1. John Bowring was appointed by Queen Victoria as emissary to Siam, later he was appointed by King Mongkut of Siam as ambassador to London, making a treaty of amity with Siam on 18 April 1855, now referred to as the "Bowring Treaty".
52 Facts About John Bowring
1. 2.
John Bowring died in Claremont in Devon on 23 November 1872.
3.
Espousal of Unitarian faith was illegal in Britain until John Bowring had turned 21.
4.
John Bowring travelled extensively and was imprisoned in Boulogne-sur-Mer for six weeks in 1822 for suspected spying.
5.
John Bowring did not share Bentham's contempt for belles lettres.
6.
John Bowring was a diligent student of literature and foreign languages, especially those of Eastern Europe.
7.
John Bowring somehow found time to write 88 hymns during this time, most published between 1823 and 1825.
8.
Bentham's personal secretary at the time, John Neal, labelled Bowring a "meddling, gossiping, sly, and treacherous man" and charged him with deceiving investors in his Greek adventure and mismanaging Bentham's funds for Bowring's own prestige with the Westminster Review and an early public gymnasium.
9.
John Bowring had begun contributing to the newly founded Westminster Review and had been appointed its editor by Bentham in 1825.
10.
John Bowring advocated in its pages the cause of free trade long before it was popularized by Richard Cobden and John Bright, co-founders of the Anti-Corn Law League in Manchester in 1838.
11.
John Bowring pleaded earnestly on behalf of parliamentary reform, Catholic emancipation, and popular education.
12.
Bentham failed in an attempt to have John Bowring appointed professor of English or History at University College London in 1827 but, after John Bowring visited the Netherlands in 1828, the University of Groningen conferred on him the degree of doctor of laws in February the next year for his Sketches of the Language and Literature of Holland.
13.
John Bowring was appointed Jeremy Bentham's literary executor a week before the latter's 1832 death in his arms, and was charged with the task of preparing a collected edition of his works.
14.
The appointment was challenged by a nephew but John Bowring prevailed in court.
15.
John Bowring is a fit charlatan, for Whig employment; pushing and overbearing in his manner, and, like other parvenus, assuming an official importance which is highly ridiculous.
16.
John Bowring had made his name as something of an expert on government accounting.
17.
John Bowring stood the same year for the newly created industrial constituency of Blackburn but was unsuccessful.
18.
In 1835, John Bowring entered parliament as member for Kilmarnock Burghs; and in the following year he was appointed head of a government commission to be sent to France to inquire into the actual state of commerce between the two countries.
19.
John Bowring spoke out passionately for equal rights for women and the abolition of slavery.
20.
John Bowring installed his brother, Charles, as Resident Director and lost no time in naming the district around his ironworks, Bowrington.
21.
John Bowring gained a reputation in the Maesteg district as an enlightened employer, one contemporary commenting that 'he gave the poor their rights and carried away their blessing'.
22.
John Bowring agreed to a compromise that directly led to the issue of the florin, introduced as a first step in 1848, by way of pattern coins not issued for circulation, and in 1849 as a circulating coin known as the 'Godless' Florin due to it omitting the words 'DEI GRATIA' in the obverse legend.
23.
John Bowring lost his seat in 1849 but went on to publish a work entitled The Decimal System in Numbers, Coins and Accounts in 1854.
24.
The trade depression of the late 1840s caused the failure of his venture in south Wales in 1848 and wiped out his capital, forcing John Bowring into paid employment.
25.
John Bowring was instrumental in the 1855 formation of the Board of Inspectors established under the Qing Customs House, operated by the British to gather statistics on trade on behalf of the Qing government and, later, as the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service, to collect all customs duties.
26.
Concerned for the welfare of coolies being exported to Australia, California, Cuba and the West Indies, and disturbed by the coolie revolt in Amoy in May 1852, John Bowring tightened enforcement of the Passenger Act so as to improve coolie transportation conditions and ensure their voluntariness.
27.
The newly knighted John Bowring received his appointment as Governor of Hong Kong and her Majesty's Plenipotentiary and Chief Superintendent of British Trade in China on 10 January 1854.
28.
John Bowring arrived in Hong Kong and was sworn in on 13 April 1854, in the midst of the Taiping Rebellion occupying the attentions of his primary protagonists and the Crimean War distracting his masters.
29.
John Bowring was appointed over strong objections from opponents in London.
30.
Fellow Unitarian Harriet Martineau had warned that John Bowring was "no fit representative of Government, and no safe guardian of British interests", that he was dangerous and would lead Britain into war with China, and that he should be recalled.
31.
John Bowring allowed the Chinese citizens in Hong Kong to serve as jurors in trials and become lawyers.
32.
John Bowring is credited with establishing Hong Kong's first commercial public water supply system.
33.
John Bowring developed the eastern Wan Chai area at a river mouth near Happy Valley and Victoria Harbour by elongating the river as a canal, the area being named Bowring City.
34.
John Bowring proposed that the constitution of the Legislative Council be changed to increase membership to 13 members, of whom five be elected by landowners enjoying rents exceeding 10 pounds, but this was rejected by Henry Labouchere of the Colonial Office on the basis that Chinese residents were "deficient in the essential elements of morality on which social order rests".
35.
John Bowring was equally impressed by the dearth of expenditure on education, noting that 70 times more was provided for policing than for instruction of the populace, so he rapidly brought in an inspectorate of schools, training for teachers and opening of schools.
36.
John Bowring became embroiled in numerous conflicts and disputes, not least of which was a struggle for dominance with Lieutenant Governor William Caine, which went all the way back to the Colonial Office for resolution.
37.
John Bowring was faulted for failing to prevent a scandalous action in slander, in 1856, by the assistant magistrate W H Mitchell against his attorney-general T Chisholm Anstey over what was essentially a misapprehension of fact but which was thought "unique in all the scandals of modern government of the Colonies or of English Course of Justice".
38.
In 1855, John Bowring experienced a reception in Siam that could not have stood in starker contrast to Peking's constant intransigence.
39.
John Bowring was welcomed like foreign royalty, showered with pomp, and his determination to forge a trade accord was met with the open-minded and intelligent interest of King Mongkut.
40.
John Bowring held Mongkut in high regard and that the feeling was mutual and enduring was confirmed by his 1867 appointment as Siam's ambassador to the courts of Europe.
41.
John Bowring saw the argument as an opportunity to wring from the Chinese the free access to Canton which had been promised in the Treaty of Nanking but so far denied.
42.
In mourning for the recent loss of his wife to the arsenic poisoning, John Bowring made an official tour of the Philippines, sailing on the steam-powered paddle frigate Magicienne on 29 November 1858, returning seven weeks later.
43.
John Bowring subsequently accepted the appointment of minister plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinary from the Hawaiian government to the courts of Europe, and in this capacity negotiated treaties with Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain and Switzerland.
44.
John Bowring was an accomplished polyglot and claimed he knew 200 languages of which he could speak 100.
45.
John Bowring died in September 1858, a victim of the arsenic poisoning of the bread supply in Hong Kong during the Second Opium War sparked by her husband.
46.
John Bowring married his second wife, Deborah Castle, in 1860; they had no children.
47.
John Bowring was a prominent Unitarian Christian and supporter of the women's suffrage movement.
48.
John Bowring is credited with popularising Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan or a Vision in a Dream which had been disparaged by the critics and discarded soon after first publication.
49.
John Bowring was responsible for the establishment of the Botanic Gardens in Hong Kong, the most indelible mark he made on the colony.
50.
John Bowring was the founder of Hastings Unitarian Church in Hastings, East Sussex, which was built between 1867 and 1868.
51.
Journalist and historian Philip John Bowring is a descendant of John Bowring's great uncle Nathaniel.
52.
John Bowring is the author of a partial biography of Bowring, Free Trade's First Missionary.