One of the first English people to learn the Chinese language, Flint broke Qing dynasty court protocol through a direct complaint to the Qianlong Emperor, which led to three years of detention in the Portuguese colony of Macau.
Left in China as a teenage boy by Captain Rigby of the Honourable East India Company ship Normanton in 1736,[2] Flint grew to adulthood speaking Mandarin Chinese.
A group of foreign businessmen headed by Flint and already disgruntled by illegal extortion on the part of the Canton customs bureau stood ready to purchase large quantities of raw silk, tea and Nankeen cloth from their point of origin or a port nearby.
However, given the length of time that foreign trade had been focused on Canton, a powerful interest group comprising the local Chinese merchants, customs officials and Qing scholar-bureaucrats had developed there.
Meanwhile, Zhejiang possessed a number of potential foreign trade ports but opening them up would have the unsettling side effect of creating additional responsibility for local officials.
[7] In 1757, the Qianlong Emperor responded to pressure from his officials and implemented a new foreign trade policy whereby all ships from overseas were barred from every Chinese port with the exception of Canton.
On 24 June he arrived outside Tianjin and announced himself as an British official of the Fourth Grade (sìpǐn, 四品), which would place him approximately halfway down the hierarchy of Chinese officialdom.
However, Flint's real purpose in coming to Ningbo in the first place was to break through the single port commerce system and trade there –he had clearly stated on arrival in Dinghai that the rear of his ship was packed with silver.
Qianlong viewed the episode with suspicion –he believed that the ship's arrival was connected with Flint's complaint, which would serve as a distraction while his supposed co-conspirators aboard Chesterfield tried to open the ports of Zhejiang to trade.
After investigation and analysis of the document, Qianlong concluded that it had been written in collusion with Liu Yabian (刘亚匾), a Sichuanese merchant, and subsequently edited by Lin Huan (林怀), a Fujianese translator employed by the East India Company in Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia).
Qianlong then ordered Li Shibiao to gather the Hong merchants in Canton, where Liu Yabian was publicly executed as an object lesson in what would happen to Chinese citizens who aided "barbarians".
[6] As for Flint, for the crime of "barbarian" collusion with Chinese "scoundrels" to create a petition that attempted to overthrow the single port trade system, Qianlong ordered him imprisoned in Macau for the term of three years.
Although Qianlong's punishment of Li Yongbiao partially satisfied Flint's demands, forbidding extortion and the enforcing the rules of the merchant guarantee system hardly proved concessionary.
[6] Furthermore, Qianlong ordered the Grand Minister (Dàchén,大臣) for Guangdong to inform the foreign traders that with all the rich produce available in China, there was no urgent need to acquire trifling products from abroad, a sentiment that he would echo several decades hence when he received the 1793 Macartney Embassy.