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forces of the British and French armies were departing Canton, so that whether these events had any correlation may be an additional issue. Nothing seems to have been consciously planned as an attack on the Governor-General, though he felt threatened by the riot (the events in Poklo being some 40 miles east of Canton). At the very least the vigilantes were acting "in flagrant violation of the stipulations of the [1860] Treaty," "stirring up the hatred of the people toward foreigners, and their dislike to Christianity." Whether they had other "ambitious ends" hidden under the banner and their rhetoric remained a serious, but moot, question.
Following normal protocol for this kind of emergency, Chalmers acting on behalf of the London Missionary Society presented their complaints to the consul at Canton. The missionaries had been given no indication of the Governor-General's intentions, but Legge specifically adds that, if all else failed, they could refer the matter "to our Ambassador at Peking." His attitude toward the Qing bureaucracy was unqualified and negative: "The [Qing] Government is effete. The foundations are destroyed.” Although this might seem like an overstatement, the feelings reflected a fairly realistic evaluation of the disarray of an empire overcome by foreign powers in the capital and unable to handle the massive Taiping Rebellion which continued to defy imperial armies and ruled over much of the centre of the empire at the time. Other means for dealing with the crisis were also at hand. Daily prayer about the whole situation and its continuing problems became the self-imposed discipline by the Chinese Christians in Hong Kong, prompting Legge to compare this "painful and discouraging" situation in Poklo with the "primitive forthgoing of Christianity” where persecution was also a stimulus for expansion.
It was part of the "cunning of history" that Legge's life and name for the next decade were identified with two major issues of the year of 1861: Poklo and his Chinese Classics.90 In missionary publications he became "Dr. Legge of Hong Kong and Poklo,” and in Hong Kong itself, the memories were more vivid and even more powerful in creating around him a kind of aura as a “folk hero" in the Carlylean sense of the term. At least one major event later in