An early
merchants of London trading in the East Indies." trading station at Bantam in Java soon led to the extension of the sphere of action to Japan and China.
The Portuguese had already founded the settlement of Macao from Malacca. 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 shorestaff residing during the season in the Canton "Factories" and, during the summer months, in the Company's premises at Macao. 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.
Two attempts had been made to establish normal official relations with China-by Lord Macartney in 1793 and by Lord Amherst in 1816, but these were rebuffed by the Manchu Court at Peking. The separate trends which British intercourse with China had hitherto taken--the activity of the East India Company, whose monopoly expired in 1831, and the unsuccessful official missions-were united in 1834 by the arrival of Lord Napier in Canton as His Majesty's Chief Superintendent of Trade. Lord Napier's efforts at improving relations with the Chinese authorities failed and he died in Macao in October, 1834. Captain Elliot, R.N., succeeded him as Chief Superintendent and for five years negotiations were intermittently continued while the position of the British merchants became more and more difficult. The ultimate result of this protracted period of undeclared hostilities was the withdrawal of British merchant ships to Hong Kong, a blockade of the Canton River in 1840 and the peaceful occupation in January, 1841, of Hong Kong Island, which was then inhabited by a few fishermen, stone-cutters and farmers and provided a notorious retreat for smugglers and pirates.
The cession of the Island to the British Crown was confirmed by the Treaty of Nanking in August, 1842. The Convention of Peking of 1860 added the Kowloon Peninsula and Stonecutters' Island to the Crown Colony and under a further Convention of Peking, signed in 1898, the area known as the New Territories, including Mirs Bay and Deep Bay, was leased to Great Britain for a period of ninety-nine years.
Almost a century of uninterrupted peaceful development followed the Treaty of Nanking. Hong Kong as a free port became one of the world's greatest harbours and entrepôts; freedom of the port and freedom of entrance and egress for all persons of Chinese race were permitted in accordance with a policy which ensured for the Colony the rôle of
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