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Hong Kong To-do: edit purge Clean up all MTR station pages. They are literally all over the place. Two model pages are Tsing Yi Station and Sheung Shui Station. They each describe a feature special to the station, Station layout, exit, and connections, as well as neighbouring stations and the station "box". We will also need plenty of updated pictures (e.g. removing all KCR-related images except those on the KCR article). Check that all pages have basically the same language structure as Tsing Yi Station and Sheung Shui Station. Links to location maps are good too. (Should also perform these checks on Chinese Wikipedia.) Clean-up pages that link with TVB, especially its series pages.

WikiProject Echo has identified Lin Zexu as a foreign language featured article. You may be able to improve this article with information from the Chinese language Wikipedia.

Contents 1 Clean-up 2 Lin Zexu 3 = 3.1 Edits concerning David Sassoon

[edit] Clean-up

This article is quite incoherent and badly needs a clean-up. I will try to do this when I have time.--Niohe 01:26, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Should not 'offical to' be replaced by his actual title? After all, most books on the subject refer t him as just 'Commisioner Lin'?

[edit] Lin Zexu

According to Jack Gray's Rebellions and Revolutions (ISBN: 0198215762): The Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu took up his position in Canton on the 10th of March 1839. He was the son of a family of small means which had nevertheless maintained a tradition of scholarship. He took the highest (jinshi) degree at the early age of 26 and joined the Hanlin Academy, the highest distinction in Chinese scholarhsip. He was a leading member of the new reform party. An official of varied, practical and nation-wide experience, in 1837 he served as Governor-General of Hunan and Hubei. There he carried out measures against opium with apparent success. His method of erradication in Hunan and Hubei was to invoke the help of the people via the local gentry in identifying both the dealers and the consumers, to execute all convicted of participation in the trade, to give addicts 18 months to cure themselves under threat of execution if they failed, and to employ such medical methods as were known to assist them in overcoming the addiction (in Canton he sought the advice of Western medical missionairies).

Hunan and Hubei, however, offered little parallel with Canton, the centre of the trade and the point of import; it is likely that in these provices home-grown rather than imported opium was the problem. Lin Zexu was ill-prepared by his experience to take action at Canton.

He was convinced that the foreign opium traders had no countenance from their governments at home. He assumed, as the letter which he wrote to Queen Victoria showed, that the import of opium into Britain must be illegal, as in China. He believed that British shipping was licensed and that the opium ships were vessels which had evaded licensing. He was unaware of the use of silver to buy tea, of the exchange problem, or of its political implications. He assumed that Elliot represented the opium merchants, and would not trust him as a channel of communication with Britain. In fact he memorialized the throne only two days after his arrival at Canton that 'it is common knowledge that Elliot is not and English official, but a renegade merchant'.

Lin ordered the surrender of the opium stored down-river at Lintin. To him this was perfectly reasonable as he had already ordered the surrender of opium in the hands of the Chinese dealers. The two cases, however, were not the same. In the first place most of the opium at Lintin did not belong to the foreign merchants at Canton, who were agents handling opium which beloged to merchants in India, and they had no legal right to surrender it. In the second place Lin did not have the force to seize the opium directly. Hence he resorted to the confinement of the British community in the factories.

The British community were besieged in the factories for six weeks. Elliot was forced to order the surrender of the drug. By this act Lin Zexu had changed the whole issue as far as the British were concerned, from the suppression of the opium traffic, a cause with which the British authorities fully symmpathized in spite of the great and ramified interests which the traffic supported, to the holding of British citizens, including innocent citizens, as hostages.

This is my first post and would be interested to know how to best mention this information in the article or any comments

[edit] =

I agree with the comments above that Lin is an extremely significant figure and this article should be expanded to perhaps four or five paragraphs.

I (temporarily, I hope) removed the significant but unsourced reference to the UN Day being placed on June 26 because Lin burned the opium on June 3 -- which would strike many readers as inconsistent. cwh 03:00, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Edits concerning David Sassoon

I don't dispute that this information is factually correct. However, it is not particularly relevant to Lin Zexu. I saw two problems with the information as it was supplied. Firstly, it violates WP:SOURCES as the website given doesn't seem to qualify as reliable to me ("self-published books, newsletters, personal websites, open wikis, blogs, forum postings, and similar sources are largely not acceptable".) Second, I feel that this does not meet WP:N standards as David Sassoon and his religion have little to do with Lin Zexu. The information would be better placed in the article on Opium or perhaps the Opium Wars, but I don't think it belongs here. DJLayton4 (talk) 16:31, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Since there's been no reply here to DJLayton4's arguments, I have removed the information and re-written the whole paragraph with a reliable source. Matt's talk 10:20, 7 April 2008 (UTC)