In the Third China War Lord Elgin threatened to take Peking
Posted in Heroes and Heroines, Historical articles, History, War on Saturday, 15 December 2012
This edited article about China originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 798 published on 30th April 1977.
Early one October morning in the year 1856, two boatloads of uniformed Chinese boarded a small craft lying at anchor off the waterfront at the great south China port of Canton. They took the crew prisoner, and hauled down the vessel’s ensign.
Arresting the crew didn’t matter all that much. They were Chinese.
The ensign was British.
The vessel was the 100-ton Arrow, one of a number of small ships trading regularly between Canton and the ports of Hong Kong and Macao which lay 100 miles or so distant, at the mouth of the Canton river.
On this occasion the Arrow had come up from Macao with rice – a perfectly legitimate cargo, which many of those carried on the river were not. Her captain, a young Irishman named Tom Kennedy, was not on board at the time of the arrests. He protested, but in vain, the Chinese maintaining that his crew were wanted for piracy.
Kennedy took the only course open to him, which was to complain to the British consul at Canton. The consul passed on the complaint to the Chinese authorities, but got no satisfaction.
Once more the dislike of the British and the Chinese for each other flared up into acts of treachery and aggression. A week after the Arrow incident, and in retaliation for it, a British gunboat seized a Chinese junk, only to find that it didn’t belong, as had been thought, to the Chinese government. More annoyed than ever, the Royal Navy then captured and dismantled four Chinese forts on the river five miles below Canton, and H.M.S. Encounter shelled Canton’s city wall. Two days later the British entered the city, but not in sufficient force to maintain themselves there.
There followed some months of hit-and-run warfare, with the two sides becoming more and more bitterly opposed to each other all the time.
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