First Opium War

The First Opium War (Chinese: 第一次鴉片戰爭; pinyin: Dìyīcì yāpiàn zhànzhēng), also known as the Anglo-Chinese War, was a series of military engagements fought between the British Empire and Qing China between 1839 and 1842. The immediate issue was the Chinese enforcement of their ban on the opium trade by seizing private opium stocks from mainly British merchants at Guangzhou (then named Canton) and threatening to impose the death penalty for future offenders. Despite the opium ban, the British government supported the merchants' demand for compensation for seized goods, and insisted on the principles of free trade and equal diplomatic recognition with China. Twentieth-century nationalists considered 1839 the start of a century of humiliation, and many historians consider it the beginning of modern Chinese history.

Senior government officials within the country had been shown to be colluding against the imperial ban due to stocks of opium in European warehouses in clear view being ignored. In 1839, the Daoguang Emperor, rejecting proposals to legalise and tax opium, appointed Viceroy of Huguang Lin Zexu to go to Guangzhou to halt the opium trade completely. Lin wrote an open letter to Queen Victoria appealing to her moral responsibility to stop the opium trade, although she never received it. Lin then resorted to using force in the western merchants' enclave. He arrived in Guangzhou at the end of January 1839 and organized a coastal defence. In March 1839, British opium dealers were forced to hand over 1,420 tonnes (3.1 million lb) of opium. On 3 June 1839, Lin ordered the opium to be destroyed in public on Humen Beach to show the Government's determination to ban smoking. All other supplies were confiscated and a blockade of foreign ships on the Pearl River was ordered.

Tensions escalated in July 1839 after drunk British sailors killed a Chinese villager named Lin Weixi; the British official in charge, Admiral Charles Elliot, refused to hand over those accused to Chinese authorities in an attempt to avoid their being killed on the spot, as had happened with British citizens in the Lady Hughes Affair of 1784. Later, fighting broke out, with the British navy destroying the Chinese naval blockade, and launching an offensive. In the ensuing conflict, the Royal Navy used its superior naval and gunnery power to inflict a series of decisive defeats on the Chinese Empire.

Opium was Britain's single most profitable commodity trade of the 19th century. After months of tensions between the two states, the Royal Navy launched an expedition in June 1840. Following the Second Battle of Chuenpi on 7 January 1841, the British forces occupied Hong Kong, formally raising the Union Jack on 26 January 1841. The British then imposed the Treaty of Nanking on 29 August 1842, which granted an indemnity and extraterritoriality to British subjects in China, opened five treaty ports to British merchants, and ceded Hong Kong Island to the British Empire in perpetuity. The Treaty of Nanking would be the first of what the Chinese later called the unequal treaties. The resulting social unrest was the background for the Taiping Rebellion, which further weakened the Qing regime.

A Second Opium War would be fought in 1856–1860, in which Britain would be joined by France, which would lead to further unequal treaties and the looting of the Old Summer Palace.