Who Could Hold the River Mouth

The forts stand sixty kilometres south-east of the centre of Tianjin, on the estuary of the Hai River, and they existed for one reason: any ship bound for Beijing had to come up this water. In the early and middle nineteenth century, under the Jiaqing, Daoguang and Xianfeng emperors, the Qing government built large batteries at the Taku mouth and at the Beitang estuary to guard the sea route to the capital and to Tianjin. What survives is a fragment. The sources describe the remnant as a gun platform overlooking the river, and the fort on the southern bank as the element repaired and opened to visitors.

In May 1858 the British and French sent gunboats under Admiral Sir Michael Seymour to take the forts, and they succeeded. Between 1858 and 1860 the Taku forts fell in the Second Opium War, the allied forces advanced on Beijing, and the outcome produced the Treaty of Peking and the opening of Tianjin. The 1860 assault has one detail that survives better than the strategy: an Anglo-French force landed at Pei Tang on 1 August and stormed the forts on 21 August, and in that action Hospital Apprentice Andrew Fitzgibbon of the Indian Medical Establishment became the youngest recipient of the Victoria Cross, at fifteen years and three months.

The forts were not preserved because they were valued; they survived because something was left. After the battle most of them were dismantled when the Eight-Nation Alliance invaded during the Boxer Rebellion. The site was added to the third batch of national key protected sites in 1988, and the fort on the southern bank was repaired in 1988 and opened to the public in June 1997. It is now a national key protected cultural relic site, a Tianjin protected site and a national patriotic education demonstration base, and it holds both the Taku Forts Museum and the Taku Forts Heritage Park. The sources also count it among the ten sights of the Tianjin gate.