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HISTORY
prominent boulder bearing the characters Sung Wong Toi* (Sung Emperor Stone) was held sacred to his memory until the hill was demolished in 1943, during the Japanese occupation, to make room for an expansion of the airport. His brother, the last Sung boy Emperor, met with final defeat in an attempted stand in the New Territories and he and his ministers fled to Ngai Shan further south, but some of his followers found refuge in Lantau where their descendants are still to be found.
Trade relations between Britain and China originally centred on Canton. The first English ship to trade peaceably with the Chinese was the East India Company ship Macclesfield in 1699.
In 1839 Chinese alarm over the growing-opium trade culminated in the appointment by the Emperor of Special Commissioner Lin Tse-hsu with orders to stamp it out.
Lin surrounded the foreign factories in Canton with an armed force and demanded the surrender of all opium supplies for destruc- tion. All opium dealers and masters of ships arriving at the port were called on to sign a bond against the import of opium on pain of death.
Captain Charles Elliot, RN, who had become Superintendent of Trade in 1836, ordered his countrymen to surrender the opium, despite the fact that much of it was owned by firms in India for whom the local merchants were agents. But Elliot refused to allow anyone to sign the bond and, much to Lin's annoyance, all British trade was stopped until the British Government could decide its policy. After a siege of six weeks the British community were allowed to leave for Macau. Lin threatened to drive them from the coast and, when the Portuguese Governor warned Elliot that he could no longer be responsible for their safety, the whole British community took temporary refuge in the harbour at Hong Kong. The Chinese then attempted to prevent local supplies of food reaching the ships and after several incidents in and around Hong Kong waters the relations between Lin and Elliot broke down completely.
Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, supported by commer- cial interests in Parliament, decided that the time had come for a
The stone bearing these characters has now been erected in a small public park near original site.
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