This chapter explores diverging practices of extradition and deportation during the 1840s to 1860s. The early colonial government of Hong Kong faced a crisis of legitimacy as China contested its jurisdiction to discipline the thousands of Chinese migrants who flocked to the growing colony. In response, the colonial government promised to ‘protect’ Chinese subjects from lawlessness and arbitrary punishment. These promises buttressed the government’s tenuous claim to the right to keep the peace and to remove people to China discretionally, especially amid the unsettling Arrow War (1856–60). Throughout this period, governors gave themselves flexible powers of ‘rendition’, ‘banishment’, and ‘deportation’, while vesting other powers of policing and population control in a mercurial office of ‘Registrar General and Protector of Chinese Inhabitants’. Colonists, imperial officials, and British diplomats in China challenged these powers. Their contestations served to refine the colonial practice of extradition.