greatly aided by frequent interviews. But these were always avoided, and often on pleas the most untenable: sometimes it was said that the weight of administrative business prevented the granting an audience—sometimes that the viceroy was preparing to attack the rebels, and might be visiting the interior—sometimes that an auspicious day must be waited for. Replies were sometimes long delayed; sometimes never given; and it was seldom that an answer was otherwise than evasive or unsatisfactory. There were many occasions on which the cabinets of the treaty powers directed their representatives to make communications, through the imperial commissioner, to the court of Peking; but only one instance occurred of any attention being paid to such communications: it was that connected with our entrance into the city, and the imperial reply was such as to encourage the viceroy in his perverse and perilous policy. The impossibility of obtaining personal access to the imperial commissioner was, in fact, not only a great grievance in itself, but it was the cause of the non-redress of every other grievance. It is not in the field of diplomatic controversy that European functionaries can have any fair chance with those who, preserving all the forms of courtesy, will deny facts, or invent falsehoods to suit the purposes of the moment.
So great had been the disposition of the Chinese authorities to bring back matters to their position anterior to the treaties of 1812, that in Foochow Foo, the only other provincial city to which we had a right of access, and in which a viceregal government exists, the high authorities had refused all personal intercourse with the representatives of Great Britain, though the consular offices are established within the city walls. The superior officers of the great provincial cities have the right of direct intercourse with the court of Peking and with the emperor himself,—a right not possessed by any of the functionaries in the ports of Shanghae, Ningpo, or Amoy, but confined to those of Canton and Foochow, the one being the capital of the province of Kwantung, the other of the province of Fookien. The importance of our being in direct communication with those through whom alone we can communicate with the ministers, or the sovereign, at Peking, can hardly be over-estimated. Sir John Bowring visited Foochow, in 1853, in a ship of war, and after much resistance from the viceroy, was finally and officially received by him with every mark of distinction; and the result of that friendly reception was the amicable and satisfactory arrangement of every question—and there were many—then pending between British and Chinese subjects in the Fookien province. It is true that on more than one occasion the viceroy of Canton offered to receive the British plenipotentiary, not in his official yamun, but in a "packhouse" belonging to Howqua; and there were those who held that Sir John Bowring should have been satisfied with such condescension on the part of the Chinese commissioner. It should be remembered that in all the treaties with foreigners, the emperor has engaged that the same attentions shall be shown to foreign functionaries which can be claimed and are invariably shown to mandarins of similar rank. It was always a part of the policy of the Chinese to maintain in the eyes of the people that
