressed a letter to the Emperor of China. Though this letter was probably never delivered it marks the beginning of official support for a whole series of adventurous attempts to share in the trade of the Eastern countries. At the beginning of the next century a monopoly of the East Indian trade was created in favour of "The Governor and merchants of London trading in the East Indies". An early trading-station at Bantam in Java soon led to the extension of the sphere of action to Japan and China, and it was off the coast of South China that the East India Company had to face both the hostility of the Chinese authorities and an intense commercial rivalry with the Dutch merchants.
The Portuguese had already founded the settlement of Macao from Malacca. It was probably the existence of this European foothold that concentrated foreign attention on Canton. In 1681 the East India Company secured a house in Macao and a little later an approach was made to Canton itself. By 1715 a regular seasonal trade had been commenced with a shore-staff residing during the season in the Canton "Factories" and, during the summer months, in the Company's Macao premises. The French, Dutch and Americans were not long in following the Company's lead, and, by the end of the eighteenth century, Englishmen trading on their own account were beginning to share the benefits of this precarious intercourse. It was into the hands of these newly arrived adventurers that the opium trade fell when, in 1800, the Company declined to carry opium in its ships owing to an Imperial edict forbidding the importation of the drug into China. For some thirty years this state of affairs continued, during which time the Chinese authorities, angered by the persistence of the illicit trade which they were unable to check, put increasingly arbitrary restrictions on the Com- pany's legitimate activities.