the Puntis Tie-chius and Tan-ka people weary of the yoke of mandarindom, as well as the Chinese Emperor fleeing before the ruthless Tartar invaders, the industrious Chinese settler as well as the roving pirate, and finally the British merchant self-exiled from Europe finding his personal and national selfrespect trampled under foot by Manchu-Chinese tyrants—all turned, with hesitating reluctance but impelled by resistless fate, to the Island of Hongkong as the haven of refuge, the home of the free.
It was not in the nature of things that Hongkong should at once become a paradise of liberty. It was not to be expected that the seekers of liberty, self-expatriated from the antipodes of the West and the East yet with the love of their respective national homes fresh in their hearts, would either be left undisturbed from without or consolidate otherwise than by years of internal friction into one political and social organism within the Colony. A stormy career, war without and dissensions within, yet real though slow growth withal and eventual power radiating from a healthful centre of innate Anglo-Saxon vitality, was what the seer gifted with power to look into the future might have predicted as the fate in store for this phenomenal Anglo-Chinese Colony in the Far East.
Searching deeper still into the underlying causes of this Eurasian phenomenon, it will be seen that the evolution of the Colony of Hongkong was in reality the product of a quasi marriage-alliance between Europe and Asia, concluded at Canton (after 1634 A.D.) between the East India Company and the Chinese Government. But this international union carelessly entered upon was characterized, in the course of the next two centuries, by a deep-seated and growingly manifested incompatibility of temper, such as made Anglo-Chinese international life at Canton a burden too heavy to be borne by either nation. British free trade notions based on the assumption of international equality could not remain in wedlock with China's iron rule of monopoly based on the claim of political supremacy over the universe. The crisis came when that claim was confronted
