Battle of Ty-ho Bay

The Battle of Ty-ho Bay was a significant naval engagement in 1855 involving the British Royal Navy, the United States Navy and Chinese pirates. The action off Tai O, Hong Kong was to rescue captured merchant vessels, held by a fleet of armed war-junks. British and American forces defeated the pirates in one of the last major battles between Chinese pirate fleets and western navies. It was also one of the first joint operations undertaken by British and American forces. Unlike the Atlantic Ocean where piracy was largely over by 1830, piracy in Asia and elsewhere in the Pacific continued to thrive as it had for centuries. Chinese and Japanese pirates constantly fought each other along China's coastal regions, thus hundreds of pirate...