You cannot protect your Seaboard against Pirates & Buccaneers. I can - So let us understand Each other, & study to promote our mutual Interests. Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary who succeeded Wellington, decided mainly on the "suggestions" of Jardine to wage war on China. In mid-1840, a large fleet of war ships appeared on the China coast and with the first cannon fire aimed at a British ship, the "Royal Saxon", the British started the first of the Opium Wars. British warships destroyed numerous shore batteries and enemy warships, laid waste to several coastal forts, indiscriminately bombarding town after town with heavy cannon fire, even pushing up north to threaten the Imperial Palace in Beijing itself. The Imperial Government, forced to surrender, gave in to the demands of the British. Richard Hughes, in "Hongkong: A Borrowed Place, A Borrowed Time", stated "William Jardine would have made his mark as admirably as a soldier as he did as a Tai-pan." Lord Palmerston wrote, To the assistance and information which you and Mr. Jardine so handsomely afforded us it was mainly owing that we were able to give our affairs naval, military and diplomatic, in China those detailed instructions which have led to these satisfactory results. In 1843, the Treaty of Nanking was signed by official representatives of both Britain and China. It allowed the opening of five major Chinese ports, granted extraterritoriality to foreigners and their activities in China, indemnification for the opium destroyed and completed the formal acquisition of the island of Hong Kong, which had been officially taken over as a trading and military base since 26 January 1841, though it had already been used years earlier as a transhipment point. Trade with China, especially in the illegal opium, grew, and so did the firm of Jardine, Matheson & Co., which was already known as the "Princely Hong" for being the largest British trading firm in East Asia. By 1841, Jardines had 19 intercontinental clipper ships, compared to close rival Dent and Company with 13. Jardines also had hundreds of small ships, lorchas and small smuggling craft for coastal and upriver smuggling. In 1841, Jardine was elected to the House of Commons, a Whig Member of Parliament (MP) representing Ashburton in Devon. He was also a partner, along with Magniac, in the merchant banking firm of Magniac, Smith & Co., later renamed Magniac, Jardine & Co., the forerunner of the firm Matheson & Co.