On this day, The Treaty of Nanking was signed, putting and end to the First Opium War (1839-1842) between Great Britain and the Qing dynasty of China. The war was sparked by China’s decision to stop the illegal importation of opium from British plantations in India and the successive destruction of a huge quantity of British opium at Humen by the Chinese Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu. Britain’s use of recently invented military technology produced a crushing victory and allowed it to impose a one-sided treaty requiring the Chinese to pay a huge indemnity, to cede the island of Hong Kong to the British as a colony, and to allow trade at five ‘treaty ports’. The treaty was signed by British and Chinese officials on board HMS Cornwallis anchored in the Yangtze river at Nanking. It was the first of what the Chinese later termed the ‘unequal treaties’.
