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Self-Strengthening, episode 2

Learning from the Barbarians

Li Hongzhang has seen at Shanghai what foreign guns can do, and Prince Gong, who runs the court's new office for foreign affairs, has seen the foreigners burn the Summer Palace; both decide China must learn their skills. The episode follows the two men from a school for interpreters in Beijing and an arsenal in Shanghai to the plains of the north, where the Nian horsemen kill the dynasty's best Mongol general and Li's modern army finally runs them down, and asks whether guns and schools could be added without changing anything else. It hears Li in his own memorial, with scholars and foreign observers.

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Transcript

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

Last time, in July 1864, the Hunan Army broke through the wall of Nanjing, and the Taiping war, the civil war that had torn China apart for fifteen years, came to an end. The man who had won it, Zeng Guofan, began sending his army home within a month, rather than become the kind of general the throne had reason to fear. His protege Li Hongzhang was another matter. At Shanghai, Li's officers had recruited an army of sixty thousand men, and by the end of 1864 more than two thirds of them carried Western arms. In Beijing, the empress dowager Cixi ruled from behind a screen, with her brother in law, Prince Gong, at her side. And Li had drawn the lesson the war had taught him. If China desired to strengthen itself, he wrote, there was nothing better than to study foreign tools. This episode is about what happened when they tried. This episode also stands on the work of J. O. P. Bland and William T. Rowe, and on the memoir of Rong Hong, a man you will meet shortly. We start in Beijing, with Prince Gong, and with a problem of words. Prince Gong was the half brother of the late emperor. In 1860, when a British and French army fought its way to the capital and the emperor fled, it was Prince Gong who stayed behind to deal with the invaders. He had watched them burn the Summer Palace. He had signed the treaties they put in front of him. And he had learned something from the experience that most of the court had not. Early in 1861 he set out his thinking for the throne. The rebels inside China, he wrote, were a disease of the body's vital organs. Russia, pressing on the northern frontier, was a threat close at hand. Britain, which wanted trade, was a disease of the limbs. In other words, the foreigners who had just burned the palace were not the worst danger. They could be managed, and while they were managed, the empire could heal itself. Under the new treaties, the foreign powers had the right to keep ministers in Beijing, and their legations had opened in the capital. Somebody now had to carry on a daily diplomatic conversation with them. And that meant interpreters. The new office Prince Gong had founded to manage foreign affairs, the Zongli Yamen, needed people who could read and speak the foreigners' languages. The Zongli Yamen was meant at first to be temporary, a makeshift office for an emergency, staffed by a handful of ministers who also held other posts at court. Prince Gong ran it, with a hardworking Manchu minister named Wenxiang at his side. It sat in a modest compound in the east of the city, and the foreign envoys who came there to argue found themselves drinking tea with the most powerful men in the government. The British had seen to it that this was urgent. Their treaty laid down that for a set number of years, British despatches would come with a Chinese translation attached, and within that time the Chinese government was expected to train a corps of interpreters of its own. After that, the English text was the one that counted. Until then, the court would have to take the foreigners' word for what the foreigners had written. Prince Gong saw the danger at once. In a memorial to the throne in October 1861, he and his colleagues wrote that "a knowledge of the character and institutions of foreign nations is indispensable to the conduct of intercourse." A memorial was the form in which officials addressed the emperor: a formal written report or proposal, sent up to the throne and answered with a note in the emperor's name. So the prince's first idea was to find Chinese teachers. He asked the throne to order the viceroy at Guangzhou and the governor at Shanghai to find natives well acquainted with foreign writing, and to send them to Beijing with a good supply of foreign books. They would teach a class of young men chosen from the Eight Banners. The Eight Banners were the hereditary military households of the dynasty, Manchu families above all, along with Mongols and some Chinese, whose families had served the throne since the conquest and lived on its stipends. The answers came back. The viceroy at Guangzhou reported that there was no man he could recommend. The governor at Shanghai reported that one candidate had presented himself, but that he was by no means deeply versed in the subject. Two of the busiest foreign trading ports in the world, and not one Chinese teacher of English between them that a governor would vouch for. So the court did what it had hoped not to do, and hired foreigners. In 1862, by the direct order of Prince Gong, a school of languages was opened in Beijing. It was called the Tongwen Guan, a name that means a school of combined learning. It was housed in spare buildings attached to the foreign office itself. The English class, as the most urgent, opened in June 1862, and the French and Russian classes the following spring. There were three classes, English, French and Russian, with ten boys in each. They were not, at first, the empire's brightest young men. Bannermen's sons were chosen because they were the court's own, and because the sons of good scholarly families had better things to do than learn the barbarians' tongues. And the students were drawn entirely from the Bannermen, Manchu or Chinese. Its purpose was to train young Qing subjects in Western languages, and to translate important works of European scientific, social and political thought. Its first English teacher was a British missionary, and its costs were paid out of the customs revenue, so Robert Hart took a close and proprietary interest in it from the start. And it was not long before the foreign office found out what Western learning could do for it. In 1864, with Prussia and Denmark at war in Europe, a Prussian warship arrived off the northern coast of China and seized three Danish merchant ships in Chinese waters. The Zongli Yamen had just paid for the translation into Chinese of an American textbook of international law, and its ministers read it. They protested, in the language the Europeans themselves used, that a foreign war had no business in China's own waters, and the Prussians gave way. It was a small victory, but the prince took the lesson. The foreigners' rules could be learned, and once learned, they could be used against the foreigners. There is one lovely detail about that Russian class. It was not new at all. A Russian school had existed in Beijing since the middle of the eighteenth century, set up in the reign of the Qianlong Emperor to handle the court's dealings with Russia. For many years it had had Chinese professors and no students. When it was folded into the new school, the only link with its past was an old professor who knew no Russian. He brought no students and no books, and he was promptly replaced by a native of Russia. I find it oddly comforting that a government office can survive for a century with nobody in it doing the job. A foreign scholar who dealt with him remembered the prince as uncommonly gracious. Prince Gong always took both his hands in his own, in the warm Manchu manner. It was nothing like the cool Chinese salute, in which even close friends each shook their own hands at a respectful distance. Prince Gong was, in other words, a man who could be comfortable with foreigners. That was rare at his level, and it was going to make him enemies. Because the school would not stay a school of languages for long. In 1865 science was added to its teaching, raising it to the rank of a college. We will come back to what that did to the court. But first we need to go south, to Shanghai, where Li Hongzhang was learning to make guns.

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

Li had begun in a small way. While he was still fighting the rebels around Shanghai, he had set up little workshops to make shells and cartridges, one of them run by a former British army doctor. They were useful, but they were workshops, not factories. They could copy a shell. They could not make the machines that made the shells. The man who understood that difference best was Rong Hong. Rong Hong was born in 1828 in a village near Macau, and went to mission schools there as a boy. When he was eighteen, an American missionary teacher took him to the United States. He went on to Yale College, and in 1854 he graduated, the first Chinese graduate of an American college. Then he came home, to a country at war with itself, and for years nobody quite knew what to do with him. He worked as an interpreter, as a clerk, and in the tea trade. In 1863 he was invited to visit Zeng Guofan, then viceroy of the provinces around Nanjing, at his headquarters at Anqing. Rong Hong gave Zeng his advice. Not a factory for rifles, he said, but a machine shop to make the machinery that could turn out rifles, cannon, cartridges, or anything else. The difference matters. Buy a rifle factory and you can make one kind of rifle until it is out of date. Buy the machines that make machines, and you can make whatever you need next. Zeng admitted the subject was quite beyond his knowledge, and told him to work out the details with two of his staff who knew more about it than he did. They were Hua Hengfang and Xu Shou, two self taught Chinese experts in mathematics and machinery who had already built a small steamboat for Zeng by hand. At the end of another two weeks, word came that the viceroy had decided. Rong Hong was to go abroad and buy whatever machinery a professional engineer judged best for China, and it was left entirely to him whether to buy it in England, France or the United States. A week later his commission came through, together with the fifth official rank and the right to wear the blue feather in his hat. The court's officials were ranked in nine grades, each with its own badge and hat button, so the fifth put a man with no examination degree halfway up the ladder. He was given sixty eight thousand taels for the whole purchase, half to be paid by the chief official at Shanghai and half by the provincial treasurer at Guangzhou. In Shanghai, that October, he met an American mechanical engineer named John Haskins, who was about to go home to the States with his wife and little daughter. Haskins went with him as his engineer. Rong Hong went to America by way of Europe. He arrived in the middle of the American Civil War, and placed his order with a machine works in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. It was many months before the machines were built and shipped. In the middle of 1865, the Qing authorities bought a shipyard in the Hongkou district of Shanghai, close to the foreign concessions. The foreign consuls objected to a Chinese arsenal in their settlement, so the works were moved to a site south of the city. Zeng was by now away in the north, as we will see, and the man in charge at Nanjing in his place was Li Hongzhang. It was Li who put the pieces together, with Zeng's blessing. And Li had twenty percent of Shanghai's yearly customs returns set aside to support the arsenal. That was Shanghai's customs money, collected by a service that Westerners ran, flowing straight into the making of guns. Rong Hong's American machinery went into the new works, and the machine shop he had dreamed up became the Jiangnan Arsenal, a plant covering several acres under one roof that held all the leading branches of mechanical work. Late in life he looked back on it with pride. "Millions have been invested in it since I brought the first machinery from Fitchburg, Mass., in order to make it one of the greatest arsenals east of the Cape of Good Hope." He had a bigger idea too, one he had been carrying since his own student days: that China should send its boys to America to be educated, as he had been. For now it stayed in his pocket. We will come back to it. He thought it should be remembered as a monument to Zeng Guofan's broad mind and his foresight in bringing Western machinery into China. In late 1867 the Jiangnan Arsenal began to manufacture weapons, equipment and steamships. That year its compound covered four hundred and sixty two thousand square feet. By 1891 it would be six times larger. Its first steamship was launched in 1868, and a translation department opened there the same year, turning Western books on science and engineering into Chinese. By 1871 its technicians had begun to make the first of a series of more advanced weapons, a breech loading rifle based on the American Remington. In the decade that followed, the main plant turned out at least twenty five thousand of them. It was, by any measure, a remarkable thing to have built in a few years, in a country just out of a civil war. And yet Li Hongzhang himself was not satisfied. In 1870 he complained that "China's military equipment is greatly inferior to that of Westerners." He was right, and he would go on being right. The trouble with copying the foreigners' guns was that the foreigners kept making new ones. And Jiangnan was not the only such works. Zeng Guofan had set up an arsenal of his own at Anqing as soon as he took the city in 1861, and that was where his two self taught engineers had built their steamboat. In 1866 Zuo Zongtang, now viceroy of the coastal provinces of Fujian and Zhejiang, founded a navy yard at Fuzhou, on the Min River, to build steam warships. He hired two French officers to run it, one of them Paul d'Aiguebelle, who had commanded the French and Chinese force that helped him take Hangzhou. The Fuzhou Navy Yard had its own school, where young Chinese studied shipbuilding in French and navigation in English. Its graduates would one day command China's fleets. Zuo did not stay to see it built. Within a year he was ordered to the far northwest, and the yard passed into other hands. But it was his idea. Now look at how all this was paid for, because it explains a great deal about what came later. There was no national budget for self strengthening, and no ministry in Beijing that planned it. The court approved each project when a governor proposed it, and then left him to find the money. So Jiangnan ran on a share of the Shanghai customs, Fuzhou on the customs of Fujian, and the armies on the lijin, the tax on goods in transit, collected in the provinces by the governors' own men. Every arsenal, every yard, every school belonged in practice to the man who had founded it, and lived or died with his career. That was its strength, because men like Li and Zuo got things done. And it was its weakness, because nobody else had to.

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

Now we have to turn north, because while Li was building, the dynasty was fighting another war. The Nian were not one army but many. They had grown up in the flat country of the Huai River, where the provinces of Anhui, Henan, Shandong and Jiangsu meet, a land of poor harvests and floods, and of walled villages that had learned to defend themselves. Nature had made that country poorer still. In 1855 the Yellow River burst its banks and swung north to a new course to the sea, and the old course across the Huai country was left a wasteland of sand and broken dykes. Men with nothing to farm took up the sword and the saddle instead. They began as gangs of smugglers and raiders, and in the 1850s, as the Taiping war drew the dynasty's armies south, they banded together into a confederation of mounted bands. The word nian was a local term for a band or a group, and that is what they were, dozens of bands, each loyal to its own chief. Their best known leader, Zhang Luoxing, was killed in 1863, but the bands simply carried on under other men. They were horsemen. They could cover huge distances in a day, strike a town, and vanish back across the plain before an imperial army could form up. By the mid 1860s they had been raiding the northern plain for more than a decade, and some of the last Taiping fighters had joined them. One of the most dangerous of their new commanders was Lai Wenguang, a Taiping general whose army had been far from Nanjing when it fell, and who brought the rebels' discipline to the Nian's speed. The dynasty's answer had been a Mongol prince named Sengge Rinchen, the most famous cavalry commander in the empire. He had destroyed a Taiping army that marched on Beijing in the 1850s, and he had fought the British and French on the northern coast. If anyone could catch horsemen, it was a Mongol cavalryman. For months he chased the Nian across the north without rest, wearing out his own men and horses. In May 1865, in Shandong, they drew him into an ambush, and he was killed. The dynasty's best general was dead, and its best cavalry with him. The court needed someone else, and it turned, again, to Zeng Guofan. He was appointed to command the forces of the empire against the Nian, the mounted bandits who raided the north. And here is the irony. Zeng had begun disbanding his own army. So in 1865 he went north to end the long war at the head of units from Li Hongzhang's Huai Army. The enemy was not, on paper, very large. Robert Hart reckoned their fighting men at no more than ten thousand, almost without powder or caps for their guns. But they did not need to be large. They needed to be fast, and they were. Zeng's plan was a patient one, the plan of a man who had starved out Nanjing. He fortified bases at key points and tried to build long lines of walls and garrisons along the rivers and canals to pen the horsemen into one region. He also tried to cut the horsemen off from the walled villages that sheltered and fed them, registering their people and rewarding those who closed their gates to the rebels. It did not work. The lines were long and thinly held, and the horsemen broke through them. And all the while, Zeng's critics at court were at work. Censors, the officials whose job was to criticise their colleagues to the throne, sent up memorials attacking him for his failure. The hero of Nanjing was learning how fast a reputation could fade. Zeng held the command for eighteen months, but only Li could really command Li's own troops. The court lost patience. It summoned Zeng to Beijing. Zeng went on sick leave instead. And Li Hongzhang, who was holding the viceroy's post at Nanjing, refused to give it up to anyone except a man of his own choosing. Think about what that means. The throne wanted to move its two greatest officials around, and the two of them, politely, would not be moved. In the end the court gave way. In 1867 Zeng was sent back to his post at Nanjing, and Li, given the title of viceroy at Wuchang, up the Yangtze, was handed the campaign against the Nian. The question I asked last time, who really won the Taiping war, the throne or its generals, had just been answered, at least for now.

Before we follow Li north, I want to take a lighter detour, to Europe, with a man who did not want to be there. In 1866 Robert Hart was going home to Britain on leave. He had a proposal for the foreign office. He had been in China for twelve years without a break, and he used this leave to find himself a wife, marrying in Ireland that summer before he sailed back. He offered to take with him an official delegate, who would study the character of the people in foreign countries and, on his return, present a report on what he had seen. In more than two centuries of rule, the Qing had hardly ever sent an official to look at Europe. Envoys came to China. China seldom sent them out. By imperial rescript, the court appointed Binchun, a Manchu then in his sixty fourth year, who worked as a secretary in Hart's own office. With him went his son and three students from the new language school. So the first official Qing mission to the West was an elderly clerk, his son, three young students and the Irishman who ran the customs. They reached London, where Binchun, though not an envoy, was well received in official circles. After London he went on to Copenhagen, Stockholm, Saint Petersburg, Berlin, Brussels and Paris, spending ten days in Paris and three to five days in each of the other capitals. There had been a plan to go on to Washington too, but that was abandoned. The problem was that the delegate hated it. The discomforts of travel disgusted him, and so did the customs of the countries he was passing through. He asked to go home early, and he was allowed to sail from Marseille on the nineteenth of August. As a piece of diplomacy, the mission was a failure. He had seen Europe in a hurry, and left nobody there with a favourable impression of Chinese civilisation. And yet he wrote it all down. His diary and the poems he wrote on the journey are full of curiosity and wonder at the cities he passed through. I like to think of him as the patron saint of every reluctant tourist. Miserable on the road, and then unable to stop telling everyone about it afterwards. The students who went with him kept diaries too. One of them filled his pages with the strange machinery of the West, from steam engines to sewing machines, in loving detail. The trip was small. But it was a start. A Qing official had gone to look at the West with his own eyes, and come back to report.

Hart did something else on that leave, and it brings us back to the school in Beijing. In 1865 the court had resolved to raise the school of interpreters to the rank of a college, by adding a department of science and admitting students already accomplished in Chinese learning. Prince Gong and his colleagues explained why to the throne. The boys in the language school were young and only half educated in their own country's letters, and to pile astronomy and mathematics on top would leave them with a smattering of everything. The machinery of the West, they wrote, its steamships, its firearms and its military tactics, all grew out of mathematics. Steamers were now being built at Shanghai and elsewhere, but if China was content with a superficial knowledge and did not go to the root of the matter, those efforts would never truly succeed. So they proposed a new department, open only to men over twenty who already held a degree in Chinese learning. If China could master mathematics, physics, astronomy, the building of engines and the engineering of waterways, they wrote, "this, and only this, will assure the steady growth of the power of the empire." That was a very large claim. And it meant asking scholars, men who had spent their whole lives on the Confucian classics, to sit at the feet of foreign teachers. To staff the new department, Hart hired professors in Europe while he was on leave. One of them was Baron von Gumpach, a German baron and a British subject, engaged in 1866 to teach astronomy and mathematics at a salary of six hundred pounds a year. The baron came out to Beijing. And then he waited. As soon as the proposals were laid before the throne, mandarins of the old school made them the target of bitter attack. The most formidable of them was Woren, a grand secretary, the young emperor's own tutor, and the most respected Confucian scholar at court. In 1867 he told the throne that a nation was founded on propriety and righteousness, not on power and scheming, and that there was no need for scholars to take barbarians as their teachers. Prince Gong answered in a second memorial. "We have now to explain", he wrote, "that in proposing these measures we have neither been influenced by a love of novelty nor fascinated by the arts of the West". Their only reason, he said, was that to bring in the foreigners' arts without their sciences would be a useless waste of public money. He set out what the critics said: that the matter was not urgent, that it was wrong to give up China's own methods to follow those of the West, and finally that it "would be a deep disgrace for China to become the pupil of the West." Then the prince played a clever hand. If Woren knew of Chinese scholars who could teach these subjects as well, he suggested, let him find them and open a school of his own. He also pointed east. Japan, he noted, had already sent young men to Britain to learn its languages and sciences. If a small country like Japan was not too proud to learn, why should China be? And the court appointed Woren to serve at the foreign office, alongside the foreigners he despised. Woren took a fall from his horse, and asked to be excused on grounds of health. The gossip in Beijing was that the fall was not entirely an accident. So the prince won the argument. But he lost the students. The scholars of the capital had heard the debate, and they knew which side their careers were on. Only a handful of candidates came forward for the new department, and few of them were the degree holders the prince had hoped for. For two years Baron von Gumpach waited for students of astronomy, and none came. When at last he was asked to take a class in mathematics instead, he refused, on the ground that such a class would be beneath his dignity. He did not last. He was let go, and he sued Robert Hart in the British courts, and lost. The college itself survived. It found its feet slowly, under a new head, and over the following decades it trained a generation of interpreters and diplomats, many of whom served in the legations China would one day open abroad. But it never became what Prince Gong had hoped, a place where the empire's finest scholars went to learn the sciences of the West. For that, the empire's finest scholars would have had to want to come. It is a comic story, the baron with no students and too much dignity. But underneath it is a serious one. The court could buy machines, and it could hire foreigners. What it could not do was make the empire's best young men want to learn from them.

Portrait of the Qing general Li Hongzhang, made around 1870
Portrait of the Qing general Li Hongzhang, made around 1870. Liang Shitai, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Back to the north, where Li Hongzhang now had the Nian war in his hands. By then the Nian had split into two forces. One stayed in the east, around Shandong. The other rode west, toward the northwest of the empire. Li did not simply chase them. Chasing them across the plain was what had killed Sengge Rinchen. Instead he blocked their escape routes and set up an effective cordon around the territory they held. Then he pushed his own troops between the two groups of rebels, cutting each off from fresh men, food and weapons. His method was to throw a ring around a disaffected area and, by stopping its supplies, to drive the rebels into the sea. And this time the ring held, because of the army that held it. The Huai Army was no longer only infantry with Western arms. By 1868 it had twenty eight to twenty nine battalions of mounted troops and seven thousand horses. Now Li's army had horsemen of its own, and the same edge in training and firepower that had beaten the Taiping. The eastern Nian were pinned against the rivers and the sea, and by the beginning of 1868 they had been destroyed. The western Nian made one last desperate ride, turning back east and north so far that early in 1868 they came within striking distance of Tianjin, and Beijing panicked. Li's armies, with Zuo Zongtang's among them, ran them down between the rivers of Shandong, and in the summer of 1868 the western Nian were destroyed too. The court had been badly frightened by how close the horsemen came to the capital, and for a while both Li and Zuo were officially reprimanded for letting them get there. The reprimands were quietly lifted once the job was done. Li Hongzhang had brought the fifteen year Nian rebellion to an end in three years. Lai Wenguang, the old Taiping general, was captured near Yangzhou and executed. The other great Nian leader disappeared in the rout, most likely drowned in one of the rivers that had penned him in. It had been done with the Huai Army, with foreign rifles and horses of its own, paid for by provincial money and led by a provincial governor. Nobody in Beijing could miss the point. Li Hongzhang now commanded the most effective army in China, and it belonged to him. The court rewarded him lavishly, and it had every reason to be grateful. It also had every reason to wonder what it would do if it ever had to ask Li Hongzhang for something he did not want to give.

In the middle of all this, Li sat down to write the clearest statement any of these men ever made of what self strengthening was for. The occasion was the treaty with Britain. Its terms allowed it to be revised after ten years, and that time was coming round in 1868. The court was worried. By secret decree, the throne called on all the high provincial officials for their confidential advice on what the foreigners wanted and how to meet them. Li Hongzhang was the youngest of the viceroys. He was forty four. Li's answer was blunt. In dealing with foreigners, he wrote, "the point of the greatest importance is to avoid exciting their contempt". Once that contempt was aroused, he warned, they would thwart China at every turn and invent a thousand obstacles. But if they respected China, things could be arranged, and questions settled by compromise. And that, he added, was not something peculiar to foreigners. It was true of the whole human race. People said foreigners were crafty and malign, he went on. But were the Chinese any different? If anything, he suggested, the Chinese could be worse. The real difference was simpler. At present, he wrote, "foreigners are powerful and the Chinese feeble." And where did the foreigners' power come from? "It certainly is not innate in them," he wrote, but from the old truth that "the requisites of Government are sufficiency of food, sufficiency of military equipment, and the confidence of the people in their ruler". That line comes from the Analects, the sayings of Confucius as his followers set them down. Notice what Li was doing there. He was defending the study of foreign power with the words of Confucius. The West was strong because it had done what the sage had always taught. China's weakness, he went on, was not innate either. It came from not taking that teaching to heart. Li had long thought the empire's examinations ought to make room for such skills too. Since the war he had argued that men who mastered machinery deserved official rank, just as men who mastered the classics did. The foreigners had come across the world, opened ports and sent their goods everywhere, all to make China's wealth their own. And then he made the argument that sums up his whole career. "A little consideration shows that those who ventured to come to this country must have placed their reliance upon something to have rendered them so fearless", he wrote, "and there is not the slightest reason why that which they confided in should not also become a source of confidence to China." In other words, what made them strong could make us strong too. He did not think the foreigners wanted to carve up the empire. Apart from Russia, he wrote, the foreign countries were all too far away, and Chinese territory would only be an embarrassment to them. What they wanted was trade, and their prosperity was bound up with the welfare of the Chinese people. They would rather use China's wealth without exhausting it, he thought, than drain the Chinese people to the last drop. He did not pretend there was no danger. "Should they, however, take advantage of their strength to impose upon our weakness by dividing our territory and sharing among them the fat of the land, in such a pressing crisis the greatest firmness would be necessary." And the most immediate danger was the treaty revision itself. "The present occasion of treaty revision with the English is a most important juncture", he wrote, and he feared the British would use force to extort concessions in the talks. He even spoke up for the foreigners' character. In his own dealings with them, he wrote, he had found that whatever they were engaged in, "they act honourably without deceit or falsehood." He pointed to Gordon, the Englishman who had organised three thousand troops of the Ever Victorious Army against the rebels, and whom Li had watched at the capture of Suzhou, leading from in front of his men. That was praise for a foreigner, sent up to the throne. It tells you how practical Li Hongzhang could be. For the rest of his life, Li stayed true to the principles he laid out in that memorial of 1867. And there, in one document, is the whole program. Avoid their contempt. Learn what makes them strong. Make it ours. Keep the peace while we do it. What the memorial did not say was what else might have to change along the way. The scholars who had fought the school in Beijing feared exactly that: learn the foreigners' arts, and you would end up thinking like the foreigners. Li thought you could take the guns and leave the rest. Over the next thirty years, China was going to find out whether he was right. Look at what had been built in just a few years after the Taiping war. A language school in the capital. A great arsenal at Shanghai and a navy yard at Fuzhou. An army with foreign rifles and its own cavalry, which had just ended a rebellion that had lasted fifteen years. That is not nothing. It is a great deal. And it had been done by a handful of men, against the grain of their own court, with money they had to find for themselves. But every one of those things depended on the men who had made it. Prince Gong in the capital, Li at Shanghai and in the field, Zuo at Fuzhou, Zeng behind them all. And men grow old, and fall out of favour, and die. And the first test came not from a foreign army but from an angry crowd. Next time, we go to the port of Tianjin. The treaties have let missionaries into the interior, and across China placards say they steal children. A French consul storms into a magistrate's office waving a pistol, and in the hours that follow a crowd kills him, a group of nuns and dozens of Chinese Christians. And Zeng Guofan, old, sick and half blind, is sent to clean it up, and comes out of it called a traitor. I hope you'll join me.

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