Bill for the Use of a Body by Dennis Wheatley Read Free Book Online Page B

the last straw and he retaliated by ordering one of his ships to open fire on some Chinese war junks. By November 1839 Britain and China were officially at war and, as you both must know, China got the worst of it.
    â€˜Britain sent sixteen men-of-war from India and four thousand troops. The fleet sailed up the Yang-tse and occupied the island of Fing-hai. The Chinese could offer little resistance to modern European weapons. An expeditionary force advanced eight hundred miles. When they were within one hundred miles of Pekin the Emperor sent his Grand Secretary, the Mandarin Kishen, to gain a respite by entering into negotiations. Elliot, annoyed by Kishen’s procrastination, forced his hand by seizing all the forts round Canton. On that Kishen agreed to surrender and signed a treaty with Elliot permitting the reopening of trade in Canton and ceding Hong Kong to Britain.
    â€˜But matters did not end there. The British Government felt that Elliot had not driven a hard enough bargain to compensate them for the trouble to which they had been put; and, on his side, the Emperor, furious with poor Kishen for having given away anything at all to the barbarians, had him brought to Pekin in chains, sentenced him to death and repudiated the treaty. So the war was renewed and Sir Charles Pottinger was sent out to take charge of the situation. He arrived in the summer of 1841. Several more Chinese cities were taken and when Nankin was surrounded the Emperor threw in his hand. By the treaty of Nankin, in August 1842, he not only confirmed Britain in her possession of Hong Kong but agreed to open the five ports of Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo and Shanghai to trade, and made restitution for the two million pounds’ worth of opium destroyed by Lin.
    â€˜This terrible trade was resumed and prospered, so that by 1850 India was shipping the drug to China at the rate of fifty-two thousand chests a year. In vain the Emperor tried to protect his subjects by punishing those caught selling the drug. In 1858, by another war, the British forced the Chinese to make legal the sale of opium, and in 1860 to cede to them the Peninsula of Kowloon.
    â€˜Meanwhile the original Colony had passed through many ups and downs. For a long time the Governors sent out from England were men who knew nothing of the Far East and were always at loggerheads with the trader tycoons. In the early days, too, the merchants had visualised Hong Kong as a warehouse that would in time supply China with the greater part of the goods she would buy from the outer world, and when the Government put up for sale the land along the waterfront high prices were paid for all the plots. But a few years after the treaty by which China agreed to receive goods through five ports, each of which began to prove a rival to Hong Kong, property here became as valueless as shares in the South Sea Bubble. A plot for which a Mr. McKnight had paidten thousand Hong Kong dollars was auctioned in December 1849 and knocked down for twenty dollars.
    â€˜The merchants were in despair and the island had acquired a most evil reputation. It was said to be the haunt of vice, piracy, pestilence and fever and the British Government was urged to give it up. It even became a saying, ‘Oh, go to Hong Kong’, instead of ‘Go to Hell’. But a new Governor arrived, Sir George Bonham. He was a very different type of man from his predecessors. Instead of despising the wealthy merchants he invited them to Government House and sought their advice on ways to better the Colony. They offered him the funds with which to drain Happy Valley and transform it from a mosquito-infested swamp into a healthy suburb and helped him to improve conditions in many other ways. A local aristocracy, led by the Jardines, the Mathesons and the Dents, came into being. They fathered the Hong Kong Club, the Jockey Club, the Cricket Club and amateur theatrical and operatic societies. By their efforts Hong Kong at