Treaty of Nanking

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The Treaty of Nanjing (Chinese: 南京條約, Nánjīng Tiáoyuē) is the agreement which marked the end of the First Opium War between the United Kingdom and China.

It was signed on 29 August 1842 aboard the British warship HMS Cornwallis in Nanjing (then known as "Nanking"). It is the first of the Unequal Treaties signed by China with a foreign power.

Under the treaty, China agreed to give Hong Kong Island (together with some small nearby islands) to the British Empire, and open the following treaty ports of China for foreign trade with low tariffs:

Canton (Guangzhou)
Amoy (Xiamen)
Foochow (Fuzhou)
Ningpo (Ningbo)
Shanghai

(The first of the romanizations are in Postal map spelling, which were used in the treaty; the second Hanyu Pinyin, the modern spellings.)

Also, Great Britain received:

21 million ounces silver for compensation
Fixed tariffs
Extraterritoriality for British Citizens on Chinese soil
Most Favored Nation status

In addition to these indemnities, China allowed British missionaries into the interior of China for the first time, and allowed British merchants to establish "spheres of influence" in and around British ports.

The treaty left several unsettled issues. In particular it did not resolve the status of the opium trade with China, which was profitable for the British and devastating to the Chinese. The equivalent American treaty forbade the opium trade, but, as both the British and American merchants were only subject to the legal control of their consuls, the trade continued. Thereafter, the opium trade flourished, and Hong Kong developed rapidly as an Anglo-Chinese enclave.

The governments of the United Kingdom and the People's Republic of China (PRC) concluded the Sino-British Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong in 1984, under which the sovereignty of the leased territories, together with Hong Kong Island and Kowloon (south of Boundary Street) ceded under the Convention of Peking (1860), was scheduled to be transferred to the PRC on July 1, 1997.