Page:"Round the world." - Letters from Japan, China, India, and Egypt (IA roundworldletter00fogg 0).pdf/136

 are from, crowd the anchorage on the west side of the harbor. Here are junks from every port between Shantung, 1,200 miles north, and Siam, Singapore, Java and the Phillipine Islands. A Chinese sailor will distinguish where they come from by difference in shape and rigging, paint and decoration; and, if honest, may tell you where stout-built junks are lying undisturbed, with a pirate crew, and nearly fitted out with a fresh supply of guns and powder. Only it would not answer to trust him implicitly, for he may belong to a piratical craft himself, and put you on a false scent.

Tt may be asked what is the secret of this sudden and enormous growth of a barren rock in population and commercial importance, when the main land close by has many commodious harbors, nearer the producing markets and the native purchasers of foreign goods. The answer to this question shows another side of the picture, not creditable to British commercial ethics. When poor China was forced, at the mouth of the cannon, to cede this island, lying in the highway of the immense commerce of Canton river, to Great Britain, she did not dream that if would become the greatest smuggling depot in the world. That the body and soul destroying drug, which she was trying to keep out of the reach of her teeming millions, would here be stored in immense quantities, and smuggled to the mainland in spite of all her efforts to prevent that cargoes of foreign goods on which she had the right to levy an import duty, would from this central point be run into every creek and bay along the coast where they could be landed by bribing the officials. That tea, camphor, cassis, sugar and other products of China, which pay an export duty at the consular ports should go to Hong Kong free. This illicit trade which an English writer speaks of as the "encouragement of commerce at the expense of revenue," is neither more or less than smuggling, and from it the fortunes of the Hong Kong merchants have been made. Verily the poor “heathen Chinee” has very few rights which John Bull is bound to respect.

Hong Kong has the reputation of being the most snobbish place in the east, and in my short experience I have seen much to confirm this Idea. Being a miniature province with a governor who represents royalty, ends set of tide-writers and hangers-on fresh from the old country, English habits and manners are not only adopted as the