This is something I am extremely curious about. During the uprising, Prince Mianning used his musket (which was forbidden in China at the time) to defeat the rebels. How did he get this musket? I've read that it was supposedly a gift from Napoleon, but there is no citation for this anywhere. So, where and how did Prince Mianning get his musket?
There's a bit of confusion here – muskets were not forbidden from China. Rather, firearms were not to be operated within the Forbidden City.^1 Hence, Mianning's musket could conceivably have come from anywhere. Given that emperors possessed substantial arsenals of hunting weapons (Kangxi, for example, wrote about using fowling pieces and muskets as well as bows for hunting on the steppes)^2 said musket was likely of local manufacture and quite possibly had been kept in the Forbidden City for several years, if not decades.
Is it possible that it was a gift from Napoleon? Yes, but so unlikely that it can be dismissed. Napoleon never sent an embassy to China (his posturing in 1817 about what he would have done if he had suggests that he would have if he could), and in any case the British naval presence in Southeast Asia would have precluded any French embassy attempt, meaning that it was almost certain that there were no formal French gifts to the emperor.^3
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