Beginning of the End

I think this article is important to help us understand how these battles were ending and how the ending of the Taiping rebellion started to come to an end. The first part that I picked out was the part about how he explains that this was the biggest win for the Imperial army against the Taiping rebels. The author does a good job at explaining to the reader that they did not lose many men and they were able to kill a lot of the Taiping rebels. In the time it was written, it sounds as if this article would have been very reassuring to the reader as they have just been told what happened in great detail, and he is explaining that they were able to win the battle with few casualties on the Imperial side. I also like how the author said this is the beginning of the end. I can imagine that when the Chinese people were reading this they could only feel relief. They can finally see an end point in sight and the readers are likely to have a lot of faith in the author and this article because of the great detail he has gone into before about the battle, so he seems trustworthy. This article allows us to see how newspapers started to explain to the audience that there is an end in sight, and they aren't far off from achieving this. Writing this in a newspaper article where thousands are going to read it means that the author must have been very confident in what he was saying which would have allowed him to reassure all of the people suffering in China during this time. This gives us a good perspective on how people were addressed during this time and how it would have felt to read this article during this uncertain time. This also shows us how impactful newspapers were in this time. News ran through these, so by this author stating that it was their best win against the Taiping's and that there is an end near, meant that this would have given the readers a lot of faith and hope that this rebellion was truly coming to an end.