CHAPTER ONE
Up from British Barbarism
The common disposition of the English barbarians is ferocious, and what they trust in are the strength of their ships and the effectiveness of their guns.
—Governor Lu K’u of Canton, 1834
In 1841, the British crown colony of Hong Kong attached itself like a small barnacle to the southeast coast of the Celestial Empire. The single offshore island that constituted the whole of the original colony was a spiny ridge of half-drowned mountains forming the seaward rampart of a deep-water harbor. Before the British came, it had no geographic identity. They gave it the Chinese name “Hong Kong,” usually translated as “fragrant harbor,” which distinguished the one appealing feature of its forbidding terrain.
Sparsely inhabited from primitive times, Hong Kong, the more than two hundred rocky islands scattered outside its harbor, and the barren seacoast opposite them lay far out in the boondocks of China. Its innumerable, deeply indented coves and mountain-ringed harbors made it a favorite lurking place for coastal pirates.
For centuries, fleets of pirate junks had apportioned their rapacity between pouncing on coastwise ships and pillaging isolated farms and fishing settlements. The Manchu emperors, lacking the unified navy necessary to sink these cut-throats, attempted to bolster the thin defenses along the pirate-infested coast of Kwangtung Province by offering tax-free land to any of their subjects who would settle there. Even so, there was no wild scramble to accept the gift.
Less troublesome than pirates but hardly more welcome to the rulers of China were the European traders who had been plying the Chinese coast since the beginning of the sixteenth century. In the middle of that century, Portuguese merchant-sailors overcame part of this hostility by employing their well-armed ships to help the Chinese emperor crush a pirate fleet. They were rewarded with imperial permission to establish a small trading outpost at Macao, forty miles west of Hong Kong Island.
Traders from Spain, Holland, England, France and America soon began to operate out of Macao, and the British East India Co. opened a trade base at Canton in 1681 to supply a lively English market with Chinese tea and silk. Canton, the only Chinese port open to world trade, stood due north of Macao and ninety-one miles northwest of the future colony at Hong Kong.