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 ranging the matter were officially commended. Foochow was notoriously out of the road of commerce and visitors, and it was a grateful change when, in August 1846, Alcock and Parkes were transferred, in corresponding capacities, to Shanghai, which, though only opened to commerce three years before, already showed ample signs of its future prosperity. In encouraging and guiding its development, the new consul followed in the steps of his able predecessor, Captain (afterwards Sir) George Balfour; and Parkes was specially commended, among other services, for his exertions in personally superintending the necessary erection of a beacon at sea. But the enjoyment of a civilised European society in the midst of a mild and tranquil native population was rudely disturbed in March 1848 by a brutal attack on three missionaries—Medhurst, Muirhead, and Lockhart. The last had married Parkes's eldest sister in 1841, and had devoted himself with signal success to the establishment of hospitals for the natives in various ports of China. The three missionaries were beaten and almost murdered near Tsingpu, not far from Shanghai, by a party of turbulent junkmen, and the Chinese authorities met all demands for redress with their customary evasions. When negotiation failed to produce any effect, Consul Alcock, on his own responsibility, announced that no British ship would pay duties, nor should a single Chinese junk leave the river of Shanghai, till the criminals were arrested and punished. Parkes was then sent up to Nanking, with Vice-consul Robertson, to lay the matter before the viceroy, and this unprecedented proceeding, coupled with the blockade of the port by a solitary British gunboat, H.M.S. Childers, brought the Chinese to their bearings. The criminals were captured and punished. Parkes took a prominent part in all these proceedings, at considerable personal risk, and his conduct, both at Shanghai and at Nanking, received the fullest approbation, not only of his immediate superiors, but of Lord Palmerston.

On his arrival in London on leave in April 1850, after a tour through India, Parkes was received at the foreign office with much appreciation of his energetic services, and returned to China in 1851, once more as interpreter at Amoy; but much of his brief tenure of the post was spent elsewhere, at Shanghai, at Formosa, and in carrying out, in February 1852, a bold and successful mission into the interior, to Hinghwa, where the youthful diplomatist more than held his own with the Chinese authorities, and managed to terminate a long-standing negotiation for the granting of a building site for the English colony. As soon as this negotiation was concluded, Parkes took up his new appointment of interpreter at the British consulate at Canton. He was now at the focus of Chinese exclusiveness and intolerance. At all the five treaty ports constituted in 1842, the right of Englishmen to enter the Chinese cities had been claimed by the treaty of Nanking; but at Canton, the official metropolis of Chinese relations with foreigners, this right had for ten years been successfully evaded. Not only was the consul, together with all his fellow countrymen, forbidden to enter the gates of Canton, or hold direct personal intercourse with the Chinese dignitary who presided over the foreign department, but walks round about the city were attended with so much danger to Europeans from the hostility of the populace, fomented by the mandarins, that exercise and excursions were almost unknown by the foreign community, who dwelt penned up in their ‘factories’ on the river bank. The plenipotentiaries at Hongkong had vainly insisted on the full execution of treaty rights. The Chinese in reply urged the danger of popular outbreaks, and the English government deprecated the risk of another war for an unproved advantage. During Parkes's residence there in 1852–4 he was compelled, like others, to accept the situation, though his constitutional courage and love of adventure enabled him to make excursions into the country with impunity. At the instance of the consul, Dr. (afterwards Sir) John Bowring, he drew up a valuable report on Chinese emigration, which was published in the blue-book of 1853 (Parl. Papers, 1853, No. 263); and his report on the Russian caravan trade with China, written in September 1853, and published in the ‘Journal of the Royal Geographical Society’ (vol. xxiv. 1854), was praised by Lord Clarendon. During the absence of both consul and vice-consul in 1853, Parkes took charge of the Canton consulate, and arranged a serious misunderstanding between the French and the English colony with tact and discretion. In recognition of his skill in averting an international quarrel, the foreign office early in 1854 appointed him full consul at Amoy, ‘as a special mark of the satisfaction with which her majesty's government had watched his conduct in the public service.’ He arrived at Amoy in May 1854. But in February 1855 he was summoned south to accompany Sir John Bowring (who had succeeded Sir George Bonham as plenipotentiary at Hongkong) on a special mission to Siam.