CHAPTER XVI.
A Brief Survey.
A.D. 1634 to 1854.
he period covered by the administration of Sir G. Bonham clearly marks, when compared with the preceding epochs, a turning point in the history of Hongkong. The reader who cares only for a detailed record of the most noteworthy facts and events connected with the history of Hongkong, will readily dispense with this chapter and hurry on to the next. But he who would understand that history in itself, discern its inner workings and decipher its deeper import, so as to study the history of Hongkong in the light of cause and effect, may well pause at this point for a brief survey of the facts presented in the preceding chapters.
The Island of Hongkong, it will have been observed, was even in its pre-British times an eccentric vantage point. It never was so much of an integral portion of Asia as to be of any practical moment to the Chinese political or social organism. Its very name was unknown to the topographers or statesmen of China and men had to come from the Far West to give it a name in the history of the East. Its situation at the farthest south-east point of the Chinese Empire, in line with the British Possessions in Africa, India and North-America, constituted it a natural Anglo-Chinese outstation in the Pacific. Hongkong never belonged naturally either to Asia or to Europe, but was plainly destined in God's providence to form the connecting link for both.
As the place so its people. Ever since the first dawning of its known history, Hongkong was the refuge of the oppressed from among the nations. The Hakkas ill-treated by the Puntis,
