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Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 18

The Eastern Campaign

Hong Rengan plans to save the besieged Heavenly Capital by a feint, and his general Li Xiucheng, the Loyal King, carries it out: Hangzhou, the siege of Nanjing broken, and a sweep east into the richest country in China. The episode follows the two men from that triumph to the gates of Shanghai, where Li expects fellow Christians and meets British and French guns, while Britain and France are at war with the Qing in the north, and asks why the foreigners chose the dynasty. It hears scholars and foreign observers most, with the Taiping in Li Xiucheng's own letter and refugees fleeing to Shanghai.

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Transcript

Last time, Britain's minister Frederick Bruce tried to force his way up the river at Dagu to have the treaty of Tianjin ratified in Beijing, and the Mongol prince Sengge Rinchen's guns sank four of his gunboats and cut his landing party down in the mud. An American envoy took the road the court offered instead, and went home with his treaty ratified but without ever seeing the emperor. In London, Palmerston wanted blood, and Britain and France sent Lord Elgin back to China with an army of some 24,000 men. And in the spring of 1860, the court rejected their ultimatum outright. So by the summer of 1860, Britain and France were at war with the Qing dynasty in the north. Keep that in mind, because this episode happens in the south, where those same two powers were about to do something very strange. This is an episode about a choice that would decide the whole war. When the foreigners in China had to pick between the dynasty they were fighting and the Christian rebels who called them brothers, which would they pick, and why? To see how that choice was made, we need to follow two men on the rebel side, one with a plan and one with an army. We start in Nanjing, the city the Taiping called the Heavenly Capital. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was a rebel state inspired by Protestant Christianity, founded by Hong Xiuquan, a failed examination candidate who believed he was the younger brother of Jesus, sent to drive the Manchu demons out of China. Hong Xiuquan had read a Christian tract, and it unlocked the meaning of visions he had seen six years before: the old man with the golden beard who commanded him was God, and the elder brother who helped him slay demons was Jesus Christ. His very first converts were his cousin Hong Rengan and a neighbour named Feng Yunshan. On 11 January 1851 Hong Xiuquan declared the founding of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, with himself as the Heavenly King. His followers had taken Nanjing in 1853 and made it their capital, and from that year Qing armies had been camped around it, in two great fortified camps, one south of the Yangtze and one north of it. The southern camp had dug in just ten days after Nanjing fell, and it had stayed there almost ever since. Yet the blockade of Nanjing was neither close nor effectual. But the camps never went away, and every year they pressed a little tighter. By 1860 supplies were hard to get into the city, and its garrison had been reduced to destitution. Something had to give. And the kingdom inside the walls was not what it had been. In 1856 the Taiping leaders had turned on each other. The Eastern King, the kingdom's chief minister and general, was killed, his severed head hung on a wall across from the Heavenly King's palace, and Taiping troops massacred six thousand of his followers and every member of his family. After that, the Heavenly King withdrew from public life, and spent his days behind the palace walls reading scripture. Opium, once banned by the Taiping, had returned to the city in force. The kingdom had armies and generals, but nobody to hold it together. Inside the walls was the man we left there last time. Hong Rengan was the Heavenly King's cousin, who had crossed Qing China in disguise to reach Nanjing, and within weeks of his arrival had been made a king and put in charge of the entire civil government of the city. He had lived for years among missionaries in Hong Kong, and he had never commanded an army. In Hong Kong he had worked for the London Missionary Society beside the Scottish missionary James Legge, who called him "the most genial and versatile Chinese I have ever known." There he had learned about European and American ideas of political economy, science, medicine and government. Legge had advised him constantly to put thoughts of Nanjing behind him, and for years he seemed to take that advice to heart. His promotion over the heads of the generals who had fought for the kingdom since the beginning had planted a burning seed of jealousy. Now he had to show that a scholar with a head full of railways and newspapers could also save a city. Hong Rengan's plan began with a map. The besiegers' southern camp depended on a supply line, and that supply line was anchored at Hangzhou, 150 miles southeast of Nanjing. Hangzhou was the capital of Zhejiang province, one of the great cities of China, rich on silk and tea, and famous for the lake beside its walls. There is an old saying: above is Heaven, and below are Suzhou and Hangzhou. So a small force would strike at Hangzhou, far to the east. The besiegers would have to send men to save it, and the lines around Nanjing would grow thin. It was a feint, a blow struck in one place to draw the enemy away from another. But Hong Rengan wanted more than a feint. He argued that the east was the direction the kingdom should go anyway. "The land there is vast," he noted, "and the treasuries are flush." Take the east, with its wealthy cities of Suzhou and Hangzhou, cut the north off from the grain it lived on, and the Qing dynasty, he argued, would starve and wither away. Every year a vast quantity of rice from the lower Yangtze was shipped north to feed Beijing and its garrisons. This was the grain tribute, and the capital could not live without it. And with the east in hand, Hong Rengan proposed to rent or buy twenty steamships from the foreigners in Shanghai, to give the Taiping command of the Yangtze. That was the heart of it. Hong Rengan's whole strategy for winning the war depended on support from the British and Americans in Shanghai. His treatise on government had spelled out why. It was the Protestant Christian nations, England, the United States, Germany and the Scandinavian countries, that he believed were the strongest and most prosperous in the modern world. He wanted China to deal with them as equals, and to learn from them: steamships, trains, telescopes and revolving guns, and railways in a country that did not yet have a mile of track. He even admired the way Americans chose their leaders. "Those elected by the majority," he wrote, "are considered worthy and capable, and decisions reached by the majority are considered just." And in his new China, alcohol, tobacco and opium would be strictly forbidden. A Taiping China built on that plan would have been, of all things, a natural partner for Victorian Britain. That, at least, was the bet. The Heavenly King put him in charge of foreign relations. Not everyone liked taking strategy from a newcomer. Hong Rengan answered his critics that he had not hidden from difficulty, but had risked his life to come to their aid. "How can I be the kind of person who covets salary and prestige?" Hold on to that plan, with its two halves: the march east, and the friendship of the foreigners at Shanghai. This episode is the story of what happened to each of them. By the end of the summer, both halves would be tested, and only one would survive.

Li Xiucheng
Li Xiucheng. John Smith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

To carry out the first half, the kingdom needed its best general. Li Xiucheng was a poor man's son from Guangxi in the far south, who had burned charcoal and worked as a labourer before joining the Taiping as a common soldier in 1851. He had risen through the ranks on talent alone, and by 1860 he was the most gifted commander the kingdom had. The Heavenly King had made him a king too, with the title of the Loyal King. In the Taiping kingdom, the kings were the top commanders and ministers of state, each with his own court and army. And Li was one of the men who had watched Hong Rengan promoted over his head. Yet it was Li who would carry out Hong Rengan's plan, and carry it out brilliantly. On 10 February 1860, Li Xiucheng left Nanjing by the one route still open, through Pukou across the river to the north, with six thousand handpicked soldiers disguised in imperial uniforms. Pukou was the town on the north bank of the Yangtze, facing Nanjing across the water. For a month his little army marched south and east, through country held by the Qing. He arrived at Hangzhou without warning on 11 March. His men first took the time to plant hundreds of Taiping banners in the hills outside the city walls, so the defenders would think a far greater army had come. Then his sappers tunnelled under the walls and blasted open a breach on 19 March. Sappers were soldiers who dug, tunnelling under a city wall to pack the end of the tunnel with gunpowder and bring the wall down. The Taiping poured into the city. But Hangzhou, like every great city of the empire, had a fortress inside it. The Manchu bannermen and their families lived in their own walled quarter within the city, a garrison inside a garrison, and they fought there with nowhere else to go. After six days, Li still could not break into the Manchu garrison. What happened inside Hangzhou in those days was a horror of a different kind. The women of the city, terrified of what the Taiping would do to them, hanged themselves, poisoned themselves, stabbed themselves with knives, and threw themselves into wells to drown. By the end, tens of thousands of them had died this way. Remember Hangzhou. The news of what happened there travelled down every canal in the region, and it would shape how the people of Shanghai, Chinese and foreign alike, saw the Taiping. And back at Nanjing, the feint worked. The commander of the siege, Zhang Guoliang, did exactly what Hong Rengan had hoped. He shifted nearly a quarter of his total siege force to relieve Hangzhou. Zhang Guoliang had once been an outlaw himself, before he went over to the government side and became one of its toughest commanders. As an outlaw he had led a 10,000 strong bandit army that ravaged the province. By the time the relief force reached Hangzhou, Li had given up the fight for the garrison and slipped away. He was heading back toward Nanjing, fast.

Frederick Townsend Ward
Frederick Townsend Ward. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Before we follow him, let's look at the city that feared the Taiping most. Shanghai had been open to foreign trade since the first Opium War. Beside its old walled Chinese city, the British, French and Americans had built settlements of their own along the river, and it had become the busiest port on the coast. It was rich, it was crowded, and it was almost undefended. Most of the allied troops in China were being gathered for the war in the north. And Shanghai had seen rebellion up close before. In September 1853, a secret society called the Small Swords, sympathetic to the Taiping, rose and took the walled Chinese city. They held it for seventeen months, hemmed in by the imperial forces on one side and the foreign settlements on the other, until February 1855. The foreigners had told both sides that the foreign ground could not be used for attack or for defence. And when imperial troops pressed too close to the settlements in April 1854, a force of about 400 foreign marines, sailors and volunteers drove them back. Refugees poured into the foreign settlements, and the plan to keep them purely foreign was defeated for good. When the imperial army finally took the Chinese city back, upwards of 2,000 people were put to death within three days. So Shanghai's people knew what an army entering a city could do, whichever side it was on. And as word of Hangzhou spread, Shanghai's wealthy merchants did what rich men do when the army will not protect them. They hired their own. The man they hired was an American named Frederick Townsend Ward. Much of the money came from a wealthy Shanghai banker named Yang Fang, who would one day become Ward's father in law. Ward was from Salem, in Massachusetts, a sailor and soldier of fortune not yet thirty years old. He had fought under the American filibuster William Walker in Nicaragua, and served as his training officer, in 1853. Filibusters were private adventurers who raised small armies in the United States to invade the countries of Latin America. Walker would go on to make himself president of Nicaragua for a time. Walker's own luck ran out that same year, 1860, in front of a firing squad in Honduras. Ward had chosen a good moment to leave the trade. Ward came to China in 1859, and his plan, remarkably, was to join the rebels in overthrowing the Manchu government. He never managed to reach the Taiping. Instead he found work on a French steamer called the Confucius, hired by wealthy Chinese merchants against river pirates, and with it he came under the orders of the daotai of Shanghai. The daotai was the senior Qing official at Shanghai, in charge of the city's administration and of its dealings with the foreigners. So the man who had come to fight for the rebels ended up working for the dynasty. In June 1860 Ward organised his force, with another American adventurer, Burgevine, as his lieutenant. There were about two hundred Europeans and Americans in the unit, and they were paid a hundred dollars a month per man. That was a fortune for a sailor off the waterfront. And the sponsors promised a reward of more than a hundred thousand dollars if the foreign contingent could defeat the Taiping garrison at Songjiang, a walled town southwest of Shanghai. Ward's army was strictly illegal, a bald violation of the neutrality ordinance, and he enlisted so many deserters that his wounded men could not go to Shanghai for treatment without being arrested. In time that small force would be known by a grand name, the Ever Victorious Army. We'll come back to how Ward's men did when the fighting started.

Now, back to Li Xiucheng, and to the turn of this whole story. With Zhang Guoliang's lines around Nanjing thinned, the Taiping struck. Taiping forces totalling more than a hundred thousand men converged on the besiegers' southern camp and overran it from three directions. On 3 May, the garrison of Nanjing sallied out from every gate of the city, while the relief armies broke the lines. Their vanguard, nearly 20,000 men, had been mounted for the occasion after a successful raid for horses. The besiegers' camp collapsed. During the retreat, a Manchu general committed suicide by eating raw opium. And Zhang Guoliang, the former outlaw who had taken the emperor's side, drowned while trying to escape from Danyang. By one estimate, the imperial armies lost no less than 60,000 men in the battle and the pursuit. Many of those men were not killed in battle but simply melted away, deserting, scattering into the countryside, or turning up later in other armies, including the Taiping's own. The siege that had hemmed in the Heavenly Capital since 1853 was over. The roads out of Nanjing were open again, and the Taiping could look outward instead of inward. For Hong Rengan, it was a vindication. His plan had worked exactly as he said it would. And for the Qing, it was a catastrophe. Think about where the dynasty stood that spring and summer. In the north, the court had rejected the allies' ultimatum, and Britain and France were sending their great army to invade. In the south, the great camp that had besieged the rebel capital almost since it fell had just been destroyed. And the emperor in Beijing was not yet thirty, surrounded by hardliners, and as far as anyone could tell, determined to fight both wars at once. The southern camp had been the last great army of the dynasty's regular troops in the lower Yangtze, and with it gone there was nothing standing between the Taiping and the richest country in China. Within weeks the court turned to Zeng Guofan, the scholar who had built the Hunan Army, and made him governor general of the region, because there was hardly anyone else left. Zeng had built his army because he knew how bad the old regular troops were. Of the Green Standard soldiers he wrote: "As soon as they spy the enemy, they run away". His own soldiers were recruited by officers from their own home districts, to fight alongside their neighbours. Years before, when Zeng's army retook Wuchang in 1854, one of the emperor's counsellors had warned that an army of 10,000 men loyal to a Hunanese provincial official would not be a blessing to the empire. And in the heart of the war, the dynasty had no capable commanders left. Zeng's army was a provincial army, raised and paid by its own commander, loyal to him rather than to the throne. Giving him the region was a bargain the dynasty would pay for later.

Now Li turned east, the direction Hong Rengan had argued the kingdom should go. After driving the imperial troops to Danyang and capturing it on 19 May, his armies moved swiftly down the Yangtze, taking Changzhou a week later and Wuxi three days after that. These were rich old cities on the Grand Canal, the great man made waterway that ran through the heart of the region. The lower Yangtze was the richest country in China: a flat, wet land of rice fields and mulberry trees for silk, laced with canals, with walled towns every few miles. "The glow of the fires illuminates the sky," wrote a Chinese observer near Shanghai, "and the cries of the people shake the earth." Rumours ran ahead of the army. A million Taiping soldiers under Li Xiucheng, it was said, were on the move toward Shanghai, with a flotilla of ten thousand boats. The country the Taiping were entering had already learned what this war could do. When Lord Elgin sailed up the Yangtze, he had passed the city of Zhenjiang, which had held more than three hundred thousand people before the war. No more than a few hundred remained, scratching out a ghostly existence. "I never before saw such a scene of desolation," he wrote. The people, he thought, regarded the war "with feelings akin to those with which they would have regarded earthquake, or pestilence, or any other providential scourge." Now the scourge was moving east, into the richest and most crowded country in China. Gentry families loaded what silver they could carry onto boats and fled toward Shanghai, and the poor followed on foot, until the city and its suburbs were packed with refugees. A loyalist diarist in the region wrote that his generation had nowhere to set its foot, and that "our voices can do no more than sigh." The Taiping fed that despair. A proclamation in Wujiang, near Suzhou, declared: "The emperor of the Qing is the emperor of a lost country". So what did the Taiping armies actually do to the people in their path? The honest answer is that it depended on where you were standing. In the town of Changshu, a witness estimated that 10,000 Taiping soldiers passed through in the autumn of 1860, and noted that they caused no harm at all to the townspeople. Changshu was a prosperous county town in the rice country north of Suzhou, and the witness was one of its own people, writing down what he saw. But the same witness saw what came on the fringes. Stragglers behind the army broke into houses to commit robbery, rape, and murder. Vanguard parties carried off women. They carried off young boys as conscripts and trained them to kill. Where the generals resided, he found, there was relative order. The worst came from the bands at the edges, beyond any commander's eye. In the towns they held for any length of time, the Taiping registered households, handed out door placards as proof of submission, and collected taxes, much as the Qing officials had done before them. One countryman told a passing missionary that it mattered very little who was emperor, so long as people were left in peace and quiet. Both of those things were true at once, and for the families in the path of the army, there was no way to know in advance which kind of Taiping would arrive. In village after village, people had to make that guess. Some local gentry raised militias to fight. Others paid the Taiping what they asked, and hoped. Many simply ran. And most of the burning, that missionary added, was done by the imperial troops before the Taiping even arrived.

Then came the greatest prize of all. If Hangzhou had been the feint and Nanjing the turn, Suzhou was the reward. Suzhou was the jewel of the region: the seat of the governor of Jiangsu province, a city of silk, scholars and gardens on the Grand Canal. Its wartime population was two million. Its defenders did not wait for the enemy to do damage. The imperial troops themselves burned and devastated its once rich suburbs. Li's forces arrived before the city's walls on 2 June 1860, and sympathizers inside simply opened the gates to welcome their new masters. The richest city in the region fell almost without a fight. The governor of Jiangsu died as his capital fell, and the officials who survived fled east toward Shanghai with everyone else. For the wealthy of Suzhou, there was another kind of ending. They were the ones most likely to commit suicide, and they did, in droves, as Suzhou and the other cities fell. These were the families who had run China for centuries, the landowners and degree holders, the class that sat the examinations and filled the ranks of officials. To them, the Taiping were not just an army. They were the end of the world they knew. Li Xiucheng now held court in Suzhou. It was quite a prize for a man whose family had scraped a living from hill farming and making charcoal: the legendary city of gardens, its merchant homes flush with treasure. From there, he later wrote, he had the general command of upwards of one thousand officers, and several tens of thousands of soldiers. In Jiangsu, the province that held Shanghai, the Taiping now had its capital, Suzhou, along with the major cities of Danyang and Wuxi. Upriver in Anhui they still held Anqing. By September 1860, the rebels controlled every county around Shanghai except those under the direct protection of foreigners. For the dynasty this was more than a lost province. The lower Yangtze had been its richest source of taxes, and the source of the grain tribute that fed Beijing. At the very moment the British and French were preparing to march on the capital, the capital's rice bowl was falling to the rebels. Hong Rengan's march east had worked. Now for the second half of his plan: the friends at Shanghai.

From Suzhou to Shanghai was about eighty miles. Even before Suzhou fell, Shanghai's officials were frantic. On 23 May, the Shanghai daotai called on the British and French consuls to ask, officially, that the allied forces protect Shanghai against the Taiping rebels. The daotai hounded Frederick Bruce for British help. If the Taiping captured Shanghai, he warned, they would shut down all foreign trade and drive out the British settlers. Bruce had been at Shanghai since the defeat at Dagu. And his own brother passed through on the way to war. Lord Elgin reached Shanghai at the end of June 1860, on his way north to join the army. So the two Bruce brothers stood in the same city that summer, one going north to fight the Qing, the other staying south and being asked to protect them. Stop for a moment and look at how strange this was. Britain and France were at war with the Qing. Their army was gathering at that very moment to march on Beijing. And here was a Qing official asking those same two powers to defend a Qing city against the Qing's own rebels. Bruce, still embarrassed by Dagu, was determined to act with perfect neutrality and have nothing to do with the conflict. Neutrality had been Britain's word for the Taiping war from the start. In April 1853, Britain's governor and envoy in China, Sir George Bonham, had sailed up to Nanjing to see the Taiping, and concluded that the true policy for Britain was strict neutrality between the two sides. No government capable of replacing the Qing dynasty, he judged, seemed to have been set up. On that same visit, when a British consular officer began reciting the Ten Commandments, a Taiping leader laid a hand on his shoulder and exclaimed twice that they were "the same as ourselves". And in 1858, the Heavenly King himself had written to Lord Elgin's fleet, summoning the foreign younger brothers to join in "extinguishing the stinking reptiles." The Taiping kept calling the British brothers. Britain kept answering with neutrality. When the daotai asked Bruce to send a British force to Suzhou, he had flatly refused. "No course could be so well calculated to lower our national reputation," Bruce worried, "as to lend our material support to a Government the corruption of whose authorities is only checked by its weakness." He had seen what the dynasty's soldiers did. Beaten in the field, they "have revenged themselves for their defeat by pillaging the defenceless villages on their line of retreat," he reported. But Shanghai itself was a different matter. Bruce asked London for permission to defend the walled Chinese city, as he put it, "to prevent, if possible, the scenes of bloodshed and pillage being enacted here" that had followed the recent rebel assault on Hangzhou. There it is. Hangzhou. Bruce and the French minister issued a proclamation undertaking to protect the city and the foreign settlements against any attack. The French had their own concession at Shanghai, a strip of riverfront between the British settlement and the old walled city, and its suburbs ran right up to the city's gates. It was a promise with very little behind it. There were only a handful of British cannons to be dragged together, along with a few hundred inexperienced volunteers to man the walls. On his own initiative, Bruce began to call up volunteers. He could not wait for London's answer. A letter from Shanghai took the better part of two months to reach London, and the reply as long again, so whatever Bruce did that summer, he would do on his own judgement. And his judgement was that Shanghai, the Chinese city as well as the foreign settlements, would be defended. And Ward's mercenaries went to war. Their first attack on Songjiang was a fiasco. The men got drunk, and they made so much noise singing and swearing and arguing among themselves that they woke the Taiping sentries, who cut them to pieces when they tried to climb the ladders. Ward went in again in July with about 500 troops. Some of his men were trapped against the wall, and the defenders dropped stinkpots filled with burning sulphur on them all night long. A stinkpot was a clay pot packed with burning sulphur and powder, thrown down from the walls to choke and burn the men below. This time Ward took Songjiang, and with it his reward. Then, on 1 August 1860, they set out to attack the other strategic city near Shanghai, Qingpu, ten miles to the northwest. This time it went badly wrong. The Taiping in Qingpu had foreign gunners of their own, under an English coastal pilot named Savage, and Ward's imperial backup never showed up. Ward himself took a bullet that punched through both cheeks and disfigured him for the rest of his life. The man who had come to China meaning to join the rebels had now been shot fighting them. And this was the summer the Taiping were coming to Shanghai believing the foreigners were their friends. From where Li Xiucheng stood, foreigners were attacking Taiping garrisons for pay, and when they came back to Qingpu two weeks later, he joined the fight against them himself.

Not every foreigner in Shanghai saw the Taiping as monsters, though. Some of the people who most wanted to know the truth about them were missionaries. In early July 1860, a boat set out from Shanghai for Suzhou, eighty miles away, carrying five British and American missionaries. One of them, a London Missionary Society man named Joseph Edkins, had a private errand. James Legge had written asking him to find out what he could about the fate of their mutual friend, Hong Rengan. There had been no news from Hong Rengan since the letter he sent by way of Elgin's ship. On the fourth night out, their boat was stopped in the dark. For hundreds of yards in front of them, all they could make out on the still surface of the water were the bodies of the dead, jamming the canal like logs. When they met a party of Taiping cavalry and asked after Hong Rengan, the answer was utterly astounding: he was now prime minister in Nanjing, second only to the Heavenly King. The quiet mission assistant they had known in Hong Kong was running a kingdom. The rebels impressed them. Griffith John, one of the party, described them as "strong in muscle, free and bold in manner, and open in countenance". Griffith John was a young Welsh missionary, and he would spend the rest of a long life in China. In Suzhou they saw what the Taiping did to the old gods. "It is common to see the nose, chin, and hands cut off" the wooden idols in the temples, and some were set out on hillsides as decoys. At Li Xiucheng's headquarters they found themselves welcomed with a six-gun salute, with drums and gongs. Edkins came away saying Li had "the character of a good man," a commander who kept his troops disciplined to protect the suffering. When the missionaries raised the silk trade, the lifeblood of Shanghai's merchants, Li replied that such trade was exactly what his regime desired. Of the stories of Taiping cruelty, Edkins wrote, "in this there has been much exaggeration and misrepresentation." Long hairs was what people called the Taiping, because they refused to shave the front of the head and wear the queue, the braid the Manchu rulers required of every Chinese man. "They seem now to be taking a hold of this empire with an iron grasp," Edkins wrote, "and treading it like conquerors." His wife Jane wrote that July: "These rebels keep sabbath as we do, they pray to God daily, they read the Scriptures, they break the idols". "I profess to be a rebel at heart somehow," she admitted. Then the missionaries went back, and this time they met the man they had been looking for. They left Shanghai at the end of July, reached Suzhou early in August, and had an interview with the Shield King himself on the day they arrived. He put off his crown and robe, dismissed his officers, and sat down with them for a free and confidential conversation. Before dinner, he proposed that they sing a hymn and pray together. He started the tune himself, and, one of them wrote, sang "with remarkable correctness, warmth, and energy." He told them that he had left Hong Kong for Nanjing solely to preach the Gospel, and had asked his cousin to let him do it. "The chief, however, would not hear of it, but insisted upon his immediate promotion to the rank of king." He told them repeatedly that he had been much happier as a mission assistant in Hong Kong than he was now, for all his dignity and power. Yet he was thoroughly devoted to the new dynasty, he said, and determined to live or die with it. He had even written a prayer for the use of the soldiers, which the missionaries thought remarkably good. When they prayed together, he asked that the idols might perish, that the temples become chapels, and that pure Christianity should soon be the religion of China. He wanted missionaries in Nanjing, as many as he could get. "I cannot do much," he said, "but if you will come, I will get you chapels, exhort the people to attend, and will attend myself regularly." It was the same spirit as his plan for the kingdom, which had called for dealing with the Western powers on terms of "equality, friendship, harmony and affection." They rode back to their boat on horses, under escort, late at night. When they called on him again the next day, they found him considerably agitated. A foreign merchant was already there, waiting on him. He had heard that the letters he had sent to the foreign representatives at Shanghai had not been opened, and that the city was held by English as well as French soldiers. The first, he said, was a personal insult to himself. The second was a direct violation of the neutrality foreigners should keep between the two sides. The missionaries told him these were matters with which they had nothing to do. But, one of them admitted, they could not help feeling a secret sympathy with him.

Those unopened letters had gone to Frederick Bruce. In late July, a British consul named Thomas Taylor Meadows, who spoke Chinese and thought Bruce dead wrong about the rebellion, presented him with a sealed letter from Li Xiucheng. A consul was a government's official in a foreign port, who looked after its merchants and dealt with the local authorities. Bruce declined to open it, saying he didn't want to involve himself with the rebels. When a letter came from Hong Rengan as well, Bruce told the consul to take no notice of it. It was, he wrote, "both inexpedient and objectionable on principle that Her Majesty's Consuls should hold any communication with the insurgents at Suzhou". What Bruce did not read was a promise. Li's letter said the Taiping would take only the Chinese part of Shanghai. The rebels had no quarrel whatsoever with their foreign brethren, and pledged not to harm any of them or their property. He even asked the foreigners to stay indoors when his army came, hoisting yellow flags above their doors to signify that there were foreigners in the house. Yellow was the Taiping's colour, the colour of their banners and their kings' robes. Bruce did try to send the rebels a warning that he meant to defend Shanghai. But the crew of the boat came back without finding anyone they could give it to. So the two sides went toward Shanghai each holding half a conversation. One had written and not been read. The other had written and found no one to read it. It is worth pausing on what that refusal meant. Bruce held it objectionable on principle for his consuls to communicate with the insurgents, and he would not open their letters even to hear what they had to say. So the one promise that might have kept the peace at Shanghai, that no foreigner would be harmed, sat unopened on a British desk.

On the afternoon of 17 August 1860, the sky to the west of Shanghai grew dark with the smoke of distant burning. The next day, the Taiping occupied the Jesuit mission at Xujiahui, six miles from the river side of Shanghai. The Jesuits were a Catholic religious order, and they had been working in this corner of China, off and on, for more than two centuries. Xujiahui stood on land that had belonged to the family of Xu Guangqi, a scholar and official of the Ming dynasty and the most famous Chinese convert of his age. On the Catholic church there, a proclamation from the Loyal King was found posted, ordering his officers and soldiers that no foreign property was to be injured, on pain of beheading. It announced that he had received the Heavenly decree to lead his soldiers everywhere to fight, and that his soldiers had now come to Shanghai. Those are not the words of a man planning to massacre foreigners. They read like the words of a man who believes he has come to an understanding. The great invasion Shanghai had dreaded turned out to be an absurdly small force, a few thousand men at most, and only lightly armed. If Li's unread letter meant what it said, they had come to take only the Chinese city, and to talk with the foreigners once they arrived. What happened at the walls over the next few days matters for how we judge everyone involved. Here the sources disagree. In one telling, the Taiping made determined assaults on the west and south gates, and were driven back by the troops defending the city, mostly British marines, Sikhs and artillery from Madras. In the other, they hardly fought at all. They didn't shoot back. A correspondent in Shanghai wrote that when they came near the walls, "They waved the hand, begged our officers not to fire," and stood there motionless, hoping to open communication and explain why they had come. Instead, he wrote, a heavy fire of rifles and grape was kept up on them for about two hours, until they retired with a loss estimated at two hundred. Grape was grapeshot: a cannon load of small iron balls that sprayed out like a giant shotgun. Where only British troops faced them, it was said, the Taiping did not fire at all, and aimed only at the imperial Chinese soldiers mixed in with them on the walls, wounding no foreigner. The next day the shelling began again. "The Insurgents stood it for several hours like men of stone," the correspondent wrote, without returning a single shot. One well-aimed shell from half a mile away arced lazily through the air and dropped right in the middle of a band of Taiping, flattening the man who carried their black flag. Li Xiucheng himself was hit. A piece of shell struck him on the cheek, and left him with a slight impediment of speech. The British commanders, meanwhile, made a point of ordering that no Taiping prisoners be turned over to the Qing authorities, to show they were nobody's ally. Among the defenders were Sikhs and artillery from Madras, protecting a Qing city in the very week the allied army in the north was capturing the Qing's forts at Dagu. Madras was the great British city on the southeast coast of India, base of one of the East India Company's three armies. If you wanted one picture of how tangled this war had become, that would be it. One paper in China called the whole affair "a gross and unmitigated error".

And then there was the burning. Around the walled Chinese city of Shanghai lay its suburbs, crowded streets of houses, shops and warehouses that had spilled outside the walls along the river. Early on the morning of 19 August, French troops moved through those crowded settlements under the city walls, firing their muskets at will and setting fire to the houses and shops. The military reason was to clear a field of fire, so that nothing stood between the guns on the walls and an attacker. What it looked like on the ground was something else. A correspondent in Shanghai described French soldiers "murdering men, women, and children, without the least discrimination." One man was stabbed right through as he lay smoking his opium pipe. A woman who had just given birth to a child was bayoneted. The beautiful temple of the Queen of Heaven was set on fire by the French, and the fire spread until most of the eastern suburb was gone. The Queen of Heaven was the goddess of the sea, the patron of sailors and boatmen up and down the China coast. The British burned the southern and western suburbs. Between them, the allied garrison fired all the suburbs of the city, the busy commercial quarter by the river among them. One witness estimated that the French left tens of thousands of Chinese homeless, in the course of defending against a lightly armed Taiping force of 3,000 at most. These were the people the defence of Shanghai was supposed to protect. Some of them had already fled the Taiping once, from towns upriver, and come to Shanghai because it was the one place the war was not supposed to reach. They had found the war anyway, and it had come at them from the side that was meant to be their shield.

On 21 August 1860, two days after his men were driven back from Shanghai under a storm of grapeshot and canister, Li Xiucheng wrote to the British and American consuls. Canister was a tin case packed with musket balls that burst open as it left the cannon's mouth, the deadliest thing a gun could fire at close range. "I came to Shanghai to make a treaty in order to see us connected together by trade and commerce," he wrote. "I did not come for the purpose of fighting with you." He blamed the French. Some of them, he said, had come to Suzhou earlier that summer and invited him to Shanghai to discuss friendly relations. "It never occurred to my mind," he wrote, "that the French, allowing themselves to be deluded by the imperial demons, would break their word and turn their backs on the arrangement made." He had been told the Qing had paid the French a large sum to defend Shanghai, and he was sure the other nations had taken their share of the emperor's money as well. Deceitful forgetfulness of earlier arrangements, he wrote, was the real cause of the wrong the foreign nations had done. "It is impossible that the affair should be forgotten," he warned. As for the French, "With human feelings, and in human affairs, all acts have their consequences," he wrote. "The French have violated their faith, and broken the peace between us." Out of magnanimity, he said, he would not personally stop them coming into Taiping territory. But he could not answer for his officers and soldiers, who were now "filled with indignation, and desirous of revenge." It was only a matter of time, he noted, until the Taiping held all of China, and then the French would have their day of reckoning. But he was willing to forgive the British and Americans, because they were his fellow Protestants. "You and we alike worship Jesus," he reminded them. "There exists between us the relationship of a common basis and common doctrines." Li signed the letter, but the thinking behind it was Hong Rengan's: a strategy that had depended, from the start, on friendship with the British and Americans at Shanghai. The Taiping withdrew on 23 August, and Shanghai was not troubled again that year. So why did the foreigners choose the dynasty? They had refused its requests, despised its soldiers, and at that very moment they were at war with it in the north. Part of the answer was trade. The daotai had warned Bruce that the Taiping would shut down foreign trade, and Bruce never opened the letters that said otherwise. Part of it was Hangzhou, and the fear of the same thing happening behind Shanghai's walls. And part of it was the war in the north. The allies said Shanghai was a base for their troops there, and would be defended as a purely military measure. And there was the old judgement from 1853, that the rebels had set up no government that could replace the dynasty. The missionaries had gone to Suzhou and come back impressed, but the men in authority did not read what the Taiping wrote. Whatever the mix, Hong Rengan's great hope of a Christian friendship with the West had met the West at the walls of Shanghai, and been answered with grapeshot. His twenty steamships from Shanghai now looked a very long way off. And the Loyal King, who had carried out the plan, was nursing a shell wound in his cheek from the guns at Shanghai. In those very same weeks, the British and French army we watched gather last time had landed in the north and was fighting its way toward Beijing. Next time, we follow Lord Elgin and his interpreter Harry Parkes on the road to Beijing, where a negotiation is about to turn into a hostage crisis.

Sources