For a time, the British merchants comforted themselves with the delusion that Lin Tse-hsu, the Imperial Commissioner, could be bought off or mollified. He dashed these hopes by blockading the Boca Tigris, surrounding the foreign warehouses at Canton with guards and demanding that all foreign merchants surrender their stock of opium. He further insisted that they sign a pledge to import no more opium or face the death penalty.
Threats and vehement protests by the traders only drove Lin to stiffer counter-measures, and the British were at last forced to surrender more than 20,000 chests of opium worth $6,000,000. Commissioner Lin destroyed the opium immediately. British merchants and their government envoys withdrew from Canton by ship, ultimately anchoring off Hong Kong Island. None of them lived ashore; the island looked too bleak for English habitation, though it had already been considered as a possible offshore port of foreign trade.
With the British out of the opium trade, a legion of freelance desperadoes flocked in to take it over, leaving both the British and Chinese governments shorn of their revenue. Further negotiation between Lin and Captain Charles Elliot, the British Superintendent of Trade in China, reached an impasse when Lin declined to treat Elliot as a diplomat of equal rank and advised him to carry on his negotiations with the Chinese merchants.
Having wasted their time in a profitless exchange of unpleasantries, both sides huffily retired; the Chinese to reinforce their shore batteries and assemble a fleet of twenty-nine war junks and fire rafts, and Captain Elliot to organize a striking force of warships, iron-hulled steamers and troop transports.
The junk fleet and two British men-of-war clashed at Chuenpee, on the Canton River estuary, in the first battle between British and Chinese armed forces. It was a pushover for the British; Chinese naval guns were centuries behind theirs in firepower, and the gun crews on the junks were pitifully inaccurate in comparison with the scientific precision of the British. Within a few minutes the junks had been sunk, dismasted or driven back in panicky disorder. The British on the Hyacinth and Volage suffered almost no damage or casualties.
No formal state of war existed, however, so Captain Elliot broke off the one-sided engagement before the enemy had been annihilated. He pulled back to wait until orders came from Lord Palmerston, British Foreign Secretary, directing him to demand repayment for the $6,000,000 worth of opium handed over to Lin. At the same time, Elliot was told to obtain firm Chinese assurance of future security for traders in China, or the cession of an island off the China coast as a base for foreign trade unhampered by the merchants and officials of the Celestial Empire. Palmerston, maintaining the calm detachment of a statesman 10,000 miles distant from the scene of battle, thought it would be best for Elliot to win these concessions without war.
Elliot, mustering the full strength of his land and sea forces, blockaded the Canton and Yangtze Rivers, occupied several strategic islands and put Palmerston’s demands into the hands of Emperor Tao-kuang. Humiliated by the irresistible advance of the despised foreigners, the Emperor angrily dismissed Commissioner Lin. His replacement, Commissioner Keeshen, began by agreeing to pay the indemnity demanded by Lord Palmerston and to hand over Hong Kong Island, then deliberately dragged his feet to postpone the fulfillment of his promises. Elliot, fed to the teeth with temporizing, ended it by throwing his whole fleet at the Chinese. His naval guns pounded their shore batteries into silence, and he landed marines and sailors to capture the forts guarding Canton.
The Chinese land defenders were as poorly equipped as the sailors of their war junks; when they lighted their ancient matchlocks to fire them, scores of soldiers were burned to death by accidentally igniting the gunpowder spilled on their clothing.
In a naval action at Anson’s Bay, the flat-bottomed iron steamer Nemesis, drawing only six feet of water, surprised a squadron of junks by pushing its way into their shallow-water refuge. A single Congreve rocket from the Nemesis struck the magazine of a large war junk, blowing it up in a shower of flying spars and seamen. Eleven junks were destroyed, two were driven aground and hundreds of Chinese sailors were killed within a few hours. Admiral Kwan, commander of the shattered fleet, had the red cap-button emblematic of his rank shot off by the British and was later relieved of the rank by his unsympathetic Emperor.
Keeshen hastened to notify Elliot that he stood ready to hand over Hong Kong and the $6,000,000 indemnity. But even the shock of defeat had not flushed the Emperor from his dream world of superiority; he repudiated Keeshen’s agreement and ordered him to rally the troops for “an awful display of Celestial vengeance.” Well aware of the hopelessness of his situation, Keeshen tried to hold out by postponing his meetings with Elliot. Elliot, not to be put off this time, countered by opening a general assault along the Canton River. Within a month, his combined land and sea offensive had reduced every fort on the water route to Canton and his ships rode at anchor in front of the city.