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Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 24

Suzhou

Charles Gordon, a British engineer officer, takes over Ward's army in 1863 and leads it beside Li Hongzhang's Huai Army toward Suzhou, the Taiping's great eastern city. The episode follows Li Hongzhang and Gordon to the siege, the secret surrender talks, the murder of the city's commander by his own officers, and Li's execution of the kings who surrendered, and asks whether Li broke a promise Gordon had made. It is told almost entirely through foreign observers; no Taiping or Qing voice on Suzhou is in the sources yet.

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1 2 3 4
  1. Shanghai
  2. Suzhou
  3. Taicang, Kunshan
  4. Wuxi
Map drawn by Then and There on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines, rivers and lakes

Transcript

Charles George Gordon
Charles George Gordon. Geruzet Frères - Belgian (active c. 1870-1889), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, the foreigners at Shanghai stopped pretending to stand aside. The British and French admirals planned a land force to clear the Taiping from the country around the city, and the American Frederick Townsend Ward agreed to fight alongside them. Li Hongzhang's new Anhui army came down the Yangtze on British steamers, and Li took over as governor of the province, and with it command, on paper, of Ward's force. Then in September 1862 Ward was mortally wounded leading an attack near Ningbo, and his dying words were a demand for back pay. And up the river, Li Xiucheng, the Loyal King, threw a huge army at Zeng Guoquan's camps below the walls of Nanjing for forty-five days, and had to give up for want of food. So now the Taiping capital had a Hunan army dug in across from its south gate, while an Anhui army and a foreign-officered one stood at Shanghai, ready to fight their way inland from the east. This episode is about that eastern front, and the great city at the heart of it: Suzhou. It's the story of a city that was given away by its own commanders, of a promise made by an Englishman, and of what happened to the men who believed it. Alongside the sources we have leaned on all season, this episode also stands on the work of J. O. P. Bland. We'll follow two men. The first you've met: Li Hongzhang, the scholar from Anhui whom Zeng Guofan had sent to raise a new army, and who was now governor of the province that held both Shanghai and Suzhou. That province was Jiangsu, the richest in the empire. The second is a man the British public would soon know as Chinese Gordon. Charles George Gordon was a British officer of the Royal Engineers, the army's corps of builders, surveyors and sappers. He was thirty years old in 1863. He had fought in the Crimean War against Russia, and in 1860 he had marched to Beijing with Lord Elgin's army and taken part in burning the Summer Palace. He wrote home afterwards that the palaces had been so beautiful it made his heart sore to burn them. In 1862 he came to Shanghai with the British troops sent to defend it, and spent months surveying the country around the city. He was also a deeply religious man, an evangelical Christian. Some twenty years later, he would die famous, at Khartoum in the Sudan. But in 1863 he was just a captain of engineers with a reputation for knowing the ground. After Ward's death, his army had gone badly. Its stand-in commander, a British officer named Holland, led it to the most severe defeat the Taiping had ever handed it, and resigned in disgust. That defeat came in February 1863, at a walled town called Taicang. Hold on to that name. In Beijing, the British minister, Frederick Bruce, wanted command of the force taken out of the hands of adventurers. He wanted a regular British officer, someone London could answer for. The army Gordon was taking over had been Ward's creation from the start. Ward had organised it in June 1860, with Burgevine as his lieutenant. By 1863 it was unlike anything else in China: a few thousand Chinese soldiers in Western-style uniforms, drilled to English words of command, led by a hundred or so foreign officers, with its own artillery and its own small fleet of steamers. The officers were a mixed crowd, many of them sailors and soldiers of fortune who had drifted to the China coast, and the men were used to being paid well and paid in plunder when a town fell. The man chosen was Gordon. The order was held up by Gordon's absence on his survey of the country, but on March 25 he took over command, at a critical moment. What he inherited was a mess. On paper the army had three thousand Chinese soldiers, though many had deserted, along with two shallow-draft paddle steamers and thirty pieces of field artillery. The force was sulky and mutinous, and it did not want an English officer. When the troops refused to parade for their new commander, Gordon, who had a lisp, reportedly shouted at them, "Damned nonthenth!" He led from the front. Like Ward, he went into action armed only with a short rattan cane. But in one way Gordon was nothing like Ward. He had no personal ambitions to serve, and he refused every kind of payment beyond his official army pay. The filibusters before him had been out for themselves. Gordon was not. That difference is going to matter a great deal by the end of this episode.

Henry Andres Burgevine
Henry Andres Burgevine. Published in Harper's Weekly, no individual artist credited., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Before we follow Gordon into battle, though, we need to deal with the man who should have had his job. Burgevine was an American adventurer, Ward's immediate subordinate. He was a North Carolinian, a big, hard-drinking adventurer who had been with Ward almost from the beginning. After Ward's death he took command, but he could not get along with the Qing officials who paid the force, and he was dismissed, and the army was put in British hands. The quarrel was about money. Burgevine fell out with Li Hongzhang over the army's pay. The men were owed wages, and Burgevine went to the banker Yang Fang to demand them. When Yang refused, Burgevine struck him in the face and carried off the silver by force. That was the end of him as far as Li Hongzhang was concerned. For a few months Burgevine tried to get his command back, and failed. Then he made his move. He rounded up seventy foreign mercenaries in Shanghai, men like himself, with nothing much to lose. On August 2, 1863, at Songjiang, he seized a steamer called the Kajow, one of the Ever Victorious Army's own gunboats, steamed it up to Suzhou, and joined the rebels. Think about how that looked. Ward's own lieutenant, who had helped him build the army, now inside Suzhou with a stolen gunboat and seventy foreign mercenaries, working for the rebels. Back home, the New York Herald ran the headline: "Yankee Chances of Succession to The Empire". And Burgevine had big ideas. He wrote to Gordon and proposed that the two of them join their forces, march north to Beijing, and bring down the dynasty for themselves. It sounds mad now. But the foreign community believed that foreigners decided the course of this war, and to them Burgevine's defection looked certain to turn the tide. Gordon was not interested. The defection also kept Gordon in the job. He had already resigned his command after a quarrel with Li Hongzhang, but when he learned of Burgevine's treachery he took it up again. Li Hongzhang, for his part, put out a proclamation offering three thousand taels for Burgevine's capture, alive or dead. A tael was the Chinese measure of silver by weight, a little over an ounce. Burgevine didn't last long on the Taiping side. Before long he quarrelled with his new masters too, and slipped away. In October he came out of Suzhou and gave himself up to Gordon, who saw to it that he was shipped out of China. He came back once more, in 1865, trying to reach what was left of the rebels, and was caught by the Qing. He drowned while still a prisoner, when the boat carrying him overturned in a river. But his story was a warning. The foreigners in this war were soldiers for hire, and what could be hired by one side could be hired by the other.

Gordon began by relieving the besieged town of Changshu. Then he turned on Taicang, the town where his predecessor had been beaten. Taicang was a walled town east-northeast of Suzhou, near the mouth of the Yangtze. It had a bitter history that spring. A pretended offer to surrender had lured Li Hongzhang's brother and two thousand Qing troops into an ambush, and he lost sixteen hundred of them. So Taicang was not just another town. Taking a walled town in this war followed a pattern. The attackers brought their guns up close and pounded one stretch of wall until it collapsed into a slope of broken brick and earth, the breach. Then the infantry had to climb that slope into the defenders' fire. Everything depended on the moments at the top of the rubble, where a few hundred men with spears, swords and muskets met the first wave hand to hand. Gordon captured the outlying defences on April 30, and on May 1 he carried the city after a determined resistance. An account quoted at the time gives the timing. The assault on the breach began at half past four in the afternoon, and for ten to twelve minutes there was a hand-to-hand fight in the breach itself. Twice the attackers were thrown back. The breach was carried only at the third assault, after the Taiping commander of the city had been severely wounded. The first regiment over the wall was led in person by an officer named Brennan. It cost. The Ever Victorious Army and its Qing allies lost about two hundred men. The Taiping lost at least two thousand dead, counting the men who were executed afterwards. And it's the executions that people remembered. On Sunday, May 3, seven prisoners were brought naked into the Qing camp, tied to stakes, and tortured. Then came the executioner, who, a witness wrote, hewed and sawed at each man's neck. Gordon's army had won the town. What happened to its prisoners was in the hands of the Qing. That gap, between what Gordon could win and what he could control, would grow wider all year.

Taicang was a frontal assault, blood for blood. Kunshan was something else. Kunshan was a walled town east of Suzhou, on the canal and the road that ran from Suzhou to Shanghai. It was defended by a garrison of eight thousand, with a covering force of between four and seven thousand picked Taiping troops under Tan Shaoguang, the Mu King, the senior Taiping commander in Suzhou. Mu King was a Taiping royal title, one of the many ranks of king that the Heavenly Kingdom handed out to its senior commanders by this point in the war. Hong Xiuquan created kings so freely in his last years that by the end of the war there were well over a thousand of them, and the title meant less every year. Gordon studied the ground, as an engineer would. He saw that the city had only one line of retreat and supply, the road and canal back toward Suzhou. So instead of attacking the city directly, he moved his army against that line. The country between Shanghai and Suzhou is flat, low and wet, cut into pieces by creeks and canals, with the Grand Canal itself running past Suzhou's walls. Armies there moved by boat as much as on foot, and whoever held the waterways held the war. He did it with a steamer. The Hyson was a small iron paddle steamer that drew so little water it could go almost anywhere in the canal country, armed with a heavy gun in the bow. On May 31 Gordon took the Hyson along the canal toward Suzhou, silencing several Taiping stockades with her guns, until he was within a mile of the city. The garrison of Kunshan suddenly found a gunboat sitting on their only road home. What followed was a rout. Gordon reported that the creek was positively jammed with rebel boats, and the crush at the bridge was awful. The Hyson kept firing at the fugitives for over three hours. At one point the Hyson had to sound her steam whistle to get clear, and the shelling did not stop until half past two in the morning. Gordon's diary added it up. Four to five thousand of the enemy killed, drowned, or murdered by villagers. Two thousand prisoners. Fifteen hundred boats captured. His own loss: two killed. Notice that phrase, murdered by villagers. The diary gives no reason, but a beaten army fleeing through the fields had more enemies than the one behind it. Kunshan cut Suzhou off from the east, and from that day the city's road to Shanghai and the coast belonged to Gordon. He made Kunshan his headquarters. You might expect a victory like that to put Gordon and Li Hongzhang on good terms. It didn't. After the capture of Kunshan, Gordon wrote very forcefully to Li to announce that he meant to resign. The quarrel was over pay and supplies for his men, an argument that would come back again and again. Burgevine's defection kept him in command that summer. But the two men never quite trusted each other.

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

By autumn, the noose was closing on Suzhou. Suzhou was the richest city of the lower Yangtze, a city of canals and gardens and silk, the capital of Jiangsu province. The Taiping had taken it almost without a fight in 1860 and made it the centre of their eastern kingdom. There was an old saying in China: above is heaven, and below are Suzhou and Hangzhou. When the Taiping came in 1860, its wartime population was two million, and as Suzhou and the cities around it fell, the wealthy killed themselves in droves rather than live under the rebels. Hong Rengan had argued for that eastern campaign in just these terms. The land there is vast, he said, and the treasuries are flush. In a letter to the foreign consuls in 1860, the Loyal King had boasted that on coming to Suzhou he had more than a thousand officers and several tens of thousands of soldiers under his command. Now Li Hongzhang's forces were coming at it from every side. Through the summer and autumn of 1863, Li's troops took the towns and stockades that ringed Suzhou, one after another, while Gordon's steamers worked the lakes and canals around it. By October the city was closed in on the east, the south and the north, and only the road west, toward Wuxi and Nanjing, was still open. Li had a great deal more than Gordon. The Qing army around Suzhou numbered fifty to seventy thousand men, and among them about six thousand foreign-led troops. Li's best tactical commander was a general named Cheng Xueqi, and at least twelve thousand of the Qing troops under him were armed with foreign muskets and rifles. Cheng had once been a Taiping officer himself, before he went over to the Qing side. He knew the men he was fighting. Inside the city were forty thousand Taiping troops, under Tan Shaoguang. This is where Li Hongzhang shows what kind of commander he was. He was not a swashbuckler like Ward or a hero like Gordon. He was a governor who raised money, moved armies and let other men do the storming. He paid Gordon's army, kept it supplied, and let his own Chinese generals take the stockades around the city one at a time. And he was learning. Li came away from his first year at Shanghai convinced, as he told Zeng Guofan in his letters, that Chinese armies needed foreign guns and steamers of their own, and he bought rifles for his Huai Army by the thousand. The fighting outside the walls was savage. At one great stockade, Gordon's men brought about forty-six guns into position within about seven hundred yards the night before the attack. White turbans were handed out to all the soldiers, so that in a hand-to-hand fight they could tell friend from rebel. An officer named Williams swam the moat with several officers and men behind him and got inside the breastwork, and the rebels fled back toward the east gate. The victory cost the force several officers killed, and about a hundred to a hundred and fifty soldiers killed and wounded. On November 19 the direct siege began, with a bombardment at the east gate. An assault on the 27th was thrown back with heavy loss. Gordon's men lost fifty killed and a hundred and thirty wounded. But the wall was not the only way into Suzhou. Below Tan Shaoguang, the city's commander, were six lesser kings. And on November 28, Cheng Xueqi came to Gordon with news. One of those lesser kings had come to see him in secret, and offered to deliver the city peacefully.

The man at the centre of the plot was the Receiving King, one of the six. According to Gordon, four of the kings, with thirty-five Taiping colonels and their followers, had opened negotiations with Cheng. Between them, the disaffected chiefs held four of the six gates of Suzhou. Why would they turn? Partly out of fear. They feared for their men and their families, and they were no longer sure the city could be held. The Loyal King himself was pulled in two directions. The Heavenly King kept ordering him back to defend Nanjing, while the eastern kingdom he had built was falling city by city. Some of the Taiping officers said that the Loyal King himself, back in the city after his defeat, had proposed to give up Nanjing and Suzhou altogether and take the whole Taiping force back south to Guangxi, while Tan Shaoguang wanted to stay and fight it out. And partly, it seems, because of jealousy. The Receiving King had been placed under his old friend and companion Tan Shaoguang, who now governed the city over his head. Gordon was delighted. He consented to the defection, he wrote, with a good deal of pleasure, because if the rebels fought it out he expected heavy losses. But the plan hit a snag. On the night of November 28 the Loyal King arrived in the city from Wuxi, and the plotters' scheme to shut Tan Shaoguang out of the city fell apart. The Loyal King did not stay. He left again for Wuxi, and the plotters went back to work. On December 1, Cheng asked Gordon if he would like to see the Receiving King himself. Gordon said he saw no need. Cheng pressed him, and Gordon agreed to meet that evening at the north gate. They met in Cheng's boat. The Receiving King's first words, Gordon wrote, were that he wanted help from him. Gordon's answer was blunt, and it is worth hearing, because of everything that came after. The Taiping chief had suggested that his men might simply stay neutral in the fight. Gordon told him that was no use. If the city fell by assault, Gordon said, he could not restrain an undisciplined force like his own from looting everyone in it. And so, in his words, "unless they could give a gate, it would be better for them to fight, or else vacate the city." He told the Receiving King that the Taiping cause had little chance of success, and that he wanted to make the Qing and the rebels good friends. He even assured him that the Qing had changed since the rising began, and no longer dared, for fear of foreign governments, to commit the cruelties they once had. The Receiving King went back inside to talk to the other kings. Two days later, Cheng told Gordon that Tan Shaoguang had got wind of the talks and wanted to behead the Receiving King, but the Receiving King was ready for him. And then word came out that all the other kings had agreed to come over. The Receiving King himself, Cheng reported, wanted no command, only permission to retire to his home with his property. Some of the others wanted commands of different sorts. Notice what is being promised here, and by whom, because it matters in a moment. Gordon was talking to the Receiving King. Cheng was talking to all of them. And the man who would decide their fate was the governor, Li Hongzhang.

There was still the problem of Tan Shaoguang. On the morning of December 4, Cheng came to Gordon and told him that the Receiving King had agreed to lure Tan onto the city wall, throw him down, and hand him over to Gordon as a prisoner. Gordon told Cheng he must have Tan as his own prisoner, and Cheng agreed willingly, even joyfully, Gordon wrote, because he had known Tan in former days. It didn't happen that way. At eleven in the morning on December 4, Tan Shaoguang held a banquet at his palace for the kings. Two Frenchmen who came out of the city soon after told Gordon what happened next. After the meal the chiefs said prayers, put on their robes and crowns, and went into the great court. Tan mounted his throne and began to speak. He talked about their difficulties, and about the loyalty of the men from Guangxi and Canton. Those were the veterans from the far south, where the rising had begun, the old core of the Taiping armies. The other kings answered him, and the argument grew louder. Then one of the lesser kings stood up and took off his robe, as a provocation. A scuffle broke out, and someone stabbed Tan with a dagger, and he fell over the table. The others held him down while an underling sawed off his head. The kings mounted their horses and rode off to their troops, and Tan's head was sent out to Cheng Xueqi. Behind them, Tan's own men and the other troops looted his palace. Tan Shaoguang was a Guangxi man, who had fought beside the Loyal King since the very beginning of the rising. He was killed by his own comrades for refusing to give up. Think about the men around that table. Some of them had been sworn brothers for nearly ten years. They had just prayed together. And they cut off their commander's head and sent it to the enemy. It's hard to imagine a clearer sign that the Heavenly Kingdom was coming apart from the inside. Gordon wanted him alive. Instead, the one man in Suzhou who would not surrender was dead, and the rest of the kings had nothing left to bargain with but their gates.

With Tan dead, Suzhou opened its gates. The city surrendered on December 4. The kings had undertaken to hand it over by secretly withdrawing the guards from one of its gates. That night, the rebels inside all shaved their heads. Under the Qing, every man had to shave the front of his head and wear the rest in a long braid, as a sign of loyalty to the dynasty. The Taiping wore their hair long, and the Qing called them the long-haired rebels. To shave it was to surrender. Now come the promises. Gordon asked that the kings who surrendered be treated with mercy, and Li Hongzhang agreed. Cheng Xueqi went further. He swore an oath of allegiance with the kings and promised them their safety. Gordon and Cheng interviewed the surrendering kings together. Gordon liked the Receiving King. He described him as a man of medium height, dark complexion, and about thirty years old, "with a very intelligent and pleasing countenance." Not everyone inside the city went quietly. The Cantonese troops in the city fought their way out through the west gate. Before they went, they killed their own wives and children to spare them from capture, and scarcely a third of the men got through. Some of them reached the Loyal King's camp at Wuxi. An Englishman who was serving with the Loyal King saw them arrive, stained with the blood of their own families. They threw themselves on the ground before the Loyal King, yelling and weeping. Several tried to drown themselves in a creek, and "one, a young chief, stabbed himself to death before he could be prevented." The fugitives said the city had not been taken by fighting, but by treachery. With the survivors came seven Europeans, men who had been sent out of Suzhou to join the Englishman's own small foreign legion. The rest of his foreigners had still been inside Suzhou when it was betrayed, and many of them died there. Soon after, the Loyal King put a thousand men under the Englishman's orders, the elite of his guards and the first division of the Englishman's own legion, with fifteen gunboats and a captured steamer flying the Loyal King's standard, to attack a Qing flotilla near Wuxi. Foreigners, in other words, were fighting on both sides of this war right to the end. Meanwhile Gordon had a problem with his own men. His army expected to loot a captured city. Instead, he asked the governor to give the force two months' pay in lieu of the loot of Suzhou. Li Hongzhang refused. The men tried to march down on the governor, and Gordon, with difficulty, made them accept one month's pay. Gordon told Li that if that was how it stood he would leave his service, and went into the city himself. He went to the Receiving King's house and asked him if all was right. Everything was satisfactory, the Receiving King said, and he seemed quite secure. Suzhou had fallen without a final assault, and the kings were alive. As far as Gordon could see, the thing had been done cleanly.

The next day, at noon on December 5, the kings and their deputies were summoned to the governor's presence. Li Hongzhang received them at his camp in a friendly way. He congratulated them in person on leaving the rebel cause, and promised to recommend them for high rank in the imperial service. They, in their turn, demanded commissions in the imperial army for themselves. And then, as they sat talking quietly, Li's executioners fell on them. Within the hour the heads of eight Taiping leaders lay on the pavement. Gordon did not know. He rode around the city wall with Cheng, who kept ordering his men to fire volleys into the air, to stop the Guangxi men from doing anything to his own men, he said. Cheng looked pale. He told Gordon the Receiving King had not come to the governor at all, and had perhaps run away. Then he told him the Receiving King had demanded command of two thousand men and half the city, with a wall to divide it, and that the governor had refused. Gordon grew uneasy, and rode to the Receiving King's palace. He got there at dark and found it gutted. The Receiving King's uncle begged him to come to his house, where the family's men were drawn up and the streets barricaded. Gordon stayed there until two in the morning, keeping Qing looting parties away. He sent his interpreter for help. The soldier who went with the interpreter came back to say the interpreter had been beheaded by the imperial troops. At four in the morning Gordon went out himself, and was taken and held by the Qing for an hour. By the time his bodyguard reached the house, the imperial troops had already broken in and gutted it. Then he found the bodies. He found the Receiving King's head lying in the dirt. "The hands and bodies were gashed in a frightful way and cut down the middle," he reported. Cheng Xueqi, the man who had sworn an oath with the kings, sat down on the ground and wept, and sent Gordon word that he had only followed Li's orders. Gordon took the Receiving King's head with him, at the son's request. Li Hongzhang never denied what he had done. He took full responsibility. The question is whether he broke his word, and here the sources disagree. On one side, Gordon had solemnly promised, in Cheng's presence, that the lives of the rebel chiefs would be spared if they made their submission, and Li had agreed. Gordon believed the governor and Cheng had arranged the killings beforehand: a premeditated massacre. On the other side, Li argued that Gordon simply did not know how things had changed. The kings had come to him defiant, demanding commissions for themselves and places in the army for their followers, and Cheng urged that if their leaders' heads came off, those myriads of followers would instantly fall quiet. Cheng added that if the kings had not been executed, the next edition of the court's gazette would have carried an order for his own head. The gazette was the court's official bulletin, copied and sent out across the empire. It was where officials learned of their promotions, and of their punishments. Under Qing law, rebellion was the worst of crimes, and an official who let rebel leaders go free could pay for it himself. And Robert Hart, who looked into the affair afterwards, wrote that he was convinced the governor's act in beheading the kings was not one of premeditated treachery. Hart was a young Irishman who ran the Qing's foreign-staffed customs service. Whichever it was, the men inside Suzhou had opened their gates on a promise, and the promise did not hold. And the man left holding that broken promise, in the eyes of everyone who had watched him make it, was Charles Gordon.

What happened to the kings happened to many of their soldiers too. Afterwards, hundreds and thousands of the betrayed garrison were cruelly put to death. A few weeks later, a small party of European visitors went to see Suzhou for themselves. They found that the execution ground was the courtyard of the twin pagodas in the city, and that the ground there was soaked with human blood. The visitors noticed the old stone tablets there, which showed that the pagodas went back to the Song dynasty, long before the Ming. Suzhou still has a famous pair of slender brick twin pagodas, built in the Song dynasty more than a thousand years ago, and these were very likely the same towers. In their words, "the creek forming its drain was still (after twenty days of slaughter) reddish with blood". One European who saw it said the creek had been so full of headless rebels that the officials had to hire boatmen to push the bodies out into the stream. Chinese informants told them that thirty thousand rebels had been led to those courtyards and executed. That figure came from informants. But the visitors had proof enough, they wrote, that the number was enormous, and the killing went on long after the kings were dead. And remember, these were men who had surrendered. They shaved their heads on the night of December 4. They thought it was over.

Gordon's anger, when it came, was enormous. Remember who he was. The man who had told the Receiving King to his face that the Qing no longer dared to commit the cruelties of the past. And now the Receiving King was dead, and the cruelty was being committed with Gordon's victory. He felt that his honour was involved. His superior had executed prisoners whose lives Gordon had personally guaranteed, and he was filled with righteous anger. Li sent Macartney to see him at Kunshan, and Gordon received him in an angry mood. Macartney was a Scottish surgeon who had resigned from the British army to join the Ever Victorious Army, and was now in Li's service. He was also running a small arsenal for Li, making shells and fuses, the seed of the great arsenals Li would build after the war. Gordon's only answer was to order out the Hyson and a body of troops, with the intention of taking Li Hongzhang prisoner. "Bloodthirsty as it looks," he wrote later to his mother, "I am anxious for his trial and execution." He wrote Li an angry letter, reproaching him for breaking Gordon's word, and demanding that he give Suzhou back to the Taiping and resign his own office. Imagine that. A British captain of engineers, demanding that a Qing governor return a captured city to the rebels and hand in his seals. Li's reply, sent through Macartney, was short. This is China, not Europe. And then Gordon's anger ran out of road. He got halfway to Suzhou, thought better of it, and went back to Kunshan. He took with him the head of the Receiving King, and the Receiving King's surviving son, whom he had been able to rescue from death. The throne sent Gordon a large gift of silver for his part at Suzhou. He refused the money, which silenced any suggestion that he was just another mercenary. The gift was ten thousand taels. The foreign community was outraged. On December 16, the Shanghai consuls of ten countries unanimously approved a statement condemning Li Hongzhang. The British envoy, Bruce, wrote to Gordon that it was clear no officer of character could serve under Li. The quarrel between Gordon and Li spelled the end of direct military cooperation between Britain and the Qing. It took Hart to patch things up. On January 30, 1864, Hart went to Gordon's headquarters at Kunshan and proposed a way forward that all sides could accept. Gordon went back into the field for a few more months, beside Li's army, and the Ever Victorious Army fought on toward Changzhou. But the partnership was never the same. Back in Britain, Gordon's campaigns made him a hero. The newspapers called him Chinese Gordon, and the name stuck for the rest of his life. Very little of that story, as it was told in Britain, dwelt on what happened to the kings at Suzhou. So did Li break his word? He certainly broke Gordon's. Whether he ever meant to keep it is the part we can't know. But it's worth remembering his answer to Gordon, those few words about China and Europe. Li Hongzhang will spend the rest of his long life dealing with foreigners, and that short reply is a fair guide to how he will deal with them.

Away from the cities, the countryside was dying. After the Taiping left Wuxi, the town fell to the Qing, and an Englishman who spent several weeks there reported that at least six thousand people were put to death, simply for being found in a city the rebels had held. The poor who had been fed every day from the Taiping granaries now starved to death. Earlier in the war, the same Englishman had ridden through Taiping country and described a land at work: at every village, people tending their silkworms for the winter, reeling the last cocoons, or tilling their fields. By his reckoning, the silk districts under the Taiping were producing three million pounds' worth more a year than before. Now the mulberry trees and the silkworms, which need constant care, were only partly tended, and in many places neglected altogether. The same Englishman travelled for miles through what had been Taiping country in late 1863 and early 1864. He passed through twenty or thirty villages a day, and in almost every room of every house he found people starved, starving, or barely keeping alive by cannibalism, feeding on the dead bodies lying thick around them. In some houses he found fifteen to twenty bodies, many of them refugees from places already taken or threatened. He gave the living all the rice he could get, knowing it would only give them the strength to starve a second time. Another correspondent found a ruined pagoda crammed with dead bodies, from which slices had been cut to eat as food. Before Wuxi the same correspondent passed a camp of twenty to thirty thousand Qing soldiers. Survivors in the district said their misery came from foreign soldiers coming to fight the Taiping. And a newspaper on the coast later reported that for eighteen li along the canal, about six miles, there was not a roof left standing. A li was the Chinese measure of distance, about a third of a mile. The Englishman blamed the British, and dated the change for the worse from the day Kunshan fell to what he called the Anglo-Manchu forces. Whoever was to blame, the starving villages were real. Step back and look at what this year had done. In the spring of 1863 the Taiping still held a rich, populous country between Nanjing and the sea, with silk and rice and great walled cities. By the spring of 1864 it was gone, taken city by city by a Chinese army with foreign guns and a foreign-officered army with steamers, and much of what was taken was ruined in the taking. The Qing had won the east. It was much harder to say what they had won. Suzhou was gone. Kunshan, Taicang, Wuxi, all gone. The Taiping's rich eastern kingdom, the land that had fed and paid for the Heavenly Capital, was a wasteland of burned villages and empty fields. And now the war was moving to the one place left. Next time, Zeng Guoquan's army seals Nanjing, and inside the Heavenly Capital, Hong Xiuquan tells his starving people that God will provide.

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