War and Game

Chinese Officials Arrest the Crew of the British Ship "Arrow" as Pirates sparking off the War-typical Imperial British Propaganda Art

Chinese police arrested 12 Chinese crewmen on a Chinese-owned trading vessel, the Arrow, on October 12, 1856. The police suspected the crewmen of piracy and smuggling. In the effort to arrest the crew members, the British flag, flown by the vessel because it was registered in Hong Kong, was torn. The British consul in Canton, Harry Parkes, demanded of Chinese authorities an apology for the damage to the British flag and the release of the Chinese crew members. When Chinese authorities released the crew but refused to apologize for the damage to the British flag, Parkes ordered British naval vessels to bombard the city.

The Chinese responded by burning foreign-owned factories and businesses in Canton. Meanwhile, a French priest was murdered in Canton. The British government dispatched a military expedition to China under the command of Lord Elgin. A French military mission was concurrently dispatched under the command of Baron Gros to avenge the death of the French priest. The Anglo-French forces seized Canton and moved north, up the coast of China, attacking ports and shipping until they reached Tianjin. The Chinese signed a treaty in Tianjin (Tianjin, Treaty of) in June 1858 but took no action to ratify the treaty until the British and French governments took renewed military action with forces still under the command of Lord Elgin and Baron Gros. The combined French and British forces occupied parts of Peking, burned the emperor's Summer Palace (the Yuanmingyuan) in the western suburbs of the city, and drove the emperor out of Peking. The Arrow War ended with the acceptance and ratification of the Convention of Peking by the emperor in 1860.

REFERENCES John K. Fairbank, ed., The Chinese World Order: Traditional Chinese Foreign Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968); Sean Glynn and Alan Booth, Modern Britain: An Economic and Social History (London: Routledge, 1996); Immanuel C. Y. Hsu, The Rise of Modern China, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Douglas Hurd, The Arrow War: An Anglo-Chinese Confusion, 1856-1860 (London: Collins Press, 1967); Charles S. Leavenworth, The Arrow War with China (London: S. Row Marston, 1901); Peter J. Marshall, ed., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the British Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

PEKING CONVENTION (1860) (Beijing Convention)
The Peking Convention was signed in 1860 between China and Great Britain after British troops attacked Beijing and leveled the Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan). The Convention of Peking ended a post-Opium War engagement that started with the seizure in Canton of the Arrow, a Chinese-owned, Hong Kong-registered ship. The British acted because the Chinese emperor had ignored the provisions of the Treaty of Tianjin (1858), refusing to allow a British ambassador to be resident in Beijing, nor would the emperor agree to exchange ratification of the Treaty of Tianjin in Beijing. Working together, British and French forces occupied the Dagu forts, protecting the approaches to Tianjin, and Anglo-French forces marched to Peking and occupied parts of the city. The emperor finally agreed to ratification and also ceded to Britain the peninsula of Kowloon. Among other provisions, Tianjin was also opened as a treaty port.

REFERENCES Wolfram Eberhard, A History of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); John K. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953); Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).