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On the afternoon of Thursday, 11 March 1847, in Hong Kong Harbour, a piratical craft, with all the appearance of a mandarin boat, fired upon a Chiu Chow (Chaozhou) vessel. It was an ambush. The lead pirate was known to the Chiu Chow ship’s master as a man to whom he had sold salt. The imposter craft carried twelve-pounder guns of European mounting, according to a report on the incident in the Friend of China.1 A few column inches along, the paper gloatingly noted that, since Hong Kong had so thoroughly usurped Macau as an enclave in the six years since the Union flag had been hoisted at Possession Point, the Portuguese colony was ‘ruined and insupportable’. It was rumoured that France or the United States was considering buying it. On that same day, at the centre of this typically confused Hong Kong canvas of lawlessness and a risk being well run, the governor, Sir John Davis, was laying the foundation stone of the colonial Church of St John the Evangelist, halfway up ‘Maritime Hill’ in the City of Victoria. The first Colonial Chaplain, Vincent J. Stanton, made an address based on Matthew 12:6: ‘I tell you something greater than the temple is here’. He was, hopefully, out of earshot of the bogus mandarin’s twelve-pounders. We cannot see the foundation stone anymore. We do not even know exactly where it is, short of it being somewhere under the nave. Records tell us what it says down there under the concrete:2 The cornerstone of this church, dedicated to St John the Evangelist and destined for the worship of Almighty God, was laid by Lord J F Davis, Baronet, a legate of the British Queen in China and bedecked with proconsular dignity on the fifth day of the Ides of March in the tenth year of the reign of Queen Victoria AD 1847. Chapter 1 Genesis, 1841–1850 10 Imperial to International Though Davis was a baronet and so merely ‘Sir John’, he gained an unwarranted peerage in translation from the Latin. Also odd is the use of the ‘Ides of March’, which was the fifteenth of the month in the Roman calendar, marking a full moon. How one can have a ‘fifth day’ of it and line it up as the eleventh is an early puzzle of St John’s. It had taken seven years just to achieve this stone-laying although events were to pick up speed from here on. Yet, though fundraising had been criticised as dilatory, and discussion over costings and architecture had taken up years and thousands of sea miles in a time before the telegraph, there is little trace of any doubt amongst the traders, military, clergy and officials who lived there that there should and would be a church of the Anglican rite built on that island. Scepticism about the future of Hong Kong seemed to be much the preserve of officials in Britain. Palmerston’s complaint that Hong Kong was a barren rock with barely a house upon is set to be quoted in perpetuity. His successor, Lord Aberdeen, saw Hong Kong as too expensive and potentially a political embarrassment in dealings with China itself and other European powers.3 People on the ground in China perceived the advantage of Hong Kong more keenly. Captain Charles Elliott, who had replaced the late and floundering Lord Napier as superintendent of trade in China and succeeded in first acquiring the island under the briefly observed Convention of Chuenpi (Chuanbi), was obviously a fervent advocate of it. He in turn was replaced by London for his presumptions in the absence of clear direction. He had exceeded himself in bagging a doubtful outpost and restoring to the Chinese the ostensibly more attractive but in fact most perilous island of Chusan (Zhoushan) outside Ningpo (Ningbo). An East India Company factory had been set up there. It was briefly but uncomfortably occupied by British troops in 1840, and the home government thought more fondly of it than it did of Hong Kong. His successor, Sir Henry Pottinger, who became Hong Kong’s first governor, carried with him officials’ doubt about Hong Kong but came to share Elliot’s enthusiasm for its strategic and financial possibilities. In this, at least, he was in harmony with the British traders who were desperate for a haven from which to pursue the trading of opium along the China coast. The die was cast over Hong Kong as...

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