The mid-nineteenth century was a difficult period in China, especially in the southern provinces then referred to as Canton. The British East India Company and the Royal Navy had defeated China in the First Opium War (1839–42) and had demanded access to the island archipelago called Hong Kong from which to distribute opium safely. In partial response to British economic penetration, the Taiping Rebellion began, history’s deadliest civil war, in which at least twenty million Chinese died of war, famine, and disease. Chinese peasants even experienced a series of droughts punctuated with floods. So when news of the discovery of gold in California arrived in 1848, an unusually high number of Cantonese were willing to abandon their families and the land of their ancestors to cross the Pacific and try their hand at getting wealthy.