The past sixty years of war and peace in China have left two landmarks as concrete embodiments of British policy—the Chinese maritime customs and the colony of Hongkong. These are documents which testify in indelible characters both to the motives and to the methods of British expansion throughout the world. For good and for evil their record cannot be explained away. Both institutions are typically English, inasmuch as they are not the fulfilment of a dream or the working out of preconcerted schemes, but growths spontaneously generated out of the local conditions, much like that of the British empire itself, and with scarcely more conscious foresight on the part of those who helped to rear the edifice.
The relation of the British empire to the world, which defies definition, is only revealed in scattered object-lessons. India throws some light upon it—the colonies much more; and though in some respects unique in its character, Hongkong in its degree stands before the world as a realisation of the British ideal, with its faults and blunders as well as with its excellences and successes.
The want of a British station on the China coast had long been felt, and during the ten years which preceded the cession innumerable proposals were thrown out, some of which distinctly indicated Hongkong itself as supplying the desideratum. But as to the status of the new port the various suggestions made neutralised each other, until the course of events removed the question out of the region of discussion and placed it in the lap of destiny.
The earliest English visitors to the island described it as inhabited by a few weather-beaten fishermen, who were seen spreading their nets and drying their catch on the rocks. Cultivation was restricted to small patches of rice, sweet-potatoes, and buckwheat. The abundance of fern gave it in places an appearance of verdure, but it was on the whole a treeless, rugged, barren block of granite. The gentlemen of Lord Amherst's suite in 1816, who have left this record, made another significant observation. The precipitous island, twelve miles long, with its deep-water inlets, formed one side of a land-locked harbour, which they called Hongkong Sound, capable of sheltering any number of ships of the largest size. Into this commodious haven the English fugitives, driven first from Canton and then from Macao, by the drastic decree of the Chinese authorities in 1839, found a refuge for their ships, and afterwards a footing on shore for themselves. Stern necessity and not their wills sent them thither. The same necessity ordained that the little band, once lodged there, should take root, and growth followed as the natural result of the inherent vitality of the organism. As Dr Eitel well points out, this small social body did not originate in Hongkong: it had had a long preparatory history in Macao, and in the Canton factories, and may be considered, therefore, in the light of a healthy swarm from the older hives.
During the first few years of the occupation the selection of the station was the subject of a good deal of cheap criticism in the press. A commercial disappointment and a political failure, it was suggested by some that the place should be abandoned. It was contrasted unfavourably with the island of Chusan, which had been receded to China under the same treaty which had ceded Hongkong to Great Britain; and even as late as 1858 Lord Elgin exclaimed, "How anybody in their senses could have preferred Hongkong to Chusan seems incredible."
But, in point of fact, there had been little or no conscious choice in the matter. The position may be said to have chosen itself, since no alternative was left to the first British settlers. As for Chusan, it had been occupied and abandoned several times. The East India Company had an establishment there in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and if that station was finally given up either on its merits or in favour of Hongkong, it was certainly not without experience of the value of the more northerly position. Whatever hypothetical advantages, commercial or otherwise, might have accrued from the retention of Chusan, the actual position attained by Hongkong as an emporium of trade, a centre of industry, and one of the great shipping ports in the world, furnishes an unanswerable defence both of the choice of the site and the political structure which has been erected on it. Canton being at once the centre of foreign trade and the focus of Chinese hostility, vicinity to that city was an indispensable condition of the location of the British entrepot, and the place of arms from which commerce could be defended. And it would be hard even now to point to any spot on the Chinese coast which fulfilled the conditions so well as Hongkong.
The course of its development did not run smooth. It was not to be expected. The experiment of planting a British station in contact with the most energetic as well as the most turbulent section of the population of China was not likely to be carried out without mistakes, and many have been committed. Indeed, from the day of its birth down to the present time domestic dissensions and recriminations respecting the management of its affairs have never ceased.
This was inevitable in a political microcosm having neither diversity of interest nor atmospheric space to soften the perspective. The entire interests of the colony were comprised within the focal distance of myopic vision. Molehills thus became mountains, and the mote in each brother's eye assumed the dimensions of animalcula seen through a microscope. The bitter feuds between the heads of the several departments of the lilliputian Government which prevailed during the first twenty years must have been fatal to any young colony if its progress had depended on the wisdom of its rulers. Happily a higher law governs all these things.
Freedom carried with it the necessary consequences, and for many years the new colony was a tempting Alsatia for Chinese malefactors, an asylum for pirates, who put on and off that character with wonderful facility, and could hatch their plots there fearless of surveillance. When the Taiping rebellion was at its height, piracy became so mixed with insurrection that the two were not distinguishable, and it required both firmness and vigilance on the part of the authorities to prevent the harbour of Hongkong becoming the scene of naval engagements between the belligerents. During the hostilities of 1857-58 a species of dacoity was practised with impunity by Chinese, who were tempted by rewards for the heads of Englishmen offered by the authorities of Canton.
It cannot, therefore, be denied that the immigrants from the mainland in the first and even the second decade of its existence were leavened with an undesirable element, causing anxiety to the responsible rulers.