Nothing was left for the allied armies to do but to punish the Chinese for their cruelty, and especially to punish the Emperor for having allowed such vile things to go on in his own great city.
The Emperor lived in a palace so gorgeous and so beautiful that it might have come out of the Arabian Nights. This palace the English general gave orders to his soldiers to pillage and to destroy. Four millions of money could not have replaced what was destroyed then. The soldiers grew reckless as they went on, and wild for plunder. Quantities of gold ornaments were burned for brass. The throne room, lined with ebony, was smashed up and burned. Carved ivory and coral screens, magnificent china, gorgeous silks, huge mirrors, and many priceless things were burned or destroyed, as a gardener burns up heaps of dead leaves and garden rubbish.
Treasures of every kind, and thousands and thousands of pounds' worth of exquisite jewels were looted by common soldiers. Often the men had no idea of the value of the things they had taken. One of them sold a string of pearls for 16s. to an officer, who sold it next day for £500. From one of the plunderers Gordon bought the Royal Throne, a gorgeous seat, supported by the Imperial Dragon's claws, and with cushions of Imperial yellow silk. You may see it if you go some day to the headquarters of the Royal Engineers at Chatham, and you will be told that it was given to his corps by General Gordon.
After the sack of the Summer Palace Gordon had a very busy time, providing quarters for the English troops, helping to distribute the money collected for the Chinese who had suffered from the war, and doing surveying and exploring work. On horseback he and a comrade explored many places which no European had visited before, and many were their adventures.
But it was in work greater than this that "Chinese Gordon" was to win his title. While Gordon was a little boy of ten, a Chinese village schoolmaster, Hung-Tsue-Schuen, who came of a low half-gipsy race, had told the people of China that God had spoken to him, and told him that he was to overthrow the Emperor and all those who governed China, and to become the ruler and protector of the Chinese people.
Soon he had many followers, who not only obeyed him as their king, but who prayed to him as their god. He called himself a "Wang," or king, and his followers called him their "Heavenly King." He made rulers of some thousands of his followers—most of them his own relations—and they also were named Wangs, or kings. They also had their own special names, "The Yellow Tiger," "The One-Eyed Dog," and "Cock-Eye" were amongst these. Twenty thousand of his own clansmen, many of them simple country people, who believed all that he told them, joined him. There also joined him fierce pirates from the coast, robbers from the hills, murderous members of secret societies, and almost every man in China who had, or fancied he had, some wrong to be put right.
His army rapidly grew into hundreds of thousands.
When this host of savage-looking men, with their long lank hair, their gaudy clothes and many-coloured banners, their cutlasses and long knives, marched through the land, plundering, burning, and murdering, the hard-working, harmless little Chinamen, with their smooth faces and neat pigtails, fled before them in terror.
The Tae-Pings, as they came to be called, robbed them, slew them, burned their houses and their rice fields, and took their little children away from them. They flayed people alive; they pounded them to death. Ruin and death were left behind them as they marched on. Those who escaped were left to starvation. In some places so terrible was the hunger of the poor people that they became cannibals, for lack of any other food.
In one city which they destroyed, out of 20,000 people not 100 escaped.