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The Second Battle of Taku Forts, in June 1859, was an Anglo-French attack on a series of Chinese forts protecting Taku, China during the Second Opium War. A chartered American steamship arrived on scene and assisted the French and British in their attempted suppression of the Taku Forts. ==Background== Taku is a village near the mouth of the Pei-ho River, which flows between low, muddy banks and runs into the Gulf of Pe-cho-li. Thirty-four miles above the river is Tientsin, constructed at the fork of the Pei-ho with the Grand Canal. Tientsin is the port of Peking and a place of much commerce. Peking is the capital of China and is about eighty miles above Tientsin. In the year 1858, French and British forces had battled their way to Tientsin, passing the Taku Forts at the Pei-ho's mouth with little difficulty, the works were insufficiently armed and held by a weak garrison which put up little defense. When Tientsin was occupied, the Chinese sued for peace, thus the first period of the war ended and a treaty was signed there containing among other stipulations, an agreement that the envoys of British and France were to be received at Peking within a year, and that the treaty was to be ratified there. Now the Chinese, as soon as the allies withdrew from Tientsin, began to regret having consented to allow the foreign ambassadors to enter their capital and attempted to have it arranged so that the treaty would be ratified elsewhere. The United Kingdom and France insisted on the original agreement and the envoys of the two countries arrived off the mouth of the Pei-ho in June 1859 and announced their intention of proceeding up the river to Peking. A British fleet, under the command of Admiral James Hope, escorted them for protection against the Chinese fortifications. They had learned that they might be opposed, so prepared themselves. It was found that not only had the forts at the river mouth, which had easily been silenced the year before, been put into a state of repair, also, the river was blocked for stopping anything larger than rowing boats by a series of strong metal barriers. The Admiral was informed that these had been placed on the river to keep out pirates and it was promised by the Chinese government that they would be removed. Despite the promise, the local Mandarins began to start work on strengthening the defences of the river. On June 21, Admiral Hope sent the Quig commander, Hang Foo, a letter warning him that if the obstructions were not cleared out of the channel of the Pei-ho by the evening of the 24, he would remove them by force. Three days of peace passed and the Chinese failed to remove their defenses so the Anglo-French fleet began to prepare for battle. The Engineers in the fleet surveyed the defences and watched a junk lowering an iron stake into the river, the base was three spiked legs, on top of the legs was a spike with an angled spiked arm pointing forward. At high water, this spike would be a few feet below water. The spikes were positioned so that they could pierce through the hull of a ship coming up the river at high tide. 〔 Beyond the spikes could be seen a barrier of logs fixed together to form cylinders, long, a cable passed through the centre of each cylinder and they were used to float two chains, run from bank to bank, below the water level.〔 Hope had several powerful ships in his squadron, none of these could take a direct part in the coming fight though. This was due to the entrance of the Pei-ho, which was obstructed by a wide stretch of shallows, the depth of water on the bar being only two feet at low tide, and a little more than eleven at high tide. Because of this, the British could only rely on eleven steam powered gunboats for the actual fight against the Chinese forts. The Royal Navy gunboats were small wooden steamers of light draft built during the Crimean War for service in the shallow waters of the Baltic and Black Seas. Admiral Hope crossed the bar with his eleven boats and anchored below the forts on the June 23. The gunboats were; HMS ''Plover'', HMS ''Banterer'', HMS ''Forester'', HMS ''Haughty'', HMS ''Janus'', HMS ''Kestrel'', HMS ''Lee'', HMS ''Opossum'' and HMS ''Starling'' all of four guns apiece. HMS ''Nimrod'' and HMS ''Cormorant'', both of six guns, were also present. Each of the gunboats had a crew of around fifty or sixty officers and men, so that the eleven small steamers together brought forty-eight guns and 500 men into the battle. The more heavily armed steamers, outside the sand bar, were to offload another 500 or 600 men, marines and sailors via steam launches, boats and an unknown number of junks. This force was meant to be used as a landing party to attack the forts once they had been silenced. A French frigate, the ''Duhalya'', was also on the scene but was too large to engage in the battle. Her crew would participate in the final land engagement. None of the Britons expected that the ensuing battle would prove a difficult task. The Taku Forts consisted of many structures, a big Chinese fort on the south side protected the coast, with earthen ramparts stretching nearly half a mile long, and guard towers behind them. At the other end of the complex sat another large fortress on the north bank of the river, many other smaller forts sat in between the two larger forts. Though the British believed that only a small Quig garrison held the defences, this due to a previous bombardment and attack in which the British and French successfully captured the positions. After this engagement it was found that hundreds of artillery pieces protected the forts with hundreds of Qing Army troops. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Battle of Taku Forts (1859)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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