William Napier, 9th Lord Napier  William John Napier, 9th Lord Napier, Baron Napier () FRSE (13 October 1786 – 11 October 1834) was a British Royal Navy officer and trade envoy in China. Napier was born in Kinsale, Ireland, on 13 October 1786. He was the son of Francis Napier, 8th Lord Napier (1758–1823) and the father of Francis Napier, 10th Lord Napier and 1st Baron Ettrick (1819–1898). He enlisted in the Royal Navy in 1803 and served - with distinction - as a midshipman on HMS Defiance at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805). He later served as lieutenant under Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald. 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 "Andromanche", 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,  , Napier's frustration in failing to break an intractable trade deadlock and secure the rights of British traders led to his favoring a military solution. 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.