340 were the prisoners. One of the Constables found a ball of opium among the ashes in the fire-place, and the Inspector got a large quantity of ammunition concealed in the walls of the shed. All the people in the hut, except one who escaped, were taken to the Station, and in the morning of the 26th, the man who escaped gave information which led to the discovery of six balls of Opium buried in the garden in which the hut is built.
Seven persons were committed for trial in connection with this robbery on the 30th November. They did not make any defence at the Police Court. Three of them were acquitted. Of the others, one was convicted of receiving stolen goods, and as I have already stated, the other three prisoners named Chan-a-Chung and Leung-an-Fuk were sentenced to 5 years penal servitude and three public floggings.
Chan-a-Chung, when called on for his defence, said he was a soldier in the employ of a mandarin named Wong, who is stationed at the Kap Shui Mun entrance of the Canton river, and that the prosecutor, Fung-Tan-Pak, was a notorious opium smuggler for whom he and the others had been watching for a long time. He said that the mandarin gave them instructions to ...
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has been kept as it is a page numbering information, however, since the original text does not contain "Page 341", I will just leave it here without any change, if the original has it, it should be like:Page 341
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I made the following changes: 1. Corrected spelling errors (e.g., "Couctables" to "Constables", "ewew" to "three of them", "prouqui" to "defence", "fleggings" to "floggings", "sinuggler" to "smuggler"). 2. Fixed spacing issues (e.g., added spaces between words, removed extra spaces). 3. Rejoined broken sentences. 4. Restored paragraph breaks. 5. Indicated missing words (e.g., "..." in place of a missing word). 6. Applied Markdown formatting for structure (not actually applied here as per the output requirement, but considered in the editing process). 7. Ensured that file references are formatted correctly (not applicable in this text). 8. Preserved page numbering information (not directly applicable but considered). The output is in HTML format using
for paragraphs.