While in Shanghai during the first week of August, Ward received some inadequate medical attention, purchased two powerful eighteen-pounder guns along with a dozen other new pieces of artillery, and—driven by desperation—enlisted a group of Greek and Italian reinforcements. “Being,” as the journalist Andrew Wilson understated it, “an irrepressible sort of element,” Ward then returned to Sung-chiang, gathered up all the able-bodied members of the corps, and marched once more on Ch’ing-p’u. This time, however, he settled in for an artillery bombardment and siege.
That Ward should have been able to recoup his position to such an extent while suffering from severe wounds is indicative of tremendous powers of physical endurance. In these, he was typical of many of the Western officers in his corps. Nearly all these men received multiple wounds during their encounters with the Taipings, and many operated effectively in spite of them. There is no doubt that they were assisted by liberal doses of strong liquor; yet their stamina was still remarkable. Ward’s investiture of Ch’ing-p’u on August 9 was undertaken while he was still unable to speak as a result of the shattering of his jaw and before his other wounds had healed or even been properly attended to. The loss of blood just a week earlier had been severe, and the pain must still have been immense, yet Ward was able to design an attack that came close to forcing Savage and the city garrison to surrender.
Any chance of such a result, however, was destroyed when Savage’s immediate superior, Chou Wen-chia, contacted the Chung Wang in Soochow and told him of Ch’ing-p’u’s plight. This second entrance of “devil soldiers” into the Kiangsu fighting alarmed the rebel commander, who quickly mustered between ten and twenty thousand men. “We set off from Soochow by boat,” the Chung Wang recalled, “arriving the following day, and went into action immediately. The foreign devils came out to give battle and the two sides met and fought from early morning until noon, and the devils were severely beaten.” Ward had no hope of success against such a powerful rebel army, led by the most talented of Taiping commanders. The defeat was particularly disastrous, as Charles Schmidt wrote, because
the rebels took all the large guns, vessels of war, stores, and money, and, by surrounding the imperial camp, killed nearly 100 Europeans, wounded nearly as many of the same, and caused a very great number of Chinese soldiers on board the vessels to jump over board and drown themselves, while the Imperial Chief Li [Heng-sung] barely escaped being taken prisoner. In this expedition Vincente also barely escaped being taken, having to cut his way through the rebels who had surrounded him.
Despite overwhelming odds against them, the Foreign Arms Corps managed to fight their way back to Sung-chiang. The Chung Wang followed close on their heels, and the gates of Sung-chiang had no sooner admitted the battered members of the corps than it was the Taipings’ turn to pen Ward up. (During this action, the Englishman Savage was gravely wounded.) Ward’s physical condition was now rapidly deteriorating and demanded more attention than could be given at Sung-chiang. At the insistence of Burgevine and the other officers of the corps, Ward was secretly lowered over the Sung-chiang walls to a riverboat waiting in one of the canals and was taken to Shanghai.
The corps’s losses at Ch’ing-p’u had been undeniably serious and produced a profoundly negative effect on Ward’s reputation in Shanghai. Yet the young American had come out of the fiasco in comparatively fortunate shape, given the severity of his strategic error in pressing the attack: For while the initial assault on Ch’ing-p’u was a logical move, it was also an obvious one, and the second attempt, rooted as it was in pride, was altogether unsound. Once it had become apparent that the Taipings were committed to holding Ch’ing-p’u, Ward would have served his own and the imperial cause better (if less dramatically) by consolidating his position at Sung-chiang and making sure that city could continue to serve as a base of operations from which to relieve the pressure on Shanghai. Because of the limited size of Ward’s force, such relief could only have been achieved by striking not at points where the Taipings anticipated attacks and were gathered in strength (such as Ch’ing-p’u) but at less predictable and less fortified spots along their routes of advance and supply. And while the capture of Ch’ing-p’u might have augmented the prestige of the Foreign Arms Corps, it was certainly not worth risking the unit’s very existence. Only Shanghai itself was of ultimate value to the rebels; had Ward shown patience and built his strength slowly in Sung-chiang, the role he could have played in denying the port to the Chung Wang would have been that much more significant.
These were all lessons that Ward would absorb over the long months of recuperation and rebuilding that lay ahead. For the moment, his ill-considered determination to take Ch’ing-p’u forced him to work for the defense of Shanghai not from the strategic bastion of Sung-chiang but from within the port itself, and not as the independent commander of his own free-lance army but as one among many Westerners who rallied in mid-August to meet the advance of the Taipings.
On reaching Shanghai, Ward took refuge in the rooms of Albert Freeman, the agent for H. Fogg and Company who had regularly helped him secure arms and supplies. Severely weakened and in great pain, Ward nonetheless continued to write out instructions for the resupply of his men at Sung-chiang, as well as orders for Burgevine, who was in command of the garrison. On August 12 the Chung Wang completed his investiture of Sung-chiang, although it remains uncertain whether he actually took the city. He later claimed to have done so, and some Chinese sources support this assertion, saying that the Foreign Arms Corps abandoned the defense of Sung-chiang and only returned after the Chung Wang had moved west toward Hankow late in August. But other Chinese scholars—along with numerous Western writers—claim that Burgevine was able to hold off repeated rebel assaults and that the Chung Wang, anxious to move on to Shanghai, eventually gave up the siege. In any event, Burgevine was able to keep the corps together and fighting, either within the walls of Sung-chiang or in the nearby countryside. And from his sickbed in Freeman’s rooms in Shanghai, Ward kept in close touch with the force, although the effort and anxiety sapped his strength badly.
The Chung Wang, meanwhile, pressed on to Shanghai, mystified and not a little troubled about what his reception from the Westerners in the port would be. During his weeks of relative inactivity in Soochow in June, the rebel general had received several Western missionaries and what he asserted were official French emissaries in audience. From these meetings he had formed the impression that his entrance into Shanghai would be welcomed in the settlements, provided he guaranteed the safety of foreign nationals and their property. But the appearance of Ward’s “foreign devils” in the military service of the imperial government had caused the Chung Wang to doubt this rather blithe assumption, as had the fact that his attempts to communicate with the Western diplomatic community in Shanghai had gone unanswered. Demonstrating the extent of the Taipings’ concern that good relations with the foreigners be established, the Kan Wang, the rebel prime minister, had journeyed from Nanking to Soochow in July and addressed a communication to Consul Meadows, urging a meeting. But Frederick Bruce, hewing to the increasingly unrealistic policy of strict neutrality, ordered Meadows not to answer the communication.
The Western powers, especially the British and the French, were about to enter the most contradictory phase of their almost comically complex dealings with the Chinese empire during the 1850s and ’60s. Mid-August saw Britain’s Lord Elgin leading the Anglo-French task force on its punitive mission to the forts at Taku in the north, where British and French soldiers were shortly to engage in an unrestrained slaughter of imperial Chinese soldiers preparatory to a march on Peking to force compliance with the Tientsin treaty. But in regard to Shanghai, Bruce and his French counterpart had already decided that if the Chung Wang approached the port, regular British and French forces, along with whatever other Western soldiers were available and the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, would man the walls of the city and repel the rebel advance. More than one Western resident of Shanghai was
confused by this apparent contradiction, and when New Englander A. A. Hayes approached an acquaintance of his in the Royal Engineers to ask about it, he received an answer that was perhaps as good as any: “My dear fellow,” the officer replied, “we always pitch into the swells. At the north the imperialists are the swells, but down here, by Jove! the rebels are, don’t you know?—so we pitch into them both.”
In fact, the interests of foreign trading governments in China had not changed, whatever the details of their dealings with Peking and Nanking. The overarching goal was to force China to comply with the advantageous (for the Westerners) terms of the Treaty of Tientsin. Obviously, it would be impossible to enforce those terms if the authority of the Manchu government collapsed completely and if the Taipings extended their ban on opium to the treaty ports. It therefore became necessary to “pitch into” both the imperialists and the rebels. Such an activist policy certainly did not imply support for either party in the Chinese civil war, but neither did it represent a more genuinely “neutral” stance than had characterized Western policy since the Opium War. Thus the belligerent shift in tactics during August 1860—propelled not only by the intransigence of the war party that surrounded Hsien-feng in Peking but also by the steady advance of the Taipings toward Shanghai—did not imply any fundamental change in objective.
On August 16 the Chung Wang himself moved to the village of Ssu-ching, along the line of advance from Sung-chiang to Shanghai, and consolidated his somewhat scattered forces. As he continued the advance east he was joined by the Kan Wang, bitter over the Westerners’ continued refusal to reply to his overtures as well as by reports that regular foreign soldiers were setting up defensive positions not only around the settlements in Shanghai but along the walls of the Chinese city. It seemed clear that the common worship of Shang-ti would not prove a sufficient force to unite the rebels and the foreigners, yet the Chung Wang and the Kan Wang continued to order their troops not to harm any foreign nationals or destroy any foreign property, under pain of death.
The Chung Wang’s communications to the Chinese residents of Shanghai, by contrast, had a strident and threatening character. “How is it,” the rebel general asked in a proclamation posted in the port by rebel spies,
that you Shanghai people alone withstand all reason, and still listen to impish mandarins who do you nothing but injury? Your offences have now reached the climax that compels me to set troops in motion for your extermination.… I issue this Proclamation strongly to command and advise you; you know that an egg can’t oppose a stone; make up your minds speedily, and submit yourselves.… I will establish my will firm as a mountain, and my commands shall be as flowing water. Immediately after I have informed you by this, my soldiers will arrive; they are not going to wait for you; don’t say that I gave you no warning.
These words put panic in the hearts of many Chinese but prompted a typically pugnacious response from the foreign settlements. The Chung Wang’s omission of any reference to foreigners in the proclamation was taken as a slight rather than diplomatic intention, and the Herald gave answer: “The ‘Faithful King’ will however find that we are not going to be ignored. Should he fulfil his threats, and march against Shanghai, he will meet with certain substantial proofs of our existence,—striking evidence of our prowess. John Bull at last is thoroughly aroused.” With callous condescension, editor Compton added that “[a] Rebel is easier to hit than a pheasant or a snipe.”
On the evening of August 17 the horizon to the west of Shanghai began to glow with the fires of burning villages, and the port’s defenders knew that the rebel assault so long anticipated was about to commence. Early on the morning of the eighteenth the Taipings occupied the historic town of Hsu-chia-hui, or Siccawei, just west of the port, where Jesuit missionaries had long before established an important Catholic community. Rumors that a French priest was killed by the rebels at Siccawei (never fully substantiated) spread throughout Shanghai, steeling the resolve of the defenders. For his part, the Chung Wang quickly scattered the few imperial Chinese units sent against him, then—ever anxious to avoid giving offense to the Westerners—left the main body of his army behind and approached Shanghai with three thousand of his Kwangsi bodyguard.
At the city walls he found his worst fears confirmed. From the grandstand of the racetrack on the western edge of the British settlement to the west gate of the Chinese city, British troops and Sikh auxiliaries from India stood at the ready, supported by the Shanghai Volunteer Corps; the south gate of the Chinese city was held by Chinese imperialists, American artillery, and still more Britishers; and the eastern side of the port was garrisoned by the French. Most of the British soldiers were equipped with their army’s new Enfield rifle, a weapon with impressive range and accuracy, while their artillery units were well-stocked with “canister,” explosive shells packed with small iron balls. As the Chung Wang’s men advanced they made contact with scattered imperialist contingents, who quickly retreated toward the west gate of the Chinese city. The Taipings followed in pursuit, then began to learn the hard lessons about Western weapons that the Manchus had absorbed during the Opium War.
“The firing of the Foreigners,” said the Herald, “both from the cannon and rifles was excellent; as soon as canister was useless, the foe were treated to shell thrown time after time into the very middle of their flags.” Raked by this brutal fire, the Taipings were thrown into tremendous confusion; but their commander’s exhortations against harming foreigners were still fresh in their minds, and they did not fight back. In fact, said the Herald of that first afternoon, “curious to relate not a shot was fired.” Instead, the Taipings moved in agitation from gate to gate, as if seeking a spot where they would be welcomed into the city by those they still believed to be their spiritual brothers.
At the western perimeter of the British settlement on the afternoon of the eighteenth, A. A. Hayes was serving with the Shanghai Volunteer Corps when, as he recalled, “a man of slight figure approached me, as I stood at the Maloo Barrier. He had collected a few fighting men, and desired to place them where they would be of some use; and so, amid the roar of artillery, the rattle of musketry, and the shrieks of native fugitives, I first met General Ward. He was a man of excellent address, mild and gentle in manner, and as kind and warm-hearted as possible. His long hair and slight mustache were dark, and he habitually wore a blue coat tightly buttoned.” Apparently recovered from his wounds sufficiently to serve, Ward had (he later claimed) been approached by the commander of the Volunteer Corps, one Colonel Neale, and asked to assist in the defense. It was Ward’s endless craving for action rather than genuine need that pulled him out of his sickbed: The reluctant Taipings were no match for the Western forces already in place and were quickly halted by the ferocious artillery barrage.
The Western commanders were not, however, happy with the simple checking of the rebel advance. When it became clear, on the night of the eighteenth, that the Taipings were no real threat, parties of British and French soldiers left the defensive perimeter and entered the western, southern, and eastern suburbs of Shanghai. The British contented themselves with merely firing any structures that might give shelter to the Taipings, but the French indulged in the kind of wantonly criminal behavior that was to mark so many of their exploits in China. Plunder and rape joined arson on the list of “defensive measures.” As one angry Westerner wrote to the Herald, the night’s activities amounted to little more than “foul murder.”
On Sunday the nineteenth, the Herald reported, the Taiping enemy further “laid himself open to some fine rifle practice,” and while Sunday night was “quiet enough,” Monday brought a new Taiping movement toward the Shanghai racecourse.
Having advanced within a half a mile, they planted their banners on the tops of high graves and mounds, whilst they themselves retreated into two neighboring hamlets. The Volunteers proceeded at once to their posts at the barricades, the Royal Marines manned the several defences of the settlement, a howitzer and rocket party were se
nt out towards the rebel lines, and the whole settlement was rendered impregnable in less than half an hour. Now the firing and shelling commenced. The Insurgents stood it for several hours like men of stone—immovable, without returning a single shot.
For five more days this extraordinary state of affairs continued. On August 21 the Chung Wang sent an injured, angry letter to the representatives of Great Britain, the United States, Portugal, “and other countries” (he purposefully excluded the French, who he claimed had betrayed their earlier promise of a welcome in Shanghai). He accused the Westerners collectively of having been bribed by the Manchu “imps” to fight the Taipings, a most serious offense against the T’ien Wang: “I came to Shanghai to make a treaty in order to see us connected together by trade and commerce; I did not come for the purpose of fighting with you. Had I at once commenced to attack the city and kill the people, that would have been the same as the members of one family fighting among themselves, which would have caused the imps to ridicule us.” Despite his hostile reception, the Chung Wang did not close the door to future good relations:
Should any of your honourable nations regret what has occurred, and hold relations with our friendly state to be best, they need have no apprehensions in coming to consult with me. I treat people according to right principles, and will certainly not subject them to any indignities. Should, however, your honourable nations still continue to be deluded by the imps, follow their lead in all things, without reflecting on the difference between you; you must not blame me if hereafter you find it difficult to pass along the channels of commerce, and if there is no outlet for native produce.