After stopping in Shanghai, Gordon visited the Chinese countryside and was appalled at the atrocities committed by the Taipings against the local peasants, writing to his family he would love to smash this "cruel" army with its "desolating presence" that killed without mercy. He arrived at Tianjin in September 1860. He was present during the capture of Peking and at the destruction of the Summer Palace. Gordon agreed with Lord Elgin that after the Chinese authorities had murdered a group of British and French officers travelling under a white flag to parley that a reprisal was in order, but called the burning of the Summer Palace "vandal-like" and informed his sister in a letter "it made one's heart sore" to burn it. The Anglo-French force remained in northern China until April 1862, then under General Charles William Dunbar Staveley, withdrew to Shanghai to protect the European settlement from the rebel Taiping army.