Gordon, Charles George

Gordon, Charles George, (1833-1885), British general and colonial administrator, known for his brilliant defence during the siege of Khartoum, Sudan, in 1885. He was sometimes called Chinese Gordon or Gordon Pasha because of his military feats in China and Egypt.

The son of a British general, Gordon was born on January 28, 1833, in Woolwich, on the outskirts of London. He entered the Royal Engineers as a second lieutenant in 1852. Gordon served in the Crimean War and later surveyed the Turkish-Russian border. He returned to England in 1858. In 1860, during the Second Opium War, he was sent to China, where he participated in the seizure of Beijing (see Opium Wars). During the Taiping Rebellion against the Qing dynasty, the emperor asked Gordon to lead an irregular army of peasants and adventurers. With this force, known as the Ever-Victorious Army, Gordon recaptured the rebel capital, Nanking (now Nanjing), in 1864, and completely suppressed the rebellion. The emperor named him a mandarin of the first class.

From 1864 to 1874 Gordon carried out various diplomatic and military engineering missions in England and Europe. In 1874, with British government approval, he entered the service of Ismail Pasha, the khedive of Egypt. Named governor of the Sudanese province of Equatoria, Gordon mapped large areas, established trading posts as far as Uganda, and suppressed the flourishing slave trade. In 1877 the khedive appointed him governor of the entire Sudan and regions bordering on the Red Sea. He introduced badly needed administrative reforms, attempted to institute peaceful relations between Egypt and Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), established communications, and worked to exploit natural resources and further reduce the slave trade.

Gordon served the British government in India, China, Mauritius, and South Africa from 1880 to 1883. He was in England in November 1883 when rebellious forces under the Sudanese religious leader Muhammad Ahmad Abd Allah, called the Mahdi, inflicted a disastrous defeat on Anglo-Egyptian forces in the Sudan. The British prime minister William Ewart Gladstone ordered the Egyptians to abandon the Sudan, and Gordon was charged with supervising the evacuation and setting up a government. He arrived in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, in February 1884, evacuating about 2500 women and children, as well as the sick and wounded, before the Mahdi's forces surrounded the city. In March Gordon requested that the forces of Zubayr Rahama Pasha, the brilliant Sudanese military leader and slave trader whose power Gordon had previously crushed, be brought to bear against the Mahdi. The British government refused the request as too controversial. Gordon's requests for other military aid were also rejected because of Britain's vacillation about its role in the Sudan. As a result, Gordon was isolated. Despite weak fortifications, insufficient food, and an understaffed garrison, he withstood the siege for ten months. In November 1884 Gladstone finally sent an expeditionary force to relieve him; it arrived two days after Gordon's death during the fall of Khartoum on January 26, 1885.

Gordon is regarded by some historians as one of Britain's greatest military leaders, and by others as charismatic, yet quixotic and impulsive.