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Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 23

Shanghai

In January 1862 the Taiping close on Shanghai, and Britain abandons the neutrality it had claimed since 1853. The episode follows Li Hongzhang, whose new army is carried through Taiping country by British steamers to defend the city, and Li Xiucheng, who tries one last time to break the siege of Nanjing, through a year of foreign intervention, massacres, cholera and the death of the American Ward, and asks how much foreign guns decided the war. It leans heavily on foreign observers, with the court and Zeng's side heard in their own reports and the Taiping only a little.

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Shanghai Nanjing Ningbo Cixi
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Transcript

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

Last time, the court in Beijing changed hands. In November 1861 Prince Gong held an audience and read out an edict, in the name of the child emperor and under the seals of the two empresses dowager, charging the old regents with treason. The new court did something the old one never had. It trusted Zeng Guofan, the scholar general of the Hunan Army, and gave him a power no Chinese official in the whole Qing dynasty had ever held. Zeng, in turn, sent a willowy thirty-eight-year-old scholar from Anhui named Li Hongzhang home to raise an entirely new provincial army. By February 1862 Li had brought several thousand Anhui peasants to Anqing to be trained by Zeng's veterans. Meanwhile the Taiping kept winning. They took Ningbo, a treaty port, with sixty thousand men in two columns, and to the surprise of the British consul there was no widespread murder. They took Hangzhou after a siege so long that the defenders ate their horses and the people boiled roots and bark, and on December 29 the inhabitants gave up their gates. And when the British asked the Taiping to stay away from Shanghai once their year's promise ran out, they answered in writing that they had to recover the whole of China for God, and could hardly make an exception of even a foot of soil. Commerce, they told him, might be the British way of making a living. To the Taiping, territory was everything. So that is where we are as the new year opens. A new regime in Beijing, a new army being drilled at Anqing, and the greatest Taiping general in the field with his eyes on the richest port in China. This episode is about what happened when the Heavenly Kingdom finally came for Shanghai, and what the foreigners there decided to do about it. It's the year the British stopped pretending to stand aside. And it's the year that decided, as much as any year did, how this war would end. The man coming for Shanghai was Li Xiucheng, the Loyal King. He was born poor in Guangxi, joined the rebellion as a common soldier, and rose to command the largest army the Taiping had. The Loyal King was a title, one of the ranks of Taiping kings under the Heavenly King himself, Hong Xiuquan, who ruled from Nanjing. Li had already broken the old siege of Nanjing, taken Suzhou and Hangzhou, and swept through most of the rich country of the lower Yangtze. Shanghai was the obvious next prize. And he had been here before. In August 1860 he had marched on Shanghai expecting fellow Christians to welcome him, and his men had been driven back under a storm of grapeshot. He wrote to the consuls afterwards, bitterly, that he had come to Shanghai to make a treaty, to link the two peoples by trade, and not to fight them. Then, the following spring, the Heavenly King had agreed with the British that his commanders would stay thirty miles from Shanghai for the rest of the year. That year was over now. And the Taiping had already told the British, in writing, that they would not promise it again. Why did everyone want Shanghai so badly? By the 1860s it was the busiest port in China, the place where the silk and tea of the Yangtze valley met the foreign ships, and where the foreign-run customs house collected duties on that trade for the Qing. For the Taiping, holding Shanghai would mean money, foreign guns and steamers bought on the open market, and a door to the outside world. For the Qing, losing it would mean losing some of the last revenue they could count on in the whole region. Hong Rengan had even dreamed of buying or renting twenty steamships from the foreigners at Shanghai. They would not sell them. The alarms first sounded on January 11, when the smoke of distant fires began to darken the horizon north of Shanghai. Soon after, two or three thousand rebels with muskets overran the town of Wusong, ten miles to the north. Then the reports came thick and fast. Eighty thousand Taiping troops, people said, were on the march from Suzhou. By the end of the month five main armies, some of them thousands strong and some tens of thousands, had occupied the towns all around the city. Some of those towns had been fought over again and again since 1860. Each time an army passed through, Taiping or Qing, the people who could get away fled toward the one place that seemed safe, the foreign settlements at Shanghai. But here's the thing about Li Xiucheng. He had no wish to destroy Shanghai in the process of taking it. He wanted the city whole. So instead of storming it, he spread his armies in a wide ring around it, testing how hard the foreigners would resist. And he sent words ahead of the soldiers. His broadsheets told the people of the country around Shanghai to make up their minds like the sun and the moon, and come over to the Taiping like running water. The British and French had their own broadsheets. On January 24, the day before the rumours said the Taiping would arrive, the British and French authorities plastered the city walls with notices in Chinese declaring Shanghai under their protection. Shanghai in 1862 was really two places. The old walled Chinese city, and beside it, along the river, the foreign settlements, where British, French and American merchants lived under their own consuls. Ever since the Taiping swept east in 1860, frightened people from all over the region had been crowding into those settlements, until the place was bursting with refugees. Everything a refugee needed got dearer. The price of rice went up by half. The price of flour doubled. Picture it. A merchant town built for trade, packed with people who had fled their homes, watching the smoke of burning villages on the horizon, and reading posters on the walls from both sides telling them who would keep them safe. For now, the Taiping stopped short of the walls. But the question hanging over the city was simple. When they did come, who would fight them?

Before we get to the fighting, I need to take you upriver, to Nanjing, because in the same January something happened there that changed how every foreigner in Shanghai saw the Taiping. It involves an old American preacher and the Heavenly King's cousin. The preacher was Issachar Jacox Roberts, a Baptist missionary from Tennessee. Back in 1847, in Canton, a young man named Hong Xiuquan had come to him and studied the Bible under him for a couple of months. That young man became the Heavenly King. And in 1860 Roberts had finally gone to Nanjing to see what his old pupil had built, and stayed there for more than a year. From Nanjing he spoke up for the rebels, passing word to the foreign merchants that the Taiping wanted their trade, on terms at least as good as the Qing's, if not better. Not everyone who visited him was impressed. A young Chinese graduate of an American college who came to Nanjing late in 1860 to see Hong Rengan met Roberts first, and had little regard for him. For foreigners who hoped the Taiping might be real Christians, Roberts was the living link. If anyone could vouch for the Heavenly Kingdom, it was the man who had taught its king. The cousin was Hong Rengan, the Shield King. He was Hong Xiuquan's cousin, a man who had spent years among missionaries in Hong Kong, and since 1859 he had been the kingdom's chief minister, the man who handled its dealings with foreigners. If any Taiping leader understood the West, it was him. Which makes what Roberts said next all the more startling. By Roberts's telling, on January 13, 1862, Hong Rengan finally lost his mind altogether. He burst in with a long sword, Roberts said, and murdered Roberts's Chinese servant right where he stood. Then, in Roberts's account, he leaped on the body and stamped his silk-clad foot on the dead man's head. And when Roberts did not respond, Hong Rengan picked up a cup of tea and flung it in the preacher's face, and struck him on both sides of the head. That's the story Roberts told. Hong Rengan told a very different one. Here the sources disagree. On one side is Roberts's account: a sword, a killing, a body trampled on the floor. On the other, Hong Rengan called the whole thing a slight misunderstanding, and said only that the preacher had fled the city in a hurry, and every effort to win him back had failed. And the slain servant seems to have turned up later in Shanghai, quite alive. A pamphlet that June even reported that Roberts had admitted it was Hong Rengan's brother, not Hong Rengan, who had beaten the man. Whatever happened in that room, the two men could no longer live in the same city. And in the end, what mattered was not what happened, but what the world was told. It's worth sitting with that for a moment. A story that may not have been true, told by an angry old man who had just run for his life, was about to land in a port full of foreigners deciding whether to go to war.

Roberts ran. He escaped on a passing British gunboat about a week later, in such a rush that he left all his books and clothes behind. He turned up in Shanghai on January 30, wild-eyed and breathless. Think about the timing. Roberts reached Shanghai at the end of the very month the Taiping armies had closed in around it, and he came with a story of murder. And then he wrote. In writing, Roberts declared that he was now as much opposed to the rebels as he had once been in their favour. Coming from anyone else, it might have been one more complaint. Coming from Roberts, it was a verdict. As one observer at the time put it, the principal link between the Protestant missionaries and the Taiping movement was now broken. Only a year or so earlier, the Welsh missionary Griffith John had come away from the Taiping predicting that, if order held, Jiangsu would be a nominally Christian province within twenty years. Now the one missionary who knew the Heavenly King best was telling the world to give up on them. For years, there had always been foreigners in the treaty ports willing to say: wait, these people read the Bible, they pray to our God, perhaps they are the future of China. After Roberts, that voice went quiet. The foreign hope in the Taiping did not die all at once, but his letters took the heart out of it, at exactly the moment the British were deciding whom to fight.

Which brings us to the turn. Since 1853, Britain had said it was neutral in China's civil war. It would defend its own people and property, trade with whoever held a port, and fight for neither side. That policy had been bent before. But early in the new year it broke. The man who broke it was Admiral James Hope, the commander of Britain's navy in Chinese waters. Lord Russell's standing orders were clear: Britain would permit no intervention in the civil war, except to prevent the torture and death of British subjects. Hope, as was his habit, ignored them and acted on what the moment seemed to demand. Look at what he had to work with. The Allies had only fifteen hundred and fifty regular troops at Shanghai, six hundred and fifty of them British and the rest French. There were two hundred civilian volunteers, and about ten thousand Qing soldiers who, on paper, defended the region, and whom everyone agreed were useless. Against them were Taiping armies counted in the tens of thousands. So Hope looked around for help, and found it in Frederick Townsend Ward. Hope was not new to the Taiping. In 1861 he had sailed up the Yangtze to Nanjing, pledged British neutrality to the rebels once more, and asked them to keep two days' march away from Shanghai, warning that any attempt on the city would be met by force. Now he was ready to go further, and march out to meet them. Ward was an American adventurer from Salem, Massachusetts, whom the Shanghai authorities and merchants had hired back in 1860 to raise a force against the rebels. He had learned soldiering of a sort as a filibuster, a private adventurer making war in other people's countries. In 1853 he served as training officer to the notorious William Walker. Walker would later make himself ruler of Nicaragua for a time. And when Ward came back to China in 1859, his plan was to join the rebels and help them overthrow the Manchu government. He could not reach the Taiping, so he went to work for the other side instead. His sponsors had promised him more than a hundred thousand dollars to take the Taiping town of Songjiang, and in one of his early fights a bullet punched through both his cheeks and disfigured him for life. He had started with foreign drifters and deserters and ended up drilling Chinese soldiers in Western style, with foreign officers and modern guns. By the spring of 1862 the court had given his army a grand name: the Ever Victorious Army. By late February, Hope was calling Ward a man upon whose experience of the Chinese he was disposed to place very considerable reliance. And Frederick Bruce wrote that Colonel Ward's force was a nucleus that should be encouraged and augmented. Bruce was Lord Elgin's younger brother, and now Britain's minister living in Beijing, dealing every week with the new court of Prince Gong. Back in 1860 he had told his people at Shanghai to take no notice of the Taiping's letters, calling any contact with the rebels objectionable on principle. From where he sat, the dynasty was the government Britain had just signed treaties with, and the Taiping were a threat to the trade those treaties protected. The plan that came out of all this was simple. The British, the French and Ward's men would together clear the Taiping out of a ring of about thirty miles around Shanghai, so the city could breathe. In practice, that meant marching out to one Taiping town after another, blowing in the walls with artillery, and sending infantry through the breach. At one town, three thousand five hundred of Ward's Chinese troops stormed the breach while a band played God Save the Queen. At another, a witness saw three little boys, each armed with a small matchlock, run forward to fire through the holes the shells had made in the parapet, and keep firing until they were killed. Nearly five hundred Taiping died inside that town, and some two thousand more were slaughtered by Qing troops as they fled the artillery. About a thousand were taken prisoner, with British help, and afterwards executed by the Qing. At one Taiping camp, the attackers came on so suddenly that they found the defenders' dinners still smoking in their cups. Hope reported that the camps they took held large stores of rice gathered from the country around, and that they were burnt and the grain destroyed. That grain was food for the countryside as much as for the rebels. An Englishman who sided with the Taiping later claimed that non-combatants died by the tens of thousands from famine. And yet the Allies could take towns far more easily than they could hold them. The British and French at Shanghai were simply too weak to leave garrisons behind against the rebels. Before long General Staveley, the British commander, decided to abandon Jiading, a walled town the Allies had taken, and to stop his raids until reinforcements came. So what did the Taiping make of all this? Remember, these were people who had greeted the British as foreign brothers in the same faith. Now British guns were knocking down their walls. The Loyal King put his answer into words. The foreign powers, he said, had struck a nearly fatal blow against the dynasty, and then, claiming to want China's good, turned around to prop it up and fight against the Taiping. They complained that Qing steamers loaded with munitions sailed past the walls of their capital under the American flag, and that they had held their fire only out of respect for that flag. In print, someone had sneered at Nanjing as the City of Coolie Kings. The Taiping said they took it as the highest compliment possible. And when they had written to the consuls, their letters had come back unopened. The foreigners, the Loyal King said, thought the Taiping cause a sinking ship, and like rats on shipboard they were deserting, not the Taiping, but their own fine words. And then one sentence that sums up the whole year: "That the foreign Powers are playing a game to suit their own profit in China, is to us perfectly clear."

James Hope
James Hope. Sydney Hodges, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Let's go back to where the fighting started, because the first battle showed everyone what the rest of the year would look like. On February 21, 1862, Hope struck the first blow. The target was Gaoqiao, a Taiping-held village about eight miles from Shanghai. Hope did not go alone. He joined forces with Ward, the American in Qing service. An English writer who sided with the Taiping later sneered that the admiral had teamed up with an American filibuster in the pay of the dynasty. Ward brought six hundred of his men. Hope and the French admiral, Auguste Protet, brought five hundred men from their ships between them. Protet commanded the French naval forces in Chinese waters. Gaoqiao was held by a few hundred Taiping and several thousand country people who had just joined them, most of them armed with bamboo spears. Against modern guns, they did not hold for long. Only one Frenchman was killed before the rebel garrison abandoned the village. The Taiping knew what they lacked. When British officers had met Taiping generals outside Ningbo only months before, the rebels had asked eagerly on all sides for foreign firearms, and they seemed to have very few. The British interpreter who reported it added that the want would be sorely felt if they ever met troops who would stand against them. The Allies brought field guns that fired explosive shells from well beyond the range of a matchlock, and rifles that outshot anything the defenders carried. A stockade that could hold off a Qing army for weeks could be battered open in an afternoon. The Taiping lost more than a hundred men killed. Large stores of grain were found in the place, and most of them were burned. One dead Frenchman, more than a hundred dead Taiping. That was the arithmetic of the new war, and it was going to repeat itself over and over again. Not everyone in Shanghai cheered. Jardine, Matheson and Company, the biggest British trading house on the coast, wrote that the policy the Allied commanders were adopting "will, it is feared, lead to disastrous consequences." Think about who was saying that. Not missionaries, not idealists, but the hardest-headed traders on the coast. But the admirals had made their choice, and the next piece of the plan was coming down the Yangtze.

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

Remember Li Hongzhang, drilling his new Anhui army at Anqing? Shanghai needed him. And Shanghai was willing to pay. Li Hongzhang came from Hefei, in Anhui. He had passed the highest level of the civil service examinations in 1847, served in the Hanlin Academy, the emperor's college of scholars in Beijing, and then joined Zeng Guofan's staff as a secretary. He was a scholar, not a soldier. But he had watched Zeng build the Hunan Army from the inside, and now he was building an army of his own on the same plan. Its basic unit was the battalion, and at full strength a battalion had five hundred and four men. In the three years after 1862, his officers would recruit sixty thousand of them. Late in 1861 a delegation of Shanghai gentry had travelled up to Anqing to beg Zeng Guofan for an army. The problem was geography. Between Anqing and Shanghai lay hundreds of miles of river, and most of it, Nanjing above all, was in Taiping hands. The answer was British steamers. A contract was signed to carry nine thousand soldiers and support staff from Anqing down to Shanghai on British steamships. The ships sailed straight down the Yangtze, past the Taiping capital, carrying a Qing army. The Taiping did not fire on British ships, and so a Qing army could pass through the heart of their kingdom unharmed. With three round trips in less than a month, by the end of April Li Hongzhang's army of six thousand five hundred Anhui troops was in Shanghai. It did not come cheap. The voyage cost a hundred and eighty thousand taels of silver, about a third of a month's customs revenue at Shanghai. A tael was the Chinese measure of silver by weight, a little over an ounce, and the unit in which the Qing reckoned its money. Zeng Guofan could hardly believe the price. It was shocking and pitiful, he wrote in a letter home. There's something almost comic about it: a Qing army riding to war as paying passengers under the Union Jack. But it was no joke for the Taiping. Li Hongzhang had come to stay. He took over as governor of Jiangsu province, the province that held both Shanghai and Suzhou, replacing Xue Huan. And with the governorship came command, at least on paper, of Ward's army, the Ever Victorious Army. So by that spring Shanghai was defended by three very different forces. British and French regulars who answered to London and Paris. A foreign-officered Chinese army that answered to whoever paid it. And a new Chinese provincial army that answered to Li Hongzhang, and through him to Zeng Guofan. Keep your eye on that third one. It's the one that will still be standing when the others are gone.

Meanwhile, down the coast to the south, the British were about to show just how far their new policy could stretch. Ningbo, as you'll remember, was a treaty port the Taiping had taken in December, peacefully, after promising the consuls to spare the foreigners. It was one of the five ports opened to British trade by the Treaty of Nanjing back in 1842, a walled city on a river a few miles from the sea, with a small foreign settlement across the water from it. Before the attack, a Taiping general had promised the consuls that he would behead any of his followers who dared to harm a foreigner. The British consul, Frederick Harvey, had been surprised by how moderate the rebels were, though he suspected their friendship was based on fear and the want of money. For months the rebels and the foreigners in Ningbo had got along. On April 23 the Taiping in Ningbo held a celebration for a commander's promotion. Part of it was a salute fired from the guns on the city's eastern gate. The guns were not well aimed, and a handful of shots sailed across the river, over the French gunship L'Étoile. The Taiping commanders sent profuse apologies the very same day. The British officer on the spot was Captain Roderick Dew of the warship Encounter. At first he took the apologies in good part. On April 27 he wrote a friendly letter to the Taiping generals, Huang and Fan, accepting them, and asking only that the guns be removed. Then two things changed his mind. He worked out, apparently for the first time, that there had been two incidents with the guns, not one. And new orders had arrived from London. On reflection, Dew seems to have decided to take those orders as licence to find a cause for war. The Taiping generals answered in writing, and their letter was received on April 29. They said there had been no suspicions or dislikes between the two sides, that they had protected foreign trade, and that they had even beheaded some of their own men who broke into a foreign merchant's house. The salute, they said, had been an accident, and the offenders would be punished. But the fort and the guns were there to protect their own soldiers, and they could not agree to remove them. Then came the line that shows they knew what was coming. If you please, they wrote, "you can, if you please, attack us", and they would stand on the defensive and not strike the first blow. In any large army, they added, there were good men and bad, and they asked that a small matter like this should not break so grand a principle as friendship. They tried to meet him halfway. They offered to take all the powder and shot out of the guns in question and stop up the openings in the walls they fired through, and to open them again only if the city itself came under attack. The guns themselves, though, would stay. Dew was not satisfied. He moved the foreign ships two miles down the river, cut off communication with the city, and sent the correspondence on to his admirals. He wrote back on May 2 that the Taiping had refused what he called very moderate demands for insults to the British and French flags. And he warned that if they still refused, he had orders to blockade the river mouth below the city and stop every foreign ship from entering. Now, Dew had a problem. Ships could shell a city, but someone still had to go in and take it. But someone else did. A ragtag fleet of a hundred and fifty small armed boats, under a former coastal pirate named Apak, was on hand to do the fighting for the Qing. Consul Harvey called the pirate fleet's arrival at that moment an extraordinary, but fortunate, coincidence. On the morning of May 10, the fighting began. Here the sources disagree on who fired first. Dew said the Taiping battery on the point fired on the British and French ships at ten in the morning. A Chinese official later said the fuse was lit by Apak and the consul's own servant, firing secretly on the Encounter from the Taiping side of the river and killing two of her crew. Whoever started it, the end was never in doubt. Six gunships shelled the city, with a break at two o'clock so that Dew could enjoy his dinner. The Taiping left about a hundred dead in and around the walls. The British lost three killed and twenty-three wounded. Then Apak's men went in. A Hong Kong newspaper reported that the pirate army did more damage in a few hours than the rebels had done in the whole five months they held the city. And the Qing official restored to Ningbo was soon busy cutting off the heads of every rebel he could catch. Even in the treaty ports, plenty of people could see what had happened. Another Hong Kong paper put it bluntly: "There never was a falser, more unprovoked, or more unjustifiable act" than the Allies taking the city from the Taiping. Neutrality, in other words, was finished. The British were not just defending Shanghai any more. They were winning back the dynasty's cities for it.

Back around Shanghai, the campaign was getting uglier. The French admiral, Protet, was leading an attack on a Taiping village when a rebel sniper shot him through the chest, puncturing a main artery, and he died that night. Protet was a veteran of France's empire in West Africa, where in 1857, as a naval commander, he had founded the town that became Dakar. He died fighting over a Chinese village. Then came Zhelin. Zhelin was a walled town south of Shanghai, near the coast. Its Taiping garrison was some two or three thousand strong. Protet's enraged French troops stormed it, and once inside they massacred three thousand people, women and children among them, and burned the whole place to the ground. The victors lost one man killed and four slightly wounded. An officer who went in afterwards wrote that almost every house they entered held the dead and the dying. The Overland Trade Report said that since Admiral Protet's death, the French troops had been behaving like fiends. And a newspaper called it "a most indiscriminate carnage on the part of our Allies". There was a method to it, of a sort. The soldiers packed up the loot first. Then, at two o'clock, the order was given to set the town on fire. Even the horses were roasted alive, and the wounded who could not get out most likely died in the flames. I want to pause on Zhelin for a moment, because it's easy to let these places blur together. A few months earlier, the British and French were telling the world they were neutral. Now their sailors and soldiers were burning towns full of families, alongside an army of hired Chinese soldiers led by an American. Whatever else this was, it was not standing aside.

Now let's go up the river again, to the other front, because while everyone was watching Shanghai, the real threat to the Heavenly Kingdom was closing in on its capital. Zeng Guoquan was Zeng Guofan's younger brother, the commander who had taken Anqing the year before. His chance came because of Shanghai. Zeng Guofan's plan for the war had always been to work down the Yangtze city by city, taking each river town before moving to the next, so that his supply line by water was never cut. With Anqing taken, the next stop was the capital itself. Li Xiucheng had been forced to shift his forces east to fight the foreigners and Ward, and the Taiping garrisons along the Yangtze were left without reinforcements. The Loyal King himself later described the Hunan Army's advance down the river as being "as smooth and as swift as the splitting of bamboo". On May 30, 1862, while Li Xiucheng was still fighting Ward and his officers for control of Songjiang and Qingpu, near Shanghai, Zeng Guoquan's forces reached a hill outside Nanjing's south gate. The hill was Yuhuatai, the Terrace of the Rain of Flowers, named for a legend of flowers falling from the sky while a monk preached there. Between Yuhuatai and the south gate lay a perfectly flat stretch of only half a mile. Nanjing's walls were built by the Ming emperors in the fourteenth century, and they ran for more than twenty miles around the city, high enough and thick enough to shrug off almost any gun in China. He had come too fast, and with too few. Zeng Guoquan had fewer than twenty thousand men, in ten barricaded camps, counting the river fleet that kept open his corridor to the Yangtze for supplies. Compare that with the old Qing armies. The Green Standard generals had laid siege to Nanjing for eight years with seventy thousand troops, and failed. The Green Standard was the dynasty's regular Chinese army, garrisoned across the provinces, slow, underpaid and mostly unable to win battles by this point in the war. But once his men had dug in, they were very hard to move. Picture a small, stubborn tick fixed to the back of a giant animal: the animal is far stronger, but it can't reach the tick. That was Zeng Guoquan at Yuhuatai: outsized and outnumbered, but dug in and immovable. And before the Taiping could even answer, something else arrived.

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

The first cases of cholera appeared in May 1862. By June it was a full epidemic. Cholera spreads through dirty water, and it kills by draining the body of fluid, sometimes within a day. Crowded camps and refugee towns were exactly where it did its worst. Nobody in 1862, Chinese or foreign, knew what caused it. European doctors still mostly blamed bad air, and the idea that it travelled in water, argued in London a few years before, had not yet won most of them over. In Shanghai, with its streets jammed with refugees, at its peak the disease killed as many as three thousand people a day in the foreign settlement. It went north, too. At Tianjin it killed twenty thousand people in a few horrifying weeks. When British officials gathered figures in September, they estimated that cholera had wiped out about one eighth of the population around Shanghai. And it reached Yuhuatai. Ten thousand of the men under Zeng Guoquan at the foot of the hill, fully half of the Hunan Army's siege force, were sick and dying. How did Zeng Guofan take it? In a way that tells you a great deal about him. He believed that Heaven was punishing him for gathering too much power into his own hands. So he asked the court to cut his power in half, in the hope of soothing Heaven's anger and ending the plague. It was the same fear he had confided to his diary only months before, when the new court first heaped its honours on him: this power is too great, he wrote then, and it terrifies me. For a Confucian scholar like Zeng, this was not superstition so much as moral order. A disaster on that scale was a sign that something was out of balance, and the man at the top was responsible. The court's reply assured him that the plague was not his fault alone. And Zeng, who held more power than any Chinese official of the dynasty before him, wept with relief when he read the letter.

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

Back near the coast, the war was about to lose its most colourful figure. By late summer Ward's army had grown, and it was fighting south of Shanghai, around Ningbo, as well as near the city itself. Ward could be blunt about his own force. He once said, "I can manage my men, but not my officers." In September he took nine hundred and fifty of his men, backed by the British gunboat Hardy and a French armed steamer, to assault a walled town about ten miles inland from Ningbo. On September 21, 1862, while directing the second attack on the town, Ward was mortally wounded. When he fell, his officers and men were filled with a berserker rage and rushed the walls with their scaling ladders. Ward did not survive the wound. And his dying words, fittingly enough for a soldier of fortune, were a demand for money. He wanted it known that the daotai of Shanghai and the banker Yang Fang owed him a hundred and forty thousand taels in back pay. A daotai was the official in charge of a circuit of several prefectures, and the daotai at Shanghai also dealt with the foreigners and their trade. Yang Fang was a wealthy Shanghai banker who had financed Ward's army, and whose daughter Ward had married. Even his last journey had a touch of the absurd. The steamer carrying his body back ran out of coal, so the crew fed the ship's own woodwork into the boiler, and then dumped in fifty barrels of pork from the hold as well. He was buried at Songjiang, the walled town that had been his army's base. The dynasty honoured him. Li Hongzhang sent a memorial to the throne praising Ward's courage, ability and loyalty in the highest terms. A memorial was a formal written report to the emperor, the ordinary way the throne heard from its officials. An imperial decree ordered altars built to his memory, at Ningbo and at Songjiang. An American soldier of fortune, honoured at altars by the dynasty he had fought for. Command passed to his immediate subordinate, Colonel Burgevine. We'll hear much more about Burgevine next time. For now it's enough to say that he could not get along with the Qing officials, and that this would turn out to matter a great deal.

So we come to the autumn, and the moment that decided whether Nanjing could be saved. Zeng Guoquan's army was still dug in at Yuhuatai, half of it sick. If the Taiping were ever going to drive it off, it had to be now. Li Xiucheng came back from the east to do it. He had a hundred and twenty thousand men under his immediate command. Against fewer than twenty thousand Hunan men, half of them sick, that was something like six to one. His plan had three parts. One army would strike Bao Chao in southern Anhui. One would go after the Hunan Army's river fleet to cut the supply line. And the third would hit Yuhuatai itself. Bao Chao was the general the court had tried to call north to defend Beijing in 1860, the man Zeng could least afford to lose. He came in answer to the Heavenly King's increasingly anxious calls for his return, using the lull while the armies in the east tended to their sick and dead. The assault on Yuhuatai began on October 13. What followed was some of the hardest fighting of the whole war. The Taiping fired explosive shells into the Hunan camps. In Chinese they called them luodi kaihua pao, the shells that bloom like flowers when they fall to earth. One of those shells sent shrapnel into Zeng Guoquan's face. The wound was not mortal. The Taiping had their own foreign weapons by now, bought from foreign traders on the coast, who sold to both sides whatever the consuls said about neutrality. Zeng Guofan, far away, could do nothing but worry. He wrote in his diary that October, "Last night, I thought about my brother Guoquan, facing danger in ten thousand forms. Anxiety burned my heart." He begged his brother to pull back if the attacks ever let up. Zeng Guoquan refused to leave. Day after day the Taiping came at the camps, and day after day the Hunan men held. In all, Zeng Guoquan's tight Hunan force endured forty-five days under attack before Li Xiucheng finally called off the operation on November 26. In the end what beat the Loyal King was not the walls but food. The Hunan navy held the river junctions, and Li's huge army had to give up the battle for want of provisions. The survival of that exhausted little army under the walls of Nanjing became the stuff of legend. So, back to the question this episode started with. How much did foreign guns decide this war? Around Shanghai, a great deal. Foreign ships carried Li Hongzhang's army past the Taiping capital, foreign guns retook Ningbo, and the fighting around Shanghai pulled the Loyal King east at the very moment his capital needed him. But at Yuhuatai it was Zeng Guoquan's Hunan men and their river fleet who held on at the foot of that hill for forty-five days. The foreigners made the Taiping fight in two places at once. The Hunan Army made sure they lost in the one that mattered. And notice who came out of this year stronger. Not the British, who had made enemies of people who once called them brothers. Not Ward, who was dead. It was Li Hongzhang, governor of a rich province, with a new army in the field and the foreigners at Shanghai now his allies. And it was Zeng Guofan, whose brother was dug in under the walls of the Heavenly Capital and would not be moved. And the foreigners were not done. Ward was dead and his army needed a new commander, and before long it would find one in a British engineer officer named Charles Gordon. Next time, Gordon and Li Hongzhang march together on Suzhou, the Taiping's great eastern city, and a surrender that should have ended in mercy ends in a massacre instead.

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