Charles George Gordon arrived in China in the summer of 1860 as a Captain in the British Army. In 1859, in retaliation for the arrest, imprisonment and torture to death of four British diplomats sent to Beijing to collect an Imperial War indemnity, the Joint British-French Alliance declared war with China which gave the newly-arrived Gordon an immediate role in one of the most controversial political acts of the 19th Century: the reprisal looting and sacking of the Emperor's Summer Palace, eight miles to the north-east of the Forbidden City in Beijing.

In April 1862 Gordon was instructed to suppress the army of the "Tai Ping Tien Ku" (Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace), a Christian rebel militia which the Imperial Army had proved unable to subdue without Western intervention. On 24 March 1863, Gordon was appointed mandarin and lieutenant-colonel in the Chinese army and was charged to clear the rebels from the district of Kiangxu. When the rebels finally surrendered, he was awarded by the Emperor the yellow jacket and peacock's feather of a mandarin of the first class, and the highest military title Ti-tu. Gordon left China in 1864 as the Commander-in-Chief of the Emperor's Ever Victorious Army with the rank of Field Marshal, but still as a British Lieutenant-Colonel