Treaty of Nanking

Signed aboard a British warship off Nanjing on 29 August 1842, the Treaty of Nanking brought the First Opium War to an end on Britain's terms. The defeated Qing dynasty handed over Hong Kong Island, opened five ports to British merchants and agreed to pay heavy indemnities. Chinese nationalists later counted it among the "unequal treaties", and it is often seen as the start of China's "century of humiliation".

For decades Britain had bought large amounts of Chinese tea and porcelain while selling little in return. Opium grown in British-ruled India and smuggled into China, where it was banned, helped to close the gap. When the imperial commissioner Lin Zexu seized and destroyed the merchants' opium in 1839, Britain went to war. Its modern ships and guns won a series of victories, and by the summer of 1842 British forces had pushed up the Yangtze and were ready to attack Nanjing.

The Qing court wavered between resistance and compromise. The commissioners it finally sent, Keying and Yilibu, had little room to act on their own. The British had prepared a draft treaty in London as early as 1840, and many of its terms followed the Convention of Chuenpi of 1841, an earlier settlement that had been rejected.

Talks took place on HMS Cornwallis, anchored in the Yangtze at Nanjing. On 29 August Sir Henry Pottinger signed for Britain and Keying, Yilibu and Niu Jian for the Qing. The treaty had thirteen articles. Four copies, each binding the English and Chinese texts together in yellow silk, were sealed, and a 21-gun salute was fired as the flags of both countries were raised. The Daoguang Emperor ratified it on 27 October, Queen Victoria on 28 December, and ratifications were exchanged in Hong Kong on 26 June 1843.

The treaty dismantled the Canton System, under which all Western trade since 1760 had been confined to Canton and handled by the licensed Cohong merchants. The Cohong monopoly was abolished, and Canton, Amoy (Xiamen), Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai became treaty ports, where British merchants could trade with whomever they chose and Britain could station consuls. Customs duties were to be fixed by agreement between the two governments rather than by China alone.

China agreed to pay 6 million silver dollars for the opium that had been destroyed, 3 million for debts owed by Canton merchants to British traders and 12 million towards the cost of the war, in instalments over three years. Hong Kong Island was ceded to the British Crown in perpetuity as a harbour and base. British troops would leave Nanjing and the Grand Canal once the first payment arrived, and the Qing promised to free British prisoners and pardon Chinese who had helped the British.

The treaty said nothing about opium. Britain did not ask for the trade to be legalised in the text, and the Qing refused to do so separately, so smuggling continued. A supplementary agreement, the Treaty of the Bogue of 1843, gave British subjects extraterritoriality, exempting them from Chinese law, and most-favoured-nation status, so that any privilege later given to another power would also go to Britain. The United States and France obtained similar treaties in 1844.

Together with later agreements of 1843, 1858 and 1860, the treaty replaced the old Canton System with a new framework for China's foreign relations that lasted almost a century. It also broke with the traditional order in which China stood above other states. At the time, however, the Qing court did not treat it as especially significant. Opium was finally legalised after China's defeat in the Second Opium War. China regained control of its tariffs in the 1920s, extraterritoriality was given up in 1943, and Hong Kong, enlarged in 1860 and 1898, returned to China on 1 July 1997.

Our 1815 map shows the Qing empire before the war, and our 1878 map shows it after the treaty, with Hong Kong under the British Empire.