Treaty of Peking

On November 14, 1860, Qing Dynasty imperial commissioner Yixin and Russian envoy Nikolai Ignatyev signed the Treaty of Peking. The treaty contained 15 articles. Its main contents were as follows:

First, to confirm the Treaty of Aigun (1858); second, the originally jointly-administrated boundary territory covering some 400,000 sq. km, east to the Ussuri River, including Sakhalin Island, was to be transferred to Russia; and third, the original Chinese internal lake Zaysan and Te Muer were to be set as the Sino-Russian western border.

In this way, Russian occupied a bulk of land in the east over Lake Balkhash and also furnished a theoretical basis for the further misappropriation of the eastern and southern part of the lake. By the Second Opium War, the Russians had looted more than 1 million sq. km of Chinese territory.