In August 1868, an angry group of Yangzhou residents burned down the home of Hudson Taylor, a British missionary who had arrived in the city with his family only two months prior and whom the local populace suspected of kidnapping children for nefarious purposes. Taylor and his family fortunately escaped the blaze, though they were roughed up a little by the crowd, but when the mighty mighty vexed Englishman went to complain to the Yangzhou prefect, the local official failed to see the urgency in the whole ‘house on fire’ situation and instead used the time to grill Taylor about where the missionary had hidden all the kidnapped children that were clearly not in the house, because as everybody could see, there were no charred little bodies in the smoking ruins of their home…so, you know, what gives?
True to form in cases like this, the British sent their man in Shanghai, Sir Walter Henry Medhurst, to obtain redress (read: “shake down”) the governor-general at Nanjing, Zeng Guofan, who–by the by–passed away on this date in 1872, but I digress…*
Anyway, Medhurst sailed up the Yangtze in a British warship piloted by a naval officer who was, unfortunately for Medhurst