By ANTHONY SPAETH

In October 1856 Chinese officials from Canton boarded the small schooner Arrow, believing her to be manned by pirates. What happened next was a sorry but significant chapter in the annals of imperialism. The headstrong British Plenipotentiary and governor of the youthful colony of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, seized upon the incident to order his gunboats to lob a few shells into Canton. His actions, initially deplored in London, sparked the Second Anglo-Chinese War--an indecorous drubbing of China that ended only in 1860 after British guns had razed the Summer Palace in Peking. The subsequent settlement cracked open the vast Chinese empire to western missionaries and drug-runners alike. It also ceded to the British-controlled island of Hong Kong the nearby mainland coastal settlement of Kowloon--a 7.8-sq. km. stretch familiar to colonists as the site of their cricket pitch.

The newfangled, shallow-draught gunboats that won the day for Bowring might seem a fitting symbol for Hong Kong, which became an important projection of British power in Asia. But far more appropriate would be the Arrow. A lorcha, she combined a hull of European design with the rigging and batwing sails of a Chinese junk. Her odd, hybrid lines evoke a more complex and exciting locale, one filled with the sparks that come from rubbing East against West.

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