China wars

China wars, 1839–42 and 1856–60. Otherwise known as the ‘Opium wars’, these were as much about clashes of imperial interests as the specific issue of opium, which was grown in British India and was one of the few commodities that China was prepared to trade. In 1839 the imperial Chinese government attempted to block the trade, seizing all opium held in the main trading port of Canton. The resulting war was an unequal conflict, with the Chinese having no answer to British fire-power, particularly from two East India Company gunboats with 32-pounder guns. The treaty of Nanking gave Britain Hong Kong and access to five other ‘treaty ports’ including Canton and Shanghai. China then collapsed into a brutal civil war known as the Tai Ping rebellion (1850–64), caught between a decadent government and religious fanaticism, in which about 20 million people died. Other powers took advantage of this, and in 1857 British and French forces occupied Canton. Although repulsed at the Taku Forts in June 1859, the Anglo-French force captured them next year, and founded the naval base at Port Arthur (modern Luda). After the convention of Peking had ceded Kowloon to Britain, in a notorious incident the Imperial Summer Palace at Peking was destroyed in reprisal for Chinese barbarities. Redvers Buller, a famous participant in the war, refused to wear his campaign medal, believing the war to be immoral. See also Arrow War.

Stephen Badsey