Today Is...Opium War Ends

If you remember anything from history class, you know the British Empire was a great time for us Brits to sail into a foreign land, look around and say 'Nice country you got here, we'll take it'.
Quite unreasonably some countries didn't particularity like that and tried to resist but a musket to the face soon made them a lot more compliant but it wasn't all take, sometimes we even introduced things to Johnny Foreigner such as hard drugs which is how William Jardin found himself in charge of exporting tonnes of Opium into China.  
He started out as a surgeon but trading drugs was far more lucrative so he took it up full time importing Opium in from India but when the Chinese Empire, our best customer, began to see the unfavorable side of massive, widespread heroin addiction, it made the choice of banning the drug and the Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu destroyed 20,000 cases of opium that the Brits had smuggled into China.
What the Chinese Commissioner failed to understand was that Britain was making so much money that unlike their addicted citizens, they weren't going to take that laying down.
Negotiations with the Chinese were unsuccessful so Britain got ready for war but the British Foreign Secretary at that time was the Duke of Wellington and he refused to sanction a war with China.
The Chinese Qing government made greater strides in suppressing the drug trafficking and was regularly destroying the cases of opium as they arrived so when Wellington was replaced as Foreign Minister by Lord Palmerston, he was much more happy to slap the Chinese around and told them either they accept whatever the hell we threw at them or else the might of the British Navy would land on their doorstep. Oh and by the way we want a convenient outpost to unload our hard core drugs for your hopelessly addicted populace, Hong Kong looks about right so throw in that and we got a deal.
China said WTF! and that's how a large fleet of British war ships appeared on the China coast laying waste to town after town with heavy cannon fire, until the Imperial Government, forced to surrender, gave in to British demands ending the Opium Wars.
Jardin went on to became an MP and died one of the richest and most powerful men in Britain so he was lucky to have been alive in the 19th Century when Britannia ruled the waves, a great time to be British or a Chinese Opium addict.