In 1818 he was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Sir
David Brewster, Sir
George Steuart Mackenzie, and
John Playfair. A
peer of Scotland, Lord Napier was an elected Scottish representative in the
House of Lords from 1824 to 1832. In December 1833, upon the ending of
British East India Company's monopoly on trade in the
Far East, he was appointed by Foreign Secretary
Lord Palmerston, a family friend of Napier, as the first Chief Superintendent of
Trade at Canton (now
Guangzhou), in China. The Second and Third Superintendents were
John Francis Davis and
Sir George Best Robinson, respectively. He arrived at
Macau on 15July 1834 on board the East India Company frigate
Andromache, and reached Canton ten days later, with the mission of expanding British trade into inner China. Lacking the necessary diplomatic and commercial experience, he was not successful in achieving the objective. Having failed to secure a meeting with
Lu Kun, the
Governor-general of the Liangguang, because of Napier's rigid demands contravening longstanding protocols, Napier's frustration led to his favoring a military intervention as personal retribution. He sent the frigates
Andromache and
Imogene to Whampoa on 11 September, defying an edict issued by Lu Kun, in a 'casualty-less' skirmish of cannon fire as the British warships breached defences at the
Bocca Tigris. After a prolonged stalemate, Lord Napier, sapped by typhus, was forced to retire to Macau in September 1834, where he died of the fever on 11October. Originally buried in Macau, he was later exhumed for reburial at Ettrick in Scotland. Napier was the first British representative to suggest seizing
Hong Kong. ==Family==