
Charles George "Chinese" Gordon (28 January 1833-26 January 1885) was a British general who served as a Major-General in the British Army, as commander of the Ever Victorious Army during the Taiping Rebellion in China, and as Governor-General of the Sudan from 1880 to 1885. Gordon became a highly-decorated military adventurer, and his death at the Siege of Khartoum in 1885 provoked a public outcry which led to the Conservative Party sweeping the Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone out of power and swearing to "avenge Gordon".
Biography[]
Charles George Gordon was born in London, Middlesex, England in 1833, and he was raised in a military family; he grew up in England, Ireland, Scotland, and the Ionian Islands before being commissioned into the British Army's Royal Engineers in 1852. Gordon first served in the Crimean War, and he spent 34 consecutive days in the trenches during the Siege of Sevastopol. He was decorated by the British and French governments for his service in Crimea, and he later helped to resolve Ottoman-Russian boundary disputes in the Balkans and Caucasus. In 1860, Captain Gordon volunteered to be sent to China during the Second Opium War, but he arrived at Hong Kong too late for the fighting. While he initially viewed the Taiping spiritual leader Hong Xiuquan with sympathy, as he saw the Taipings as eccentric Christians (Gordon was himself a nondenominational evangelical), Gordon was appalled at the atrocities the Taipings committed against rural peasants and vowed to smash the cruel Taiping army. He took part in the destruction of the Summer Palace in Peking before taking command of the foreign Ever Victorious Army in 1862, succeeding the late Frederick Townsend Ward. His army was instrumental in putting down the Taiping Rebellion, regularly defeating much larger forces. He was nicknamed "Chinese Gordon" due to his newfound fame, and, in 1872, he was promoted to Colonel. In 1873, Khedive Isma'il Pasha of Egypt recruited Gordon into the Egyptian Army with the permission of the British government, and he oversaw attempts to suppress the slave trade while serving as Governor of Equatoria in the Sudan. Gordon remained in Equatoria until 1876, and he went on to build several way stations from Sudan to Uganda. In 1880, he was named Governor-General of the Sudan and granted the honorific title of Pasha, but, exhausted, he resigned and returned to Europe that same year. When the Mahdist revolt broke out in the Sudan in 1881 and the Egyptian army proved inadequate in its attempts to crush the rebellion, Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone sent Gordon to Khartoum in 1884, and he was instructed to oversee the evacuation of loyal soldiers and civilians and to depart with them. After evacuating 2,500 civilians, however, Gordon and a smaller group of soldiers and non-military men remained in Khartoum, and Gordon exchanged correspondence with Muhammad Ahmad; Ahmad declined Gordon's offer of the Sultanate of Kordofan, and Gordon, when asked to convert to Islam, merely responded, "No!" The Mahdists proceeded to besiege Khartoum for almost a year, and the British public admired Gordon for his bravery, although the government did not, and only public pressure led to the government sending a relief force to aid the maverick general; however, it arrived two days too late. On 26 January 1885, however, the Mahdists stormed Gordon's palace, and Gordon - dressed in his uniform - stood at the stop of the staircase and was impaled by a javelin to the chest. The Mahdists proceeded to take his head and leave his body to the flies. Gordon's devout faith, his skill with native peoples, his fearlessness, his hatred of glory, honors, and social rewards, and other popular qualities led to him acquiring a saintlike reputation in Britain.