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The Chinese Government gave Gordon the highest rank in its military hierarchy, and invested him with the yellow jacket and the peacock's feather. He rejected an enormous offer of money; but he could not refuse a great gold medal, specially struck in his honour by order of the Emperor. At the end of the year he returned to England, where the conqueror of the Taipings was made

At last it was determined to ask the General at the head of the British Army of Occupation for the loan of an officer to command the force. The English, who had been at first inclined to favour the Taipings, on religious grounds, were now convinced, on practical grounds, of the necessity of suppressing them.

Thousands of years of civil wars and countless endless sieges have placed them in the dilemma of to-day more often than it is possible to say. Only fifty years ago the Taipings made whole provinces suffer the way Peking has now suffered.... Such things must live in the blood of a people and never be quite forgotten....

Though it was now being rapidly ruined by the depredations of the Taipings, its strategic strength was obviously enormous.

Historically, 1911 was the lineal descendant of 1900, which again was the offspring of the economic collapse advertised by the great foreign loans of the Japanese war, loans made necessary because the Taipings had disclosed the complete disappearance of the only raison d'etre of Peking sovereignty, i.e. the old-time military power.

Beneath her windows were carried every day the dead bodies of the poor creatures massacred by the Taïpings, and she followed with reluctant gaze these sad "waifs and strays" as the river conveyed them seawards. Though her health was not good, she hastened, on the conclusion of peace, to follow her husband to Pekin.

Yet, indifferent as they were to the co-operation of foreigners, the Taipings proclaimed themselves Christians, and appeared to aim their blows no less at lifeless idols than at living enemies. Shangti, the Supreme Ruler, the God of the ancient sages, was the object of their worship. They found his name in the Christian Bibles, and they published the Bible as the source of their new faith.

In April, 1853, the news reached us that Nanking had fallen into the hands of a body of rebels who, by a curious irony, called themselves Taipings, "Soldiers of Peace." They were Chinese, not Manchus, and their leaders were all from the extreme south. Starting near Canton, they had proclaimed as their object the expulsion of the Tartars.

But his military instinct showed him a far more important step to take. About twenty miles inland and fifty miles from Gordon's headquarters was a city called Chanzu, which was the only one in that neighbourhood loyal to the Imperial cause. It had been held by the Taipings, but the chief had persuaded his men to abandon the cause of the rebels and throw in their lot with the Emperor.

The native authorities were permitted to engage foreign ships and seamen to operate against the rebels, who sustained a siege in Nanking almost as long as the siege of Troy. From Shanghai, Suchau, and other cities the Taipings were driven out by the aid of foreigners, chiefly led by Ward and Gordon, the former an American, the latter a Briton.