270,244 tons in one year, but it speedily recovered again. The foreign shipping returns for the five years of this administration show an average yearly increase of 487 vessels, representing 251,350 tons, being 68 per cent. The tonnage increased from 300,000 to 700,000 tons of square-rigged vessels. The junk trade improved on the whole in similar proportions. Aided during this period by a great extension of the lines of communication connecting Hongkong with other parts of the world, the Colony not only continued to be the headquarters of all the great commercial establishments in China, but became by this time the most extensively visited port in the Pacific.
The currency question was not advanced in any way by Sir J. Bowring. By order of the Colonial Office he published (July 9, 1857) a notification to the effect that Australian sovereigns and half-sovereigns should have legal currency in Hongkong. But he urged upon the consideration of Her Majesty's Government the inconvenience of making the sovereign the standard of exchange in a country where gold is not legal tender. He also inveighed against the absurdity of keeping the accounts of the Government in Sterling in a Colony where not a merchant, shopkeeper or any individual has any transaction except in dollars and cents. Sir J. Bowring went even further and urged the Lords Commissioners of H.M. Treasury to sanction the introduction of a British dollar and the establishment of a Mint in Hongkong. Unfortunately, this sage proposal was rejected by the Treasury Board on the plea that the mercantile supporters of Sir J. Bowring's notions were merely some Shanghai merchants who had, from dissension among themselves, prevented the introduction of Mexican dollars into that place and whose obvious interest it was to advocate any scheme which, if it succeeded, relieved them from difficulty and, if it failed, would cost them nothing. Sir J. Bowring's call for a British dollar was not only considered a risky and expensive experiment but premature in view of the fact that Sterling money remained, under the terms of the Royal proclamation of May 1, 1845, the standard of value in Hongkong,
