Page:Europe in China.djvu/179

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CONFIRMATION OF THE CESSION OF HONGKONG.
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an officer of the British Government should examine the registers and passes of all Chinese vessels visiting Hongkong to buy or sell, and that any Chinese vessel arriving in Hongkong without such register or pass should be considered an unauthorized or smuggling vessel, forbidden to trade, and to be reported to the Chinese Authorities. Article XV provided for the recovery of debts, incurred by Chinese residents of Hongkong, through the English Court of Justice, or, if the debtor should flee into Chinese territory, through the British Consul at an open Treaty port. Article XVI provided that the Hoppo of Canton should furnish the corresponding British officer in Hongkong with monthly returns of passes granted to Chinese vessels to visit Hongkong, and that the British officer in Hongkong should forward similar monthly returns to the Hoppo. Article XVII provided for small craft plying between Hongkong, Canton and Macao, being exempt from all port charges if they carried only passengers, letters or baggage, to the exclusion of all dutiable articles. Those of the foregoing articles, which referred to a British officer doing in Hongkong the work of the Chinese revenue preventive service, and which would have practically confined Chinese trade with Hongkong to trade between the five open ports and Hongkong, were disapproved by the Home Government as much as by the local mercantile community. No such British officer was ever appointed, and fifteen years later (June 26, 1858) the whole Supplementary Treaty was formally abrogated. The object aimed at by those two Articles (XIV and XVI), the Chinese Government sought later on to attain by the so-called Custom's Blockade of Hongkong, and the duties, assigned by those two Articles to a British officer, are at the present day discharged by the English staff of the Kowloon Imperial Maritime Customs Office, established in Hongkong.

As regards that Article of the Nanking Treaty which provided for the payment by the Chinese Government of an opium indemnity amounting to six million dollars, the London Gazette of August 25, 1843, gave notice to those entitled to

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