Second Opium War

The Second Opium War was fought from 1856 to 1860 between Qing China and an allied expeditionary force of Britain and France, following an escalation of tensions from the 1839 to 1842 First Opium War over China's restrictions on the opium and broader foreign trade. Fighting culminated in an Anglo-French capture of the Chinese capital, Beijing, in October 1860, where allied troops looted and then burned the Old Summer Palace, the emperor's grand suburban residence, an act still remembered in China as a symbol of the era's foreign humiliation. The war ended with the Treaties of Tianjin, negotiated in 1858 and ratified after the fighting's end, and the Convention of Peking, which together opened additional Chinese ports to foreign trade, legalized the opium trade, permitted foreign legations in Beijing and ceded the Kowloon Peninsula to British Hong Kong. The settlement deepened the unequal treaty system that constrained Qing sovereignty over foreign trade and diplomacy for decades afterward, contributing to the broader nineteenth-century weakening of Qing central authority.