way, in 1853, with three vessels carrying 268 Chinese settlers. The restrictive policy which in after years, when pushed to an extreme, banished coolie emigration from the Colony, was initiated by Governor Bonham in a proclamation (January 4, 1854) which, however, did not go beyond regulating the provisioning and dietary scale of coolie ships.
At the close of Sir G. Bonham's administration, the conviction forced itself upon Hongkong merchants that the Nanking Treaty, though it improved British relations with China, had commercially but little effect, and that the expansion of trade that took place since the year 1843 would anyhow have resulted from purely natural causes. The returns of the Board of Trade shewed that the import of British manufactures into China was, at the close of the year 1850, less by nearly three-quarters of a million sterling, compared with what it was in 1844. Exports of tea and silk increased indeed enormously, but this increase was chiefly owing to opium and specie and not to the vast trade in manufactured goods which had been expected to result from the Nanking Treaty. It was seen at last that what restrains the influx of British fabrics into the interior of China is not the paucity of open ports but the fact that the industry of China can beat British power-looms with regard to both the cost of production and the durability of the fabric.
The opium trade of the Colony, which Sir Robert Peel's Government had at one time (in 1840) intended to suppress by the imposition of a prohibitive tax, entered in spring 1853 into its present state of legitimate commerce, through the decision of the Chinese Government to legalise the importation of opium. The published raison d'être of this decision was 'the inefficiency of the laws against opium by reason of their excessive severity.' In reality, however, Chinese statesmen, as they had been induced by financial considerations to prohibit the importation of opium in 1830, now legalised its importation in 1853 on purely financial grounds. In 1839 they excluded Indian opium because it drained China of its silver. In 1853 they imposed a heavy import duty on Indian opium to provide funds for the
