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Updated: June 1, 2025
This picture of Gordon lighting a cigarette in the press of a doubtful battle may well be coupled with that already given during the Taeping rebellion, of his standing unarmed in the breach of an assaulted stockade, while around him pressed on or wavered the individuals of a forlorn hope.
Inside Soochow, and at Nankin, it was possible to see with clearer eyes than at Shanghai that the Taeping cause was one that could not be resuscitated. But although Burgevine soon and very clearly saw the hopelessness of the Taeping movement, he had by no means made up his mind to go over to the imperialists.
Their cowardice helped them not; of 20,000 Manchus not one hundred escaped. The tale rests on undoubted evidence. A Taeping who took part in the massacre said, "We killed them all, to the infant in arms; we left not a root to sprout from, and the bodies of the slain we cast into the Yangtse."
Gordon then began to question his own interpreter as to what he thought, and on receiving the reply that "there was something improper," he determined to proceed himself with all speed to Lar Wang's house. On his way he passed through crowds of excited Taeping soldiers, and he also met a band of Imperialists laden with plunder.
He assigned the state of his health as the cause of this change, but there was never the least doubt that the true reason of this altered view was dissatisfaction with his treatment by the Taeping leaders and a conviction of the impossibility of success.
Kwo Sungtao was accompanied by the present Sir Halliday Macartney, who had rendered such good service to China, his adopted country, during the Taeping war and afterward, and who, during the last sixteen years, has taught the Chinese government how to make itself listened to by the most powerful States of Europe.
Riding up to the hotel he found a party of some twenty or more diggers who were having a last carouse for the "benefit" of the landlord -ere they bade goodbye to Chinkie's Flat on the following evening. Among them were two men who had become possessed of the "Ever Victorious" battery, left to them by the recently deceased "Taeping," who had succumbed to alleged rum and bad whiskey.
The insurrection or the Taeping rebellion, as it is called could have been easily put down in the beginning, but ministers in China are slow to move, and it soon became a real danger to the empire.
With the taking of Soo-chow the Taeping resistance was really broken, and soon Nankin and Hangchow were the only important places left to them, though plenty of fighting was still to be done.
While Gordon was there, or only a few hours after he left, Tien Wang, the leader of the moribund Taeping cause, seeing no chance of escape, swallowed gold leaf in the approved regal fashion, and died. On the 19th July the Imperialists succeeded in running a gallery under the wall of Nanking, and in charging it with 40,000 lbs. of powder.
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