Fay - The Opium War, 1840-1842: Barbarians in the Celestial Empire in the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century and the War by which They Forced Her Gates Ajar

Its a place all ups and downs, the hills rising to gaunt granite peaks, the gullies falling to narrow beaches and rocky coves. Two large islands and quite a few small ones embrace the Kowloon peninsula, which pushes gently into the South China Sea, and if you could somehow bring the land parts tidily together, youd have a square only twenty miles on a side. So its no more than a patch, this, possessing no natural resources; in fact, not even gifted, given the narrowness of the shoreline and the steepness of the approach, as a place nature intended for a port. A patch of ground that in the 1840s, when it first began to get attention, could point to only a handful of inhabitants, most of them farmers and fishermen, and offered no compelling reason why it should ever attract more. In short, a piece of China that on the face of it ought never to have become what today it has become: a place packed with over six million people, almost all of whom are Chinese, and almost none of whom farm or fish. A place well known to westerners, many of them Americans, who come and go and even settle down, brought less by the tourist attractions than by the business opportunities it offersthe money to be madeat the highest levels of commerce and finance. A place well known to a particular group among these westerners, a group brought for the same reasons but harboring a feelinga keen and now somewhat bitter feelingthat they have always been more than visitors: they belong there. And a government, distant, acidly determined, that insists they never have and dont. The place, of course, is Hong Kong.

No one looking back to the moment when Hong Kong began to make a name for itself should have expected that because it was barren and empty, barren and empty it would always be. Circumstances have a way of invalidating expectation. The circumstance in this case was a decision on the part of the British, shortly before the Opium War began, to take refuge there. Hong Kong island (eventually it passed its name on to the colony as a whole) is some eight miles long and up to four miles wide. It lies east to west just below the Kowloon peninsula and forms a U about Kowloons tip but always a mile or more away. The water there is deep but the bottom is not beyond the reach of an anchor. The wind is muffled (not alwaysa typhoon at Hong Kong can be disastrous) on the west by Lantao, the other big island in the group, and on the east by an extension of the mainland. As a place to drop anchor in, nothing more secure is available anywhere else about the Gulf of Canton. Indeed, so effectively does the topography lock Hong Kong in that if you arrive one evening by sea, as tourists often do, when you come on deck in the morning you may wonder how your ship got in at all.

A safe anchoragethat was all the British at the time wanted. There was no thought of landing or taking on goods. The narrowness of the seafront would not have been helpful, and anyway, there were no docks or landing slips. But on a day late in August 1839, they came, several score merchant ships accompanied by the few small men-of-war available to Charles Elliothe was the chief superintendent of trade, and in that capacity Britains only official representative on the China coast. Besides officers and crew and men from the agency houses, the ships carried the whole of the British communitymen, women, and childrenat Macao. They had left at the insistence of the Portuguese governor because Chinese troops were threatening Macao from the north. In the gulf itself there had already been some bloody scraps. Off Lantao one night, boatloads of Chinese had attacked a passage schooner, killed every lascar except the bosun (who jumped into the water and clung to the rudder), and so knocked about the single English passengercutting off one ear and stuffing it into his mouththat it was a mercy he survived. No doubt these had been pirates. There were many about the gulf. But war junks of the Chinese maritime service were making threatening gestures, too. And behind all this was a much more annoying development. In March, at the height of the trading season, a special high commissioner sent direct from Peking (Beijing) had reached Canton (Guangzhou), lectured the local mandarins and the Hong merchants into a state of shock, and made arrangements to bring the barbarians, particularly the British barbarians, to order. His first step had been to cut the barbarians off from all contact with Macao or their ships. His second had been to force, as a condition of their release, the surrender of merchandise worth several million dollars. Next, he had declared all further trade with the British closed until other conditions were met, conditions with which the British had made it plain they would not comply. And at the same time he had signaled, by the suddenly vigorous behavior of his war junks and troops, that if they wouldnt, they would pay.

The merchandise was opium, twenty thousand chests of it, brought into the gulf and up to the mouth of the Canton (or Pearl) river, surrendered there to the special high commissioner Lin Tse-Hs, and destroyed by being dumped into salt water. Twenty thousand chests worth perhaps six million dollars, or two-and-a-half million pounds sterling. Elliot had persuaded the merchants involved (Lin, no fool, had a pretty good idea who they were and how much of the stuff they had) to send for the chests. Naturally, they were not in the river, but in receiving ships (floating warehouses) out in the gulf or up the coast, or in the opium clippers that had brought them from Calcutta. Getting word to these vessels had taken time. There was a good deal of resistance to the giving of the necessary orders, in part because most of the chests belonged to distant persons who had entrusted them to these merchants to be sold. But Elliot had assured them that he asked for the surrender on behalf of his government. Surely it would find the money to cover the loss. Failing that, it would compel the Chinese to do so.

Meanwhile, the British were looking for their safe anchorage, not because they walked in fear and trembling of what Lin Tse-Hs would do now, but because they intended to make his next move impossible. He had taken them for a tidy sum by catching them up a river. He must not be allowed to catch them thus againnot him, not others, ever. Lin knew where they were. British vessels had dropped anchor at Hong Kong before and had not hesitated to meet impertinent behaviorin their confidence that was how they instinctively perceived itwith solid shot. They would not hesitate now. And if things turned violent Lin would be instantly alerted. But the Hong Kong roadstead, a mile wide, with exits at both ends and no forts save a small battery at Kowloon, was a far cry from the Canton River. He could never repeat his maneuver here.