Charles Gordon

Biography

Charles George Gordon was born on January 28, 1833, in Woolwich, London, the fourth child of a British Army general. He was commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1852 and served in the Crimean War — where he absorbed lessons in siege warfare at Sevastopol — before being assigned to China in the aftermath of the Second Opium War (1860). He arrived at a moment when the Taiping Rebellion was threatening Shanghai, and found himself drawn into a conflict that would make him famous across three continents. Gordon took command of the Ever Victorious Army in March 1863 after the death of its founder, American adventurer Frederick Townsend Ward. The EVA was approximately 4,000 strong — Chinese soldiers trained and equipped in Western style, with European and American officers — and had a record of mixed performance under its previous commanders. Gordon transformed it into an effective combined-arms force through personal leadership of extraordinary intensity. He led every significant attack in person, carrying nothing but a rattan cane — famously disdaining weapons, though he almost certainly had a pistol — and relying on his physical presence at the critical moment to steady his troops. In fourteen months of command, Gordon captured thirty-three cities and towns in Jiangsu Province, systematically destroying the Taiping defensive network around Shanghai and opening the road to Nanjing. He resigned his command briefly in a fury when Li Hongzhang had Taiping officers executed in violation of a surrender agreement Gordon had personally guaranteed — an episode that revealed the moral seriousness that made Gordon so unusual among the foreign adventurers who fought in China and so difficult to work with for the pragmatic Li Hongzhang. Gordon's subsequent career was defined by a quality he had shown in China — a combination of military genius, deep religious faith, apparent personal incorruptibility, and a restlessness that made him incapable of conventional life. He served as Governor-General of Sudan, attempted to abolish the slave trade in Egypt, and became a global celebrity celebrated in British newspapers as a Christian hero of empire. His death at Khartoum on January 26, 1885 — besieged by Mahdist forces while awaiting a British relief expedition that arrived two days too late — made him a martyr and one of the most famous figures of the Victorian age. It was the same Kitchener who later avenged Gordon at Omdurman in 1898.

Key Battles