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By 1833, the Chinese opium trade soared to 30,000 chests. [7] British and American merchants sent opium to warehouses in the free-trade port of Canton, and sold it to Chinese smugglers. [8] [10] In 1834, the EIC's monopoly on British trade with China ceased, and the opium trade burgeoned.
The number of people using the drug in China grew rapidly, to the point that the trade imbalance shifted in the foreign countries' favor. In 1839 matters came to a head when Chinese official Lin Zexu tried to end the opium trade altogether by destroying a large amount of opium in Canton, thereby triggering the First Opium War.
The skirmish was the first armed conflict of the First Opium War and occurred when British boats opened fire on Chinese war junks enforcing a food sales embargo on the British community. The ban was ordered after a Chinese man died in a brawl with drunk British sailors at Tsim Sha Tsui .
The interpretation of the war, which was long the standard in the People's Republic of China, was summarised in 1976: The Opium War, "in which the Chinese people fought against British aggression, marked the beginning of modern Chinese history and the start of the Chinese people's bourgeois-democratic revolution against imperialism and feudalism."
The Second Battle of Taku Forts (Chinese: 第二次大沽口之戰) was a failed Anglo-French attempt to seize the Taku Forts along the Hai River in Tianjin, China, in June 1859 during the Second Opium War. A chartered American steamship arrived on scene and assisted the French and British in their attempted suppression of the forts.
The Battle of Canton (Chinese: 廣州城戰役) was fought by British and French forces against Qing China on 28–31 December 1857 during the Second Opium War.The British High Commissioner, Lord Elgin, was keen to take the city of Canton as a demonstration of power and to capture Chinese official Ye Mingchen, who had resisted British attempts to implement the 1842 Treaty of Nanking.
In China, the First Opium War is considered to have been the beginning of modern Chinese history. [ 9 ] [ 10 ] [ 11 ] Between the two wars, repeated acts of aggression against British subjects led in 1847 to the Expedition to Canton which assaulted and took, by a coup de main , the forts of the Bocca Tigris resulting in the spiking of 879 guns.
The Third Battle of Taku Forts (Chinese: 第三次大沽口之戰) was an engagement of the Second Opium War, part of the British and French 1860 expedition to China.It took place at the Taku Forts (also called Peiho Forts) near Tanggu District (Wade-Giles: Pei Tang-Ho), approximately 60 kilometers (36 mi.) southeast of the city of Tianjin (Tientsin).