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THE ADMINISTRATION OF SIR J. DAVIS.
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(Colonial Secretary) and M. Martin (Colonial Treasurer) assisted at the memorable interview. But Kiying was a match for them all, blandly explained away everything that seemed shady and conceded nothing. The fact was, the Pottinger Treaties had, as Sir John Bowring once put it (April 19, 1852), 'inflicted a deep wound upon the pride, but by no means altered the policy, of the Chinese Government.' The Treaty remained as it was, and our two diplomatists were reluctantly compelled to try and gloss things over by publishing a garbled account by a proclamation (July 10, 1844) and an imperfect translation (July 16, 1844), leaving it to the public to find out the mischievous provisions of the Treaty for themselves in course of time. An illustrative case soon occurred. On August 10, 1844, a Chinese junk, heavily armed and manned by a crew of 70 ruffians, but having no clearance papers as required by Article XIV of the Supplementary Treaty, ventured to drop anchor in Hongkong harbour. The junk had really come to frighten away or report upon any Chinese trading junks that might be in harbour. But the harbour police mistakenly suspecting her to be a piratical vessel, arrested her, and as there were doubts whether she was a trader without papers or a pirate, Sir John Davis ordered her to be delivered to the Kowloon Mandarin as having come into harbour without the clearance papers required by Treaty. This was the first and only case when the foolish concessions of the Supplementary Treaty, constituting the harbour police of Hongkong as underlings of the Chinese revenue preventive service, were acted upon by a benighted Hongkong governor. The denouement was too ridiculous: the junk turned out to be neither a trading nor a piratical craft but a Chinese revenue farmer's guardboat. However, the news got abroad that every Chinese trading junk, visiting Hongkong without those precious clearance papers, which no Chinese customs office would grant, was to be handed over by the British harbour police to the tender mercies of the Kowloon Mandarin. This contributed materially to injure the native commerce of the Colony and to keep away the junk trade for some time to come.