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Rh unfulfilled promise of the opening of Canton city, the ungrateful Viceroy was as intractable as ever. The Earl of Clarendon had, when giving Sir John his instructions (February 13, 1854), specially warned him, 'to treat all questions of unrestricted intercourse with the Chinese with much caution, so as not to imperil commercial interests which, with temperate management, would daily acquire greater extension.' But this policy of waiving at Canton the rights granted to British residents and condoning the insults incessantly offered to them by that proud city, did no good with people like the Cantonese gentry. It merely postponed the impending crisis and put off for a brief interval the day of reckoning for years of continued breaches of Treaty rights. Canton was now the only port in China where the Nanking Treaty was systematically disregarded, and this was done at Canton simply on account of the proximity of Hongkong. The establishment of a British Colony at the mouth of the Canton river was to the haughty Cantonese what German Alsatia is to sensitive Frenchmen: a festering wound in their side, a source of constant irritation.

Yeh Ming-shen, the successor of Seu Kwang-tsin in the Imperial Commissionership and Viceroyalty at Canton and the most faithful exponent of that Manchu policy which heeds none but forcible lessons and is bound by none but material guarantees, was the very man to bring the existing popular irritation to a crisis. He was the idol of the gentry and literati of Canton who had (in 1848) erected, in honour of Sen and Yeh, a stone tablet recording their anthropophagous hatred of Europeans in the following memorable words, 'whilst all the common people yielded, as if bewitched, to all the inclinations of the barbarians, only we of Canton, at Samyuenli (1841) have ever destroyed them, and at Wongchukee (1847) cut them in pieces: even our tender children are desirous to devour their flesh and to sleep upon their skins.' Viceroy Yeh, the representative of this party, hated the power, the commerce, the civilization of Europe even more than any of his predecessors. He was not aggressive, however, nor did he think it worth while to strengthen his 20