Page:Twentieth Century Impressions of Hongkong, Shanghai, and other Treaty Ports of China.djvu/153



RUGGED ridge of lofty granite hills, rising almost sheer out of the waters of the estuary of the Canton River, off the south-east coast of China, the island of Hongkong is well fashioned by Nature to serve as an outpost of the British Empire in the Far East. Extremely irregular in outline, it has an area of only 29 square miles, measuring 10½ miles in greatest length from north-east to south-west, and varying in breadth from 2 to 5 miles. The haunt of a few fishermen and freebooters less than seventy years ago, this tiny spot has become, in the hands of the British, a phenomenally prosperous entrepôt of trade at which ships hailing from all points of the compass discharge their cargoes and replenish their holds. The almost precipitous slopes of the hills, formerly as bare as the rocky escarpments on the opposite mainland, are covered from base to summit with luxuriant verdure, and a fine city of 300,000 inhabitants, who live amid all the advantages of Western civilisation, has sprung up along the northern shore and overflowed to the neighbouring peninsula. "It may be doubted," as Sir William des Voeux, a former Governor, wrote in a despatch to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1889, "whether the evidences of material and moral achievement, presented as it were in a focus, make anywhere a more forcible appeal to the eye and imagination, and whether any other spot on the earth is thus more likely to excite, or much more fully justifies, pride in the name of Englishman."

It was in the year 1839 that the British, driven from Canton by the persecution of the Chinese and denied an asylum in Macao, were compelled in their adversity to seek refuge in the sheltered haven of Hongkong. At that time the barren inhospitable appearance of the island seemed to preclude any hope of a permanent settlement. Moreover,