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HE epoch in Hongkong's history which opens with the administration of Sir John Bowring (1854) and closes with that of Sir J. P. Hennessy (1882) is characterized by the severance (since March, 1857) of the ties which had united the interests of the Colony with the Imperial policy of Her Majesty's Government in China. When the successive Governors of Hongkong ceased to act as Her Majesty's diplomatic agents in China, it was not merely that the connection of the Colony and its Governors with the Foreign Office ceased and determined. The change involved the subordination of Hongkong's interests to the desire, always uppermost in the mind of H.M. Minister in Peking, to keep on good terms with Hongkong's implacable enemies, the Chinese Mandarins. The first Governor of this period, Sir J. Bowring, was not only deprived of the office of H.M. Representative in China, but found his successors in that office to sacrifice the welfare of the Colony to a maudlin policy of cringing subservience to China as a fancied equal of Europe and a supposed great and mighty Empire. And the last Governor of this period, Sir J. P. Hennessy, whose one desire was to obtain that same post, exhibits the strange spectacle of a Governor of Hongkong deliberately acting on the false assumption that the Imperial interests of Great Britain and of peaceful relations with China are irreconcilably hostile to the local interests of the Colony.

The earliest portion of this narrative is occupied with the story of that struggle between China and Europe, in which