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and a dedication plaque from the Imperial court. This would not have been unusual for a Chinese general killed in action, but for a foreigner it was a great but much misunderstood honour. Missionaries in particular were indignant, and it was only very fortunate that the local peasantry did not take it to its normal and logical conclusion by placing an image of Ward on the altar, otherwise the missionaries would doubtless have forced the authorities to remove it.
The oral history related in 1993 by the curator of the History Department of Sungkiang county is insignificantly at variance with the story as related by Caleb Carr in his book The Devil Soldier published in 1991, which regrettably I did not come across until it appeared in paperback in 1995, two years after my visit to Sungkiang. Carr explains that the Japanese invaders had sacked Ward's shrine and Memorial Hall and defaced his grave in 1940. And in 1955, six years after the communists came to power, his remains were dug up and the gravesite and shrine were destroyed and paved over. He added that the whereabouts of Ward's bones today are unknown, and have almost certainly been destroyed.
Carr's version is almost certainly accurate though Ward has not been forgotten in Sungkiang and local memory still has Ward's bones under the high altar of the Catholic church.
As an After Note readers might be interested in Franck's final paragraph providing his version of the end of Ward's natural successor, his second-in-command, Burgevine, who had been born in North Carolina in 1836.
"The southerner was overbearing and, there remains little doubt, dishonest and disloyal, and he was soon discharged by the financing merchants of Shanghai. He went over to the [Taiping] rebels and tried to get Gordon to join him and establish a new dynasty! But the staid Britisher seems to have had so little imagination in his make-up that he 'peached' on Burgevine instead. [The US] consul deported the Carolinian to Yokohama, but he came back to Amoy, 'got lickered up', and started to rejoin the rebels. He was captured by the Imperial Chinese