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Self-Strengthening, episode 1

The Ruined Capital

In July 1864 Zeng Guofan, the Hunanese scholar whose army has just ended the Taiping war, rides into a Nanjing that has been fought over for eleven years, and he decides to send most of his men home rather than become the general the throne fears. The episode follows Zeng and his protege Li Hongzhang, who keeps his own army under arms, and meets the people who will run the next thirty years, the empress dowager Cixi and Prince Gong in Beijing, Zuo Zongtang in Hangzhou and Robert Hart at the Customs, and asks who really won the war, the throne or its Han generals. It hears the court in its own edicts and Zeng's side in its own reports, alongside foreign observers and scholars.

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Nanjing Beijing Anhui Hangzhou China
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Transcript

[previously] If you heard the last season, you left the Qing dynasty battered but still standing, saved from a rebellion that came close to toppling it. And you left it with a question: can it 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? If this is where you are starting, you are in the right place. Everything you need to follow this season, I will tell you as we go. We begin in the summer that war ended.

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

On the twenty eighth of July 1864, Zeng Guofan arrived from Anqing to take possession of the city of Nanjing, nine days after his brother's army had broken through its wall. Anqing was his headquarters, a river city upstream on the Yangtze. Nanjing, the old southern capital of the empire, had for eleven years been the capital of a rebel kingdom. Zeng was fifty two that summer, and he was not a soldier by training. He was a scholar from Hunan, a province in the middle of China, who had passed the empire's highest examinations and served at court in Beijing among the Hanlin academicians, the emperor's own college of scholars. Early in 1853, home in Hunan to mourn his mother, he had been asked by the throne to raise a local militia against the rebels. What he built became the Hunan Army, and the Hunan Army had just won the war. He was a stern, self examining man who kept a diary every day for decades and wrote his younger brothers long letters about duty and discipline, letters later read across China as a model of how a Confucian gentleman should live. The rebels were the Taiping, the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. Their leader, Hong Xiuquan, was a failed examination candidate from the south who believed that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, sent down to rid China of demons. The demons, in his telling, were the Qing, the dynasty that had ruled China since 1644. The Qing emperors were Manchu, from a people from beyond the Great Wall to the northeast, ruling over a vast Han Chinese majority. When the emperor's court announced the fall of Nanjing that summer, it counted fifteen years since the rebels had first risen, and said they had trampled more than ten provinces underfoot and overthrown several hundred cities. Nobody counted the dead with any precision. Most estimates put them at twenty million or more, which would make it the bloodiest war anywhere in the world in the nineteenth century. That is the war Zeng Guofan had come to Nanjing to end. His younger brother, Zeng Guoquan, had held Nanjing under siege for two years. In July his men packed twenty tons of gunpowder under the wall and sprang the mine at noon on the nineteenth, opening a breach nearly two hundred feet wide. Those of you who were with me at the end of the last season heard that wall come down, and heard what the soldiers did inside. This time we walk in afterwards, with the man who won. The Hunan Army poured through, its discipline broke, and for days the soldiers looted, burned and killed, until a heavy rainstorm on the afternoon of the twenty fifth of July finally washed the city clean. The Heavenly King, the title Hong Xiuquan gave himself, was not there to see it. He had died more than six weeks before the wall came down, most likely of disease. Even a secretary on the victors' own staff was sickened, and asked in his diary how the commanders who allowed it could face their general, the emperor, or Heaven and Earth. The reports that went to Beijing told a much tidier story. Zeng's account to the throne claimed that a hundred thousand rebel soldiers had been killed in the fighting. That was not true. We have a British witness to set beside it. The acting British consul at Zhenjiang, a river port downstream, was a man named Adkins, and he paid no attention to the first rumours of victory, "having been so often deceived by reports of Chinese victories." On the twenty fourth of July he got hold of a copy of the official report to the throne, and the next day he set off upriver in a British warship to congratulate the Chinese commander on the end of his siege. He found Zeng Guoquan at his camp outside the south gate. The next day he rode into the city to see the breach for himself. The palace of the Heavenly King had been burnt to the ground, and it was said that Hong and his closest attendants lay buried in its ruins. The consul was inclined to believe it, since the city had been closely blockaded since January. Words could not describe, he wrote, the utter desolation of everything within the walls. The houses left standing looked as if nobody had lived in them for years. The grand gateways that marked the mansions of the rebel princes opened onto courtyards full of brickbats and charred timbers, and many of the side streets were overgrown with jungle four feet high. On his ride through the city he saw a great number of unburied bodies, and in many places the smell was so bad that he and the lieutenant with him were almost overpowered. Judging by the dead in the streets, he thought the rebel garrison at the end could not have been large, perhaps ten thousand men against fifty thousand under the imperial commanders. Other reports from the city said the streets and houses were literally blocked with bodies, and that most of these people had not been killed in the assault at all, but had starved during the long blockade. The consul had no love for the rebels. A ride through the streets of the city as they now were, he wrote, "would satisfy the most ardent advocate of the Rebel cause of the dreadful hollowness of the system they support." Zeng Guofan, for his part, had ordered that any treasure found buried in the city be handed over to the public funds. There was none. To take the rebels' great stronghold and find no wealth in it whatever, he observed, "certainly surpasses your humble servant's calculations, and is a thing of rare occurrence." Which tells you something about what everyone had expected to find. In Beijing, meanwhile, there was jubilation. The news of the victory reached the capital in six days. An imperial decree gave thanks. "This was indeed a special dispensation in Our favour," it said, "for which we are grateful to Heaven and Our sacred Ancestors. The Empresses Dowager are agreed in their feelings of gratitude for the peace and order which have been granted to Us." Notice who is speaking there. The decree spoke in the voice of the emperor, but it went out of its way to mention two widows standing behind him. We will come to them. The same decree mourned the dead emperor, the boy's father, who had never stopped pursuing the rebels' destruction. "It continually grieves Us to think that He did not survive to see his designs carried out." And it praised the generals, "those great warriors who, during the pacification of the country, were exposed to every blast of heaven, and were drenched with rain, tasting every danger and difficulty". The rewards followed. Zeng Guofan was created a marquis and made senior guardian of the young emperor, and his brother was made a noble of the third grade. At the same time Li Hongzhang, a name you will hear a great deal this season, was created an earl. Behind all this ceremony there was a question nobody at court said out loud. The story went round that some of Zeng's own commanders, his brother among them, urged him to let the faltering dynasty fall and take power in Nanjing as the new emperor of China. It is not as fanciful as it sounds. By the summer of 1864, Zeng Guofan was the most powerful man in China, holding what amounted to a military dictatorship over the east and center of the country. And the army that had done it was his. Its officers were his men, chosen by him, loyal to him, paid through him. That was new, and it was dangerous. The dynasty's own armies had failed in this war. The Manchu bannermen, the hereditary soldiers whose ancestors had conquered China, and the Green Standard troops, the regular Chinese garrisons, had been beaten by the rebels again and again. So the throne had done something it had always feared to do. It had let Han Chinese scholars raise armies in their home provinces, loyal to the men who raised them. Much of the money came from a new tax on goods moving along the roads and rivers, called lijin, which the generals' own offices collected in the provinces they controlled. It had worked. The dynasty was saved. And now it had to live with the men who had saved it. He did not take the throne. He seems to have made up his mind long before. Before the city ever fell, he had told his brother that if Nanjing fell, the two of them would have to retire. Hello, and welcome to the first episode of a new season. I'm telling this season's story on the work of Hosea Ballou Morse, Stephen R. Platt and Stephen R. Halsey, and on the words of men who were there, among them Augustus Lindley, Andrew Wilson and W. A. P. Martin. This season runs from that summer in Nanjing to the summer of 1894, thirty years in which the men who saved the Qing dynasty tried to make it strong enough to survive the world that had come knocking at its door. They gave their effort a name, self strengthening, and we are going to follow it from the beginning to the bitter end. You will meet the people who ran those thirty years in this episode. Zeng Guofan, whom you have just met, the scholar general. Li Hongzhang, his protege, the man who will become the most important official in China. Cixi, the young widow in Beijing whose voice you heard behind that decree. Prince Gong, the emperor's uncle, who ran the court's dealings with the foreigners. Zuo Zongtang, the proudest and prickliest of the generals. And an Irishman named Robert Hart, who ran the empire's customs, and whom the court came to trust more than almost any foreigner alive. And under it all runs one question I want you to carry through this episode. Who really won this war? The dynasty, or the generals who fought it?

There was one man the victors wanted more than any other, and he had not been found inside the city. His name was Li Xiucheng, and the Taiping called him the Loyal King. He had begun life as a poor man in the far south, a charcoal burner by some accounts, and had risen through the rebel ranks to become the last great general the Heavenly Kingdom had. The British consul paid him a backhanded tribute. He had for many years been, the consul wrote, "the most restless and determined of all the desperadoes" the movement had sent out. He was the one who had threatened Shanghai in 1860, who had faced the British admiral's forces around Shanghai and Colonel Gordon at Suzhou, and he had tried to bring foreigners into his own forces. Rebel sympathisers, the consul added, called him the main hope of the Taiping cause in its declining days. When the wall came down, he got Hong Xiuquan's young son and heir out of the city, and gave the boy his own best horse. Three days later, two local men turned Li himself over to Zeng Guoquan's forces. The British consul, who had been told of the capture, was pressed to visit the prisoner in his confinement. He declined, on the grounds that he had no personal acquaintance with him. I find that a very British reason not to meet the most famous rebel in China. With Li Xiucheng's capture, the war was effectively finished. There would be rebel bands fighting on in the hills for a while yet, and Hong Tianguifu was caught a few months later and executed. But the Heavenly Kingdom, as a state, was over. When Zeng Guofan reached Nanjing, Li Xiucheng was waiting for him under guard. And Zeng gave him something unusual for a captured rebel: time, and a brush. In his cell, Li wrote out his own account of the rebellion and of his part in it, a confession that ran to some fifty thousand words. It is one of the very few accounts of the Heavenly Kingdom written from the inside, by a man who had served it almost from the beginning. Zeng read it closely. And then he edited it, striking out the passages that did not paint his own army in a good light. So the most important rebel testimony of the war reached the throne having passed first through the hands of the man who had won it. Beijing wanted Li Xiucheng sent to the capital alive. Orders to that effect were on their way, and Zeng knew they were coming. He did not wait for them. In spite of those orders, he casually ordered the rebel general's execution. Li Xiucheng was executed on the seventh of August 1864. What he might have said in Beijing, to interrogators who answered to someone other than Zeng, we will never know. And then Zeng did the thing that surprised everyone, and that decided the shape of the next thirty years. He began to send his army home. The demobilization of the Hunan Army began in August 1864, less than a month after the fall of Nanjing. His brother, whose men had sacked the city, was the one he worried about most. Zeng warned him plainly that commanders who seized control of the money had never brought anything but evil to the country and harm to their own families. Zeng Guoquan left his command that autumn and went home to Hunan, pleading illness. Think about what Zeng was giving up. His army was a private one in all but name, raised by him, officered by his friends and relatives, and paid out of taxes he had the right to collect in the provinces he governed. Every general in Chinese history knew what happened to men with armies like that. Either they took the throne, or the throne took them. Zeng chose a third way. He let the army go, and he made it very plain to Beijing that he was doing so. And he turned to rebuilding, the way a Confucian scholar understood it. He had the great examination hall at Nanjing repaired, so that the provincial examinations could be held there again. He set up a printing office in Nanjing to reprint the classics and histories the war had destroyed, books the Taiping had banned and burned. He and Li had already persuaded the throne to cut the crushing land tax on the districts around Suzhou and Shanghai, and refugees were coaxed back to the empty farms. Officials came to call these years the Tongzhi Restoration, after the boy emperor's reign: not a new order, but the old one, repaired. Schools, books, taxes, farmers back on the land. The guns would come a little later. To understand why, we have to go back three years, and look at who was sitting on that throne.

On the fourteenth of September 1861, the news reached Zeng Guofan in his camp that the emperor was dead. "Heaven has collapsed," he wrote. The emperor was the Xianfeng Emperor, and he had died on the twenty second of August 1861, barely a month past his thirtieth birthday. He had died not in Beijing but in exile, of a kind. A year earlier, in the autumn of 1860, a British and French army had fought its way to the capital, and the emperor had fled to his hunting retreat at Chengde, beyond the Great Wall. The foreigners had looted and burned the great garden palace on the edge of Beijing, the Yuanmingyuan, the place English speakers call the Summer Palace. The emperor never came back. He left behind in Beijing his younger half brother, Prince Gong, to make what peace he could with the invaders. Prince Gong, still in his twenties, had done exactly that. He signed the treaties the British and French demanded, watched their armies leave, and early in 1861 set up a new office to deal with the foreigners, the court's first real foreign ministry in all but name. That office was called the Zongli Yamen, which means something like the office for the general management of foreign affairs. He had fathered just one son who could inherit the throne. That son was, in August 1861, only five years old. To rule for the boy, he issued an edict naming his eight closest Manchu advisers as regents, Sushun, Zaiyuan, Muyin, Duanhua and four others. Sushun, the most forceful of them, was an imperial clansman known for his harshness and hated by many at court. He had also been one of the strongest backers at court of Han Chinese commanders like Zeng Guofan. Prince Gong was not among them. The regents were hardliners. They dreamed of tearing up the new treaties, and they were suspicious of Prince Gong's apparent softness toward the foreigners. But the boy had a mother. She was in her middle twenties. She had come into the palace as a low ranking consort, and she had risen because she had done the one thing no other woman in the palace had done. She had given the emperor a son. She is known to history by the title she was given that year, Cixi, the empress dowager. And alongside her was the dead emperor's senior wife, his empress, who had no son of her own but outranked her. The two widows did not intend to be pushed aside. For weeks, at the hunting retreat, they had been holding secret meetings with Prince Gong's younger brother. The regents had kept Prince Gong from seeing his brother in exile. But Beijing was his ground. He was popular there for restoring order after the war with Britain and France, and the city's garrison troops were loyal to him. In the autumn of 1861 the court set out to carry the dead emperor's coffin back to the capital. The widows and the boy travelled ahead by a faster road. The regent Sushun stayed behind with the coffin. They reached Beijing first. And that afternoon, Prince Gong held an audience and read aloud an edict in the name of the child emperor, sealed by the two empresses dowager, charging Sushun and the other regents with treason. The young empress dowager herself charged them with faking the edict that had named them regents in the first place. The emperor, she said, had been too feeble at the end to dictate it. Guards rode out to Sushun's camp that night and arrested him in his tent. Two of the other regents, Zaiyuan and Duanhua, were granted the honour of strangling themselves with silk, the polite death the dynasty offered its princes. In fact they were hanged in a dungeon of the Imperial Clan Court. Sushun was granted nothing. At two in the afternoon on the eighth of November, in front of a massive crowd, he was beheaded in the cabbage market in Beijing, where common criminals were executed. The year by the Chinese calendar was a xinyou year, and so this is called the Xinyou coup. In late November 1861, two weeks after Sushun's death, a series of edicts came out in the name of the child emperor. The real turn had come earlier. The same edict that ordered the regents' arrest had asked, in the boy's voice, that his mother, the empress dowager, administer the government in person, with princes to advise her. The boy's reign was given a new name, Tongzhi, which can be read as ruling together. On the twenty third of December, a friend of Zeng's wrote that the government had fallen into the hands of the unknown empress dowager, who now ruled "from behind a screen." That was meant literally. When the two widows held audience with the officials of the court, a silk screen hung in front of their seats, with the boy emperor on his throne before it. Foreigners in China were reassured. One foreign newspaper likened it to the revolution in Paris in 1848, as sudden, sharp and decisive, and said it had done more to reassure foreigners than anything since they were first let into the country. Prince Gong was rewarded with the title of Prince Counsellor, and for the next few years he and Cixi governed side by side. They worked at first as something close to equals. Later, when the prince had learned his place, it would be as mistress and minister. For Zeng Guofan, out in the field, the coup changed everything. The new rulers needed the war won, and they decided to bet on him. He received the edicts of reappointment and promotion on the fifteenth of December 1861. They gave him command over the military affairs of four provinces, Jiangsu, Anhui, Jiangxi and Zhejiang. No other Chinese official in the Qing dynasty had ever held such power. And his reaction was not triumph. "This power is too great," he wrote in his diary. "My stature will be too high, and my undeserved reputation has outgrown itself. This terrifies me to the extreme." That fear is the key to Zeng Guofan. He owed his new power to two widows and a prince who had just shown, in a cabbage market, what happened to men who held too much of it. So when he disbanded his army in 1864, he was not only being modest. He was being careful. But careful men do not always get to decide what happens to the armies they create.

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

Because around the same time he was promoted, Zeng did something that would outlast all his caution. He authorized a willowy thirty eight year old scholar from Anhui named Li Hongzhang to go home to central Anhui and muster an entirely new provincial militia. Like Zeng, Li was a Hanlin scholar. Zeng had been his teacher in Beijing while he prepared for the highest examinations, which he passed with distinction in 1847. On Zeng's staff, Li had drafted letters and reports, and watched at close quarters how a scholar ran an army. Li pulled together several thousand Anhui peasants, and in February 1862 he brought them to Anqing to be trained by veteran units of the Hunan Army. It was called the Huai Army, after the Huai River that runs through the north of Anhui. And almost at once it was needed somewhere else. Shanghai, the great foreign trading port at the mouth of the Yangtze, was under threat from Li Xiucheng's rebel armies. The officials and merchants there begged for help. But Shanghai was hundreds of miles downstream, past rebel held country. So they hired British steamships. The contract was to carry nine thousand soldiers and their support staff from Anqing down to Shanghai on British steamships. It cost a hundred and eighty thousand taels of silver, roughly a third of the monthly customs revenue of the port of Shanghai. A tael was the Chinese ounce of silver, the unit in which the empire counted its money, a little more than an ounce and a quarter in weight. Zeng Guofan was appalled at the price. It was "shocking and pitiful!" he wrote in a letter home. But it worked. 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 had been landed at Shanghai. Soon Li took over as governor of the province around it, replacing a man named Xue Huan. And with the governorship came command of the strangest unit in China, the Ever Victorious Army. It was a force of Chinese soldiers under foreign officers, drilled in the Western manner and paid by the Shanghai merchants, first led by an American adventurer and later by the British officer Charles Gordon. Li watched those foreign officers, and above all their weapons, very closely. Li learned something else from the foreigners at Shanghai, and that was how far he could push them. At Suzhou, late in 1863, rebel commanders surrendered the city believing their lives had been guaranteed. Li had them put to death. Gordon, who felt that his own word had been broken, was so enraged that he went looking for Li with a revolver. Li kept out of his way until the storm passed, and the two men went on working together. Several months after his arrival in Shanghai in 1862, Li introduced European musketry to his own growing forces. In early 1863 he also bought mobile artillery pieces that fired explosive shells. His officers kept recruiting. In the three years after 1862, they built a force of sixty thousand men. By the end of 1864, more than two thirds of those sixty thousand troops carried Western arms. So here is the picture at the end of the war. Up the river at Nanjing, Zeng Guofan is sending his Hunan Army home. Down at Shanghai, his old student Li Hongzhang is building an army that will reach sixty thousand men, and by the end of the year more than two thirds of them will carry Western arms. Some of you have already met Li Hongzhang, as an old man near the end of a very long road. This season is how he got there. The Huai Army was Li's, in the same way the Hunan Army had been Zeng's. Its officers came from his home country, they owed their careers to him, and they would follow him for thirty years. Remember that. When the dynasty next needs an army, it will not be the emperor's army it calls. It will be Li Hongzhang's.

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

There was a third general, and he could not have been more different from either of them. His name was Zuo Zongtang, and he too was from Hunan, another of Zeng's commanders. He was born in 1812, a year after Zeng, and he had failed the highest examinations three times. He gave up, went home and farmed, and studied geography and the defence of the frontiers instead. He was famously proud. As a young man he called himself a new Zhuge Liang, after the most celebrated strategist in Chinese history. Zeng recommended him for high office anyway, and in 1862 Zuo was made governor of Zhejiang, the rich coastal province south of Shanghai, most of which was then in rebel hands. His task was to take it back. And by the spring of 1864, he had reached its capital, Hangzhou. He was not alone. Alongside his own troops fought another of those odd hybrid units, a force of Chinese soldiers under French officers, raised at the port of Ningbo. On the second of March, the French and Chinese force attacked the city and took three forts on the south side, before a charge from the defenders drove them out again. On the twenty ninth, they tried again, on their own, too early, and failed. Then on the thirty first of March, the combined forces made a final assault, and Hangzhou fell to Zuo Zongtang. The city had not really been taken by storm. It had been strangled. Imperial troops had taken the nearby city of Jiaxing, and with it went the supply lines and communications Hangzhou depended on. The defenders fled north to Huzhou. With the loss of both Hangzhou and Suzhou, the rebels no longer held any of the great cities of the east. Only Nanjing was left, and you know what happened to Nanjing. So by that summer, the dynasty had three great Han Chinese generals in the field, each with his own army and his own province. Zeng, cautious and scholarly, who wanted to go home. Li, practical and ambitious, who kept his men. And Zuo, proud and stubborn, who would in the end march farther than either of them. Keep an eye on Zuo. His road will take him to the far end of the empire.

Now we need to follow the money. Because none of what comes next, not the guns, not the ships, not the schools, could be paid for with good intentions. And the money was in the hands of a foreigner. In the treaty ports, the coastal and river cities opened to foreign trade by force, the customs duties on that trade were collected by an unusual body: a Chinese government service run by foreign officers. It had begun at Shanghai in 1854, when rebels held the Chinese city and the local customs house had collapsed, and foreign inspectors stepped in to collect the duties on the dynasty's behalf. By the 1860s it covered every treaty port. Its head, the Inspector General, was a man named Lay. And by 1863, the court could not stand him. The Chinese blamed all the difficulties of the past year on his faulty arrangements. The trouble was a fleet. During the war, Lay had bought seven gunboats in England for the Chinese, to use against the rebels on the Yangtze and along the coast. They arrived too late to be needed, for by then the rebels were all but beaten. And they came with a catch. Their British commander refused to take orders from the provincial officials, and showed an agreement that he was bound by nothing that was not countersigned by Lay himself. In other words, the emperor had bought a navy, and an Englishman was in charge of it. The ministers in Beijing resented his presumption in making himself master of the new force. And they were saddled with a bill of seventy thousand ounces of silver a month, an enormous sum, they thought, for a fleet that was superfluous, if not dangerous. Lay did not help himself. He demanded an imperial palace to live in. He demanded the dismissal of the two Chinese colleagues who had been appointed to share control of the customs with him. In all the four months from June to October, he was never once admitted to see Prince Gong in person. The ministers complained to the British minister in Beijing, Sir Frederick Bruce, and said they meant to dismiss Lay and the fleet together. Bruce took Lay's side. For a few days it looked as though a dispute over some gunboats might start another war. The man who stopped it was the American minister, Anson Burlingame. Prince Gong's colleague Wenxiang told him that, sooner than submit to having the fleet forced on them, the Manchu government would retreat beyond the Great Wall. Burlingame took that to Bruce, and after three days of argument, the British minister gave way. Pacing the floor near midnight in the American legation, Bruce suddenly exclaimed, "The fleet may go." The crisis was over. The ships were sent to India and sold. Not every foreigner in Beijing was pleased. An American missionary there at the time thought the dismissal of the fleet a backward step, because it had promised to force the opening of mines and the founding of schools of science. He also admitted, with some frankness, that a fleet manned and commanded by Englishmen "would contribute to keep the paw of the lion on the gateways of China." Which was, of course, exactly what the court had objected to. To him, the rejection of the fleet showed how the Chinese felt about all the machinery of the West, which in their eyes meant steamer, telegraph and railway. A year or two before, an English merchant had strung the first telegraph wire in the empire, from Shanghai down to the mouth of its river. To men at court, a wire like that was a foreign thing on Chinese soil, run by foreigners and serving foreigners. Whether the empire should allow such things at all would be argued for the next thirty years. That November, Lay was dismissed from his post. He left very comfortably. For the months he had spent in conflict with the government that employed him, he was paid fourteen thousand pounds sterling. Which may be the best paid quarrel of the century. Both Bruce and Burlingame strongly recommended a successor. He was the man who had been running the customs in Lay's absence. And so Robert Hart was appointed to succeed him as Inspector General of Customs. Hart was twenty eight years old, an Ulsterman, from a Protestant family in County Armagh in the north of Ireland. He had come out to China at nineteen as a junior interpreter in the British consular service, and moved over to the customs a few years later. He had learned Chinese well, and he had learned how Chinese officials thought. He was everything Lay was not. Lay had treated the court as his employer only on paper. Hart understood that he worked for the emperor. Prince Gong wrote to him that his "prudence, tact, and experience are known to all." There was one condition. Because of all the trouble Lay's half diplomatic position had caused, Hart was not to live in Beijing. That condition did not last. Within a couple of years Hart had moved the customs headquarters to the capital, and there he stayed, close to Prince Gong and the foreign office, for more than four decades. His service sent home a steady, honest flow of revenue, collected by foreign staff the court could not easily cheat and who could not easily cheat the court. Much of what the next thirty years tried, from arsenals to schools to warships, would be paid for out of Robert Hart's customs. A foreigner had helped the dynasty stay solvent. Now the question was what it would buy.

Which brings us back to the men who had won the war, and to what they had learned from it. At Shanghai, Li Hongzhang had seen foreign arms at close quarters. Within months of arriving he brought European muskets into his own army, and in early 1863 guns that fired explosive shells. And Prince Gong had seen it in Beijing in 1860, in a palace burning on the edge of the capital. One of Li's close aides at Shanghai was an official named Ding Richang, who ran workshops there making foreign style guns. Ding put the lesson bluntly. "Since the beginning," he wrote, "Sino-foreign relations have rested not on reason but on power." It was an uncomfortable thing for a Confucian official to say. The classics taught that good government rested on virtue, and that the empire's neighbours would be won over by its example. Ding was saying the foreigners did not care about the empire's example. They cared about guns. And so China would need guns of its own. Ding hoped that if the dynasty could build them, it could change the terms of its whole relationship with the foreign powers. The idea was already in the air. A scholar from Suzhou named Feng Guifen, who had fled the rebels to Shanghai, wrote essays around 1861 asking how the Western countries, so much smaller than China, could be so much stronger, and answered that China must learn what they knew. He was careful to say what he meant. China would keep its own ethics and teachings as the foundation, and borrow the West's methods only to make itself rich and strong. That formula, Chinese learning at the root and Western techniques laid on top, would be repeated in one form or another for the rest of the century. Li Hongzhang went further. "I contend that if China desires to strengthen itself," he wrote, "then there is nothing better than to study foreign tools." To strengthen itself. That phrase, ziqiang, self strengthening, came from one of the oldest of the Chinese classics, the Book of Changes, which taught that the superior man strengthens himself without ceasing. Now the phrase was given a new meaning. It meant learning to make the foreigners' guns and the foreigners' ships, so that China could stand up to the foreigners. Defeat in the wars with Britain and France had taught the lesson, and the end of the rebellion gave the chance to act on it. After the Taiping war, the court approved the building of dockyards at Shanghai and at Fuzhou. It was the beginning of what this season is about. But notice what kind of beginning it was. It did not come from the throne. It came from a handful of generals and governors, each in his own province, each with his own army and his own share of the customs money. And it rested on a bet. That you could take the foreigners' tools without taking anything else of theirs. That you could learn to build a steamship and still be the same empire you were before. So who won the war? The dynasty survived. But its new armies had worn away the court's power, and Han Chinese officials in the provinces, men like Zeng and Li, now held a wide range of new powers. Next time, the learning starts, and it meets men who, as Li Hongzhang put it, ridicule Western tools as "clever and deceptive gadgetry". Shanghai gets an arsenal, and Li argues that if China wants to study foreign tools, there is nothing better than to acquire machines that make other machines. And out on the plains, in a war against the roving Nian horsemen, the court takes command from Zeng Guofan and hands it to Li Hongzhang. I hope you'll join me.

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