"A Life of Suspicion and Distrust": Race, Sino-American Relations, and the 1857 Poison Panic in Hong Kong

On January 15, 1857, as the Second Opium War raged, bread distributed by the Esing bakery to Hong Kong’s Western community was doctored with a prodigious amount of arsenic. Few were seriously harmed, but the American trader Augustine Heard Jr noted that the poisoning marked a great change in the Sino-American relationship. Although Americans were not involved in the war, Heard’s comments suggest that, influenced by rumors and panic, the Sino-American relationship deteriorated as Americans increasingly saw themselves as members of a besieged white community. This article argues that the 1857 Hong Kong poison panic was a watershed moment that recalibrated how Americans in China perceived the Chinese, and that such panics entrenched racial barriers between white and non-white colonial communities.