Second Opium War

The Second Opium War, also called the Arrow War, was fought from 1856 to 1860 by Britain and France against Qing China. It ended with British and French troops in Beijing, the burning of the emperor's Old Summer Palace, and the Convention of Peking, which legalised the opium trade, opened more of China to foreigners and ceded Kowloon to British Hong Kong. Russia used the crisis to take large territories in the north-east.

The First Opium War had ended in 1842 with the Treaty of Nanking, but Britain was dissatisfied with the trade and diplomatic access it had gained. In the 1850s it pressed for renegotiation, demanding that all of China be opened to British merchants, that opium imports be legalised, and that a British ambassador be allowed to live in Beijing.

In October 1856 Chinese officials in Canton, now Guangzhou, boarded the Arrow, a Chinese-crewed ship registered in Hong Kong, on suspicion of piracy and arrested twelve of its crew. Its British registration had in fact expired. The British consul, Harry Parkes, protested that the British flag had been insulted, and when the viceroy Ye Mingchen did not meet all his demands, British warships bombarded Canton. When the Commons censured the government, Lord Palmerston called an election in 1857 and won it. France joined Britain, citing the execution of a French missionary, Auguste Chapdelaine, in Guangxi.

The Indian Rebellion of 1857 diverted British troops. At the turn of 1857 and 1858 an Anglo-French force of fewer than 6,000 men took Canton. Ye Mingchen was captured and exiled to Calcutta. The allies then sailed north, captured the Taku Forts guarding the approach to Tianjin in May 1858, and forced the Qing court to sign the Treaties of Tianjin in June. These promised foreign legations in Beijing, more open ports and free navigation of the Yangtze. Separately, by the Treaty of Aigun of May 1858, China recognised Russian control of the left bank of the Amur.

The Xianfeng Emperor's court then hardened its position, and the Mongol general Sengge Rinchen strengthened the Taku Forts. In June 1859, when a British squadron tried to force its way up the river to escort envoys to Beijing, the forts' guns sank four gunboats and the attack failed. In 1860 Britain and France sent a much larger expedition under Lord Elgin, with around 11,000 British and 6,700 French troops. They landed in August, took the Taku Forts and Tianjin, and advanced on Beijing.

As the allies advanced on Beijing in September, Qing forces seized Parkes and a group of British and French officers, soldiers and a Times journalist. The prisoners were tortured, and several were killed. On 21 September the allies destroyed Sengge Rinchen's army at Baliqiao, and the emperor fled north, leaving his brother Prince Gong to negotiate. Allied troops looted the palaces outside Beijing, and after the surviving prisoners were released and their treatment became known, Elgin ordered the Old Summer Palace, the Yuanmingyuan, to be burned as a punishment aimed at the emperor personally. British troops set it on fire on 18 October 1860; the French declined to take part.

On 24 October 1860 Prince Gong signed the Convention of Peking, ratifying the Tianjin treaties. China paid 8 million taels of silver each to Britain and France, opened Tianjin to trade, legalised opium, granted freedom of religion and ceded part of Kowloon to Britain. A further treaty gave Russia the lands east of the Ussuri River, where it founded Vladivostok.

The defeat, the emperor's flight and the destruction of the palace were a profound shock to the Qing dynasty. With peace restored, the government could concentrate on crushing the Taiping Rebellion, and it launched the reforms known as the Self-Strengthening Movement. As the court was bound by the unequal treaties to pay indemnities and protect Westerners, resistance to Qing rule grew.

Our 1815 map shows the Qing empire at its height, and the 1878 map shows it after the war, with the Amur and Ussuri lands now part of the Russian Empire.