After the war the tide of the insurrection turned and its decline began, mainly through the aid given by the English to the government forces. Ignoring the fact that the movement was a Christian one, and might have gone far towards establishing Christianity among the Chinese, and friendly relations with foreign peoples, the English seemed mainly governed by the circumstance that opium was prohibited by the Tai-ping government at Nanking, the trade in this pernicious drug proving a far stronger interest with them than the hopeful results from the missionary movement.
Operations against the insurgents took place through the treaty ports, and British and French troops aided the imperial forces. The British cruisers treated the Tai-ping junks as pirates, because they captured Chinese vessels, and the soldiers and sailors of Great Britain took part in forty-three battles and massacres in which over four hundred thousand of the Tai-pings were killed. More than two millions of them are said to have died of starvation in the famine caused by the operations of the Chinese, British, and French allies.
General Ward, an American, led a force of natives against them, but their final overthrow was due to the famous Colonel Gordon, "Chinese Gordon," as he was subsequently known. He was not long in organizing the imperial troops, the "Ever-Victorious Army," into a powerful force, and in taking the field against the rebels. From that day their fortunes declined. City after city was taken from their garrisons, and in July, 1864, Nanking was invested with an immense army. Its fall ended the hopes of the Tai-ping dynasty. For three days the slaughter continued in its streets, while the new emperor avoided the sword of the foe by suicide. Those who escaped fled to their former homes, where many of them joined bands of banditti.
Thus came to a disastrous end, through the aid of foreign arms, the most remarkable insurrectionary movement that China has ever known. What would have been its result had the Chinese been left to themselves it is not easy to say. The indications are strong that the Manchu dynasty would have fallen and the Chinese regained their own again. And the Christian faith and worship of the rebels, with their marked friendliness to foreigners, might have worked a moral and political revolution in the Chinese empire, and lifted that ancient land into a far higher position than it occupies to-day. But the interests of the opium trade were threatened, and before this all loftier considerations had to give way.
A BRONZE-WORKER'S SHOP.
COREA AND ITS NEIGHBORS.
We have thus far followed the course of two distinct streams of history, that of Japan and that of China, flowing near each other, yet touching at very few points in their course. Near the end of the nineteenth century these two streams flowed together, and the histories of the two countries became one, in the war in which their difference in military skill was so strikingly displayed. Japan made use of the lessons which it had well learned in its forty years of intercourse with Europe. China fought in the obsolete fashion of a past age. As a result, the cumbersome mediæval giant went down before the alert modern dwarf, and the people of Eastern Asia were taught a new and astounding lesson in the art of war.
Between China and Japan lies the kingdom of Corea, separated by a river from the former, by a strait of the ocean from the latter, claimed as a vassal state by both, yet preserving its individuality as a state against the pair. It has often been invaded by China, but never conquered. It has twice been invaded by Japan, as described in preceding tales, and made tributary, but not conquered. Thus it remained until the end of the nineteenth century, when it was to become the cause of a war between the two rival empires.