Sir Harry Parkes in China Author:Stanley Lane-Poole Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Commissioners were received in state on board the flagship Cornwallis by Her Majesty's Plenipotentiary, supported by Admiral and General. The deck was ablaze wit... more »h officers in full-dress uniforms; the marines presented arms; the band played, as the three mandarins set foot for the first time on a British man-of-war. In the midst of this pomp and pageantry of court and war, a slim fair-haired boy with eager young face and vivid blue eyes was formally presented to the Imperial Commissioners. It was thus that Harry Parkes took his place at the age of fourteen in a great historic scene. From this day for more than forty years there were few events in the history of British relations with the Far East in which he did not play a conspicuous part; till the lad who carried dispatches for Sir Henry Pottinger at Nanking in 1842 ended his busy and eventful life in 1885 as Her Majesty's Minister to the Court of Peking. At the time of the Treaty of Nanking, Harry Parkes was employed in the office of J. R. Morrison, the Chinese Secretary to the Plenipotentiary, and was studying Chinese with a view to an interpreter's appointment. Those were not the days of competitive examinations, or it is probable that England might have been deprived of one of the most distinguished of her public servants in the East. A boy who went out to China at the age of thirteen could not have enjoyed many opportunities for acquiring the varied accomplishments of a modern student-interpreter, but it may be doubted whether he did not gain more than he lost by his premature initiation into public affairs. The man of action is seldom a man of grammars, and Harry Parkes belongedessentially to the class of men of action—the men who made the Indian Empire and planted the colonies of England over the face of the globe. T...« less