Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 21

Anqing

Zeng Guofan believes the war will be won at Anqing, the city that guards the river road to Nanjing, and he sets his brother Zeng Guoquan to starve it. The episode follows Zeng and Hong Rengan through the year long struggle for the city, from Zeng nearly trapped at Qimen and Hong Rengan's great relief plan to Harry Parkes talking the Taiping general Chen Yucheng out of taking Hankou, and the massacres at the end, and asks whether British neutrality was ever really neutral. It is the season's most mixed episode, with foreign observers and British officials heard most but the Taiping and Zeng's own side in their own words, and a Chinese visitor to Nanjing.

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Transcript

Last time, the war in the north came to its end. British troops spent two full days burning and smashing the Summer Palace outside Beijing, in punishment for the kidnapping of Harry Parkes and the murder of his companions. And Prince Gong, left to deal with the invaders, ratified the new treaty with Lord Elgin as the first snow began to fall. The price was steep: indemnities of sixteen million taels, roughly eighty times the silver actually left in the imperial treasury. But I want to begin this episode somewhere else, far to the south, in a mountain valley in Anhui province, with a man who heard about all of this by letter. That man was Zeng Guofan, the scholar who had built the Hunan Army. In October 1860 he was ordered to send his very best field commander, a man from Sichuan named Bao Chao, north with three thousand veteran troops to save the capital. Zeng did not want to send anyone. Only here at Anqing, he wrote to his brothers, in this one single city, were the rebels on the wane. "How can we lightly pull back?" So he stalled, asking the emperor to choose the commander himself, and by doing so he stole another month for his siege. When the news came that the emperor had fled to his hunting grounds, with the British and French only a few miles from Beijing, Zeng broke down in tears. And when Prince Gong put a Russian offer of help against the rebels to a handful of senior officials, Zeng among them, Zeng's answer that December was cautious. "Since ancient times," he wrote, "whenever outsiders helped China, as soon as they were done they always came up with unforeseen demands." Hold on to that line, because this whole episode is about outsiders, and help, and what it costs. And hold on to the name Zeng kept coming back to: Anqing. Anqing was the capital of Anhui province, a walled city on the north bank of the Yangtze, upstream from Nanjing. The Yangtze was the great highway of central China, the river that carried the trade and the armies of half the empire, and whoever held its cities held the road. Nanjing was the Heavenly Capital of the Taiping, the rebel kingdom founded by Hong Xiuquan, the Heavenly King, who believed himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ. For the Taiping, Anqing was the buffer that protected Nanjing from any advance on the rebel capital from the north or the west. For Zeng Guofan, it was the door he had to break before he could push his army any closer to Nanjing at all. And it was a hard door, because the country around the city was wrapped in water on three sides, which made it exceptionally hard to approach by land. Let me remind you who Zeng Guofan was, because this is his episode. He was a Confucian scholar from Hunan, a man of books and examinations, who had never meant to be a soldier at all. When the emperor first ordered him to take charge of the militia of his home province, in early January 1853, he did not want the appointment. But he built something new. His foot soldiers were recruited by officers from their own home districts, so that a man fought alongside his neighbours. And he paid them well, just over four taels of silver a month, nearly triple the wage of the dynasty's regular Green Standard troops. The Green Standard was the old standing army of the Qing, made up of Chinese troops garrisoned across the provinces. The result was an army that was loyal first to its own officers, and above them to Zeng Guofan. When his men retook the great river city of Wuchang in October 1854, the emperor was astonished that a mere scholar could have done such a thing. But one of the emperor's counsellors warned that an army of ten thousand men loyal to a Hunanese official would not be a blessing to the empire. That tension never went away. The dynasty needed Zeng, and it feared what it needed. And Zeng had thought hard about how to win. In a memorial to the throne on the eleventh of November 1859 he laid out his strategic vision. A memorial was a formal written report to the emperor, the main way any official in the provinces spoke to the throne. There were two kinds of rebels, Zeng wrote: the roving bandits, whose armies never stopped moving, and the pretender bandits, who wanted a capital and a throne. The Taiping were pretenders, and pretenders, he argued, could be fought by severing their branches and leaves first, and then crushing them in their nests. Nanjing was the nest. Anqing was the biggest branch. The trouble was that he did not have much to do it with, because by 1860 his militia still numbered only about sixty thousand men in total. His chance came in the summer. In June 1860, while most of the Taiping forces were distracted by their walkover victories in the east, Zeng moved into Anhui from the west and sent his younger brother, Zeng Guoquan, to lay down a quiet siege at Anqing. Zeng Guoquan led ten thousand Hunanese troops up close to the city wall, and there they dug. They built two earthen walls and a twenty foot moat, and settled in to wait. That is what a siege like this was: not a storming party with ladders, but a ring of mud and patience, with hunger doing the work inside. And Zeng watched how his brother ran it, down to the men who did the work. When he learned that his brother's labourers were being paid in rotten grain instead of silver, he wrote back angrily. "You must nurture the people for their own sake," he told him, "and choose officials who will act on their behalf." Remember that sentence too. By the end of this episode it will sound very different. To keep any relief army away from the diggers, a Manchu commander named Dorongga set up a line of twenty thousand cavalry outside the rebel stronghold of Tongcheng, forty miles north of Anqing. The Qing dynasty was Manchu, a people from beyond the Great Wall whose emperors had ruled China since the seventeenth century. And Zeng Guofan took the rest of his forces, about thirty thousand men in all, into the mountains of southern Anhui, below the river. In late July he made his headquarters in a valley town called Qimen. On his first sight of the place he was pleased. "This is a place we can defend," he wrote, "with no need for greater forces." He would come to regret that sentence.

Qimen sits in a ring of mountains, and that is exactly what made it look safe, and exactly what made it a trap. The Taiping were not going to leave the commander of the whole Qing war effort sitting quietly in a valley. One of their kings, the Attending King, captured the town of Xiuning, thirty miles to Zeng's immediate east, which commanded the only road in that direction. The Taiping gave their great commanders the title of king, wang in Chinese, each with a name of honour: the Loyal King, the Brave King, the Attending King. Then, on the first of December, the army of the Loyal King, Li Xiucheng, crossed into Zeng's valley. Zeng had only three thousand troops of his own at his headquarters to fend off the rebel army. He sat down and wrote to his brother at Anqing a letter that reads like a man settling his accounts. "Though I regret that my scholarship is still incomplete," he wrote, "at least I am guilty of no great crimes." It was not the first time Zeng had expected to die. Years earlier, after one of his first defeats, he had rowed out of sight of his officers and tried to drown himself, until a worried secretary dragged him out of the water. And then, at Qimen, the strangest thing happened. Li Xiucheng paused. He did not want to risk a pitched battle against unknown odds, because his real objective lay elsewhere, in the provinces of Jiangxi and Hubei. When the fighting did come, the second day was a bloodbath, and Li Xiucheng pulled away, leaving four thousand dead and wounded behind him on the valley floor. Zeng had survived. He had not escaped. And notice what had saved him. Not his own strength, but the Loyal King's reluctance to risk a battle he had not come for, a pause of a single day that let Bao Chao sweep into the valley the next morning. We will see that reluctance again before this episode is over. On the fifteenth of December the rebels took the town to his west and severed his communications with his brother at Anqing. Now his lifeline was a single supply road from Jiangxi, held open by Zuo Zongtang, who was defending the porcelain making city of Jingdezhen to the southwest. Zuo Zongtang was another Hunanese scholar turned commander, and one day he would be among the most famous generals in China. For now he was holding a road. Zeng tried to fight his way out, leading nine thousand of his men eastward to break through the Taiping cordons. It went badly. One night a rebel garrison sneaked out under cover of darkness and set fire to his camp. The winter passed, and then the spring, and still he was hemmed in. On the twenty second of April 1861, he wrote a somber letter to his sons back home in Hunan. "We are surrounded on all sides", he told them. "Our supplies are all cut off." The army's morale, he said, was shaken. And he gave his sons one piece of advice above all. "You must not become soldiers," he told them. And then he judged himself, with the cold honesty that runs through all his letters. "Warfare calls for extremity, but I am too balanced. It calls for deception, and I am too direct." Here is the man the Qing dynasty is resting on, writing to his sons in case he dies. He did not die. In early May he abandoned Qimen at last, with his eyes still fixed on the one place that mattered. "The destiny of our family, and the security of the empire, both depend on whether or not we recapture Anqing," he wrote. That summer the emperor ordered him to send Zuo Zongtang away to help defend the province of Zhejiang, and Zeng refused. Nothing, not the emperor's orders, not his own life, was going to pull him away from that city.

Now let's cross the lines, to the other side of this war, and to the man in Nanjing who was trying to save Anqing. His name was Hong Rengan, and he was the Heavenly King's cousin. He had been Hong Xiuquan's first convert, long before there was any Heavenly Kingdom at all. He had come to Nanjing from years among the missionaries of Hong Kong, his cousin had put every decision in the capital into his hands as the Shield King, and he had written a plan to remake the kingdom with steamships, railways and newspapers. And the Heavenly King had put him in charge of foreign relations, which meant that every foreigner who came to Nanjing came, sooner or later, to him. Of all the Taiping leaders, he was the one the foreigners thought they could talk to, and so the visitors came. One of them was a young Chinese man named Rong Hong. Rong Hong had gone to America as a teenager, and he had graduated from Yale in 1854, the first Chinese graduate of an American college. He had come home to China the next year, with an American education and no obvious place to use it. He went up to Nanjing to learn the character of the Taiping, and above all whether they were the men fitted to set up a new government in the place of the Qing dynasty. His party met no challenge from either the imperial or the rebel forces on the road, first to Suzhou and then on to Nanjing. In Nanjing he called first on a missionary living there, for whom he had little regard, and then, on the nineteenth of November, on Hong Rengan. Rong Hong had brought a list. At the top of it: to organize an army on scientific principles, and to establish a military school for the training of competent military officers. After those came a naval school, a proper banking system, and schools for the people. If the Taiping would carry out those reforms, Rong Hong promised, he would pledge himself to their cause. It was the kind of list Hong Rengan himself might have written. And he could not accept it. He could not make such promises on his own, he explained; the other kings would have to have a vote, and the majority would have to agree. Think about what that tells you. The most modern mind in the Heavenly Kingdom was its chief minister, and he could not promise a school. The Heavenly Kingdom had kings, and the kings had armies, and none of them was going to hand their power to a young man with a list. They offered Rong Hong a seal of office and robes, and he turned them down. What he did take was a passport, to let him travel freely through Taiping territory. His reason was not political. Whole stocks of tea lay stranded and untouched in the war zone, and he thought he might make a fortune by buying them up and selling them in Shanghai. So the first Chinese graduate of an American college walked away from the Heavenly Kingdom unconvinced, and went into the tea business.

Others came away from Nanjing far more hopeful. Griffith John was a Welsh preacher, sent out to China by the London Missionary Society. It was the same society that had employed Hong Rengan himself during his years in Hong Kong. Late in 1860 he travelled up through Taiping country to the Heavenly Capital. On the way he crossed about a hundred and twenty miles of Taiping territory, and at Suzhou he watched the local landed gentry come in, in parties, to give their allegiance to the new rulers. The gentry were the educated landowning families who ran local life in China, and the dynasty relied on them to keep order in the countryside. Taiping officials told him the walled cities along the way had been turned into fortresses, and were being kept empty of people while the war went on. He stayed in Nanjing for seven days. And he got what he came for. As he wrote afterwards, "My object was to obtain from the chief an edict of religious toleration. This I have obtained." An edict was a written command from a ruler, and among the Qing and the Taiping alike it carried the full weight of the throne. This one was written in imperial vermilion ink on yellow satin, and it welcomed foreign missionaries to take up residence in the Heavenly Kingdom. Vermilion was the colour of the ruler's own brush in China, and yellow was the imperial colour. It was written out by the Heavenly King's young son and stamped with his father's seal, and it gave full permission to missionaries of every persuasion, Protestant or Catholic, to enter and live in the rebels' territory. The missionaries, the edict said, were "sincere and faithful men". The whole world, it declared, together with the Heavenly King and his son, was one family. Hong Rengan told John that the Heavenly King had wanted his son to write it, to foster an interest in the Gospel, and that the edict opened up the whole of the rebels' territory, Nanjing included. Griffith John went back to Shanghai elated. He reported that order, health, peace and happiness reigned in the Taiping capital. He wrote that God was uprooting idolatry in the land through the insurgents. And he predicted that if they brought order to the province around Nanjing, it would be nominally Christian within twenty years. Manchu power, he wrote, was undermined. "It must fall. There is no power to uphold it." He even believed that the missionaries had caused the rebellion in the first place, and so owed it a good end. And he was angry at his own side, because the rebels, he wrote, had been treated by Britain and its French allies "in a way that reflects disgrace on our flag." Not everything he saw pleased him. The Shield King, the missionaries' great friend, by now had four wives, and insisted that he had to follow his cousin's custom. And the Heavenly King himself, John thought, wrote like a lunatic. The Taiping, for their part, asked their foreign friends for patience. You foreigners have had the Gospel for upwards of eighteen hundred years, one Taiping prince told them, and we only, as it were, eight days; you must bear with us. But the door was open. Or it seemed to be.

Behind all these visitors, Hong Rengan had a war to run. Anqing was being strangled, and it was his job to find a way to save it. His first idea had depended on the foreigners. He had counted on buying steamships from them to carry the Taiping armies up the river to Wuchang. But after the repulse at Shanghai in August, it was clear the foreigners would not sell, so the armies would have to go on foot. So here is the plan he drew up, and it is a bold one. Don't hurl armies at the siege lines around Anqing. Go around them, far upriver, and threaten something Zeng Guofan cannot afford to lose. The Brave King would take a large army of a hundred thousand around to the north, through Anhui. The Loyal King would take a second army along the south bank, through Jiangxi. And in the spring the two would converge on Wuchang. Wuchang, the capital of Hubei, stood where the Han River meets the Yangtze, facing the trading town of Hankou and the city of Hanyang across the water; together the three are called Wuhan. Wuchang, as it happened, had a defensive garrison numbering only about three thousand troops. Threaten the three cities, the thinking went, and Zeng would have to pull his men away from Anqing to save them. The Brave King was a commander named Chen Yucheng, and he had been fighting for the Taiping since he was a boy. He was still in his twenties, and his enemies called him the four eyed dog, for the marks beneath his eyes. Before he marched, Chen left behind a garrison of roughly twenty thousand soldiers in Anqing, with strict orders to defend the walls but not to sortie from the gates to engage the enemy. The Loyal King, Li Xiucheng, was the hero of last year's campaigns, the general whose eastern sweep had broken the siege of Nanjing. Li Xiucheng had grown up poor in Guangxi, and had joined the Taiping as a common soldier and risen from the ranks. And his parting words to those who stayed in the capital were stern ones: begin stockpiling food. He saw clearly what was at stake. "If Anqing can be held, there is no need to worry," he said, "but if it is not firm, the capital will not be secure." Hong Rengan meant to take the field himself. He had his own reasons. The Heavenly King had made him a king little more than two weeks after he arrived in Nanjing, breaking an old promise never to appoint another king, and the older Taiping commanders grumbled that he only wanted power and fame. He had not hidden from difficulty, he told them, but had risked his life to come to their aid. "How can I be the kind of person who covets salary and prestige?" A command in the field was the one thing a scholar from Hong Kong could not talk his way into, and now he would have one. He had never commanded an army before. But when he set out, his officers knelt before him and sang: "May the Shield King live a thousand years, a thousand years, a thousand times a thousand years!" And to a British missionary visiting him, privately, away from all that singing, he said something very different: "pray for me." Hold on to those two pictures of the same man, because we will come back to see how his campaign turned out.

While the Taiping armies were gathering, a very different expedition was coming up the Yangtze from the sea. It is worth stopping to look at what Britain wanted from this river, because it explains almost everything the British did in this episode. On the eleventh of February, a squadron under Admiral James Hope started up the Yangtze, with the object of opening that river to foreign trade. Hope was the commander of Britain's naval forces in China. He was the same admiral who had been badly wounded two summers before, when the guns of the Dagu forts beat back his gunboats. The Treaties of Tianjin, now ratified in Beijing, had opened new ports on the Yangtze to British ships, and the British meant to use them. Lord Elgin himself had suggested that a naval force, large enough to inspire respect, should present itself before Nanjing to get assurances for British trading ships. The awkward thing was that between the sea and those new ports lay the Taiping, holding long stretches of the river and its banks. Britain's answer was simple: it claimed the right for its ships to sail the full length of the river freely, whoever held the banks. The river did not make it easy, because the ships kept running aground, and it took them more than two weeks to complete the voyage of two hundred miles. Going ahead of the main squadron, in charge of the talking, was Harry Parkes. Parkes was the British interpreter whose kidnapping by the Qing, only months before, the British had punished by burning the Summer Palace. He was not a man who would be easily frightened by a rebel king. He reached Nanjing on the twenty fourth of February, and the rest of the expedition joined him four days later. Hope pledged the neutrality of the British nation to the Taiping authorities once more. On the first of March, Parkes explained Britain's plans for trade on the Yangtze to the Taiping leaders. There was the question of customs, too. Elgin's instructions had been that the Qing government's dues on foreign trade should be collected at Zhenjiang or Shanghai. In other words, British ships would pass through rebel waters, but pay their duties to the rebels' enemy. Hope intended to leave a warship at Nanjing, the six gun paddle frigate Centaur. And then a problem. The Heavenly King, it turned out, had received a vision that warned him not to allow the foreigners to leave their gunboat. Parkes was not impressed. "He must have another vision!" he shouted. In the end the two sides came to terms. Parkes promised that British forces would not oppose a Taiping attack on the cities of Zhenjiang and Jiujiang the way they had at Shanghai. And what he wanted in return was simple. If the Taiping would keep their hands off British ships as they passed up and down, he wrote, "our principal object will be attained." As the squadron pressed on upriver, Parkes watched what everyone asked for. "Opium and arms, opium and arms," he wrote, "is the one cry we hear from mandarins, soldiers, and people, at every place we have yet come to." Mandarin was the foreigners' word for a Qing official. And on the way, a peasant told him something that cuts through this whole war. He drew little distinction between imperial troops and rebels, because he had suffered alike at the hands of both. I think that man deserves a moment, because there were millions like him, and almost none of them left their words behind.

There was one more thing Hope wanted out of Nanjing, and for Britain it was the most important of all. Shanghai. Hope wanted the Taiping kept well away from the city. He proposed a radius around Shanghai of two days' march, about thirty miles, which no rebel army would enter. His written message asked that Taiping troops not approach within two days' march of Shanghai or the nearby port of Wusong, and said that any attempt to enter them would be repelled by force. The lesser kings in Nanjing stalled. So Parkes left them and marched all the way across Nanjing to put the case to the Heavenly King himself. On that errand he came face to face with how the Heavenly Kingdom saw the world. On a wall there hung a map of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, in which Britain and France appeared merely as tiny islands huddled in the upper left hand corner. The Taiping, Parkes fancied, believed that Britain, like themselves, was after land. He tried to set them straight. He told them "that our interests here were strictly commercial," and that they must put out of their minds any idea that Britain sought the possession of territory. It was for the protection of British commerce, he said, and for that purpose only, that Britain kept a force at Shanghai. And then he made the other half of the point. Britain, he insisted, took no part in the struggle between the Taiping and the imperial side, with whom it was also at peace. But any Taiping movement upon Shanghai, he told them, would be considered as an attempt to injure Britain. Experience, he went on, had shown that the imperial government could not be trusted to protect the place, and that plunder and violence marked the progress of the Taiping, so the British had to protect themselves. Britain, he said, would be glad when order was restored to the country, whether by its becoming wholly Taiping or by its going back to imperial rule. The Taiping listened, and asked two very reasonable questions of their own. How exactly would the admiral use his influence to stop the imperial forces attacking them from Shanghai? And could one of their own officers visit Shanghai to see what arrangements had been made? They were asking, in other words, whether this neutral circle would keep out both sides, or only one. The Heavenly King gave way. Hong Xiuquan agreed to notify his commanders near Shanghai to stay thirty miles from the city for the rest of the year. The order that went out told them they must not approach nearer than a hundred li to Shanghai and Wusong, an arrangement, it said, that would be to the advantage of both parties. A li was the Chinese mile, about a third of an English one. Capturing those places, the order said, was no part of the plan of campaign for the present year. Now, notice those words: for the present year. That is a deadline, and it will come back to haunt everyone. And here is a detail that tells you a great deal. The admiral's message had told the Taiping that Britain had ordered Shanghai defended, yet the Foreign Secretary's first orders on defending any treaty port were dated the twenty fourth of July 1861. And notice something else. Britain was neutral. Britain took no part in the struggle. And Britain had just drawn a circle around the great port of Shanghai and told one side of a civil war to keep out of it. To the Taiping's friends among the foreigners, it looked like a trap. One of them called the admiral's message simply a trap to catch the Taiping, and not a very sailorlike one. And they pointed out that in practice, for all the talk of neutrality, the imperial side was being supplied with ships, stores, arms and every munition of war it required. To them, the results of the admiral's whole voyage up the river were entirely harmful to the Taiping. So was British neutrality ever really neutral? Keep that question in your pocket, because the next few months are going to answer it.

While Parkes was bargaining in Nanjing, the Brave King was on the move. Chen Yucheng had swung westward, with the aim of getting into the rear of the imperial army around Anqing. His army was big on paper, nearly fifty thousand men, though its real fighting strength was no more than half that number. But what it could do was march. His men covered two hundred miles on foot in just eleven days, taking three cities on the way. He took Huoshan on the tenth of March, where there was no considerable force to oppose him, and Yingshan on the fourteenth. And on the seventeenth of March 1861, an advance party of the Brave King's forces arrived outside the river town of Huangzhou. They surprised the two thousand imperial soldiers and cavalry who garrisoned the town, slaughtered them all, and took their horses. Huangzhou lay only about fifty miles from Hankou. Chen Yucheng now had a perfect base from which to attack Hankou upstream. Remember Wuchang, across the river, so lightly held. Remember Zeng Guofan, trapped in his mountain valley, with his brother dug in at Anqing. If the Brave King took the three cities now, the whole Qing position on the river would come apart, and Zeng would have to let go of Anqing to save it. Everything in Hong Rengan's plan was working. For a few days that spring, the whole war on the river hung on what the Brave King did next. And then the Brave King had a visitor.

On the twenty second of March 1861, just five days after the Brave King's men took Huangzhou, Harry Parkes arrived. He had come on up the river with the admiral's ships, and now he called on the rebel general in the town. The advance force in the city numbered about twenty to thirty thousand men at that point. Parkes looked around him with a careful eye. He saw proclamations posted that forbade looting, with the heads of two rebels hanging beside them as a warning. The notice made known that those two men had been executed for robbing the people of their clothes. Then he sat down with Chen Yucheng. And he advised him not to think of moving on Hankou. The rebels, Parkes explained, could not occupy Hankou without seriously interfering with British commerce. Chen tried to find a way around this. Could he take just Hanyang, the city next door? Parkes said no. The rebels could not take any one of these cities. Now, think about where Chen Yucheng is sitting. He has just made one of the great marches of the war. Wuchang is lightly held. His kingdom's survival hangs on drawing Zeng Guofan away from Anqing. And a foreign official, whose country says it takes no side in this war, is telling him which cities he may not touch. He could have ignored him. He did not. He had to send a courier back to the capital in Nanjing to get instructions. And while he waited, his initiative drained away. No answer came back from Nanjing in time, and the moment to strike was lost. One of the Taiping's British friends wrote bitterly that their cause suffered from British contact here, as in every other instance. Parkes went on up the river. Chen Yucheng turned around. He came back east toward Anqing, and on the twenty seventh of April he arrived at the Jixian Pass, the northern approach to the city, at the head of thirty thousand troops, to reclaim it. It was the same pass that Zeng Guoquan's ten thousand had come down the year before to reach Anqing. Chen's men set up eighteen more stockades on either side of a lake outside the city called Waternut Lake. A stockade was a fortified camp, walled with timber and earth. But after three days of hard attacks, the Brave King's men failed to break through Zeng Guoquan's main defensive works. On the first of May, hope arrived, in the shape of an army of twenty thousand Taiping reinforcements under Hong Rengan himself, outside Tongcheng. Remember, this is a man who has never commanded an army. He went out sensing, in the very orders that sent him from the capital, the jealousy of the other members of the Heavenly King's family. And he wrote poetry on the march. "A brush stands erect like a weapon," one of his poems begins, a scholar's brush sweeping armies away. Across the lines, Zeng Guofan was worried. He estimated that the Taiping armies had grown more than tenfold. On the sixth of May, Hong Rengan's army divided into two columns and advanced south toward Anqing, and Dorongga's cavalry beat both of them back savagely. The poet's war was over almost as soon as it began. The Brave King tried once more. He left twelve thousand men behind to hold the stockades at the Jixian Pass and Waternut Lake, and gathered the rest for another blow. At dawn on the twenty fourth of May, the combined Taiping forces attacked the imperial cavalry in three columns, two from the north and one from the south, but a spy had revealed the plan, and they fell into an ambush. The cavalry sent a detachment around to fall on the Brave King's troops from behind, and drove him north to Tongcheng in a chaotic retreat with heavy casualties. The rout cut him off from his twelve thousand men at Anqing.

And what of the other half of the plan, the Loyal King's army south of the river? Li Xiucheng had his own ideas about where his army should go. In fact the Heavenly King had ordered him to go north, and he had refused, and gone west instead. His march was slow and wandering. In April his army was still more than two hundred miles to the south of where it was supposed to be. Then one day, at the Gan River, as if by an act of God, the waters suddenly dried up, and his army crossed the river on foot. And people came to him. As the weeks passed, some three hundred thousand new followers joined him around the town of Ruizhou. That is worth pausing on. In these years a Taiping army is not just soldiers; it is a moving crowd of people who join it as it passes, hungry, ruined, or simply swept along. Li Xiucheng finally arrived outside Wuchang in June, two months late for his rendezvous with the Brave King. The Brave King, of course, was long gone. When the Loyal King failed to appear in April, he had left a garrison at Huangzhou and taken his best troops back to attack the siege lines at Anqing himself. Imagine what that rendezvous could have been: the Loyal King's huge crowd on the south bank, the Brave King's veterans on the north, and Wuchang between them with a garrison of a few thousand. Instead there was one army, months late, standing on a riverbank alone. Li sent a letter to Huangzhou by way of the British consul at Hankou. The consul kept the letter as a souvenir and never delivered it. I want you to sit with that for a moment. A British official, in a war his government called none of its business, simply pocketed a letter between two rebel armies. Li's men did make one bold crossing, swimming the river, and then a great wind blew so strongly and fiercely that no boats could cross for four days, and Bao Chao's boats were held back. But Li Xiucheng had no stomach for a long fight upriver. At the end of June, he abandoned the western campaign. He retraced his route with his huge new following, and finally divided his army into two columns to enter the eastern province of Zhejiang. We will see where those columns went next time. For now, what matters is where they did not go. They did not go to Anqing. So the great plan was finished. The northern army had stopped short of Hankou on a foreigner's advice, the southern army had arrived too late and left, and the Shield King's own army had been beaten back at Tongcheng. Everything now came down to the people inside the walls, and how long they could eat.

Remember the garrison the Brave King had left there, twenty thousand men under orders to hold the walls and never come out. Now they were sealed in, with Zeng Guoquan's earthworks on the land side and Zeng's gunboats on the river. Inside Anqing, the food was running out. But not as fast as Zeng Guofan wanted, and he knew exactly why. Foreign ships were coming up the river and bringing supplies to the besieged garrison, salt and oil among them. The most recent ship, he learned, had unloaded nearly two hundred tons of rice at Anqing. To a foreign trader this was just business. Rice is rice, and a starving city pays well. To Zeng Guofan it was the difference between victory and failure. "If the foreign ships can be stopped, we will see our day of conquest at Anqing," he wrote. So he set out to stop them. He ordered his gunboats to begin escorting all foreign ships that passed Anqing on the river. And in Beijing, Prince Gong backed him up. Prince Gong was the emperor's younger brother, who had stayed behind to make the peace, and he now ran the court's dealings with the foreigners from a new office set up that year for the purpose. On the eighteenth of July, Prince Gong claimed the right of imperial forces to board any foreign ship that tried to land in rebel territory, and if warranted to seize its cargo and arrest its crew. This was the new world the Convention of Beijing had made: a British minister living in Beijing, Frederick Bruce, Lord Elgin's younger brother. On the twenty third of July, Bruce wrote to the British consul at Shanghai and told him to warn the foreign merchants that the imperial forces were planning to attack any ship that tried to run their blockade of Anqing. Which is to say: you are on your own. A blockade, in plain terms, is the closing of a place to all traffic by force. The shipments stopped. So answer the question for yourself. A neutral Britain stood aside while the Qing cut off the food of a Taiping city. Was that neutrality, or was it a choice?

The first to break were the men outside the walls. Remember the twelve thousand Taiping soldiers the Brave King had left behind in the stockades at the Jixian Pass and Waternut Lake. Bao Chao's men stormed the first three stockades and killed all three thousand men inside them. Bao Chao kept only one prisoner alive from those stockades, to be dismembered beneath the walls of Anqing. The rest, in the stockades at Waternut Lake, held out until they finally ran out of food at the beginning of July and signalled their willingness to surrender. And they surrendered everything. The eight thousand rebel soldiers in the Waternut Lake stockades handed over all their weapons: six thousand foreign rifles, eight thousand long spears, a thousand gingals, eight hundred Ming dynasty matchlocks, and two thousand horses. A gingal was a long, heavy musket fired from a rest, often by two men. Six thousand foreign rifles, by the way, in the hands of the same rebels the foreigners had refused to sell steamships to. Now Zeng Guoquan's army had eight thousand disarmed prisoners on its hands. The commander in charge of them had a plan: to open the gates of the camp and bring the prisoners in ten at a time, so they could be beheaded in batches. By his own account, he supervised the butchering of eight thousand prisoners in the course of a single day, starting at seven in the morning and finishing by the light of lanterns just after the sun went down that night. I am not going to dress that up. Men who had laid down their arms, brought in ten at a time and beheaded, from morning until dark. It was not the first mass killing of this war, and it would not be the last. Years before, at Canton, the governor general Ye Mingchen's dragnet had caught an estimated seventy five thousand accused Taiping supporters, and a British consul called the executions there among the most horrible of which the world had any authentic record. Both sides in this war killed prisoners. But this was the Hunan Army, the army of scholars, and these were men who had surrendered. And Zeng Guofan, the careful scholar who told his sons not to become soldiers, who had told his brother to nurture the people for their own sake, approved. If Confucius were alive, he wrote to his brother, he too would say that it was right to exterminate the rebels. Confucius was the ancient sage whose teachings on order, duty and right conduct were the foundation of the Chinese state and its examinations. And by the nineteenth of July he was putting it plainly to his brother. "Since you lead an army, you should take the killing of rebels as your purpose," he wrote. This is the same man who wept for an emperor's flight and worried that he was too balanced for war. He had found his extremity.

Inside the walls of Anqing, there was nothing left to eat but each other. The price for human meat in the city had reached half a tael of silver per catty by the end, about thirty eight cents a pound. A tael was about an ounce and a third of silver, the money of account in Qing China, and a catty was a weight of about a pound and a third. Let that settle. People in Anqing were buying and selling each other. The Brave King made one last attempt. After a circuit of well over two hundred miles, he came back in through the Jixian Pass on the twenty fourth of August. For seven days his men fought at the siege lines, and on the night of the third of September the Brave King gave up once and for all, set fire to his stockades at the Jixian Pass and withdrew, leaving Anqing to its fate. That same last night, most of the surviving garrison soldiers appear to have escaped the city through a tunnel they had been digging under the wall. The defenders who had been ordered never to come out of the gates came out at last, under the ground, in the dark. When the Hunan Army entered the city on the fifth of September, it was no longer defended. Zeng Guofan had already written to his brother about what should come next. "When we conquer the city, the proper thing to do will be to kill a lot of people," he had written. They did. Here the sources disagree, mainly on whether Zeng's officers first separated out the women before they killed everyone who was left. All told, about sixteen thousand people are thought to have survived the siege of Anqing, most if not all of them civilians. Everyone else who had been inside that city when the siege began was gone, starved, fled through the tunnel, or killed. So that is how Anqing fell: not in one great battle, but in a long slow squeeze of mud walls, a foreigner's advice at Huangzhou, rice ships turned away, and a day of beheadings by lantern light. The buffer that had protected Nanjing from the west was gone. Zeng Guofan had cut the biggest branch. Now the nest lay downriver, and the road to Nanjing lay open. Think of the two men we followed through this year. Zeng Guofan began it trapped in a valley, writing his will to his sons, and ended it master of the city he had staked his family and his empire on. Hong Rengan began it with the kingdom in his hands, missionaries at his door and his officers on their knees, and ended it with his great plan in pieces and his first army beaten back at Tongcheng. And between them, in the stockades and the streets and the fields along the river, were the people who paid for every turn of it. And what of the question we started with? Britain had pledged the Taiping its neutrality, and then its officials fenced off Shanghai, warned the Brave King away from Hankou, kept a rebel letter, and warned their own merchants off the trade that fed Anqing. None of it was a shot fired. All of it told on one side. But Zeng's victory did not land in the world it was meant for. Two weeks before Anqing fell, far to the north at his hunting retreat at Rehe, the Xianfeng Emperor died, and left his throne to a little boy. Who would rule in that boy's name, and what they would make of a scholar general with the war in his hands, is the story of next time.

Sources

• Augustus F. Lindley, Ti-Ping Tien-Kwoh: The History of the Ti-Ping Revolution (1866), pp. 95-97, 242-243, 828-330, 330-332, 332-334, 334-336, 336-337, 337-339, 347-348, 462-463, 467-469, 469-470, https://archive.org/download/tipingtienkwohh03lindgoog/tipingtienkwohh03lindgoog_text.pdf
• Julia Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (2011)
• Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (2012)