The Sun.
London, England, 1841-03-08 00:00:00

CHINA.

MEMORIAL OF ICE-SHEN, VICEROY. OF PECHE-LEE (THE
SUCCESSOR OF LIN), RECOMMENDING THE EMPEROR TO
PUT A TEMPORARY STOP TO FOREIGN INTERCOURSE WITH
CHINA.
I assert it as a fact, that what my country views with feel-
ings of the deepest indignation and pity, ,is seeing the land over-
flown with foreign poison, and the people thereof duped and be-
fooled; and, moreover, I assert that this evil springs from our
holding intercourse with foreigners, no less than from native
traitors making light of the laws !
it now appears that your Majesty's Minister, Hwang Tseo-
tsze, of the Hungloo Temple, has duly memorialized, praying
your Majesty to take it upon yourself alone to decide this mat-
ter, but your Majesty has preferred to make due inquiries, and
to examine into the circumstances of the case, and has ordered
the acting Viceroys and Fooyunes of every province to em-
body their ideas on the subject in duly prepared memorials.
Your Majesty is now fully aware that what the afoiesaid
Minister recommended cannot be put in force, and you are
now looking around you for some more sage, more feasible
plan. The sage plan required is nothing more than to act on
the principle of straightening the stem (that the branches may
also be straight) and purifying the fountain (that the stream
may also run clear ! ) And if it be asked me ow may this be
done ? I reply, by wise measures defeating the schemes of the
foreigners, and 'having done this, you have merely to bend
down their back, and pin them by the collar ; support the
people of your country with kindness, and the common
peoi-le being kindly treated, will not merely have smiling
faces, 'but also grateful hearts. Draw the laws tightly around
the traitors, and those traitors being thus hemmed in by the
net of the law will lose heart, and their spirit will desert them !
I beg the liberty of explaining my-elf. Let us in the first
place take up the subject of our sycee silver leaking out of the
country by means of these foreigners, and discuss it. This
commodity then, is the most valuable production of our inner
land. At present the opium that these foreigners bring is not
bartered for other commodities, but exchanged alone for sycee
silver. Taking the amount (of opium sold) during the last 30
or 40 years, and adding it up, it comes to several thousand
myriad myriads* (100,000,000,000). These hundreds of
thousands of millions of taels, if distributed among the people
of our central land, would be no small amount, and here We
see it leaking out to the distant foreigners, among whom seven
or eight-tenths of it remain. I have examined and found that
the several we used to have abounding is silver ore,
from the time of the Sung dynasty (A.D. 969-1279) the
Yuen dynasty (A.D. 1279-1333), the Ming dynasty (A.D.
1368-1644) and until now have all been utterly exhausted.
Only at Ke-nan, near Kinchow, there is a mountain belong-
ing to the Burmese where there is a large mining establish-
ment, and beyond the boundaries of Kwangse there is the
Sung-Sing mountain, which belongs to Cochinchina, where
there is another mining establishment. The ore in these
mines is very abundant, but as they do not belong to China
the natives are unacquainted with the proce,s of smelting.
They only send a merchant (perhaps like one of the Hong
merchants here) to receive the duties and allow people from
China to work them for their own account. Both places em-
ploy annually about forty or fifty thousand labourers, and the
money they annually extract does not exceed two millions of
taels, which they remit to our inner land. It is, indeed, a
most difficult article to be obtained. Now then, we see that
the outside foreigners have, in the course of several tens of
from ns more than we could make up again
' -y drug
they have been obtaining our most valuable production ! It is
i a ears,
taken
thousand away
years;'ay and in return for their most ileait
by reason of this that in its salt taxes and transit duties Peking
in Tartary there are only bills or
is short 160,000 taels; Keang-nan, Che• keang, and other
Cher-been Alagistrates are late in
pnloatceess, ,
aln4do
tohie• Icshoe,ooe
fooo taelsan a;
making their remittances ! There is not a department in
* There is some prodigious inisfake here. Even allowing
• the foreigners to have abstracted every year for the last forty
years 10000,000 taels of syeee (and they have done nothing
of the kind) it could only amount to 400,000,000