30
431
Failure of Treaty of Hoomum Chai.
(4)
knowledge. As, however, British Consular and other authorities had no jurisdiction over Chinese subjects and Chinese vessels, and as the presence of the free port of Hongkong, a depot of duty- free goods, would afford Chinese merchants unlimited opportunities of illicit trade, especially in opium, it was recognised that in all fairness some arrangement would have to be made which would enable China to protect her revenue rights and remove the reproach that the British by retaining Hongkong as a free port were deliberately providing facilities for Chinese merchants and shipowners to flout their own Government and carry on clandestine trade. Accordingly, the Supplementary Treaty of Hoomun Chai further provides* (1) that Chinese vessels trading between the treaty ports and Hongkong must be provided with a special pass, valid for one trip only, to be issued by the Customs authorities at the port from which the vessel cleared for Hongkong; (2) that a British official would be appointed at Hongkong to examine the registers and passes of all Chinese vessels; (3) that any Chinese vessel found without a pass or register would be considered as an unauthorised or smuggling vessel, would not be allowed to trade, and would be reported to the Chinese authorities; (4) that the Customs authorities at each port should render to Canton a monthly return of the passes granted to Chinese vessels proceeding to Hongkong, with details of the cargoes carried; and (5) that these separate port returns should every month be embodied in one return by the Canton authorities and sent to the proper British official in Hongkong, who on his part was to render similar returns to the Chinese authorities at Canton of all Chinese vessels arriving at and departing from Hongkong with details of their cargoes, such returns to be transmitted by the Canton authorities to the Customs officials at the ports concerned. It is significant that in the Chinese text, but not in the English, of Article XIII of this Hoomun Chai Treaty there is a final clause which rules that Chinese merchants residing at non-treaty ports in the provinces of Canton, Fukien, Kiangsu, and Chekiang are not to be permitted to ask for passes for vessels to trade between such non-treaty ports and Hongkong, and that if any vessel should violate this ruling the British official and the Kowloon magistrate are jointly to investigate the case and report. The fact that this clause does not appear in the English text indicates clearly the desire of the Chinese authorities at that time to exclude even Chinese vessels from the privilege of trading between Hongkong and ports not opened to foreign trade.
4. These treaty stipulations, safeguarding China's revenue rights, which with good will and effective organisation on each side could have been made a success, speedily died of inanition. The foreign Inspectorate of Customs had not yet been established, and there was no centralising and co-ordinating Customs organisation to see that the Customs officials at the treaty ports should try to make the arrangement work. It was natural, too, that the Chinese authorities should not actively encourage trade in native bottoms between the new treaty ports, opened at the point of the bayonet, and this foreign free port on their own const, which had been torn from them by force. There is evidence that they even discouraged it by charging heavy fees for the passes required by the treaty. The Hongkong officials and trading community were equally short-sighted. Still, in spite of the lack of encouragement from the Chinese authorities, trade in Chinese vessels between the treaty ports and Hongkong
* Supplementary Treaty of Hooman Chai, 1843, Articles XIII, XIV, and XVI,
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After a
did spring up, and probably, if it had been given a fair chance, would have grown and prospered with the development of the Colony. It was killed, however, partly by the attitude of the Chinese authorities, partly by the determined opposition of the British traders, who strongly objected to the using of the Hongkong harbour police as agents for the protection of China's revenue, partly by the exactions of these police and of the employees of the opium farmer, and partly by the cramping fiscal policy of the second Governor of the Colony, Sir John F. Davis, who believed in raising revenue by all manner of restrictive fees, auction duties, and farming monopolies, a polioy which during the early years of the Colony helped effectively to strangle trade in native vessels. In time, however, the tide turned. few years' experience of these shipping pass regulations they were, at the earnest request of the British merchants, allowed to fall into abeyance. Gradually, the more respectable class of Chinese settled on the island, drawn there by the sense of greater security and by the opportunities of business which the free trade status of the Colony offered. Then came in Growth of coast- 1847 the opening up of the coasting trade to foreign-flag vessels, enabling them to carry foreign flags. freely between the treaty ports native produce, the conveyance of which had up till then been restricted to Chinese junks The outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion in 1850, which spreal disorder over the richest sections of the country, not only induced large numbers of Chinese to settle in the Colony, but also, by driving the transport of goods from the land to the water, gave a marked impetus to the shipping trade. As the China seas at that time were infested with pirates, this meant a widespread demand for the protection of the foreign flag, a demand which the Hongkong authorities recognised by throwing open, by Ordinances No. 4 of 1855 and No. 9 of 1856, to the Chinese residents of the Colony who held leases of Crown lands the right to register vessels under the British flag and thus participate in this protected trade.
ing trade under
Tientsin, 1858.
§ 5. This system of registration was destined to play a fateful part in the political Treaty of relations of Great Britain and China, for it was the seizure by the Chinese authorities of one
of the vessels thus registered that provided the occasion for the so-called "Arrow war of 1856- 1858. The Treaty of Tientsin, which ended this war and which was signed on 26th June 1858, abrogated the Supplementary Treaty of Hoomun Chai, giving thus the official coup de grâce to the shipping pass regulations, but made no attempt to deal with the problem by substituting any other procedure.§ Two years later the Convention of Peking, signed 24th October 1860, added a further element of contention by the cession to the British Crown of that part of the promontory of Kowloon which had been leased two years previously to Sir Harry
* British Parliamentary Papers: "Report from the Select Committee on Commercial Relations with China" (1847), PP. 159, 161, 203, 250-253, 385, 451. Ibid., pp. 160, 172
British Parliamentary Papers: "Rules and Regulations concerning the Trade in China and Notifications promulgated in 1847," pp. 35, 36.
§ "Let me state my belief that Lord Elgin's exclusion of the above provisions from the Treaty of 1858, in which he incorporated almost all the remaining provisions of the Supplementary Treaty, is to be ascribed to the fact that they had been from the first unappealed to, and that the Chinese authorities with whom his Lordship negotiated Treaty and Tariff never once referred to them. These mandarins were either northerns by birth, or so little identified with the Canton administration, that a question so local in aspect may have had no interest, for them."-Memorandum by T. F. Wade on the Revision of the Treaty of Tientsin. British Parliamentary Papers: China No. 5 (1871), p. 462.
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