Second Opium War (1856-1860): Britain, France and the Qing Empire

The Second Opium War (1856-1860), also called the Arrow War, was fought by Britain and later France against Qing China. It began with a dispute over a ship at Canton (Guangzhou) and ended with Anglo-French troops occupying Beijing and burning the emperor’s Summer Palace. The treaties that followed opened China much more widely to foreign trade, diplomacy and missionaries, and legalised the opium trade.

Background: unfinished business

The First Opium War had ended with the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, which ceded Hong Kong to Britain and opened five ports, including Canton and Shanghai, to British trade. Britain, France and the United States soon wanted more: access to the interior, ports on the Yangzi River, diplomats resident in Beijing and a legal opium trade.

Relations at Canton were especially tense. The city’s population and officials resisted British attempts to enter the walled city, which had been promised in principle after 1842. The governor-general of Guangdong and Guangxi, Ye Mingchen, refused to deal with British representatives on equal terms. At the same time the Qing were fighting the Taiping Rebellion, which left them little capacity to resist foreign pressure.

Trade itself had not grown as quickly as British merchants had hoped after 1842, and many blamed Qing restrictions rather than limited Chinese demand for British goods. Opium, still officially illegal, continued to pour in from British India through smuggling networks and receiving ships off the coast, and it remained one of the most valuable commodities in the China trade. Foreign merchants also became involved in shipping Chinese contract labourers abroad, a traffic that caused growing anger in southern ports.

The Arrow incident

On 8 October 1856 Qing officers boarded the Arrow, a lorcha (a Chinese-built ship with a Western-style hull) anchored at Canton, and arrested twelve of its Chinese crew on suspicion of piracy. The ship was registered in Hong Kong, although its registration had in fact lapsed, and the British claimed that its flag had been hauled down.

The British consul, Harry Parkes, and the governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, demanded the release of the crew and an apology. Ye returned the men but refused to apologise. Late in October British warships bombarded Canton’s forts and shelled the city, and Chinese crowds burned the foreign factories outside the walls in December.

Britain and France go to war

In London the action was controversial. In March 1857 the House of Commons passed a motion moved by Richard Cobden condemning the government’s conduct. The prime minister, Lord Palmerston, called a general election and won a larger majority, and the government sent Lord Elgin as special envoy with an army.

France joined the campaign, citing the execution of a French missionary, Auguste Chapdelaine, in Guangxi in 1856. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 delayed the expedition, as troops bound for China were diverted to India. Russia and the United States sent envoys who did not fight but sought the same privileges.

At the end of December 1857 British and French forces captured Canton. Ye Mingchen was taken prisoner in January 1858 and sent to Calcutta, where he died the following year.

For more than three years after its capture, Canton was governed by a joint Anglo-French commission, with Harry Parkes as its leading figure, while a cooperative Chinese governor nominally remained in office. The occupation showed that the allies could hold a major Chinese city, but it did not force the emperor in Beijing to negotiate, which is why the envoys decided to carry the war north.

The northern campaign and the Treaties of Tianjin

To put pressure on the court, Elgin and the French envoy Baron Gros sailed north to the mouth of the Hai River, which leads to Tianjin and Beijing. On 20 May 1858 their gunboats took the Taku (Dagu) forts guarding the river, and the envoys moved to Tianjin.

The Qing court agreed to terms. The Treaties of Tianjin, signed with Russia, the United States, Britain (26 June) and France (27 June) in 1858, provided that:

• foreign envoys could reside permanently in Beijing;
• ten more ports would open, including Hankou, Jiujiang, Zhenjiang and Nanjing on the Yangzi, and ports in Manchuria, Shandong, Taiwan and Hainan;
• foreign ships could sail the Yangzi and foreigners could travel inland with passports;
• Christian missionaries could preach and own property under protection;
• China would pay indemnities, 4 million taels of silver to Britain and 2 million to France.

A follow-up tariff conference in Shanghai in late 1858 set an import duty on opium, in effect legalising the trade.

Russia used the crisis skilfully without fighting. In May 1858, by the Treaty of Aigun, the governor-general of Eastern Siberia, Nikolay Muravyov, obtained the left bank of the Amur River from the Qing. The United States, represented by William Reed, signed its own Treaty of Tianjin, securing the same commercial privileges through the most-favoured-nation principle.

Renewed fighting, 1859-1860

When British and French envoys returned in June 1859 to exchange ratifications in Beijing, they tried to force their way up the Hai River instead of using the route the Qing proposed. On 25 June the rebuilt Taku forts, under the Mongol general Sengge Rinchen, sank or disabled several British gunboats and repulsed a landing with heavy losses. The American commodore Josiah Tattnall helped tow British boats, famously explaining that “blood is thicker than water”.

In 1860 a much larger Anglo-French force, roughly 17,000-18,000 troops, landed at Beitang. It took the Taku forts on 21 August and occupied Tianjin. As talks resumed, Qing forces seized Parkes, the diplomat Henry Loch and dozens of others under a flag of truce on 18 September. Allied troops defeated Sengge Rinchen at Baliqiao (Palikao) on 21 September, and the Xianfeng Emperor fled to his summer retreat at Rehe (Chengde), leaving his half-brother Prince Gong to negotiate.

The Summer Palace and the Convention of Peking

The allies reached the Yuanmingyuan, the vast imperial garden palace northwest of Beijing, in early October and looted it. When the surviving prisoners were released, it emerged that about 20 of them had died, many after torture. Elgin ordered the palace burned on 18-19 October as a punishment aimed at the emperor personally (see Burning of the Old Summer Palace).

Prince Gong signed the Convention of Peking with Britain on 24 October and with France on 25 October 1860. China ratified the Tianjin treaties, ceded the Kowloon peninsula opposite Hong Kong Island to Britain, opened Tianjin, allowed Chinese labourers to emigrate on foreign ships and increased the indemnity to 8 million taels each. In a separate treaty in November, Russian envoy Nikolay Ignatyev secured the land east of the Ussuri River, where Vladivostok was founded that year.

The destruction of the Yuanmingyuan caused controversy in Europe as well as lasting outrage in China. The French writer Victor Hugo condemned the looting in an open letter of 1861, comparing the allies to bandits. Treasures taken from the palace were auctioned among officers in Beijing and later appeared in museums and private collections in Britain and France, where questions of their return are still debated. A small dog found in the palace was taken to Britain and presented to Queen Victoria, who named it Looty.

Key people

• James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin (1811-1863): British envoy who negotiated the Tianjin treaty and ordered the burning of the Summer Palace.
• Harry Parkes (1828-1885): British consul at Canton in 1856 and a prisoner of the Qing in 1860.
• Ye Mingchen (1807-1859): governor-general at Canton, captured by the British and exiled to Calcutta.
• Prince Gong (1833-1898): the emperor’s half-brother, who negotiated the 1860 settlement and later led foreign affairs.
• Sengge Rinchen (1811-1865): Mongol general who defended the Taku forts.

Consequences

The war deepened the system of “unequal treaties” under which foreign powers gained extraterritoriality, fixed low tariffs and treaty ports. Opium imports continued to grow until the late 19th century. Foreign legations settled in Beijing, and in 1861 the court created the Zongli Yamen, its first office for foreign affairs.

Paradoxically, the settlement gave Britain and France a stake in the dynasty’s survival, and they began to help the Qing against the Taiping. Officials such as Prince Gong and Li Hongzhang launched the Self-Strengthening Movement, building arsenals and shipyards to meet the Western military challenge.

The war also helped shape the global opium economy. Legal import into China allowed production in British India to keep expanding until the 1880s, and domestic Chinese opium cultivation grew as well. Campaigns against the trade grew in Britain and China in the following decades, and Britain finally agreed in 1907 to phase out exports of Indian opium to China.

Timeline

• 1856, 8 October: Qing officers board the Arrow at Canton.
• 1856, late October: British warships bombard Canton.
• 1857, March: Palmerston loses a Commons vote but wins the general election.
• 1857, 28-29 December: Anglo-French forces capture Canton.
• 1858, 20 May: The allies take the Taku forts.
• 1858, 26-27 June: The Treaties of Tianjin are signed with Britain and France.
• 1859, 25 June: The allies are repulsed at the Taku forts.
• 1860, 21 August: The Taku forts fall to a larger Anglo-French army.
• 1860, 18-19 October: The Old Summer Palace is burned.
• 1860, 24-25 October: The Convention of Peking is signed.

Why it matters

The Second Opium War completed the forced opening of China begun in 1842. It brought foreign diplomats to Beijing, spread trade and missions into the interior, gave Russia the Pacific coast of Manchuria, and left a lasting memory of humiliation that still shapes Chinese views of the 19th century.