Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 20

The Summer Palace

Prince Gong, left behind in Beijing by his fleeing brother, has to bargain for a capital with the allies at its gates and their captured envoys in his prisons. The episode follows Prince Gong and Lord Elgin from the release of the surviving hostages to the looting and burning of the Summer Palace and the convention that ended the war, while in his camp in the south Zeng Guofan is ordered to send his best troops north, and asks whether the burning was justice or vandalism. It leans on scholars and British officials, with the court in its own edicts and a little Chinese public voice on the peace.

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Transcript

Last time, on the afternoon of the eighteenth of September 1860, Harry Parkes, Lord Elgin's interpreter and chief negotiator, was taken prisoner under a flag of truce by Sengge Rinchen's army, along with twenty five other foreigners who had crossed the lines to Tongzhou with him. Parkes and Elgin's private secretary were carried to Beijing in chains and locked in the prison of the Board of Punishments to wait for their execution. Three days later, at the bridge of Baliqiao, British guns broke the emperor's Mongol cavalry, and the road to the capital lay open. And the Xianfeng Emperor slipped out of Beijing and fled north to his mountain retreat at Rehe, leaving his younger brother, Prince Gong, behind to make peace with the allies. So this is where we are. An emperor in the mountains. An allied army of British, French and Indian troops a day's march from his capital. And in the middle, a young prince who now holds the most valuable prisoners in China, and has no army left to protect them or himself. This episode asks a hard question about what happened next, and I'm going to let the people who were there argue it out. When the British burned the emperor's great garden palace, was it justice, or was it vandalism? But before we get to the fire, we need to go to the prison. It was quite dark when the cart carrying Parkes and the secretary turned through a gateway into a large courtyard. Men came forward with paper lanterns, and the secretary felt Parkes shudder as he read the characters written on them. Parkes could read Chinese. He told his companion that this was worse than he had expected. They were in the hands of the torturers, in the worst prison in China, the Board of Punishments. Even by Chinese standards, the secretary wrote, it was the most dreaded prison in the empire. Men lifted Parkes out of the cart and led him through a door. A quarter of an hour of painful waiting followed. With the secretary in the cart was Nal Sing, one of the troopers taken with them. The secretary told him where they were, and told him to keep up his spirits. The trooper answered that he did not fear. If he did not die today, he said, he might die tomorrow, and he was past sixty, and he was with them. Then they heard the clank of chains. The secretary raised himself and looked over the side of the cart, and saw Parkes with a heavy chain hanging from his neck, being led along between two men, with another behind carrying a lantern. He asked Parkes how he was. The chains were not very heavy, Parkes said, but he feared they meant to separate them, and then he was taken through a dark doorway, out of sight. Now it was the secretary's turn. He was led through the same door into a small room, where three mandarins sat behind a table. A mandarin was what Europeans called any official of the Chinese empire, the scholars who had passed the examinations and ran the country. "There were various iron implements lying on the table, and the walls were hung with chains and other disagreeable looking instruments, the use of which it was unpleasant too closely to investigate." On one side of the room stood a low bench with a small windlass at each end, with rope coiled around it. He did not need to be told what it was for. "On entering, I was shoved down on my knees before the table, a man on either side laying hold of my hair and beard, — a number of questions were asked me, but as I did not understand Chinese, I could not answer them, and each time I failed to reply I got kicked and cuffed." His hat had been knocked off. He was afraid of being left out in the sun without it, and when he moved to pick it up, he was knocked down and kicked again. "An iron collar was then secured round my neck, with a heavy chain extending to my feet." He made signs for his hat again, and this time, to his surprise, a man picked it up and put it back on his head. Then he was led out to a courtyard where Parkes sat on a bench with irons on his ankles. They were not allowed to speak. Double irons went onto the secretary's ankles too, the chain between them only about three inches long, and it was passed through a link of the chain from his neck. Then the two men were led away in different directions. They were the lucky ones. The other prisoners taken that day, Britons, Frenchmen and Sikh troopers of the escort, were held elsewhere, and they were tied up by their wrists in cords so tight that their hands turned black and swelled until, in some cases, they burst. Among them was the newspaper correspondent who had often said he wanted to see how the Chinese could really fight. His name was Thomas Bowlby, and he wrote for the London Times. A Sikh trooper who was held with him and lived described how he died. "Mr. Bowlby died the second day after we arrived; he died from maggots forming in his wrists". Of the twenty six prisoners taken on the eighteenth of September, fifteen would die in the course of their short captivity: one Frenchman, four Britons, and ten Sikhs. Parkes and the secretary would not be among them. And the man who now decided what happened to all of them was Prince Gong.

Prince Gong was the Xianfeng Emperor's younger half brother, and still in his twenties. Once a rival for the throne, he had been kept away from power by his brother for years. Some of you have already met Prince Gong at the far end of his life, an old man called back to office when another war was going badly. Here he is at the start of it all. Now his brother had gone north and left him behind in Beijing to make peace with the allies when they arrived. He did not have much to work with. A handful of officials stayed behind with him, among them his father in law, Guiliang, the old Manchu statesman who had already failed once at Tianjin, and a Manchu minister named Wenxiang, who would become his right hand for years to come. What he did not have was soldiers. The army that had been meant to stop the allies had broken at Baliqiao, and its cavalry had scattered. And every decision he made had to be squared with Rehe, where the war hawks around his brother controlled who could reach the emperor and which messages he saw. So the prince was negotiating in two directions at once: forward, with an enemy who held all the guns, and backward, with a court that held all the authority. Prince Gong's first move was to tell the allies who he was. He announced his appointment as High Commissioner, with full powers to negotiate. Full powers were exactly what the commissioners at Tianjin had lacked, and when the allies found that out, they had broken off the talks. This time the emperor had given the man at the table the most absolute full powers. But the two sides were bargaining over different things. The ambassadors wanted their people back first. They told Prince Gong that if the prisoners were not returned within three days, they would advance on Beijing and prove that the law of nations could not be broken without punishment. Prince Gong wanted the army to stop first. He wrote to the French envoy that if the allies attacked Beijing, not only would their own people die, but their army would be cut to pieces on its retreat. And he held the prisoners. He told the ambassadors that if Beijing were assaulted, he could not answer for their safety. It was a threat, and it may also have been the simple truth. The allies gave him a deadline. If one of the city's gates was not handed over to them by noon on the thirteenth of October, their guns, already dug in opposite the northern wall, would open fire. Meanwhile, the court's officials tried another route. They went to the man in chains. In prison, Parkes was pressed to help settle the war, and he resolutely refused to take on the role of negotiator, which he had no authority to hold. He was careful not to commit Elgin to anything, or to make his own safety depend on concessions wrung from the allies. Lord Elgin's line was just as hard. He wrote afterward that from the moment of the arrest, a sense of duty had made him turn a deaf ear to every offer to return the prisoners that involved the slightest step back by his army, or the dropping of any demand he had made. Elgin believed that standing firm was what would save them. If he had wavered, he wrote, the prisoners would have been lost, because the Chinese, finding they had a lever to move him with, would have used it without mercy. And something did change inside the prison. Parkes and the secretary were very badly treated for their first ten days. On the twenty eighth of September they were freed from the heavy chains. After that, in Elgin's words, conciliation was the order of the day. In early October, with fresh ammunition up from the coast, the allied army moved again, swinging around to the north of Beijing. And on the way, they came to the most beautiful place in China. Before we go in, hold on to the question this episode is asking. What you are about to hear is going to make it harder to answer, not easier.

Northwest of Beijing lay the Yuanmingyuan, the Garden of Perfect Brightness, which the British called the Summer Palace. It was not one palace but hundreds of buildings, halls, temples, libraries, pavilions and lakes, spread over hundreds of acres of gardens that the emperors had built up over a century and a half. The Qianlong Emperor had even had Jesuit missionaries design a quarter of European style palaces with fountains, a little piece of Versailles in the middle of a Chinese garden. One of its libraries held one of only seven complete copies of the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries, the vast collection of Chinese writing that the Qianlong Emperor had ordered copied out by hand. The emperors had lived there far more than in the Forbidden City, and it held the treasures of the dynasty. The French reached it first, with the British only a little way behind. After a brief fight with twenty badly armed eunuchs, the gates were flung open. Inside, they found the place empty and undefended. And then the looting began for real. The French officers tried to call their men back into line, and not even a dozen from each company answered the order to fall in. One British officer, heading back to camp with his pony loaded with jade, called out to some Sikh cavalry in Hindustani, "Be quick or it will all be gone!" On the morning of the seventh of October, Lord Elgin heard that the French and the British cavalry had taken the Summer Palace. That afternoon he rode out to see it. He wrote that night that it was really a fine thing, like an English park, with numberless buildings and handsome rooms, filled with Chinese curios, handsome clocks and bronzes. "But, alas! such a scene of desolation." The French general came to him full of protests. He had stopped the looting, he said, so that all the plunder could be divided fairly between the two armies. Elgin did not see a single room in which half the things had not been taken away or broken to pieces. He tried to get a British regiment sent to guard the place so the treasures could be sold at auction, but it was hard to do anything by system in a scene like that. What upset him most was not the stealing. It was the waste. Of a million pounds' worth of property, he guessed, not even fifty thousand would ever be realized. "French soldiers were destroying in every way the most beautiful silks, breaking the jade ornaments and porcelain", he wrote. "War is a hateful business. The more one sees of it, the more one detests it." The British commanders eventually ordered all their soldiers to hand in their loot, to be sold together at auction in Beijing and the money shared out by a prize committee. A prize committee was the British army's old system for dividing captured enemy property among the men by rank, from the general down to the private. And the soldiers were not the only ones taking things. The local Chinese, by one reckoning, got more loot out of the palace than the two allied armies did. Much of what the soldiers carried away ended up in Europe, in country houses, regimental messes, auction rooms and museums. A few years later the French empress opened a whole Chinese museum in the palace of Fontainebleau, filled with treasures from the Summer Palace. With the allies pressed close up to the walls of the capital, Prince Gong, whom Elgin called the Chinese Regent, gave way to save the city from being stormed. On the afternoon of the eighth of October, the prisoners still held in Beijing, eight in all, were sent into the allied camp. Releasing Parkes and the secretary was one of the first things Prince Gong did. They were freed only just in time. Less than an hour after Parkes and the secretary walked out through the gate of the temple where they were then held, an order arrived from the emperor to put all the prisoners to death. Elgin listed them as they came in: Parkes, his secretary, one Sikh of the irregular cavalry, four French soldiers, and a Frenchman at the head of a scientific commission, whose hands and wrists had been badly hurt by the cords tied around them. The others, Bowlby among them, did not seem to be in Beijing, as Elgin had hoped they would be. Elgin wrote that Parkes and the secretary had behaved very well in great danger, and that they seemed in good health in spite of everything. There was one more detail in Elgin's letter that I can't leave out. The official line, as it reached the British camp, was that the emperor had gone north "being obliged by law to hunt in the autumn".

While the allies were looting the Summer Palace, an order was traveling south from the court, to a man who had his own war to fight. Zeng Guofan was a scholar from Hunan province, an official who had never been trained as a soldier, who had raised a private army of Hunan men to fight the Taiping when the emperor's regular troops failed. He had passed the highest of the imperial examinations and risen through the court at Beijing, and he lived by the old Confucian virtues: duty, discipline, loyalty and endless self examination. He kept a diary for decades, and much of what we know of his mind comes from it and from his letters home. That summer the throne had made him governor general of the three provinces of the lower Yangtze, much of which was in Taiping hands, and imperial commissioner for the war against them. The Taiping were the rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom, a Christian inspired movement that for seven years had held Nanjing, the old southern capital, as their own. That spring, when the great imperial siege camps around Nanjing collapsed and their generals died, Zeng had found himself, quite unexpectedly, holding the command against the Taiping. Now his army was laying siege to Anqing, a Taiping city on the Yangtze, and he had staked all of his forces on that siege. On the tenth of October, orders from Beijing came. Zeng was to send his very best field commander, Bao Chao, a man from Sichuan province, north to save the capital, with his three thousand veteran troops. It was an order from the throne, in an empire where an order from the throne was not supposed to be debated. Bao Chao was the best field commander Zeng had, and his three thousand were veterans. Taking them away would leave a hole in the lines around Anqing just when the siege mattered most. And Zeng did not want to obey it. He wrote to his brothers that there was only one place where the rebels were weakening: "here in Anqing alone, in this one single city, they are on the wane. How can we lightly pull back?" And he did the arithmetic. It would be January before Bao Chao's forces could reach Beijing, he reasoned, and by then it would be winter, and surely they would no longer be needed. So he wrote back to the emperor, and asked him to choose who should command the force going north. It was a question, and questions take time to travel. With it, Zeng had stolen another month for his siege of Anqing. He was not a man who felt sure of himself. "I live in deep terror that I am not up to this great responsibility", he wrote to his brothers.

On the sixteenth of October 1860, it was cold in the sharp cut mountain valley in Anhui province where Zeng Guofan had his camp. He dragged himself from his bed, weak from a long bout of vomiting the night before. Then a courier arrived. The emperor and his court, the message said, had left for the northern hunting grounds, and the British and French armies were only a few miles from the capital. Zeng was a Confucian scholar to the bone. His whole life rested on loyalty to the throne, and on the idea that the emperor stood at the center of the world and held it together. And now the emperor had run. He wrote in his diary in despair, and as he came to terms with how helpless the emperor's flight had made the throne, he broke down in tears. But he still did not send Bao Chao. As he saw it, failure at Anqing would throw the Yangtze open to the Taiping as far as Wuchang, and even put Hunan in danger again. It looked like a cold calculation, though his refusal to budge came as much from fear as from stubbornness. But think about what it meant. A general ordered by the emperor to save the emperor's capital had weighed the order against his own campaign, and chosen his campaign. The great provincial armies that would save this dynasty were not the emperor's armies in the old way. They answered to the men who raised them.

Back in Beijing, Prince Gong ran out of time. On the thirteenth of October, with allied guns trained on the walls, the court's officials opened one of the northern gates of the city, the Anding Gate, and the allies took possession of it. Over the following days the bodies of the prisoners who had died came back to the allied camp in coffins. For Lord Elgin, that changed everything. James Bruce, the eighth Earl of Elgin, was not a man who loved war. He had governed Jamaica and then Canada, and in China he wrote again and again of his disgust at what his own side did. He was also the son of the Lord Elgin who had carried the Parthenon marbles off from Athens to London. Hold that thought too. He felt there was only one course of action his army could take that would punish the Qing government for having kidnapped Harry Parkes and his party, and for murdering Thomas Bowlby and the others, while sparing the people of the capital. The British army was in a mood for something far worse. One general said that if they had had their way, every mandarin in Beijing would have been strung up. Elgin's answer was the Summer Palace. He chose it over the palaces inside the city, the Forbidden City itself. The Summer Palace was the emperor's own home, and some of the prisoners had been held and mistreated there. Elgin had notices put up in Chinese, explaining that the burning was a punishment for the emperor's bad faith, and not for the people of Beijing. He meant it as a blow aimed at the emperor's own pride, to punish him for what had been done to the prisoners, and not at his subjects. The French envoy protested, and so did the French commander, who called it an act of vandalism that would not even achieve its aim. Elgin went ahead anyway, and ordered the British army to burn the Summer Palace to the ground. On the eighteenth of October, a month to the day after Parkes was taken, British forces began the work of methodically destroying the eight hundred acre complex of buildings and gardens. It took them two full days of burning and breaking and smashing before the major structures were destroyed. Among the British officers who did the work was a young captain of engineers named Charles Gordon. He wrote home that you could scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places they burned. Remember him. Before this war with the Taiping is over, he will be leading Chinese troops against them. Notice what had happened to Lord Elgin in the space of eleven days. On the seventh of October he had walked through the looted palace and grieved over the waste, the broken porcelain and the torn silk. Eleven days later, what was left of it burned on his orders. He had not stopped caring about beautiful things. He had decided that there was something he cared about more. The soldiers found strange things as they worked. In one carriage house stood a large store of gifts left over from Lord Macartney's failed embassy of 1793, apparently untouched after almost seventy years. The presents that were meant to open China to British trade had sat in a shed for two generations. And in a wardrobe, curled up, the soldiers found a little Pekingese dog. A British officer took him back to England as a present for Queen Victoria. The dog was named Looty. I will let that name speak for itself. A British interpreter watching the fire wrote that "it betokened to our minds a sad portent of the fate of this antique empire". Was it justice, or was it vandalism? The people of the time could not agree either. On one side was a simple argument. Men under a flag of truce had been seized, tied until their hands burst, and left to die, and something had to answer for it that was not the ordinary people of Beijing. On the other side was a simpler one. Whatever the emperor had done, the palace and its treasures had done nothing, and the world was poorer for their loss. In London, the Times saw the burning as a just reprisal for the kidnapping of Parkes and the murder of Bowlby and the others in his party. In exile, the French writer Victor Hugo condemned it as plunder by people who equated Europe with civilization and China with barbarism, and he turned their own words back on them: this, he declared, "is what civilization has done to barbarism." Hugo was the most famous writer in France, living in exile on the island of Guernsey because he refused to accept Napoleon the Third, the same emperor whose troops had led the looting. In Parliament, the argument broke out in February 1861, when the two Houses voted thanks to the commanders and troops of the China campaign. In the House of Lords, a peer refused to let pass what he called an act of vandalism, sanctioned by a British ambassador and defended by a British minister. He said it might justly be ranked with such deeds as "the burning of the library of Alexandria". In the House of Commons, an Irish member called it "an act of barbarism and vandalism, for which it was difficult to find any precedent in ancient or modern history". Elgin never backed down. When he came home he defended himself in a speech, and it is worth hearing how he put it. He said no one regretted more than he did the destruction of what he called a collection of summer houses and kiosks, already stripped of their contents before he did anything. But he said that the only other way to mark what had been done to the prisoners was another year of war, and he spoke of "an atrocious crime, which, if it had passed unpunished, would have placed in jeopardy the life of every European in China". The time had come, he said, "when I must choose between the indulgence of a not unnatural sensibility and the performance of a painful duty." As he saw it, it had been that or nothing. The burning was the only way to answer British anger without fighting on. And for a long time afterward, the Chinese would remember the French for the looting and the English for the burning. Today the ruins of the European palaces still stand in a park in Beijing, broken columns and carved stone in the grass, and they are kept as they are, on purpose, as a memorial of national humiliation. I'll leave the verdict to you. But notice that Elgin aimed his blow at the emperor's pride, and that for a century and a half since, it has been remembered as a wound to the pride of China. Far to the south, the news took weeks to arrive. On the afternoon of the sixth of November 1860, Zeng Guofan opened a letter from a friend in the north and learned for the first time that the British and French had not only taken Beijing but had burned the emperor's palace to the ground. "I have no words to describe the depths of this pain," he wrote in his diary.

Now the treaty could be signed. With the palace still smoking, Prince Gong agreed to everything. Lord Elgin entered Beijing in state, and at the Board of Rites, the ministry in charge of ceremonies, the Convention of Beijing was signed. Elgin was carried to the ceremony in a sedan chair, with a band playing God Save the Queen. As his chair came through the gate, the bearers crouched down with their backs and knees bent and rushed it forward to the steps of the hall, the guards presented arms, and the bands played. On one side of the hall stood the British officers. On the other, more than a hundred mandarins. At the steps, Prince Gong came forward to meet him, in the secretary's words, "with an anxious, hesitating salutation". Elgin bowed, walked straight to his seat, and motioned the prince to the other. The business began with the interpreter handing Prince Gong a translation of Lord Elgin's full powers. The prince said that his own were not as long as Lord Elgin's, but they were just as ample. Then a mandarin of high rank opened a box on the table and took out papers wrapped in yellow silk, which he held above his head with great reverence and laid before the prince. Yellow was the emperor's color, and nothing wrapped in it was handled lightly. It was the emperor's decree, giving Prince Gong full powers to negotiate and conclude a peace, and to set the great seal of the empire on the treaty as proof that it was ratified. The convention was signed, each envoy set his seal on it, and the treaties were formally exchanged. Prince Gong then signed and sealed a paper stating that the great seal meant the emperor accepted every clause. At the very end, when Elgin rose to leave, the prince went with him a short distance and then stopped. When Elgin stopped too, the senior mandarins urgently beckoned the prince forward, and after a moment's hesitation he walked with Elgin to the edge of the steps. The secretary thought the prince looked older than his years. His face was intelligent, but there was an expression of anxious care on it, which, given his position, was hardly surprising. If he felt fear, the secretary wrote, he hid it, but the part he was being made to play must have been against everything he had been raised to do in front of the high officers of the state. The same photographer who had fussed over the dead at the forts on the way up was there with his camera, and he pointed it at the prince. Prince Gong looked at it in a state of terror, pale as death. He may well have thought it was a gun. After the last month, who could blame him? The British convention was signed on the twenty fourth of October and the French one on the twenty fifth, and an imperial edict ratified both on the twenty eighth. It was late October, and the first snow was beginning to fall. Lord Elgin did not stay for the winter. He left Beijing in November, and the next spring his younger brother, Frederick Bruce, the envoy whose ships had been sunk at Dagu, came to live in the capital as Britain's first resident minister. So what did the war buy? First, the whole Treaty of Tianjin from two years before was now in force: new treaty ports, the Yangtze opened to British ships, and freedom for missionaries. With it came the right to keep an embassy in Beijing, the freedom for foreigners to travel beyond the treaty ports, and the legalization of opium. That first point was the one the court had fought hardest against. For the first time, foreign ministers would live in the capital and deal with the throne as equals, not as bearers of tribute. Within a few months, Prince Gong would ask the throne for a new office to handle them, the first body in the Qing government built to deal with foreign countries. It would become his life's work. Think about that last one for a moment, given how this season began. Commissioner Lin had destroyed the foreigners' opium on the shore near the Bogue and started a war to stop the trade. Twenty years later, the drug came in by treaty, paying its duty at the customs house like tea or cotton. Then the new terms. Tianjin itself was added to the ports open to foreign residence and trade. The tip of the Kowloon peninsula, across the harbor from Hong Kong island, was ceded to the British crown in perpetuity. The British had in fact been holding it for months already. That spring, Harry Parkes himself had arranged a lease of it from the governor general at Canton. Now the lease became a gift, forever. And Chinese subjects were to be allowed to emigrate abroad, under suitable regulations. That clause mattered more than it sounds. Tens of thousands of Chinese laborers had already been shipped to Cuba and Peru under contracts that often amounted to slavery, and many more had gone to the gold fields of California and Australia. The treaty made emigration legal and, in theory, regulated. And then the money. Having fought their way to Beijing, the British doubled their indemnity to eight million taels, and Prince Gong had no choice but to grant it. A tael was the Chinese ounce of silver, and with the French demand added, the indemnities totaled sixteen million taels. That was roughly eighty times the silver actually left in the imperial treasury. The only real source of money to pay it was the customs duty on foreign trade at Shanghai and Canton. So the war's own bill would be paid out of the very trade the war had been fought to open. The dynasty would have to keep that trade running, and keep the foreigners happy, in order to pay the foreigners off. The French had one more thing. The Chinese text of their convention carried a clause the French text did not: "And it shall be lawful for French missionaries in any of the provinces to lease or buy land and build houses." The Chinese government always maintained that the clause had been slipped in surreptitiously. As for the envoys, Lord Elgin was stiff and unbending through it all, and the French envoy genial and conciliatory. And far away at Rehe, one person in the emperor's household vehemently opposed the surrender: his concubine Cixi, who had received the Grand Council on his behalf when he fell sick on the road north. There was one more winner who had hardly fired a shot. The Russian envoy had offered himself to Prince Gong as a go between with the British and French. A few weeks later he collected his fee, a treaty that gave Russia the whole Pacific coast east of the Ussuri River, where a new Russian port called Vladivostok had been founded that summer.

And now we leave Beijing and go back south, to the man who never sent his troops. Zeng Guofan's guess had been right. The conventions were signed in late October, and by his own reckoning, Bao Chao's men could not have reached Beijing before January. But the end of that war raised a new question, and with the emperor's permission, Prince Gong put it to a handful of senior officials, Zeng among them. The Russians, whose envoy had followed the allied army to Beijing, were now offering to help the dynasty put down the Taiping. Should the court accept? The Russians had offered warships to sail up the Yangtze to Nanjing, and the court was also thinking of using foreign ships to carry the southern grain north. Writing in December 1860, Zeng advised against accepting foreign military help right away, though he allowed that it might come in handy later. For the moment, he admitted, his army had absolutely no route by which to advance on Nanjing. Foreign gunboats would arrive at a city his own troops could not yet reach. He wanted the Russians put off until his land forces had taken back enough Taiping country to threaten Nanjing properly. Then he gave the emperor a short lesson on the foreigners, none of whom he had ever met. "Since ancient times," he wrote, "whenever outsiders helped China, as soon as they were done they always came up with unforeseen demands." Everything had to be settled clearly in advance, he warned, and the court had to understand the character of the people it was dealing with, because they were not all the same. In his opinion, the British were the most cunning, followed by the French. The Russians were more powerful than either, and the British were afraid of them. And the Americans, he wrote, had a pure and honest nature. They had not joined the British and French in their attack on Canton, and they had not fought at the mouth of the river below Tianjin. "We can see that the Americans are sincere and obedient in their dealings with China". Zeng did not know that an American commodore had towed British boats into the fight at the mouth of that same river in 1859, shouting that blood is thicker than water. So much for his intelligence on the Americans. But his last point was the one that would outlive him. Whatever happened now, he wrote, the most important thing was for China to improve its own technology, so that it would not need outside help in the first place. "If we study how they make their cannons and ships," Zeng concluded, "it will be of great benefit to us in the long run." Within a couple of years, Zeng would set up a workshop to build guns and steamships, and the idea in that one sentence, learn the foreigners' skills to resist the foreigners, would become a program for a whole generation of Chinese officials. Hold on to it. It is where the story of the next thirty years begins. The emperor took the cautious advice. He accepted ten thousand rifles and eight cannons from the Russians, which would take a year to arrive, and declined their offer of warships. Prince Gong had warned him of the danger. If Russian gunships sailed up to Nanjing without Zeng's army there to meet them, the Russians might just decide to throw in their lot with the rebels. So the dynasty survived its war with the foreigners, and it was still losing its war with the Taiping. Zeng Guofan had kept his best troops. He had kept his siege. And he had staked everything on one city on the Yangtze. Next time, we go to that city. Zeng Guofan sets his brother to starve Anqing, Hong Rengan throws everything he has at breaking the siege, and Harry Parkes, freed from his chains, turns up on the Yangtze to talk a Taiping general out of taking a city.

Sources

• Henry Brougham Loch, Personal Narrative of Occurrences during Lord Elgin's Second Embassy to China, 1860 (1869), pp. 154-157, 169-172, 285-288, https://archive.org/details/personalnarrativ00lochrich
• Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, Volume I: The Period of Conflict, 1834-1860 (1910), pp. 596-597, 600-602, 602, 604-605, 605-606, 606-608, 610-612, 612, 615-616, https://archive.org/details/internationalrel01mors
• Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, Volume II: The Period of Submission, 1861-1893 (1918), p. 51-52, https://archive.org/details/internationalre02mors
• James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin, ed. Theodore Walrond, Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin (1872), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10610
• Julia Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (2011)
• Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), p. 14-15
• Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (2012)