CHAPTER 1 Introduction [Arrow] Lorcha is the name given to a class of vessels of partly English and partly Chinese rig, that is greatly in request in these waters on account of the facility with which these craft are worked by native crews. They, like other vessels, received colonial [Hong Kong] registers, and are bona fide British vessels as much as the brigs, schooners, steamers, etc. that are built or fit out from Hongkong. The Arrow was one of them, and had a regular register which was in my hands at the time that her crew was seized by the Chinese officers.… Four mandarins and nearly forty men boarded the lorcha, hauled down her flag, and bound and carried off her crew to a war junk lying close by.… the mandarins in ignorance of the Treaty, which required them to make previous reference to me before seizing the men,…1 SIR HARRY PARKES, “Private Letter to His Sister,” 14 November 1856. ∵ The incident described by Harry Parkes, the British consul in Canton (廣州 Guangzhou) during the time of uneasy Chinese-British relationship there, in- volved the lorcha Arrow, owned by a Chinese and manned by a Chinese crew but registered in Hong Kong as a British vessel with a nominal British captain from Ireland. The problem was that Arrow carried out smuggling in the har- bor of Canton, and had been detained by the Chinese authorities. The British consul in Canton filed a protest against such a confiscation and it became the fuse for the outbreak of the well-known Second Opium War, which is more appropriately called the Arrow War, in 1856.2 The Arrow War was well known in contemporary Chinese historiography as a clear sign of British imperial in- vasion of China that infringed China’s sovereign rights in ruling its subjects effectively by using the extraterritorial rights of foreign consuls granted by the unequal treaties, and the colonial status of Hong Kong as the umbrella 1 Stanley Lane-Poole, The Life of Sir Harry Parkes, Sometime Her Majesty’s Minister to China & Japan, Vol. 1: Consul in China (London: Macmillan and Co., 1894), 228. 2 J.Y. Wong, Deadly Dreams: Opium, Imperialism, and the Arrow War (1856–1860) in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 43–66. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/978900434��66_00� 2 CHAPTER 1 for protecting ethnically Chinese captains and crews, who committed crimes of smuggling and piracy, from punishment by the Chinese authorities. This study is not going to argue either that xenophobic Viceroy of Liangguang 兩廣 (廣東 Guangdong and 廣西 Guangxi provinces), Ye Mingchen 葉名琛, or the cunning Harry Parkes and John Bowring, the final Chief Superintendent of the Trade of British Subjects in China, should be held responsible for their ex- aggerated reactions in the Arrow incident, given the fact that the registration of lorcha in Hong Kong had expired a few days before the incident happened. Instead, the Arrow had two hybrid features in that it comprised both Chinese junk rig and a Western hull as its physical form and hoisted a foreign national flag as its intentional choice of foreign status despite, both of which were not exceptional practices after the war. The first feature was later changed into the form of steam tug (luntuo 輪拖), which had a steam-launch (dan xing xiao lun 單行小輪) in the front to tow a Chinese junk behind. The second feature continued, and not only were British national flags hoisted by Chinese-owned vessels, but American, French and German national flags were also involved, and these are known as foreign-flagged Chinese junks in the records of the Kowloon Customs from 1887. The foreign-managed Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs (CIMC), which established the Kowloon Customs in 1887, could do little for the Chinese gov- ernment in stopping the navigation of these so-called hybrid vessels, which necessarily made use of the international framework, both the CIMC and the treaty ports system, to evade the taxation originally levied on purely native Chinese vessels. Van de Ven mentioned that the CIMC was important in its century of service in China by providing an international accepted regulatory framework in helping China to participate in foreign trade.3 This study argues that the Chinese merchants did not necessarily participate in foreign trade in the original ways expected by the creators of such frameworks; instead, they tried to break down the barrier distinguishing native from foreign trade by using the regulatory framework for their own advantage. Van de Ven also suggested that the CIMC was a “frontier regime” in governing the movements of goods, vessels and people in a “frontier region”. Besides, the CIMC was “a civic bureaucracy with a cosmopolitan nature”.4 By borrowing Van de Ven’s term, this study argues that the term “frontier region” refers not only to obvious examples of the coastal treaty ports, where early modernization 3 Hans Van de Ven, Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 4. 4 Hans Van de Ven, Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China, 4..