Then and There Coming next Search

Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 12

The Hunan Army

With the dynasty's own armies failing, the court orders Zeng Guofan, a scholar official home in Hunan mourning his mother, to raise local militia, and he builds something new: an army loyal to its own commanders. The episode follows Zeng from that order to his first great victory, while the Small Swords seize Shanghai's old city and Ye Mingchen, governor general at Canton, answers rebellion there with mass executions, and asks what it meant that the dynasty's survival now rested on armies it did not raise. It hears the court and Zeng in their own memorials and proclamations, with foreign observers at Shanghai and scholars.

Listen in Apple Podcasts Spotify

Hunan Wuchang Shanghai Guangzhou
Map drawn by Then and There on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines, rivers and lakes

Transcript

Zeng Guofan
Zeng Guofan. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, the Taiping came down the Yangtze in a flood of commandeered boats, and on 19 March 1853, after a siege of only eleven days, Nanjing fell to them. They killed its Manchu garrison and their families, and two days later the Heavenly King announced that he had made the city his capital. The Qing dug in outside the walls and could not take it back. And the army the Heavenly King sent north to take Beijing got within twenty miles of Tianjin, before the winter and hunger wore it down and the waters of the Grand Canal, let into its camp, finally drowned it. The dynasty had survived. But it had learned that its own armies could not win this war for it. This episode is about the man who built the army that could. He was not a soldier. He was a bookish, clumsy man who could barely ride a horse. And when the order came to raise that army, he tried to say no. To meet him we need to back up a few months, to the winter before Nanjing fell, when the Taiping were still on the march and nobody yet knew where they would stop. His name was Zeng Guofan, and he came from a family of modest farmers in Hunan, the province the Taiping had just marched through. He had done what Hong Xiuquan never managed. He passed the examinations, all the way up, and won the highest degree, the one that opened the doors of government. It did not come easily. He failed the first rung of the examinations several times before he got through, just as Hong Xiuquan had. The difference was that Zeng kept going, and the doors opened for him. By his late thirties he was a vice minister in Beijing, one of the rising scholar officials of the empire, a man of books and memorials and careful self examination. He kept a diary in which he scolded himself, day after day, for laziness, for vanity, for talking too much and sleeping too late. He wrote long letters home, too, lecturing his younger brothers on study, thrift and family duty, letters that Chinese readers would go on reading for a century after his death. And he was not a mere flatterer of the throne. In 1851 he sent the young new emperor a memorial on his faults so frank that the emperor was furious, and Zeng kept his post only because others spoke up for him. Hold on to that picture. A careful, anxious, stubborn moralist, who doubted himself constantly and almost never changed his mind. Then, in the summer of 1852, his mother died. A Confucian official whose parent died was expected to leave office and go home to mourn, for twenty seven months, and Zeng went home to Hunan. Mourning was no mere formality. It was among the most serious of a son's duties, and an official who skipped it was disgraced. He had scarcely been home four months when the orders reached him. In early January 1853, as things in the heart of the empire got worse and worse, the emperor ordered Zeng Guofan to take charge of the haphazard militia units in Hunan. The emperor was the Xianfeng Emperor, only twenty one, who had come to the throne in 1850 and had known nothing but this rebellion since. And that same month, as we heard last time, the Taiping took Wuchang, the great river city just north of Hunan. Why Zeng? Not for any talent for war. He was convenient. He happened to be there on the ground already, and he knew the region and its people. The court was handing out orders like this to officials at home all over the troubled provinces. Raise the local militia, keep the bandits off, hold the line until the real army arrives. Militia, in the Qing world, meant local defence corps, raised and paid for by the gentry of a county, the landowners and degree holders, to guard their own villages. They were meant to be part time, local, and under the eye of the magistrate. The empire had leaned on them before. In the first war with Britain, at Canton, the authorities had rebuilt the forts and recruited thirty six thousand local militia. And at a village called Sanyuanli, perhaps twenty five thousand men from eighty or ninety villages had gathered on the hills against a British force, and a peasant line jabbed with spears at soldiers whose muskets had stopped working in the rain. One of the militia's notices had proclaimed, "We do not need official troops, nor the help of the state". That line should have given the court pause. A militia that did not need the state could, one day, decide it did not need the dynasty either. Zeng did not want it. He decided to refuse, and drafted a memorial declining the appointment on the grounds that he had to go on mourning his mother. A memorial was the formal written report or request an official sent up to the throne. Behind that proper excuse, though, he doubted that the militias could ever be properly organised at all. And he had no wish to spend his mourning going cap in hand to the local gentry for money they did not want to give. His father and his brothers and a friend went to work on him. Here was the dynasty in danger, and the province in danger, and Zeng was the man the emperor had asked for. In the end they convinced him. He tore up the draft memorial and accepted the mission. And then, having said yes to raising a militia, he went off and built something else entirely.

Start with what he saw around him, because he hated it. The regular provincial army was the Green Standard, Chinese troops spread across the empire in small garrisons, badly paid and badly led. On paper it had some six hundred thousand men. In practice its companies were under strength, its officers sold places and pocketed pay, and many of its soldiers had other trades and turned out only for parades. Zeng put it bluntly. "As soon as they spy the enemy, they run away," he wrote, "and when the enemy departs, they come back and murder the locals" and pass them off as rebels, so they can claim victory. That was his judgement of the army he was supposed to support. So he decided not to support it. He would build his own. He built it on people. Each commander recruited his own officers, through his own personal ties, and the officers recruited the soldiers, from their own home districts, so that a foot soldier fought alongside his neighbours. Think about what that means in battle. The man beside you is from your village. Your officer knows your father. If you run, everyone at home will know. Every recruit needed someone from home to vouch for him, and his name, his village and his family were written down. The loyalty ran upward, man to officer, officer to commander, commander to Zeng. When a commander died, his men often went home rather than serve under a stranger. That was the army's strength, and it was also exactly what a dynasty ought to fear. These soldiers were not the emperor's men. They were Zeng's men. And the officers, as far as Zeng could manage it, were scholars like him, men of the examinations, chosen for character and loyalty rather than for any experience of war. One of his best commanders, Luo Zenan, was a village schoolteacher and a philosopher of the Confucian classics, who had never fought before in his life. Zeng drilled his men's minds as well as their bodies. He lectured them on duty and obedience, the way a teacher lectures his pupils, and expected his officers to do the same. It was an army built like a Confucian family, with Zeng as the father at the head of it. He paid them well. A foot soldier earned a salary of just over four taels of silver a month, nearly triple the wage of a Green Standard soldier. A tael, remember, was the Chinese ounce of silver. Four of them a month was a real living for a farm boy from the hills. The money came from wherever Zeng could find it: contributions squeezed from the local gentry, the sale of official ranks and titles, and later a new tax on goods moving along the roads and rivers. He was slow, deliberately. When the court pressed him to hurry, he asked the emperor for patience. "We aim for excellence, not sheer numbers," he wrote. "And we want it to be truly effective, not just available quickly." The army took its name from Hunan's great river, the Xiang, which was also the old literary name for the province. In English it is the Xiang Army, or simply the Hunan Army. Not everyone was pleased to see a mourning scholar build a private army. The regular troops in Hunan resented him, and once, in 1853, they came after him directly and burned down his headquarters. He moved further south in the province, out of their way, and kept building. And then he did something that shows how clearly he saw this war. To support his land troops, Zeng decided he needed a freshwater navy of his own, to fight on the rivers and lakes, and he set up three shipyards to build one. There was one problem. At the outset, neither he nor his generals had ever seen a gunboat, and there were no craftsmen in Hunan who knew how to build one. They learned. His shipyards built fast oared boats and bigger gunboats, and he bought foreign made cannon by the hundred through Canton to arm them. The river navy, more than anything, was what would make the Hunan Army different from every other force the dynasty had. By February 1854, Zeng Guofan had thirteen battalions of land troops ready to fight, supported by ten naval battalions with a fleet of more than two hundred war boats. He had fixed a land battalion at five hundred and five men, officers included, so the land battalions alone came to more than six thousand five hundred men, all of them his. Some of the officers were his own family. Three of his younger brothers would serve, and in 1854, when Zeng was forty three, they were thirty two, thirty, and twenty six. The one who was thirty was named Zeng Guoquan. Remember him. He is going to matter a great deal at the end of this season. Now, all of that was the organiser. The general was another matter. As a tactical commander, the bookish Zeng Guofan was an utter disaster. He was physically clumsy and could barely ride a horse. That spring he took to the water himself, and personally led a fleet of forty ships north to take back a place called Jinggang, near Changsha. His fleet was routed. What happened next tells you a great deal about the man. He rowed out of sight of his officers and tried to drown himself. A worried secretary, who had followed him in secret, saw him fall into the water and managed to drag him out. On the very same days, as it happened, the officers he had trained won a real victory over the Taiping a little way up the river at Xiangtan. The army worked. It was the man at the top who still had to learn his part, and his part, it would turn out, was not to lead the charge. It was to build, and to hold on.

Zeng also understood something else. This was a war of ideas, and he needed to answer the Taiping proclamations with one of his own. Early in 1854, as his army set out, he put out a proclamation against the rebels, and it is one of the most important documents of the whole war. He began with the destruction. "Everywhere they pass through," he wrote, "every boat large or small is stolen, every person rich or poor is plundered and left with nothing". That much any official might have said. What came next was different. "Scholars cannot read the classics of Confucius," he wrote, "but instead there are the so-called words of Jesus", the book they call the New Testament. Confucius was the sage whose teachings on family, duty and right conduct had shaped Chinese government and Chinese families for two thousand years. His classics were what every examination candidate studied. The Taiping had no use for him. In Hong Xiuquan's own account of his visions, God had Confucius whipped in heaven for leading the people astray. Wherever the Taiping went, they smashed the tablets in Confucian temples and the idols in Buddhist ones, and the books of the classics were burned or banned unless the Taiping had rewritten them. "It is the most extreme threat to our Confucian teachings since the dawn of the world." Notice whose side he says he is on. He did call on people to defend their emperor. The Xianfeng Emperor, he wrote, "worries deeply and examines his conduct. He respects Heaven and feels pity for the people." And he pointed out that the emperor had not raised taxes, nor conscripted soldiers to fight the rebels, as proof that the throne was still in control. But the heart of his appeal was not the threat to the Qing. Zeng framed the war against the Taiping as a war to save Confucian civilisation. Think about how clever that was, and how necessary. Remember what the Taiping had been telling the Chinese. That the empire belonged to the Chinese and not to the Manchu, and that the Manchu were demons. A Hunanese scholar could hardly answer that by asking the Chinese to fight for the Manchu. So he made it a different war. Not Chinese against Manchu, but the whole inherited world of the Chinese gentry, its books, its ancestors, its families and its temples, against a foreign god. To the scholars and landowners of the Yangtze valley, a Taiping victory meant the end of everything they were. And there was something more under it. The man raising this army was asking men to fight for their civilisation and for him, and only after that for the dynasty. Hold on to that. It is the question this whole episode is circling.

Zeng's army went down the Xiang River into the Yangtze, and turned toward Wuchang. The Taiping had abandoned Wuchang when they went on to Nanjing in 1853, and then come back and taken it again in the summer of 1854. So Wuchang was where Zeng's new army would have to prove itself. Through the summer of 1854 his boats and his battalions fought their way down the Xiang and out onto the Yangtze, taking back Yueyang, at the mouth of Dongting Lake, on the way. And every mile brought him closer to Wuchang. His forces reconquered Wuchang, the vital river city, in October 1854. It was the new army's first great victory, a provincial capital taken back from the rebels by force, and it had been won by an army the dynasty had not raised. In Beijing, the emperor was delighted. "It is astonishing," he announced, "that Zeng Guofan, a mere scholar, could have accomplished such a wonderful deed!" He named Zeng acting governor of Hubei, the province Wuchang was the capital of. And then one of his counsellors spoke up. A Hunanese provincial, the counsellor warned, with an army of ten thousand men loyal to him, "would not be a blessing to the empire." Within days the emperor took the governorship back, and gave Zeng an honorary rank instead, a title with no province attached. That moment holds the whole problem of this season in a few days of court politics. The dynasty needed Zeng's army to survive. It did not dare give Zeng the power that would make his army truly strong, the power of a governor over a province, its money and its officials. For years he would fight on with that distrust over him, raising his own money, begging for funds, and watching officials with less to show for it given the posts he was refused. And the court was in no position to pay for his army even if it had wanted to. With the Taiping on the Yangtze, the taxes of the richest provinces stopped reaching Beijing, and the rice boats on the Grand Canal could no longer get through. In 1853 the court, desperate for money, began issuing paper notes and casting big copper coins worth far less than their face value, and prices in the capital leapt. A dynasty that could not pay its own armies was in no position to tell Zeng Guofan how to run his. Zeng pressed on down the river that winter, and there the Taiping's best general, Shi Dakai, the Wing King, was waiting for him. Shi lured Zeng's light, fast boats into Poyang Lake, a great lake off the Yangtze, and sealed them in, cutting the fleet in two. Then he fell on the heavy boats left on the river. Zeng's own flagship was taken, and Zeng, once more, tried to throw himself into the water, and once more his men pulled him out. The Taiping went on to take Wuchang yet again the next spring. It would not be the last time the city changed hands. The war on the Yangtze would go back and forth for years. But a new kind of army now existed, with its own commander, its own money, its own fleet, and its own loyalties. And it could win.

Now let's go down the river, all the way to the coast, to a city we watched open to foreign trade a few episodes ago. Shanghai. In the decade since the Treaty of Nanjing, Shanghai had grown up in two halves. There was the old walled Chinese county town, and beside it on the riverbank, the new foreign settlement, British, American and French, where the merchants built their houses and warehouses. It had been opened to foreign trade by nothing grander than a notification from the British consul. A year after it opened there were eleven firms there, English and American, represented by twenty three men. By 1847 the foreign residents numbered a hundred and eight, eighty seven of them English. In its first year, 1844, forty four foreign ships entered the port. In 1855 the number was four hundred and thirty seven. The reason was its place on the map. Shanghai sat near the mouth of the Yangtze, a short run by canal and river from the silk and tea country, and with the whole trade of the great river behind it. Shanghai's share of China's tea exports rose from a seventh in 1846 to a third in 1851. And just downriver, at Wusong, the opium receiving ships lay at anchor, ten of them up to the spring of 1854, holding the drug for English, Parsi, Jewish and American firms. And in Shanghai, as everywhere along the coast, there were secret societies. The Small Sword Society was one of them, a brotherhood of the kind that swore oaths to overthrow the Qing, with many of its members boatmen and workers from Guangdong and Fujian, far from home. On 7 September 1853, the Small Sword Society rose and took the city of Shanghai. The county magistrate was killed. The circuit intendant, the senior Qing official in the city, was rescued by an Englishman and an American, who let him down over the city wall. The intendant was Wu Jianzhang, a Cantonese who had bought his office, and who had once been one of the hong merchants of the old Canton trade, so he knew the foreigners well. From the safety of the foreign settlement he would go on to deal with them again, and it was with him that the consuls would strike their bargain over the customs. Out along the coast, rumour ran wild. Sixty miles off, people said there had been a fearful slaughter in the city, that the streets were covered with dead bodies and blood, that the foreigners and the rebels had been fighting, and that the whole foreign community had taken to the ships off Wusong. Meadows, of the British consular service, whom we met last time, was making his way toward Shanghai, and he heard those stories. When he got there he found that there had been no fighting at all with the foreigners, and that in the whole city, the slaughter and bloodshed came to the killing of one man. So, a rebellion, but not a massacre. And the rebels sent word that they were with the Taiping. The Taiping were not so sure. When word reached Nanjing, they denounced the Small Swords' immoral habits and refused to accept them as followers. The Small Swords held the city anyway, hemmed in by the imperial forces on one side and the foreign settlements on the other, for seventeen months. The foreigners declared themselves neutral. They told both sides that the foreign ground could not be used for attack or for defence. That was easier to declare than to enforce, with a rebel city on one side of the settlement and an imperial army camped on the other. And neutrality did not keep the people out. Chinese refugees poured into the settlement from the old city and the country around it. The settlement had been meant to be foreign. The flood of refugees after the city fell in September 1853 put an end to that for good. Out of the same chaos came something else that would last a long time. With the Qing customs house gone, the British, American and French consuls set up a board of foreign inspectors to collect the customs for the Qing, and the foreign run Chinese Maritime Customs was born. There was one more traveller who came to Shanghai in those months. Hong Rengan, the Heavenly King's cousin, had found refuge with the missionaries in Hong Kong, and become a baptized Christian. In 1854 he sailed north to Shanghai, hoping to find a way up the river to Nanjing and his cousin. He found the Chinese city controlled by a secret society sympathetic to the Taiping. He asked for its help, and it refused him. So he stayed among the missionaries in Shanghai for a time, studying, and then went back to Hong Kong. The road to the Heavenly Capital was still closed to him.

The imperial troops besieging the Small Swords had camped close by the settlement, and they did not respect its neutrality much. On 3 April 1854, a wandering squad of them went into a building going up close to the British consulate, and attacked two Englishmen. The foreigners demanded that the Qing camp be moved. The Qing commander, a provincial judge, said he had no power to do it. So the foreigners moved it themselves. British and American sailors and marines came ashore from the ships in the river, and joined the merchants' own volunteers, a militia the settlement had formed the year before. They went in the next afternoon, the fourth of April. Landed forces and volunteers together made a total of about four hundred men, and they marched out against the imperial camp and drove the Qing troops back. The ground they fought over was a stretch of wet, low land near the racecourse, and the fight went down in the settlement's memory as the Battle of Muddy Flat. The foreign loss was four killed and eleven wounded. It was a small fight, and the settlement made a legend of it. But look at what it meant. Foreign merchants had just fought the emperor's troops, on Chinese soil, to keep the emperor's war out of their part of the city. And they had won. A dozen years after the Treaty of Nanjing, the foreign settlement at Shanghai was behaving less like a guest of the Qing and more like a small state of its own. That summer the settlement's residents rewrote their rules, and set up an elected council to run their roads, their police and their taxes, which they would keep for nearly ninety years. Nobody in Beijing had agreed to any of it. It simply happened, in the gap that the war had opened.

The Small Swords held out through that year and into the winter. Their neighbours to the north, the French, had their settlement right up against the old city's wall, and after a run of quarrels with the rebels, the French came down on the Qing side. Through the winter the French admiral's guns pounded the walls, and his men fought beside the Qing troops. In February 1855, on the Chinese New Year, the rebels evacuated the city, and the imperial troops entered the city they had besieged in vain for seventeen months. The Chinese New Year was the greatest festival of the year, the day families gathered and the whole country stopped. Many of the Small Swords broke out and escaped. Those left behind did not. Their leader was caught and killed as he fled. What followed was a massacre. Upwards of two thousand people were put to death within three days. Three hundred who had surrendered to the French admiral were handed over to the Qing officials, and tortured to death. Women were mutilated and killed. Rebels were crucified, and tortured with hot irons. Heads hung in bunches round the city walls. A single bridge, the Pagoda Bridge, had nineteen on it. Last episode we watched the Taiping kill the Manchu families of Nanjing, and I said we would see the Qing do the same. Here it is, in a city full of foreign witnesses, right next to the settlement that had declared itself neutral. The foreigners of Shanghai had watched the Small Swords take the city with hardly any killing. Now they watched the emperor's soldiers take it back and put more than two thousand to death. Some of them drew a conclusion that would matter later in this season. If this was the government, perhaps the rebels were not the worst thing that could happen to China. And it was not the worst of it. Down the coast, at Canton, something far larger had been going on for months.

Ye Mingchen
Ye Mingchen. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Canton was governed by Ye Mingchen, the governor general of Guangdong and Guangxi. A governor general was the emperor's viceroy over two or three provinces, the most powerful official in the south. Ye had been governor of Guangdong in 1849, when Canton kept its gates closed to the British, and the emperor had rewarded him with a noble title for standing firm. That spring the militia had paraded through Canton every night, quiet and good humoured, and grim in what they meant. The emperor declared that he could not oppose the unanimous opinion of the people of Canton, nor force the British right to enter their city. His edict rewarded the officials for "tranquillising the people and in managing the barbarians", and the viceroy and the governor dedicated inscriptions in the city's main temples, giving the credit for the victory to the people's patriotism. So the lesson Ye learned that spring was simple. Hold firm against the British, and the throne rewards you. He was a stern, scholarly, stubborn man. He would not meet foreign envoys, he answered their letters as briefly as he could, and he believed, with some reason after 1849, that if you refused the British long enough they gave up. Then his own province rose against him. It was not only the Taiping who had taken heart from the fall of Nanjing. All over the south, secret societies and bandit gangs rose in their wake. The rebels around Canton were not Taiping. They were local secret society men, wearing red turbans, and through the summer of 1854 they gathered by the tens of thousands and besieged Canton itself. To the court, and to Ye, the difference hardly mattered. They were all rebels. For months the rebels held the country around Canton. They took Foshan, the great manufacturing town just upriver, and cut the city off from much of its food. Inside the walls, Ye had few troops he could trust. He paid for militia, he fortified the gates, and he waited. Ye held the city. And then he took his revenge. The dragnet that year caught an estimated seventy five thousand accused Taiping supporters. The government went after not only the rebels themselves, but the relatives, however innocent, of every known member of the movement, out to the furthest branches of the family tree. Ye himself boasted that he had beheaded upwards of seventy thousand rebels in one month, in the province of Guangdong alone. The foreigners at Canton could see it happening. The captain of the Hermes, the steamer that had carried the British governor to Nanjing, wrote: "We know that the authorities at Canton were taking heads off by forties and sixties a day". The viceroy himself, he said, admitted to three hundred in one day. The captain went to the execution ground, and saw pools of blood from recent killings, and heads piled up in old bottle racks. And he drew his own conclusion. The rebels were winning everywhere, so these could not all be rebels. Far more likely, he thought, they were the heads of helpless and harmless people, taken to satisfy the emperor that his viceroy was making progress. It is worth setting that beside what the Taiping promised in their own proclamations, that when they took a city they put to death the rapacious mandarins and corrupt magistrates, and harmed no one else. One British witness at the execution ground counted sixty three men beheaded in the space of four minutes, before he had to stop watching. So many were killed that the executioners in the end packed only the right ears into the boxes meant for heads. The British consul called it a series of executions "among the most horrible for extent and manner, of which the world has any authentic records". In the summer of 1855 a young Chinese man came home to Canton from America. His name was Rong Hong, and he had just become the first Chinese graduate of an American university, at Yale. At the execution ground he found headless bodies piled up in heaps. "The ground was perfectly drenched with human blood." Hold on to that young man too. He is going to spend his life trying to bring the learning he found in America home to China. Canton's terror had one more consequence, and it was for Hong Kong. The executions in Canton were a turning point in the fortunes of Hong Kong, as refugees and merchants with their money flooded into the British colony to escape them. The colony grew on Canton's fear, and so did its Chinese merchant class. Some of those refugees were rebels and their families, slipping out of reach of Ye's dragnet. Some were simply people with money, who had decided that a British colony was safer than a Qing city. Either way, every boat that left Canton for Hong Kong in those months carried a small verdict on the Qing. And the foreigners on the river, the British above all, took one more lesson from it. Here was the man who had kept them out of Canton for years, who would not see them, who answered their complaints with a line or two, and who could now kill on a scale they could barely describe. To the British at Canton and Hong Kong, Ye Mingchen was becoming the face of everything they hated about the Qing, and the man who would have to be broken before anything changed. They would need only a pretext. And in a little more than a year, a small boat called the Arrow would give them one. Step back for a moment and look at the empire at the end of this episode. In Hunan, a scholar in mourning has built an army that can beat the Taiping, and it is loyal first to him. In Shanghai, foreign merchants have fought the emperor's troops, and foreign inspectors are collecting his customs. At Canton, the emperor's viceroy keeps order by killing on a scale the world has rarely seen. The dynasty survives. But more and more, it survives on armies, money and men it does not control. Before the Arrow, though, next time we go back up the river to Nanjing. Soon the Taiping are going to break the Qing camps outside their capital, and the Heavenly Kingdom has never been stronger. And then Yang Xiuqing, the Eastern King, speaking with the voice of God, will ask for something no subject should ever ask for, and the Heavenly Kingdom will turn on itself.

Sources