Britain’s gunboat diplomacy in the mid-nineteenth century built an important imperial presence in China. The First Opium War and the subsequent Arrow War opened China to trade, especially to opium imported from British-controlled India, and compelled the Qing Dynasty to sign the Treaty of Nanking (1842) and the subsequent Treaty of the Bogue (1843) – the unequal treaties. The treaties granted Britain extra-territorial rights, ceded Hong Kong to Britain, required the Qing to pay indemnities, and ended Qing control over their tariffs on foreign trade. Most importantly, they ended the Qing Dynasty’s Canton trade system that had attempted to put strict limits on foreign trade. Over the following decades, British investors built many of the transportation and commercial industries in developing a Chinese economy more integrated into the world trade system. Major British companies such as Jardine & Matheson, Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, Butterfield & Swire, John Swire & Sons, British-American Tobacco, and the Asiatic Petrol Company played a central role in many of China’s most important industries, from banking, shipping lines on China’s navigable rivers, railroads, chemical industries, soap-making, breweries, mining collieries, lumber, cotton and woolen mills, dockyards, cold storage and warehouses, to hotels, while many British subjects owned small property holdings such as private residences and rooming houses. Investors had placed the majority of this investment in the vicinity of Shanghai.