An 1843 line engraving of British infantry attacking a Joss House,
made from a sketch drawn on the spot by Capt. Stoddart R.N.

“Is he lucky?" was the question Napoleon is reputed to have always asked before promoting an officer to the rank of general. Sir Hugh Gough, the commander-in-chief of the British army during the Opium War (1839-1842), was blessed with the luck of the Irish; otherwise he would not have survived fighting in every major battle in the Peninsular War. This general never lost a single battle and won four colonial wars. He died, at the age of 90, a field marshal and a viscount.

Born in 1779, Gough came from an Irish army family and was appointed the adjutant of Colonel Rochford’s Foot when a youth of only 15. Military historians and his contemporary generals have tended to dismiss him unfairly as a poor strategist and inept tactician, but the basic strategy of the Opium War had already been established when he took command of the British army in China. There was a Royal Navy battle fleet of some 50 warships already in situ when he arrived in China. It included a couple of immensely powerful 74-gun men-of-war, which could blow a hole in the wall of any Chinese coastal city. However, the navy's secret weapon was its gunboats. The best known of these lethal paddle steamers was the Nemesis. She was called the “Nevermiss” by the British and the “Fire Devil” by the Chinese. These gunboats could manoeuvre at eight knots in either direction and were brisling with cannon, rocket tubes and swivel guns. The Chinese had only a few slow-moving war junks that relied on wind power and so were hopelessly out-gunned. China had not possessed a national navy for centuries.

The British master plan was to capture a few coastal cities, sail up the Yangtze River to the entrance of the Grand Canal and blockade it. This would cut off the critical food supply from southern China to the capital Peking (Beijing) in the north of the country. There were no serious battles during the Opium War, just sieges and skirmishes. This was due largely to the traditional tactics of the Chinese generals who slavishly followed the favourite maxim of Sun Tzu, the great Chinese strategist: “To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill,” he wrote. Neither the procrastinating military mandarins nor Sun Tzu, though, ever seemed to realise that this tactic is not very effective against an enemy that goes straight for the jugular. Gough was a notoriously aggressive general. Attack was his only known military tactic. At the Battle of Sobraon during the First Sikh War, when told that he was short of ammunition, he was heard to mutter, “Thank God! Then I'll be at them with the bayonet.”

Gough was a ‘soldier's general’ who believed in leading his troops from the front. During the Battle of Ferozeshan (also in the First Sikh War), his infantry was being slaughtered by heavy cannon fire. He created a diversion to draw the enemy fire away from his troops by galloping across the enemy front, dressed in his famous white ‘fighting coat.’ The Sikh gunners recognised him, opened fire and missed. He won the battle. It was not a tactic that would have been recommended by Sun Tzu.

During the Opium War, Gough was fortunate to have had some very capable officers. His brigade commanders were both Peninsular War veterans. They were formidable soldiers and one of them, Lord Saltoun, had led the charge against Napoleon's old guard at the Battle of Waterloo that had put the French to flight. Gough was lucky in that the two principal generals selected by the Chinese emperor were not of the same quality. Yang Fang, the Chinese commander at Canton (Guangzhou) was not in his prime; he was so old and deaf that his subordinates could communicate with him only in writing. The other general, I-Ching, had been appointed through nepotism, because he was a relative of the emperor. The latter attempted to recapture Ningpo (Ningbo) from the British with a plan based on numerology. He launched his attack on the auspicious hour of the tiger, on the day of the tiger, in the month of the tiger, in the year of the tiger. The British found out and set a trap. They let the Chinese enter the city, and then slaughtered them in the narrow streets with disciplined musket fire through the windows of the houses. Thirty years earlier, Gough had destroyed a Napoleonic army at Tarifa using exactly the same tactics.