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Rh to act as Chief Superintendent of the trade of Her Majesty's subjects with that country and invested with full power to negotiate and conclude a Treaty for the arrangement of the differences subsisting between Great Britain and China. For the latter purpose, Major-General Sir Hugh Gough and Admiral Sir William Parker were associated with him as respective Commanders-in-chief of the military and naval forces in China. Sir H. Pottinger having arrived at Macao (August 10, 1841) together with Sir W. Parker, by the steam-frigate Sesostris, and called on Governor Pinto, held forthwith several conferences with Captain Elliot, Sir Hugh Gough and Mr. A. R. Johnston. He next dispatched (August 13, 1841) his Secretary, Major Malcolm, to Canton, to deliver to the Imperial Commissioners and to the Viceroy dispatches announcing his arrival as Sole Plenipotentiary, and warning the Chinese Authorities that the slightest infringement of the terms of the truce, concluded by the Treaty of Canton, would lead to an instant renewal of hostilities in the Canton Province.

The arrival of these dispatches, and the plain warning thus given to the Chinese Authorities, caused great excitement at Canton. The literati and gentry viewed the attitude of superiority and the tone of undisguised severity, which Sir H. Pottinger had adopted in these dispatches, so utterly at variance with the polite and humbly respectful style of Elliot's communications, as a studied insult and unbearable disgrace. The popular feeling, thus aroused, vented itself at the next public examination of graduates (September 16, 1841), when the Acting Prefect (Yü Pao-shun) was hooted by the students and driven out of the examination hall as a public traitor. The people now made common cause with their officials, though they hated them, and the officials, egged on by the literati to defy Sir H. Pottinger's warning, waited only for a diminution of the forces at Hongkong when they're-built most of the forts inside the Bogue. But when they attempted (September, 1841) to re-arm the Wangtong forts, close to the Bogue, H.M.S. Royalist, forming part of the small squadron under the command