His original name was Sun Wen

Born to a family of poor farmers in Xiangshan, in the South China province of Guangdong.

Caused widespread addiction in China & later Chinese government destroyed tons of opium

May 1858 —> British warships arrived in Tianjin and forced the Chinese to negotiate

The condition was worsen when British sailors killed a Chinese villager

June 1858 —> treaty signed and provided residence for foreign envoys, new ports for western trade, and the right for foreign travel

The treaty of Nanjing: China pay a large indemnity, cede Hong Kong Island to the British, and increase the number of treaty ports

By the end of the 19th century, the Western powers and Japan had forced China’s ruling Qing dynasty to accept wide foreign control over the country’s economic affairs. .

The British Supplementary treaty of the Bogue: gave British citizens extraterritoriality & most-favoured-nation status

June 1859 —> the French and British came back to ratify the treaty however the Chinese refused.

August 1860 —> the French and British came with larger troops and managed to destroy the Dagu batteries, captured Beijing and burned the Yuanming Garden, the Emperor's Summer Palace

Late August 1860 —> the Chinese agreed to observe the treaties of Tianjin and ceded the British Southern portion of the Kowloon peninsula.

The Boxer Rebellion formally ended with the signing of the Boxer Protocol on September 7, 1901.

By terms of the agreement, forts protecting Beijing were to be destroyed, Boxer and Chinese government officials involved in the uprising were to be punished, foreign legations were permitted to station troops in Beijing for their defense, China was prohibited from importing arms for two years and it agreed to pay more than $330 million in reparations to the foreign nations involved.

The Qing dynasty, established in 1644, was weakened by the Boxer Rebellion. Following an uprising in 1911, the dynasty came to an end and China became a republic in 1912.

In the Opium Wars (1839-42, 1856-60), popular rebellions and the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), China had fought to resist the foreigners, but it lacked a modernized military and suffered millions of casualties

By the late 1890s, a Chinese secret group, the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists (“I-ho-ch’uan” or “Yihequan”), had begun carrying out regular attacks on foreigners and Chinese Christians. (The rebels performed calisthenics rituals and martial arts that they believed would give them the ability to withstand bullets and other forms of attack.

In 1900, the Boxer movement spread to the Beijing area, where the Boxers killed Chinese Christians and Christian missionaries and destroyed churches and railroad stations and other property.

On June 20, 1900, the Boxers began a siege of Beijing’s foreign legation district (where the official quarters of foreign diplomats were located.) The following day, Qing Empress Dowager Tzu’u Hzi (or Cixi, 1835-1908) declared a war on all foreign nations with diplomatic ties in China.

As the Western powers and Japan organized a multinational force to crush the rebellion, the siege stretched into weeks, and the diplomats, their families and guards suffered through hunger and degrading conditions as they fought to keep the Boxers at bay.

By some estimates, several hundred foreigners and several thousand Chinese Christians were killed during this time. On August 14, after fighting its way through northern China, an international force of approximately 20,000 troops from eight nations (Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States) arrived to take Beijing and rescue the foreigners and Chinese Christians.

His brother who emigrated to Hawaii as a labourer, brought him to Honolulu, and became a student at a British missionary school for three years and at an American school, Oahu College, for another year, he first came into contact with Western influences.