ABSTRACT
In the closing years of the nineteenth century, the Chinese Empire became one of the prized targets in the race to carve out spheres of influence and expand colonial empires. China had, in practice, long been closed to maritime foreign trade, which between 1757 and 1842 had been confined to Guangzhou. In that year the treaty of Nanjing (Nanking), signed after Great Britain had defeated China in the First Opium War (1839-42), had forced China to open five treaty ports to British ships and traders and to cede Hong Kong to Great Britain; the latter much to the dismay of Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, who would have preferred to gain Zhoushan and not just a barren rock, as he said Hong Kong was, with almost nobody living there. In 1844 France – simply as an imitation of the British, one French historian wrote (Lorin 1906: 27) – and the United States concluded similar treaties; the French succeeding in having China revoke a ban on Christianity. Due to over-optimistic expectations about the prospects of trade with China too many ports had been opened at the same time, with the existing ones, Macau and Guangzhou, suffering from the new competition. Hong Kong and the treaty ports had a slow start, as did later ones.
