2-979-644 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The War in China - Shop of the Chinese Baker, Esing (Alum), at Victoria, Hong-Kong, 1857. 'View '...drawn by a Portuguese named Baptista, who is here thought a clever artist, and who was a pupil of Chinery...[of] the house of Esing (properly called Alum) the baker who supplied the bread poisoned with arsenic from which so many people suffered in Hong-Kong, and who, with his father and eight of his workmen, are now on their trial for that crime...Two or three hundred people, altogether, had partaken of the poisoned bread, but no lives had been lost...Private letters from the Chinese Seas, received at Paris, state that Alum had been tried before a Council of War legally constituted, and convicted of an attempt to poison the English Charge d'Affaires and his family. The man was condemned to death and shot...'. In fact Cheong was expelled, and forbidden from ever returning to Hong Kong. From "Illustrated London News", 1857.