The First Opium War had its roots in a trade imbalance that Britain resolved through narcotics. Under the Canton System, Canton was the only port where foreign merchants could conduct business in China. European demand for Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain far exceeded Chinese appetite for European exports, and silver flowed eastward in quantities that worried British merchants and the East India Company alike. Their solution was opium — shipped from company plantations in India into Canton, creating the dependency that reversed the trade balance.

When Chinese official Lin Zexu destroyed a large confiscated quantity of opium at Humen — the fortified gateway to Canton — in 1839, the British government treated it as a provocation sufficient for war. The First Opium War began. Local officials who sued for peace and signed agreements with British representatives were punished by Beijing for their capitulations. The Qing court sent more troops. The fighting resumed.

On the night of May 21, 1841, Qing forces attempted a surprise attack on British positions in the hills north of Canton. They were repelled. By 2:00 am on May 24, Gough had assembled a combined force of roughly six thousand soldiers and sailors for the assault on the city itself — the 49th Foot, the 26th Cameronians, Royal Marines, Madras Artillery, Bengal Volunteers, and others. The iron-hulled steamer Nemesis towed the left column upriver.

British troops captured the four northern forts in under half an hour. Within that time, soldiers stood on the heights looking down on the city walls from one hundred paces. On May 25, a force of approximately four thousand Qing soldiers advanced across the paddy fields to the northeast and made repeated attacks. They were repelled. Their encampment was burned; their magazines blown up. By the morning of May 26, Gough was prepared to take the city. Then a white flag appeared on the wall.

A ceasefire was negotiated between British plenipotentiary Charles Elliot and the governor-general of Canton. The terms were significant: a six-million-dollar indemnity, Chinese troop withdrawal of sixty miles, British withdrawal down the Pearl River. Canton would not be destroyed. But elements of the British forces looted the city after the battle, and their presence in the surrounding countryside ignited something the treaty had not anticipated.

What became known as the Sanyuanli incident involved local Cantonese villagers — farmers and tradespeople, not soldiers — who attacked a small contingent of British troops and briefly forced them to take shelter. The British regarded it as a minor skirmish. The Chinese public received it differently. It was the first time civilians in Qing China had taken up arms against a foreign military force. The officials and troops had failed. The people had not. Stories spread. Accounts grew. The episode took on, as historian Frederick Wakeman later wrote, "almost mythic proportions."

The battle itself had limited effect on the broader war, which continued until 1842. Canton's wall was breached, its forts taken, its treasury paid. By June 1, all British forces had left the area.

But the Sanyuanli incident left something behind that the battle itself did not: a usable story about civilian resistance. Historian Wakeman observed that Chinese history extracted from these humiliating defeats "a great popular victory, blemished only by the cowardice of Qing officials." Every tablet, every shrine to those who died at Sanyuanli, was recorded. The incident helped cultivate the idea that when the state fails its people, the people must act — an idea that reverberated through the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions that followed.

The dead of these battles — Qing soldiers, British troops, Cantonese civilians caught between competing forces — left thinner records. Their names are not on the shrines. The village of Sanyuanli still stands north of Guangzhou, a reminder that what gets remembered from a war is not always what determined its outcome.