Self-Strengthening, episode 8

Famine and Reconquest

In 1876 Zuo Zongtang, now in his sixties, finally marches into Xinjiang with an army fed by foreign loans, and in the same years the rains fail across north China and millions starve. The episode follows Zuo and his field commander Liu Jintang through the campaign that broke Yaqub Beg's kingdom in under two years, and Yaqub Beg to his sudden death, and sets beside it the famine the court and foreign missionaries tried to relieve, asking what the reconquest cost and whom it served. It leans heavily on foreign observers; the rebels' own voice is a handful of claims, and the famine is told by missionaries and the court's grants.

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Transcript

Last time, a young British interpreter named Augustus Margary was killed on the Burma border of Yunnan, and the expedition he had gone to meet was driven back the next day. Britain's minister, Wade, used his death to press for a settlement of every question outstanding between the two governments, and in September 1876, at the seaside town of Yantai, Li Hongzhang signed it: more treaty ports, an indemnity, and an imperial letter of regret, to be carried to London by a mission. The man who carried that letter, the scholar Guo Songtao, presented it to the queen in February 1877, and stayed on in London as minister, appointed to reside there for a term of years. And Robert Hart, who ran the Qing Customs, had been asked by the foreign office in Beijing for proposals, and answered with a long memorandum: what both sides really wanted, he wrote, was changes in the treaties, not confirmations of them. All of that happened on the edges of the empire that face the sea. This episode turns the other way, inland and west, to the edge of the empire that faces the deserts of Central Asia. And it sets beside that story another one, closer to home, a disaster that killed people by the million. So let me first remind you where we left the far west. Xinjiang, which means the New Frontier, was the great region beyond the western end of the Great Wall that the Qianlong Emperor had conquered in the 1750s. It is divided by a mountain range, the Tianshan, the Heavenly Mountains. North of the range are grasslands and a string of towns along the foot of the mountains. South of it is the Tarim basin, a ring of oasis cities around one of the driest deserts on earth, the Taklamakan. Most of the people of the southern oases were Turkic speaking Muslims. There were also many Dungans, Muslims who spoke Chinese, scattered through the north and through the provinces of Gansu and Shaanxi further east. In the 1860s, while the Qing were fighting for their lives against the Taiping, the Muslims of the northwest rose, and the Qing lost Xinjiang almost entirely. Into the wreckage came a soldier of fortune from the khanate of Kokand named Yaqub Beg, who by 1865 had made himself ruler of a kingdom based at Kashgar, in the far southwest of the Tarim basin. He had grown up in the Fergana valley, and had fought the Russians as they pushed south into Central Asia before he ever came to Kashgar. Kokand was one of three Muslim khanates of Central Asia, with Bukhara and Khiva, and in these same years all three fell under Russian power. Russia took Tashkent in 1865, Samarkand in 1868 and Khiva in 1873, and in 1876, the very year Zuo marched, it swallowed Kokand itself. So Yaqub Beg's kingdom was squeezed between two advancing empires, the Russians coming south and the Qing coming back from the east, with the British watching from India. At Kashgar he was known as the Ataliq Ghazi, the champion of the faith, and the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul recognised him as emir and sent him rifles, cannon and officers to train his army. In 1870 he had taken Urumqi from the Dungans, so that by the middle of the decade he ruled, or claimed, nearly all of Xinjiang. He had made treaties with Russia and with Britain, which he hoped would protect him. To the British in India, he was a useful buffer between their empire and Russia's, and a British mission had visited his court and signed a treaty with him in 1874. His treaty with England, in the end, was a failure, because it gave him no British protection when he needed it. And the Russians had quietly occupied the Ili valley, in the far northwest, promising to give it back when the Qing could hold it again. That was in 1871, and the Russians had made themselves comfortable there since. Against all of that stood one man: Zuo Zongtang. Zuo was a Hunanese scholar general who had made his name fighting the Taiping, and who since 1867 had been crushing the Muslim risings in Shaanxi and Gansu, province by province and city by city. Zuo was not a typical mandarin. He had failed the highest examination three times, and spent years as a tutor and a gentleman farmer in Hunan, reading geography and books on farming while other scholars memorised the classics. He liked to call himself a modern Zhuge Liang, after the great strategist of the Three Kingdoms, and his enemies at court found him proud, blunt and very hard to work with. He came to office late, in his forties, on Zeng Guofan's recommendation, and rose fast: governor of Zhejiang, then viceroy on the southeast coast, where he founded the navy yard at Fuzhou, and then viceroy of Shaanxi and Gansu. The northwest campaign had taken him six years, and it had ended in 1873 with the fall of the last Muslim stronghold in Gansu, at the very gate of the road west. Along the way he had built the empire's first arsenal in the northwest, at Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu, on the Yellow River, and brought craftsmen up from the far south to make guns and shells there. By 1876 he was in his sixties, and he had spent the best part of a decade in the northwest. He was past sixty when the army crossed into Xinjiang, old for a general, and he would direct the whole campaign from far behind the front. And he had won an argument. When Japan landed on Taiwan, Li Hongzhang had told the court that the real danger was the sea, while Zuo warned that losing Xinjiang would leave the whole northwest open. In the end the court decided to pay for both. The argument had been fierce. Li's side said Xinjiang was a wasteland that cost millions of taels a year to hold even in peacetime, and that the silver would be better spent on ships. Zuo answered that whoever held Xinjiang protected Mongolia, and whoever held Mongolia protected Beijing, and that if the far west were let go, the frontier would only move closer to the capital. In 1875 the court made Zuo its imperial commissioner for the military affairs of Xinjiang, with command of the whole campaign. Paying for Zuo's war meant something new: borrowing from foreign banks. The Qing government had raised an imperial loan abroad just before this, an eight per cent loan issued at par and secured on the customs revenue. Of that loan, three hundred and fifty two thousand seven hundred pounds was issued in 1875 and all taken up in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and the rest, two hundred and seventy four thousand nine hundred and fifteen pounds, was issued in London in March 1876. Secured on the customs revenue means that the lenders would be repaid out of the duties collected by Robert Hart's foreign run Customs service, which was why foreign banks were willing to lend at all. In December 1877 a second imperial loan, for five million taels at seven per cent, was issued. A tael is the Chinese ounce of silver. Five million of them was a very large sum, and the empire was borrowing it to win back a desert. Zuo's man for the money was a merchant banker named Hu Xueyan, who arranged his loans with foreign firms on the coast, among them the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. The coastal provinces were also ordered to send a share of their own revenues west every year, and much of it arrived late or not at all. So the war in the desert was paid for, in the end, by the trade of the coast, by the foreign banks, and by the Customs service that collected the duties on that trade. The army that money paid for was large. In its entirety it numbered some fifty thousand men. Many of them were veterans. With the Taiping and the Muslims of Yunnan put down, the victorious soldiers of Yunnan, instead of being sent home, were invited to join a fresh campaign in the regions beyond the Gobi. An imperial edict called on all true soldiers to vindicate their country's honour and their outraged religion against the Dungan outcasts. Notice that word religion. The court did not present this as a war for territory alone, but as a war to restore the moral order of the empire against men it called outcasts. And the weapons were new. As many as ten thousand rifles of the Berdan pattern were sent in a single convoy to the arsenal Zuo had built at Lanzhou, his base in Gansu. The Berdan was a modern breech loading rifle, designed in America and adopted by the Russian army, and far faster to load than the old muzzle loaders. Then there was the distance. This is the part of the story that is easy to skip and should not be, because the real enemy in Xinjiang was not Yaqub Beg. It was the distance. From Lanzhou to Hami, the first oasis inside Xinjiang, was a stretch of country some nine hundred miles as the crow flies, and probably nearer twelve hundred by the road the army followed. The road ran up the narrow Gansu corridor between the mountains and the desert, and then across the Gobi to Hami, and every sack of grain had to be carried by cart, mule or camel. Zuo's answer was patience. His men planted and harvested crops along the road to feed the army that followed, and the advance moved forward harvest by harvest. His rule for the campaign was slow advance, quick fight: take as long as it needed to gather the grain and the animals, and then, once the army moved, strike fast and finish. In 1876 he moved his own headquarters up to the western end of the Gansu corridor, the last town inside the Great Wall, to be closer to the front. The advance guard had begun its march west before the end of 1874. And some of the food came from a surprising place. Russian caravans kept passing back and forth between the Ili valley and the Chinese lines, and the chief suppliers of the Chinese army were the Russian merchants of Central Asia. Grain came from the north too, by camel caravan across Mongolia from the towns along the Great Wall, and from the farms of the Gansu corridor itself. So Russia, which was holding a piece of Xinjiang and had no wish to give it back, was feeding the army that would one day come and ask for it. I find that one of the more delightful ironies in this whole season. Command was split along the mountains. North of the Tianshan, Zuo held the supreme command. South of it, the commanders were two generals, Jin Shun and Zhang Yao. Zuo's own field commander in the north was a younger Hunanese general, Liu Jintang, who would lead much of the hardest fighting. Liu Jintang had inherited his command. His uncle, Liu Songshan, had led those same Hunan troops against the Muslims of the northwest until he was killed in battle in 1870, and the nephew had taken over his men. They moved in silence. The official gazette in Beijing was reticent about what was happening, and the most profound secrecy was observed. The first target was Urumqi, the main city north of the mountains. Its defence was not prolonged. After a few days, towards the close of August 1876, Urumqi surrendered to the Chinese. Liu Jintang's men had already stormed a fortified Dungan town on the approaches to the city. On the second of September the Chinese sat down before the walls of Manas, the next Dungan stronghold to the west. What happened at Manas we will come to in a moment. Because first, we have to go back east, all the way across the empire, to the other front. For now, notice that by 1877 the campaign ended Yaqub Beg's rebellion, took back the eight cities of Turkestan, and left a devastated country all along its line of march. Hold on to that phrase, a devastated country. It is the price of this episode, and there are two of them. So that is the setup. An old general, a borrowed fortune, a long road, and at the end of it a kingdom whose ruler has bet everything on the British and the Russians.

Because in the same year that the Qing army took Urumqi, the rains stopped falling in the north of China. I want to tell these two stories side by side, because they happened at the same time, to the same empire. Every memorial from the governors of the starving provinces went to the same small group of men in Beijing who were reading Zuo's requests for money. In Chinese memory this disaster is called the Dingwu famine, after the names of its two worst years, 1877 and 1878, in the traditional sixty year cycle of years. North China is a dry country even in good years: the plain around the Yellow River, and above it to the west the high loess plateau of Shanxi, where the crops depend on a summer rain that does not always come. The disaster began unevenly. Floods hit five provinces, locusts devastated parts of three, and drought destroyed crops and lives in the whole or in parts of nine. Then, in 1877, the drought and the locusts came back, and the condition of the people became desperate. The drought lasted until May 1878, and the famine went on through the summer of that year. The worst of it fell on Shanxi, and on Shaanxi and Henan beside it, but drought and locusts reached into western Shandong and Zhili too, the province around Beijing. The governor of Shanxi in these years was Zeng Guoquan, the younger brother of Zeng Guofan, the general who had taken Nanjing from the Taiping, and he spent his time in the province pleading with the court for grain, silver and tax relief. In 1878 the court sent a senior official, Yan Jingming, to Shanxi as its own commissioner for the relief. In normal times, the Qing state ran a system of granaries meant to hold grain against exactly this kind of year. But two decades of rebellion had emptied many of them, and the money to refill them had gone to the armies. A century earlier, at the height of the dynasty, the Qing had run one of the most effective famine relief systems in the world, moving grain across provinces and opening the granaries when the harvest failed. The famine of the 1870s found that system a shadow of what it had been. And the famine country was very hard to reach. It cost nearly four pounds a ton to carry food into the stricken districts of Henan. To carry it up onto the plateau of Shanxi cost, by one estimate, more than fourteen pounds a ton. There were no railways into the interior, and the roads up into Shanxi climbed through mountain passes where grain moved on carts and on the backs of mules and men. Grain could be shipped north by sea to Tianjin. From there it had to go overland, hundreds of miles, and climb into the mountains. And people died. I am going to give you some of the detail, not all of it, because the detail is the only way to understand what the numbers mean. Homes broke up. Millions of people took to the roads. Women and children were sold into slavery. People ate the bark of trees, and grass seed, and a soft earth ground into powder. They pulled down their houses and sold the timber for a few days of food. The dead were buried in great pits outside the towns, because there was nobody left with the strength to dig graves one at a time. In one county alone, more than a hundred thousand women and children had been sold, by the count of a register kept in its government office. Many of the girls sold in the famine ended up as servants, concubines or prostitutes in the cities further south, and their families never saw them again. The selling was not always cruelty. A family that sold a daughter to a household with food might be the only way she would live, and the only way the rest of them could eat. A British diplomat reported that in Shanxi people preyed upon each other like wild beasts. In one village, an innkeeper told a traveller that there used to be many dogs there, "but now there were none, as they had all been eaten." And worse than the dogs. The viceroy's delegate on the relief told a foreign relief worker plainly that human flesh had certainly been eaten in Shanxi, though not in Zhili. Here is a single village, with a number on it. One village of five thousand people lost eight hundred in a single year, from cold, famine and fever. And one father of sixty came for relief, and died in the very act of receiving it. By one reckoning, half the population of Shanxi had been destroyed, and some millions more had died in Shaanxi and Henan. The fever that killed alongside the hunger was typhus, a disease carried by lice that spreads wherever starving people crowd together. It killed the people trying to help as well. Some of the missionaries who went into Shanxi with relief caught it and died there. When it was over, the total loss of life from famine and typhus cannot have fallen much short of ten million people. Ten million people, after two years of drought in a row. And what was the government doing? At the top, it was doing what a Confucian government was supposed to do when heaven withheld the rain. The emperor was held to rule by the Mandate of Heaven, and a drought was read as a sign that something in the order of things had gone wrong, to be answered by prayer and ritual as well as by grain. Li Hongzhang, as governor general of Zhili, was responsible for the capital province. Refugees poured out of the countryside into Tianjin, where he had his headquarters, and the city's officials and merchants opened soup kitchens to feed them. In 1877, the year of the great drought in the northern provinces, he sent for the sacred rain compelling tablet. It was brought from Handan, and afterwards Li reported to the emperor that its influence with the Dragon King had been most satisfactory. It is worth pausing on that picture for a moment, given who was doing the praying. It is easy to smile at that. But in a year like that one, an official who did not pray for rain would have looked to his people as though he did not care whether they lived. And the court did more than pray. In Shanxi, an imperial decree of the tenth of February 1877 ordered that collection of the land tax for 1876 be put off until the end of 1877. The land tax was the main revenue of the Qing state, paid by every farming household, and in a famine it was the one thing the court could give back at once. Over the famine years, the remissions of land tax were calculated at more than eighteen million taels. But the court would not do one thing. The imperial treasury was bankrupt in cash, but the empire's credit was kept up by the steady refusal of the ministers to pay their way with loans. Think about that beside what we have just heard. The same government borrowed abroad to send an army across the desert, and would not borrow to feed its own starving provinces.

Back to Manas. Manas was a walled town on the road west from Urumqi, the last great Dungan stronghold north of the Tianshan. Its defenders were Dungans, led by their general, Hai Yan. The Dungans of Urumqi and Manas had risen in 1864, set up a state of their own, and then been beaten by Yaqub Beg, who took Urumqi from them in 1870. Some of them had fought for him since, and some against him. So the men inside Manas had no friends anywhere. The Qing saw them as rebels, and Yaqub Beg had been their enemy as recently as his own conquest of the north. They had held out through two months of siege. The Qing batteries pounded the walls, several assaults were beaten back, and in the end the defenders' food was almost gone. Hai Yan went out to the Chinese outposts and begged for an honourable surrender. Terms were granted, at least on the surface, though everything was left vague. On the sixth of November 1876, Hai Yan and the main body of his fighting men came out of the city toward the Chinese camp. And they were attacked from all sides, by artillery, horse and foot, and in a short time they were annihilated. It seems the Chinese, watching from the hills, took that armed and well ordered column for an attempt to break out, and acted on the suspicion as if it were fact. It did not stop there. The surviving chiefs were executed with the extreme of torture. Every able bodied man was killed. The women, the children and the old men were spared. Even the dead were punished. The bodies of the first Dungan leaders of the rising were dug up and quartered, as an example to all traitors to the Chinese empire. In Qing eyes, none of this needed excusing. It was just retribution on traitors. By the end, the great majority of the Dungans had fallen either in the field or by the hand of the executioner. I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to tell this as one more battle on the way to Kashgar. Hai Yan's men had been granted terms, however vague, before they were cut down. Why so savage? It was not the first time in these wars. When Li Hongzhang's army took Suzhou from the Taiping in 1863, the rebel princes who had surrendered the city were killed. And when the last Muslim stronghold in Gansu fell to Zuo in 1873, thousands of its defenders were killed after they had given up. The rebels had done the same to Han towns. These were wars in which a surrender guaranteed nothing. Part of the answer lies back at the start of the rising, when the Muslims had killed Han Chinese in great numbers. To the Qing army, the blood of the Chinese massacred in 1862 and 1863 was now atoned for. And Chinese prestige was restored, as high as it had stood at any time in that century. The fall of Manas struck a blow that resounded through Central Asia, and spread panic through all of the Muslim country, north and south of the mountains. That was the point. Manas was a message, and it was addressed to Kashgar.

At Kashgar, Yaqub Beg read the message. He was in his late fifties now, a soldier who had fought his whole life, against the Russians, against rival khojas, against the Dungans, and won. For a dozen years he had ruled the southern oases as their emir, and he had fought his way to that throne. The Chinese invasion dispelled whatever illusions he had. In their eyes, and before their power, he was only another Sultan of Dali, one more rebel like the Muslim ruler in Yunnan whose city their armies had already taken. His own people were not as solidly behind him as he might have hoped. He ruled through officers brought from Kokand, taxed the oases heavily and enforced religious law strictly, and many who had welcomed him as a deliverer had grown tired of him. So what should he do? There was still diplomacy. Yaqub Beg had an envoy in London, and in 1877 the British government suggested to the new Qing minister there, Guo Songtao, that Kashgar be left to Yaqub Beg as a vassal of the emperor. Zuo would have none of it. He was winning, and he meant to finish. He decided that, under the circumstances, the boldest policy would be the most prudent. If he could only beat the Chinese in the field by superior tactics, he hoped, he might ride out all his difficulties and dangers. Instead he concentrated all his forces, his Dungan allies included, along the southern slopes of the Tianshan, and made his headquarters at Turpan. Turpan was the key. It sits in a deep basin just south of the mountains, one of the lowest and hottest places in Asia, watered by underground channels from the snows, and it guards the passes through which any army from Urumqi must come south. It was also rich, an oasis of vineyards and melon fields in the middle of the desert, and whoever held it could feed an army. At Turpan he had with him three thousand five hundred cavalry and five thousand infantry, with twenty guns, most of them of ancient make. His horsemen were called jigits, and his foot soldiers sarbazes. Some of them carried modern rifles, bought through India or sent by the Ottomans, and some had been drilled by Ottoman officers. But most of his army was still armed and trained the old way. In all he had perhaps seventeen thousand men, but they were scattered over a widely extended area. The fort guarding the pass at Dabancheng, on the road from Urumqi, was held by nine hundred horsemen with muskets and two guns. And his allies were not much comfort. A Russian officer who visited him reckoned that besides his regular soldiers there were ten thousand Dungans of the eastern region, and judged them untrustworthy and badly armed. The Dungans had their own reasons for fear. They were the ones who had massacred the Chinese at the start of the rising, they had everything to dread from the Qing, and they had little loyalty to Yaqub Beg. Even among them there was discontent. That Russian officer was Captain Kuropatkin, and on his return he gave a very gloomy account of Yaqub Beg's affairs, predicting the speedy break up of his state. He had been sent to Kashgar on a mission, and had crossed the whole of the kingdom to meet Yaqub Beg at Turpan. Kuropatkin would one day be Russia's minister of war, and lead its armies against Japan in Manchuria. On this occasion, at least, his judgment was good. Yaqub Beg himself demanded of another Russian traveller why the Russians had been feeding the Chinese army sent against him. So Yaqub Beg waited at Turpan for the Chinese to come. And while he waited, the other disaster went on growing.

By the second winter of the famine, the court was pouring silver into the stricken provinces. The imperial grants recorded up to the middle of October 1877 amounted to two million six hundred and twenty three thousand, six hundred and forty four taels. That sounds like a great deal. Set it against the price of moving grain onto the Shanxi plateau, and against the numbers of the dead, and it was not nearly enough. Li Hongzhang raised money of his own for the relief, and he did it in a very Qing way. He collected two hundred and fourteen thousand, three hundred and forty five taels in contributions, chiefly by selling official titles and honours. Selling ranks was an old Qing method of raising money in a hurry. A merchant could buy the right to wear an official's button on his hat, or an honorary degree, without passing the examinations, and the treasury took the silver. It worked, and the purists at court hated it, because it put men into the ranks of the scholar officials who had never earned their place. The local gentry gave too. In one district, the gentry contributed thirteen thousand taels to the relief, against government grants of six thousand. The gentry were the local landowners and degree holders who ran so much of village life in Qing China, and in a famine it was often their granaries and their soup kitchens that kept people alive. Far to the south, in the rich cities of the lower Yangtze, merchants and gentry raised their own relief for the north and sent their own men to give it out, and the Chinese newspaper in Shanghai printed reports from the famine country to keep the money coming. To raise funds, some of them printed pictures of the famine, showing families eating bark and selling their children. And then there were the foreigners. In Shanghai, the foreign merchants and missionaries set up a famine relief committee, which collected money from the treaty ports and from abroad and sent it inland through the missionaries. Protestant and Catholic missionaries were already living in the north, and some of them went into the famine country with money and grain. The best known was a Welsh Baptist named Timothy Richard, who gave out relief in Shandong and then in Shanxi, and came out of it convinced that China needed railways and modern learning, not only sermons. Another was David Hill, an English Methodist from York, who went into Shanxi in 1878 with relief money. Catholic missions took in famine orphans by the hundreds. Not everyone welcomed them. Many officials and gentry suspected that foreign relief was a way to buy converts, and the missionaries, who often preached as they gave, did not always make that suspicion easy to dismiss. So even charity in the famine became one more argument about the foreigners in China. And for the villages themselves, all the silver in the world could not move grain up those mountain roads fast enough. At home, the appeal reached the very top of the Church of England. In February 1878, the Archbishop of Canterbury summoned a meeting at Lambeth Palace for the starving in China. When the lists closed at the end of September, the subscriptions received came to more than thirty thousand pounds, besides about ten thousand more collected by the mission societies. Again, it sounds like a lot. Set it against the dead, and it comes to very little for each life. Still, this was something new. It was one of the first times that people on the other side of the world had raised money for a disaster in China, and some of the foreigners who went into the famine country came back seeing China very differently. The relief saved people. But it never came close to matching the size of the disaster. And in the end it was the weather, not the relief, that ended the famine. The rains came back in 1878, and with the harvests that followed, the famine slowly loosened its grip. And here is the thing to hold on to. In these same months, the Qing were finding money for a war at the far end of the empire, and that war was going very well. So let us go back to the desert.

In the spring of 1877, the Qing armies came south over the Tianshan. By then the Chinese army was reckoned at some sixty thousand men, fifty thousand of them around Gucheng, north of the mountains, and ten thousand at Hami in the east. The obvious threat was the big army in the north, coming south through the passes from Urumqi. But the decisive blow was in fact struck by the smaller force, coming west from Hami. In the middle of April, General Zhang Yao took two small towns on the road from Hami without meeting any serious opposition. Zhang Yao had spent the two years before at Hami, putting his soldiers to work on irrigation and farms, so that his army could feed itself at the end of the long road. Now those farmer soldiers were the ones who broke the kingdom. In the north, the passes fell to Liu Jintang's men, and the fort at Dabancheng with them. Dabancheng, Turpan and Toksun all fell in the second half of April. Yaqub Beg fought. Outside Turpan he gave battle to the invader, and though driven from the field by overwhelming odds he made one more stand at Toksun, to the southwest. Then he fell back, first to Karashahr and then to Korla, on the road around the north of the Tarim basin. Karashahr and Korla sit where the road south from Turpan comes out of the mountains and turns west along the edge of the desert, toward Kucha and Kashgar. It was not the battles that broke his army. It was the news. An army that knows what happened at Manas does not wait to find out whether the next town will be any different. When word spread that the ruler had been driven out of Turpan, panic followed, and the majority of his soldiers either went over to the enemy or fled in headlong flight to Karashahr. In these engagements, by desertion and by the enemy, Yaqub Beg probably lost not less than twenty thousand men. The army he had gathered at Turpan simply melted away. Yaqub Beg tried to talk. He sent overtures to the Qing commanders, looking for terms that would guarantee his own safety. All of his overtures were met by categorical refusals. The Qing were not interested in a bargain with a rebel. They wanted his kingdom back. On the twenty third of June, the official gazette in Beijing carried a narrative of the operations around Turpan, and honours for the generals. The gazette was the court's printed digest of edicts and memorials, copied and sold across the empire, and the foreigners on the coast translated it to follow what the court was doing. The report said that the Muslims who submitted were allowed to go back to their peaceful lives. After Manas, the Qing could afford to be generous at Turpan. Mercy for those who gave up, and the memory of Manas for those who did not.

And then, in the middle of the collapse, Yaqub Beg died. This is the strangest moment of the whole campaign. Of the main fact, that Yaqub Beg died at Korla in May 1877, there is no doubt. The date given is the first of May. But how he died is another matter. Here the sources disagree, and it matters, because it changes whether his kingdom was conquered or fell apart from within. On one side, he died of natural causes. One newspaper held to its report that he had died of fever on the first of May, after an illness of seven days, and the first news to reach London, by telegram from Tashkent, said he died at Korla after a short illness. On the other side, he was murdered, by a party of conspirators led by a man named Hakim Khan Torah. If Hakim Khan was, as reported, a chief from Kucha whom Yaqub Beg had once subdued, then a plot and a murder look not only possible but likely. The court's own gazette in Beijing said nothing about his death at all. So he died in May 1877, either by poison or from disease, and there are two versions of how he met his death, a fever or a plot, each with evidence behind it. Why does it matter? Because if his own chiefs killed him, the kingdom was rotting from the inside before the Qing ever reached it. If a fever took him, then it was one man's death that broke a state which might otherwise have fought on. What happened next is clearer, and it tells you how fragile his kingdom had always been. A kingdom built by one man, around one man, with no settled rule for who came after him, does not long survive him. One of his own people, a mulla, told it this way: Yaqub Beg died, and his army then recognised Hakim Khan Torah as his successor. Meanwhile, in Kashgar, the mullahs named Yaqub Beg's eldest son, Beg Kuli Beg, as their king, according to his father's will. A mulla is a Muslim scholar and teacher of religious law. So the kingdom had two rulers at once, one with the army and one in the capital. On the thirteenth of May the body was brought in state from Korla to Kashgar, to be laid in the mausoleum of Afaq Khoja. Afaq Khoja was a Sufi master who had ruled Kashgar two centuries before, and his tomb outside the city was its best known shrine. And while the body travelled west, the sons and chiefs he left behind turned on each other, and fought a little civil war of their own. A dozen years earlier, Yaqub Beg had arrived at Kashgar with a handful of men and made himself a king. Now he was gone, and the kingdom he had built went with him.

Through the summer of 1877 the Qing armies rested and gathered supplies. Then they came west again, and the Kashgarian soldiers fell back before them toward Kucha, driving the villagers along with them. The army moving west was Liu Jintang's, with the Manchu general Jin Shun among its commanders. Jin Shun was a Manchu bannerman who had fought in the northwest for years, and he and Liu had taken Urumqi together the year before. In October 1877 they reached Kucha, an old oasis city on the road to Kashgar. Kucha had been a great Buddhist kingdom on the Silk Road a thousand years before. More recently, it was at Kucha, in 1864, that the rising in the southern oases had begun. And there they found a battle already going on. Yaqub Beg's soldiers had been trying to force the people of Kucha to go west with them, and the townspeople had refused to retreat any further. The Kashgarian commanders wanted to carry off the population, so that the Chinese would find nobody to feed or help them, and to win favour with the new ruler in Kashgar, Beg Kuli Beg. So when the Chinese arrived, the Kashgarian soldiers and the townspeople were fighting each other. Then the Kashgarians turned to face the Chinese. There were probably about ten thousand men on each side. Their general was wounded early in the day. Even so, a charge of their cavalry, some four or five thousand horsemen, was only beaten back with real difficulty. In the end the Kashgarians broke, and left more than a thousand of their dead on the ground. It was the bloodiest and the hardest fought action of the whole war. So the hardest battle of the war was fought not by Yaqub Beg, who was dead, but by the commanders of a kingdom already falling apart, against an enemy and against their own townspeople at once. And then the Qing did something that tells you a good deal about how Zuo meant to hold this country. Zuo had always said that the far west could only be held if it could feed itself, and feed the soldiers who guarded it. At Kucha they set up a supply depot and a garrison, and a board of administration to feed the destitute and give out seed corn, so that the farmers could plant again. The army that had killed every able bodied man at Manas was now handing out seed corn at Kucha. Terror for those who resisted, bread for those who submitted. It is a very old way of winning back a country, and it worked.

After Kucha, the rest went fast. The oasis towns along the road west, Aksu among them, gave up one after another as Liu Jintang's columns came on. Then came the capital. On the seventeenth of December 1877, the Chinese took Kashgar by a sudden assault. With the fall of Kashgar, the Chinese reconquest of Eastern Turkestan was complete. Yengisar and Yarkant quickly shared the same fate. Khotan, far to the southeast at the edge of the desert, was taken early in January 1878. Beg Kuli Beg probably fought, and lost. He certainly escaped, and reached Tashkent, in Russian territory, together with a Kyrgyz chief who had been wounded in the battle. He was not the only one to flee. That winter, thousands of Dungans from Shaanxi and Gansu, the last remnant of the great Muslim rising, crossed the snows of the Tianshan into Russian territory under their leader Bai Yanhu. Their descendants still live in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan today, and they are still called Dungans. Tashkent had been taken by Russia in 1865, and it was now the capital of Russian Turkestan. The last of Yaqub Beg's line to rule at Kashgar was now a refugee in Russian territory. So Xinjiang was Qing again. For anyone in Europe who had written the Qing off as finished, it was a jolt. Zuo was made a marquis for it. Seven years later, in 1884, the court made Xinjiang a province of the empire, governed like the provinces of China proper, and its first governor was Liu Jintang. That was a real change. For more than a century the Qing had ruled the far west through military governors and local Muslim lords. Now they meant to rule it the way they ruled Hunan or Shandong. To at least one British observer at the time, it was beyond doubt the most remarkable event in Asia in fifty years. And the way it was done mattered as much as the fact. The Chinese had conquered Kashgar with European weapons, and by careful study of Western science and skill, with troops drilled on the Prussian model. This was self strengthening, in the field, working. Remember the question this season keeps asking: could the Qing add Western guns and methods without changing anything else? In Xinjiang, for once, the answer looked like yes. The army was still a Chinese army, led by Confucian scholar generals, loyal to the throne, and it had won with foreign rifles and foreign money. The arsenal at Lanzhou, the breech loading rifles, the foreign loans secured on the customs: every piece of the new state the reformers had been building since the Taiping war was in that army. It is worth sitting with that for a moment, because this whole season is shadowed by a defeat that is still years away. By December 1877, a Qing army had crossed the desert, ended Yaqub Beg's kingdom and taken back the eight cities of Turkestan. But think about the other ledger, too. The court found foreign loans for the desert, and would not borrow for the famine. And the famine, in the end, killed close to ten million people. Whom did the reconquest serve? The dynasty, certainly, which won back its far west and its prestige with it. Whether it served the starving villages of Shanxi is a harder question. The court tried to do both, as best it could, and the desert got the loans. And yet it is also true that a dynasty which had looked finished in 1864 had, by 1878, put down every great rebellion against it and won back its lost territory. That is not nothing. And it was not quite finished. In the far northwest, the Ili valley, with its rich farmland and the passes that led into Russian Central Asia, was still in Russian hands. Russia had promised to give it back when the Qing could hold it again. Now the Qing army was standing at its edge. Under the Qing, Ili had been the military headquarters of the whole of Xinjiang, the seat of the general who governed it. A reconquest without Ili was a reconquest without its capital. And the Russians, after seven years there, had built up their trade and settled in. Next time, the court sends a Manchu grandee, Chonghou, to St Petersburg to ask for Ili back, and he comes home having signed most of it away. He will be sentenced to death for it, and the empire will find itself on the edge of a war with Russia. And Zuo Zongtang, the old man of the desert, will be ready to march again.

Sources

• Demetrius Charles Boulger, The Life of Yakoob Beg; Athalik Ghazi, and Badaulet; Ameer of Kashgar (1878), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33712
• Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, Volume II: The Period of Submission, 1861-1893 (1918), pp. 193-194, 286-287, 287-289, 294-296, 300-301, 301-303, 304-305, 305-308, 308-309, 309-310, 310-311, 311-313, 313-314, 330-332, 470-471, https://archive.org/details/internationalre02mors
• J. O. P. Bland, Li Hung-chang (1917), pp. 189-191, 290-292, https://archive.org/details/cu31924023144706
• W. A. P. Martin, A Cycle of Cathay, or China, South and North, with Personal Reminiscences (1896), p. 379-381, https://archive.org/details/cycleofcathayor00mart