On October 24, 1860, the Qing envoy Yixin signed the Convention of Beijing with the British representative Lord Elgin, and the fighting that had begun in 1856 came to an end. The agreement was signed in the capital after the allied armies had entered Beijing and burned the imperial summer palace, and it added to the terms that had been forced on the Qing court at Tianjin in 1858. France signed its own convention the following day. The city was taken.
The terms opened Tianjin as a treaty port and allowed foreign ships to carry goods on the Yangtze, and it raised the indemnity to be paid, and it confirmed the cession of Kowloon opposite Hong Kong island to Britain, and it permitted foreign envoys to live in Beijing. The right of Christian missionaries to buy land and build in the interior was written in. These were imposed on a court that had no way to resist. The terms were hard.
The war and the settlement that followed changed the position of China. The treaties of the 1850s and 1860s opened more of the country to foreign trade and residence, and they reduced the control the Qing government had over its own tariffs and over the treatment of its citizens. It also lost territory in the north, where Russia took the left bank of the Amur and the land east of the Ussuri under separate agreements, and the pattern was repeated in the decades that followed. The loss was large.
The treaties signed at this time are classed among the unequal treaties, and Chinese governments sought for a century to revise or end the terms that were imposed. The Kowloon peninsula was returned to China together with the New Territories in 1997, and the events of 1860 are part of the standard teaching of modern Chinese history. The original documents are held in archives in Beijing and London.