CANTON CONVENTION, THE, the instrument of 1858 by which the Commonwealth obtained the opening of five further treaty ports to its merchants along the coast of the Chinese empire, resident consuls at each, and the right of the Commonwealth's subjects to be tried, for offences committed within those ports, before the Commonwealth's own magistrates rather than the Emperor's. It followed a naval demonstration off Canton in 1856 to 1858 that this contributor's colleagues on the naval side describe, with a frankness this contributor finds it easy to share, as having encountered remarkably little that could honestly be called a war; the squadron's guns were shown rather more often than they were fired, and the Convention that resulted was negotiated, in the main, across a table rather than a breach.
It is worth recording, since the comparison is not one this Commonwealth's own popular memory troubles to draw, how differently the same coast had been left twenty years before. The first Canton crisis, in 1839, saw a considerable quantity of the Commonwealth's own opium stock seized at Canton by the Emperor's officers and no material answer returned by a Commonwealth whose whole disposable naval and military strength was, in that year, already committed to the reconquest of the Indies (q.v.) from its own rebellious provinces: a fleet that might, in another season, have exacted immediate satisfaction on the China coast was at that date blockading Kingston and Bridgetown instead. This contributor does not think it excessive to say that the Severance (q.v.) is, among its other costs, the reason the Commonwealth arrived at Canton in 1858 as a negotiating power rather than, as a rival continental empire arrived some years earlier, a conquering one; the appetite for a Chinese war was spent, in 1839, on a domestic one, and had cooled by the time the Commonwealth's attention returned east.
The Convention's commercial results have exceeded, on the customs returns this contributor has consulted at the Board of Trade, even the optimistic projections of the merchants who lobbied for it: the tea and silk trade through the five ports has better than trebled in the half-century since, and the Commonwealth's mercantile houses at Canton and Shanghai now maintain establishments as considerable as any this contributor has visited at the older factories of India. The Commonwealth takes a proper mercantile pride in the figures, and takes it, on this contributor's own observation of the subject in conversation at more than one Westminster dinner table, with a blush it does not always trouble to explain to itself: a republic that governs no acre of the Chinese empire and asks, in its own account of the matter, only for open ports and equal law, finds itself somewhat at a loss to say, when a franker interlocutor presses the point, quite why its own magistrates should sit in judgment on Chinese soil at all. (H. LeF.)