Shortly afterward the French joined forces with the English. Canton and Tientsin were captured, and the Chinese government was forced to agree to add more trading ports to the five provided by the 1842 Nanking Treaty. The ensuing short-term armistice was broken by sporadic Chinese attacks on British supply lines and a general resumption of hostilities, ending in the occupation of the Chinese capital at Peking. The Kowloon Peninsula, jutting from the Chinese mainland to a point one mile north of Hong Kong Island, became involved in the war when its residents rioted against British troops encamped there. The British had considered the annexation of Kowloon for several years, realizing that if the Chinese decided to fortify it their guns would command Hong Kong harbor. Treating the riot as a compelling reason for taking possession, the British obtained an outright cession of the peninsula and Stonecutters Island, a little body of land about one mile west of Kowloon, under the terms of the 1860 Convention of Peking. Bowring, meanwhile, had created a public Botanic Garden—still a beautiful hillside haven at the heart of the colony—laid down new roads and erected a number of public buildings. But his daily relations with other colony officials had degenerated into a battle-royal of insults and counter-accusations. The home government, appalled at Bowring’s un-British disregard for good form, rushed in a new minister to direct negotiations with China and replaced Bowring as governor with Sir Hercules Robinson, an unusually able colonial administrator. Bowring left the colony with his reputation at low ebb, snubbed by its English residents. The Chinese of Hong Kong, inured to snobbery but grateful for Bowring’s attempts to help them, saw him off with parting gifts. Sir Hercules began his administration with a piece of good fortune; practically all the contentious subordinates who had made Bowring’s tenure a long nightmare resigned or retired. The colony’s military leaders kept the pot simmering by demanding most of Kowloon for their own use, although Robinson wanted to preserve it for public buildings and recreational grounds. In England, where the brimstone smell of the Bowring affair lingered for many months, the London _Times_ was moved to describe the China outpost as a “noisy, bustling, quarrelsome, discontented and insalubrious little island” whose name was “always connected with some fatal pestilence, some doubtful war, or some discreditable internal squabble.” Robinson’s skirmish with the military attracted no more attention than a stray pistol-shot after a thundering cannonade.