The 5th original of the Lonely Mountain Thief
（1）
In the long history of trade between Britain and the Qing Dynasty, although the huge trade deficit made the British quite embarrassed, in the eyes of the Qing government without the slightest world view, there was no problem, the British silver continued to flow into China, there was no problem, the British face turned black at a speed visible to the naked eye, there was no problem.
Since there was no problem, the Qing government would not find a way to help Britain balance the deficit through normal commodity trade, and with the growing anxiety of not being understood, the British finally found a commodity that was attractive to the Chinese people - opium after abandoning cotton textiles and forks to open up the Chinese market.
From 1800 to 1820, Britain imported an average of four thousand boxes of opium into China every year, gradually cultivating Chinese smokers and smokers, wearing suits and shoes, and very civilized British politicians even directly advertised for the drug trade, saying that after a meal, the gods walked everywhere, came at night, slept soundly and enjoyed.
The British capitalists must have expanded their reproduction rapidly after discovering that opium was profitable, and by 1840, Britain's annual exports of opium to China had reached about thirty-five thousand boxes, and the proportion of opium in Britain's export trade to China had also increased rapidly from the initial 10% to more than 50%.
According to the Chronicle of the East India Company, in the winter of 1829 many of the company's dun ships stayed in Victoria Harbour, many of which were opium ships, which shipped opium from India to the mouth of the Pearl River, hoarded on barges, and sold to local tobacco dealers, who then sold opium in dinghies to coastal areas.
（2）
With the flood of drugs, the outflow of silver, in 1839 the fierce male Lin Zexu came to Guangdong, and then in June did the feat of Humen gun smoke, in the face of the financial road was cut off, the British were naturally angry from the heart, evil to the side of the bold, the British commercial supervisor in China at that time Yi Lu did not expect the Qing Dynasty government to intervene in their free and noble drug trade, while asking for help from the British government, while gathering british armed opium ships and British personnel in China in Victoria Harbor, seeking the opportunity to counterattack.
In August, the British warship "Wallag" from India sailed to Hong Kong, and Yilu began to provoke the Qing army, and the means were also very unpretentious, specifically: when requesting the purchase of fresh water and grain at the Kowloon port, it opened fire on the Qing warships; when the British merchant ships obeyed Lin Zexu's request to go along the Pearl River to Huangpu for normal trade, they stopped the attack, etc., which can be described as very indiscriminate.
Fortunately, Lin Macho was very vigilant, and at this moment, most of the troops on the Yilu side were opium dealers, not only in small numbers, but also weak in combat effectiveness, so they were all repelled, and later Lin Saw that the British had signs of fighting a sea guerrilla attack on the Kowloon Peninsula as a nest, in order to eliminate the troubles forever, so as to occupy the commanding heights of the Kowloon Peninsula in November, Yi Lu understood his opponent's thoughts very well, and successively attacked the Qing positions, and in several battles the Qing army won a complete victory, and the British were forced to evacuate Victoria Harbour.
In February 1840, the British government, at the request of opium merchants, sent the Eastern Expeditionary Force to launch a war of aggression against China, and after four months of voyage, in June 1840, more than 40 British warships and more than 4,000 British regular troops from the Indian colonies gathered at Victoria Harbour to blockade the Pearl River.
The British elites believed that Guangdong was too far away from the Qing government, and no matter how big the movement was, it might not be able to shake the Qing Emperor and meet their demands for land and trade, so they did not attack Guangzhou, where Lin Zexu was located, but went north along the coast, broke through Dinghai (present-day Zhoushan Islands), reached the mouth of the Baihe River in Tianjin, and presented the "Letter from viscount Palmerson to the Chinese Emperor to the Emperor of China" from the British officials.
How close are Tianjin and Beijing? Spectators who do not live in these two places may not be very sensitive, just look at the map, 120 kilometers, if the highway is straight, run for an hour. Because of this, although the Daoguang Emperor could not understand what was happening, but his heart was greatly shaken, the good guys nomadic civilization and agricultural civilization had fought for thousands of years, each time it was a step by step walking and fighting, the time was measured in months, how could this time not hit the opposite side of the house? The Qing government said that it did not talk about martial virtue, but in fact it was like a child who had never seen the world, and immediately sent Qi Shan to negotiate with the British.
Coincidentally, this "Letter from viscount Palmerson to the Emperor of China" is not a direct treaty of Nanjing, but a letter, which mainly says: China's smoking ban has desecrated the majesty of the British Empire, so the British sent troops to the Qing government to demand compensation and apologies, and you have to pay compensation for the losses suffered by british opium dealers, and for the islands, you have to cut and so on. With the British saying this, there is room for coordination and turnover.
So Qi Shan, after getting the consent of the Daoguang Emperor, wrote to the British: Lin Zexu, who sold cigarettes in Humen, misunderstood the fair and strict will of our great emperor and was deceived into going to Guangdong to ban poison. We will find out the crimes he has committed and then sentence him heavily. But considering that these things are happening in Guangdong and cannot be handled in Tianjin, please ask your commander to return to Guangdong immediately, and the Minister of Chincha on our side will also go to Guangdong immediately, and he will definitely be wronged for the British!
This is exactly in line with the intentions of the British, YiLu has been in China for many years, and has a deep understanding of China, he knows that if he forces the Qing government to sign the contents of the Treaty of Nanjing as soon as he comes up, the Daoguang Emperor must jump the wall in a hurry, and the matter cannot end in a short period of time, and it was Already September, the weather immediately turned cold, the British came from Guangdong, could not spend the winter in the cold Tianjin, so they borrowed a donkey, and after getting the assurance of the Qing government, they went south to return to Guangdong. Qi Shan, because of his meritorious "retreat from the enemy", was appointed as the minister of Chincha and rushed to Guangzhou.
After Qi Shan arrived in Guangzhou at the end of November, with his many years of experience in the tao, he began to play tai chi with YiLu, paying compensation, cutting land, and opening commercial ports to repeatedly entangle with Yilu, and Yilu saw that there was no victory or defeat at the negotiating table, so he directly started to do it.
On January 7, 1841, the British first captured Shajiao, Dajiao Fort, which is the coastal fort near today's Seagull Island in Guangzhou, and directly demanded the cession of Shajiao, Qi Shan directly frightened his guts, and immediately promised to give the British a place to live in the outer ocean, but Shajiao was absolutely impossible.
Yi Lu originally wanted Hong Kong Island, but Qi Shan repeatedly entangled with him, so he made a much bigger request, so Qi Shan immediately agreed to the previous small request, and Lu Xun's view of human nature was indeed a bit accurate. So Yi Lu borrowed the slope to get off the donkey, and finally agreed to ask for an island in Hong Kong for the British to live and trade.
On January 20, Qi Shanshang played Daoguang, saying that the British were willing to return Dinghai (Zhoushan Islands, Zhejiang) and Shajiao, but it was not easy for the British to cross the sea, and he wanted to plead with Daoguang on behalf of the British to follow the example of the Western Yi people living in Macau and allow them to stop their ships in Hong Kong, east of Guangdong.
Then, on January 25, before the treaty had been signed and negotiations were still in progress, British troops landed in Hong Kong and began to survey Hong Kong's land, and Yi Lu also gleefully reported to the Queen and the British media that an agreement had been reached between him and Qi Shan, agreeing to cede Hong Kong Island to britain, and Hong Kong was officially transferred to the British Empire. At the same time, YiLu also unilaterally informed the Qing Dynasty officers and men stationed in Hong Kong and the residents of Hong Kong, saying that the British representative Yilu and the Minister of Chincha, Qi Shan, had made up their minds, that Hong Kong Island had all been ceded to British administration, that there were copywriting documents in hand, that the Qing Dynasty officers and men stationed in Hong Kong would immediately withdraw from Hong Kong Island, that the people in Hong Kong, that you had all become British people, that you must obey us British, and that you should not cause trouble.
But what makes people can't help but be amused is that Qi Shan's statement at that time was to play on behalf of the pleading, to put it bluntly, Yi Lu and Qi Shan were just a glove of the masters of both sides, in the feudal Qing Dynasty and constitutional monarchy of Britain, only the emperor and the queen had the right to change the system and land sovereignty, Qi Shan had a very thorough understanding of his own positioning, and told Daoguang the result of the negotiations to wait for the Daoguang Emperor to decide, while Yi Lu became blind because he was too eager to succeed, limited by the communication conditions at that time. Neither glove could understand the true intentions of their masters, so in the end the talk turned into self-indulgence between the two gloves, which didn't make much sense.
In April, after the report arrived in Britain, the British government reacted strongly, and the British capitalists were even more angry, believing that the law of righteousness was too little. On April 12, 39 British businessmen sent a letter to Foreign Secretary Palmerston complaining that "all the objectives of this expedition have been unnecessarily sacrificed"; on April 16, 48 British groups and companies sent letters to Palmerston, demanding that the arrangements for the Law of Righteousness be rejected and renegotiated; and that The Foreign Secretary Palmerston's intention was to occupy the huge island group of the Zhoushan Islands, so he was greatly angered by the small island sent by the Law of Justice.
It should be pointed out that the British central government is still quite calm and objective compared with the righteous law of negotiation with the Qing Dynasty, at least on the issue of QiShan's lack of right to cede territory, the British government sees it very clearly, the trading representatives of the two sides are only representatives, without the consent of their respective masters, they think that the treaty is valid, and the righteous law is obviously too anxious.
On 3 May, Palmerston repudiated the results of the talks, dismissed him from his post as plenipotentiary envoy and commercial supervisor in China, and wrote a letter criticizing him: In your notice to the British people in the Chinese media, you announced that Hong Kong Island was permanently incorporated into the British territory, and I must make it clear to you that no territory belonging to the monarch can be ceded to another monarch unless it is a formal treaty directly approved by the monarch, and no subject has the right to cede any land of his master. Therefore, even if you sign an agreement with Qishan to cede Hong Kong, this agreement has no value or effect until the Chinese emperor ratifies it, not to mention that you and Qishan did not sign a formal treaty to cede Hong Kong Island, in any case, it is certain that when you issued this notice, even if Qishan signed this treaty, it was not approved by the emperor, so it is completely premature for you to issue this notice.
In fact, after Qi Shan returned the results of the negotiations, the Daoguang Emperor was a classic incompetent rage, and took Qi Shansuo into Beijing and dismissed him from his post and raided his home.
（3）
Subsequently, the British government decided to stop the negotiations and instead send Pu Dingcha, who was recuperating in The United Kingdom, to replace Yilu to continue the war, and Palmerston repeatedly ordered Pu Dingcha to repeat the war, emphasizing that the first thing to do after China was to reoccupy the Zhoushan Islands abandoned by Yilu, and the place of negotiation should not be chosen in Guangzhou, because Guangzhou is too far from Beijing, and if the negotiations in Guangzhou are likely to fall into the procrastination of Chinese, tianjin's Baihekou is a good place to negotiate. The general point is not to be as afraid of war as the law of righteousness, but to fight until the Chinese emperor unconditionally accepts all the terms.
On June 5, 1841, Pu Dingcha rushed from the British mainland to Hong Kong, this 52-year-old man who had engaged in colonial aggression in Asia for more than 30 years obviously had stronger execution, after arriving in Hong Kong on August 10, he announced his refusal to negotiate with the Guangdong government, and on August 21, he went north in a big way, successively occupying Xiamen in Fujian, Dinghai, Zhenhai, and Ningbo in Zhejiang.
By June 1842, the British government continued to send reinforcements from India, and finally more than a hundred British warships were stationed in Hong Kong, estimated at about 100 men per ship, an army of about 10,000 people.
After obtaining sufficient troops, Pu Dingcha immediately moved north from Zhejiang, directly captured Shanghai, and then went up the yangtze river along the estuary of the Yangtze River to occupy Zhenjiang, burning and looting along the way. On August 10, more than 80 British warships arrived at the city of Nanjing, the Daoguang Emperor had already been frightened and lost his temper at this moment, a year ago because Qi Shan negotiated by the British took advantage of him, he dismissed him from his post and raided his home, and immediately sent the back pot hero Qi Ying and Pu Ding to investigate and negotiate peace, and the cowardice and shamelessness of the feudal emperor were vividly displayed.
On August 29, 1842, Qi Ying and Pu Dingcha signed the Treaty of Nanking on a British warship on the Nanjing River, and the third article of the treaty is interesting: "Because British merchant ships travel far across the sea, there are often damage that need to be repaired, and they should be given a place along the coast to facilitate ship repair and materials for garrisoning." Today our Great Emperor has given permission to give the island of Hong Kong to the Great British monarch and hereditary heirs for a long time to govern by law. ”
Obviously, he was slapped by others and could not take care of himself, the Qing government also praised you to see that it is not easy to send you an island, I seriously doubt that the taiji master Ma Baoguo once drew nutrition from the Nanjing Treaty, otherwise there would not be that refreshing young man who does not talk about martial arts.