ENG-1971 — Page 307

HISTORY

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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 on 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. By the end of the 18th century, the British dominated the foreign trade at Canton but found conditions unsatisfactory, mainly because of the conflicting viewpoints of two quite dissimilar civilisations. The Chinese regarded themselves as the only civilised people and treated all others as barbarians. Foreigners trading at Canton were subjected to humiliating personal restrictions. Confined to the factory area, they were allowed to reside only for the trading season, during which they had to leave their families at Macau. They were forbidden to enter the city and to learn the Chinese language. Shipping dues were arbitrarily varied and generally much bickering resulted be- tween British and Chinese. Yet there was mutual trust and the spoken word alone was sufficient for even the largest transactions.

Trade had been in China's favour, and silver flowed in until the growth of the opium trade from 1800 onwards reversed this trend. The outflow of silver became more marked after 1834, when the East India Company lost its monopoly of the China trade and the foreign free traders, hoping to get rich quickly, joined in the lucrative opium trade, which the Chinese had made illegal in 1799. This led to the appointment of Lin Tse-hsu in March 1839 as special Commissioner in Canton, with orders to stamp out the opium trade. A week later he surrounded the foreign factories with troops, stopped food supplies and refused to allow anyone to leave until all stocks of opium had been surrendered and dealers and ships' masters had signed a bond not to import opium on pain of execution. Captain Charles Elliot, RN, the British Government's Representative as Superintendent of Trade, was shut up with the rest and authorised the surrender of 20,283 chests of opium after a siege of six weeks. But he would not allow normal trade to resume until he had reported fully to the British Government and received instructions. The British community retired to Macau and, when warned by the Portuguese Governor that he could not be responsible for their