Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/225

East India Company may have seemed to furnish a model. But the representatives of the Company refused to transact business unless the combination was dissolved and their threat proved temporarily effectual.

It is usually stated, in a rough way, that suspension of trade by order of the Chinese authorities was the serious danger always hanging over the foreigner's head in those times. But the annals show that what with duties upon imports, fees levied from purveyors of food-stuffs, presents to the collectors of customs, tonnage dues, and so forth, the local authorities made such a rich harvest out of the commerce that its suspension amounted to a calamity in their eyes. Hence, when official extortions grew excessive, or when inconvenient complications of other kinds arose, the British merchants sometimes resorted to the heroic device of sailing away from Canton to seek, more propitious markets at Ningpo, Amoy, Chusan, or some other place along the coast. Usually, however, that kind of remedy proved worse than the original disease, and Canton remained in effect the sole entrepôt, the British merchant struggling bravely against Chinese official greed, on the one hand, and against, on the other, the unsympathetic exigencies of a London Board of Directors, who saw little beyond the four corners of their ledgers.

The great Emperor Chienlung, immediately after his accession (1736), relieved the trade of