Suppressing the Taiping rebellion would almost certainly have proved impossible had not the British army contingents in China taken the imperial side after the resolution of their own conflict with the Emperor. The armed presence of the British dated back to 1840, to the beginning of the so-called Opium war. In 1837 the Chinese government had taken measures to prevent opium trading, whereupon the East India Company, which grew opium poppies in the fields of Bengal and shipped the drug mainly to Canton, Amoy and Shanghai, felt that one of its most lucrative ventures was in jeopardy. The subsequent declaration of war began the opening-up, by force of arms, of the Chinese Empire, which for two hundred years had remained closed to foreign barbarians. In the name of Christian evangelism and free trade, which was held to be the precondition of all civilized progress, the superiority of western artillery was demonstrated, a number of cities were stormed, and a peace was extorted, the conditions of which included guarantees for British trading posts on the coast, the cession of Hong Kong, and, not least, reparation payments of truly astronomical proportions. In so far as this arrangement, which from the outset the British regarded as purely interim, made no provision for access to trading centres within China itself, the need for further military campaigns could not be ruled out in the longer term, especially in view of the existence of four hundred million Chinese to whom the cotton fabrics produced in the Lancashire mills might have been sold. It was not, however, until 1856 that an adequate pretext for a new punitive expedition presented itself, when Chinese officials in the port of Canton boarded a freighter to arrest some members of the all-Chinese crew who were suspected of piracy. In the course of this operation, the boarding party hauled down the Union Jack, which was flying from the main mast, probably because at that time the British flag was not infrequently flown as cover for illegal trafficking. But since the boarded ship was registered in Hong Kong and was flying the Union Jack rightfully, the incident, laughable in itself, provided the representatives of British interests in Canton with the occasion for a confrontation with the Chinese authorities which was presently and deliberately pushed so far that there was felt to be no alternative but to occupy the port and bombard the official residence of the prefect. At very nearly the same time, as luck would have it, the French press was running reports of the execution, on the orders of officials in Kwangsi province, of a missionary named Chapdelaine. The description of this painful procedure culminated in the claim that the executioner had cut the heart from the breast of the dead abbé, and cooked and eaten it. The cries for retaliation and punishment which promptly filled France chimed perfectly with the endeavours of the warmongers in Westminster, so that, once the necessary preparations had been made, there was witnessed the spectacle of a joint Anglo-French campaign, a rare phenomenon in the age of imperial rivalry. This enterprise, which was dogged by the greatest of logistical difficulties, entered its crucial phase in August 1860 with the landing of eighteen thousand British and French troops in the Bay of Pechili, barely a hundred and fifty miles from Peking. Supported by a Chinese auxiliary force recruited in Canton, they captured the forst of Taku that stood surrounded by deep ditches, immense earthworks and bamboo palisades amidst saltwater marshes at the mouth of the Peiho river. After the fortress garrison had unconditionally surrendered and attempts were being made to put an orderly end, by negotiation, to a campaign that had already been concluded from a military point of view, the allied delegates, despite the fact that they had the upper hand, became ever more lost in a nightmarish maze of diplomatic prevarication dictated partly by the complex requirements of protocol in the dragon empire and partly by the fear and bewilderment of the Emperor. In the end, the negotiations foundered on the mutual incomprehension of emissaries from two fundamentally different worlds, a gap which no interpreter could bridge. While the British and French side viewed the peace they would impose as the first stage in the colonization of a moribund realm untouched by the intellectual and material achievements of civilization, the Emperor's delegates, for their part, endeavoured to make clear to these strangers, who appeared to be unfamiliar with Chinese ways, the immemorial obligations toward the Son of Heaven of envoys from satellite powers bound to pay homage and tribute. In the end, there was nothing for it but to sail up the Peiho in gunboats and advance on Peking overland. Emperor Hsien-feng, who was debilitated despite his youthful years and suffered from dropsy, shirked the impending confrontation, departing on the 22nd of September for his retreat at Jehol beyond the Great Wall amidst a disorderly array of court eunuchs, mules, baggage carts, litters and palanquins. Word was conveyed to the commanders of the enemy forces that his majest the Emperor was obliged by law to go hunting in autumn. In early October the allied troops, themselves now uncertain how to proceed, happened apparently by chance on the magic garden of Yuan Ming Yuan near Peking, with its countless palaces, pavilions, covered walks, fantastic arbours, temples and towers. On the slopes of man-made mountains, between banks and spinneys, deer with fabulous antlers grazed, and the whole incomprehensible glory of Nature and of the wonders placed in it by the hand of man was reflected in dark, unruffled waters. The destruction that was wrought in these legendary landscaped gardens over the next few days, which made a mockery of military discipline or indeed of all reason, can only be understood as resulting from anger at the continued delay in achieving a resolution. yet the true reason why Yuan Ming Yuan was laid waste may well have been that this earthly paradise — which immediately annihilated any notion of the Chinese as an inferior and uncivilized race — was an irresistible provocation in the eyes of soldiers who, a world away from their homeland, knew nothing about the rule of force, privation, and the abnegation of their own desires. Although the accounts of what happened in those October days are not very reliable, the sheer fact that booty was later auctioned off in the British camp suggests that much of the removable ornaments and the jewellery left behind by the fleeing court, everything made of jade or gold, silver or silk, fell into the hands of the looters. When the summerhouses, hunting lodges and sacred places in the extensive gardens and neighbouring palace precincts, more than two hundred in number, were then burnt to the ground, it was on the orders of the commanding officers, ostensibly in reprisal for the mistreatment of the British emissaries Loch and Parkes, but in reality so that the devastation already wrought should no longer be apparent. The temples, palaces and hermitages, mostly built of cedarwood, went up in flames one after another with unbelievable speed, according to Charles George Gordon, a thirty-year-old captain in the Royal Engineers, the fire spreading through the green shrubs and woods, crackling and leaping. Apart from a few stone bridges and marble pagodas, all was destroyed. For a long time, swathes of smoke drifted over the entire area, and a great cloud of ash that obscured the sun was borne to Peking by the west wind, where after a time it settled on the heads and homes of those who, it was surmised, had been visited by the power of divine retribution. At the end of the month, with the example of Yuan Ming Yuan before them, the Emperor's officers felt obliged to sign without further ado the oft-deferred Treaty of Tientsin. The principal clauses, apart from fresh reparation demands that could scarcely be met, related to the rights of free movement and unhindered missionary activity in the interior of China and to negotiation of a customs tariff with a view to legalizing the opium trade. In return, the Western powers declared themselves willing to uphold the dynasty, which meant putting down the Taiping rebellion and crushing the secessionary movements of the Moslem population of the Shensi, Yunnan and Kansu valley regions, in the course of which between six and ten million people were made homeless or killed. Charles George Gordon, by nature shy and Christian-spirited, though also an irascible and profoundly melancholy man, who was later to die a famous death in the siege of Khartoum, took over the command of the demoralized imperial army and within a short period transformed into so powerful a fighting force that when he left the country he was invested with the Chinese Empire's highest decoration in recognition of his services, the yellow jacket.