The Old Curiosity Rock: Hong Kong, the first Opium War, and the Travelogues and Fictions of 1839-42

Abstract

This paper has a number of protagonists: Captain Arthur Cunynghame, Captain Sir Edward Belcher, army surgeon Edward H. Cree, Lieutenant John Ouchterlony, Commander J. Elliot Bingham. They all wrote pieces of travel while involved in the ‘Expedition to China’ or ‘the Chinese War’ that led to the Crown’s occupation of Hong Kong, that ‘barren rock in the sea’. In the spirit of our ‘Pacific Gateways’ conference, I want to look at the scenes of arrival in these men’s accounts, but also at how the new acquisition of Hong Kong led to imaginative renderings of the place in image and text (some of these military men sketched and painted too). Novels published in England during the First Opium War – by Frederick Marryat and Charles Dickens, specifically – may not be specifically about Hong Kong or China, but they pick up on the motifs of journeying by land and by sea (Nicholas Nickleby, 1838-9; Poor Jack, 1840; Percival Keene, 1842), exploration and settlement (Masterman Ready, or the Wreck of the Pacific, 1841) and also the loss of one’s property to another man (The Old Curiosity Shop, 1841). More directly than his novelistic colleagues, George Chinnery’s paintings of the Pearl River Delta, its landscapes and inhabitants are a record of this man’s journey into a new, old and changing world along the China coast, and evidence that a new imperial presence in China opened up original imaginative (and lucrative) opportunities. Reading these various texts and images, I am particularly interested in the land-water dichotomy and the geopolitical mapping of the (imperial) world through terrestrial settlements as well as along maritime lines.