GIL DE URIBARRI, Spanish Chargé d’ Affaires to Prince Kung and the Tsung-li yamên, April 3, 1883

Foreign representatives to Prince Kung and the Tsung-li yamên.

Your Imperial Highness: The undersigned have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your imperial highness’s and your excellencies’ note of January 23, being an answer to the joint note of the foreign representatives of November 18, 1882.

It is with sincere regret that the undersigned have seen from the yamên’s note that your imperial highness and your excellencies still persist in the attempt to explain away the most undoubted rights granted by the treaties to the subjects and citizens of foreign powers residing in China under the faith and protection of these treaties. Under these circumstances the undersigned can see no advantage in continuing at present the discussion upon the subjects under consideration. They have transmitted to their Governments the yamên’s last note, as well as former correspondence on the subject, and they shall expect the instructions of their Governments before proceeding further in the matter.

At the same time, while expressing their sincere regret that their endeavors to arrive at a satisfactory understanding with the yamên should have remained without any practical result, the undersigned think it their duty to draw the attention of your imperial highness and your excellencies to the serious consequences which any attempt of the Chinese Government to infringe the rights granted by the treaties, as understood by the Governments of the undersigned, would undoubtedly carry with it.

Before closing this note, however, the undersigned, without wishing to reopen the discussion, think it necessary to reply to some of the allegations put forward by the yamên in their last note, and which, if they remain uncontradicted, might be considered by the yamên and brought forward by them in future discussions as positive facts. Your imperial highness and your excellencies state in the note that one of the points put forward by the foreign representatives was that foreign merchants, on paying the same duties as Chinese merchants, were at liberty to resell at the port, according to their own pleasure, native produce purchased by them.

This statement of the views of the undersigned is not entirely correct. What they have stated is that foreign merchants, having paid the inland charges on native produce purchased by them in the interior, or having purchased such produce at the port, are at liberty to resell it according to their own pleasure at the port, and to forward it coastwise or into the interior, under the existing rules on the subject.

Your imperial highness and your excellencies further state that the general tendency of the joint note was to claim for foreign merchants certain advantages which for more than twenty years they had not been enjoying.

To this the undersigned would reply that for ten and more years, foreign establishments have existed at Shanghai and some of the other open ports, in which the manufacture of native produce has been going on without ever any objections being raised against it by the Chinese Government. No new claim has therefore been put forward by the undersigned, but the reassertion of rights stipulated for by the treaties has been rendered necessary by the attempt of the yamên, first begun a year ago, to deny them.

With regard to the negotiations carried on by Sir Thomas Wade and the yamên on the subject of the import trade, the undersigned beg to draw the attention of your imperial highness and your excellencies to the statement made by Sir Thomas Wade, that any arrangement intended to change the present mode of taxation of foreign imports could be only a provisional one, on probation, and that, before its introduction , measures would have to be adopted to serve as guarantees for the faithful execution of the arrangement. The proceedings of the yamên during the negotiations on the questions of import and export trade have, however, hardly been such as to encourage the undersigned to recommend to their Governments the adoption of the measure discussed between Sir Thomas Wade and the yamên.

The undersigned seize the opportunity, &c.,