In the midst of the May 2 rejoicing, the T’ien Wang dispatched a message to his senior advisers and assistants, summoning them to an immediate council of war to determine the future of the great Taiping movement. The message was brought out of the T’ien Wang’s sumptuous yellow palace by one of his female attendants: Taiping men were generally forbidden from entering the inner sanctum of their leader, who lived alone with a retinue of concubines and cited Solomon and his hundreds of wives as a hallowed example. Making its way from splendid residence to splendid residence, the summons finally reached the colonnades and gilded domes of the palace of the Chung Wang, or “Faithful King.” (The T’ien Wang’s lieutenants, though subordinate to him, all incorporated the word wang, or “king,” into their titles.) The Chung Wang had been more responsible than any man for lifting the recent siege of Nanking. Indeed, his considerable military talents had ensured the survival of the rebellion for a number of years. And he had been honored in return: Once a poor mountain farmer and laborer called Li Hsiu-ch’eng, he now controlled troops numbering in the hundreds of thousands, as well as a vast fortune in silver. But in the spring of 1860 the Chung Wang was a deeply troubled man, vexed by doubts about the Taiping cause that no amount of honor or reward could ease.
Though only thirty-seven at the time he was summoned to the May 2 council of war, the Chung Wang had about him, said an Englishman who knew him in Nanking, “a trace of arduous mental and physical exertion” that “gave him a rather worn and older appearance. His figure light, active and wiry, was particularly well formed;… his bearing erect and dignified, his walk rapid but stately. His features were very strongly marked, expressive, and good, though not handsome according to the Chinese idea, being slightly of a more European cast than they admire.” An anxious, restless man, the Chung Wang seemed to find spiritual ease only on the battlefield: “His large eyes flashed incessantly, while the lids were always twitching. From his energetic features, and the ceaseless nervous movement of his body … no one would imagine that he could possess such perfect coolness in battle; yet I have often since observed him in action, when, in spite of his apparent excitability, his self-possession was imperturbable, and his voice … unchanged, save being more rapid and decisive in moments of greatest danger.”
Like many of the hundreds of thousands of Taiping adherents, the Chung Wang had joined the rebellion less out of genuine devotion to the strange amalgam of Christianity and Chinese mysticism that was the T’ien Wang’s faith than out of weariness with Manchu oppression. In the two centuries since Tartar tribesmen had swept down out of Manchuria and into China, deposing the Ming and establishing their own Manchu dynasty, their rule had degenerated into a system of corruption and repression that left China’s poorest provinces in a state of near-constant rebellion. Young peasants joined these uprisings almost as a matter of course: “When I was young at home as an ordinary person,” the Chung Wang later recalled of the Taiping movement, “I understood nothing, but joined up in the excitement.” In the ensuing decade of the 1850s, as the Taipings made their way from province to province and became the greatest threat to Manchu rule in the history of the dynasty, the Chung Wang battled his way up and out of the rebel ranks. But he also witnessed internecine conflicts among the Taiping leaders, brutal suppressive measures undertaken by the Manchus, the T’ien Wang’s withdrawal into a private world of debauchery, and the slaughter of millions of his fellow peasants by both rebel and imperial troops. By 1860 the Chung Wang was weary and losing heart: “There were many people in the [T’ien Wang’s] Heavenly Dynasty who did harm to the people; what could I alone do, for all my compassion? Power was not in my hands, so what could I do?… Once you are riding a tiger’s back it is difficult to dismount.”
The lifting of the siege of Nanking had not given the Chung Wang any commensurate sense of relief. In fact, his worries, especially those concerning his sovereign, had only multiplied. After the victory, said the Chung Wang, “no edict was pronounced praising the generals; the field commanders were not received in audience, nor were the court officials. The Sovereign was not interested in the affairs of government, but merely instructed his ministers in the knowledge of Heaven, as if all was tranquil.” Militarily, the Chung Wang knew that the rebel position at Nanking was still far from secure. The “demon imps” would be back, and, unless the Taipings could break out of the Nanking region and secure open routes to adequate sources of supply, the imperialists would eventually crush the movement, if only through attrition. The rebels’ next move would be crucial, and the May 2 council of war thus took on immense importance.
Knowing this, the Taiping chiefs arrived at the meeting wearing their most impressive regalia and armed with battle plans that each was convinced would prove the salvation of the Heavenly Kingdom. The T’ien Wang made it a point on such occasions to wear robes of imperial yellow—previously reserved for the occupant of the Dragon Throne in Peking—as well as a tall headdress reminiscent of the Ming dynasty. The Chung Wang wore a coronet of gold, in the shape of a tiger flanked by two eagles and decorated with precious stones and pearls. Rebels these men may have been—but the plundering of more than half of China had allowed their movement to take on singularly imperial trappings.
Plans for a spring campaign were proposed and discarded. The Shih Wang, or “Attendant King,” proposed a move southeast, toward the farms of Chekiang and Fukien provinces and the rich ports of Ningpo and Foochow. But such a long march to the coast, the other wangs argued, would leave the upper stretches of the Yangtze River badly exposed and the western approach to Nanking open. The Ying Wang, or “Heroic King,” wished to march in this direction and reinforce the city of Anking, rightly considered the gateway to the Nanking region.
It was the T’ien Wang’s cousin and prime minister—the Kan Wang, or “Shield King”—who proposed the plan that most appealed to his sovereign. It incorporated the objects of the Shih Wang’s and the Ying Wang’s plans but achieved them more efficiently than either. The Taiping forces, said the prime minister, should strike out from Nanking in two great pincers, one to the north side of the Yangtze and one to the south. In a pair of wide sweeps that would shatter the Manchu forces in central China, the two armies would converge not on Anking but much farther to the west, at Hankow. The “demon imps,” their attention fixed on Nanking and Anking, would not be ready for such a move. The Shih Wang’s suggestion that the rebellion be resupplied through a move to the seacoast was also accepted. Ningpo and Foochow were too distant, however, to be incorporated into the Kan Wang’s scheme. Instead, the port of Shanghai in the rich province of Kiangsu was selected as a target. Attacking here before moving west, the Taiping southern pincer would secure needed supplies—including twenty armed river steamships for use on the Yangtze—and hopefully establish friendly relations with the Westerners who traded at the port and who worshiped, the Taipings believed, their own Shang-ti.
The Chung Wang had misgivings about the prime minister’s plan but thought it the best of those put forward and elected to support it. That was enough for the T’ien Wang, who approved the strategy as well as the assignment of the Chung Wang to lead the vital southern army, which was to conquer the province of Kiangsu, move on to Shanghai, then wheel rapidly west and approach Hankow. Yet the Chung Wang’s heart was still not at rest: He was given only one month to take the provincial capital of Soochow in Kiangsu, and the T’ien Wang’s language in ordering him to do so was, in the young commander’s opinion, “severe.” But, as the Chung Wang observed, “things being what they were, and since I was employed by him, I had to obey.”
With the plan settled, the Taiping armies were assembled and addressed by their commanders. Uniforms of red, yellow, white, and orange silk, emblazoned with the names of commanders and individual units, as well as hundreds of brilliantly colored banners and thousands of long spears, all moved in splendid agitation as the Taiping soldiers enthusiastically answered the exhortations of their chiefs. Having abandoned the shaved forehead and
long pigtail that were signs of Chinese submission to the Manchus, the Taiping men wore their hair loose and uncut (earning them the epithet chang-maos, or “long-haired rebels”), and sometimes wound it in red and yellow turbans. And there were women in the ranks, as well: The Taipings had rejected the crippling custom of binding feet, and the daughters of the cause were able to move about freely. Taken as a whole, the Taiping hordes were an impressive and, in the Chinese experience, unprecedented sight.
Indeed, in the midst of this spectacle of color and passion, relatively few onlookers stopped to remark on the utter backwardness of the Taipings’ armaments. Most carried simple swords and spears; firepower was confined to antique gingals (weighty matchlock firearms supported by cumbersome props), the occasional musket, and ancient cannons that, though often beautifully embellished, were as likely to split open as to hit their marks on firing. The arsenal was rounded out by “stinkpots”—hand-held bombs that produced burning, nauseating gases—and firecrackers, used to create panic. One British consular official, who had traveled up the Yangtze in 1853 to get a preliminary picture of the rebellion for his government, had made a point of asking about this seemingly vital shortcoming:
I inquired how it was that the Taipings did not make greater use of the smaller firearms, muskets and pistols, the former of which I said were, with the attached bayonet, our chief arms? I was induced to ask this because, while there was a great demand among the Taiping soldiers for swords, they seemed to take little interest in guns. [The commander] said, that his people did not understand the use of them, and that they were valueless when the supply of ammunition ran out or the springs went wrong. Swords and spears, he said, seldom got out of order, were easily repaired, and he found that his people could always beat the Imperialists with them.
It was no boast. Backward as Taiping arms were, imperial weapons were no better—to date, the “demon imps” had won no crucial engagements against the rebels. And, so long as the terms of the conflict remained the same, it seemed unlikely that they ever would.
The Chung Wang marched out of Nanking accompanied by his bodyguard—a tested force of 5,000 men from his native province of Kwangsi. Then his fully assembled army of almost 100,000 troops began the trek toward Soochow: over a hundred miles through country as yet untouched by the rebellion and occupied by imperial soldiers. But the faith of the Chung Wang’s legions in their commander was great, and that faith gave them powerful confidence: As one Western missionary who had witnessed an earlier Taiping advance remarked, the “personal appearance of their men in arms, and of their women on horseback … made the insurgents appear like a new race of warriors.… They all seemed content, and in high spirits, as if sure of success.”
A very different sort of scene was taking place in the walled cities and towns that sat along the line of advance from Nanking to Soochow. Here nervous mandarins and imperial officials of varying civil and military ranks received word of the approach of the Taipings with visible fright. Some of this fear was inspired by rumors of rebel atrocities, but much of it sprang from the knowledge of what the emperor would do to any man who failed in his appointed task. Simple beheading was the best of these fates; the infamous “death of a thousand cuts”—in which the skin was flayed from a living traitor’s body—was more commonly pronounced. Faced with the manifold dangers of a successful rebel advance, many Chinese officials chose suicide, as did hundreds of the citizens under their control.
And, even if such unfortunate Chinese could steel themselves and face the rebel approach, they had another enormous problem to contend with: retreating imperial forces, whose most common form of defense against the rebels was of the scorched earth variety. The loose discipline of the imperial troops was another result of the Manchus’ two-hundred-year reign, during which the post of soldier had steadily lost social and political luster and finally become a refuge only for those who could not succeed as civil bureaucrats, scholars, farmers, or merchants. Such men were ill-disposed toward mercy or regional loyalty, and their making a wasteland of the territories assigned to them at least gave the emperor no cause for complaint.
In truth, the Taiping rebellion had seen unrestrained brutality practiced by both sides. In the face of this fact, even sinophilic Westerners had been forced to admit that, while the people of the Middle Kingdom could not generally be accused of cowardice, it would (as one Western expert who observed the rebellion wrote) “be more difficult perhaps to defend the Chinese against the charge of being cruel.” This cruelty may have been qualitatively no different from that which characterized the peoples and governments of many Eastern and Western nations during the mid-nineteenth century. But, as was so often the case, the Chinese outdid the rest of the world in quantity. During the ten years since the Taiping rebellion’s outbreak, the people of the Middle Kingdom endured almost unbelievable suffering: by 1860, somewhere between 10 and 20 million Chinese had died in battle, been slaughtered wholesale, or starved to death. But not before exhausting every possibility of survival: In several cities and towns ravaged by the rebellion, human flesh had been selling by the pound.
Given such an atmosphere, it was small wonder that the Chung Wang—a man known for his exceptional decency and leniency—should have inspired fanatical devotion among his people. By distributing food and money to starving Chinese peasants in the territories he conquered, the Chung Wang was able to net immense popularity on both sides of the rebellion. It was a testament to his humility and perception that he never deluded himself as to the nature of that popularity: “Today,” he later wrote in his account of the rebellion, “if everyone knows the name of the Chung Wang Li Hsiu-ch’eng it is really because I was ready to distribute money; even enemy officers and officials with whom I came into contact I treated well; and because I was willing to give help to the suffering people.… It is not because I was talented, and I was not the head of the government.”
The point was an important one. The vast body of China’s peasantry had scant interest in the Taiping faith and little affection for the Manchu dynasty—the brutality practiced by both sides ensured as much. Popular loyalty in this most cataclysmic of the world’s civil wars was therefore generally secured through one simple policy: decent treatment. The same citizens who might flee the advance of a Taiping general who was, for example, an ex-bandit using the cause as a cover for plundering (and there was more than one such man in the rebel camp) might easily welcome the advance of the Chung Wang. Similarly, villagers who had once risen in rebellion against oppressive Manchu officials might shift their loyalties back again if an enlightened imperial commander appeared on the scene (although in 1860 there were precious few of these).
In the century and a quarter since its conclusion, the Taiping rebellion has been represented by various commentators—from Western missionaries excited by the rebels’ neo-Christianity to Chinese revolutionaries searching for the roots of their populism—as an ideological struggle. But while the religious and political components were important as detonators, the more fundamental and long-standing desire for decent treatment was the charge. Because of this, the struggle became—to an extent only grudgingly conceded by social historians—one of personalities, of individual leaders and their idiosyncratic policies. And among these personalities, in the spring of 1860, the agitated, restless young general known as the Chung Wang was preeminent.
During the march to Soochow he once again demonstrated why. Meeting exceptionally stiff imperial resistance at the walled town of Tan-yang, the Chung Wang spent two days reducing its defenses. Upon learning that the imperial commander of Tan-yang had died during the battle, the Chung Wang ordered his body found, placed in a coffin, and buried at the foot of the town’s pagoda: rare treatment for a fallen antagonist during so bitter a conflict. But, as the Chung Wang put it, “[a]live he was an enemy, dead, he was a hero; I did not bear him any hatred.” The Chung Wang claimed that the imperialists lost 10,000 men at Tan-yang, and, while such numbers were invariably exaggerated by both s
ides during the rebellion, the victory did open the way to the town of Ch’ang-chou, the first vital position on the line to Soochow.
The capture of walled cities and towns was the outstanding feature of warfare throughout China during the Taiping period, but it had particular importance in Kiangsu province. Here the mountains and hills that surround the Yangtze farther upriver settle into a flat, rich alluvial plain, as the surging waters calm and spread into a nourishing delta. This was some of China’s finest farm country: moist, rich earth laced by tens of thousands of small creeks and manmade canals. Most of these waterways were impassable to anything but small rivercraft, and their nerve centers were the towns that appeared at crucial intersections. As a general rule these towns were surrounded by high walls—sometimes as thick as they were tall—into which were cut gates in the primary directions of the compass. Some towns were actually built over the creeks and canals, and most were surrounded by muddy moats that, given the near-medieval state of China’s military development, offered additional protection. Outside the walls stockades and trenches were constructed as a first line of defense, and these could be formidable. The Chinese excelled at the construction of earthworks, as well as at their destruction, usually accomplished through tunneling and mining with heavy explosive charges.