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The transit-pass business was becoming a nuisance and Parker feared that if the items being passed increased without limit then the Chinese merchants would bring the whole trade down. The Daotai suggested that as only five articles have been mentioned in the bonds Parker had seen to date the simplest thing was to permit as many donkey-skins, etc., as merchants like whether they export them or not, so long as it is limited to these five articles. Parker agreed. Some eight years later, when Parker was stationed in Korea, the then Consul in Zhenjiang wrote to solve a question which was cudgelling the legal brains of that port. The question was 'on what principle had donkey-skins, melon-seeds and lily-flowers received favoured treatment?' Parker replied that he had noted that during the previous ten years goat-skins had replaced donkey-skins and therefore assumed that the donkeys were now all dead. And even in 1903 Zhenjiang was the one port in China where transit-passes still flourished, even in purely Chinese hands. The mystery would seem to have been solved when Parker found an explanation in 1887, when Prince Chun, father of the Emperor, was treated for fever with boiled donkey-skin and mud taken from the bottom of a deep well.
The last days of the foreign concession at Zhenjiang
In October 1911, when the Emperor and his Court were overthrown, the Chinese Imperial Navy unit in Zhenjiang, consisting of twenty sampans each with one muzzle-loading bow gun, surrendered to the Republican revolutionaries. The Imperial Garrison of one hundred and fifty men also surrendered together with its four ancient muzzle-loading guns, all being handed over to the Republicans.
Against the backdrop of mounting nationalism and hostility towards foreigners the War Lord period from 1916 until the late 1920s meant that China was ruled by hundreds of tyrants, with private armies, some large but most were petty, whose interminable activities caused widespread suffering. They all had their individual aims as well as the common feature of such "generals" of extracting the maximum of taxes from all and sundry. Zhenjiang did not escape and suffered from occupations and incursions from the forces of various War Lords as well as widespread destruction during the mutiny by the local garrison in 1922.