Chinese Warfare.

Cromwell Argus, Volume V, Issue 214, 16 December 1873, Page 7

Chinese Warfare.

The Times has a curiously powerful article on the fate of the Panthay kingdom, in Western China. The Sultan's capital, Talifoo, was a city strongly-fortified, and surrounded at a distance of thirty miles by another line of forts, the vacant space within being employed to grow provisions. The Chinese, with their reorganised army of 200,000 men, who are partly armed, we believe, with rifles, bought an entrance into the inner ring, ami reduced the central city by famine. The Sultan, Suleiman, after poisoning his wives, and, it is said, his children—hut this must mean female children only—offered to surrender himself, and was carried in his stately palanquin a corpse to the Chinese General's tent. The latter, however, quite unmoved, ordered the slaughter of the whole population, men, women, and children, who, to the number of 50,000, were at once put to death. Colossal crimes of this kind usually bring their own retribution, and we should not wonder if this did, their complete success tempting the ruling Chinese to a similar massacre of all the barbarian strangers in their ports. If it does, Europe will have a great task to perform—the final termination of this dynasty, followed either by the dismemberment of China, or the elevation of an Emperor with a totally different spirit.