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Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 11

The Heavenly Capital

In two years the Taiping march from the hills of Guangxi down the Yangtze and take Nanjing, the old southern capital, and Hong Xiuquan makes it his Heavenly Capital. The episode follows Hong and Yang Xiuqing from the proclamation calling the Chinese to rise against the Manchus to the capture of Nanjing, the first British visit to the rebels, and the march north to take Beijing, while in Hong Kong Hong's cousin Hong Rengan tells a missionary the story of the Heavenly King. It is told mostly through foreign observers, with the Taiping heard in a handful of their own proclamations.

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Transcript

Yang Xiuqing
Yang Xiuqing. Perinbaba, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, we met Hong Xiuquan, a failed examination candidate from a village about thirty miles from Canton, who read a Christian tract and found in it the key to the visions he had seen six years before. The old man in black with the golden beard who had commanded him in his dream was God, he decided, and the elder brother who had helped him slay demons was Jesus Christ. That made Hong Xiuquan, in his own understanding, the younger brother of Jesus, sent down to rid China of its demons. His neighbour Feng Yunshan carried the new faith into the hills of Guangxi, and by 1847 there were about two thousand followers, most of them Hakka. The Hakka were the guest people of the south, descendants of migrants from the north who lived among the older settlers but apart from them, and fought them often over land and water. When a pestilence swept the region in 1850, and word spread that the sick could be healed by praying to Hong Xiuquan's God, the numbers exploded. On 11 January 1851, Hong Xiuquan declared the founding of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, with himself as the new emperor, the Heavenly King of China. Taiping means great peace. The name promised a kingdom of heaven on earth. Later that year his followers took a small walled town called Yongan, and were soon besieged there by the emperor's troops. Hong now named his kings, and put every one of them under the superintendence of one man, the Eastern King. The Eastern King was Yang Xiuqing, a charcoal burner from the hills who fell into trances and spoke with the voice of God the Father. When God spoke through Yang, even the Heavenly King had to listen. Alongside the sources we have leaned on all season, this episode also draws on the reports of Thomas Taylor Meadows, a British interpreter in China whom we will meet along the way. And this is the episode where the Taiping stop being a rumour from the hills and become a power. When it opens they are a hunted army in the far south. By the time it closes, they will be reaching for the emperor himself. So let's begin with what they were fighting for. Or at least, with what they told everyone else they were fighting for. In the spring of 1852 the Taiping broke out of Yongan and marched north toward the Yangtze, and as they marched they put out proclamations in the names of their kings. The earliest and most important of them went out under the name of the Eastern King, Yang, and it is not a sermon. It is a call to arms. First, a word on who it was aimed at. The Qing dynasty that ruled China was not Chinese. Its emperors were Manchu, from a people beyond the Great Wall to the northeast, who had conquered China in 1644. The Manchu were a small people ruling a vast one. They kept their own hereditary soldiers, the bannermen, in walled garrisons inside the great cities, and they made every Chinese man shave the front of his head and wear the rest of his hair in a long braid, the queue, as a sign of submission. After two centuries most people simply lived with it. The proclamation set out to make them stop. It began by asking whether the Chinese could still call themselves men, when under Manchu rule the flame of oppression, as it put it, "has risen up to heaven". And then came the line that set out the whole idea in a sentence: "China is the head, Tartary is the feet", and "China is the land of spirits, Tartary the land of demons." Tartary was the old name for the lands beyond the Wall, where the Manchu came from. Why was China the land of spirits? Because the great God, the Heavenly Father, made heaven and earth, and the Chinese had honoured him from of old. And why were the Manchu rulers demons? Because they worshipped the devilish serpent, the king of Hades. But the feet, the proclamation said, had taken the place of the head, and demons had usurped the land of spirits. Notice what has happened there. The demons Hong Xiuquan had been sent down to slay in his visions now have a face, and a government. Then the charges. If all the bamboos of the southern hills were made into pens, it said, they would not be enough to write down the crimes of the Manchu rulers, and all the waves of the Eastern sea could not wash them away. The Manchu conquerors had made the Chinese "wear a long tail behind", the queue, giving them "the appearance of brute animals". They had put Chinese men in Manchu caps and Manchu clothes, so that they forgot their origins, and twisted the Chinese language with the slang of the capital. When drought and flood came, the government looked on without compassion while the people scattered or starved. And it had let corrupt magistrates spread over China, "flaying the skin and devouring the fat of our people". "Offices are to be obtained by bribes, crimes are to be bought off with money," it said, while rich men took all authority and heroes died in despair. A proclamation like this was not only for the converts. It was for the miners and boatmen, the jobless and the hungry, and above all for the secret societies of the south, whose oath was to overthrow the Qing and restore the Ming, the last Chinese dynasty. And it had a simple claim at its heart. The empire, it declared, "belongs to the Chinese, and not to the Tartars", and so did its food and its people. It even did the arithmetic. The Manchu, it said, were at most a hundred thousand, and the Chinese more than fifty million. The real number of Chinese was several hundred million, which only made the point stronger. So why, it asked, did the many serve the few? Let every Chinese man join the Taiping, and with united strength sweep the Manchu away. This is where the Taiping become hard to pin down, and it is worth saying so plainly at the start. They began as a religious movement, the God Worshippers, with a prophet and a scripture. They drew in the poor and promised them a just order. And now they were calling on the Chinese to rise against a foreign dynasty. Were they a church, a peasant revolution, or a rising of Han Chinese against Manchu rule? The honest answer is that they were all three at once, and different people joined for different reasons. Hold on to that question. It is the one the foreigners will be trying to answer at the end of this episode, from the deck of a British steamer.

But before we march with the Taiping, we need to go back to the coast, to Hong Kong, and to a man who missed the rising altogether. Hong Kong had been British for about a decade by then, since the war that ended in the Treaty of Nanjing, and it was full of traders, missionaries and refugees from the mainland. Hong Rengan was Hong Xiuquan's cousin, and he had been one of his very first converts, along with Feng Yunshan, back when the faith was a few men in a village. When the God Worshippers gathered in Guangxi, he set out to join them and arrived too late. The army had already gone. And being a relative of the rebel king, back home, was now a dangerous thing to be. One day in the late spring of 1852, one of the converts of a missionary in Hong Kong brought a guest to meet him. The missionary was Theodore Hamberg, a Swede, who worked among the Hakka and preached in their own dialect. The guest was Hong Rengan, and the story he told was hard to believe. He had been kidnapped, he said, and had escaped, and had hidden for four days in a forest and six in a cave before he made his way to the coast. He spoke of visions and battles, of armies and congregations of believers, and of a heavenly prophet from among the Hakka. Hamberg listened, and confessed afterwards that he was lost: "I could form no clear conception of the whole matter." Put yourself in his chair. A refugee walks in from the countryside and tells you that the rebellion everyone in Hong Kong is hearing rumours about is led by his cousin, who believes he has been to heaven and met God. So the missionary did the sensible thing. He asked Hong Rengan to write it all down, and Hong Rengan did. Then he left, without being baptized. Hamberg turned those pages into a short book about the Heavenly King's visions, published in Hong Kong, and for years it was what the outside world knew of who the Taiping were and where they came from. Remember the young man who wrote them. He left that house a refugee with nowhere in particular to go, but he will not stay out of this story. In fact, of everyone in this episode, he is the one to watch. A believer who was there at the very beginning, who missed the rising, and who has now seen how the foreigners live and think. For the moment, though, his cousin was a long way inland, and the Heavenly King was about to find out what happened when his army met a real city wall.

Hong Xiuquan
Hong Xiuquan. Ford & West Lith., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

By the summer of 1852 the Taiping had left Guangxi behind and crossed into Hunan, the province to the north. They had already paid for it. Feng Yunshan, the man who had built the God Worshippers in the hills, the Southern King, was killed by Qing fire on the march that June. And the Western King, who like Yang spoke in trances, though with the voice of Jesus, was mortally wounded in front of the walls of the next great city on their road. That city was Changsha, the capital of Hunan. Early in September they arrived before it, dug themselves in, and began a regular siege that would last more than two months. Picture it. A rebel army that not long before had been a few congregations in the hills, now digging in under the walls of a provincial capital. On the way north through Hunan they had picked up recruits of a kind they would put to good use, miners from the hills of the south of the province, men who knew how to dig. Turned into sappers, the miners tunnelled under city walls, packed the tunnels with gunpowder, and blew the walls open. Again and again at Changsha the mines went off and opened breaches, and again and again the defenders threw the attackers back and filled the gaps. And it was there, outside Changsha, that Hong Xiuquan took on the trappings of an emperor: by one account, he first took up an imperial seal and had himself styled Myriad Years. Myriad Years, ten thousand years, was the acclamation reserved for the emperor in Beijing. To be called it was to claim the throne. Remember that this was a man who had once told his soldiers to call him only their lord, and never supreme or holy, because those words belonged to God alone. The kingdom was still new, but its king was learning to sound like an emperor. The siege did not go well. Changsha's walls were high and thick, and fresh Qing troops kept arriving to defend them. On 29 November the last assault on Changsha was thrown back with heavy losses to the besiegers. The next day they lifted the siege. It was their first great failure, and it might have been the end of them. Instead they turned away from the city altogether and headed north, toward the great lake of Dongting and the Yangtze River beyond it. A word on that river, because the rest of this season happens on it or near it. The Yangtze is the longest river in China. It runs from the mountains of the far west to the sea at Shanghai and cuts the country in two, and along its middle and lower reaches stand some of the richest cities in the empire. Whoever held the river held the boats, the rice and the salt that moved on it. And the Taiping were about to find out how much of it they could hold.

At Yiyang they captured several thousand boats, sailed them on to Yueyang, and on the thirteenth of December entered the town, which its defenders had abandoned. For the first time the Taiping had a fleet. An army of hill people was about to become an army of the river. At the Yangtze stood Wuchang, the capital of Hubei province. It faced two other cities across the water, Hanyang and the great trading town of Hankou, where the Han River joins the Yangtze. Together the three were one of the busiest crossroads in China. Wuchang was blockaded, and on 12 January 1853 it was taken by assault. It was the first provincial capital the Taiping had taken, and the treasury came with it. In the government treasuries they found silver to the amount of seven hundred thousand taels. A tael was the Chinese ounce of silver, a little more than an English ounce, and the unit in which the empire counted its money. With the city, the Taiping now controlled the middle reaches of the Yangtze River. Ask yourself where the emperor's army was in all this. There were roughly a hundred and thirty thousand banner troops based in the region around Beijing, and none at all in Guangxi, where the rising began. The provincial troops of the regular army, the Green Standard, were spread thin across the country in small posts, badly paid, and often more used to policing than fighting. Against an army that believed God was marching with it, they kept giving way. And the Taiping kept growing as they went. Every city they took gave them boats, and every county they passed through gave them recruits, boatmen and miners and the poor. They did not stay in Wuchang. In February they put everything on the river and set off downstream, east toward the sea. They took the river port of Jiujiang, and then Anqing, the capital of Anhui province, in a matter of weeks, and hardly a Qing army stood in their way. Remember Anqing. Years from now, the whole war will turn on it. By the time they reached their next target, half a million rebels were flooding down the Yangtze in the ships they had commandeered along the way. Picture that, if you can. Not an army on the march so much as a whole people on the move, riding the river toward the sea. And waiting at the end of the current was Nanjing.

Nanjing means the southern capital. It had been the capital of the Ming, the last Chinese dynasty, when its founder drove out the Mongols in the fourteenth century, and its walls were among the longest in the world. In the Taiping proclamation's terms, it was the perfect prize. The old capital of the Chinese, taken back from the demons. And like every great city of the empire, Nanjing had its Manchu garrison, walled off inside the city, with the bannermen and their wives and children living together in their own quarter. The siege was short. One Taiping division sprang a mine under the north-east angle of the wall, while another blew down one of the city gates. On 19 March 1853, after a siege of only eleven days, Nanjing, the ancient capital of China, fell into the hands of the Taiping. Then came the part of this story that has to be told plainly. About twenty thousand Manchu lived inside the garrison, the soldiers and their families. The men did not take up their weapons. They threw themselves to the ground and begged for pity. The rebels killed them like animals, and then their wives, and their daughters, and their sons. Of a garrison of five thousand men, twenty thousand people with the women and children, barely a hundred survived. The governor general who had come to defend the city died in its fall. One of the Taiping summed it up afterwards in words that are hard to read. "We killed them all, the devils, to the infant in arms", the words ran, and "we left not a root to sprout from." The devils. That is the proclamation we heard at the top of this episode, carried through to its end. If the Manchu were demons and not people, then there was nothing to stop a soldier of God from killing their children. I want to sit with this for a moment, because a story like the Taiping's is easy to tell as a romance, a band of believers against a corrupt empire. The Manchu bannermen of the Nanjing garrison were not the emperor's ministers or his generals. Most were ordinary soldiers and their households, who had lived in that city for generations. The Taiping were not the only side in this war that killed families, and before this season is over we will see the Qing do the same, and worse. But this was where the Heavenly Kingdom took its capital, and this was how.

Two days after the capture of Nanjing, the Heavenly King announced by proclamation that he had established his court and seat of government there. He renamed it the Heavenly Capital. The demons' southern capital became the capital of God's kingdom on earth. He took over the offices of the old governor general, the Qing viceroy of the region, and set about rebuilding them as a palace. And then, from the day he entered Nanjing, Hong Xiuquan more or less disappeared. He secluded himself from sight and became, to his own people, an unseen incarnation of the deity. He would spend most of the next eleven years inside his palace walls, with his scriptures and his women attendants, while other men ran his kingdom. Yang, the Eastern King, was appointed Prime Minister. And Yang held a power no Qing minister ever had. When he fell into his trances and God the Father spoke through him, his words outranked the Heavenly King's own. Think about that arrangement for a moment. A king who could not be seen, and a minister who could speak with the voice of God. Hold on to it, because it is not going to last. Yang built a government that looked a great deal like the one it meant to replace. Six boards were formed, like the six boards of Beijing, with one more added for foreign affairs. The six boards were the great ministries of the Qing state, for officials, revenue, rites, war, punishments and public works. So the Heavenly Kingdom's answer to the Qing government was, in its bones, a copy of the Qing government. They even held their own examinations, like the Qing ones, except that the candidates were tested on the Taiping scriptures instead of the Confucian classics. So the man who had failed the examinations again and again was now the man who set them. But the Taiping also meant to remake the world, and not only its government. Inside the city, private property was abolished, at least on paper. Money and valuables went into a sacred treasury, and the kingdom fed and supplied its people from common stores. Later in 1853 the Taiping court published a plan for the whole country called the Heavenly Land System. All land would belong to God, shared out among families by their size, and every twenty five families would keep a common granary and a church. It was never carried out in any real way. But if you are looking for the peasant revolution inside the Taiping, that plan is where you will find it. What life inside the Heavenly Capital was like, the outside world first heard from people who had fled it. The interpreter I mentioned at the top of the episode was posted at the British consulate in Shanghai, the treaty port nearest the war. He questioned fugitives from Nanjing and the cities near it, and reported what he learned to his superiors. What struck him most was that the rebels had a sacred book, which their chiefs and older soldiers read and repeated diligently, and urged on every newcomer. From the highest to the lowest, he wrote, "they eat in parties of eight", and before they sit down to eat they all kneel, and the man at the head of the table recites a long passage from the book. Every fugitive agreed on it, and the insurgents said the book had been sent down from Heaven. The second thing every fugitive agreed on was the discipline. In the cities they took by storm, rape and adultery were punished by death. The fugitives were no friends of the rebels, the interpreter wrote. But when he asked about rape, they all scouted the idea as an outrageous slander, and spoke instead in "terms of wonder, if not of respect, of their chastity". Opium smoking was punished by beheading, and even smoking tobacco earned a beating with the bamboo. That last rule went back to the hills of Guangxi, where Hong Xiuquan had banned opium, tobacco and strong drink among the God Worshippers. And then there was the strangest rule of all. Men and women were separated. The women of Nanjing, young and old, were shut up in separate buildings, divided into squads of twenty five with the senior woman as overseer, and given regular rations. "They are employed in preparing ammunition." "No male, not even as father or husband, is allowed to enter the buildings thus appropriated." Whoever did was put to death. The women were told by their leaders that the separation from their husbands was only for now, and that once affairs were settled all would be reunited. Children were taken into care too. The ragged were clothed at once, and the boys were put in barracks under special officers, who taught them the sacred book and the use of arms. Think about what that meant for a family in Nanjing that spring. Husband in one quarter, wife in another, son in a barracks learning scripture and arms, and all of it, they were told, only until the war was won. While the Heavenly King, who made these rules, lived behind his palace walls with his wives. The interpreter's own verdict came in a phrase. Here, he wrote, were striking signs of a movement "puritanic and religious, if not fanatical", and patriotic and political as well. He guessed the new faith would turn out to be the old Confucian ethics with the two things it lacked, a God and an immortal life, borrowed from the Christian missionaries. There was one more choice the Heavenly King made at Nanjing, and it may have been the biggest. He stopped. Instead of driving on while the dynasty was reeling, he settled down to hold and defend his new capital, and that may have been the error that lost him the empire.

The Qing did not let him sit there in peace. Just ten days after Nanjing fell, an imperial army dug in outside it, the southern camp, and stayed there almost without a break. A second great camp rose north of the river, near Yangzhou, to keep the Taiping from spreading north. Its first commander was an old acquaintance from earlier in this season, Qishan, the official who had been disgraced for his bargain with the British at Canton, now forgiven and sent back to war. The Taiping did not sit entirely still. Within two weeks of taking Nanjing they had also taken Zhenjiang, where the Grand Canal crosses the Yangtze, and Yangzhou, the rich salt city on the far bank. That put the Heavenly Kingdom astride the empire's great artery, the canal that carried southern rice north to the capital. Between them the two camps were meant to strangle the Heavenly Capital, and for years they tried. The containing trench around Nanjing was extended until, by 1859, it stretched forty five miles, with more than a hundred guard camps along its length. For six years the two sides sat in stalemate. The man who held that line together for much of it was a soldier with an unusual past. Zhang Guoliang had been a bandit chief, whose ten thousand strong army ravaged his province before he went over to the emperor. His bandits had marched under the mottos "take from the rich to save the poor" and "kill the officials but spare the people", which is not so far from what the Taiping were saying. It was a common enough road in those years. A bandit with an army could be a rebel or, with a pardon and a rank, an imperial officer, and the Qing took the ones it could buy. Now he was one of the emperor's best fighting generals, digging trenches around the men he might once have joined. The commander of the southern camp was Xiang Rong, a veteran general who had chased the Taiping all the way from Guangxi and never quite caught them. Zhang served under him, and was the man he sent wherever the fighting was hardest. For all that, the blockade of Nanjing was neither close nor effectual, despite the strength of the armies around it. The Yangtze ran right past the walls, and the Taiping still held towns up and down the river, so boats, food and fighters kept getting through. So the Heavenly Capital became a city under siege that was never quite besieged. Neither side could take the other, and the war spread out into the provinces around them. Hold on to those camps. They will be broken and rebuilt more than once before this war is done, and what happens to them will decide a great deal.

George Bonham
George Bonham. The original uploader was Clithering at Chinese Wikipedia ., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The war had now come within reach of Shanghai, where British and other foreign merchants had been settling since the port opened about ten years before. And the British had a question they badly needed answered. Who were these people? Rumour said the rebels were Christians, which would be wonderful news to the missionaries. Rumour also said they might sweep away the emperor and with him every treaty Britain had won, which would not be wonderful news to anyone in Hong Kong. The man whose job it was to find out was Sir George Bonham, the governor of Hong Kong. The governor of Hong Kong was also Britain's Superintendent of Trade in China, the man who spoke for Britain to the Qing. In April 1853 he went up the Yangtze from Shanghai on a steamer, the Hermes. He went partly to explain that Britain meant to be perfectly neutral, and partly to learn what the rebels believed and what they were after. On the way, as they passed the river city of Zhenjiang, the Taiping forts there fired on the Hermes. It was not a good start. But at Nanjing things went very differently. News soon spread among the rebels that the British were brethren, and numbers of them came straight aboard to fraternise. The ship's captain noticed that they "appeared much pleased at our wearing our hair long in front like themselves". That was not a small thing. The Taiping had stopped shaving the front of their heads, the mark of submission to Manchu rule, and here were foreigners with full heads of hair. When the ship weighed anchor to move closer to the city walls, many of the rebels fell in at the capstan to help, and seemed, the captain said, "to enjoy it all as great fun". He was struck by how they behaved. "In a manner quite unlike any Chinese we had ever met, they at once met us on the most friendly terms, and remained so the five days we were there." Some of the visitors saw idols the sailors had picked up as curiosities, and made it clear by gestures that these were very bad and useless things. Hundreds of Chinese came aboard over those days, and nothing was stolen, and the crew said that if anyone had told them that ten days before, every man in the ship would have answered, "It is impossible." Meanwhile the interpreter, who had come up with the governor, went ashore, met two of the Taiping kings, and explained, among other things, what the British believed. When he got to the first of the Ten Commandments, one of the Taiping kings put a hand on his shoulder and exclaimed, twice over, that it was "the same as ourselves". The king told him that there could be peace between them, and more than that, that they could be close friends. And they might now land at Nanjing, he added, and walk about wherever they pleased. Then he turned to the British promise of neutrality, and to the idea that Britain might help the Qing, and answered it with complete calm. "It would be wrong for you to help them, and, what is more, it would be of no use. Our Heavenly Father helps us, and no one can fight with Him." So far, so friendly. And then came the ceremony. The Taiping chiefs' first answer to Bonham had been unceremonious, and a Taiping minister came aboard to arrange for the governor to be received in the city. Bonham was afraid that disputes over ceremony would spoil the good feeling, so he sent an excuse instead, and put what he had meant to say into a dispatch, dated 30 April 1853. In it he set out Britain's treaties with the emperor and its trade, and said that Britain's desire was to stay perfectly neutral in the conflict between the Taiping and the Qing. The answer that came back was in the form of a decree. A decree, in the Chinese world, was what an emperor sent down to his subjects. Equals exchanged letters. The Taiping issued theirs to the distant English, as a people who had long recognised the duty of worshipping Heaven. In the Taiping view there was one God and one true sovereign under heaven, and every nation, the English included, belonged to him as subjects. Now, if you were with us at the start of this season, you may hear something familiar here. The Treaty of Nanjing had made Britain and China equals on paper. Now a kingdom that called all within the four seas brethren was issuing the distant English a decree. Bonham sailed back down the river and drew his conclusions. No government able to replace the Qing, he judged, appeared to have been set up. And the true policy for Britain was strict neutrality between the two sides. The French went up the river later that year, and the Americans the year after, and they came away little wiser and just as determined to stay out of it. That is the policy Britain will follow for years. Whether it holds is one of the big stories of the rest of this season.

Sengge Rinchen
Sengge Rinchen. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

But that spring it was not Britain that the Qing court in Beijing was afraid of. It was the Taiping. Having taken Nanjing, the Heavenly King did not send his armies east to the sea. Instead he turned north, and sent an army to attack and conquer the capital of the empire and the Manchu court that held it. It was a bold idea. Take Beijing, and the demons' dynasty falls. In May 1853, a small army of about seven thousand men crossed to the northern bank of the Yangtze and set out. Ahead of them lay hundreds of miles of the north China plain, a land of wheat and millet fields and dusty roads, very different from the wet rice country and the rivers of the south they knew. They marched fast, and lived off the country as they went. They crossed into Henan, failed to take its capital, Kaifeng, crossed the Yellow River, and spent two months besieging another walled city they never took. Then they swung west into Shanxi and back east again, and came down onto the plain south of Beijing that autumn. Somewhere on that road, notice, the Taiping had left behind the thing that made them so strong in the south. The river. No boats now, and no fleet to bring them food. Towards the end of October they reached the Grand Canal, and took the town of Jinghai, about twenty miles from Tianjin. The Grand Canal was the great waterway that carried the grain of the south up to feed Beijing. And Tianjin was the port of the capital, its gateway from the sea. Its fall would leave Beijing open. The Taiping had come from the hills of Guangxi to within reach of the emperor's door. The court was badly frightened. Not only was the Manchu garrison of Beijing sent out against them, but large bodies of Mongols were brought in too. Years later, with an Anglo French army marching on Beijing, Qing censors would remember the alarm of 1853, when the rebels from the south were advancing on the capital, and write that it had been many times more serious than the alarm the foreigners caused. Censors were officials whose duty was to watch and criticise the rest of the government, and to tell the emperor uncomfortable truths. The emperor in Beijing was the Xianfeng Emperor, barely into his twenties and only a few years on the throne, and he had been losing provinces ever since. In the capital, officials sent their families away, and those who could afford it began to leave the city. But the rebels had come as far as they would come. The man leading the Mongols against them was Sengge Rinchen, a Mongol prince and one of the most trusted commanders the court had. And winter on the north China plain is long and bitterly cold, for southern soldiers with no supplies, no reinforcements and no way home. Hopeless of success, with famine in their camp and no prospect of help from their friends, the whole garrison cut its way out through the besiegers in early February 1854, after more than three months. They were a spent bolt now, beleaguered and falling back southward. Reinforcements set out from the south to rescue them and never got through. And Sengge Rinchen hunted the survivors from one fortified camp to the next. And at one of their last camps, he found a way to finish them. He walled in the Taiping camp, and a crew of a thousand labourers spent a month digging a line of trenches to connect it, through a dry riverbed, to the Grand Canal forty miles away. Then he let the water in, flooding the Taiping camp to its rooftops and drowning the army of rebels into submission. By the spring of 1855 it was over. The last survivors surrendered, and their commanders were taken to Beijing and put to death. Remember Sengge Rinchen, too. We have not seen the last of him. So the Heavenly Kingdom had a capital, and it had lost the chance to take the other one. It held Nanjing, and for years afterwards it would hold its own against the emperor's armies. And the dynasty had learned something too. Official after official had been sent to put the rebellion down, and each had only lost his reputation. Somebody would have to build a new kind of army. Step back and look at what we have seen in this episode, because it holds all three answers to the question we started with. A religious movement, with a sacred book recited before every meal and an unseen king who had met God. A promise to the poor, of land shared out by families and a treasury held in common. And a call to the Chinese to throw off foreign rulers, carried through, at Nanjing, to the killing of children. Which of those was the real Taiping? All of them, and the war that followed would be fought against all of them at once. Next time, we go to Hunan, where an official named Zeng Guofan is at home mourning his mother, and is about to be handed an appointment he very much does not want.

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