extra tax on the legitimate junk trade of Hongkong. It served, indeed, to induce Chinese merchants in Hongkong to conduct their shipping business in foreign bottoms (exempt from this blockade) rather than by native junks, but, as foreign vessels were excluded from all but Treaty ports, this blockade tended to nullify the right of Chinese subjects residing in Hongkong to trade, by native junks, with the non-Treaty ports of their own country. In fact, this blockade served not only as an efficient check on smuggling, but as a simple means of compelling the junk trade of the Colony to pay double duty unless conducted viâ the two principal ports of South-China, Pakhoi and Canton. And this was the real purport of the measure: to effectually subordinate the native commerce of Hongkong to that of Canton for the injury of the former and the benefit of the latter port, and permanently to neutralise, so far as the junk trade of Hongkong was concerned, the freedom of the port.
It was a clever scheme, this blockade of Hongkong. And the credit (or discredit) of having devised and suggested it, and demonstrated its justification on the basis of international law, to the great delectation of Viceroy Jui, belongs to the British Consul of Canton, Mr. D. B. Robertson, on whom, as the irony of fate would have it, H.M. Government bestowed the honour of the knighthood. This was meant as a reward for his subservience to the short-sighted pro-Chinese policy of the Foreign Office, which Sir Rutherford Alcock initiated in China but which in this case served to give to the prestige and prosperity of Hongkong the heaviest blow it has ever received at the hand of its enemies.
In the face of the support thus given, by H.M. representatives in China, to the blockade of the port, Sir Richard could not do much beyond protesting against a measure which, at best, combined summum jus with summa injuria. He ascertained, however, that the measure, as originally formulated (July 1, 1868), aimed at levying, on Chinese shipping resorting to Hongkong, a special war-tax, called Li-kin, which amounted in the case of opium to taels 16 per chest, and that this Li-kin
