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Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 22

The Widows' Coup

Two weeks before Anqing falls, the Xianfeng Emperor dies at Rehe, leaving a five year old son and eight regents; within three months the boy's mother Cixi, with the senior empress and Prince Gong, has overthrown them. The episode follows Cixi and Prince Gong through the coup that put two widows behind the throne, the new court's trust in Zeng Guofan and the founding of Li Hongzhang's Huai Army, while the Taiping take Ningbo and Hangzhou, and asks what kind of regime would rule China for the next half century. It hears the court in its own edicts and the Taiping in their own refusal to British demands, alongside foreign observers and officials.

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Transcript

Prince Kung, photographed by Felice Beato, 2 November 1860
Prince Kung, photographed by Felice Beato, 2 November 1860. Felice Beato, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, after a year long siege, Anqing fell. The Taiping had tried everything to save it. Their great relief plan had sent two armies up the Yangtze, and the Shield King, Hong Rengan, a man who had never commanded an army, had led a third himself, only to see both his columns beaten back by imperial cavalry in a single day. The Brave King, Chen Yucheng, made one last attempt in August, and on the night of the third of September he burned his stockades and withdrew, leaving Anqing to its fate. When the Hunan Army entered the city on the fifth of September 1861, it was no longer defended, and inside, human flesh had been selling for half a tael of silver a catty. Zeng Guofan had told his brother that the proper thing to do on taking the city would be to kill a lot of people, and when it was over about sixteen thousand people are thought to have survived, most of them civilians. The buffer that had guarded the Taiping capital at Nanjing from the west was gone. It should have been the greatest moment of Zeng Guofan's life. But on the fourteenth of September the news from the north reached him. "Heaven has collapsed," he wrote, "the earth is split open." Because two weeks before Anqing fell, the emperor had died. This is an episode about a palace, and about who gets to rule from it, and it is one of the strangest and most consequential stories in this whole season. To tell it, we have to go north, beyond the Great Wall, to a hunting retreat called Rehe. Rehe was the emperors' summer retreat, a great walled park of palaces and temples in the hills northeast of Beijing, beyond the Great Wall. In September 1860, with the British and French armies closing on Beijing, the Xianfeng Emperor had fled there with his court, leaving his brother, Prince Gong, to deal with the invaders. He never came back. He stayed at Rehe through the winter and on through the spring and summer, while Prince Gong made the peace and lived with its consequences in the capital. And on the twenty second of August 1861, never having returned to his capital, the Xianfeng Emperor died, barely a month past his thirtieth birthday. He had been a sickly, unlucky ruler, and he left behind an unlucky inheritance. He had come to the throne in 1850, at eighteen, just as the Taiping were gathering in the far south, and his whole reign had been war. He had hated the treaties the foreigners forced on him. When his commissioner told him they were nothing more than slips of paper to make the barbarians leave Tianjin, which he could easily cancel, Xianfeng hoped very much that the promised exchange of ratified treaties in Beijing would never happen. It did happen, in the end, and he had run from it. At Rehe he was a sick man, and the business of the empire came to him there by courier, from a capital he had abandoned to the foreigners. Xianfeng had managed to father just one son who could inherit his throne. That son was, in August 1861, only five years old. In his last days, the dying emperor signed a decree appointing a board of regents to rule during his son's minority. He named his eight closest Manchu advisers, Sushun, Zaiyuan, Muyin, Duanhua and four others, to be the regents for his heir. A regent rules in the name of a monarch too young to rule himself, until the child comes of age. Sushun was the strongest of them, a hard, able Manchu minister who had been the dead emperor's closest confidant. In fact, the very edict naming the imperial heir had been written in Sushun's own hand. So far, so orderly. A child on the throne, eight grown men around him. But the regents had left two people out of the arrangement, and they would regret it. Let me introduce our two leads for this episode. The first is the boy's mother. She was a Manchu woman who had entered the palace as a teenage consort, one of the emperor's lesser wives, and she was in her middle twenties when he died. History knows her by the title she was given as the new emperor's mother, Cixi, the empress dowager. She had risen above the other consorts by giving the emperor what none of them had: in 1856 she bore him a son. Some of you have already met Cixi at the other end of her long life, still holding the court in her hands. Beside her stood the dead emperor's principal wife, the senior empress, a young woman with no son of her own. The boy's succession edict at first left out the customary praise of the senior empress, and it had to be put right by naming both women empress dowager. An empress dowager was the widow of an emperor, and above all the mother of a reigning one; in a court built on filial duty, even an emperor owed her a son's obedience. And the second lead is the man we left in Beijing last time. Prince Gong was the dead emperor's brother, the man who had been left behind in Beijing to make the peace with Lord Elgin. One of the first things he did as the allies closed in was to release Harry Parkes and the companion held prisoner with him, on the eighth of October 1860. And when a British photographer pointed a camera at him at the signing of the peace, the prince sat before it in a state of terror, pale as death. He was still in his twenties, and he had already dealt face to face with the foreigners more than anyone else at the court. Early in 1861 he set up a new office to manage relations with the foreign powers, the first the Qing had ever had, and he ran it himself. By excluding the imperial family from power, the regents threw Prince Gong and his brothers into opposition, and onto the side of the empresses. They were suspicious of him already. The regents dreamed of tearing up the new treaties, and were suspicious of Prince Gong's apparent softness toward the foreigners. And in Beijing, the people who ran things were losing faith. A British doctor at the new legation in Beijing reported that the capital's elite professed no love for, or confidence in, the stability of the present dynasty. So that was the situation that autumn: a dead emperor, a small boy, eight regents in a hunting park, two widows, and a prince in the capital whom the regents distrusted.

Prince Gong
Prince Gong. John Thomson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Now, the coup. It was quiet at first. For weeks, at the hunting retreat, the two empresses had been holding secret meetings with Prince Gong's younger brother. That brother was married to Cixi's younger sister. Prince Gong himself the regents had kept away, preventing him from holding an audience with his brother in exile. But everyone, regents and widows alike, had to bring the boy and the dead emperor's body home to Beijing, and that was a long road. The procession split. Behind came the emperor's body, on a bier carried by a hundred and twenty four bearers, and with it, Sushun. Ahead went the forward party, with the empresses and the boy, and they arrived in Beijing on the first of November, to be greeted by a host of officials and soldiers dressed in white, the colour of mourning. White was the colour of mourning in China, as black was in Europe. And then Prince Gong moved. He held an audience and read aloud an edict in the name of the child emperor, authorized by the seals of the empresses dowager, charging Sushun and the others with treason. The regents were charged with having caused the war with England and France by misleading Xianfeng with treacherous advice. And the empress dowager personally charged them with faking the edict that had named them regents in the first place, because, she said, her husband had been too feeble at the end to dictate it. Think about how neat that is. The war, the burning of the Summer Palace, the humiliation of the flight to Rehe, all of it now belonged to the men who had been the emperor's closest advisers, and none of it to the prince who had signed the peace. That night, guards rode out to Sushun's camp and arrested him in his tent. The rest followed. Five of the regents were stripped of rank and banished to the western frontier. The three senior members, Zaiyuan, Duanhua and Sushun, were sentenced to death. Zaiyuan and Duanhua were granted silk cords to strangle themselves; in fact they were hanged in a dungeon of the Imperial Clan Court. The Imperial Clan Court was the body that judged and punished members of the imperial family itself. Being allowed to take your own life was a mark of favour for a condemned nobleman, sparing him the executioner. Sushun got no such mercy. At two in the afternoon on the eighth of November, in front of a massive crowd of spectators, he was beheaded in the Beijing cabbage market. The cabbage market was Beijing's place of public execution, an open market street outside the inner city. Three months earlier he had stood at the emperor's side. History calls this the Xinyou coup, after the name of the year 1861 in the Chinese cycle of years. And then the new order was set out. An edict asked that the empress dowager should in person administer the government, with princes to counsel her. The first act of the new rulers was to make Prince Gong Prince Counsellor, a post created specially for him. They offered to make his rank of imperial prince perpetually hereditary, and for the time being he respectfully declined. Even the name of the reign was changed. The regents had chosen a reign title for the new emperor, and as a sign of the change of policy it was thrown out. A decree of the seventh of November condemned the regents' title as tautological and adopted a new one: Tongzhi. Every Qing emperor reigned under a title, chosen for good omen, and was known to history by it; the boy would be the Tongzhi Emperor. Tongzhi can be read as ruling together, and that is exactly what happened. The two empresses dowager would sit behind a silk screen at audiences, hearing the business of the empire, while the boy sat on the throne in front of them. The Chinese phrase for it means listening to government from behind a hanging screen: the ministers addressed the throne, and the voice that answered came from behind the curtain. There was no precedent in the Qing for widows ruling from behind a screen; earlier dynasties had known it, but the Manchu house never had. For the foreigners in Beijing, this was very good news. The English newspaper at Shanghai compared it to the revolution at Paris in 1848, which had astounded Europe: sudden, sharp and decisive. And it was a revolution that suited them. The men who wanted to tear up the treaties were dead or banished, and the man who had signed them now stood beside the throne. Among Chinese of position, the dominant note of the new government, peace with the Western powers, was seen as essential to restoring order at home. Cixi and Prince Gong worked together at first almost as equals. Later, it would be mistress and minister. But that is a story for other seasons. So what kind of regime was this? It is worth asking, because the answer shaped China for half a century. It was a regime of the imperial family against the old favourites, of a mother ruling for her son, and of a prince who believed the dynasty could only survive by keeping the peace with the foreign powers and turning all its strength on the rebels. And it lasted. Cixi would hold power in one form or another for the next forty seven years, until her death in 1908. For now, what matters is this: the two widows and the prince had a war to win, and very quickly they decided whom they would trust to win it.

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

Remember Zeng Guofan, writing that heaven had collapsed. For a man like Zeng, the emperor was not just a ruler but the centre of the moral order, and his death in exile, with the war unwon, was a catastrophe in every sense. And for weeks it was not clear who would now be giving him his orders. Under the old emperor he had been given wars to fight but, for years, not the provincial offices that would let him pay and feed his armies. The new court did things differently. In late November 1861, two weeks after the execution of Sushun, it issued a series of edicts in the name of the child emperor, making Zeng the master of the war. They gave him command of all military affairs in four provinces. Those four were Jiangsu, Anhui, Jiangxi and Zhejiang, the whole lower Yangtze, the richest country in China and the heart of the war. Much of that country was in Taiping hands, of course. The court was giving Zeng the right to rule provinces he would first have to win back. No other Chinese official in the Qing dynasty had ever held such power. For the first time, the man fighting the war in the Yangtze valley had the authority to run the provinces that paid for it. Remember the warning from years before, when Zeng's army first retook Wuchang: one of the old emperor's counsellors had said that an army of ten thousand men loyal to a Hunanese official would not be a blessing to the empire. The new court had decided it could not afford that fear any more. It was a gamble, and the two widows and the prince took it within weeks of seizing power. Think about what that means. The Qing were a conquest dynasty, and for two centuries they had generally kept the highest military commands for Manchu and Mongol bannermen. Zeng received the edicts on the fifteenth of December 1861. Before the month was out, a shipment of priceless gifts from the empress dowager arrived at Anqing for him, among them an imperial jade ring. And Zeng's reaction was not joy. "This power is too great," he wrote in his diary. "My stature will be too high, and my undeserved reputation has outgrown itself. This terrifies me to the extreme." You might take that for false modesty. I don't think it was. Zeng was a deep student of Chinese history, and that history was full of generals whose power grew too great, and who were destroyed for it. On the twenty third of December, a friend wrote to him that the imperial government had fallen into the hands of the empress dowager, who now ruled "from behind a screen." And in February 1862, Zeng asked the government to please refrain from giving his family any more honours until they had actually managed to reconquer Nanjing. That is Zeng all over. Keep your head down, finish the job, and never let the court think you want more. And he soon learned how the regents had ended, the most powerful men at court, condemned within a single week. But he needed more. He needed men.

Li Hongzhang
Li Hongzhang. Russell & Sons, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Hunan Army was a Hunan army. Its men were recruited through home districts and personal ties, so that a man fought beside his neighbours under officers he knew. That made it loyal and tough, but there were only so many Hunanese to go around, and the war was now far bigger than Hunan. So Zeng did something he would never have been allowed to do under the old court. He built a second army. He chose a man who had once worked for him as a secretary. He authorized a willowy thirty eight year old scholar from Anhui named Li Hongzhang to return to his home in central Anhui in order to muster an entirely new provincial militia. Li Hongzhang had passed the highest of the imperial examinations as a young man, and had studied under Zeng in Beijing before the war. He came from Hefei, in the middle of Anhui, from a family of scholars, and his father had passed that same highest examination before him. In the early years of the rebellion he had fought the Taiping in his home province with local militia, without much success, before joining Zeng's staff. The new force would be called the Huai Army, after the Huai River, which runs through the north of Anhui. Like the Hunan Army, it would be raised through local leaders and personal ties, and its men would look first to the officers who raised them. By these means Li pulled together several thousand Anhui peasants, and in February 1862 he brought them to Anqing to be trained by veteran units of Zeng's Hunan Army. Think about where they were trained. In the city that had been starved and emptied only months before. At full strength, each battalion of the new army numbered five hundred and four men. It began small. It would not stay small. In the three years after 1862, Li's officers recruited a force of sixty thousand men. And unlike Zeng's Hunanese, Li's army would be armed from abroad. Several months after he reached Shanghai in 1862, Li introduced European musketry to his growing forces. In early 1863 he bought mobile artillery pieces that fired explosive shells. And by the end of 1864, more than two thirds of his sixty thousand troops had Western arms. Keep your eye on this man. In a few episodes he will be at the centre of everything, and long after this season ends, he will still be there. And notice what Zeng had done. He had not only won a city and an empire's trust. He had raised up a second man with a second army, recruited the same way, loyal the same way. The dynasty that had once feared one such army now had two, and soon it would have more. That is the price of being saved by your own provinces. Hold on to it; this season will end with it, and the next will have to live with it.

While the court was being remade in Beijing, the Taiping were on the march in the east. The Loyal King, Li Xiucheng, had taken his enormous new following east into Zhejiang, a province that with its neighbour Jiangsu paid a quarter of the empire's income in peacetime. And on Zhejiang's coast stood a treaty port. On their way the Taiping took one city after another, among them Shaoxing, Fenghua and Yuyao, until they came up against the British at Ningbo. Ningbo was one of the five ports opened to British trade by the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, with a British consul and a small foreign settlement on the river across from the walled Chinese city. The British consul there was Frederick Harvey, and he was watching his city empty. "The city is like a desert," he wrote, with only the shipping in the harbour still moving. The local daotai was desperate. He offered the French customs collector fifty thousand taels to pull together a foreign militia and go out and fight the Taiping. A daotai was the Qing official over a circuit of several prefectures, and at a treaty port he was also the man who dealt with the foreigners. Instead the foreigners decided to talk. They did not want the city defended, and they did not want it stormed. What they wanted was for the war to pass them by, leaving their trade and their lives alone. On the twenty eighth of November, the consuls of Britain and the United States and a French naval officer agreed to go out to the rebel headquarters aboard a British gunboat and deliver a message. The message was a pledge of neutrality: that they took no part in this civil contest, but claimed exemption from injury and annoyance at the hands of both parties. The Taiping general commanding at Yuyao gave it his unqualified assent, with one condition. If the Qing officials resisted and he had to attack Ningbo, he said, "I cannot be responsible for the lives of any of your countrymen who may remain inside the city." "Otherwise, I will do all I can to prevent their being molested, and will at once behead any of my followers who dare to offer them any annoyance." He spoke of the foreigners as worshippers of the same God and the same Jesus, and called them his foreign brothers. And on all sides, the visitors noticed, his men asked eagerly for foreign firearms, of which they seemed to have very few. That want, the British interpreter thought, would be sorely felt if they ever came up against troops brave enough to stand against them. Hold on to that observation; it will matter a great deal before this season is over. At the town the Taiping had just taken, the visitors saw only a few dead bodies, and some of those, they were told, were Taiping soldiers who had been caught plundering and burning. The general told them that a second Taiping army was marching on Ningbo from the southwest, and when they went up that branch of the river they found it camped only ten miles from the city. On the second of December a British party rode out again, to ask the Taiping commanders to wait one week before beginning their assault. In the city, fake notices went up in Chinese claiming that six British and French warships were on their way from Shanghai, bringing six hundred foreign troops to defend Ningbo. Whoever put them up was trying to keep the local troops from deserting. On the ninth of December, sixty thousand Taiping troops in two columns appeared outside the city gates. A storming party swam the moat and went up the wall, as one witness put it, like wild cats. And Ningbo fell. Contrary to Harvey's expectations, there was no widespread murder. He reported that the city was now in the full and unquestionable possession of the Taiping forces, and that the rebels had shown wonderful moderation. Their commanders told the consuls that it was their wish to live on terms of friendship and amity with all foreigners. To celebrate their peaceful capture of a treaty port, they declared three months free of all duties on trade. But Harvey was not won over. He saw no sign at all of respectable Chinese merchants coming back to the city. And the Taiping's friendship, he judged, was based on fear and the want of money. Remember that judgement. It was only an opinion, but opinions like it are what wars get decided on. For the moment, though, a treaty port was in rebel hands, its consul still at his post and its foreigners unharmed, though its trade had yet to come back. It was exactly the outcome the Taiping had promised. Whether the British would accept it was another matter.

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

Now we come back to Shanghai. Everything in this part of the story turns on one small phrase, the present year, and on what happens when a year runs out. Remember the promise the Taiping made at Nanjing in the spring: no attack on Shanghai or Wusong, no army within a hundred li, for the present year. The present year was nearly over. And the British wanted it extended, forever if possible. A British naval officer sent the Taiping a list of demands. The promise not to come within a hundred li of Shanghai and Wusong, he complained, had not been faithfully observed. He listed British losses he said the rebels had caused: seven thousand five hundred and sixty three taels, four thousand eight hundred dollars, twenty bales of silk, and two muskets. He insisted that no vessel owned by British subjects be interfered with on the Yangtze in any way or under any pretext. Under the first arrangement, the British had allowed the Taiping to levy moderate duties on ships trading in their territory, but they had also stationed a warship at Nanjing to make sure British ships could pass the river freely. And he wanted the Taiping to promise to keep a hundred li away from the river ports of Jiujiang and Hankou, too, where a large and valuable British trade had sprung up. The Taiping answered in writing. Their reply went through the British demands point by point, politely, firmly, and with a confidence that tells you how the war looked from Nanjing at the end of that year. And for once in this story, we hear them speak for themselves, at length, to the British. "It is true that in the spring of this year we did make an agreement of this nature," they admitted. But they explained why it could not stand. There is "no spot under the wide canopy of heaven" that God had not created, they wrote, and upon them rested the duty of recovering the whole of China for God by force of arms, so "it is difficult for us to make any exception in the matter of territory, even to the extent of a foot of soil". They had agreed to spare Shanghai for the year, they said, only because the British were, as they put it, of the same origin as themselves, and as a mark of their goodwill. And then came the line that answers Harry Parkes. "Though commerce may be to you the means of livelihood," they wrote, to the Taiping the possession of territory was all important. Remember what Parkes had told them in Nanjing: that Britain's interests were strictly commercial. Here was the answer. Your interest is trade. Ours is the country. It was their divine duty to kill the imps wherever they were found, the reply went on, and if there were no Qing soldiers at Shanghai, the Taiping would never think of sending troops there. And if Shanghai were willing to drive out the Qing soldiers itself, the Taiping would send officers to keep order there, and to protect not only the people but British trade as well. At that very moment, they pointed out, the Loyal King and the Attending King were at the head of several million soldiers, recovering Suzhou, Hangzhou and the whole province from the enemy. The imps were the Taiping's word for the Manchu rulers and their servants, a word for demons. The year was drawing to a close, they said, and with it the time named in their agreement, and they could never agree that their troops should not prepare to take those places merely out of regard for British trade. They reminded the British of an old promise of their own. British officers, they recalled, had once told them: "If your troops do not kill or injure British subjects, or do not burn or plunder British houses or property, then we shall remain neutral and assist neither party." They called the British proposal a grave error, one that in truth helped the Manchu rulers, who had made the great empire of China their prey for so long. All their power, they said, came from God, and their support from Christ. And if the British wanted to make proposals, their only course was to wait until the Qing had been destroyed. The British warning was just as blunt. If the Taiping repeated the absurdity of attacking Shanghai and Wusong, they would meet not merely a repulse, as on the former occasion, but worse. So there it was, in writing on both sides. The British said: our interests are trade, and you will keep away from where we trade. The Taiping said: our interest is all of China, and we will not leave a foot of it to the enemy because you sell things there. Neither side was lying. That was the problem. Britain could not have both things at once: a neutral Britain and a Shanghai safe from the Taiping. And once the year was out, it was going to have to choose.

Meanwhile, the Loyal King was finishing the job he had come east to do. Hangzhou was the capital of Zhejiang province, one of the great cities of China, a city of silk and canals and lakes. The Taiping had taken it once before, briefly, in the raid that broke the siege of Nanjing, and then let it go. This time Li Xiucheng meant to keep it. The first time, the Manchu garrison had held out in its own walled quarter of the city, and the Taiping had moved on before they could take it. This time there would be no moving on, and the people inside would pay for it. There were two point three million people inside the city, and starvation hit quickly. By the thirteenth of December, all the food was gone, and the defending troops ate their cavalry horses and draft animals, while the civilians boiled roots and tree bark. By the end, even human flesh was being sold in the market. If that sounds like Anqing, it should. This was the same war, fought the same way, by both sides: you did not storm a great city, you starved it. But this siege was far swifter than the one at Anqing, because with so many mouths inside, the food ran out fast. Li Xiucheng's men fired arrows into the city wrapped in messages promising not to harm the people, and giving them a choice: join the Taiping, or go free. On the twenty ninth of December, the inhabitants gave up their gates. A foreigner who rode with the Taiping was travelling toward the city, making for the Loyal King's headquarters. His journey had taken twelve days, the later part in large canal boats, through country where, as he saw it, the people in every village were tending their silkworms for winter, reeling the last cocoons, or tilling their fields. He left the boats a day's march from Hangzhou, came over a rise and saw the city lying before him, in his words, "in the clear frosty air of a fine December morning." "The extensive city was in flames in several quarters," he wrote, "and the dense columns of smoke shrouded as with a pall the slaughter taking place beneath." He could see dark masses of troops rushing forward against the city amid the constant roar of artillery, and it was plain that he had arrived at the moment of a grand assault. A fleeing imperial soldier his party caught told him the Taiping had just captured the city. The fugitives were imperial soldiers from the Hangzhou garrison, running in every direction, and when he reached the Taiping lines he found them almost empty, the few men left busy guarding prisoners. Inside, the defenders made their own ends. The Manchu bannermen in the garrison quarter burned themselves alive, while many of the Chinese imperial officials slit their own throats. The Manchu general in command and a number of his men set off a mine and blew themselves up with their citadel. In a Qing city, the Manchu garrison lived in its own walled quarter, apart from the Chinese, and in the Taiping's eyes they were the imps themselves. The governor of the province hanged himself. And Li Xiucheng did something that astonished the loyalists. He paid for the dead governor's body to be carried to Shanghai for burial with full honours. "How can a savage wolf have such feeling?" a Qing official wondered. Another loyalist complained that because the Loyal King had issued orders not to harm the people, the people had not helped fight against him. But was there a massacre at Hangzhou? Here the sources disagree. The foreigner who rode with the Taiping granted that a great loss of life occurred, but insisted that not a man fell except in battle, and that no one who was not fighting was killed, except by starvation or by their own hands. The British admiral, Hope, reported that the rebels were stated to have committed their usual atrocities. Whichever is true, the city had been starved before it fell. For the Loyal King, Hangzhou was a great triumph, and he now commanded armies of more than a million souls. With Ningbo and Hangzhou taken, the Loyal King now had almost total control of the two rich provinces around Shanghai. And the year was over. The promise to keep a hundred li from Shanghai had been made for the present year, and the present year had run out. In Beijing, two widows and a prince had just taken power and handed the war to Zeng Guofan. In Anhui, Li Hongzhang was about to raise a new army. And in Shanghai, the foreign merchants, the refugees and the British guns were waiting to see what the Loyal King would do next. Next time, he comes.

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