Page 342 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

328.

Between the English settlement on Hong Kong and Kanlung op­

posite it, foreign merchants could conduct their business
66
"without being molested." This included the opium trade.

Six months after the English occupied Hong Kong, they

opened another port at Amoy up the coast. Immediately the

American missionaries despatched Abeel and Dyer Ball, a

medical missionary, to establish a miss..on. A native of
Charleston, South Carolina, Ball had arrived at Macao only

in 1841 after a three-year residence at Singapore, where he

practiced medicine and learned the Chinese language. Roughly

two hundred miles up the coast from Hong Kong, the city of

Amoy (Hsia-men) lay on an island by the same name in the

mouth of the Lung-la or Dragon River in the province of Fukien.

The river mouth was crowded with islands, "ten or twelve

which stretch irregularly agross between the northern &

southern points of the main land which bound this inlet."

Amoy, six miles from the sea, was an excellent location for

11
a port, since the water in the harbor was guite sufficient
for any ships at any time. 11 Across the harbor lay the island
67
of Kulangsu, which shielded Amoy from the open sea. In 1841

66
Letter, Chi.na Mission to American Board of Commissioners,
Jan. 31, 1843, in Missionary,I-Ierald, XXXIX, 8 (August 1843), 303-04.
Abeel wrote first-hand concerning the activity of the English
in constructing a settlement on Hong Kong. "Dwellings, ware-houses,
roads, bridges, wharves, and rows of native mat-shops, have ap­
peared as if by magic. All seem insnired with the fullest con­
ridence that it is destined soon to become a most flourishing
commercial mart." Journal of D. Abeel, Feb. 2, 1842, in Mission­
ary Herald, XXXVIII, 12 (December 1842), 465.
67
Abeel also described Kulangsu: "The island of Kulangsu
1
cannot be far from a mile and a h� f in length and half that
breadth. Its surface is more irregular, rising into several
strange shaped hills and sinkina ir1co as many quiet valleys. It
is almost impossible to have a greater variety of changes and
prospects in the same place." Journal of D. Abeel, Feb. 24 & Mar. 10,
l842, in Missionary Herald, XXXVIII, 12 (December 1842),466-67.