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The '''Canton War''', also known as the '''Cantonese War (1850-1857),''' was a 19th century colonial war over European influence in China. It pitted the [[Great Qing|Great Qing Empire]] and the [[Kingdom of the Netherlands]] against the British, French and the breakaway [[Canton|Cantonese Kingdom]]. The war lasted 7 years and is considered to be the bloodiest colonial war of the 19th century with numbers of causalities that weren't matched until the [[East Indies Crisis (1960-1976)|East Indies Crisis]] that occurred in the 1960s to 1970s.
The war led to a dramatic balance shift in East Asia and allowed for the rise of [[Canton]], [[Corea]] and [[Taulandt]] as major regional powers. It is also known to many historians as the beginning of the Dutch Decline with the Kingdom of the Netherlands loosing influence in Southern China and simultaneously loosing the vast swatches of North American territory to the Spanish Empire in the [[2nd Dutch-Spanish War|Dutch-Spanish War (1850)]].
==Background==
The Dutch established a base on the island of Formosa in the 1620s. Although not universally welcomed, they fostered a good but informal relationship with the Ming on the mainland. However, in the 1640s, with the rise of the Qing dynasty, the Dutch completely cut their ties with the Ming and allied with the burgeoning Qing instead. This had developed into a formal military alliance, and throughout the 18th century, the Dutch possessed unfettered and uncontested trading rights in China, much to the envy of other European powers.
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As soon as Europe got word of the incident, Britain hastily declared war on the Dutch Empire. France soon joined on the side of Canton and the British. This quickly developed into a global conflict, with British and Dutch colonies being pitted against each other in the Americas, and multiple naval battles being fought on the English channel. In China, the Anglo-British-Cantonese alliance was slowly pushing back the Dutch and the Qing. Things started to look tragic for the Dutch, especially when the Spanish Empire declared a separate war against the distracted Dutch Empire in late 1850, hoping to take some of the territories from the Dutch [[Tussenland|Colony of Tussenland]] in America. Dutch Formosa was now being attacked on all sides, by Britain and France from Canton and the Spanish from Manila.
===Aftermath===
The war ended in disaster for the Dutch and the Qing. In the resulting Treaty of Tchangtcheou (1857), the Kingdom of Canton was formally recognized by all nations, taking most of the southern Qing territory. Multiple treaty ports were opened, specifically Tchangtcheou (France), Foochow, Taichow, Ningpo, and Shanghai (Britain). The Dutch were forced to concede defeat and retract their monopoly on the Asian trade. All Dutch presence in China was removed. This war would later be known
However, it was the Qing that suffered the most damage in the war. Although still holding a large territory, the situation in post-war Qing had devolved into a constant civil war between local warlords, and they would never recover from that point on/ The Qing would be known as the "Sick Man of Asia [亞洲病夫], and by the late 1880s, although the Qing state was still present ''de jure,'' it was already considered dead. The withering of the Qing in the 1880s had allowed for a new Asian power to enter the global stage: the Empire of Corea.
== See Also ==
* [[2nd Dutch-Spanish War|2nd Dutch-Spanish War (1850-1855)]]
{{Timeline and Lore}}
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