One of the great dramas of Hong Kong history was played out close to the north-eastern corner of Southorn Playground. This is where the E Sing Bakery once stood. The second Opium War had broken out in 1856 and the Chinese put an embargo on the supply of food to the colony. Placards appeared all over the town, urging the Chinese to join the struggle against foreigners, and tensions were high. At this moment an attempt to poison the entire European population almost succeeded.
A batch of bread baked at E Sing, the island's only bakery, was laced with arsenic. The Europeans were doubly lucky. First, the perpetrators had not realized that the Indians also ate bread for breakfast, and being earlier risers than the Westerners, the Indians suffered first and were able to send out warnings. Second, so great was the quantity of arsenic used that it induced vomiting before it could take effect and do lasting harm, as George Villiers, Earl of Clarendon, recalled in his Life and Letters: 'The excitement was of course most intense. The medical men of the colony whilst personally in agonies thro' the effects of the poison were hurrying from house to house interrupted every step of the way by frantic summons...emetics were in urgent request'
No one warned the Governor, Sir John Bowring, about the poisoned bread and he and his wife suffered badly. She never recovered from the effects of the arsenic and died in England about four months later. The owner of the bakery, Cheong Ah Lum, was brought back from Macao under arrest. He and fifty-one of his workers were imprisoned for three weeks in a room measuring 15 feet square in the Central Police Station but were freed and deported after the trial for want of evidence.