Jottings from the Granite Studio

Listening to NPR this evening, today’s installment of the series “China Rising” looks at the China-Africa connection through the life and career of British army officer and adventurer Charles “Chinese” Gordon (1833-1885).  Gordon took over for Frederick Townsend Ward against the Taiping in 1862 and was later killed by the forces of Mahdi Mohammed Ahmed in Khartoum in 1885.

While I’m no huge fan of Charles Gordon, who was nothing if not a relentless self-promoter with delusions of grandeur and a true product of the colonial system, he was hardly the vanguard of British narco-imperialism suggested by the report.  First of all, it was Lord Elgin, not Gordon, who burned the Yuanmingyuan palaces in the 1860 Anglo-French Expedition.  The report continues to ominously suggest that “Gordon later fought in one of history’s bloodiest rebellions in which tens of millions of Chinese died.” Yeah, but Gordon’s involvement with the Taiping Rebellion was on the side of the Qing (more or less) and the business interests of the Shanghai treaty port (a bit more than less).  Taking over for Ward, Gordon led the Ever Victorious Army, an adhoc outfit armed with European and American weapons, in a tenuous alliance with Li Hongzhang and Zeng Guofan against the Taiping.  For his efforts, the Qing Empire presented Gordon with an honorary imperial military rank and other awards.

Of course if you take the standard CCP historiography as your guide, the Taiping Rebellion represented a proto-revolution of the peasantry against the allied forces of the feudal classes and the foreign imperialists, which makes the involvement of Gordon (and Zeng and Li for that matter) somewhat less notable, but that’s a whole other kettle of doufu.

Gordon’s later career as an officer and governor in Africa opening new areas to exploration, settlement, and trade and, of course, extending British colonial influence on the continent ultimately led to his head on a pole at the age of 52.

Anyway, that NPR–whose Beijing correspondent is the son of one of the most famous Qing historians working in the United States today–could have botched 19th-century history so badly is a bit shocking.  I’m sure the Beijing bureau had nothing to do with the piece, but seriously…if the people back at NPR HQ who were responsible for this series had consulted their China correspondent, bothered to do some research, or for that matter run a quick Google search, they could have gotten their facts down a bit better than they did.