The Second Opium War grew from disputes that the British government chose to treat as causes for war. The immediate trigger — the boarding of the merchant vessel Arrow and the hauling down of its British-registered flag by Chinese officers — arrived on top of accumulated frustrations over Chinese resistance to expanding the terms of trade won in the First Opium War. Britain wanted open cities, legal opium imports, and diplomatic representation in Beijing. The Qing government had other ideas.

Commissioner Ye Mingchen, the official governing Guangdong and Guangxi, refused British demands. Rear-Admiral Michael Seymour, commanding British naval forces in China, responded with what his dispatches described in the clipped language of military administration. The orders were given. The ships moved upriver.

On October 23, HMS Coromandel and HMS Barracouta attacked the four Barrier Forts on the Pearl River. Seymour reported minimal British casualties and four or five Chinese soldiers killed in what his report characterized as "ill-judged resistance" — phrasing that reflects the British military viewpoint of the time, not an accounting of the lives those men led before the guns found them.

Seymour proceeded to Canton. The Shameen Forts, the Dutch Folly Fort, Bird's Nest Fort, Blenheim Fort, Macao Fort — one after another, the positions that defended the city were taken, their guns disabled. On October 26, four hundred marines and seamen breached the city wall and briefly occupied Canton itself, inspecting the governor's premises and withdrawing at sunset. Two British soldiers died in the fighting in the streets; twelve were wounded. The number of Chinese military and civilian dead in this phase of the battle was not systematically recorded in the British dispatches.

Commissioner Ye offered no concessions. On October 30, the bombardment resumed to maintain the breach in the city wall. The fighting continued until November 5 and beyond — on November 6, British forces captured the French Folly Fort after Chinese war junks had gathered there.

For the people living in Canton, these were not abstract military operations. Residential areas burned. The print record from this period, including period illustrations preserved in British publications, shows conflagrations spreading through the suburbs. Who died in those fires, what they had built across their lives, what they lost — these things were not counted in the dispatches that Seymour sent to London. History has preserved the admirals' names and the ships' names. It has not preserved the names of those who lived where the shells fell.

The battle at Canton in the autumn of 1856 was the beginning, not the end. The Second Opium War would continue until 1860, drawing in French forces alongside the British, concluding only after the burning of the Old Summer Palace outside Beijing and the signing of the Convention of Peking. Canton's forts were the first positions taken; the court at Beijing was the last target.

For Guangzhou — the city Canton became — these events belong to a period that the Chinese describe as the century of humiliation: the long era of foreign concessions, unequal treaties, and military defeats that ran from the First Opium War to the end of the Second World War. The Pearl River still runs past the places where the forts stood. The water that the British warships moved through is the same water. The city that rebuilt itself around those losses is now one of the largest on Earth.