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Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 16

The Shield King

Opium, the drug the first war was fought over, becomes legal in 1858, and Lord Elgin takes his ships up the Yangtze to see the river his treaty has opened, straight through the Taiping war. The episode follows Elgin past the Heavenly Capital's guns and Hong Rengan, the Heavenly King's cousin, on his secret journey across Qing China to Nanjing, where he is made Shield King and writes a plan to remake the kingdom with railways, banks and Western friendship, and asks whether the Taiping could have become something new. It hears the Taiping in Hong Rengan's own words, alongside British officials and scholars.

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Shanghai Yangtze River Nanjing Hong Kong
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Transcript

James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin
James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin. Felice Beato (1832–1909); Henry Hering (1814–1893), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time Lord Elgin got his treaty. On 26 June 1858, at Tianjin, with the allies' gunships moored in the river and the threat of a march on Beijing hanging over them, the emperor's commissioners yielded and signed, and the ratified copies were to be exchanged in Beijing within a year. The Treaties of Tianjin opened ten more ports, let foreigners travel anywhere in the empire, and gave British ships the right to sail up the Yangtze, the great river through the heart of China. They also gave Britain the right to station an ambassador in Beijing, the clause that troubled the Xianfeng emperor most, and he hoped very much that the exchange of ratified copies there would never happen. And Qiying, the aged diplomat who had dealt with the British ten years before, was confronted by them with an old memorial of his own to the emperor, found at Canton, left the talks and Tianjin, and was ordered by his emperor to put an end to himself. But the treaties had left one thing unsaid, and it was the oldest thing of all. Opium. Opium was the drug made from the dried sap of the poppy, grown in British India, shipped to China and smoked there by millions, and it was the reason Britain and China had first gone to war, in 1839. It had been illegal in China for more than a century. Through all those years, and through the first war and the treaty that ended it, the trade had gone on anyway, smuggled along the coast with officials paid to look away. Driving the trade out of Canton in 1839 had only turned every port on the coast into a centre for the sale of the drug, and made every official along the coast a ready grantor of permission to sell and land it. Back in London, in early 1857, weeks before Elgin was even appointed, a secret and confidential dispatch from the Cabinet had ordered that opium was to be legalised. And yet Elgin, of all people, did not want to be the man who asked. He thought it would not be wise to impose so momentous a change, in a trade of so peculiar a character, on a defeated government. This episode has two halves, and two very different men. In the first, Elgin finishes his treaty at Shanghai, makes opium legal, and then takes his ships up the Yangtze to see the river he has opened, straight through the middle of a civil war. In the second, a cousin of the rebel king slips across Qing China in disguise, reaches the rebels' capital, and writes a plan to turn China into something no one had imagined before. Let's start with the opium, and with an American. William Reed was the United States envoy, and his instructions were to support the Chinese in any lawful measures against the trade. Yet at Tianjin he had deliberately left out of his treaty the articles against opium in the earlier American treaty. That autumn, in Shanghai, Reed explained why, in a letter to Elgin. He had come to the conclusion, he wrote, that the desire of the Chinese government to obtain a revenue from opium was now stronger than the wish to prohibit it. The trade as it stood, Reed said, had all the dishonourable features of a great smuggling transaction. Better to bring it into the open, tax it, and control it, than to pretend it was not there. Think about who was saying this. The American government had put articles against opium into its first treaty with China, and had told its citizens they would get no protection if they traded in it. Now its own envoy was telling the British that the battle was lost. Elgin had held back from raising the subject at all. He wrote that he could not reconcile it to his sense of right to urge the imperial government to abandon its traditional policy on opium, under the kind of pressure the allies had been bringing to bear on it at Tianjin. That is a remarkable thing for a British envoy to say. He had just bullied a treaty out of the court at gunpoint, and he would not use the same guns to force opium on it. Reed's support changed things. Fortified by the backing of the one other nation with a large share in the carrying trade, Elgin no longer saw any reason to hesitate about proposing legalisation to the Chinese deputies. And so it was Reed, the neutral, who supplied Elgin with the push he needed to raise the question at all.

The place to do it was a set of talks that hardly anyone noticed at the time. The Treaties of Tianjin had laid down the principles. What they had not settled were the details of trade: exactly how much duty would be charged on every good that came in or went out, and how the customs would work. Those were left to a conference at Shanghai between British and Chinese officials, and the first meeting was held on 12 October 1858. Shanghai by now was the busiest of the treaty ports, a walled Chinese county town with a fast growing foreign settlement along the river beside it. On the Chinese side were the same commissioners who had signed at Tianjin, Guiliang and Huashana, now negotiating without a gunboat in sight. The result was a new tariff. With three exceptions, opium, tea and silk, the duty on every import and export was set on a general basis of five per cent of its value. Five per cent was low, and it was fixed now for a very long time to come. Most countries in this period set their own tariffs and changed them when they liked. China had now agreed to a rate it could not change without the consent of the foreign powers. In fact there was no revision of the tariff for forty four years, and the Chinese treasury suffered heavily from just one small concession in it, the duty free list of goods meant for foreign residents, which Chinese buyers came to like as well. At the time it was generally recognised that both the tariff and the rules of trade that went with it were the work of one man, the interpreter Lay. Lay was the young interpreter who had browbeaten the commissioners at Tianjin, and he was also the inspector of the customs at Shanghai, collecting duties on foreign trade on the emperor's behalf. He was in his mid twenties, ambitious and impatient, and he knew more about China's foreign trade than anyone else at the table. And one of the rules he wrote was going to matter enormously, though no one said so out loud. The rules said that the Chinese high officer in charge of foreign trade would be at liberty, of his own choice, to select any British subject he saw fit to help him in the administration of the customs revenue. That sounds like a small administrative clause. It was the seed of something big: a customs service for the whole empire, run by foreigners in the emperor's pay, which would grow into one of the most important institutions in China. The man best placed to run it, of course, was the man who wrote the rule. Elgin signed the tariff on 8 November. The French envoy, Gros, signed it on 24 November. And tucked into it, with a rate all of its own, was opium.

The question of opium was brought up at the second conference on the tariff, on 13 October 1858. And the Chinese deputies made no objection. I want you to stop on that for a moment, because it is one of the strangest anticlimaxes in this whole season. In 1839 Commissioner Lin Zexu had destroyed more than twenty thousand chests of opium at Canton, and Britain had gone to war over it. The emperor of that time had refused to legalise the drug even when some of his own officials urged it. When the first war ended, his negotiators, Qiying and Yilibu, had refused point blank to write it into the treaty in any official way. And now, in a meeting room in Shanghai, the question came up and nobody objected. The import duty was finally set at thirty taels for each picul of opium, which came to about seven or eight per cent of its average value. A tael was a Chinese ounce of silver, and a picul was a weight of a little over sixty kilograms, about what a chest of opium held. There was one condition, and it was the Chinese side's. Once landed, opium could be carried into the interior only by Chinese, and only as Chinese property. Foreign merchants could bring it to the treaty ports. From there it belonged to China, and to China's own taxes. The effect was immediate. The organised smuggling of opium, the deliveries outside the treaty ports that had gone on for decades, ceased at once. There was no longer any reason to smuggle what could be landed legally. And the court seems to have accepted the new order completely. For fifty years after this there was no renewal of the edicts against the trade in opium inside China. It was not only the foreigners who profited. Thirty years later, the taxes charged on opium inside China averaged nearly three times the import duty. The court that had once banned the drug now drew a revenue from it for its own treasury. So that was the end of the opium question, at least for now. The drug that had been the stated cause of the first war became a legal import, with a duty and conditions of its own. It is hard not to feel the weight of that silence. Opium did not go away. It grew. Within a generation, Chinese farmers would be growing poppies on a vast scale themselves, and opium would be woven into the life of the empire, from the coolie's pipe to the official's treasury, for the rest of the century. None of that was decided by anyone in that room in Shanghai. But the room was where the last door closed.

There was one more piece of business at Shanghai, and this one the Chinese did care about. On 22 October the Chinese commission wrote to Elgin about the clause that had haunted the court since Tianjin: the British envoy living in Beijing. The commissioners argued, quite reasonably, that the treaty had in reality been extorted under military pressure. They begged him to give up the envoy in Beijing. And they were not wrong about how the treaty had been made. Elgin himself described it as imposed with a pistol at the throat, even while he still thought of himself as China's friend. Officially, Elgin treated the plea as an attempt to upset the treaty. He replied that he had no option but to maintain it in its entirety, as it had been settled at Tianjin. But Elgin had come to China to make a treaty of peace, and he wanted to leave behind conditions that might actually make one last. So he offered a middle way. He kept every right the treaty gave, but he told them that if the British ambassador was properly received at Beijing when the treaty was ratified there the following year, it would certainly be expedient for the ambassador to live somewhere else. In other words, come to Beijing once, be received with honour, exchange the ratifications, and Britain would probably not insist on staying. It was a real concession, and a sensible one. It also tells us something about Elgin. He did not much like the treaty he had made. He wanted it obeyed, but he did not want to rub the emperor's face in it. But notice what it hung on. Everything depended on that one visit to Beijing the next year going smoothly. Hold on to that, because it is the thread the next episode pulls.

With the treaty settled, Elgin turned to something quite different. He left Shanghai on 8 November, the day he signed the tariff, aboard the steam frigate Furious, and headed up the Yangtze. He took a small fleet of five ships. No foreign warship had ever gone so far up the Yangtze. Beyond Nanjing the British had no charts at all, and they sounded their way up the river as they went. He wanted to see for himself the river his treaty had opened. The Yangtze is the longest river in Asia, and in 1858 its lower reaches ran straight through the heart of the war between the Qing and the Taiping. The Taiping were a rebel movement that had risen in the south eight years before, led by a man named Hong Xiuquan who believed he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, sent by God to drive the Qing, a dynasty of Manchu conquerors from beyond the Great Wall, out of China. They called their state the Heavenly Kingdom, and Hong called himself the Heavenly King. Since 1853 they had held Nanjing, the old southern capital on the Yangtze, which they called the Heavenly Capital. Britain was officially neutral in that war, and Elgin was about to see what that neutrality meant on the river itself. The first great river city he came to was Zhenjiang, which had changed hands between the Taiping and the Qing and lay in ruins. Elgin wrote that he had never before seen such a scene of desolation. Before the war Zhenjiang had held more than three hundred thousand people. No more than a few hundred remained, scratching out a ghostly existence among the ruins. His ship, the Furious, ran onto a rock nearby, and some two hundred and fifty tons had to be taken out of her before she floated off on the rising tide, to three rounds of cheers across the fleet. While they waited, Elgin went ashore. He visited Golden Island, an island in the river that had been a famous Buddhist sanctuary with a precious library. Its temples were now a ruin. On a long walk he went into the cottages of small farmers, and in one he found men smoking opium. They told him they smoked about eighty cash worth a day, when their wages, if they worked for hire, were a hundred and twenty. The opium was Indian; the local kind, they said, was not good. A cash was the small copper coin of everyday China, with a square hole in the middle so that the coins could be strung together. Elgin asked them how they could provide for their wives and families if they spent so much on opium. They answered that they had land. It is an extraordinary little scene. Days after Elgin had signed the tariff that made the drug legal, here were men who smoked it, good humoured and delighted to talk, spending two thirds of a day's wage on Indian opium. The neutrality Elgin was supposed to keep, he decided, was absurd. Writing of how the British had seen fit to affect neutrality between the emperor of China and the rebels, he made it clear he thought it a pretence. And as for the people along the river, he thought they regarded the war with feelings akin to those they would have had toward an earthquake, or pestilence, or any other providential scourge. Not as a cause, in other words. As a disaster. Something that happened to them. That is worth remembering whenever we talk about this war as a struggle between two causes. For most people along the river, it was neither. It was something that burned their towns and emptied their fields, whoever was winning. Wade, his interpreter, was even less impressed by the rebels, and judged the men at one Taiping fort to be a gang of opium smoking pirates. After weeks on the river, on 6 December, Elgin reached Hankou, having navigated six hundred miles of an unknown and uncharted river. Hankou was the great trading city in the middle of the Yangtze, a crossroads of the inland trade, one of three cities facing each other across the river at Wuhan. Few places had suffered more. Across the river from Hankou, the provincial capital Wuchang had been taken by the Taiping three times and retaken by the Qing, and the whole cluster of cities had been fought over for years. By the time Elgin arrived the Qing held it again, and he could see for himself what years of war had done to the busiest market in the interior. In the end Zhenjiang, Jiujiang and Hankou were chosen as the Yangtze ports to be opened to foreign trade. But I have skipped ahead. Because between Zhenjiang and Hankou, the fleet had to pass Nanjing.

The plan for passing the Heavenly Capital was careful. The orders were that a small gunboat, the Lee, would go ahead. If fired on, she was to hoist a flag of truce, and if the flag of truce was fired on, she was not to return fire until ordered. It was evening on 20 November, and the sun was going down as the ships came up to Nanjing, with the Lee about a mile in front. Elgin watched her pass most of the batteries in front of the city. Then, in his own words: "I was just making up my mind that all was to go off quietly, when a puff of smoke appeared from a fort, followed by the booming of a cannon." "The 'Lee' on this hoisted her white flag in vain; seven more shots were fired from the forts at her before she returned them." Then every fort opened fire as the ships came within range, and every ship fired back. Elgin was standing on the bridge above the paddle box until a shot passed very nearly over his head and the captain advised him to go below. It was Elgin's first direct contact with the Taiping, and it came in the form of a cannonball over his deck. The Furious was struck seven times, one ball going into Elgin's own cabin. On the ship called the Retribution one British sailor was killed and two others badly wounded. From the walls, the Taiping may well have seen it differently. A single foreign steamer coming up ahead of a fleet, without asking leave, looked exactly like a scout for a hostile force. Elgin had no doubt what had to happen next. If they left it there, he wrote, the Chinese would say they had had the best of it, and the ships might be attacked again on the way back. Here is where the logic of gunboat diplomacy takes over. It did not matter, to Elgin or to the navy, whether the first shot had been a mistake. What mattered was how it would look if it went unanswered. He hoped the rebels would send some message and let him explain that the British meant them no harm, but, he added, "it is impossible to anticipate what these stupid Chinamen will do." That line tells you a great deal about the man. He could pity China's poor and despise his own countrymen's bullying, and in the same breath dismiss the people he was about to shell. The next morning he sent his gunships back down the river to hammer the rebel forts until, as he put it, the British had done enough for their honour. The garrison of the forts was soon in flight, and the guns were abandoned. Elgin wrote at eleven the next morning that they had had about an hour and a half of it. And it had all begun with a mistake at sunset. The defenders had taken Elgin's ships for imperial forces. Later, the Taiping sent a message expressing their contrition for what had happened, with the assurance that the British ships would not be troubled again.

James Bruce
James Bruce. Samuel Freeman / David Martin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

And then something even stranger happened. The rebels began to write to Elgin as friends. At another point on the river, the British steered toward a spot on the shore where an officer was waving a flag, with a crowd behind him generally armed with red umbrellas. The officer turned out to be third in command, and a Canton man, like the other chiefs. Told that the British had been scandalously fired on, they at once confessed their error, said the firing had been the act of some local men who did not know the ships of your great nation, and promised it would not happen again. That detail makes sense. The Taiping had begun among the Hakka people of the hills of Guangxi and Guangdong, and many of their early leaders were men from the south, far from home on the Yangtze. They offered presents, and begged the British to come into the city to see their chief. The British declined both. The Taiping hoped for more than peace. One Taiping commander asked the British captains, with all their heart and might, to help him annihilate the enemy's vessels on the river, and promised them titles from the Heavenly King in return. The captain of the Retribution refused. Their country's law, he answered, prohibited them from giving aid to either party in a conflict. So the Taiping commander lowered his request. He asked only for one or two small cannons, some packs of gunpowder, and ten or more gun barrels. He understood, he wrote, that Britain had legal strictures against sharing its weapons, but he appealed to their shared faith. You can see the problem from the Taiping side. Here were foreign Christians, worshippers of the same God and the same Jesus, sailing past with the best guns in the world, and they would not sell even a handful. On Christmas Day 1858, as the fleet passed the walled city of Anqing on its way back down to Shanghai, Elgin received a letter from the Heavenly King himself. It hailed the foreigners as younger brothers in the faith, and it summoned them to a holy war. "Join us in doing service to the Father and Elder Brother and extinguishing the stinking reptiles." The Father was God, and the Elder Brother was Jesus, and the stinking reptiles were the Qing and its Manchu rulers, whom the Taiping meant to destroy. To the Heavenly King, the British were fellow Christians who would surely join the crusade. Elgin saw it very differently. As the ships came back toward Nanjing at the end of December, he wrote that the rebels had sent him a letter written on a roll of yellow silk about three fathoms long. "It seems to be a sort of rhapsody, in verse, with a vast infusion of their extraordinary theology." He thought it would be awkward for him to have any dealings with the rebel chiefs, and decided not to land. Instead he sent some of his staff ashore. They rode seven or eight miles on horseback through Nanjing to the yamen of a chief who said he was third in the rebel government, and who struck them as a rather commonplace person. He told them the British bombardment had killed three officers and twenty men, and that the Taiping had beheaded the soldiers who fired on the British ships. The emissaries described their ride through the city as if through a great park, with trees and wide streets. But no trade was allowed, and the place seemed almost deserted. So there it was. The Heavenly King offered brotherhood. Elgin offered neutrality, and a lesson in gunnery. To the Heavenly King, there was nothing strange in writing to Elgin that way. He believed God had sent him to rule the whole world, and that foreigners were his younger brothers who would naturally take their place beneath him. Neither side understood the other, and neither knew that a man who could have explained them to each other was, at that very moment, somewhere on the roads between them.

His name was Hong Rengan, and he was the Heavenly King's cousin. He had grown up near Hong Xiuquan in the same family village and had been among his first believers. But he arrived too late to join the first rising, and found himself hunted by the Qing instead, kidnapped for the bounty on his head, escaping, and living four days in a forest and six in a cave. He ended up in Hong Kong, where from 1855 he worked for the London Missionary Society beside the missionary James Legge. Legge was a Scot and a great scholar, who spent much of his life translating the Chinese classics into English. In Hong Kong he learned about European and American ideas of political economy, science, medicine and government, and Legge called him the most genial and versatile Chinese he had ever known. Legge constantly advised him to put thoughts of Nanjing behind him. Years before, in Hong Kong, the Swedish missionary Theodore Hamberg had translated Hong Rengan's story into English and published it, hoping to convince English readers that the rebels worshipped the same God they did. And Nanjing had been through a bloodbath. In 1856 a coup ended with the severed head of the Eastern King, who had run the capital and the armies, hung up for display, and six thousand of his followers massacred. The kingdom was tearing itself apart, and his cousin needed him. Then, in the late spring of 1858, while Legge was away in Britain on home leave, Hong Rengan disappeared. He left Legge's home in Hong Kong in May and travelled first to Canton. Then he set off alone, in disguise, to attempt the journey overland across seven hundred miles of war torn countryside to Nanjing. He was a scholar, not a soldier, in his mid thirties, and he had spent years in a British colony among missionaries. Now he had to pass as an ordinary Chinese traveller on roads full of soldiers, bandits and refugees. Imagine what that meant. He was the rebel king's own cousin, and the Qing would have executed him on the spot if they had caught him. If anyone had searched him properly, his name alone would have been enough to have him killed. The road north climbed through a mountain pass on the ridge between Guangdong and Jiangxi, the main gate from the south into the Yangtze valley. At the pass Qing sentries checked the travellers, but Hong Rengan, dressed as a peddler, was unremarkable to them, and he passed without incident. At one point he actually joined a unit of the imperial army, and when the Taiping attacked it, he had to flee in the chaos and butchery of defeat with only the clothes on his back. He still had gold leaf sewn into his jacket. He gave a piece of it to a soldier and became his partner in trade. In October a Qing patrol captured him and held him for several days. They searched him, but they did not think to open the seams of his coat, where along with the gold leaf he had hidden an outline of his family history, the one document that could have given him away. It is one of those details that makes you hold your breath. Had a single soldier slit that seam, the journey would have ended there, and so would he. And then, in December 1858, his road crossed Lord Elgin's. Here was the British fleet, on the river, close at hand. Hong Rengan tried to reach it. He could not get to see Wade, and he could not get passage on the ships. But he did convince one of the British sailors to take a letter back to James Legge and his other missionary friends in Hong Kong. Think of how close that was. The one man in China who knew both the British missionaries and the Heavenly King came within reach of the British envoy's ships, and the ships went on without him.

So he went on, on foot. The roads he took over the next months led through the war zone between the Qing armies and the Taiping, and he moved slowly, waiting for gaps between the fighting. On 22 April 1859, after nearly a year of travel, Hong Rengan arrived at last at the Heavenly Capital. His welcome at the outer lines was not warm. A Taiping patrol took him for a Qing spy. So he opened the seam of his jacket and took out the hidden scrap of paper that described his family history, and it convinced the commander that this stranger really did come from the Heavenly King's own village. The Nanjing he entered was not the city of the early years. It seemed nearly empty. The strict ideals of the first days had worn away, and opium had returned in force. The Taiping had banned opium on pain of death. The Heavenly King himself had retreated from public life, and spent his days behind the palace walls reading scripture, seen by almost no one but the women of the palace. But he saw his cousin. It was eight years since they had last seen each other, and by Hong Rengan's own account the reunion was bittersweet. For Hong Xiuquan, after the killings, here at last was someone from home he could trust: family, a believer from the very beginning, and a man who knew the foreigners' world. Hong Rengan brought that world with him. His knowledge of how English Protestants worshipped led to the improvement of many important forms of Taiping worship. He came at a moment when the kingdom badly needed someone. Since the killings, the ablest of the old generals, Shi Dakai, had led his army away for good, and the Heavenly King trusted almost no one outside his own family.

What happened next shocked the Taiping court. Remember how the kingdom was ruled. The Heavenly King sat at the top, and beneath him had been a handful of kings, each with his own title and his own army, who ran the state and fought the war. After the killings only a few were left, and the Heavenly King had promised there would be no more. Little more than two weeks after Hong Rengan arrived, the Heavenly King broke an earlier promise never to appoint another king, and made his cousin one. His title was the Shield King, meaning the defender of the kingdom, and with it came the post of chief minister. Hong Xiuquan put him in charge of the entire civil government of Nanjing, with rank equal to that of the dead Eastern King. And he announced to his ministers that from now on every matter in the capital that needed a decision would be referred to the sole authority of the Shield King. Imagine how that looked to the men who had fought for the kingdom for years. A man who had spent the war in Hong Kong with missionaries, who had never commanded troops, was suddenly placed above every general in the kingdom. Among them was Li Xiucheng, a soldier from a poor family who had risen through years of fighting to become one of the kingdom's best commanders. Hong Rengan's promotion over his head planted a burning seed of jealousy. Hong Rengan knew he had to win them over. So he stood before the court and spoke about the policies of the Eastern King, criticising them point by point and offering improvements. He had no army and no victories. What he had was his cousin's trust, his learning, and the ability to explain the foreign world. He decided to use all three. The crowd went silent. Before he spoke, when the crowd murmured and he tried to turn the post down, his cousin had whispered to him that all would be well. "The wave that crashes with great force," he said softly, "soon spends itself and leaves peace." Hong Rengan called on his people to rejuvenate China and resist the northern barbarians, in order to wipe out the humiliations of two hundred years. The northern barbarians were the Manchu rulers of the Qing, who had conquered China in 1644 and ruled it ever since. It worked, or at least he believed it did. As he remembered it later, the court accepted him as their model of wisdom. Now he had to show them what that wisdom was.

What Hong Rengan wrote next is one of the most remarkable documents of nineteenth century China. He called it a New Treatise on Aiding Government. He wrote it for his cousin and the Taiping leadership, and it carried the promise that they would have foreign help in building a Christian state in China. It was, in effect, the first truly global plan for reform in China's history. Start with how he wanted the Taiping to treat the foreigners. For centuries the Chinese court had called every outsider a barbarian. Hong Rengan wanted the word dropped, and replaced in dealings with the British by terms such as equality, friendship, harmony and affection. "Human beings are not willing to be considered inferior," he wrote, and the old system of tribute, in which foreign rulers sent gifts to the emperor as his subordinates, should be abandoned. He had noticed that the strongest and most prosperous nations in the modern world were the Protestant ones, England, the United States, Germany and the Scandinavian countries. The most powerful nation, in his eyes, was Great Britain, whose strength came from the intelligence of its people and its system of laws, which China should copy. He believed its ruling house had lasted a thousand years, longer than any dynasty in China. And he set China under its Manchu rulers beside Persia, a land where, as he saw it, the people accepted a slave's lot without complaint. But his greatest admiration was for the United States, which the Chinese called the Flowery Flag Country because of its stars and stripes. He called it the most righteous and wealthy country of all, and wrote that despite its military strength, "she does not encroach upon her neighboring countries". When gold was discovered in California, he noted, all comers were welcome, and the acceptance of foreigners in America was so wide that some of them had even become officials there. And he glowed about American democracy. "Those elected by the majority," he wrote, "are considered worthy and capable, and decisions reached by the majority are considered just." He wrote proudly of his foreign friends too, listing his missionary contacts from the strong countries, James Legge among them, and recalling that the late Theodore Hamberg, who had published his story, had been extremely fond of him. That list had a purpose. To the Taiping leaders, it promised that the foreign Christians would help them. And when the treatise was later leaked to the foreigners, a London review called it one of the most curious documents ever issued. Remember where this was being written. Inside a besieged rebel capital, by a cousin of a man who believed he was the son of God. Then he turned to the things that made a state strong. Beside religion, the greatest treasure, he set a long list of what he called middle treasures, including steamships, trains, clocks and watches, telescopes, sextants, and revolving guns. Siam, he pointed out, had learned to build steamships and made itself a country of wealth and civilisation. The Japanese, who unlike the Qing had opened willingly to foreign trade, would certainly become skilful in the future. He wanted patent laws, so that imitators would be punished and Chinese inventors would have the encouragement they needed to build machines that could match the Westerners'. He proposed railroads, at a time when there was not so much as a mile of track in his country. Many of these ideas would become catchphrases for Chinese reformers into the twentieth century and beyond. Within a few years, the Qing's own reforming officials would start to argue for some of the very same things, steamships, arsenals, foreign learning, to save the dynasty the Taiping meant to overthrow. He wanted newspapers of every imaginable description, from local dailies to provincial monthlies, with harsh punishments for false reporting. He wanted banks that would issue paper money, and insurance, and a postal service. He called for Christian institutions to care for orphans and widows, the disabled and the destitute. And alcohol, tobacco and opium would all be strictly forbidden. Set that last line beside the first half of this episode. The Qing had let opium in as a legal, taxed import, and the Taiping's new prime minister wanted it banned outright. The Heavenly King read his cousin's treatise and wrote his approval beside most of its proposals. So here is the question this episode leaves us with. Could the Taiping have become something new? Think about what we have seen in this episode. On one side, a Qing court that had just legalised opium under foreign pressure and still hoped to wriggle out of the treaties. On the other, a rebel minister calling for railways, a free press, equality with the West and a ban on opium. For a moment it looked possible. The rebels had at their head a man who wanted railways, banks, newspapers, equality with the West and friendship with Britain, while the court in Beijing still hoped the treaties could be torn up. But the Heavenly Kingdom was also a theocracy at war, led by a king who seldom left his palace, with generals who resented the newcomer. A plan on paper is not a state. And the British, whose friendship Hong Rengan was counting on, had just shown on the river at Nanjing how little they understood the Taiping, and how little they cared to. In any case, events far to the north were about to take Britain's attention away from the Yangtze altogether. Next time: Elgin's younger brother, Frederick Bruce, sails north with the ratified treaty for the exchange in Beijing. He insists on taking the river route past the Dagu forts, and the man now in charge of the coast's defence is the Mongol general Sengge Rinchen.

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