ENG-1974 — Page 286

HISTORY

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Peking in chains. Palmerston was equally dissatisfied with Hong Kong which he contemptuously described as ‘a barren island with hardly a house upon it' and refused to accept it as the island station which had been demanded as an alternative to a commercial treaty.

'You have treated my instructions as if they were waste paper,' he told Elliot in a magisterial rebuke, and replaced him by Sir Henry Pottinger who arrived in August 1841. The latter conducted hostilities with determination. Twelve months later, August 1842, after pushing up the Yangtze River and threatening to assault Nanking, he brought the hostilities to an end by the Treaty of Nanking, August 29, 1842.

In the meantime, the Whig Government in England had fallen and in 1841 the new Tory Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, issued revised instructions to Pottinger, dropping the demand for an island.

Pottinger, who had returned to Hong Kong during the winter lull in the cam- paign, was pleased with the progress of the new settlement and, in the Treaty of Nanking, deviated from his instructions by successfully demanding both a treaty and an island, thus securing Hong Kong. In addition five Chinese ports, including Canton, were opened for trade. The commercial treaty was embodied in the supplementary Treaty of the Bogue, October 1843, by which the Chinese were allowed free access to Hong Kong Island for trading purposes.

Extensions to the Colony 1860-99

The Second Anglo-Chinese War, 1856-8, arose out of disputes over the inter- pretation of the earlier treaties and over the boarding of a British lorcha the ‘Arrow', by Chinese in search of suspected pirates. The Treaty of Tientsin 1858, which ended the war, gave the British the privilege of diplomatic representation in China. The first British envoy, Sir Frederick Bruce, who had been the first Colonial Secretary in Hong Kong, was fired on at Taku Bar on his way to Peking to present his credentials, and hostilities were renewed from 1859–60.

The troops serving on this second expedition camped on Kowloon peninsula, as the earliest colony photographs show. Finding it healthy, they wished to retain it as a military cantonment, with the result that Sir Harry Parkes, Consul at Canton, secured from the Viceroy the perpetual lease of the peninsula as far as Boundary Street, including Stonecutters Island. The Convention of Peking, 1860, which ended the hostilities, provided for its outright cession.

Other European countries and Japan were now demanding concessions from China, particularly after Germany, France and Russia had rescued her from the worst consequences of her defeat by Japan in 1895. In the ensuing tension Britain felt that efficient defence of Hong Kong harbour demanded control of the land around it.

By the Convention of Peking on June 9, 1898, the New Territories, comprising the area north of Kowloon up to the Shum Chun River, and 235 islands, were leased for 99 years. The move was directed against France and Russia, not against China, whose warships were allowed to use the wharf at Kowloon City, where Chinese