Hong Kong (1800s–1930s) oversaw the founding of the new crown colony of Hong Kong under the British Empire. After the First Opium War, the territory was ceded by the Qing Empire to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland through Treaty of Nanjing (1842) and Convention of Peking (1860) in perpetuity, with additional land was leased to the British under the Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory (1898), Hong Kong became one of the first parts of East Asia to undergo industrialisation. Territorial establishment Beginning of trade China was the main supplier of its native tea to the British, whose annual domestic consumption reached in 1830, an average of per head of population. From the British economic standpoint, Chinese tea was a crucial item since it provided massive wealth for the taipansforeign (especially British) businessmen in Chinawhile the duty on tea accounted for 10% of the government's income. Some of the earliest items sold to China in exchange for tea were British clocks, watches and musical boxes known as "sing-songs". These were not enough to compensate for the trade imbalance and the insistence by the Chinese that they be paid for in silver. Opium exports from India after 1830 provided the silver needed to balance the trade. Lin Zexu, a special Chinese commissioner appointed by the Qing Daoguang Emperor, wrote a letter to Queen Victoria in 1839 taking a stance against the acceptance of opium in trade. He confiscated more than 20,000 chests of opium already in Hong Kong, which had already been used years earlier as a transhipment point, and supervised their destruction. Confrontation London saw the destruction of British products as an insult and sent the first expeditionary force to the region. The First Opium War (1839–1842) began at the hands of Captain Charles Elliot of the Royal Navy and Capt. Anthony Blaxland Stransham of the Royal Marines. After a series of Chinese defeats, Hong Kong Island was occupied by the British on 20 January 1841. Sir Edward Belcher, aboard HMS Sulphur, landed in Hong Kong on 25 January 1841. Possession Street still exists to mark the event. Commodore Sir Gordon Bremer raised the Union Jack and claimed Hong Kong as a colony on 26 January 1841. He erected naval store sheds there in April 1841. The island was first used by the British as a staging post during the war, and while the East