The series of defeats suffered by the Qing in the 1839–42 Opium War, though the worst in the dynasty’s two centuries of rule, did not long go unchallenged. Exposed by the outsiders, in less than a decade the empire faced rebellions within on a quite staggering scale. The two catastrophes were of course related. Had the Qing not just been humiliated, their forces trounced and their economy fractured, the insurgencies might not have arisen. On the other hand, without foreign forbearance and eventual support, the Qing could scarcely have hoped to suppress them. Relations with the foreigners were becoming more complicated. Having crippled Macartney’s ‘old, crazy, First-rate Man of War’, the Western powers now opted to keep it afloat; rather than tangle with the wreckage, they would make it safe in the name of salvage.
Nearly all of China was affected by the rebellions. ‘Red Turban’ armies fighting for a Ming restoration (Ming pretenders were never in short supply) terrorised Guangdong in the mid-1850s. Muslim separatists took over Yunnan from 1855; other Muslim revolts plagued Shaanxi and Gansu from 1862. A host of heavily armed peasant bands known collectively as the Nian rampaged across Anhui and Jiangsu north of the Huai River from at least 1851. On cue, the Yellow River, capricious as ever, burst its dykes, causing devastating floods that climaxed in 1855 when it opted for an old estuary north of Shandong. Meanwhile Triad fraternities flexed their muscles in the ports, taking over Xiamen and then Shanghai in 1853–55; they and other secret societies also mobilised among the rural masses; ethnic minorities rebelled in the hills; pirates infested the coast. And there were more. But all these outbreaks were localised and little coordinated. They paled into insignificance beside the Taiping upheaval, ‘one of the great pivotal events of Chinese history’, or, as contemporary writers in both The Times and the North American Review had it, ‘the greatest revolution the world has yet seen’.20
Whether revolution, civil war or mere uprising, the Taiping movement spans the insurrectionist watershed between the dynastic challengers of the past and the ideological engineers of the future. It was both a nativist throwback and a radical new departure, a people’s revolution masterminded by ideological simpletons, an Asian peasants’ revolt flavoured by Judaeo-Christian messianism. In all its fury it raged for more than a decade (1850–64). From Guangdong and Guangxi in the far south it extended to within a few days’ march of Beijing, affecting sixteen out of the eighteen provinces and turning the heart of the country along the Yangzi into an extended battlefield. Its magnitude seemed at the time, and possibly remains, unprecedented. Sober analysts have tried to quantify the death toll: ‘twenty million people lost their lives’ (Reilly), ‘twenty million or more’ (Spence), ‘between 20 and 40 million people’ (Teng). Not all died in battle; the famines, retributive feuds and casual massacres that dislocation engendered took a heavy toll; so did power struggles and purges within the Taiping leadership. Thousands died simply from exposure, despite having burned whole libraries to warm themselves (including three of the four manuscript copies of the Qianlong emperor’s ‘Four Treasuries’). As ever, the greater the loss, the less certain the body count. Suffice it to say that, if the figures are even remotely accurate, more of the human race perished in the Taiping convulsion than in the First World War.
Throughout its few turbulent decades the man at the heart of this phenomenon was Hong Xiuquan (1814–64), a member of Guangdong’s large Hakka community. The Hakkas claimed descent from one of the early waves of Han migration into the south – that which had accompanied the Eastern Jin dynasty when in 311 Luoyang fell to the Xiongnu as reported in that miraculously preserved letter of the Sogdian merchant Nanai Vandak. Hardworking and opinionated, some Hakkas had since migrated to south-east Asia; more would follow. But mostly they were marginal farmers subject to the fiscal, environmental and demographic pressures of the times. Of Hong Xiuquan, a good-looking youth and promising scholar, much was expected by his impoverished family and rural clansmen. But like countless other aspiring examinees, he found this weight of expectation insupportable when failure greeted his attempts to pass the district examinations. He tried four times, and on one of them, when entering the Guangzhou examination compound, he was handed a loosely bound collection of tracts containing translated extracts from the Bible, a production of the London Missionary Society’s Singapore branch. Hong took it and put it aside for later reference.
Unlike the Jesuits in the seventeenth century – those polymath padres who had directed their talents and their proselytising towards the court and officialdom – the Protestant missions operated at a lower social level. Rather than pursuing a doctrinal accommodation with Confucian tradition and pinning their hopes on the top-down conversion of an empire, they looked to the saving of individual souls and the refutation of heresy. The Word of God, carefully translated, widely disseminated and selflessly advertised by their own example, was deemed sufficient unto the task; and in the case of Hong Xiuquan, it did indeed work in mysterious ways. Hong, now a village schoolmaster, started having hallucinations and dreams. When later he thought to peruse the mission’s ‘Good Words for Exhorting the Age’, as the tracts were entitled, he realised that his dreams were in fact visions. The bearded gentleman with fair hair who had given him a sword was God himself; and the younger man who had taught him how to use it against evil demons, and who had then accepted him as a sibling, was Jesus Christ. Hong must therefore be the next son of God, China’s son of God; and clearly the sword meant that he had been entrusted with a weighty mission – to root out idolatry and so perform for China the redemptive miracle that his elder brother Jesus had worked in the Western world.
Openly proclaiming his task, and proving an inspirational preacher, Hong converted Hakka friends and family in rural Guangdong and began destroying local shrines dedicated to Buddhist or Confucian worship. This proved controversial. He was obliged to flit between Guangdong and neighbouring Guangxi, where an early adherent had successfuly formed a satellite community of ‘God-worshippers’. In 1847 Hong was back in Guangzhou city, extending his acquaintance with the Bible through instruction from a Baptist minister from Tennessee. The Reverend Isaacher Jacox (sic) Roberts was the first to take advantage of the tolerance extended to missionaries under the Sino-American treaty. A difficult man, he would later report that Hong, though prepared for baptism, never actually received it; he, Roberts, had not been ‘fully satisfied of his fitness’.21
Repairing to the ‘God-worshippers’ in the gorges of Guangxi, Hong resumed his recruitment of followers. His mission began to assume a more political and military character. Arms and gunpowder were hoarded, signals practised, troops drilled and plans laid. As well as proclaiming his visions and destroying more shrines, Hong and others in his hierarchy who were possessed of a basic education began to integrate their revelatory faith with their knowledge of China’s historical past. Their starting point, and the inspiration for their military organisation, seems to have been the Zhouli, or ‘Rites of Zhou’ – the ‘fundamentalist’ text describing a utopian society in which names corresponded to realities that had supposedly been composed by the Duke of Zhou and had inspired reformers ever since. In those far-off times, according to the ‘God-worshippers’, China had been the recipient of ‘the original doctrine of the Heavenly Father’. It had then shared it with the wider world, and there it had survived and been renewed. But in China, Heaven’s first home, it had been turned on its head by a succession of ‘devilish’ invaders after the fall of the Han dynasty. Zhongguo’s road had thus diverged from the true path. The Manchus – ‘imps’ or ‘demons’, the Taipings called them – were the latest manifestation of these ‘devilish’ usurpers and, like shrines and idols, they must be destroyed. Only then could there be re-established the taiping tianguo, the ‘Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace’. A tag by which the movement would be known, this phrase neatly combined the Christiantianguo, ‘Kingdom of Heaven’/‘Heavenly Kingdom’, with the Zhouist or Daoist taiping, ‘Great Peace’.
Other contemporary movements, such as the Red Turbans and the Triads, also opposed the Manchu Qing as alien usurpers; they wanted to set the clock back to 1644 and restore the Ming. But the Taipings opposed the Qing as the last in a long line of heretical alien dynasties; the clock should go back to AD 221. This chimed, as it were, with important strands in recent thought. Eighteenth-century scholars equally unreconciled to the Qing had blamed the failure of the indigenous Ming on the Neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi (he of the ‘Four Books’ and the text-bound ‘investigation of all things’) or Wang Yangming (and his dangerously malleable ‘innate sense’ of what was right and humane). They too, therefore, had looked back to an earlier tradition and especially to the Han dynasty when the classic texts still retained a pristine quality uncorrupted by later editing. Practising what they called ‘evidential research’, these scholars brought to bear on the classics a more scientific approach in linguistics, geography and astronomy, and so restored a certain vitality to Confucian studies.
Earlier another Ming loyalist, Wang Fuzhi (d. 1692), had pursued a similar line of anti-Manchu argument but with quite different results. Questioning the cherished belief that alien invaders always succumbed to zhongguo’s superior culture and were assimilated by it, Wang Fuzhi had proposed that Han and non-Han values were in fact incompatible; alien regimes had warped Chinese civilisation rather than being absorbed by it, and Confucius himself had foreseen as much. Therefore, wrote Wang, ‘destroying the [aliens] to save our people may be called humane, deceiving and treating them as they hate to be treated may be called loyal, and occupying their territory . . . confiscating their property . . . may be called righteous’.22 Wang Fuzhi sought only a rationale for opposing the Manchu Qing; but in such sentiments later writers have discovered ‘the first hesitant gropings towards the discovery of a “national” tradition’. Ethnocentric and exclusive, these gropings did not as yet amount to ‘a new organic tradition’ of Han assertiveness. But as an experiment to this end, the contribution of Hong Xiuquan and the Taipings would be significant, ‘albeit fantastic, visionary, and intellectually distasteful to upper-class Chinese of the time’.23 Whether by chance or design, the Taipings tapped into some of the sources of later Chinese nationalism – antipathy to Qing imperialism on the grounds of its alien origin, authenticity through alignment with an impeccably organised agrarian society, insistence on China’s centrality (even within Christianity’s universal ‘All-under-Heaven’), a yearning for social justice and gender equality, and the espousal of a common Han Chinese identity based on place, race and culture rather than dynastic mandates and historiographic sanction.
After three years in and around Guiping in Guangxi, Hong and his associates had gathered disciples and recruits to the tune of about twenty thousand. Some had useful experience, having belonged to pirate and other insurgent groups or worked in the local mines. Many were Hakkas, both men and women. A few had a genuine flair for military tactics and organ-isation. Discipline was strict, with opium, alcohol, tobacco, gambling and sex outlawed on both religious and practical grounds. Money and possessions were pooled, foot-binding banned, pigtails cut and the hair allowed to grow. There were frequent prayer and instruction sessions; on the Seventh Day they rested and worshipped. Such practices could scarcely fail to attract attention, and in late 1849 the ‘God-worshippers’ narrowly repelled an assault by the authorities. Soon after, Hong officially declared himself ‘the Heavenly King’, and the whole community moved out of the Guiping area, heading north through the hills to the Yangzi watershed.
What began as a migration turned into a crusade. The Taipings’ ‘Long March’ lasted over two years (1851–53) and took them from the obscurity of Guiping to centre stage in Nanjing. Sometimes compared to Moses’ Exodus or the Prophet’s hegira (hijra), in its military aspect the advance more obviously resembled the Arabs’ post-hegira jihad. Closer to home, the most remarked precedent was Huang Chao’s marathon progress of 879–80, when he led his rebel army north along much the same route to exterminate the Tang dynasty. Like Huang Chao, the Taipings had mixed fortunes. Despite fanatical onslaughts, they were forced to fall back before the well-defended cities of Guilin and Changsha. They gathered adherents and defectors by the thousand, but the larger the heavenly host, the greater the need for supplies and munitions. In this respect, while the capture of Yuezhou on Lake Dongting proved a breakthrough, that of Wuchang and Hankou, the twin cities of the Middle Yangzi, was the turning point. Now with guns, money, supplies and above all boats, the Taiping armies took to the river. Downstream, Anqing fell in early 1853, then – amid the slaughter of every Manchu they could lay their hands on – the high-walled metropolis of Nanjing. Zhenjiang at the river’s confluence with the Grand Canal followed. In March 1853 the ‘Heavenly King’ entered Nanjing in style, borne aloft in a golden palanquin and wearing the dragon robe of a Chinese emperor plus the tinsel crown of a Christian king.
Arrived in ‘the southern capital’, from where the Ming founder had proclaimed his rule, the Taiping commanders seem to have opted to follow his example. Instead of continuing their barnstorming advance to Beijing, they held back to institute the new Jerusalem and savour the fruits of victory. Momentum and surprise – not to say panic – were lost. When two months later the advance was at last resumed, smaller expeditionary armies, minus their Heavenly King, headed north to Beijing and west up the Yangzi, where Anqing and Wuchang had already been retaken by Qing forces. But the northern thrust was by now expected. Boats had been removed from the Yellow River to prevent a crossing and Banner troops massed to oppose the insurgents. The Taipings veered west to Kaifeng and received some assistance from the Nian rebels. By the time they approached Beijing, their lack of cavalry was telling. Worse still, the northern winter, a novel experience for Guangxi Hakkas, was setting in. They halted outside Tianjin and would get no farther. Reinforcements arrived in 1854 and the campaign resumed, only to peter out in a series of irrelevant sieges. It was abandoned in 1855.
The western thrust fared better. Anqing was secured and Wuchang retaken – though later lost again to a provincial army from Hunan. With forces reckoned in the hundreds of thousands, plus control of the vital Yangzi corridor over a distance of around 500 kilometres (310 miles), the Taiping kingdom now bestrode the empire. Suzhou, Shanghai and the other teeming cities of the delta were threatened. Trade in the region was at a standstill; the wider world took notice. Anglo-American missionaries, sensing a triumph beyond their wildest dreams, urged support of the rebels. The Reverend W. A. P. Martin expected them to ‘revolutionise the empire, rendering all its vast provinces open to the preachers of the Gospel’.24 But the French were sceptical; Catholic images were as liable to be vandalised as Buddhist or Confucian ones. And the other foreign powers, though initially sanguine, grew more cautious when the northen expedition failed and a Qing army held steady around the Ming Hongwu emperor’s tomb in the hills behind Nanjing. All observers, too, had deep reservations about the Taipings’ inexperience, the more so when their literary productions were scrutinised and first-hand reports of the Heavenly Kingdom began to filter out.
Most foreigners who reached Nanjing could not fault Taiping discipline and dedication. They were impressed by an idealism and a puritanical abstinence unknown among contemporary militias, by the important role assigned to women (including military deployment), by the pervading spirit of fraternity, and by the common ownership of resources. On paper, and to an unascertainable extent in practice, the taiping tianguo was as much commonwealth as kingdom. The sexes were segregated, equal rights were enjoyed by each, and land was made available to all. But there was a naivety and presumption in it all. Even the missionaries were taken aback by Taiping ignorance; they baulked at the sight of animal sacrifices in Taiping chapels, were riled by patronising comments about ‘Our Lord’ (meaning Hong) being ‘Your Lord too’, and were embarrassed by Taiping questionnaires asking for God’s personal details (‘How tall is God? And how broad? How large his abdomen? Does he write verse? How rapidly?’, etc.).25
This questionnaire came in response to one of a more political nature submitted by a British mission to Nanjing in 1854. The attitude of the British was crucial and, though initially ambivalent, was already souring. The Taiping kings – Hong’s seniormost commanders had just been crowned as subkings of the Heavenly Kingdom’s four compass points – were as disrespectful of foreigners as any Qing official. They, and Hong himself, had already embraced a life of luxury, surrounded by concubines, that was at odds with both their emphasis on the Ten Commandments and the austerities expected of their hard-working subjects. There were also deep divisions within the leadership. In 1856 a horrific bloodbath took the lives of tens of thousands when two overbearing kings were toppled and their supporters massacred. The ‘Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace’ was looking more like a hellish kingdom of great purges. It was this, as well as the movement’s military setbacks, which slewed international opinion against the Taipings and in favour of the Qing.
For the Qing, too, the attitude of the British was crucial. The British had the largest fleet and the only one capable of reopening the Yangzi. The young Xianfeng emperor (r. 1851–61), though deeply suspicious of Anglo-Taiping contacts and distrustful of foreigners in general, had already asked the British for naval assistance in attacking the Taipings. It had been declined on the grounds that the British were neutral. The other powers took a similar line, happily advertising their contacts with the rebels if only to cow the Qing. In the case of the British, this was more like holding the Qing to ransom; for they had just tabled a demand for the revision of the 1842 treaty confident that the Taiping menace would find the Qing court at its most amenable.
Revision of the treaty meant rewriting it. Backed by the French and Americans, the British were now demanding more treaty ports, commercial access to the interior of China, a permanent ambassador in Beijing, the legalisation of the opium trade, the suppression of piracy and the lifting of internal transit dues. That was the first list; but as with the earlier treaty, cause was soon found to extend it. The interplay of negotiation and bombardment that ensued also closely resembled that which preceded the first treaty. Talks got under way but were suspended when in late 1856 a Chinese-owned but Hong Kong-based lorcha (small freighter) was suspected of piracy and seized by the Guangzhou authorities. The ship was called the Arrow and its legal status was highly debatable. But the incident was enough to ruffle British feathers and precipitate the ‘Arrow War’ (1856–60).
Despite the demands of other wars in the Crimea and then India (the Great Rebellion or Mutiny), sufficient shipping was found for an Anglo-French task force. It stormed Guangzhou, captured and deported its governor, took over the city and then sailed north. In April/May 1858 the Anglo-French force took the Dagu forts at the mouth of the Beihe and reached Tianjin. Beijing was again at the foreigners’ mercy; and again the Qing capitulated. The result was the punitive Treaty of Tianjin. With more insults to redress and more expenses to recoup, the British and French now imposed terms so heavy that one of their own negotiators considered them unreasonable. ‘We asked or rather dictated what . . . the Chinese could neither safely promise nor be fairly expected to perform.’26Expanding and adding to the earlier list, the British and French demanded the opening of six new treaty ports, four in the hitherto closely guarded areas of Taiwan, Shandong and Manchuria. The Yangzi, and with it the richest provinces of the empire, was also to be opened to foreign trade as soon as the Taiping occupation permitted; and there were to be four treaty ports on the river, including Nanjing and Hankou. Travel in and around the treaty ports was to be unrestricted, and passports afforded to those who wished to go farther afield. Christian preachers were to be protected (it was attacks on Catholic missionaries which had provoked the French into participating in the task force); the new British ambassador in Beijing was to be accompanied by family and retainers and suitably accommodated; the noxious word yi was never again to be used of foreigners; and the import of opium, though its use was still banned, was legalised subject to a not unreasonable rate of duty.
Of all these concessions, that for a resident British ambassador in Beijing proved the least palatable – as it had when Macartney came calling sixty-five years earlier. Mainly because of it, the court prevaricated over ratification. In 1859, in the course of pressing for ratification, an Anglo-French detachment was repulsed at the Dagu forts. This all-too-rare triumph led the Qing court to repudiate the treaty and led the foreigners to plan drastic action. Within a year some twenty thousand British and French troops stormed Dagu, took Tianjin and, when fired up by news of the execution of some of their captured colleagues, sacked the Qing emperors’ summer retreat at Jehol. In the process the Summer Palace, a fanciful Louvre designed for the Qianlong emperor by the Jesuits, was looted and burned. Though no great loss to architecture, it was a body blow to Qing prestige. Despite the emperor’s absence – he had fled Jehol for Manchuria just in time – the court sued for peace on the same day.
The negotiations that produced the 1860 ‘Convention of Peking’ were less notable for their terms – ratification of the 1858 treaty, another massive indemnity, a bit of the Kowloon peninsula to be added to Hong Kong, and Tianjin made a treaty port – than for the negotiators. On behalf of the court, Prince Gong, a brother of the Xianfeng emperor, emerged as a realistic and resourceful representative. He would preside over the empire’s foreign relations for the next thirty years, winning the respect of his adversaries and the reputation of a reformer. When the Xianfeng emperor died, aged thirty, a year after the Peking Convention, his mother, the Dowager Empress Cixi, engineered a succession of minors. It ensured her ascendancy but introduced an element of uncertainty to the succession. Prince Gong was one of those who provided the stability, continuity and realism that would lead to the period being acclaimed one of zhongxing, ‘restoration’.
The other newcomer to the negotiations was Russia. Taking advantage of the Qing’s embarrassments at the hands of the Western powers and the Taipings, the tsarist government had again taken up the question of Manchuria’s north-eastern borders. Russian expeditions had re-explored the Heilongjiang (Amur River) and could find little sign of Manchu administration either north of it or in the long coastal region east of its Wusuli (Ussuri) tributary. The Qing claimed the whole vast area as part of their Manchu patrimony but had forbidden Han settlement there, or anywhere else in Manchuria. The Russians claimed it mainly for the potential, at its southernmost tip, of a warm-water port on the Pacific.
Sino-Russian negotiations to resolve the matter coincided with those between the Anglo-French forces and the Qing over the Tianjin Treaty. Skilfully interposing themselves as intermediaries while promising secret support to the Qing, and taking every advantage of Qing weakness, the Russian delegates secured a treaty ‘that opened the entire northern frontier of the Qing empire, from Manchuria to Xinjiang, to Russia’s political and commercial influence’; moreover the subsequent demarcation of the Manchurian frontier awarded them all the territory north of the Heilongjiang and east of the Wusuli border.27 There, in due course, would be constructed Vladivostok, Russia’s only year-round Pacific port.
Back in Nanjing, the God-worshippers of the Taiping kingdom followed all these developments with interest. Little attempt was made, however, to take advantage of them until 1861, by when it was too late. In that year Taiping forces thrust east into the Yangzi delta, taking Suzhou, then Hangzhou and Ningbo, and threatening Shanghai. Reassurances were given to the foreigners about their concessions and their trade; and in Ningbo, a treaty port, the Taiping occupation proved exemplary. But the Westerners had by now secured all their demands from Beijing and were anxious only to enjoy them in peace, especially in respect of access to the Yangzi ports. They were therefore as keen as the Qing to see the rebellion ended. Guns and gunboats, transport, munitions and loans were made available to the Qing. More famously, volunteer units composed mainly of Chinese irregulars but equipped, drilled and officered by French, Americans and British fought alongside the Qing troops. The French-officered unit was called the ‘Unvanquished Army’, while its Anglo-American equivalent was the ‘Ever-Victorious Army’. The names were translations of those given them by the Chinese for recruitment purposes, not hard-earned accolades; both in fact suffered their share of reverses. But with modern rifles, howitzers, horse-drawn field guns and inspirational commanders – initially the American buccaneer Frederick T. Ward, latterly the God-fearing British hero Charles Gordon – they helped beat off attacks on Shanghai and reclaim the cities of Zhejiang and Jiangsu.
By 1863 the Taiping forces were disintegrating and their capital itself coming under ever closer siege. It fell the following year amid the sort of massacre with which the name of Nanjing has become synonymous. Hong Xiuquan, the latterly reclusive ‘Heavenly King’, was not among the victims. He had died a few weeks earlier of supernatural causes; a surfeit of ‘manna’ was diagnosed by his physicians. The martyrdom to which a Son of God was entitled was denied him. Heaven’s revenge, though confidently predicted, also failed to manifest itself. Harried and dispersed to the four corners of the empire, the remnants of his forces were absorbed by other rebel groups and by 1870 the movement was extinct.
In Nanjing today, a Ming garden complex houses the little ‘Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Historical Museum’. Integration being the modern message, the exhibits and photographs tell less about the Taipings and more about those who suppressed them. Prominence goes to the dashing exploits of the Ever-Victorious and Unvanquished armies. But well represented too are armies from Hunan and Anhui under their provincial generals Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang. Zeng, his protégé Li (both of whom would also be involved in ending the Nian revolts) and Zuo Zongtang (who finally extinguished the Muslim revolts in the west in the 1870s), represented the real legacy of two decades of rebellion.
With the Manchu Banners proving too moribund to check the rebels, provincial governors and governors-general led by Zeng Guofan’s example in Hunan had been encouraged to raise and train their own forces. To pay for them, they were granted fiscal rights that included the sale of degrees and imposts on internal trade. Known as likin, the latter in particular brought in large revenues destined exclusively for the provincial administrations at a time when imperial revenues from conventional taxation were declining owing to the disturbances. The new armies, better paid and equipped, gave a good account of themselves and had largely contained the Taipings throughout the late 1850s. But the situation was potentially as explosive as that at the end of the Tang dynasty when over-militarised governors of the frontier provinces had exacted a heavy price for coming to the aid of the dynasty.
In the late nineteenth century it was the empire rather than the dynasty which suffered. With military and financial resources of their own, the provincial administrations assumed a prominence and displayed a dynamism that helped shore up the dynasty and stabilise the economy. But this reprise, or ‘restoration’, was attained at a price. To foreign observers in particular it looked as if the empire itself was ripe for fragmentation. The Russians debated plans for detaching Mongolia, Manchuria and Xinjiang; the British began to take an interest in Tibet; the French, lately established in what they called ‘Indo-Chine’, showed a proprietary interest in Guangxi and Yunnan; and a Japan transformed by the Meiji reforms staked a claim to the Ryukyu Islands and an interest in Korea that would soon extend to Manchuria.