Background
Charles George Gordon (1833-1885) , British general and administrator known as "Chinese" Gordon, was born in Woolwich on Jan. 28, 1833, ninth of the eleven children of General H. W. Gordon.
Charles George Gordon (1833-1885) , British general and administrator known as "Chinese" Gordon, was born in Woolwich on Jan. 28, 1833, ninth of the eleven children of General H. W. Gordon.
After distinguishing himself in the Crimean War in 1855 and 1856, Gordon volunteered in 1859 for service in the British war against China.
In 1863, as a brevet major, he was appointed commander of a small force raised to defend Shanghai against the Taiping rebels, who had wrested the central provinces of China from the Manchu emperor. When Gordon assumed command, this force--called the Ever-Victorious Army--was a mutinous rabble of Chinese officered by European adventurers. Gordon established an unchallenged personal dominance, and within 18 months his force had crushed the numerically superior rebels.Gordon returned to England in 1865. Appointed, as brevet lieutenant colonel, to command at Gravesend, he devoted his spare time to religious study and charity.
In 1873, after serving for two years as British representative on the Danubian Commission, he was invited by the khedive of Egypt to become governor of Equatoria, in the southern Sudan. There, he established a chain of stations reaching to Uganda, mapped the largest lakes, and went far toward ending the slave trade.
Gordon resigned in 1876, but in 1877 he reluctantly resumed service with the khedive as governor general of the Sudan, an area of more than a million square miles. From his capital at Khartoum, he decreed a series of far-reaching reforms, conquered and pacified the province of Darfur to the west, and suppressed the slave trade. In 1880 Gordon took the post of secretary of the viceroy of India, but he resigned within a month, unable to conform to the diplomatic niceties of the position. He then returned to China.
In 1881 and 1882 Gordon commanded British troops in Mauritius and then was engaged by the government of Cape Colony in southern Africa to reorganize its military establishment. Refusing an invitation to assume command in the Belgian Congo, he resolved to adopt a life of contemplation and left England for the Holy Land in December 1882. He remained in Palestine for nearly a year, pursuing studies in biblical topography and exegesis.
Meanwhile in the Sudan an obscure fakir had proclaimed himself the Mahdi, or Expected One, and had overrun the province of Kordofan. In 1883 William Hicks, British general known as Hicks Pasha, had been killed and his army annihilated by the Mahdi's rebel forces, and the British government found itself forced by public opinion to ask Gordon to restore the situation in the Sudan. He was dispatched single-handed, equipped only with his reputation, to subdue the Mahdi, evacuate the civilian population of Khartoum, and establish a stable government in the Sudan. The subsequent reluctance of the British government to recognize that he was in danger, its rejection of his advice and requests, and the tardiness of its attempts to relieve him were partly due to confusion in the minds of various ministers, some of whom clung to the illusion that Gordon had been sent out merely to report on the military situation. Nevertheless, Gordon managed to evacuate more than 2,500 women, children, wounded, and sick before Khartoum was sealed off by the rebels. The siege began on Mar. 13, 1884; despite pressure from public opinion and--in private--from Queen Victoria, it was not until November that a relief force was dispatched. That Khartoum sustained a siege of 317 days--one of the most remarkable feats in military history--was solely due to Gordon, who, without reliable subordinates, inspired the population of the city and its feeble Egyptian garrison. The relief force arrived two days too late. Gordon was killed on Jan. 26, 1885.