ABSTRACT
In the history of Sino-British relations, the early 1830s was a period of remarkable change. In 1834, an Act of English parliament abolished the British East India Company’s (EIC) century-old monopoly over the China trade and opened this commerce to ‘all British subjects’, thus beginning the ‘free-trade’ era. However, the British public’s first taste of free trade with China predated this official abolition of the EIC’s charter by two years. In 1832, defying both the EIC’s longstanding pacific China policy and Qing law,3 Charles Marjoribanks, president of the EIC’s Canton Factory, sent Hugh Hamilton Lindsay (an EIC supercargo) and Charles Gutzlaff (a Prussian missionary) on a secret mission to the forbidden
coast of the Middle Kingdom ‘to ascertain how far the northern ports … may be gradually opened to British commerce’ (Ship Amherst 3).4 The voyagers loaded a private ship, Lord Amherst, with English products, disguised themselves, landed in several forbidden ports, distributed Chinese tracts about ‘the English character’ and religion, and clashed with the Qing authorities trying to drive them away.
