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The birth of foreign newspapers and a foreign press corps in China really begins in the small enclave of Canton, the city now known as Guangzhou, in what were called the Factories, the somewhat fortified and mostly self-sufficient warehouses where a select group of foreigners was begrudgingly permitted to trade by the Qing dynasty. God, Mammon, and flag are the primary interests in the very earliest newspapers and journals. The roots of the foreign press are revealed in opium. The nineteenth century British-dominated “mud trade”, based on opium as a narcotic smoked for pleasure or relaxation rather than medicinal purposes, was already over fifty years old by the time the first English-language newspapers appeared in China, coincidentally sponsored by the largest suppliers. The circumspect voice of the missionaries is described. The chapter also addresses the Napier fizzle and the First Opium War. It is shown that Hong Kong is a colony in need of a press.

This chapter focuses on the emergent formation of collaborative colonialism in the early colonial era: from the First Opium War (1840–1842) to the 1911 Republican Revolution. It notes that long before the Opium Wars, many coastal Chinese were already in close contact with Europeans as a result of the latter's trading in commodities such as tea, porcelain, silk, and foodstuffs. With commercial activities manifest in the coastal Chinese regional networks, in Southeast Asian economies, and in the European dominated New World, a class of elite transnationals arose around Hong Kong and exercised considerable economic clout. It notes that the overall effect of nineteenth-century European colonial expansion in the region was the inclusion of Chinese merchants in the newly arisen global networks; yet the dependence of the Europeans on the Chinese also helped boost the ability of some Chinese merchants to dominate intra-Asian trade, including trade with China.

Through its encounter with China, the West remade itself in sound. That is the argument of this book, which tells the story of Western people experiencing China with their ears around 1800. To tell it, the author draws on two sets of sources. The first set are documents of Western listening in China—to music and musical theater, but also to other human-generated sounds such as gongs, cannon salutes, and speech—at the height of the “Canton System,” the trading relationship between China and the West that came to a violent end in the First Opium War of 1839–42. The second set of sources are texts by European writers, mostly music scholars, who wrote about China and Chinese music around 1800. None traveled to China or heard the country’s music directly. Indeed, whether or not they even heard real Chinese music, Westerners in this era did not always distinguish between it and other kinds of Chinese sounds. This is not only a book about music; it is also book about sound, as it was shaped in and through global narratives and imperial encounters.

The name of the junk might have brought out the differences in perception of the Chinese and the British, and laid the first seeds of dissension. Before becoming the Keying, the Junk could have had another name. No record showed that the British owners had considered the sensibilities of the Chinese crew when they renamed the junk. The name Keying also embodied the divide in fundamental ways in seeing things. The British saw Qiying as the symbol of improvement in post-First Opium War Sino-British relations, but the mandarin was much less popular with the Cantonese.

This chapter travels to the port city of Canton, the main source of direct European knowledge about Chinese sounds around 1800. From about 1700 until the conclusion of the First Opium War in 1842—a period Western historians call the era of “the Canton System” or “Old Canton”—China’s maritime interaction with the world outside its bor­ders took place mostly here. This chapter investigates Western listening in the context of such con­flict and compromise, against the background of a long­ term collapse of Sino­-Western relations. The vast majority of its earwitnesses were British (and later American) professional men: traders, naval officers, naturalists, diplomats, missionaries, and doctors. All were products of the upper classes or used their travel to China to gain a higher station back home. Some took a sympathetic interest in what they heard in Canton, especially Chi­nese music. Many celebrated the vastness of the Canton soundscape, in which millions of people made noise together at once; they were awestruck by the sheer difference of Canton’s sound worlds. Most, however, found Chi­nese sounds off­-putting, even threatening. They wrote about them with ab­solute confidence in Western superiority, hearing the world with imperial ears.

The Keying was undertaken by a group of Hong Kong investors. Their aim was to sail the junk from Hong Kong to London, where it would be put on public display, along with the collection of Chinese artefacts that it carried, and earn the investors a handsome return. This was possibly an attempt to cash in on enthusiasm in London for‘things Chinese’, fomented by Nathan Dunn’s exhibition. Yet the Keying enterprise serve as a commentary on the backward culture of China, and the junk itself demonstrate the peculiarities of Chinese naval architecture. In the mid-1840s, part of the British public perceived the First Opium War as a disgrace, the Keying enterprise could be seen as an attempt to‘redress’ this perception.

This chapter explores the reasons that the Keying remained ignored. The Keying sailed to the west in a time when famous voyages were conducted and when museums were being built to house achievements and data from great maritime explorations. The long traditions of other cultures were not considered as anything worth studying closely, and the Keying was categorized as just the foreign and exotic. One result of this neglect is that museums in the present day have no concrete data to build models by. By bringing the Keying back to the limelight, the author hopes to stimulate the interest in a little known Chinese maritime past and the world of experiences that it encompassed.

The Keying was put on display initially at Blackwall. Later, in 1850, it moved up to the Strand, perhaps in order to have better access to its intended audience. The move up the Thames itself was remarkable, however, the silence of the newspapers showed that the feat attracted little attention. For the first year, the Keying was a star attraction, royalty and celebrities, such as Charles Dickens all visited it. However, its attraction didn’t last. In July 1851, because of the troubles caused by the crew, a judge warned that if the Keying wouldn’t leave the Strand, they would be indicted, so the junk returned to Blackwall. Charles Kellett had ceased to remain as the captain of the Keying after the junk arrived in Britain and became a business partner, earning enough to live ashore. He Sing, the mandarin, was promoted to captain and became, in a way, the representative of China.

Twenty six of the Chinese crew arrested the Keying about a month after the junk arrived in New York. They claimed that they had been only engaged for eight months, but had stayed on for nearly a year. They also reported that they wanted their wages as well as their return passages paid to them as per their agreements as they have not been paid. The court case revealed the gulf between the European officers idea of their agreement and the crew’s. The crew would have been signed on using the Asiatic Articles that were not yet fully formalized but already differed in important respects from standard British articles, however that might not have been apparent to Kellett. In 1847, the New York Court ruled in the Chinese crew’s favour.