PART TWO
CHAPTER 6
October 16, 1860, dawned cold in the sharp-cut mountain valley in Anhui province where General Zeng Guofan dragged himself from his bed, weakened from an extended bout of vomiting the night before. He was a sturdy man in his late forties, five foot eight with a broad chest and sad, deep-set eyes intensified by a long goatee beard that fell down over the front of his robes. Old age hadn’t yet settled onto him, though the pressures of war were bringing it close. He blamed the vomiting on drinking too much tea before his dinner, but it was only one of a growing list of wretched disorders that wore him down, like his heart palpitations or the insomnia that kept him awake deep into the night and haunted him with exhaustion by day. On this particular morning he went through his normal routine: receiving visitors in his tent, catching up on correspondence, busier than usual so he had no time for his customary game of Go with a subordinate. It was only after lunch that the courier arrived, bearing an official message from Beijing informing him that the emperor and his entourage had left for the hunting grounds in Manchuria, and the British and French armies were only a few miles from the capital. There wasn’t anything that could be done, he wrote in his diary with despair. At least not that he could do. Coming to terms with the helplessness of the emperor’s flight, he broke down into tears.1
Indeed, from where he sat in his headquarters in the town of Qimen, wrapped in the mountains of southern Anhui and fighting a protracted rear-action campaign against the farthest Taiping stronghold up the Yangtze, there was nothing he could do. In name at least, he was now the commander in chief of the dynasty’s campaign against the Taiping rebels—a mantle he had inherited unexpectedly when the siege camps at Nanjing had collapsed that spring and the generals Zhang Guoliang and He Chun had both died. But he was four hundred miles on the other side of the Taiping domain from Suzhou, where the Loyal King’s victorious armies roamed at will, and still farther from Beijing, where the British and French armies were nearing the imperial capital. It was too late for his forces to be of any use in either of those places. So he pulled himself back together and focused on the few things he actually could do something about. He sent a man up with a rope to measure the height of a steep mountain that faced his camp. He continued with his paperwork. He went to bed that night and once again braved the demons that haunted his sleep.
This wasn’t where Zeng Guofan had expected his career to lead, nor could he have predicted that this remote valley in rural Anhui province would be, as now seemed to him likely, the place where he would die. He wasn’t a fighting man but a scholar: a man of books and poetry and moral philosophy who had started his life under circumstances not so far removed from those of Hong Xiuquan and the millions of others who tried their hands at the imperial examinations. There had been nothing especially promising in his background, the eldest of five sons born to a farming family in rural Hunan province. It wasn’t that the men of his family were unlettered, but none of them had ever made any headway on the exams. His father was the first in the family to try in earnest, and he had failed the lowest examination, the district-level xiucai, sixteen times before finally passing it in 1832, when he was already well into middle age. Zeng Guofan, however, showed far greater talent (at least of the kind the examiners were searching for), and he managed to pass that same examination the year right after his father did, while he was still just twenty-two years old with a full career ahead of him. It hadn’t been effortless—he had failed six times before he passed—but with concerted effort and a willingness to punish himself, he managed to claw his way up the ranks. The following year, he passed the provincial exam that had forever eluded Hong Xiuquan and then went on for the top examination in the empire, administered by the emperor in Beijing. After failing it twice, he passed with brilliance in 1838, winning the coveted jinshi degree and an appointment to the Hanlin Academy.2
In an empire governed by Confucian scholars, the Hanlin Academy was the repository of the most elite of the elite, and Zeng Guofan’s selection in 1838 saw him joining a group of a hundred or so students and faculty culled from an imperial population numbering roughly 400 million.3 The senior Hanlin scholars were the custodians of interpretation of the Confucian texts; they chose the questions for the examinations and oversaw their administration. They tutored the emperor and the young princes who might someday be emperor themselves. Those men were the monarch’s brain trust, the think tank that converted ancient and arcane philosophical texts handed down over millennia into meaningful policy and governance. For the junior members such as Zeng Guofan, it was an introduction to the halls of power—a stipended period of study with the most talented scholars in the empire and an entrée into the social world of court life in the capital. His appointment marked the beginning of what would be a graceful climb through the intricate architecture of the dynasty’s bureaucracy. Whereas in Hong Xiuquan the confounding difficulty of the examinations bred madness and revolt, in this favored child, Zeng Guofan, it bred loyalty and gratitude.4
The rewards of success on the examinations entailed not just power and prestige but, more tangibly, wealth. Zeng’s family had gone into great debt to fund his education, and even with the Hanlin stipend he had little money in Beijing. But that changed with his first appointment outside the capital, administering the provincial examination in the capital of Sichuan in 1843. Lower officials currying favor pressed him with gifts, as did the grateful families of the scholars who passed. He returned to Beijing with sixteen sedan chairs loaded down with furs, jade, and silver—more than enough to clear all of his outstanding debts.5 At the same time, however, he was wary of the corruption and obsession with material pleasure that dominated life at court. He chafed at the insincere flattery and politics that formed the basis of so many friendships in the capital and wrote home to his brothers that he didn’t want any friends who didn’t improve him as a person.6 His wariness of Beijing society only increased as he came under the influence of a coterie of distinguished teachers in Beijing who espoused a rigid school of moral philosophy known generally as Neo-Confucianism, deeply grounded in ideas of self-discipline and self-cultivation. Under their guidance, he began to examine himself with a keenly judgmental eye and to set strict lists of rules to govern his daily conduct: to rise early and spend an hour in quiet thought each morning. To stay indoors at night. To avoid starting a new book until he’d finished reading the last one. To keep a diary every day. To walk a thousand paces after each meal. The list went on and on.7
If his mother hadn’t died in 1852, Zeng Guofan’s career might have been a relatively predictable one—rarefied, to be sure, but unremarkable. As it happened, however, she passed away that summer just as the Taiping army was carving its original course northward from Guangxi, through Hunan and up to the city of Wuchang in Hubei province. Under normal circumstances, officeholders in the Qing dynasty were never assigned to posts in their home provinces; it was a hedge against localized power, ensuring that officials were more loyal to the emperor than to the people they governed. An official of Zeng’s stature found himself back in his birthplace only if he retired, if he was cashiered for incompetence, or, as was the case here, if one of his parents died and he had to withdraw from public life for the customary three years of mourning. After receiving the news of his mother’s death in the spring of 1852, he turned his back on the life of the capital and returned to Hunan. The provincial capital, Changsha, was under siege, so he took a roundabout route that steered wide of the burgeoning rebellion and arrived home in the late autumn.
Order was collapsing in his home province. As the imperial armies tried to concentrate on the fast-moving Taiping forces, they had left a vacuum in their wake that was irresistible to outlaws, and gangs of bandits ravaged villages and towns with near impunity. In response, the worried emperor issued orders for civil officials to start mustering local militia forces to protect their jurisdictions. But those militias were, by and large, small and ill equipped. Their hastily recruited soldiers had no experience in fighting, and weapons were hard to come by. With the exception of a unit of 2,000 men who successfully held the walls of Changsha against the rebels, most of the militia units were worse than ineffective. Their leaders were self-interested and reluctant to leave their immediate homes. It was difficult to coordinate them, and when they were enticed to fight elsewhere, many simply wound up looting the remains of what was left after the Taiping armies had passed.8
In early January 1853, as conditions in the central empire deteriorated, the emperor issued an order for Zeng Guofan to take charge of the haphazard militia units in Hunan and use them to restore order to his province. Similar orders went out to individuals in neighboring provinces as well, and all were rooted in desperation—essentially an admission that the imperial forces couldn’t contain the rebellion. In Zeng Guofan’s case the order broke with all precedent by granting him the power to take up broad-based military affairs in his home region. But the emperor knew him to be loyal and chose him not because he had shown any aptitude for military affairs (which most scholars disdained, martial bravado being an affectation of the ruling Manchus, not the subject Chinese)9 but because he was convenient: he happened to be there on the ground already and was familiar with the region and its people. He hadn’t come on especially strong recommendation; it was his teacher in Beijing, Tang Jian, who had suggested his name to the emperor, noting that although Zeng Guofan was quite learned, he actually wasn’t all that talented. Zeng’s latent skill, according to Tang Jian, and the reason he might be a good choice for the mission, was that he knew how to use men. “He is good at recognizing talents,” Tang told the emperor, “and is capable of synthesizing people’s good points. If he is willing to use the wisdom of others as his own … he might make a fine leader.”10
Zeng Guofan didn’t want the appointment. He had scarcely been home four months when the orders reached him, and he hadn’t even finished the rituals for burying his mother, let alone observing the proper mourning period.11 He had no practical military experience (nor did he care to gain any), and the shepherding of the militias struck him as an impossible task. So he decided to refuse the appointment, and drafted a memorial declining it on the grounds that he needed to continue mourning his mother. It was no small matter to refuse the emperor’s orders, but one’s parents were supposed to come first. His sentiments were genuine; he wrote to a friend in Beijing that day that he simply couldn’t abide the guilt of leaving his mother unburied.12 But his stance of propriety also masked a skepticism that the militias could ever be properly organized. He would have to travel throughout the districts raising money from gentry who had no interest in helping one another, and he didn’t see how that would result in anything more than trouble.13
But then came the news that on January 12, 1853, the Taiping rebels had conquered Wuchang, the capital of neighboring Hubei province to the north of Hunan. They now controlled the middle reaches of the Yangtze River. The crisis was becoming larger than anyone had expected. Zeng Guofan’s father and brothers, along with a close friend, pleaded with him to take up the appointment so he could help save their native place from destruction. In the end they convinced him, and he tore up the draft memorial and accepted the mission.14
The Qing dynasty’s standing military was divided into two vast and separate forces. The elite forces were the hereditary banner armies, composed of Manchus and Mongols, which operated in the north. These were the personal armies of the emperor and the Manchus more widely, and their forces were concentrated where the emperor lived, as well as in their traditional homeland of Manchuria and the handful of garrison cities scattered about the empire. They reached their peak in the days of the great eighteenth-century frontier wars, when they consolidated vast regions of Central Asia under Manchu rule. But they had been on the decline since then, and—with a few notable exceptions—the soldiers of the new generation were but shadows of the great warriors from whom they were descended. There were roughly 130,000 banner troops based in the region around Beijing but none at all in the province of Guangxi, where the Taiping had originated.
Below the banner forces, and responsible for maintaining control throughout the bulk of the empire, were the Green Standard armies, whose soldiers, and most of whose officers, were ethnically Chinese. Roughly speaking, while the Manchu bannermen guarded the emperor and his people, the Chinese soldiers of the Green Standard kept order in the far-flung expanses of the dynasty’s territory, and their standing numbers were proportionally greater: 600,000 on the books in the early 1850s.15 However, that high figure was illusory, as commanders typically inflated their personnel numbers in order to embezzle extra pay and supplies. And the soldiers were profoundly undertrained, as it had been more than a generation (fifty years, in fact) since they had been mobilized for large-scale warfare.
To make matters worse, although the Green Standard was far greater in number, the elite banner armies commanded the lion’s share of the Qing military budget, leaving the larger Chinese force not just underprepared but underfunded as well. The campaigns of the eighteenth century had drained the Qing dynasty’s military treasuries, which were far from being replenished by the 1850s. Widespread cost-saving measures meant little or no improvement in military technology and poor maintenance of the arms stores that did exist. By tradition, individual soldiers were responsible for purchasing and maintaining their own hand weapons (swords and knives, mostly), but in peacetime they preferred to use their meager salaries for other purposes, such as buying food for their families or purchasing opium. The state provided the firearms (matchlocks, effective in Central Asia but already obsolete in Europe by the time of the American Revolution), and those too were in poor repair due to cost-cutting efforts. An imperial statute of 1816 decreed that weapons should not be replaced until they had been used for thirty or forty years. Many in actual use were more than a century old.16 The nineteenth-century Qing military thus suffered from a fatal combination of too much peace and too little prosperity.
By the time the Taiping broke out of Guangxi and headed north, the Green Standard functioned less as an army than as a vast network of police forces or constabularies spread out over the empire. Green Standard units kept local order and protected imperial grain shipments, as well as performing such mundane tasks as transporting prisoners and moving the mail. Commands were fragmented and distributed among local civil and military officials in jealous competition with one another—a deliberate measure to make sure a mutinous Chinese commander couldn’t organize them against the dynasty. But the absence of any clear chain of command also made it nearly impossible to mobilize them against a large and swift-moving enemy such as the Taiping.17
Zeng Guofan was well aware of the Green Standard’s deficiencies. As early as 1851, while still in the capital, he had advocated reducing its numbers. The provincial forces were bloated with superfluous soldiers who had nothing to do, he wrote to the emperor. Idle and bored, they took up with local bandit gangs. They smoked opium and set up gambling houses. They went AWOL and caused trouble, and when they were actually called upon to fight, they paid ne’er-do-wells to take their places and fill the ranks. “As soon as they spy the enemy, they run away,” he wrote, “and when the enemy departs, they come back and murder the locals [to dress them up as rebels] and claim victory.”18 To a friend, he wrote that “even if Confucius himself came back to life, he could spend three years and still not manage to correct their evil ways.”19 When he accepted the emperor’s mission in 1853, Zeng Guofan took his criticisms even further. The Green Standard forces were always chasing the rebels’ tail, he wrote, and never attacked them head-on. They used cannons and muskets to attack from a distance, but he’d never heard of them fighting in close quarters with small arms. This, he wrote, showed that they were poorly trained, lacked courage, and had no martial skills to speak of.20
So he proposed to start from scratch with a new kind of force. Taking as his model a general of the Ming dynasty who had formed militias to fight Japanese pirates on the coast, Zeng proposed building a force that would be small and efficient. It would be carefully trained, and its soldiers would be courageous. In a broad sense, the army he began to assemble in 1853 was a military outgrowth of his Neo-Confucian sense of moral order; just as he had learned to discipline himself, so would he discipline his army. He pleaded for patience from the worried emperor. “We aim for excellence, not sheer numbers,” he wrote. “And we want it to be truly effective, not just available quickly.”21
He started with strict guidelines for recruitment. First, the soldiers should, like himself, be young men from rural, not urban backgrounds. “Those who want a strong army use soldiers from the mountain villages,” he explained in an 1855 memorial, “and they avoid the men of the cities and waterways.”22 In his own version of the pastoral romantic, he believed that “Those who live their lives in the mountains and rural areas are tough, while the ones from the river villages are slippery. The cities are full of lazy and carefree wanderers, while the rural villages have men who are simple and sincere.” Second, he insisted that recruitment should take place only through personal channels. He would choose his own commanding officers from among his brothers, friends, fellow scholars, and others brought in through careful interviews—and they, in turn, would select their own subordinates. The process would repeat itself down through the ranks all the way from the top to the bottom, where foot soldiers were recruited by officers from their own home districts, to fight alongside their neighbors.23
In terms of the relationship between officers and men, it was a Confucian scholar’s vision of an army. Confucius taught that the relationship between father and son was the absolute moral foundation of a society, and Zeng encouraged an analogous bond of affection between his officers and soldiers. This was hardly to encourage indulgence (he was a famously strict father); rather, its purpose was to build an unbreakable sense of duty. In 1858, he instructed his commanders that they “should act towards their soldiers like a father acts toward his sons or an elder brother toward his younger brothers. When the elder is strict, the younger will be well disciplined, and the family will flourish. If he spoils them, they will be headstrong and arrogant, and the family will decay.”24Likewise, in an essay on “Forgiveness” he insisted that punishment was the key to maintaining harmony within a group. Small kindnesses, he believed, were entropic; the father who pardons his son’s faults eventually loses control of his family, and soldiers who aren’t punished by their officers become rude and disobedient. “Forgiveness cannot govern the people,” he concluded, “indulgence cannot order a family, and generosity cannot control an army.”25 The family analogy also worked from bottom to top, and from the foot soldiers on up to the generals; he encouraged each to “serve his superior in the same way a son serves his father.”26
These personal ties were inviolable. No soldier or company officer was expected to answer to a commander with whom he lacked a personal relationship. And generals could not overleap their senior commanders to give direct orders to the lower ranks.27 At its extremity, this meant that when a general transferred one of his commanders, the entire pyramid of command below that man was transferred along with him. The officer replacing him would, if new, have to begin the process of recruiting his own command from scratch.28 And by the same logic, when a commander was killed in battle, the soldiers under him either had to be rerecruited into new units through personal channels or else discharged and sent home.29 Were Zeng Guofan himself to perish, the army would dissolve.
Zeng also encouraged loyalty by paying his men extremely well. When funds were available (which they rarely would be, though the enlistees didn’t know that), a foot soldier in Zeng Guofan’s force received a salary of just over 4 taels of silver per month, nearly triple the wage of his Green Standard counterparts.30 In addition, there were generous prizes to be won in battle: 10 taels of silver for killing a bandit, 15 for capturing one alive, and if they should capture a Taiping (a “longhair” bandit, as distinguished from an everyday one) it was worth 20 taels, or nearly five months’ wages. Any soldier who captured a rebel horse could keep it as his prize; if he didn’t want it, he could hand it over to his superior and get 10 taels of silver. Smaller prizes rewarded the capture of matériel: 5 taels for a barrel of gunpowder, 3 for a cask of lead bullets, and 10 for a large cannon or 5 for a small. They would get 3 taels each for a musket (or “bird gun”) and 2 each for captured swords, spears, and banners.31 These were fantastic incentives to poor farmers, though they also suggest that valor didn’t come for free.
After recruitment came indoctrination. The farmers who enlisted in Zeng Guofan’s army had, by and large, no military experience at all; they were a blank slate. So he gave them an imperial mandate when they first entered camp. “We have enlisted you to become militiamen and to exert your strength on behalf of the dynasty,” went his instructions to new recruits. “The food and supplies with which we feed and nurture you every day all come from the coffers of the emperor.”32 This was the core, and nearly the fullest extent, of their ideological indoctrination: an admonition to serve the country and to feel gratitude toward the emperor. The rest of their psychological training broke down into extremely concrete and personal terms: learn to kill or be killed. “The reason we want you to learn martial arts is so that when you go forth to fight the bandits you will fight to the death,” he told them. “If you do not hone your skills every morning, then when you encounter the bandits you will not be able to kill them, and they will kill you.” He told them to take a personal stake in their own training. “You study martial arts to protect your own life: practice to the point of excellence, charge in with courage, and you might not be killed. But the second you turn back, your life is over. This principle is clear.” The only way to be truly brave, Zeng believed, was to have no fear of death. And so he also appealed to their sense of fate. “If it is not your time to die,” he explained to the new soldiers, “then even if ten million of the enemy surround you, they will not be able to kill you because you will have divine protection. But if it is your time to die, then even if you stay home and sit still, doing nothing at all, death will still find you.”
For those to whom personal loyalties, generous pay, and a sense of fate weren’t enough to ensure bravery, there was also a ruthless list of punishments—for, as Zeng had explained to his officers, without strict punishment there was no way to control an army. So faking an injury in order to get compensation meant forty strokes of the cane and an immediate discharge. Soldiers who ran from battle were, if caught, beheaded. And a soldier who gave a false report of meritorious deeds would not just be decapitated but also have his head hung on display as a warning to others.33
It was here that the specific nature of Zeng’s original recruitment process became especially important. For in the vast, amorphous Green Standard army, a would-be soldier could simply show up and enlist. By the same token, he could also simply disappear. The personal nature of the Hunan militia’s recruitment process, however, made desertion nearly impossible, and therein lay a great efficiency of Zeng’s system. Every soldier was recruited at home, in person, in his own district. The soldiers in his unit would know exactly where he lived, and most likely had grown up with him. The officer who enlisted him would, by Zeng Guofan’s strict instructions, have taken down not just the man’s name but also his fingerprints and the names of everyone in his extended family—some of whom were required to provide personal guarantees for his service.34 By such means, no soldier from this army could ever run from battle and expect to simply disappear into the countryside; justice could always be exacted on his family.
The first obstacle to actually building this force wasn’t the enemy but the local officials with whom Zeng competed for funds, weapons, and supplies. They were protective of their own jurisdictions and generally refused to support him unless explicitly forced to. It didn’t help that his unorthodox position carried a title as vague as “Imperially Dispatched Vice President of the Board of War, Former Vice President of the Board of Ritual,”35 which had no obvious significance to the provincial officials and was easily ignored. Nor did it help that thanks to the hastily improvised nature of the mission, his seal—the physical manifestation of his authority—was carved not from jade but from wood, leading some to conclude that it was forged. He also had no compelling authority over the Green Standard commanders with whom he was supposed to coordinate, and at the outset they found Zeng Guofan so irritating that they sometimes attacked his militia forces instead of the enemy. Soldiers from his army were repeatedly detained and sometimes killed by Green Standard forces, and once, in 1853, they came after him directly and burned down his headquarters.36
The dynasty’s central government traditionally supplied the armed forces with funds and equipment, but it was so bankrupt by the time of the Taiping Rebellion that there was nothing extra to give Zeng or the other new militias that cropped up across the country. The emperor therefore granted the leaders of those forces exceptional permission to raise their own funds by a variety of means, including collecting transport taxes on the rivers, selling degrees and honorary ranks to the wealthy, and straightforward fund-raising. Zeng therefore had to appeal directly to the wealthy landowners and merchants in Hunan for support, though they were not naturally inclined to support activities outside their own home spheres. So he needed a message. He was only vaguely aware of the apocalyptic Christian doctrines that had bonded the early Taiping armies together, but it was enough for him that they had destroyed Confucian temples in the cities they conquered. Those temples, with their rituals in honor of the sage and the state system they represented, were the very foundation of his life’s career. Thus his appeal for support did not center on the threat that the Taiping rebels posed to the Qing dynasty, whose waning authority hadn’t proven to be much of an inspiration (especially in Hunan, where hundreds of thousands from the general population had already joined the rebels). Instead, he reached further back beyond the rule of the Manchus to charge that the Taiping Rebellion imperiled Confucian civilization itself.
In a public proclamation of 1854, Zeng appealed for contributions to his militia by laying out the threat the rebels posed to China’s known way of life. “Everywhere they pass through,” he wrote, “every boat large or small is stolen, every person rich or poor is plundered and left with nothing, and not even an inch of grass remains.”37 In a particular appeal to the scholars, he warned that the Confucian texts were banned under the Taiping. “Scholars cannot read the classics of Confucius,” he wrote, “but instead there are the so-called words of Jesus: the ‘New Testament’ book. They take thousands of years of Chinese manners, ethics, classics and laws, and in a single day sweep them away completely!” This was a far greater crime than a mere threat to the rule of the Manchus. “How could this be just a disturbance to our Qing dynasty?” he continued. “It is the most extreme threat to our Confucian teachings since the dawn of the world.” There had long been rebellions in China, he said, but never before had they turned on Confucianism itself. Even the worst of them had left the ancestral temples untouched. Beneath his words lay the dark warning that the Taiping aimed not to become the next dynasty but to do away with dynastic rule altogether.
Zeng walked a fine line in that proclamation, for in such uncertain times even a formerly complacent subject of the emperor might throw his support to the rebels if he thought they were destined to win. The so-called Mandate of Heaven wasn’t supposed to be permanent, and it was understood that every dynasty would eventually end. But the wealthy landowners to whom Zeng Guofan appealed most directly had prospered under this dynasty, and in rallying their support for his army Zeng had to convince them that it was not yet the natural time for the Manchus to fall. So he admitted that circumstances might look remarkably similar to what one expected at the end of a dynasty—widespread uprisings, near-total breakdown of government control—but he insisted that the emperor was better than that. Yes, he wrote, in the final days of the Han, Tang, Yuan, and Ming dynasties the government had lost its grasp on the countryside and “gangs of bandits were as thick as the hairs on your head.” But the Xianfeng emperor, he argued, had not, like those past emperors, really lost control. Wishfully, perhaps, he wrote that Xianfeng “worries deeply and examines his conduct. He respects Heaven and feels pity for the people.” The emperor hadn’t raised taxes, he pointed out, nor had he conscripted soldiers to fight the rebels. This proved that he was still in control and that this would not be the end of the dynasty. In writing such an overt apology for the distant and removed emperor in the midst of untrammeled chaos, Zeng was addressing a concern that lay in every mind: namely, that the Manchus might be losing their mandate to rule.
Such an appeal might have resonated with educated gentry and scholars who owed their power and prestige to the reigning dynasty, but it is unclear what, ideologically, a farmer stood to gain from the continuance of Xianfeng’s rule. Beyond basic security and reasonable taxation, there was little that the government in Beijing mattered to the people of the countryside—and this particular government was doing an especially poor job of ensuring security. But the peasants weren’t providing the funds for his army, they were providing the manpower, and for that reason it was essential that Zeng Guofan should pay his farmer-soldiers well and teach them that their food and supplies were gifts from the emperor—even if in reality they were procured not from government stores but from local gentry. In the absence of unthinking loyalty to the sovereign, material enticements were necessary.
For weapons, Zeng Guofan’s army used the same Chinese armaments that were found on both sides of the war. The primary weapons were the brutal implements for close combat: swords and spears of military origin, along with the tools of the farmer: hoes, long forks, and hatchets. Second to those were the firearms, especially the long matchlocks known as “bird guns” that were fired by lowering a lit fuse to a pan of gunpowder at the rear of the barrel. Matchlocks couldn’t be fired in the rain, and the burning fuses were easily visible at night. They took about a minute to reload, but with careful training in repeated firing (which Zeng implemented in his camps) a team of experienced matchlock gunners firing in sequence could keep up a steady barrage. The heavier taiqiangor “carried gun,” known in English as a gingal, was a large-bore matchlock about eight feet long that took three or four men to operate, either on a tripod or carried on two men’s shoulders. It could throw a one-pound ball nearly a mile. And finally there were the wheeled brass cannons—large ones on the walls of cities, smaller ones pulled along on campaign—which were expensive and therefore relatively rare.
The Green Standard used weapons provided by the government, but Zeng Guofan got what he could from the provincial authorities and then set up armories of his own to make the rest. The rebel side, for its part, had had to be even more resourceful: the Taiping raided the arms stores of cities they captured, relied heavily on farming implements, and cast their own small cannons while on the original campaign north. When under siege, they even learned to boil down structural bricks to extract saltpeter for makinggunpowder.38 In time, both sides would try to equip themselves with repeating carbines from the foreigners in Shanghai. As an indication of just how stagnant the development of military technology was at that point in China’s history (and of why those foreign guns would be so useful), when the Taiping captured the Hunanese city of Yuezhou in 1852, they unearthed a huge stash of rusty firearms left over from a war that had concluded in 1681. The guns might have been nearly two hundred years old, but the rebels were delighted to have them.39
In structure, the basic unit of organization for Zeng Guofan’s army was the ying, or battalion, which he formalized at 505 men, including officers.40 They could be grouped together to make forces of differing sizes but shared an internal structure that was inflexible. Each battalion was made up of four regular companies (shao)—designated fore, aft, right, and left—of 108 men each, plus a personal bodyguard of 72 men for the battalion commander and the battalion commander himself, to make 505. Each company was then broken down into eight squads (dui), of which two were gingal squads, two carried matchlock muskets, and four carried swords and spears. A normal squad had 10 soldiers, plus a squad officer and a cook. But since the gingals were so unwieldy, those squads had two extra, for 12 soldiers (three guns, with four men to operate each). Each company commander also had a seven-man entourage, including a lieutenant, five bodyguards, and a personal cook. The 72-man bodyguard of the battalion commander could be detached separately and operated as six squads, each with 10 soldiers, an officer, and a cook. Two of the squads manned the cannons, three carried swords and spears, and one carried muskets. Finally, there were the porters: 180 support personnel for each battalion, detailed to help carry the weapons, gunpowder, medicine, and clothing. Thus, cannons were few, and nearly half the soldiers didn’t use firearms at all. These battalions were intended to be self-supporting and self-disciplining, to which end the battalion commander’s 72-man bodyguard also functioned as a self-contained military police force to prevent the soldiers from committing crimes in nearby civilian towns when they were encamped.
To support the land troops, Zeng commissioned a freshwater navy to fight on the rivers and lakes. It was a completely novel plan; at the outset, neither he nor his generals had ever seen a gunboat, and there were no craftsmen in Hunan who knew how to build one. Nevertheless, he set up three shipyards and brought in outside experts to teach the locals how to build appropriate war craft. An adviser from Canton showed them how to make the large “fast crabs” that were the stock in trade of the southern opium smugglers, crowded with fourteen oars on either side and bearing a crew of forty-five. (Though they would prove so unwieldy that Zeng eventually abandoned them.) Two advisers from Guangxi province taught them how to make the more nimble “long dragons” and sampans that skimmed the southwestern riverways. The long dragons were ornate, colorful boats forty-five feet long and six across the beam, with sixteen oars and seven brass guns weighing about four hundred pounds apiece. They had a large sail mounted amidships and bristled with spears and swords and banners when they carried a full crew. The smaller sampans were open-decked with ten oars each, measuring thirty feet long and less than four wide, with a single brass gun pointing in each direction.41They were lovely vessels, and swift. As a young American described one he spotted on the Yangtze, “brightly varnished and bottom flat as boards can make it, she scarcely seems to touch the water.”42
By February 1854, Zeng Guofan had thirteen battalions of land troops ready to fight, supported by ten naval battalions with a fleet of more than two hundred war boats, a hundred river junks bearing supplies, and one large, grand vessel for a flagship.43 But it turned out that as a tactical commander, the bookish Zeng Guofan was an utter disaster. He was physically inept and could barely ride a horse. After some small initial success in pushing the rebels northward out of Hunan that spring, a brutal series of defeats sent his forces scurrying back through the province all the way to its capital, Changsha, as the rebels overran territory he had thought was secure. Following up on their victories against him, the Taiping pierced right through the heart of the province and conquered the major city ofXiangtan to the south of Changsha, which held one of his shipyards. They threw up defenses and commandeered a fleet of his boats. A separate Taiping force took the smaller city of Jinggang just to the north of the capital, and between them Changsha itself was now threatened. Zeng wrote a memorial to the throne taking full blame for his inexperience and asking to be punished.
In an attempt to break the potential siege of Changsha, Zeng divided his forces. He sent one column with naval support south toward Xiangtan and personally led a fleet of forty ships north to take back Jinggang. The river flowed from south to north, so Zeng was fighting with an upstream advantage. Nevertheless, the expected victory turned into a rout. Caught in a crosswind with a strong current, his inexperienced men lost control of their vessels. Those who didn’t drown outright saw their boats captured and burned by rebels who waited on the banks, or who blocked them with a fleet several times larger than Zeng’s. This time, he didn’t write a memorial but instead took matters into his own hands; he rowed out of sight of his officers and tried to drown himself. A worried secretary who had followed in secret saw him fall into the water and managed to drag him out. His officers carried him back to Changsha to recover.44
Each defeat gave fodder to his provincial critics, and even as he lay recovering from his suicide attempt a group of imperial officials in Changsha were petitioning for him to be punished and his army disbanded. 45 But then came word of a decisive victory by the land forces he had sent south to Xiangtan. Four days of incessant attacks against the rebels’ mudworks ended in a slaughter, with reports of ten thousand rebels killed and a thousand boats captured. The remainder of the Taiping force began to pull back in a wide retreat to the north, leaving Changsha safe for the time being. There was hope. Zeng soon learned to leave the battlefield command to others (as Tang Jian had told the emperor, his true talent was to use the talents of others). He had time to reconsolidate his forces and rebuild his navy, and through the summer and fall of 1854 they pushed the Taiping northward out of Hunan entirely and into Hubei province, where his forces reconquered its capital, the vital river city of Wuchang, in October.
The string of victories quieted his provincial critics for a time, but many in Hunan and Beijing remained leery of his unorthodox position. The Xianfeng emperor, at least, was delighted by the news that Zeng’s force had recaptured Wuchang. “It is astonishing,” he announced, “that Zeng Guofan, a mere scholar, could have accomplished such a wonderful deed!” But one of the emperor’s counselors took a more jaundiced view, admonishing him that in the long run, the result of a provincial from Hunan raising an army of 10,000 men loyal mainly to himself “would not be a blessing to the empire.”46 The emperor had no reply to that.
As his army grew, Zeng Guofan collected the best commanders he could find. Most of them were Hunanese, beginning with his closest acquaintances and neighbors and fanning out through the local networks of scholars. Three of his four younger brothers would serve as commanders: Guohua, who was thirty-two years old in 1854, when Zeng Guofan was forty-three; Guoquan, thirty; and Guobao, twenty-six. But along with the Hunanese there were also several key commanders from other provinces, brought in by recommendation or poached from the upper ranks of the Green Standard. Some were even Manchus, the most valuable of whom was a cavalry officer named Duolonga, who was exceptionally talented but high-handed and proudly illiterate in Chinese. His disdain for the non-Manchu commanders was palpable, and they for their part mostly refused to work with him.47 For specific skills Zeng Guofan also relied on outsiders—cavalrymen, for example, he recruited from northern provinces, where the flatter topography produced better horsemen than did mountainous Hunan. He set up a separate pay scale for non-Hunanese: the officers were paid considerably more, presumably because they lacked the regional loyalty that helped motivate his fellows, though at the lower levels it was the Hunanese soldiers and porters who were paid equal or higher wages, showing their value in his eyes. The great mass of lower officers and foot soldiers were always from Hunan, so Zeng’s overall organization came to be known as the Hunan Army.
It was a counterinsurgency force, and his motto—repeated constantly in his letters and commands—was “Love the People.” Without winning over the local populations, he believed, his army would have no hope of success. And given the well-known depredations of the regular imperial forces, he tried to ensure that the Hunan Army would carry itself with more restraint. This was partly for the sake of propaganda, spreading the moral vision of a benevolent imperial government that cared for its subjects. But it was also practical, as armies on campaign depended heavily on the surrounding population for their food. When there were reliable supply lines feeding back along the waterways to Hunan, his army could receive a steady stream of personnel, letters, gunpowder, and silver, as well as barges carrying the fundamental foodstuffs: rice, salt, cooking oil, and charcoal. But vegetables and meat had to be purchased by the soldiers from markets that sprang up near their camps. And laborers to build walls and dig ditches around those camps had to be hired from the local population.
Though the officers were scholars who lived in a world of books and philosophy, his men were unlettered. So Zeng instructed them with songs. At one point later in the war, disturbed by frequent reports of misconduct by his soldiers, he composed a song titled “Love the People” to try to teach them how to behave while on campaign. Among the rules in the song (which reflected just as well what the soldiers were doing as what Zeng wanted them not to do): Don’t steal doors from people’s houses (to make fires). Don’t trample their crops or make lots of noise when they are sleeping. Don’t take their cookware or snatch their ducks and chickens. Don’t force them to dig ditches. If you have no money, don’t pick vegetables by the side of the road. “For every man you impress into service as a porter,” went the song, “a family is left weeping and living in fear.” And “We don’t steal, the rebels steal; if we plunder, then we’re just like the rebels.” The song ended with the essence of his counterinsurgent vision of unity between the army and the peasants (a sentiment deliberately echoed in the early Red Army of the twentieth century): “The soldiers and the people are like one family, and no matter what, we won’t bully them. Sing ‘Love the People’ every day, and in Heaven there will be peace, on Earth there will be peace, and among men there will be peace.”48 He ordered his commanders to teach their men to sing it whenever they had free time.49
After taking Wuchang in October 1854, the Hunan Army began to claw its way down the Yangtze River to the east. Their home province was finally secure behind them, and between their position at Wuchang and the massive Green Standard siege camps atNanjing lay a winding stretch of river about four hundred miles long (three hundred as the crow flew) along which the Taiping held all of the strategic walled cities. As long as the rebels held those cities, they would always have a pathway open to their capital and the imperial siege of Nanjing could never be completed. So it fell to Zeng Guofan, against terrible odds, to take them back.
The Taiping armies were larger and had greater momentum, so Zeng Guofan’s successes depended mostly on the enemy’s attentions being directed elsewhere—though in most cases, his army’s initial victories were followed by such sharp and complete reversals that any self-confidence he managed to gain was repeatedly broken. After pushing down along the river as far as Jiujiang, the city that commanded the junction of the Yangtze River with the enormous Lake Poyang to its south, a horrifically ill-conceived division of his forces in the winter of 1855 ended in February with his flagship in flames and his best ships bottled up in the lake by Taiping forces, unable to connect to the river and therefore useless to the greater army. As the scale of the loss became obvious and his men reached the verge of mutiny, he attempted suicide a second time by riding a horse awkwardly into the thick of the battle. Once again his officers managed to pull him back before he could complete the deed.50
After the fiasco at Jiujiang in February 1855, Zeng wound up stranded for eighteen months in Jiangxi province just to the west of Hunan, with more than ten thousand men but no funds with which to pay their salaries. The officials of that province were as contemptuous of him as the ones in Hunan had been, and they not only refused to lend support but mocked him publicly, leaving him humiliated and helpless to act as the Taiping armies stormed right back up the Yangtze and took back Wuchang that April. Only the bloody suppression of the Eastern King’s coup attempt in the rebel capital in 1856, and the lull in Taiping power that followed it, finally gave him a window of relief. Toward the end of 1857, his father died and he returned home again for mourning. Disheartened by his failures and frustrated by the intransigent officials who constantly blocked his efforts, he submitted his resignation and left the army in the hands of his senior officers. The emperor accepted his resignation, with the condition that he would have to come back out to fight again if called. The leave of absence lasted about a year.51
Though the regional nature of Zeng Guofan’s army made for usually close-knit fighting ranks, it also meant that the morale of his soldiers depended heavily on the security of Hunan province itself. It was therefore an extremely delicate matter to lead the army out of the province and down the Yangtze River into someone else’s home territory. After all, the initial formation of the militia had been to restore order to Hunan in the wake of the Taiping invasion, and even Zeng Guofan’s own decision to accept the emperor’s mission hinged on his father’s conviction that it was necessary to protect their home district. But once the goal of putting down the bandits and Taiping remnants in Hunan province was accomplished, Zeng set his sights down the river through Hubei, Jiangxi, and Anhui toward Nanjing. If he ever felt any personal misgivings about moving his army out of their home province, he did not share them with his family. By the summer of 1860, he would write in a letter home that his life now belonged to the empire as a whole. “Now that I’ve heard the will of Heaven,” he wrote, “whether it takes me to Anhui or Jiangnan, there’s nowhere I will not go. Early on, I put thoughts of death out of my mind, and when the time comes to face my end, I will have no feelings of regret. This is a great blessing.”52
His officers and men, however, were not so divinely inspired, and in leaving Hunan they were also leaving their homes—and their parents, children, and wives—undefended. His orders directing the Hunan Army’s campaign into the neighboring provinces of Jiangxi and Anhui therefore took care to point out that by fighting in those provinces the army would be protecting Hunan at its rear. But in a war with multiple moving fronts, such a strategy was sometimes untenable. In the spring of 1859, with his army bogged down in Jiangxi province fighting for the pottery-producing city of Jingdezhen on the far side of Lake Poyang, a separate, massive Taiping army under Shi Dakai the Wing King numbering between 200,000 and 300,000 soldiers (according to Zeng’s intelligence) swept across Jiangxi to their south, and then coursed northward across the border into Hunan behind them.
Shi Dakai’s invasion of Hunan was a shocking blow to Zeng Guofan’s men, who began begging for leave to go home. But he didn’t see any possibility of pulling back from Jingdezhen, which would only open a separate route for Taiping forces to threaten the upstream territories. So he transferred only a handful of commanders back to Hunan, with orders to pull together all of the discharged, furloughed, and retired Hunan Army veterans they could lay their hands on. And he asked his other officers to reassure their troops. “Hunan needn’t worry that it doesn’t have soldiers or commanders,” he wrote to them. “Its only worry is that we couldn’t pull them together in time to stop the rebels at the border.” He had faith that the forces mustering in Hunan could hold off the invasion and ordered his commanders at Jingdezhen to “tell your men to go on fighting with their hearts at ease and to let go of their worries about affairs back home.”53 It was a wishful reassurance, but the hastily assembled defense forces did ultimately succeed, with 40,000 of them holding out through that summer against Shi Dakai’s army at the walled city of Baoqing deep within the province, only thirty miles from Zeng’s own native home. Shi Dakai finally gave up the siege and took his army southward into Guangxi in August. Only after Jingdezhen fell that same month did Zeng Guofan begin to send more help back to Hunan.54
· · ·
The more experience he gained, the more stubborn he became. It was a trait born of balancing his responsibility to his own people—his family, his soldiers, their families in Hunan—against his responsibility to the Xianfeng emperor and the wider Qing Empire. When he drove his men to continue fighting through their homesick agony that spring and summer of 1859 at Jingdezhen, he was putting the imperial campaign against the Taiping rebels first, asking his men to set aside their personal worries and trust him. But sometimes it worked the other way. After he captured Jingdezhen, the emperor ordered him to take his army up the Yangtze River all the way to Sichuan, to the northwest of Hunan, to guard against the possibility that Shi Dakai would ultimately make his way up there and threaten control of that enormous and wealthy province. Such a redeployment would take Zeng Guofan and his army out of the main theater of the war, away from the campaign that protected Hunan at its rear and that—if it did succeed in conquering Nanjing—would give them credit for helping to put down the rebellion. So in this case, Zeng put himself and his men first.
He rebuffed the imperial orders by pleading compassion for the misery of his soldiers. “The Hunan militiamen in Jiangxi have been worrying about their homes,” he wrote to the emperor. “They are responsible for their families, and their feelings of homesickness are strong. Because the situation in Jingdezhen was so serious, I wouldn’t allow them to take leave, but if we now pick up and start marching toward Sichuan, our route will pass through Hunan province and one after another they’ll all ask for leave. I don’t have the power to stop them.”55 This was the drawback to working with militias, he said, for “after a long time on the march, they often start to think of going home.” Even if he could keep them from taking leave to care for their families, the journey to Sichuan was arduous, more than a thousand miles, passing through the Three Gorges and other dangers, and his army was exhausted by the fighting in Jiangxi. “Personally,” he wrote, “I fear the men wouldn’t follow me gladly.” His appeal worked, and with the support of others who petitioned that he was needed in the east, he was relieved from marching his army to Sichuan and left to continue the campaign downriver from Hunan.
But even as he tried to balance his affection for his men against his duty to the emperor, the sacrifices sometimes caught up to him. For the intimacy of their local origins also meant that his army’s losses were felt all the more bitterly. Zeng Guofan’s brother Guohua had developed into a respected battlefield commander when, in November 1858, he led his forces into a slaughter at the hands of a Taiping army at the town of Three Rivers in Anhui province. Guohua died in the battle, and the senior commander committedsuicide. Altogether, six thousand Hunanese soldiers were massacred at Three Rivers, many of them from Zeng Guofan’s own home district. Soon afterward came the butchery at Jingdezhen, and the Hunanese casualties mounted further. As Zeng Guofan mourned the loss of his brother Guohua at camp, and as another of his brothers (who would himself die in the war) swore revenge for their family’s loss, back in Hunan the rice-terraced hills of Zeng’s childhood rang with the cries of his grieving neighbors, who everywhere shouted from their rooftops, calling to the faraway ghosts of their dead sons and begging them to come home.56
Up until 1860, Zeng Guofan’s army on the Yangtze played only a supporting role in the overall imperial campaign, which centered on the Green Standard forces under Zhang Guoliang and He Chun that were laying their ever-tightening siege of Nanjing. But then, just as it seemed that victory was within their reach, came the great reversal in the spring of 1860, when Hong Rengan’s plan to break the encirclement succeeded with such stunning effect. By the end of May, the imperial armies were destroyed and their commanders dead, and the Taiping were exploding out of Nanjing toward the east. In the leadership vacuum that ensued, Zeng Guofan’s time came at last. In June 1860, the Xianfeng emperor appointed him to the powerful governor-generalship of Anhui, Jiangsu, and Jiangxi, the three provinces most heavily ravaged by the war. In late August, Xianfeng also named him imperial commissioner in charge of the military affairs in those same three provinces, establishing him as the new commander in chief of the dynasty’s forces in the Yangtze River Valley.
The frustration of constantly having to fend for his own army began to fall away, thanks to the desperation of an emperor who had (as one of Zeng Guofan’s assistants put it) nowhere else to turn.57 After years of scrabbling with recalcitrant provincial officials and jealous Green Standard commanders, those two appointments put Zeng Guofan simultaneously in charge of both the civil and military administrations in the primary theater of war. As commander in chief of the military, he could direct the remnants of the imperial army and the local militias to act in support of his Hunan forces. And as governor-general of the three provinces, he could appoint his protégés to important civil posts where they could squeeze the resources of those provinces—at least the parts of them that were still intact and still under imperial control—to give his army the funding and supplies it needed.58
The serendipitous promotions made him, if anything, even more stubborn. There was a long tradition of independent-minded commanders in China’s history (“When the general is outside the capital,” went the saying, “the ruler’s orders won’t all be followed”). And as Zeng Guofan developed into an experienced leader and gained further control over his own part of the campaign, it appeared at times that for all his professed loyalty to the dynasty, he would take direction from no authority above himself. His years of service in the capital before the war had taught him how ineffective the bureaucrats of the central government could be, how inexperienced and self-gratifying, and he did not want their inexperience to affect his campaign. Trusting only his own developing sense of strategy and knowing his army’s limitations, he all but ignored many of the orders that issued from Beijing. As in 1859, when he had refused the orders to chase Shi Dakai into Sichuan, now in 1860 a new set of orders arrived, commanding him to abandon his campaign in Anhui and take his troops immediately downriver to protect Suzhou and Shanghai. But on the formal excuse that his forces were insufficient to help at the moment, he stayed where he was.
The strategy he had decided to follow, and from which he did everything possible not to depart, was one of encirclement. It was more than a little reminiscent of his obsession with the game of Go. He laid out his strategic vision in a memorial to the throne on November 11, 1859, while he was still operating as a supplement to the Green Standard’s siege of Nanjing.59 The dynasty was fighting two kinds of rebels, Zeng explained, and a distinction should be made between the “roving bandits” with constantly moving armies and the “pretender bandits” who wanted a capital and a throne. Shi Dakai, who had just crisscrossed the empire, and the Nian rebels in the north, with their vagabond armies on horseback, were all roving bandits. The only way to fight them was to prepare for their arrival, hold your position, and try to blunt their momentum. But with the pretenders—the most important being the Heavenly King in his capital at Nanjing—you could fight them by “severing their branches and leaves” (cutting them off from the foraging armies that supplied them) and then crushing them in their nests. He pointed out that the Green Standard had failed to surround Nanjing completely (indeed, the one free path they had left open would prove their undoing), and he believed that to really cut the city off, the imperials would first need to conquer a string of fortified cities along the Yangtze to its west, one by one, beginning with the Brave King’s base at Anqing, the capital of Anhui province. Anqing, held by the rebels since 1853, was their farthest major anchor of control up the Yangtze. It projected defensive power over both the river and land approaches to Nanjing from the west. It was the choke point, and as long as the Taiping held it there was no way for Zeng Guofan’s forces to move beyond them and no way to complete a siege of Nanjing. But if he could cut Anqing off and crush it, he thought he might be able to open the way to the rebel capital.
On the ground it wasn’t such a simple matter. The rebels had vast numerical superiority (by 1860, Zeng Guofan’s militia still only had about 60,000 men total),60 and they were all but impossible to contend with in open combat. Reports compiled by his intelligence officers showed the wild range of irregular formations the rebels had been known to use. There was the protean “crab formation”—with a cluster of troops in the middle (the body of the crab) and five lines reaching out on either side—that could rapidly reconfigure itself as two columns, four columns, or a crosslike configuration of five phalanxes, depending on what they encountered. There was the “hundred birds formation,” in which a large division would disintegrate into small clusters of twenty-five soldiers, each roaming freely like birds in a flock or stars in a galaxy so that it was impossible to tell the size of their force or where to attack them. There was the “crouching tiger,” used in hilly terrain, where 10,000 or more rebels would hide close to the ground in total silence and then, as the imperials passed through a valley, suddenly leap up together in ambush.61 In an open fight, the imperials generally didn’t stand a chance.
So winning was a matter of manipulating the battlefield to his own advantage. In every military engagement, Zeng wrote in an essay on strategy, one side would always be the host and the other would be the guest. The host always had the advantage. The defenders of a walled city were always the host, while those who attacked it were the guest. The same was true of a fortified camp. If two armies met in the open, the one to reach the site of battle first would be the host, while the latecomer would be the guest. With two armies facing each other in stalemate, it was a matter of patience: The guest was the army that first gave a shout and fired its guns. The host was the one that waited.62 With an inherently weaker army, Zeng Guofan tried to ensure that the rebels would always be their guests: by luring them into attacking his own defensive works or, failing that, provoking them into making the first move. To that end, he settled on a practice of using tightly fortified camps, planted in close proximity to the rebel forces, in hopes of drawing them into making the first attack.
In June 1860, when the majority of Taiping forces were distracted by their walkover victories in the east, Zeng Guofan moved into Anhui from the west and sent his younger brother Zeng Guoquan to lay down a quiet siege at Anqing. Guoquan led 10,000 Hunanese troops up close to the city wall, pitched camp, and—with the help of laborers hired from the local population—began to build two high earthen walls underscored on each side by a twenty-foot-wide moat. The walls ran parallel to the wall of the city and sandwiched the Hunan Army camp between them. The inner wall, facing the city, was to protect them from the forces within, and the outer wall was to protect them from relief forces. In essence it was, on a smaller scale, their own walled city. To further protect against reinforcements from the north, 20,000 cavalry under the Manchu commander Duolonga set up a line of obstruction outside the rebel stronghold of Tongcheng, forty miles north of Anqing, while Zeng Guofan’s naval forces set up blockades on the Yangtze River a few miles above and below the city.
In late July, Zeng Guofan took the rest of his forces, about 30,000 men total, into the mountains of southern Anhui below the river. He made his headquarters in the walled town of Qimen, in a valley about sixty miles to the southeast of Anqing, with six battalions of his own. It was a rugged country with few roads, and he stationed the rest of his men under their commanders at a radius to control the approach from the east and to maintain an overland supply line to the west, leading through Jingdezhen (which was now his) back into Jiangxi province.
At first sight, he knew Qimen was the perfect place to make his headquarters. It was enveloped on all sides by a sawtooth quilt of mountain ranges, utterly unapproachable from the north or south, and his own forces controlled the road that ran from east to west. He was delighted. “The peaks rise ever higher in layers, and the mountains are four times as numerous as the ones back home,” he wrote when he first got there. “There are sweet springs and luxuriant forests. It is delightfully secluded and quiet, and the passes need no more than a company to hold them. This is a place we can defend, with no need for greater forces.”63 From there, Zeng could coordinate the overall campaign for Anqing from a point of safety.
But as the summer of 1860 gave way to fall and the new war with Britain and France erupted in the north, his sanctuary in Qimen began to feel more like a prison. On October 10, orders from Beijing came, instructing him to send his very best field commander, a man from Sichuan province named Bao Chao, along with his 3,000 veteran troops, to help Senggelinqin’s banner forces defend against the Allies in the north. Zeng Guofan didn’t think his army could possibly hold its position at Anqing without Bao Chao’s support, and he was certain that Senggelinqin’s elite Mongol cavalry could defend the capital. So, despite the immediacy of the emperor’s crisis, he extemporized. It would be January before Bao Chao’s forces could arrive in Beijing, he reasoned, and by then it would be winter and surely they would no longer be needed. In the meantime, he had staked all of his forces on the siege of Anqing, with almost nothing to hold his rear upstream. Failure at Anqing would throw open the gates for the Taiping to take back the Yangtze up toWuchang and even threaten Hunan again. So he held fast to his foothold in Anhui with an almost pathological focus. His unwillingness to budge was as much a product of fear as of stubbornness, though; in private letters home, he confessed that he was barely holding his own.64
He did not obey the order, at least not directly. Instead, when Zeng Guofan finally wrote back, he asked the emperor to choose which of his commanders (including Zeng himself) he would prefer to lead a detachment of Hunan Army soldiers north to help Senggelinqin fight the foreigners. But there was no reason for such a memorial, other than to delay the dismemberment of his forces in Anhui.65 It took two full weeks for a letter to travel the nearly eight hundred miles between Qimen and Beijing, and Zeng well knew that by the time he got his answer back at least four weeks would have passed. He had just stolen another month to continue his siege of Anqing. “Everywhere in the entire empire the rebels have gained the upper hand,” he wrote in frustration to his brothers, “but here in Anqing alone, in this one single city, they are on the wane. How can we lightly pull back?”66 With the entire world falling apart around him, he held his ground, believing that if he gave up even the small advantage he had in his mountain valley in the heart of the kingdom, all would be lost.
October wore on with a cold and persistent rain that ground Zeng Guofan’s spirits into a bleak depression. He paced restlessly in his quarters, brooding on the fate of the emperor and wondering what he should do. He played endless games of Go, and obsessed about the passage of time.67 “My eyesight dims with each passing day,” he wrote to his brothers, “and my energy fades. Day by day I feel older. I live in deep terror that I am not up to this great responsibility.”68
The campaign on which he had staked everything was not going well. Anqing was shut up like a drum. The rebel garrison inside apparently had plentiful stores and could wait as long as it needed for reinforcements. One of his most beloved commanders hadn’t been heard from in days, since his garrison in the nearby town of Huizhou—which was supposed to protect Zeng’s eastern flank—had suddenly been overrun by Taiping raiders. Rebel forces pressed invisibly from all sides of Qimen, and the town itself was clogged with thousands of defeated soldiers, who looted the shops and left nothing to buy in the markets.69 Still, no word came from Beijing. So he held his ground, worried, and wondered if he would have to abandon Anqing to the Taiping—and with it southern Anhui,Wuchang, and possibly even Hunan and the central empire.
Finally, on the afternoon of November 6, 1860, he opened a letter from a friend in the north and learned for the first time that the British and French armies had not only successfully invaded Beijing but had gone on to burn the emperor’s palace to the ground. His numbness gave way to shock. “I have no words to describe the depths of this pain,” he wrote in his diary.70 The ranks of the bannermen were scattered in the north. The Green Standard was routed in the east. The dynasty’s traditional forces had failed on both fronts, against both enemies. Zeng Guofan now faced the grim prospect that he, alone, in all of the empire, still commanded an unbroken army. His campaign in Anhui was the only one left.