Sir John Bowring: The Radical Governor
A gifted utilitarian, and sometime Member of Parliament, Douglas Hurd writes that John Bowring spent ten tumultuous years in China where he believed in supporting the cause of progress with British gunboats.
Few administrators of the former British empire have led a more varied and controversial life than Sir John Bowring, Governor of Hong Kong from 1854 to 1859. His photograph shows the man; stiff white hair, spectacles on the big nose, high wing-coll ar, ungainly figure, humourless argumentative mouth. Bowring’s life was a hectic game of snakes and ladders.
When he came to China at the age of fifty-seven, he had already succeeded and then failed in four separate careers, as civil servant, editor, businessman and radical politician. His restless energy, coupled with an almost total lack of discretion, brought him up each slope to somewhere near the top, then rolled him down again.
Nor did old age reduce his restlessness or improve his luck. Ten years in China enabled him to start a war, and bring about a major political crisis and a general election in Britain.
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