AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF HONG KONG
In a period of about one hundred and fifty years as a British colony, Hong Kong has grown from an uninviting collection of sparsely populated islands to become one of the manufacturing, commercial, and finan cial centres of the world, with a population nearing six million. This is a remarkable
achievement in any context.
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The history of Hong Kong is as dynamic as its economic and social achievements, and a fresh examination of that history is long overdue. Previous studies of the history of Hong Kong have seen events largely through Western eyes. This important new assess ment makes use of Chinese sources, where these are available, and presents a very dif ferent perspective on th½'nterplay between the Chinese and WesJ�1ners who have shaped
the development of Hong Kong.
Within a ,broadly chronological frame work, a narrative history of wide-ranging scope Uf!folds - sweeping from prehistoric times tc the .1.98�s, when Hong Kong began preparing .for the resumption of Chinese sov ereignty in 1997. Enlivened by character studies of many of �he.significant and colour ful figures in Hong Kong's past and illu minated by a fascinating selection of illustra tions, this authoritative volume will appeal to general readers, students, and scholars.
The book contains over one hundred and tvventy _jlh.1str2i���} of \vhich twe�ty-four are colour plate:;. 1'.1any of these illustra
tions are published here f9r the first time. In
addition there are maps, a glossary, and a comprehensive bibliography.
The Brothers/
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GUANGDONG SHENG
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Jacket illustrations: A C11inese sthool painting of Hong Kong from the harbour, c..1850, showing the hulks Princess Charlotte and Tamar at anchor. St John's Cathedral, with the 1house of the Commander-in-Chief to frs left, is visible on the hill, a1hd the two turrets of the Roman Catholic Ca·:hedral are above the sails of the clipper (lower rigi1t;. Reproduced by courtesy of Martyn Gregory, London. Back: A view of the north shore of Hong Kong island, r989. To the left are the naval docks and in the .c::en \re are the business district
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andJpehind this, Mid-Levels. Serried ranks of tall build '
ings stretch on to West Point, far right. Reproduced by courtesy of Frank'Fischbeck, Hong Kong.
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©Hong Kong Government
0· 114'20'E
AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF HONG KONG
· AN
ILLUSTRATED
· HISTORY
OF
HONG KONG
NIGEL CAMERON
Hong Kong
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Oxford New York
1991
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York Toronto Petaling ]aya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland
and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan
© Oxford University Press r99r
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press 'Oxford' is a trade mark of Oxford University Press
First published r99r Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press, Inc., New York
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Cameron, Nigel
An illustrated history of Hong Kong.
r. Hong Kong, history
Title 95r.25
ISBN o-r9-584997-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cameron, Nigel.
An illustrated history of Hong Kong I Nigel Cameron.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN o-r9-584997-3 : $45.00 (est.)
r. Hong Kong-History. I. Title. DS796.H757C36 r99r
95r.25-dc20 90-48787 CIP
Printed in Hong Kong by Elite Printing Co., Ltd.
Published by Oxford University Press, Warwick House, Hong Kong
IN AFFECTIONATE MEMORY OF IRENE JOYCE (JO) BOSTON (1909-1989)
CONTENTS
List of Colour Plates List of Maps and Figures
ix
x
INTRODUCTION
r
r.
THE ORIGINS OF CONFRONTATION
4
2.
FIRST CLASHES
17
/'3·
THE TREATY OF NANJING
26
4.
EARLY HONG KONG
32
5.
GOVERNOR DAVIS - ONE AGAINST ALL
44
6.
EARLY VICTORIA - FABRIC AND SOCIETY
55
7.
GOVERNOR BONHAM
67
8.
BOWRING'S WAR WITH CHINA
75
9.
CONSOLIDATION UNDER ROBINSON
90
ro.
THE GROWTH OF CHINESE INSTITUTIONS, AND THE PROBLEMS OF EDUCATION
103
rr.
MACDONNELL AND THE LAWLESS 'DEPOT'
119
12.
COLONIAL APPEASEMENT
129
13.
MR HENNESSY'S PROCEEDINGS
138
14.
PUBLIC HEALTH, AND THE BLOCKADE
152
15.
CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM, AND THE LEGALIZATION OF OPIUM
164
16.
PLAGUE, AND THE NEW TERRITORIES ACQUIRED
180
17.
THE 'FIRST TWO DECADES OF THE NEW CENTURY
205
v111
Contents
18.
INTER-WAR YEARS -
THE TWENTIES
224
19.
INTER-WAR YEARS -
THE THIRTIES
237
INVASION AND OCCUPATION 250
REHABILITATION AND TRANSFORMATION 265
POPULATION, HOUSING, AND EDUCATION 280
GROWTH OF AN INDUSTRIAL GIANT 293
CORRUPTION AND THE ICAC 306
FINAL YEARS 320
327
Notes
Appendices 333
Bibliography 342
Glossary 346
Acknowledgements 347
Index 348
LIST OF COLOUR PLATES
(Between pp. Io2 and Io3)
An East India Company officer, c. 1800 (Martyn Gregory)
Tea being packed for sale to Western merchants, late eighteenth century (Martyn Gregory) Opium ships at Lingding Island, 1824 (Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Ltd.) A street in Guangzhou, 1838 (Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Ltd.)
A view of the Guangzhou factories, c. 1850 (Martyn Gregory)
Admiral Sir William Parker, Commander-in-Chief, who arrived in Macau in 1841 (Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Ltd.)
Howqua, the senior Chinese merchant in Guangzhou, c.1830-40 (Martyn Gregory)
A young Chinese merchant at Guangzhou, early nineteenth century (Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Ltd.)
Commissioner Lin, c.1840 (Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Ltd.) View of Macau, prior to 1844 (Martyn Gregory)
Possibly the earliest oil painting of Hong Kong island (The Asian Collector Ltd., Hong Kong) The opium clipper, Red Rover, undated (Martyn Gregory)
Two medals awarded to Sir Henry Pottinger (Christie's)
(Between pp. 230 and 23I)
Jardine's East Point offices and godowns, 1844 (Martyn Gregory)
The residence of the Lieutenant-Governor, Major-General D'Aguilar, in Hong Kong, 1840s (Hong Kong Museum of Art)
Chinese nursemaids and their charges, r856 (Christie's)
Happy Valley racecourse and the colonial cemetery, late 1840s (Martyn Gregory) Spring Gardens, Hong Kong, 1846 (Martyn Gregory)
Sir Boshan Wei Yuk, a wealthy business man, early twentieth century (Christie's) A crowd on the way to the races, 1858 (Christie's)
A street stall and its patrons, south China, 1839 (Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Ltd.)
Hong Kong coolies, mid-nineteenth century (The Asian Collector Ltd., Hong Kong) Races at the C,anton Regatta Club, 1850s (Martyn Gregory)
The north shore of Hong Kong island, 1989 (Frank Fischbeck)
LIST OF MAPS AND FIGURES
The Territory of Hong Kong
1. A plan of Guangzhou
The geographical setting of the opium trade
Victoria in 1845 and 1848
Plan of a typical tenement house, built before 1903
Plan of the first floor of a wealthy Chinese house, nineteenth century
Front endpaper
6
13
59
154
154
The map attached to the Convention between Great Britain and China, 1898 192
The defensive line and the routes of the Japanese attack on Hong Kong 2 5 8
Reclamation and development in Hong Kong Back endpaper
Introduction
l_N the year 1997 when Hong Kang re¥.erts to Chinese sovereignty, ? mm
one hundred and fifty-six years will have elapsed since it became a British
_possession. What was then an insignificant mountainous scattering of larger and smaller coastal islands in the South China Sea, the haunt of pirates, the refuge of occasional storm-blown fishermen, peopled by several hundred resident fishers and farmers, changed in a few years into a small, bustling, striving, and strident Victorian seaport of the Orient.
A war with China gave it birth, its other parent being the Western passion for trade. Further wars between the British and the Chinese, basically over that unruly and headlong passion, were to shape Hong Kong's society, while the flux of trade itself conditioned its thinking as well as the physical form of Victoria, its main settlement.
As other ports opened to Western trade up and down the China coast, the fledgling colony faltered but persevered, attaining its apparently final form by the first decade of the twentieth century. The First World War did not deeply affect its fortunes, or greatly alter its outlook or position in the world. By the outbreak of World War II, Hong Kong was little different from the colony of 1910. But this second world conflict ended the colony's life under a brutal Japanese occupation that lasted three years until the tide turned and the British returned, uncertain colonists in a now anti-colonial Orient.
Within a decade of the war's end the Hong Kong of the past was embarked on a curious process of change and development. This process was so unusual in an apparently adult city that it took most Hong Kong people_ by surprise. The 1949 revolution in China served as the catalyst initiating this unexpected development; the post-war economic climate and the revolution in industrial processes encouraged and continued it. An entirely different colonial entity emerged - modern Hong Kong, a city haphazardly grown into one of the commercial, industrial, and financial giants of the world.
The last part of Hong Kong's colonial history constitutes the period of its
real significance in the world. In this, Hong Kong is unlike most places where growth usually follows a more predictable pattern. Gradual decline from greatness is' a more usual picture than that of dramatic rebirth.
2 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
Historically, Hong Kong is a distinctly odd place. Lack.ing_a.JuckgrouncloJ
gQrmal, logical progression to eventual maturity, iL_turned from a__w_r.t_o.f
fixed colonial adolescence to an adult state of a genetically improbable kind. The huge success of tbis new entity imbues it with a quality as unique as it is elusive of description.
The story and significance of Hong Kong, more than that of most cities (or city-states as in some ways it may be seen), is to be sought primarily in early nineteenth-century economic thrust and later in the effects of economic and political upheavals in China. Hong Kong's belated economic success is due in essence to post-World War II capitalist drive and a massive influx of Chinese refugees who became its manpower. In successful combination those factors forged the Hong Kong of today. Equally, they are contributing factors in the coming demise of the territory as a separate political entity in 1997.
In his history of Hong Kong, first published in 195 8, the late G. B. Endacott opens the first chapter with the following sentence: 'Hong Kong is a British colony situated on the South-east coast of China. ' ft is a measure of the profound changuo status of the place that today, thirty years op, virtually nto one in the world who can read a newspaper any longer needs to
heoffered :hat pie�oLinfo-rmation. Many of them may in fil�Ct be wearing
clothe_s Qr listening to_a_radiQJ llade in Hm:!g Kong. From the barely emerging industrial_entity_clescrib�d_by Endacon, an astonishin_gly different Hong Kong
ha� �loomed. ts future, cloudy and disregarded in those early dayS-OLth� communist reyolution in China, js.-11ow°ap_proacliing-SomethingJike clarity. As its term draws near and the treaty with China terminates Britain's lease in 1997, we shall see the final close of a colourful period.
In the light of those facts, one of the periodic updatings which the passage of time and the press of events requires in considering the history of any place would seem due for Hong Kong. It was still possible in 195 8 to regard colonial possessions - those which had not by then been surrendered to their indigenous peoples - with a certain glow of nostalgic pride as Britain relin quished them and their (in colonial terms) insurmountable problems. That opinion is largely unacceptable now. Thirty years on, whatever our personal view may be of colonialism, it can scarcely be identical with that current in the climate of political opinion of 195 8. The intervening years have, among myriad other transformations, cast Hong Kong in a role of some significance in the world context, a position it did not then hold. In those three decades major shifts in political thought have taken place, and the perspective we now apply to the scene has sharply altered. Reason enough for a retelling of the story.
�_J.-
., �- -
However tempting a pastime it may be, gazing into a crystal ball has little relevance in a history, and it requires no clairvoyant faculty to see, and no great courage to admit, that whatever the state of affairs afreLthe-c� retu-r-n--to - Ch-in-a �in--==19�97:_____ ,..--a s_tate of affairs promised bx the Chinese to
Introduction 3
remain unchanged far 50 years - a great city which will have passed from the hands of a_�_e_stern democracy to those of Chinese socialism will be ratfier l!__nlikely to continue as the same sort of organism for__y_ery long. What H..ong Kong_wilIJiecome...._after-1--9-aged....a s its third state.
It is with the first two historical states of the colony, the pre�dustrial and the industrial, that this volume attempts to deal. 1
The Origins of Confrontation
HONG KONG was from the very beginning a unique colony. Unlike other lands when the British took them, it was sparsely populated, an island (in the guess of the government Gazette of May r84 r) of some 7,4 5 o villagers and fishermen. It had not a semblance of mineral wealth, its terrain was mostly mountainous with little flat land, and there was scarcely- a tre·e, far less any thing that might be called a forest. As the British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston put the matter, in high disgust at the choice, Hong Kong was a 'barren island with hardly a house upon it'. No teeming populace awaited the chance of British employment on plantations or other enterprises, no great river .flooded down from some rich hinterland. The local Chinese eked out a paltry living from tiny rice paddies squeezed into valleys, by keeping chickens
I and a few pigs, and by fishing the local waters. Pirates, indigenous to the
j China coasts, perched now and then between raids like predators in this or
that secluded cove. It was an altogether insignificant place.
J.
The reason for the taking of Hong .Kong - that understood by British merchants of the time and only partially comprehended by Lord Palmerston in England - was the need to secure a land base from which they could conduct their business of purveying to China the illegal import opium. For this trade they required only a sheltered deep-water harbour for their ships and a strip of shore for their 'factories', 1 as trading stations were then named. They took Hong Kong as they had taken other places, by force of arms. A small force, admittedly, but deployed without the consent of the rightful owners, the Chinese imperial government. There is some slight room for doubt, indeed, whether the choice of Hong Kong island was entirely a British one. E. Eitel, a civil servant in Hong Kong whose book Europe in China is a history of the colony's first half century, hints at this. It is conceivable at least that the cunning Qishan, Viceroy of Chili, with whom Captain Elliot negotiated for a base, made the suggestion. Guangzhou, seat of the provincial governor of Guangdong Province, was a mere day's sailing west and up the Zhu Jiang (the Pearl River), and from there it would be simple, in theory at least, to keep an eye on the barbarian colonists and their activities - which, after all, were principally the importation of opium up that same river to
The Origins of Confrontation 5
Guangzhou, the sole port at which the Chinese countenanced trade with foreigners. Eitel, who knew personally many of those who participated in the founding of Hong Kong, allows the possibility of Qishan's influence.
One of the fundamentals of Chinese policy towards commercial contacts with non-Chinese peoples, applying equally to tribes from Central Asia and to foreigners who came in ships to its coasts - a policy initiated as long ago as the Ming dynasty - laid down the principle that trade was a privilege granted by a beneficent emperor to the inhabitants of the less desirable regions of the world. To trade with the Chinese could in no sense be con sidered a right. Conversely, one of the fundamentals of Western thought was, and is, that to trade with those, no matter where, who are willing to purchase and to sell is the natural right of all men.
It was the inevitable contradiction enshrined in those opinions which lay at the root of the history of relationships between the West and China, from the very firs_uim_e._a_W--es te.t.lLille!chant, a Portuguese, arrived at Guangzhou in September _15 17 with the seri�o trade. In fact, the Portuguese ships managed to trade peacefully and returned to Malacca from where they had come, their captain 'loaded with riches and renown'. And Macau, establis�e_sl by t�e_Portl!gufse �iny peninsula at the mouth of the Zhu Jiang; was ceded to-Portugual in 15 5 7 - one result of the banning of direct trade between China and Japan, -after which the Portuguese fleet of merchantmen became the prime carriers of that commerce in place of the Chinese.
Trade restrictions imposed in the Ming dynasty, and in the early Qing
(which succeeded it in 1 644), were eased by the late seventeenth century, and foreign vessels called at Xiamen, Fuzhou, and Ningbo. Later, restrictions were reintroduced and British attempts to claim old trading privileges in 17 5 5 met with resistance. Under the Qianlong emperor (1 73 6-95) trade was virtually confined to Guangzhou. It was this restriction, imposed by the Chinese in an attempt to ward off the aggressive attentions of stubborn foreign merchants, and to stem the outflow of silver from the treasury to pay for opium imports, which proved to be one of the principal precipitating causes of what came later to be termed the century of Western aggression and dominance in China.
1.
Guangzhou was to remain the sole legal port where trading was permitted
from 17 57 until the forcible opening of Nanjing by the British under the terms of what the Chinese justifiably call the First Unequal Treaty of 1 842. British trade with China has a much shorter history than that of the Portuguese. It wa.s not until the mid-eighteenth century that the major part of Western trade with China came to be in British hands, and this was very largely because of the proximity of India. The sub-continent acted as a staging post on lengthy voyages to and from China and was, more importantly, a source of some of the goods which were carried in ever larger
quantities to' China in British ships.
6 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
The monopoly of British trade with China was held by the British East India Company whose principal cargo was the tea to which the British public was so deeply addicted. Other goods from China - porcelain among them - were carried, but tea was the mainstay, the company gradually permitting other merchants to handle other goods. The Chinese, in an effort to regulate trade and to profit by it, had long ago designated a group of merchants in Guangzhou through whom foreign trade was exclusively channelled. This group, called by the British the Co-hong, was required by the authorities in Beijing to pay large sums of money for this privilege. They in turn extracted it from foreign traders in the form of taxes levied by the Guangzhou Maritime Customs with a severity and stringency which varied from time to time in an arbitrary manner.
PL AN
OF THK
CITY OF CANTON.
Custom Ho·ll,8e.
£. Foreign .FactorieB.
3. Hoppo's Yamen.
4- Vicerofs Yamen to 1858 ; R.C. Cathed!ral from 1860.
Viceroy's Yamen from 1860.
Governor's Yamen.
Tartar-General's Yamien.
Manch'll, Para.de (hmnd.
Examination Hall.
British Consulate from 1860.
French ,,
JfJ. Execution <hound. 1.'I. Petition · Gate.
"A�ppr-oxlt11a.to Scele or roet
erOl'IT
m,oin
ro1n�
r. A plan of Guangzhou showing the locations of the foreign factories and other principal sites.
(Source: Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire.)
The Co-hong owned what were termed 'factories' - warehouses and residential buildings - situated outside Guangzhou's city limits to the south east and fronting the river. There foreigners were permitted to live and trade for the 'season' (from October to May each year), after which they were
The Origins of Confrontation 7
obliged to leave for Macau. These conditions had been accepted with more or less good grace as inevitable, but other constraints on trading became increasingly irksome and were seen by the merchants as approaching the intolerable. The Eight Regulations laid down by the Chinese, while not always applied, included not only the ban on residence and trading during the four summer months but also a ban on movement outside the factories and on entry into Guangzhou itself. Foreigners were forbidden to learn Chinese, although this rule was not always enforce d, and all communications with the Co-hong had to be made in Chinese via the officially appointed linguists. Even more vexatious, those communications were required to be couched in the form of petitions and forwarded through the Co-hong to the civil authorities. This, of course, was in line with the Chinese opinion that foreign trade and even the presence of foreigners on Chinese soil was a privilege and in no way a right. Merchants were forbidden to bring their womenfolk with them, and, in theory at least, Chinese servants were not permitted to work in the factories. On a wider horizon, foreign warships were forbidden to enter the mouth of the Zhu Jiang (called by the British, with that combination of romanticism and bravado characteristic of the times, the Bocca Tigris, the Tiger's Mouth).
The effect of those restrictions on the merchants was cumulative and more profound than their content would on the face of it appear to merit. In addition there was the climate of opposing convictions which aroused fury in the merchant breast. And it must also be remembered that in those times there existed an assumption, at least among the less educated members of the foreign community, of their own innate superiority over the Chinese at large; and this was paralle led and mirrored by a strongly held Chinese conviction of similar content.
Behind the details of the regulations, enforce d only periodically in time of tension, lay the fact that their strict implementation when the Chinese wished could, and did, bring the unruly traders to heel. To the proud British merchants this was abhorrent.
Both sides erred, both were guilty of misjudgement. The Westerners had no conce ption of the quality, far less the greatness, of Chinese civilization: the Chinese, having known mostly the rough and ready manne rs of merchants and seamen, equally had no idea of the attainments of Europeans, classing them as they designated all non-Chinese as yi, a word usually rendered in English as 'barbarian' but meaning 'uncultured'. Even the august Lord Macartney, arriv�ng in Beijing in 1793 , found that the barges carrying him to Beijing had been labelled 'tributary' by Chinese officials following the normal procedure.
China was in a strong position. The Chinese had little need of any of the
merchandise brought by the foreigners, while they appeared to be in great need of China's tea and to a lesser degre e its silks, porcelains, and even
8 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
exotica such as rhubarb (which was regarded in Chinese circles as the loosener of Western bowels without which it appeared they functioned only sporadically and uncertainly). From the inception, the trading profits were very much China's. All that the merchants bought had to be paid for in silver, the sole currency of the country. The Chinese were a virtually self-sufficient people. They had little need of English broadcloth. Small quantities of lead, tin, and copper from Cornish mines were acceptable. But the balance of trade rested with the Chinese. In 1761 the East India Company shipped 2,626,000 pounds of tea from Guangzhou worth £83 1 ,000. Forty years later the amount had risen to 23 ,3 00,000 pounds at a cost of £3 ,665 ,000. Nine-tenths of the stock on board any British ship bound for Guangzhou consisted of silver bullion.
To some extent this unpromising situation (from the British point of view) was offset by what was called the 'country trade', that which was carried on by private merchants trading between India and China, from which the East India Company derived a profit from shipping the goods.
Attempts to redress the conspicuous imbalance of trade were in the end a crucial factor in determining the future course of relations between Britain and China, and were to result in the birth of Hong Kong.
_ ,-British determination to trade with China was given a further powerful impetus by the Industrial Revolution. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the pioneering East India Company had become an arthritic, deeply conservative organization. In 1 83 3 private traders in cities such as Glasgow and Manchester persuaded the government to end the Company's strangle hold on all British trade. This was received in the Guangzhou factories with glee, the English-language periodical The Canton Register of March 1 83 4 declaring roundly that 'British trade to China will be entirely free and unrestricted'.
--
The realities of the situation were more complex. In the eighteenth century what were called 'agency houses' had been set up, private traders at Guangzhou working for companies in London and India on commission. Gradually such firms began trading on their own account in rice and opium. The best known was Jardine, Matheson and Company which, in the 1 830s, acted in both capacities - agency-and-private trader. The original partners were William Jardine (1785-1 843 ), a ship's surgeon who joined Magniac and Company as their agent at Guangzhou; and James Matheson (1796- 1 878), who came to South China as Danish Consul at Guangzhou and went into the agency business. He joined Magniac, then controlled by Jardine, and in 1 83 2 the name became Jardine, Matheson and Company. This event was to cast its shadow over the relationship between Britain and China for many a decade to come.
The economic clout of the agency houses proved to be an irresistible force. Before the end of the East India Company's monopoly of British trade there
Dr William Jardine (178 5-1843 ). The portrait by George Chinnery (1774-18 5 2), the most accomplished Western artist to work in the East during the nineteenth century, spending the last 2 7 years of his life in and around Macau, is one of the artist's most accomplished. Jardine and James Matheson were co-founders of the 'Princely Hong', as Jardine, Matheson and Company came to be known.
were 88 of them in Gqangzhou, and by 1 837 they numbered 15 8, and handled more than half of the total British trade there. The Co-hong merchants, charged by the Chinese government to deal with all foreign trade, lacked sufficient capital and were indebted to the foreign traders, by the 1 83 0s owing about $3 million to them at r.5 per cent interest per month. The Co-hong merchants were further squeezed by their government which arbitrarily extracted from them huge sums - in 1 834 almost 5 00,000 taels of silver, earmarked for the emperor, repairs to the banks of the Huang He (the Yellow River), and presents to the hoppo, the head of Chinese Maritime Customs. The situation for the Chinese merchants gradually became intolerable.
The other fa�tor, besides the difficulties encountered at Guangzhou, leading to the seizure of Hong Kong was opium. The subject has been chronicled as the dirtiest scandal of British trade and foreign relations, and set aside by other writers as an inevitable product of the trade imbalance between Britain and a self-sufficient China. Yet, during much of the nine teenth century, opium (called laudanum in Britain) could be bought freely in
10 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
any chemist's shop and was in regular use before the discovery of aspirin fo1 the alleviation of pain.
The zeal with which merchants traded in opium is well documented, not least in their own letters and other papers, by the Chinese involved, and by those on both sides who wished to suppress the trade. But when the stakes are high, zeal is common enough among the punters. Yet in any balanced summing up it has to be conceded that the whole history of the importation of opium into China by unscrupulous merchants forms one of the most unsavoury and ignoble episodes in British mercantile ventures, surpassed only by the horrors of the slave trade.
A mere outline of the figures involved in the sale of opium shows the scale
of the financial exchange that took place. At the time of the first Chinese prohibition edict in 1729 (there were another 47 to follow, 22 of them imperial) about two hundred chests of opium were imported by China in a year. A chest generally weighed 1 40 pounds, the weight varying- with the season and the type, thus the annual total consumption was 28,000 pounds of the drug. In 1767 the total had jumped to around the thousand mark (1 40,000 pounds). And this comparatively slow increase rocketed from about the turn of the century until the beginning of the Opium War four decades later. Despite what one of the principal merchants called 'the hottest persecution we remember', suppression of the trade by the Chinese was almost always ineffectual, even when the opium ships were driven from Guangzhou to the mouth of the Zhu Jiang in 1 820, whereupon the island of Lingding was quickly pressed into service as the new depot. The trade, hitherto fluctuating under attempts at suppression, then increased to 1 8,670 chests per annum and a price war began between Jardine, Matheson and Company and others selling opium from Western India. This was resolved by the formation of a syndicate of all the opium dealers, and by 1 834 the total opium import for the year stood at 1 6,5 16 (over 3. 3 million pounds) valued at silver
$9,654,970. In the following year (1 835- 6) the total import rose to 27,111 chests (almost 4 million pounds) valued at $1 7,904, 248.
The British were not alone in the trade. Their supplies were grown in India
, (in some places under duress). There was a sizeable American contribution of opium from Turkey - to the extent that many Chinese thought that country was a part of the United States. The traffic was so profitable that in 1 839 The Chinese Recorder, published in Guangzhou, summed up the situation in these words:
The most eminent merchants engaged freely in the traffic . . . Throughout India and China, many of the most distinguished merchants - men who would be slow to partake in any other than what they regarded as . . . honourable pursuits - have been foremost in this traffic.
Opportunities for profit on a massive scale were taken up by both Chinese
The Origins of Confrontation 1 1
and foreigners. Chinese law was openly flouted by both sides and, when temporarily enforced, subverted by stealth. In such a climate of opinion the effects of opium on the users was not considered. What was more apparent, at least to the Chinese, was the economic havoc caused by the colossal drain of China's silver into Western pockets.
Even the torpid Beij ing authorities at last informed the emperor in 1 83 8 of the plight of Fuj ian and Guangdong Provinces where nine persons out of 10 were opium addicts. Western travellers remarked that in Chinese towns opium shops were as common as gin shops in England. The causes of opium addiction among the Chinese have been more often investigated than has the parallel English addiction to cheap Dutch gin, without much in the way of solid conclusions - perhaps the squalid and miserable conditions of life for the poor in both places may offer some clues. But there is no doubt of the extent of the addiction to opium. Lin Zexu (1 785 -1 85 0), a provincial governor soon to occupy centre stage in the opium conflict, affirmed that
1 per cent of the population of China (estimated at about four hundred million) was addicted, and official alarm was considerable. In a letter to the British monarch by Lin and others, drafted but not sent, the ravages are eloquently expressed:
There is a class of evil foreigner that makes opium and brings it for sale, tempting fools to destroy themselves, merely in order to reap profit . . . Now the vice [opium smoking] has spread far and wide . . . But our great Manzhu Empire regards itself as
responsible for the habits and morals of its subjects and cannot rest content to see any of them become victims to a deadly poison . . . 2
The following year another version of the letter was actually sent, but it seems that it was never received.
The plain fact of the matter was that the Beij ing government, having failed in the early stages of opium importation to stop or control it, was now quite incapable of doing so. The problem had become a nation-wide phenomenon involving the very officers of the government who would have to suppress the trade. Corruption was near total.
On the British side was the fact of the enormous sum of money paid out annually for China tea, now more or less balanced by the sum earned from the sale of opium from India - especially from Bengal. The total value of the trade in 1 832 was 10 million rupees, in 1 837 over 20 million, and in the following year over 3 o million. A select committee of the House of Commons in London reported in 1 83 o, and again in 1 83 2, that 'it does not seem advisable to abandon so important a source of revenue as the East India Company's monopoly of opium in Bengal'.3 Captain Elliot, soon to play his part in the qirth of Hong Kong, wrote from Macau in February 1 83 7 to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, that the value of opium imported into
r2 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
China in r83 6 was larger than that of all the tea and silk bought from China by Britain. But he deplored the dependence on a 'vast prohibited traffic in an article of vicious luxury . . . liable to frequent and prodigious fluctuation'. In the following year, however, the Duke of Wellington remarked that Parlia ment did not look down on the opium trade but had in fact looked for ways of promoting it. Not surprisingly Jardine, leading importer of opium, in reply to accusations that the trade was mere smuggling, stated with specious reasoning: 'We are not smugglers, gentlemen! It is the Chinese Government, the Chinese officers who smuggle, and who connive at . . . smuggling; not we! '4
Such, then, were some of the mercantile, financial, political, and human
aspects of the opium trade. The results when the Chinese government at last made up its mind to extirpate the trade were predictable. They included the annexation of the island of Hong Kong.
The train of events that led up to that act began to speed up, and the conflict of interests to intensify, with the appointment of Lord Napier as the British government's Superintendent of Trade at Guangzhou following the cessation of the East India Company's monopoly in r83 3. Formerly communication with the Chinese authorities had been via the Co-bong. Lord Napier, however, sent officially as Superintendent of Trade, was a govern ment official and not, as the Chinese had requested, a taipan or manager. His instructions were, however, to refrain from 'all such conduct, language and demeanour as might needlessly excite jealousy and distrust', and to impress on the British community at Guangzhou 'the duty of conforming to the laws and usages of the Chinese Empire'.
Lord Napier, unfortunately, was a man hopelessly unsuited to such diplo
matic address. As the Chinese began to strengthen their defences on the Zhu Jiang, he sent British frigates to cruise off the mouth of the river and 3 00 soldiers to the Portuguese enclave of Macau. Astutely, the Chinese responded by bottling him up at Guangzhou by means of laying barriers across the river, with fire-ships placed ready to be drifted down-river should the need arise. The Chinese demanded Napier's speedy removal, promising that normal trading would then resume. The British community was at first unsure whether its interests required it to support Napier, but he soon lost their allegiance and was forced to retreat to Macau under Chinese guard - severely harassed by their incessant beating of gongs and firing of crackers. An ill man, once there he shortly died.
Napier's contribution to a tense situation had been to ignore both his instructions and the accepted manner of dealing with the Chinese authorities in almost every particular. The Chinese, in contrast, behaved at all times with strict propriety. The net result of the episode was the worsening of relations and new regulations reinforcing Chinese control of the mercantile community. Napier was succeeded by another figure later to play his part in the story of
2. The geographical setting of the opium trade and the area in which hostilities took place during the First China War. (Source: Chang, Commissioner Lin and the Opium War, p. 59. Copyright © 1964 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.)
Hong Kong, John Francis Davis, a conservative, a Chinese scholar, a man predictably unpopular with the merchants. On his arrival, 85 of the British community dispatched a petition to London demanding a plenipotentiary in his place. Davis resigned.
His successor, Sir George Robinson, appointed in r83 5, conceived it best to conduct affairs from a ship moored in the Bocca Tigris. H. B. Morse, in his International Relations of the Chinese Empire, characterizes him as 'a bad case of swelled head', and the Chinese ignored his existence. The two years during which he was in office were marked by ever more frequent and potentially dangerous incidents between the two sides. Captain Charles Elliot was appointed in place of Robinson in June 183 6.
Charles Elliot, who was to play a large part in the coming events, was born
Captain Charles Elliot (1801 -75 ). This photograph appears to be the sole likeness of the man who decided on Hong Kong as a British base on the China coast.
in 18 01, son of the Honourable Hugh Elliot, at one time governor of Madras. At 14 he joined the navy as a volunteer, serving in the Mediterranean. Later he was in India, round the coast of Africa, and in the West Indies, attaining Lieutenant's rank in 18 22 and being promoted Captain in August 18 28. Still only 27, Elliot retired from the navy, accepted a job in the Colonial and Foreign Office, and later served in Guiana (now Guyana) until 18 34. With reluctance he took the post of Master Attendant offered in Napier's mission, which he felt was too humble a job for a man of his experience. In a letter to the Foreign Office written before Elliot's departure for China, Davis had put his seal of approval of Elliot's abilities in somewhat fulsome words : 'The talents, information, and temper of that gentleman would render him eminently suited to the chief station in this country.'
Elliot enters the story of Hong Kong on 1 February 18 3 5 at the gates of Guangzhou, roughed up by the guards as he tried to present a report on an incident on the Zhu Jiang. His principal duties as he saw them were to oil the wheels of trade, to conciliate the Chinese authorities, to act in accordance with the regulations, and to respect Chinese sovereignty. To the Chinese he was something of an anomaly. For all his even-handed dealings with them he appeared as the protector of the opium smugglers. Elliot himself invented a new Chinese term, calling himself yuan chi - an employee from afar. Lord Palmerston in London had laid on his shoulders the impossible task of addressing the Chinese authorities directly, not through the Hong merchants,
The Origins of Confrontation I 5
and of refraining from superscribing his communications with the offending word pin - petition - both instructions contrary to established Chinese regulations. Elliot continued his courteous diplomatic attempts to com municate directly, but in the end he realized he could not win and retired to Macau. He asked for vessels from India to come to his assistance.
On 3 December I 83 8 a consignment of about three hundred and fifty pounds of opium was seized by the Chinese as it was being landed at Guangzhou in front of the factories. The event brought Elliot swiftly up-river bearing a document inscribed with the character pin. Elliot claimed that he had attempted to put a stop to British opium smuggling but that his lack of authority had prevented him from succeeding. The upshot of the affair was that the Chinese emerged from the exchange with only the slightest dent in their armour of rules and regulations, and the pin stayed. Elliot informed them that he had sent away all I I opium ships from the Huangpu (Whampoa) anchorage, an island Io miles down-river from Guangzhou. Normal trade was resumed.
The vehemence of the British merchants' feelings, echoed by Elliot and all
the other officials, on the subject of equality between the Chinese and them selves must seem - a century and a half later - a somewhat inconsequential, even frivolous matter on which to insist when the stakes were not only opium but the continuation of the whole highly lucrative China trade. Such senti ments were founded on an inbuilt sense of British superiority, a belief which had an almost precise mirror image in the Chinese conviction of their own superlative greatness. Unfortunately for the Chinese, although they had every right to exclude opium imports, and while they assuredly possessed greatness as a civilization, power to control the foreigners had long slipped from their hands. This was soon to -be resoundingly demonstrated.
A policy of strict enforcement against Chinese participants in opium
smuggling and against opium users had been in operation for some time, and at the end of January I 83 9 Elliot reported that 'the stagnation of the opium traffic at all points . . . [has] been nearly complete for the last four months'. And, a week later: 'The stagnation of the opium traffic . . . and the conse quent locking up of the circulating medium is already producing great and general embarrassment.' The Chinese anti-opium drive seemed to be working. 'There seems', wrote Elliot to Palmerston, 'no longer any room to doubt that the Court has firmly determined to suppress, or, more probably, most extensively check the opium trade.'
Gradually, it became obvious to the merchants that a new wind was blowing. Russell and Company, large traders, actually issued a circular in February I 83 9 to their clients informing them that the firm 'had resolved to discontinue all connection with the opium trade in China'. And they wrote to their London agent: 'If the export of teas is to be kept up, new sources must be opened to produce the means of paying for them.' They hoped 'that the
16 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
British government, seeing the danger likely to occur to their revenue from tea will discourage the culture of opium, and in this way only can the trade be cut off'. But most opium traders saw it as the most cost-effective item in the China trade. They waited for the wind to change.
The Chinese government had for some time realized that, its edicts having failed to stem the narcotic tide, new measures were necessary. Added to the economic and social ill-effects of opium, unusually severe droughts, floods, and famine, with consequent civil unrest, had raised the cost of living and sapped army morale. But within the Western community at Guangzhou the new Chinese enforcement measures were regarded with derision. Matheson, a leading dealer in opium, remarked cynically that edicts against opium were so much 'waste paper'. And the Canton Register told its readers what they wanted to believe - that China was 'infinitely inferior to Europe in the art of man-killing'. Even if armed conflict occurred, at most it would make only a temporary break in trade. Jardine, now in London, through� parliamentary activities, and Matheson, through his influence with Palmerston, were vociferous spokesmen for freedom of trade and equality of address between British and Chinese authorities: and for what amounted to legalization of the opium trade.
But Chinese opinion was hardening. A wide-ranging debate, touched off by
an imperial request to provincial authorities to offer views on opium suppres sion, narrowed the matter down to a policy of drastic action. Details of the massive scale of the Chinese debate, involving large numbers of officials all over the country, make interesting reading, revealing an official China on the whole unaware of the country's vulnerability, still confident of its immemorial sovereignty and the efficacy of its remedies against the barbarians. On the conclusions reached by the Chinese in the great debate, and on the British reaction to the measures instituted as a result, hung iri large part the future of China. Not for several centuries had the Chinese known a serious threat to their sovereignty. The climacteric looming in the r840s was apparent neither to the Chinese nor, in any precise understanding of its portents, to any other nation involved at that time.
The immediate outcome of the Chinese debate was to thrust Lin Zexu
under the eye of history, and to lead to the enactment of a new statute under which beheading was decreed for the principals, and strangulation for the accessories dealing with foreigners in opium, while those surrendering illicit stocks before r8 months elapsed would merit pardon. Lin was recalled to Beijing from his post as Governor of Hubei and Hunan, and appointed Imperial Commissioner charged with the suppression of the opium trade. He arrived to take up duty in Guangzhou in r83 9. The stage was set for the coming drama.
First Clashes
LI N ZExu was born in 178 5 to a family whose Ming ancestors had included many a prominent statesman. At the age of 3 6 he reached the highest ranks of the mandarinate and thereafter was entrusted with a succession of important positions, culminating in his appointment to the governorship of the prov inces of Hubei and Hunan.
Lin had taken a leading role in the debate on the opium question during his governorship and was a natural choice for Imperial Commissioner at Guangzhou. Both before he arrived there and after, he attempted to gain as much knowledge as possible of those concerned with the opium trade and of the events connected with it. He reached Guangzhou at eight in the morning of 10 March 1 83 9, was greeted by high officials and observed by, among others, an American, who wrote that Lin had 'a dignified air, rather a harsh or firm expression, was a large corpulent man, with heavy black moustache and long beard, and appeared to be about 60 years of age'. 1 He was in fact 5 4, stout but of average Chinese height.
The core of his plans lay in an aggressive policy towards Chinese addicts
and 'pushers', combined with a firm line in dealing with foreign merchants. He at once reinforced measures which had already had some effect in pre venting the landing of opium, demonstrating his considerable abilities. Where he was less capable was in his inaccurate knowledge of Westerners. He had no personal experience of them, relying on Chinese opinion. He supposed that tea and rhubarb were essentials of their diet and that to stop supplying them would result in the foreigners' submission. Bizarre as that may seem, it could be matched by many a Western misconception about China. Lin also thought that foreign merchants were under orders from their governments, and he failed to comprehend that profits from opium financed purchases of tea. But quite cor·rectly he upheld the principle that foreigners on Chinese soil must obey its laws. 'Having come into the territory of the Celestial Court, you should pay obedience to its laws and statutes, equally with the natives of the land. ' He informed the emperor that it would only be as a last resort that he would employ force. But, secretly, prudently, he had drawn up plans for an emergency.
18 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
After taking stock of the situation in his first week, he upbraided the Hong merchants for involvement in the illegal trade and issued a decree to all foreigners: 'How can you bring hither opium which you do not use in your own country to defraud others of their wealth and to undermine others' lives.' He required them to remit to him their stocks of opium, calling on all foreign merchants to sign a bond that they would refrain from importing it in the future.
He was unsure that with the naval force at his disposal he could remove the opium fleet at Lingding - 'amidst the gigantic waves and billows'. Never theless, on 24 March he ordered all trade with Westerners to cease and with drew the Chinese working in the factories, confining the merchants to their premises on the banks of the Zhu Jiang until they delivered the opium. The 800 Chinese servants left 'as if they were running from a plague'. It was to be 47 days before the blockade was lifted.
Captain Elliot, now bent on force rather than negotiation, had no option and capitulated, agreeing to surrender the stocks. 'There can be neither safety nor honour for either government until Her Maj esty's flag flies on these coasts in a secure position. ' On the morning of 27 March he notified Lin that 20,283 cases of British-owned opium would be delivered. In fact this was less meaningful than it seemed, for - as Matheson had pointed out before Lin had demanded it - 'not a chest of opium had been sold in Guangzhou for the last five months'. Chinese action to prevent smuggling had taken effect. The situation was now a direct confrontation between the Chinese- and British governments in the persons of Lin and Elliot.
Meaningful or not, Lin at this point must have felt that he was winning the day. He publicly destroyed the opium by mixing it with lime and salt and flushing it from specially dug trenches into the sea, a not inconsiderable task since the quantity involved amounted to over four million pounds. Being a literary man, he composed an Address to the Spirit of the Sea - 'you who wash away all stains and cleanse all impurities'. He explained : 'If it [the opium] had been cast into the flames, the charred remains might have been collected. Far better to hurl it into the depths, to mingle with the giant floods.' And he added that he was telling the 'Spirit of the Sea' all this so that his watery subjects might be warned and keep away.
The opium stocks were no more; but this was only half of the task with which the emperor had charged Lin. The more difficult part was to prevent more from being imported. None of the merchants would sign his bond, and in this Elliot supported them, meanwhile making overtures to the Portuguese in Macau to allow the British to reside and trade from there. Before a reply could be received from the Portuguese to this rather importunate request (which would, had it been acceded to, have meant their virtually surrendering sovereignty over the peninsula), Elliot issued an order on 1 r May to all the British in Guangzhou to leave. Then, on 24 May, he notified the Chinese
First Clashes r 9
authorities that he was leaving the scene because of ill health. And in the afternoon he set out for Macau with all the British subjects who had been detained in their factories. Betwe en the determined acts of Lin and the unruly merchants he was a sorely tried man.
A month before, Elliot had put in a request for warships from India, predicting that the upshot of the confinement of the British at Guangzhou would prove the downfall of the Commissioner at the hands of 'Her Majesty's prompt, powerful, and measured intervention'. To Palmerston he wrote that to miss such an opportunity for intervention would be to sacrifice the trade with China. The merchants themselves, a matter of a day after their release from the siege of the factorie s, sent a deputation to London to press for compensation for their lost opium, which Elliot had rashly promised them would be forthcoming fron1 the .British government.
In London, in times when political issues were still debated in powerfully
slanted pamphlets published by interested partie s, there was much agitation on the subject of the insult to the British flag at Guangzhou and the 'un justified' imprisonment of merchants in 'appalling conditions', deprived of food and water, and threatened with death. The fact that the merchants were not so deprived, were supplied with food, water, and even, secretly, Chinese servants, and that they suffered little or no hardship during the seige went
Henry Temple Palmerston, 3 rd Viscount (1784-1865), Foreign Secretary in 1830, and Prime Minister, 18 5 5-8 and 18 5 9-65. The portrait is by John Partridge, Court Painter to Queen Victoria.
20 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
unheeded. Three hundre d concerned companies in the British cotton trade applied pressure on Palmerston, complaining bitterly that the interruption in the opium trade had rendered their Indian custome rs - growe rs and shippe rs of the drug - unable to pay for cotton goods from England. Palmerston himself appeared to be dependent on Jardine and his London agent for information on the Guangzhou situation, and in late September 1839 Jardine offe red the Foreign Secretary his own views. China's principal ports should be blockaded, he advised, and an apology sought for insults to the British; payment should be demanded for the surrende red opium; an equitable trade treaty should be negotiated as should the opening of other Chinese ports to fore ign trade; and various islands on the China coast should be temporarily occupied so as to achieve these ends. He furthe r suggested that it might be necessary to take pe rmanent possession of some island with a safe anchorage. And he put forward Hong Kong as one such island.
Not long after receiving Jardine's suggestions, in October 1839, Palmerston
wrote a top secret dispatch to Elliot informing him that he had ordered a naval force to sail, its obje ct the blockade of Guangzhou and the Hai He (the Pei Ho River) leading to Beijing. It was scheduled to arrive in Chinese waters in March 1840.
The decision to go to war with China was taken by Palmerston alone under the he avy influence of Jardine and the suggestions of Elliot and others. Parliament and the British people had no knowledge of his intentions or action until the fleet was on its way to China. There was then no way by which it could be recalled. Palme rston appears to have been wholly convinced that his was the sole method of securing agreement with China on all the re levant issues. Long after, when Palmerston's Chinese war was over, he was to write: 'The re is no doubt that this event, which will form an epoch [sic] in the progress of the civilization of the human races, must be attended with the most important advantages to the commercial interests of England.' It was; but as to the progress of civilization, he was mistaken.
Elliot now forbade the British merchants to trade. Commissioner Lin, surprised at his own misjudge ment of the situation, urged them to trade. He was also discomfited by the murder of a Chinese by drunken British sailors in
a brawl on a visit ashore in Tsim Sha Tsui. Lin de manded, justifiably, the · surrender of the culprit. But Elliot could find no clearly guilty man. He explained this and refused to make a scapegoat of any one man. Equally, it
was firm Chinese custom that a murder should be expiated by a death sentence - the assumption of collective responsibility being paramount, it need not be carried out on the actual murderer. For Elliot, the issue was one of extrate rritoriality, the principle that in litigation between foreigners and Chinese, the law administered shall be that of the defendant's own country. His only possible course was to punish the members of the group for brawling, which he did.
First Clashes 2 r
Commissioner Lin now ordered the Portuguese in Macau to expel the British. The Portuguese did not ask them to stay, and on 26 August r83 9 they left in their ships and anchored in Hong .Kong harbour, in hot, cramped conditions in midsummer. Lin then forbade the Chinese to supply them with food and water. At the end of the month, HMS Volage appeared over the horizon from India with news that the frigate Hyacinth was on her way. That same day, ironically, Lin was writing to the emperor: 'the mere fact that they [the British in their ships] will be prevented from going ashore and getting fresh water is enough by itself to give power of life and death over them'.
Some fifty vessels sheltered the British civilians and several thousand men in Hong Kong's August and September heat and high humidity. Elliot's continued refusal to hand over a culprit in the affair of the murder effectively stopped the flow of food and water. Lin ordered all springs near the sea to be poisoned, and threatened dire penalties to villagers tempted to make a little money out of the British. By 4 September the food and water situation was serious. Elliot and Captain Smith of the Vo lage took the cutter Louisa with the schooner Pearl and a pinnace and sailed over to Kowloon. They arrived off the town at midday, confronted by a strong battery and three war junks. With Elliot was the missionary Charles Gutzlaff - sometime spy and paid employee of opium merchants - as interpreter. Two letters were offered to the Chinese officials. One threatened dire consequences should the British be further deprived of food and water. The other urged the local Chinese not to poison the springs. The letters were refused.
Then, in this apparently run-of-the-mill encounter, there were fired the first shots in what proved to be a century of British gunboat diplomacy. The scene is captured brilliantly if with idiosyncratic use of the language by the brother of Elliot's secretary, A. W. Elmslie, in a letter he wrote to London.
After a long interview with the mandarins [we] anchored a short distance from the Junks. At 2 p.m. Capt. Elliot sent a message . . . and told them that if they did not get provisions in half an hour, they would sink the Junks, - The half hour expired, and no provisions arrived. - Captain Smith ordered his Pinnace to fire . . . The Junks then triced up their Boarding nettings, and came into action with us at half pistol shot; our guns were well served with grape and round shot; the first shot we gave them they opened a tremendous and well directed fire upon us, from all their Guns (each Junk had 10 guns, and they brought all these over on the side which we engaged them on) . . . The Junk's fire, Thank God! was not enough depressed, or . . . none of us would have lived to tell the Story. - 19 of their Guns we received in mainsail, - the first Broadside I can assure you was not pleasant . . . The Battery opened fire . . . at 3 .45 p.m. and their fire was steady and well directed . . . At 4.30, having fired 1 04 rounds, the cutter had to haul off as she was out of cartridges. The junks immediately made sail after the Louisa and at 4.4 5 they came up with the English vesse�s. We hove the vessel in stays on their starboard Beam, and the 'Pearl' on the larboard Bow of the van Junk, and gave them three such Broadsides that it
22 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
made every Rope in the vessel grin again. - We loaded with Grape the fourth time, and gave them gun for gun. - The shrieking on board was dreadful, but it did not frighten me; this is the very first day I ever shed human blood, and I hope it will
be the last.2
Commissioner Lin reported two Chinese soldiers killed, two seriously wounded, and four slightly wounded. On the British side, Captain Douglas suffered a flesh wound, and two seamen were seriously wounded. Lin, however, reported to his emperor that at least 17 British were killed and one of their ships sunk. In fact it is doubtful whether Lin ever knew what actually happened for the commander on the spot had the habit, almost universal among Chinese officers, of inflating the glory of his actions to curry favour and gain promotion. Chinese reports of action in this and the following year were mostly fallacious, and the emperor was deceived.
After the shooting, after the Chinese-reported victory, the provisioning of
British ships speedily returned to normal, even if the prices were higher than before. On 27 October Elliot moved the ships to Tongkoo Bay (Deep Bay) on the east side of the estuary leading to the Bocca Tigris, a safer anchorage. He had been informed that the fleet of Admiral Guan Tianpei had been reinforced and might attempt to take a captive as token culprit for the murder in Tsim Sha Tsui.
Meanwhile two British merchant ships had signed Lin's bond, and when one of them started off up the Bocca Tigris against Elliot's prohibition the Volage tried to intercept. Since the ship was being escorted by Chinese vessels, the warning shot that was fired across her bows was naturally mis interpreted by the Chinese. The engagement that resulted was 'the most serious collision that has ever taken place between Her Majesty's forces and those of this Empire', in the words of Elliot. From the Volage the barrage directed at the squadron of 29 Chinese junks holed one and sank another.
Once more, Lin's version of the engagement differed from Elliot's. Both were mendacious in varying degrees. The brief Battle of Chuanbi, as it came to be known, demolished any hope that may have remained in Commissioner Lin's mind of conducting affairs in his own way and of bringing the opium problem to a conclusion. British trade now passed into American hands for almost a year, and in the nine months until mid-June r840 almost twenty-five million pounds of tea were shipped to England by the Americans, and a further one-half of that weight to Singapore for trans-shipment there.
There things rested, static, deadlocked, until the arrival in June r840 of the first vessels of the British expeditionary force dispatched surreptitiously by Palmerston. Among the ships, Lin noted in his diary on r3 July, were 'three cart-wheel ships that put the axles in motion by means of fire, and can move rather fast'.3 He was reminded of the first example he heard of, which had been up at Guangzhou five years previously - the steamer Jardine. What he
First Clashes 23
failed to comprehend was that with these paddle steamers lay the means of victory for the British over any junk fleet that he could send against them. Instead he assured the emperor that the defences of Guangzhou were excellent.
Meanwhile the ships of the expeditionary force had not been idle, four of them having sailed up the coast to Zhoushan island whose surrender they demanded. When it was refused the flotilla bombarded the place and troops landed without further opposition. The next day they advanced on Tinghai. 'All the houses were shut up,' a British interpreter reported, 'and the silence of death reigned through all the streets!' In London, The Times surrendered to what might be termed an outburst of patriotic glee. 'The British flag waves over a portion of the Chinese empire for the first time!'
Most of the expeditionary force sailed on north to the Hai He, arriving with Elliot aboard on 9 August. Palmerston's letter to the emperor, carried by the fleet, dealt with his complaints about Commissioner Lin's actions at Guangzhou, and this was understood by the Chinese to be the principal British grievance. Mistranslation of the phrase 'to demand from the emperor satisfaction and redress' as 'to beg the emperor to settle and redress a grievance' distorted British intentions. In fact the emperor had given imperial approval to all Lin's actions, but just before the arrival of the fleet changed his mind, ordering the Viceroy of Guangdong-Guangxi, Qishan, to accept all communications from the foreigners, no matter how they might be addressed or in what language. And on 21 August r840 he angrily addressed Com missioner Lin: 'You speak of having stopped foreign trade, yet a moment after admit that it is still going on. You say you have dealt with offenders against the opium laws, yet admit they are still at large . . . So far from doing any good, you have merely produced a number of fresh complications . . . '. The unfortunate Lin was referred to the Board of Punishments on 28 September, and Qishan appointed as his successor, arriving in Guangzhou on 29 November r840. Lin was kept in Guangzhou after his dismissal, ostensibly as a consultant although he was never consulted.
Commissioner Lin has earned an honourable place in history. He was burdened with an impossible task, that of trying to force foreigners to accept Chinese laws, of suppressing opium smuggling, and of treating all non Chinese as tributaries. He did not realize that Britain was by far the most powerful country in the world. And he was faced by Elliot whose intent was to secure a new trading relationship with China and to have his country treated on terms · of equality - quite apart from the thorny question of opium. The two men, each sincere enough in his own way, both saddled with unrealizable goals, could never have come to terms. Lin Zexu was exiled to Ili in Xinjiang on 28 June r841. After many a tribulation he was eventually restored to his rank and served with great credit until his death in r850 at the age of 67, while on the way to attempt the suppression of the Taiping rebels.
24 An Illustrated History of Hong Kong
His replacement, Qishan, had had an equally distinguished career and was armed before his arrival in Guangzhou with the elements of a very different Chinese policy. He and Elliot entered into negotiations without advancing much towards an agreement. And in the end Elliot tired of what seemed a fruitless process. On 6 January 1841 he sent Qishan an ultimatum to the effect that unless some basis for negotiation was reached by the following morning he would take possession of the twin forts at the Bocca Tigris.
No reply was received. The forts were attacked from the sea while about 1,500 troops were landed and took them from the rear by assault. Chinese resistance was brave and they fought doggedly with the loss of 5 00 men. On
20 January the Convention of Chuanbi was signed by Qishan, its terms humiliating in the extreme. An indemnity of six million dollars was to be paid by China; Hong Kong island was to be ceded to Britain; British merchants were to be re-established at Guangzhou; there was to be direct official contact between Britain and China on terms of equality. In return, the British promised to evacuate Zhoushan.
Not surprisingly, the Convention was at once repudiated by the emperor. Qishan was summarily dismissed and deported. He failed to appear for the formal signing of the Convention in February, and the forts were retaken. The Guangzhou factories were reoccupied, and by 21 May 1841 all the tea had been shipped out. Qishan's successor unwisely mounted an attack on British shipping at Guangzhou, but Elliot spared the city the shame of occupation. The British sailed away to Hong Kong. Elliot had the dispiriting experience of learning, from the pages of a Macau newspaper, that he had been dismissed from his post. Palmerston had received news of the Con vention of Chuanbi and found its terms too soft. Elliot had used 'too much refinement in submitting to their [the Chinese] pretensions'. He continued, in terms hauntingly reminiscent of those used by the emperor in1 his castigation of Lin:
You have disobeyed and neglected your instructions; you have deliberately abstained from employing . . . the force placed at your disposal . . . Throughout the whole course of your proceedings you seem to have considered that my instructions were mere waste paper which you might treat with entire disregard.
Palmerston's fury was perhaps a reaction to the failure of his expeditionary force sent without the consent of Parliament to extract a satisfactory treaty from the Chinese.
The facts of the matter were somewhat at variance with the accusations. Palmerston had never succeeded in reaching any clear understanding of the situation which he was attempting to control from afar. His instructions looked good enough on paper, but his penetration into the impasse of opposing convictions held by the two sides was slight. He also seemed to
First Clashes 2 5
think that he could scare the Chinese more easily than was the case. The rooted 'pretensions', as Palmerston saw them, of the Chinese to their superi ority, their dismissal of the idea of equality with foreigners, together with the nature and processes of decision-making in the government of China - all these were but hazily perceived notions which the Foreign Secretary dis counted. Unfortunately it was precisely these factors that animated the Chinese resolve, and which formed the everyday constraints of Elliot's dealings with the Chinese. He was also saddled with the grievances and indignation of a pack of tough traders, few of whom had any interest other than making money, and none of whom had a lesser opinion of their British compatriots than the Chinese had of themselves.
3 . The Treaty of Nanjing
TH E most significant result of those skirmishes over the illegal import of opium was the demonstration to the British authorities, and to the govern ments of other Western nations, that China - huge, monolithic, mysterious, with its vast population and sprawling pre-industrial way of life - now lay virtually defenceless against the deployment of a comparatively small naval force, one which, moreover, operated from no permanent base and many thousands of miles from home. It was suddenly obvious to all that the ancient realm of China could without great effort be made to dance to a West ern tune.
The Convention of Chuanbi, despite its official repudiation by both Britain and China, was considered valid by Captain Elliot who quickly announced its terms, the most immediate of which was the demand for the cession of Hong Kong. This article, however, was encumbered by the unworkable provision that, while holding sovereignty, the British would permit the Chinese customs to levy their dues as if trade were still being condu cted on Chinese soil at Huangpu island downstream from Guangzhou. And there w�re other arrange ments to be worked out - trading relations, exchange of criminals, com pensation for the seizure of the opium, and - trickiest of all - the equality of British and Chinese officials, and the elimination of the humiliating word 'petition'.
J. J.
Airily setting aside these problems, and disregarding the absence of agree ment to the Convention from London, Commodore Bremer (a relation through Prince Albert of Queen Victoria) sent a detachment of sailors under Captain Edward Belcher to claim Hong Kong island. Belcher raised the flag at Possession Point. Hong Kong was declared a British possession. Captain Belcher of HMS Sulphur, one of the British squadron sent by Palmerston,
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