Sir Harry Smith Parkes (24 February 1828 – 22 March 1885) was a British diplomat who served as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary and Consul General of the United Kingdom to the Empire of Japan from 1865 to 1883 and the Chinese Qing Empire from 1883 to 1885, and Minister to Korea in 1884. Parkes Street in Kowloon, Hong Kong is named after him.
Early life Parkes was born in Birchill Hall in the parish of Bloxwich in Staffordshire, England. His father, Harry Parkes, was the founder of Parkes, Otway & Co., ironmasters. His mother died when he was four, while his father was killed in a carriage accident in the following year. He lived with his uncle, a retired naval officer, in Birmingham and was educated at a boarding school in Balsall HeathOxford DNB (2004) before entering King Edward's School, Birmingham in May 1838.
Career in China (1841–64)
First Opium War
In June 1841, Parkes sailed to China to live with his cousin, Mary Wanstall, who was also the wife of the German missionary Karl Gützlaff. Upon arriving in Macau in October 1841, he prepared for employment in the office of John Robert Morrison, a translator of Sir Henry Pottinger, who was then the British envoy and plenipotentiary and superintendent of British trade in China. Around this time, the First Opium War (1839–42) was being fought between the British and the Qing Empire of China.
Parkes learnt the basics of the Chinese language and joined Morrison in Hong Kong in May 1842. On 13 June, he accompanied Pottinger on an expedition up the Yangtze River to Nanjing. He witnessed the Battle of Chinkiang, the last major battle of the First Opium War, on 21 July. He was also present at the signing of the Treaty of Nanking on board on 29 August.
As a translator and then a consul
Between September 1842 and August 1843, Parkes served as a clerk under Karl Gützlaff, who was appointed as a civil magistrate in Zhoushan after the British occupied the island. In August 1843, he passed the consular examination in Chinese in Hong Kong and was appointed as a translator in Fuzhou in the following month. However, as there was a delay in the opening of Fuzhou port, he was instead reassigned to serve at the consulate in Canton and as an assistant to the Colonial Secretary of Hong Kong.
In June 1844, Parkes was appointed as a translator in Amoy. In March 1845, he and Rutherford Alcock (the British consul in Amoy) were transferred to Fuzhou, where they were attacked on 4 October by Chinese soldiers, who threw stones at them. In June 1846, he assisted Alcock in securing $46,163 from the Chinese authorities in Fujian as compensation for British property looted and destroyed during a riot.
In August 1846, Parkes and Alcock were transferred to Shanghai, where Parkes continued to serve as Alcock's translator. He started studying the Japanese language in the following year. In March 1848, he accompanied the British vice-consul in Shanghai to Nanjing to negotiate the punishment of the Chinese men who assaulted three British missionaries in Qingpu, Shanghai. He was appointed as a translator in Shanghai on 9 April 1848. After taking a period of leave from 1850–51 in Europe, he returned to China and continued his service as a translator in Amoy – an appointment he assumed in July 1849. He was reassigned to Canton again on 21 November 1851 and travelled there in February in the following year. While he was in Canton, he served as an acting Consul during Sir John Bowring's absence. In August 1853, he was temporarily placed in charge of the British vice-consulate in Canton.Lane-Poole, Stanley. (1901). Sir Harry Parkes in China, p. 138.
Parkes was appointed as the British consul in Amoy in 1854. In 1855, he accompanied Bowring to Siam as a joint secretary of the diplomatic mission to conclude a commercial treaty between the British and Siamese. The treaty, known as the Bowring Treaty, was signed in Bangkok on 18 April. Parkes then returned to Britain with the Bowring Treaty for it to be ratified by the British government. He delivered it on 1 July and was received by Queen Victoria on 9 July. He spent the rest of the year helping the Foreign Office with Chinese and Siamese business. He exchanged the ratified Bowring Treaty in Bangkok on 5 April 1856 and arrived in Canton in June to serve as the acting British consul during Alcock's absence.
Second Opium War
Outbreak of war
Parkes's position as the acting British Consul in Canton brought him into renewed contact with Ye Mingchen, the Qing-appointed Imperial Commissioner and Viceroy of Liangguang. Conflict between them eventually led to the outbreak of the Second Opium War (1856–60).
On 8 October 1856, the Chinese-owned lorcha Arrow was boarded by officials from the Qing water patrol when she entered Canton Harbour, on the Pearl River, after they received intelligence that several pirates were on board. They arrested 12 Chinese sailors, leaving two behind to look after the vessel. Following the account of the ship's captain, a twenty-one-year-old Irishman called Thomas Kennedy, Parkes alleged that the Red Ensign had been flying on the ship's mast at the time, and protested to Ye against its removal, which would have represented an insult to Britain. Ye replied that Arrow was owned and crewed by Chinese sailors and that the flag had not been flying at the time. Parkes persisted with his allegation of an insult to the British flag, which he considered a violation of British treaty rights and reported to Sir John Bowring, the Governor of Hong Kong.
Subsequent scholarship has established discrepancies in Parkes's account of the alleged insult to the British flag. First, the ship's papers were still in his possession at the time of the incident, meaning that it would have been illegal for the Arrow to leave port. British captains were obliged to give their papers to the consul when they arrived and were not permitted to leave until they had retrieved them, with the proper stamps. If the Arrow had not been about to leave port, there would have been no reason for her colours, under ordinary circumstances, to be up. Parkes alleged that the incident took place at 8:30 am, at which time the British consulate at Canton would not have been scheduled to open for another hour and a half. Further, Captain Kennedy admitted in his deposition to Parkes of 9 October 1856 that he had been breakfasting in another vessel called the Dart at the time of the incident, an account that his fellow diners, John Leach and Charles Earl, corroborated. Unmooring the boat while Kennedy was not on board would have meant leaving without him. According to a local newspaper, the master and crew of a nearby Portuguese lorcha corroborated Chinese officers' account that no flags had been flying on the Arrow when it was boarded by the marine police.
Parkes demanded that Ye release the detained sailors immediately and apologise for the alleged insult to the British flag.Wong, pp. 43–66 Although the British right to enter Canton had been established under the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, it had previously been denied. Bowring saw the Arrow incident as an opportunity to enforce this right. The deliberate escalation of the incident into a war had the object of forcing the removal of Britain's obstacles to trade and diplomacy in Canton.
Because Ye refused to capitulate despite minor reprisals, the Royal Navy breached Canton's walls on 29 October, after which Parkes accompanied Admiral Sir Michael Seymour in entering Ye's administrative office. The British did not have sufficient troops to permanently occupy Canton, but they kept warships on the Pearl River and positioned their artillery to overlook the city. On 16 December, Qing forces set fire to the European settlement outside the city. Parkes retreated to Hong Kong and spent nearly a year there. During this period of time, he was severely criticised in Parliament. On 26 February 1857, Lord Malmesbury said in the House of Lords, "If it were not for the serious consequences involved in this matter, I do not know that I have ever met anything which I should consider more grotesque than the conduct of Consul Parkes throughout these transactions."
Battle of Canton
British reinforcements assembled in Hong Kong in November 1857 in preparation for war against the Qing Empire under the direction of Lord Elgin, who had been appointed as the British High Commissioner and Plenipotentiary to China. The British acted in coordination with the French, who were also drawn into the Second Opium War over the death of Auguste Chapdelaine, a French missionary in China. Parkes, who was attached to Admiral Seymour's staff, was part of the group of Anglo-French representatives who delivered an ultimatum to the Qing officials on 12 December. When the ultimatum expired, the British and French bombarded Canton on 28 December and conquered the city by late December. Parkes hunted Ye Mingchen through the streets of Canton; George Wingrove Cooke reported that Parkes took special pleasure in humiliating Ye. "Ye was my game," said Parkes, and finally found what a report called "a very fat man contemplating the achievement of getting over the wall at the extreme rear" of the administrative office.
On 9 January 1858, Bogui was nominally reinstated by the Qing government as the Governor-General of Canton, but the city was actually governed by a European commission of two Englishmen (one of whom was Parkes) and a French naval officer. Parkes was the leader of the trio because he was the only one among them who could speak Chinese. The commission established a court, administered a police force, and opened the port on 10 February. Even though the Treaty of Tianjin was signed on 26 June, the Qing authorities in Guangdong remained hostile towards Europeans in Canton throughout 1858. They even mobilised militias and placed a large bounty on Parkes's head. Parkes was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB) by Queen Victoria on 6 December 1859.
Beijing campaign
On 25 June 1859, with the British attack on the Taku Forts by the Hai River in Tianjin hostilities between the Anglo-French and Qing sides resumed. On 6 July, Parkes was requested to join Lord Elgin in the Bohai Sea. He sailed on 21 July and was appointed as Lord Elgin's Chinese secretary alongside Thomas Francis Wade.
On 1 August 1860, as an attaché to General James Grant, Parkes was sent to Beitang, Tianjin to take possession of the evacuated fort and perform some reconnaissance during the advance to the Taku Forts. After the successful assault on the main north fort on 21 August, he assisted in the negotiations for the surrender of the remaining Chinese positions in the forts. Three days later, he arrived in Tianjin, where he arranged for provisions for the Anglo-French forces and had meetings with the Qing imperial commissioners. Upon learning that the imperial commissioners did not hold plenipotentiary powers from the Xianfeng Emperor as they initially believed, the British and French troops then advanced further towards Tongzhou near the Qing capital, Beijing (romanized as "Peking" at the time).