First Opium War

The First Opium War was fought between Britain and the Qing empire from 1839 to 1842, and it opened China to foreign trade on unequal terms. British merchants had for decades sold Indian opium grown by the East India Company into China, where the drug drained silver from the country and was illegal; the Daoguang emperor sent Commissioner Lin Zexu to Canton in 1839 to confiscate and destroy more than twenty thousand chests of it. When British property was destroyed, London sent a naval expedition. Steam-driven gunboats took Guangzhou, Ningbo, Xiamen and Shanghai in turn, and British troops landed north of the capital. The treaty of Nanjing in 1842 ceded Hong Kong, opened five treaty ports, fixed a low tariff and awarded twenty-one million silver dollars of indemnity, and a supplementary treaty gave British subjects the right to be tried by their own laws. Further treaties followed with the United States and France. The defeat began what Chinese historians call the century of humiliation, and it forced the empire to confront technology and diplomacy it had refused to enter on equal terms. The war showed the gulf between an industrial navy and an empire that had long neglected its coasts.