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Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 25

The Fall of the Heavenly Kingdom

By 1864 Zeng Guoquan's army has sealed Nanjing, and inside the Heavenly Capital Hong Xiuquan tells his starving people that God will provide. The episode follows Zeng Guofan and Li Xiucheng through the last months, Hong's death, the mine that breaks the wall and the sack of the city, and Li's capture and confession, and closes the season by asking what thirty years of opium and war cost ordinary people, and what they leave to the empress dowager Cixi and the boy Tongzhi Emperor: a dynasty saved by Han Chinese generals with armies of their own, and foreigners in treaty ports along the coast. It leans on foreign observers, with the court in its own reports, the Taiping in their last words and Nanjing's people in their own accounts of the sack.

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Transcript

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

Last time, we watched the Taiping lose their great eastern city. The kings inside Suzhou killed their own commander, the Mu King, because he would not give up, and on the fourth of December 1863 they surrendered the city. Within the hour, the heads of eight Taiping leaders lay on the pavement, cut off on the orders of Li Hongzhang, the governor of the province, whose army had fought beside Charles Gordon's at the siege. Gordon was a British engineer officer in command of the Ever Victorious Army, a force of Chinese soldiers drilled and led by foreign officers and paid by the Qing. Its American founder, Ward, had been mortally wounded near Ningbo in September 1862, and the man who followed him, Burgevine, could not agree with the mandarins and was dismissed. He had given his word that the surrendering kings would be spared, and he was so enraged that he ordered out his steamer and a body of troops to take Li prisoner, then turned back halfway. The quarrel ended Britain's direct military partnership with the Qing, and behind the armies, in the country the Taiping had lost, people starved, some of them feeding on the dead bodies that lay thick around them. All of that was a sideshow, in a way. The war was always going to be decided at one place, and that place was Nanjing. Nanjing was the capital of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the city the Taiping called their Heavenly Capital. Hong Xiuquan had proclaimed his kingdom on the eleventh of January 1851, with himself as its Heavenly King. This is the last episode of the season, and it is the story of how that kingdom ended: the siege, the mine, the sack, and what the whole bloody business left behind. To tell it, I need to step back a few months, to the summer of 1863, before Suzhou ever fell. The man who meant to take Nanjing was Zeng Guofan. Back in January 1853, the emperor had ordered him, a scholar official home in Hunan province, to take charge of the local militia, and he had not wanted the job. From that reluctant start, Zeng built an army of his own, which came to be known as the Hunan Army. Its men called it the Xiang Army, after the Xiang River that runs through Hunan, and it was something new in China: an army recruited by its own commanders, loyal to them, and paid through them. He built a navy too, for a war fought along rivers. When he set up his first shipyards, neither he nor his generals had ever seen a gunboat, and there was no craftsman in Hunan who knew how to build one. By February 1854 he had thirteen battalions of land troops ready to fight, and ten naval battalions with a fleet of more than two hundred war boats. He was never truly sure of his own command. In the bleak autumn of 1860 he wrote to his brothers that he lived in deep terror that he was not up to this great responsibility. The siege of Nanjing was in the hands of Zeng's younger brother, Zeng Guoquan. Zeng had sent him to besiege the river city of Anqing in 1860, and now he sat in front of Nanjing. Anqing had been the key. Zeng had to have it before he could push his army any closer to Nanjing, and he wrote that the destiny of his family and the security of the empire both depended on it. When the Hunan Army finally entered Anqing on the fifth of September 1861, the city was no longer defended. By the end of the siege, human flesh was being sold inside it by the pound. Before it fell, Zeng had written to his brother that when they conquered the city, "the proper thing to do will be to kill a lot of people". About sixteen thousand people are thought to have survived the siege of Anqing, most if not all of them civilians. Hold on to that letter. It tells you what kind of war this was by now, on both sides. In the autumn of 1862, Li Xiucheng, the Taiping general they called the Loyal King, had thrown an army of a hundred and twenty thousand men at Guoquan's camps for forty-five days. On the twenty-sixth of November he gave up, for want of food, because the Hunan navy held the river. On the thirteenth of June 1863, in a sudden night attack, Zeng Guoquan finally took the stone fort on Yuhuatai, the hill that looks down on the city's south gate. That left the river. Along the Yangtze below Nanjing's walls, the Taiping held a chain of forts, and as long as they held them, the city could breathe. On the river that June, anchored right under those forts, was an Englishman named Augustus Lindley. He had thrown in his lot with the Taiping, and he was aboard a lorcha with a party of European volunteers. A lorcha was one of the small Western hulled vessels with Chinese sails that worked the China coast. He did not like what he saw. The Taiping garrisons laughed at the idea that the imperial troops could ever take any outwork of the city, and the night guard was careless. When he complained to the old Taiping king who commanded the forts, the old man answered, "I have held these forts for twelve years," and promised to hold them twelve years more. That very night, the old king found reason to regret it. There had been fighting on the river earlier in the evening, but by the small hours it had died away into the calm of a summer night, and the Englishman and his companions, filthy with powder, went to sleep. Around them, the bamboo signals of the lone sentries went tap, tap, and the drums of the guards in their little lookout houses on the walls went tum, tum, fainter and less often, until they stopped altogether. At the end of June, the Hunan river fleet came down the Yangtze in dense lines that covered the whole breadth of the river, firing cannon, rockets and fire arrows as it came. The Englishman woke to the roar of artillery that seemed to be right alongside his vessel, and rushed on deck to find the water, the shore and the forts lit red, and enemy gunboats everywhere, above and below him. The Taiping were entirely taken by surprise. The guns of the river forts were not loaded, and they were too heavy to work quickly or to aim down at the boats sweeping past beneath them. The few shots the forts did fire tore into the packed gunboats, and the yellow river swallowed shattered men and boats alike, carrying the wreckage away downstream past villagers on the banks. It cost the Hunan fleet more than two thousand sailors killed or wounded. But the forts fell, and with them went the river. The western gates of the city, the ones that opened toward the Yangtze, were now useless to the Taiping. Now Zeng Guoquan's army held the hill above the south gate, and the Hunan fleet held the river. What remained was to close the ring.

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

In November, Zeng Guoquan's men built a wall three miles long, running from the Ming tombs east of the city down to his positions in the southeast, and the eastern side of Nanjing was all but sealed. One gap stayed open for a while. Bao Chao, Zeng's best field commander, failed to close the siege at the Shence Gate, and Zeng had to send him back to Anhui, leaving that gate open. The Ming tomb at Nanjing holds the founder of the Ming, the last Chinese dynasty before the Manchu conquest, and the Taiping had always cast their war as a rising of the Chinese against Manchu rule. Nanjing had been the Heavenly Capital for more than a decade. The Taiping had taken it on the nineteenth of March 1853, after a siege of only eleven days, by springing a mine under the northeast angle of the wall. When they broke in, they hunted down the city's Manchu garrison. Of some twenty thousand Manchu men, women and children, barely a hundred survived. One Taiping fighter boasted of it: "We killed them all, the devils, to the infant in arms". For years after that, imperial armies had camped outside the walls, with a trench that by 1859 ran forty-five miles, and never managed to close the city. Now, gate by gate, someone was doing it. And inside the walls, the man who had to make sense of it was the Loyal King himself. Li Xiucheng was the last great commander the Taiping had, and when he took cities he gave orders not to harm the people; one loyalist complained that, because of those orders, the people would not help fight against him. He still spoke with a slight impediment from the fighting at Shanghai, where a piece of shell had struck him on the cheek. Back in November 1860, when he rode out of the capital to try to relieve Anqing, Li's parting words to those who stayed behind had been stern instructions to start stockpiling food. Li knew what was coming. In 1862, watching the Hunan Army roll down the Yangtze toward the capital, he had said its progress was as smooth and as swift as the splitting of bamboo. After Suzhou fell, he came back to the capital and pleaded with the Heavenly King. Abandon Nanjing, he urged, and take the court and the army west into Jiangxi province. Hong Xiuquan refused. He angrily accused his best general of lacking faith. To understand that answer, you have to remember who Hong was. He had sat the civil service examinations again and again, and failed every time. Then he read a Christian tract, and it unlocked for him the meaning of the dream visions he had had six years before. The old man in black with the golden beard who had commanded him in those visions, he decided, was God, and the elder brother who had helped him was Jesus Christ. That made Hong, by his own words, a son of God alongside Jesus, sent to slay the demons that were China's idols. And by then Hong had long since withdrawn from public life. He spent his days behind the palace walls reading scripture, seen by almost no one but the women of his palace. There was old bitterness between the two men as well. When the Heavenly King's cousin Hong Rengan arrived in Nanjing in 1859, Hong had made him the Shield King and put him above every general, and the promotion over Li Xiucheng's head planted a burning seed of jealousy. So the kingdom stayed, and the ring tightened. By then there were about thirty thousand people left inside Nanjing's walls, a third of them soldiers. It was a fraction of the half million rebels who had poured into the city eleven years before. Fear held the place together. People caught communicating with anyone outside the walls were pounded to death between stones or flayed alive in public. Outside, Zeng Guofan was thinking about food too. He advised his brother not to let any more women or children escape the city. The reasoning was cold: every woman and child kept inside was one more mouth eating the defenders' rice, and the sooner the rice ran out, the sooner the city would fall. Zeng was a Confucian scholar to his bones, raised on the classics' teaching that good government cares for the people. But here he was a general running a siege, and he ran it like one.

Zuo Zongtang
Zuo Zongtang. Boiarskii, Adolf-Nikolay Erazmovich, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

While Nanjing starved, the Heavenly Kingdom was being stripped of everything else it owned. Southeast of Nanjing, in Zhejiang province, the war belonged to Zuo Zongtang, another of Zeng's Hunan men, a proud and prickly scholar whom Zeng had recommended to command there. The great prize in Zhejiang was Hangzhou, the provincial capital. Li Xiucheng had taken Hangzhou himself, by surrounding it, firing arrows into the city wrapped in messages that promised not to harm the people, and starving it out. There had been 2.3 million people inside, and starvation hit quickly. When the governor of the province hanged himself as the city fell, Li Xiucheng paid to have his body carried to Shanghai and buried with full honours. Hangzhou had suffered before that, too. When Li's sappers first blasted a breach in its wall in March 1860, the city's women hanged themselves, poisoned themselves and threw themselves into wells rather than fall to the Taiping, tens of thousands of them by the end. Now it was the Taiping's turn to be on the inside. In the end the city fell from outside. The imperial capture of Jiaxing, midway between Suzhou and Hangzhou on the Grand Canal, cut Hangzhou off from its supplies and its communications, and made it impossible to hold. Zuo did not do it alone. A French-Chinese force had come up from Ningbo, the port the British and French had taken back from the Taiping. At Ningbo, after the allies stormed the wall, a Qing official's pirate army had been goaded into the city, and a Hong Kong paper reported that it did more damage in a few hours than the rebels had done in five months. On the twenty-ninth of March 1864, that Franco-Chinese force tried a premature assault on its own, and it failed. On the thirty-first, a final assault by the combined forces took the city back for the emperor. The defenders fled north to Huzhou. With both Hangzhou and Suzhou gone, the Taiping no longer held a single one of the great eastern cities. Think about what that meant. The rich country that Li Xiucheng had conquered for the Heavenly Kingdom, the country that had fed it and paid for it, was gone. Nanjing was on its own.

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

In the east, one more Taiping city still stood in the way, and that was Changzhou, on the Grand Canal between Suzhou and Nanjing. But after Suzhou, Britain's minister in Beijing had declared that no officer of character could serve under Li Hongzhang, and told Gordon to hold no communication with him. It was Robert Hart who patched things up. Hart was a young Ulsterman who ran the Qing's foreign customs service, a Briton in the emperor's pay. On the thirtieth of January, he went to Gordon's headquarters at Kunshan and proposed an arrangement that every party could accept. So at the end of February Gordon took the field again, and that spring his Ever Victorious Army besieged Changzhou alongside an army led by Li Hongzhang. Li's army was his own, raised among the peasants of his home province of Anhui and trained by veteran units of Zeng's Hunan Army. On the twenty-third of April, Gordon took Changzhou's outlying defences. The imperial batteries were ready early, and the governor gave orders to open fire; when the walls were broken, Gordon's regiments went at the breaches with their colours carried in front. And there, for a moment, both sides stopped. The defenders and the attackers stood at bay, neither willing to close hand to hand, while the officers pushed and pulled and beat at their own men with their swords to break the spell. It was the Taiping who recovered first. Fighting for their lives, every man "discharged his missile on the heads of the assailants", and the attackers' colours were pushed off the wall and down the breach. Gordon's guns swept the walls, and in the afternoon the attackers came again, with signal rockets going up and a yell running along the whole imperial line. The defenders met them, as a witness wrote, "With their bamboo spears, and undiminished courage," while others rained bricks down from heaps piled ready along the rampart. At the critical moment, the Taiping king who held the city led a last desperate charge in person, and after twenty minutes of close fighting the stormers were thrown to the bottom of the breach. All the while, Li Hongzhang's own columns were thrown at a second breach, one after another, and none of them could get a footing inside the walls. The bravest of their officers got his colours partly into the breach before he too was brought to a stand and forced back. That failed assault cost Gordon's force twenty-seven officers and four hundred men. The Taiping were not finished as fighters. Bamboo spears and brickbats were holding off rifles and artillery, for a while. They could not do it forever. On the eleventh of May the city was taken by assault, for a loss to Gordon's force of fifty killed and two hundred and seventy-nine wounded. The king who had led the charge was taken alive, and it was said that ten men were needed to bind his hands. Brought before the governor, he was defiant. If it were not for Gordon's disciplined troops, he said, all the governor's hosts together could never have taken the city from him. His captors put him to death. And by one foreign account, twelve thousand people besides the garrison were massacred with their families, all but a small number. Changzhou was Gordon's last battle in China. Within weeks his army was paid off and disbanded, with his agreement and the governor's. The Ever Victorious Army had been born to defend Shanghai, and it ended without ever coming near Nanjing.

Back at Nanjing, Zeng Guoquan was squeezing the last air out of the city. On the city's east side rose a hill called the Dragon's Shoulder, crowned by a castle known as the Fortress of Heaven, with a second, the Fortress of Earth, at its base. In February 1864, Guoquan's forces captured the Fortress of Heaven at the peak. The Fortress of Earth below it held out. Then his men invested the last two gates, and the city was closed off completely. Around Nanjing, the siege lines now held more than a hundred mud forts, each with a few hundred men inside. Gordon saw the walls for himself, and what struck him was the emptiness, and a deathlike stillness. "For miles the wall is deserted entirely," he noted, "only here and there is a single man seen, miles from any support." But a wall with few defenders on it was still a wall, and Nanjing's was one of the longest city walls ever built, more than twenty miles around. So the Hunan Army went under it. Mining was an old and brutal trade. You dug a tunnel from your own lines to the foot of the wall, packed the end with gunpowder, and lit it, while the defenders dug their own tunnels to find yours and fight you in the dark. By June, the Hunan Army had sunk mines at more than thirty sites around the wall, and had nothing to show for it but four thousand dead miners. Guoquan was cracking under it. "If we don’t break this city in a month," he warned, "our whole army is going to crumble to pieces." He had reason to fear it. Two summers before, when cholera swept the camps, ten thousand of his men at Yuhuatai, fully half the siege force, had been sick and dying at once. That autumn, during Li Xiucheng's great assault, Guoquan had been struck in the face by shrapnel from an exploding shell, and when his brother pleaded with him to retreat, he refused to leave. Zeng Guofan spent nights awake over him. In his diary that October he wrote, "Last night, I thought about my brother Guoquan, facing danger in ten thousand forms. Anxiety burned my heart." Guoquan dreamed that he was climbing a high mountain, all the way to the summit, and found there no path ahead and none behind. The court wanted the siege finished, and in the end Zeng Guofan invited Li Hongzhang to bring his army to join the assault on Nanjing. Li, out of respect for his old teacher's position, politely made an excuse not to come, leaving the Zeng family to take the city alone. Guoquan wanted the prize for himself, and his older brother knew it. "Why must you have sole credit for conquering Nanjing?" Zeng Guofan wrote to him on the nineteenth of June. It is a very human moment in the middle of all that killing: two brothers, one at headquarters and one in the trenches, arguing about who gets the glory. And then, on the third of July, Guoquan's men finally captured the Fortress of Earth at the base of the Dragon's Shoulder. From there, they could dig one more tunnel.

Hong Xiuquan
Hong Xiuquan. Ford & West Lith., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Before that tunnel was finished, the Heavenly King was dead. By the spring of 1864, the food in Nanjing was running out. When the starving people looked to Hong Xiuquan, he told them to eat manna, the sweet dew God would send; in practice, that meant the weeds and grasses that grew in the city. Then the Heavenly King died, more than six weeks before his enemies broke through the wall. How he died is not a small question, because it goes to what kind of man the Heavenly King was at the end. Here the sources disagree. From the imperial side came the story that the Heavenly King had killed himself by swallowing gold leaf. On the other side, a confession said to be his own son's has his father simply succumbing to sickness, on the twenty-fourth of May 1864. Either way, the Heavenly King went out of the world before his city did. His eldest son, Hong Tianguifu, still a boy, was proclaimed in his place as the new ruler of the Heavenly Kingdom. Zeng Guofan would later have Hong's body dug up, to make sure it really was the Heavenly King. Hong had outlived most of the men who rose with him in the hills of Guangxi, and now he had left his capital to a teenager and to a general he had accused of lacking faith. Years before, when Hong Rengan first stood before the court and criticised the dead Eastern King's policies point by point, the Heavenly King had whispered a proverb to him. "The wave that crashes with great force," he said softly, "soon spends itself and leaves peace." It is hard not to hear that line differently now.

That general did not give up. On the fifteenth of July, Li Xiucheng led a midnight sortie out of the Taiping Gate with a few hundred cavalry, straight at the Hunan lines. They were driven back. By then, Zeng Guoquan's miners were nearly done. Under the wall on the city's northeast side, they had run an enormous mine. They packed six thousand cloth sacks under the wall, holding a total of twenty tons of gunpowder. They sprang the mine at noon on the nineteenth of July 1864. When the smoke and dust settled, there was a breach nearly two hundred feet wide, right through the wall. Eleven years earlier, the Taiping had broken into Nanjing with a mine under the northeast angle of the same wall. Now a mine on the same side of the city let their enemies in. It came at a price even for the attackers. The falling rubble crushed every man of the vanguard of four hundred who had crouched below, waiting to charge. All those years of the Heavenly Capital, and it came down to a hole in a wall and the men who would run through it.

The Hunan Army poured through the breach. The defenders were too few, and they were starving, and Nanjing, the old southern capital of the empire, fell in blood and fire. When the soldiers reached the palace of the Heavenly King, they found it eerily empty and quiet. The Heavenly King was already dead. And his son was gone. Li Xiucheng had spirited the boy away. In the chaos, the Loyal King and the boy rode out of the city disguised as Hunan soldiers. I want to stop on one fact, because it matters for everything that comes after. This siege, the one that broke the Heavenly Kingdom, was carried out by Zeng's forces without foreign aid. Gordon had fought at Suzhou and Changzhou, but the Taiping capital was taken by a Chinese army, raised by a Chinese scholar and under his brother's command. Zeng Guofan himself was not there to see it. He arrived from Anqing on the twenty-eighth of July, nine days after his brother's men breached the wall, and took possession of the city. His reports to Beijing claimed that a hundred thousand rebel soldiers had been killed in the fighting. That was not true. Remember the count from inside the walls a few months earlier: about thirty thousand people in all, and only a third of them soldiers. When a British consul named Adkins entered the city a little later, the streets and houses were literally blocked up with the bodies of the dead, most of them dead of famine. The rewards from Beijing were lavish. Zeng Guofan was made Senior Guardian of the heir apparent and created a marquis, and at the same time Li Hongzhang was created an earl. A marquis and an earl were hereditary noble ranks, which the Qing dynasty very rarely gave to Chinese civil officials. They were also a measure of how much Zeng had become. In practice, he now ruled eastern and central China through his armies. A story was told afterward that some of his top commanders, his brother among them, counselled him that the time had come to abandon the faltering Qing dynasty to its fate, and take power in Nanjing as the new emperor of China. Zeng did not do it. He had framed the whole war as a war to save Confucian civilization. And in that civilization, a loyal minister did not take the throne of the dynasty he served. He had been writing to his brother in exactly the opposite spirit. "If by good fortune Nanjing should fall, we brothers will have to retire," he had told Guoquan in May, "and this can be our way to prepare". He had warned him that "military commanders who have usurped fiscal power have never brought anything but evil to the country and harm to their own families". So in August 1864, less than a month after the fall of Nanjing, Zeng began sending his army home. But the men who had taken the city that July were already destroying it.

The Hunan Army had held together through years of hunger, cholera and four thousand dead miners. Inside Nanjing, its discipline broke. The soldiers broke ranks and laid waste to the rebel capital in an orgy of uncontrolled looting. They set fire to the palaces of the Taiping kings, and then to the homes of ordinary people. One of the men who walked through it was Zeng Guoquan's own secretary, and he kept a diary. "Children and toddlers," he wrote, "some not even two years old, had been hacked up or run through just for sport." Of the women in the city, he found none under the age of forty left. He was furious, and his fury was aimed at his own side. Of the commanders who let it happen, he asked, "How can they face their general? How can they face the emperor? How can they face Heaven and Earth? How can they face themselves?" Behind those numbers, a few voices survive from the people it happened to. One of them belongs to a girl named Huang Shuhua. She was sixteen years old when the soldiers came to her family's house. "They killed my two older brothers in the courtyard," she said, "then they went searching through the rooms of the house." One soldier took her captive, and he only laughed at her. "You, I love," he said. "You, I will not kill." She did not let it end there. She somehow found the means to kill him, and then she hanged herself. I will not add anything to that. The fires burned for days, until a heavy rainstorm came pouring down on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth of July and finally washed the city clean. Consul Adkins put the number the victors slaughtered at ten thousand. The coast newspapers spoke of thirty thousand massacred, and one insisted they were inoffensive men, women and children. Whatever the true number, that was what victory looked like in Nanjing that summer. And remember how this city became the Heavenly Capital in the first place, with the Taiping killing its Manchu families to the infant in arms. The killing at Nanjing ended as it began.

Meanwhile, the Loyal King was on the run. Somewhere outside the city, Li Xiucheng gave the Heavenly King's son his own best horse, so the boy could ride on, and he himself took refuge in an abandoned temple on a hillside twelve miles south of Nanjing. It was local people who found him. Two men, whom he would afterward call scoundrels, turned him over to Zeng Guoquan's forces on the twenty-second of July, just three days after his escape. With his capture, the war was effectively finished. In the days that followed, Li Xiucheng wrote the story of his life and of the Heavenly Kingdom for Zeng Guofan, a confession that ran to fifty thousand words. It is the fullest account any Taiping leader left of the movement from the inside: the rising in Guangxi, the killings among the kings, the great campaigns in the east, and a Heavenly King who would not leave his capital. Zeng read it, and edited it, striking out passages that did not paint his own army in a good light. Page after page of it explained the decisions Li had made in the field, many of which his captors still did not understand. Then Zeng casually ordered the Loyal King's execution, in spite of orders he knew were coming from Beijing that the rebel general be sent to the capital alive. Li Xiucheng was executed on the seventh of August 1864. He had grown up poor in the hills of Guangxi, scraping a living from hillside farming and charcoal, and joined the Taiping in 1851, when one of their armies camped in his village. In February 1860 he had ridden out of Nanjing with six thousand men in stolen imperial uniforms, blasted a breach in Hangzhou's wall to draw the besiegers away, and then swung back to overrun the imperial camps around the capital with more than a hundred thousand men. The man who broke that siege ended his life writing for his enemy, and died on his enemy's order. The boy he had tried to save was caught that autumn in Jiangxi province and put to death. So was Hong Rengan, the Shield King. Hong Rengan had once written a plan for the Heavenly Kingdom that called for steamships and railways, in a country that did not have a single mile of track, and for newspapers of every description. He had praised the American way of choosing leaders: "Those elected by the majority," he wrote, "are considered worthy and capable". He had urged that China speak to the British not of barbarians but of "equality, friendship, harmony and affection." And that is the end of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. It is also the end of this season, and so I want to step back and look at where these thirty years have brought us. When this season began, Lord Napier reached Macau in July 1834 and wrote at once to the viceroy at Canton, as one official to another, and the viceroy would not deal with him except through the merchants. When his chief rival for the post withdrew, Napier had written triumphantly in his diary, "The Empire of China is my own". In those years China had one door to the West, at Canton, and the court believed it set the terms of everything that came through it. Since then, China had fought Britain twice, and lost twice. The first ended with Hong Kong given up and five ports opened to foreign trade. When the terms reached him, the Daoguang Emperor wrote back, "I can only hate myself and feel ashamed that things have reached this point." The second added ten more ports, in the north, on Taiwan and up the Yangtze, gave foreigners the right to travel anywhere in the empire, and legalized the sale of the very drug the first war had been fought over. It ended with the emperor's Summer Palace burned to the ground on Lord Elgin's orders, two full days of burning and smashing. To pay for that second war, the British and French demanded indemnities of sixteen million taels of silver, roughly eighty times the silver actually left in the imperial treasury. Opium is the thread through all of it. When the first war's treaty was drawn up, Qiying refused point blank to have the drug written into it, and the British envoy, Pottinger, asked whether it would not be better to legalise its importation at once. Sixteen years later it was done, almost in passing, at a conference on tariffs in October 1858, with no Chinese objection. A British official travelling up the Yangtze with the fleet reported that, on both sides of the war, the one cry he heard from mandarins, soldiers and people at every place was "opium and arms, opium and arms". Even in the Heavenly Capital, where the Taiping had once held to strict puritan ideals, opium had returned in force by 1859. Think of the men who stood at the front of those wars. Lin Zexu, the commissioner who made the British surrender their opium, had between six and ten million dollars' worth of it thrown into trenches at the mouth of the Pearl River and washed out to sea. He was dismissed for the war that followed and sent into exile on the far western frontier, and he died in 1850, on his way south to fight the rebellion that became the Taiping. Qiying, the imperial clansman who had kept amicable relations with the British ten years before, left the talks at Tianjin without leave in 1858, hurried back toward Beijing, and was condemned to death. The decree informed him that it was the emperor's will that he put an end to himself, and he was allowed the silken cord in place of the executioner's sword. Ye Mingchen, the governor general at Canton who would not meet the foreigners, was shipped off by Lord Elgin and died in exile in India in April 1859. And in the middle of it all came the Taiping war, which by the time the Heavenly Kingdom was destroyed had left tens of millions dead and almost toppled the dynasty. So what was it, this Heavenly Kingdom that came so close? It began as a faith. Hong Xiuquan baptized himself and threw away the Confucian tablets in his schoolroom, and one bishop of the day judged that Hong had made the insurrection a great religious movement. It was also a war against foreign rule. From 1845 Hong preached that the Manchu rulers were usurpers, and his cousin promised his people that they would wipe out the humiliations of two hundred years. And it was a kingdom of the poor that grew to a real state. At its height it held some seventy thousand square miles and about twenty-six million people. Why did it fail? Partly, it tore itself apart. In 1856 Taiping troops in Nanjing massacred six thousand followers of the Eastern King, the movement's ablest commander, and every member of his family, and hung his head across from the Heavenly King's palace. Partly, the Heavenly King failed it, retreating into his palace and his scriptures while his cousin and his generals quarrelled. Partly, the foreigners turned against it, and British officers fought for the Qing as hired men. In the starving country the Taiping had lost, survivors told a visitor that their misery had come because foreign soldiers had come to fight the Taiping. But above all it met something new: Zeng Guofan's Hunan Army, its soldiers from his own home province and loyal only to him, which took Nanjing without foreign aid. Those dead are hard to see, because there are so many of them. So remember the smaller pictures, like the river city of Zhenjiang, which held more than three hundred thousand people before the war and was left with no more than a few hundred. "I never before saw such a scene of desolation," Lord Elgin wrote when he passed it. Or the once prosperous Taiping country, where a traveller often found fifteen to twenty bodies in a single house. Or the canal on the way to Suzhou, where a missionary's boat was stopped at night because, for hundreds of yards ahead, the water was jammed with the bodies of the dead. Or the town of Changshu, where the Taiping army itself passed through in good order, and the stragglers behind it broke into houses to rob, rape and murder, and dragged young men away tied together by their braids. Or a sixteen-year-old girl in Nanjing, in a house where her brothers lay dead in the courtyard. Both sides did this. One peasant on the Yangtze told a British visitor he had suffered alike at the hands of the emperor's troops and the rebels. That is the cost. Now, what is left standing? The dynasty is left standing, which at its worst moments few would have bet on. On the throne sits a small boy, the son of the Xianfeng Emperor, who died at his hunting retreat in 1861 and left a board of regents to rule for him. The boy, eight years old in 1864, reigns as the Tongzhi Emperor, and the years of his reign would come to be remembered as the Tongzhi Restoration. The real power at court belongs to the boy's mother, Cixi, the empress dowager. She and the senior empress had overthrown the regents in a coup with Prince Gong, the prince who had bargained for Beijing with the allied armies at its gates, and now, as one observer put it, she ruled "from behind a screen." It had been done with nerve. Prince Gong threatened violence with his bodyguard to force his way through to the boy emperor, then read out an edict in the child's name charging the chief regent with treason. Prince Gong had already given the court something it never had before: an office to deal with the foreign powers as states, set up in Beijing in 1861. And out in the provinces stand the men who actually saved the dynasty. Ten years before, when Zeng Guofan was still building his Hunan Army, one of the emperor's counsellors had warned that a Hunanese official with ten thousand men loyal to him "would not be a blessing to the empire." Since then, Zeng had been given more power than any Chinese official in the Qing dynasty had ever held. Beside him stood Li Hongzhang with his own army, and Zuo Zongtang with his men in Zhejiang. Only two years earlier, Li Hongzhang had been a willowy thirty-eight-year-old scholar from Anhui whom Zeng sent home to raise a new militia. Now he was a governor and an earl. They were Han Chinese, the people the Manchu conquerors had ruled for two centuries, and the Qing dynasty now depended on them. Eleven years before, Zeng had not even wanted the job of raising a militia. Now he was the man the dynasty could not do without. Zeng had chosen to stay a loyal servant of the throne. But the armies were built now, and the habit of raising them was learned. The court in Beijing had been saved by men it did not create and could not fully command. And along the coast and up the Yangtze, in the treaty ports, foreign trade now paid a duty fixed by treaty, at five per cent on most goods. The foreigners there lived under the law of their own consuls rather than China's, with their gunboats in the rivers. So that is the China the empress dowager and her little son inherit: battered, bankrupt, half ruined, but still standing, with new kinds of power in the provinces and new kinds of foreigners at the doors. One last picture. A Chinese graduate of Yale named Rong Hong, who had known Hong Rengan in Hong Kong, once came to Nanjing to see him. He offered to serve the Taiping if they would adopt a list of reforms, and the list began, "To organize an army on scientific principles." The Shield King could not promise it; the other kings would have to vote, and the majority agree. Within a few years, Rong Hong would be working for Zeng Guofan instead. And the question for the next thirty years is the one that men like Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang were already asking. Can the dynasty learn to make the foreigners' guns, their ships and their factories, and grow strong enough to stand up to them, without changing what it is? [handoff] That is the story of our next season, Self-Strengthening. It opens at the end of July 1864, when Zeng Guofan arrives at Nanjing to take possession of the city, nine days after his brother's army broke through its wall. And he will have to decide what a loyal servant of the throne does with an army of his own. Thank you for listening, and I will see you then.

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