HISTORY
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Macau, but being allowed up-river as far as Whampoa, 12 miles from the city of Canton, for discharging and loading. A strictly limited number of Europeans connected with the trade were allowed, under security paid by their Chinese business associates, to reside in Canton during the trade season only, being obliged by the Chinese authorities to leave the country as soon as they had completed the year's business. Only certain Chinese merchants, the Hong merchants, were given a monopoly of Western trade; and while they operated individually and not as a guild, they were able to fix prices arbitrarily for a time until they lost their monopoly to outside Chinese merchants known as the 'shopmen'.
G
As, throughout the eighteenth century, the volume of trade between China and the West continued to grow, until it reached large proportions, the various restrictions imposed on it by the Chinese Government became, in European eyes, steadily less realistic and less endurable. Although the French, Dutch, Spaniards, Danes and Swedes also traded with Canton, the volume of British trade by 1763 was more than double that of all the others together. It was the British who, having the largest stake in the trade, were the most critical of the Chinese restrictions.
In 1793 Lord Macartney was sent as Ambassador to Peking in an attempt either to improve trading conditions at Canton and Macau, or else to acquire from the Chinese Government some small island or minor port where Europeans would be able to reside permanently, trade with whatever Chinese merchants wished to deal with them, and be subject to their own laws while residing at the port.
These requests were refused unconditionally. A second embassy, sent in 1816, was even more of a failure, the Ambassador, Lord Amherst, being ordered to leave Peking without being presented to the Emperor.
Hitherto British merchants operating privately in the China trade had been under restraints imposed on them by the East India Company, which, from Calcutta, licensed private British shipping on the China route and, at Canton, saw to it that all British subjects obeyed the Chinese regulations. In 1813, the Company's monopoly of trade with India was abolished; it continued to hold its monopoly of trade with China, but also