The confiscation and destruction of some 20,000 chests of a narcotic at Humen in 1839 (1839)
Commissioner Lin Zexu's action at Humen, near Canton, the immediate trigger of the first conflict.
History · Revolutions & empires
The Opium Wars
1839–1842 and 1856–1860
Two conflicts between Qing China and the Western powers over trade, drugs and diplomacy
Two wars fought by Britain — joined by France in the second — against Qing China, arising from British exports of Indian-grown opium into a country where the drug was illegal, and from Western demands for diplomatic equality and open ports. The first war, provoked by the Qing commissioner Lin Zexu's destruction of confiscated stocks at Humen in 1839, ended with the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, which ceded Hong Kong Island and opened five treaty ports. The second, triggered by the boarding of the ship Arrow in 1856, ended with the occupation of Beijing, the burning of the Old Summer Palace and the Convention of Peking in 1860. Together they opened the era Chinese historians call the century of humiliation.
How to spot them
- ▸A commissioner who writes to Queen Victoria and destroys 20,000 chests of a drug at Humen in 1839
- ▸An iron paddle steamer that shatters war junks in the Pearl River
- ▸The first of the so-called unequal treaties, signed aboard a warship in 1842
- ▸The looting and burning of an imperial pleasure palace outside Beijing in 1860
- ▸Hong Kong Island in one treaty, the Kowloon peninsula in the next
What happened
A British iron steamer whose shallow draught and pivot guns devastated Qing war junks (1841)
The Nemesis, the East India Company's iron paddle steamer, nicknamed the devil ship.
A treaty signed aboard HMS Cornwallis in August 1842, ceding an island and opening five ports (1842)
The Treaty of Nanking: Hong Kong Island ceded, and Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo and Shanghai opened.
The boarding by Qing officials of a Chinese-owned lorcha flying a British flag, October 1856 (1856)
The Arrow incident, the pretext for the second conflict.
The looting and burning of the Yuanmingyuan outside Beijing on Lord Elgin's orders (1860)
The destruction of the Old Summer Palace, in reprisal for the killing of captured envoys.
The 1860 convention that added the Kowloon peninsula to a British colony (1860)
The Convention of Peking, which also ratified the Treaties of Tientsin of 1858.
Quick-fire facts
- •Opium was grown under East India Company monopoly in Bengal and sold at auction in Calcutta, to be carried to China by private traders
- •Lin Zexu wrote an open letter to Queen Victoria asking how Britain could ban the drug at home and push it abroad; it is not certain she ever saw it
- •Lord Palmerston was foreign secretary in 1839 and prime minister during the second war
- •The Treaty of Nanking imposed an indemnity of 21 million silver dollars and ended the Canton system of trade through the hong merchants
- •The Supplementary Treaty of the Bogue in 1843 granted extraterritoriality and most-favoured-nation status
- •The Treaties of Tientsin of 1858 opened further ports, permitted foreign legations in Beijing and missionaries in the interior
- •The opium trade itself was effectively legalised in the settlement of 1858–60
- •The Xianfeng Emperor fled to Chengde in 1860 and died there the following year
- •Hong Kong's New Territories were added later, on a 99-year lease from 1898; the whole colony returned to China in 1997
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Sources
- Julia Lovell — The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China
- Stephen R. Platt — Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age