Charlie George Gordon

Gordon was born in Woolwich, London, and served as a member of the H. W. Fourth son of General Gordon. He was educated at Taunton School and later entered the Royal Military Academy in 1848. In 1852, he was appointed second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, and he continued his training at the Royal Engineers School in Chatham, where he was promoted to lieutenant in 1854.

He was initially assigned to build defenses at Milford Haven in Wales. But due to the outbreak of the Crimean War, he was assigned to Balaklava (now Ukraine) in January 1855. He participated in the attack on Sevastopol from June 18 to September 8. He also participated in the expedition to Kinburn and returned to Sevastopol after the conflict ended. Gordon accompanied an international peace committee to delineate the new border between tsarist Russia and Turkey in Bessarabia. He continued his investigative work in Asia Minor and returned to England at the end of 1858; he was appointed as a teacher at the School of Engineers and was promoted to captain in 1859.

Gordon's time in Britain was short. In 1860, when the Second Opium War broke out, he volunteered to go to China and arrived in Tianjin in September. He missed the attack on Dagu Fort, but did catch up with the occupation of Beijing and the Summer Palace. He stayed in northern China until April 1862, until the Taiping Rebellion began threatening Europeans in Shanghai.

The Taiping Rebellion won a series of victories in Guangxi, Hunan, and Hubei provinces starting in 1850, and occupied Nanjing in 1853; later, the offensive began to slow and the Taiping Rebellion basically stopped expanding, but they were close enough to Shanghai to threaten European immigrants there. Shanghai has formed a volunteer team of Europeans and China to defend the city. The army was commanded by an American, Frederick Townsend Ward. Sporadic fighting continued in the western suburbs of Shanghai, and Ward's army was slowly withdrawing.

The British arrived at this time, and British General William Staveley decided to work with Wall and another small French army to drive out the Taiping rebels within 30 miles of Shanghai. Jiading and Qingpu were originally occupied by the Taiping Army, but at the end of 1862, these areas were basically recaptured by the Volunteers.

Wall was killed in the attack on Cixi, and his successor was not liked by the China emperor. Li Hongzhang, then governor of Jiangsu Province, asked Stevili to appoint another British officer to command the foreign rifle team. Steveli chose Gordon, who was already a major by this time. In March 1863, Gordon took over command in Songjiang. He strictly trained the troops with a small rattan in his hand and repeatedly attacked fiercely. He was given the title of Everlasting Victory Army, a title used to encourage but exaggerated. Gordon reorganized the army and supported Changshu. The rescue was a success and Gordon quickly gained the respect of the soldiers.

In November, Suzhou was captured by Gordon and China troops. In May 1864, the Taiping Army fell in Changzhou, the last fortress on the outskirts of Tianjing (present-day Nanjing), and the reputation of the Ever-victorious Army also reached its peak. However, he had a big argument with Li Hongzhang because he opposed the surrender (see Suzhou surrender for details). After the war, China Emperor Tongzhi awarded Gordon the title of Admiral, the highest rank in the China army; in addition, the United Kingdom also promoted him to lieutenant colonel and named him Sir Bartz.

Gordon returned to England and took charge of commanding the Royal Corps of Engineers 'defensive fortress near the River Thames at Gravesend. In October 1871, Gordon represented Britain on the Danube Commission to maintain Galatz's ships at the mouth of the Danube River. In 1872, Gordon was sent to the Crimean Peninsula to inspect the local British cemetery. When he passed through Istanbul, he met the then Egyptian Prime Minister Nubar Pasha. He and Gordon discussed working under Ismail Pasha, the Ottoman Empire's governor in Egypt. In 1873, Gordon accepted the governor's invitation with the consent of the British government and arrived in Egypt in early 1874, where Gordon became a colonel in the Egyptian army.

The Egyptian government began expanding southward in the 1820s, and under the leadership of British explorer Samuel Baker, reached Khartoum on the upper Nile River in February 1870 and Gondokoro in June 1871. Baker encountered great difficulties locally, so the governor asked Gordon to take care of local affairs. After a short stay in Cairo, Gordon traveled to Khartoum via Suakin (the Sudanese seaport) and Berber (the northern Sudanese town), from where he continued along the White Nile to Gandokalo.

Gordon remained in the province of Gonzalo until October 1876. He established outposts from the Sobat River to the Ugandan front line, as well as fighting the slave trade. However, Gordon began to conflict with Egyptian officials and Sudan, which led to Gordon returning to London and informing the governor that he would not return to Sudan. The governor wrote to him, and Gordon agreed to return to Egypt, but insisted that he must become governor of all Sudan. After the governor agreed to some discussions, Gordon became governor of all Sudan.

After becoming governor, Gordon began to deal with broader issues. One of them is improving relations between Egypt and Ethiopia (Abyssinia), mainly over the controversy over the Bogos region. War broke out in 1875 and the Egyptian army was defeated, so Gordon went to Bogos to negotiate with Abyssinia. He twice condemned the unjust behavior of Emperor Johannes IV's brother, but received no reply. Soon after, another uprising broke out in Darfur. The rebels were quite large, and Gordon believed that diplomatic channels were a better solution. This time Gordon only brought one translator to the enemy camp to negotiate. The bold operation was considered a success, with some rebels joining him and others withdrawing south. In March 1878, Gordon was called to Cairo and he was appointed chairman of the committee. Egyptian Governor Ismail resigned in 1879 and passed the seat to his son.

Gordon returned to the south and traveled and inspected Harrar in southern Abyssinia. He chose a military location to build a city and planned the dredging of the Nile River and lakes. He found that the local officials were quite corrupt, so he dismissed the local officials. He then continued to crack down on the slave trade in Darfur. His subordinate Gessi Pasha successfully ended the uprising in the Bahr-el-Ghazal region. He tried again to sign a peace treaty with Abyssinia, but was unsuccessful. He returned to Cairo and resigned as governor, exhausted from years of complex work.

In 1880 Gordon visited King Leopold II of Belgium in Brussels and was invited to help take charge of the Congo Free State. In April, the colonial government of the Cape of Good Hope offered him a command position in the local army. In May, the Marquis of Ripon, who was about to go to India to serve as governor general, asked Gordon to be his personal secretary. Gordon agreed to this last request, but resigned shortly after arriving in India. After resigning, he went to Beijing, China, in July and met again with Li Hongzhang, who was then Governor of Zhili and Minister of Beiyang. Li told him of the crisis of a war between China and Russia, so Gordon used his influence to ensure that China would no longer go to war with Russian troops over the Ili Valley. Gordon returned to England, but left for Mauritius in April 1881 to command the local Royal Engineers. He remained in Mauritius until March 1882, when he was promoted to Major General. He was sent to the Cape of Good Hope to reinforce Basutoland (now Lesotho). A few months later, he returned to England. Soon after, Gordon went to Palestine, a place he had always longed to visit, and stayed there for a year studying the Bible. The King of Belgium invited him again to manage the affairs of the Congo Free State, and he accepted and returned to London to prepare. But shortly after his arrival in Britain, the British government asked him to go to Sudan immediately, where conditions became quite bad after he left, and a Mahdi uprising led by Mahommed Ahmed broke out.

Egyptian troops in Sudan were unable to withstand the uprising, and the Egyptian government was busy suppressing another uprising. After September 1882, Sudan was in a position on the verge of destruction. In December 1883, the British government ordered Egypt to abandon Sudan, but the evacuation was difficult and thousands of Egyptian soldiers, civilians and their families remained trapped in Sudan. The British government then asked Gordon to go to Khartoum to process and evacuate people.

In January 1884, Gordon arrived in Cairo, where he was again appointed governor and embarked on a road of no return to Khartoum. On February 18, he arrived in Khartoum. Gordon began to repatriate women, children and the injured back to Egypt. About 2500 women, the elderly, and the elderly, were evacuated before the Savior Army blocked the road. Gordon wanted influential local leader Zobeir to take over Sudan, but the British government refused, citing his former status as a slave.

Rebels continue to attack in Khartoum and near eastern Sudan, while Savakin's Egyptian troops continue to be defeated. A British force under General Gerald Graham was sent to Savakin and forced the rebels to withdraw. Gordon had strongly advocated that the road from Savakin to Berber should be reopened, but this request was rejected by the London government. In April, General Graham and his troops withdrew. In May, Berber's defenders surrendered and Khartoum was completely isolated.

On March 18, 1884, the siege of Khartoum began. Although the British government decided to abandon Sudan, many people in the civil society still called for sending troops to save Gordon. It was not until August that the British government decided to save Gordon, but it was not until November that the British rescue team was ready to start action.

At the end of December 1884, Garnet Joseph Wallsley's troops arrived in Korti. On January 20, 1885, they arrived at Metemma, where they discovered the gunboat Gordon had sent four months earlier to transport them up the Nile. On the 24th, the two steamboats set out for Khartoum, but when they arrived on the 28th, they found that Khartoum had fallen and Gordon had been killed for two days.

Gordon's death greatly shocked Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. She denounced Prime Minister William Eurt Gladstone for failing to save him, causing Gladstone to lose popularity and be forced to step down. It also led to the collapse of the Liberal Party government and the beginning of the long-term Conservative Party rule. On the other hand, it increased Britain's determination to annex Sudan; in 1898, British troops led by Horatio Herbert Kitchener defeated the Savior Army, and Sudan became a province of Egypt until independence in 1956.

In 1890, the Ministry of Industry Building in the British Concession in Tianjin was completed. In order to commemorate Gordon's contribution in the opening and planning of the Concession, the building was named Gordon Hall. At the inauguration ceremony, a huge photo of Gordon was hung in the center of the venue. Li Hongzhang, Governor of Zhili and Minister of Beiyang, announced the official opening of the building after praising Gordon's military command skills. After the first expansion of the British Concession in Tianjin in 1897, a newly built road was named Gordon Road (now Hubei Road). In Shanghai, where Gordon once lived, in 1900, the Shanghai Public Concession also named an important newly built road in the western district Gordon Road (now Jiangning Road). In 2010, Tianjin City rebuilt Gordon Hall on the south bank of the Haihe River.