PART THREE
CHAPTER 12
Zeng Guofan needed a larger army. His tightly knit Hunan forces had prevailed in capturing the city of Anqing, but once that foothold was gained, a vast territory of rebel control with tens of millions of subjects spread out to their east. The Taiping still held several important towns in northern Anhui, where Chen Yucheng the Brave King now bristled in retreat, and both sides of the river downstream toward Nanjing were firmly in rebel hands as well. And of course, beyond Nanjing there was the entire eastern coast—which was a hopeless cause. His men were exhausted after their yearlong campaign for Anqing, and many wanted to go home; he worried that lethargy was setting in.1 They could hold this one city quite securely, though, so while he mulled over his next steps, Zeng focused on reconstruction. He took over the government offices in Anqing. He petitioned Beijing to keep the city as the provincial capital despite its years outside imperial control. Under his direction, an army of laborers began rebuilding the city’s Confucian academy and examination hall (the most tangible symbols of imperial civilization). They repaired the city wall. The new governor-general finally had a proper base of command in one of his three provinces.
The relatively small territory under Zeng Guofan’s immediate control—mainly the southern half of Anhui province—was in a ghastly state. South of the river, through the mountainous counties around Qimen and Xiuning, the year and a half of fighting for Anqing had completely broken the agricultural cycle. The rice fields in the valleys were choked with weeds, the tea bushes on the hillsides unpruned and growing wild. The peasants who had survived the fighting by fleeing into the hills had run out of food and were starving. His own funds were short, so there was only so much he could do for them (it was those peasants who, by growing rice and tea, were supposed to support his army, not the other way around). Under Zeng’s direction, the Anhui civil government set up relief stations in the mountainous southern part of the province to hand out porridge to the famine-stricken population. There were seven stations, each capable of feeding three thousand people, and he hoped they might do some good, though he admitted in a letter to his family in Hunan that things had gotten so bad in southern Anhui that he was starting to hear rumors of peasants eating their dead.2
The entire imperial war against the Taiping was now in Zeng Guofan’s hands, and as his perspective shifted to account for a new field of combat that was far larger than his focused campaign for Anqing, he began reshaping his army to compensate. In November 1861, two months after the conquest of Anqing, he sent his brother Guoquan back to Hunan to recruit 6,000 more Hunanese soldiers for the coming push toward Nanjing. Politically, it was a risky move; he didn’t yet know of the coup d’état in Beijing that had removed Sushun from power, and to continue to amass personal forces—recruited by his own brother in his own home province—was a provocation to critics in Beijing, who saw him as a growing threat to the central government’s authority. But he was unaware of the change in government when he sent off his memorial to Beijing on November 16 explaining his decision to call up new forces from Hunan. “We can take advantage of the fear we have struck into the rebels and drive straight in at their nest in Nanjing,” he promised—but only if his army had sufficient troop strength. “Nothing would be better than for Zeng Guoquan’s forces to drive deep into the belly of the rebel territory,” he wrote. “What a shame it would be to sit by and allow this opportunity to pass!” The new Hunan recruits, he explained, could garrison the cities and towns his army had already conquered, which would free up the veterans to go on campaign with his brother downriver toward the rebel capital.3
But even if his brother’s recruitment efforts were successful, those extra forces wouldn’t be enough. As he had maintained from the start, the only way to destroy the enemy’s “nest” was to surround it completely and cut off all avenues of supply and reinforcement, so the field of war encompassed more than just the two hundred miles of riverine flatlands lying between Anqing and the rebel capital. Even if he could somehow push his brother’s army straight through to Nanjing, and even if he could keep that army supplied along the river, the capital would still be open on all other sides. To cut Nanjing off completely, he would have to gain control of northern Anhui, where the Brave King’s army still loomed. He would have to establish firm control of southern Anhui below the river, a territory to which he had barely managed to cling during the Anqing campaign. He would also need to control the southern approaches from Zhejiang province and its capital, Hangzhou. He especially needed the cities downstream to the east of Nanjing that the Taiping had so deftly conquered in 1860—Wuxi, Changzhou, and above all the garden city of Suzhou, where Li Xiucheng had made his base.
A strategy began to take shape in his mind. He envisioned three separate armies, one of which would depart from Anqing and march eastward downriver toward Nanjing. Another, under Zuo Zongtang, would enter the southern part of Zhejiang province from Jiangxi, then cut northward to come at the provincial capital of Hangzhou from below. The third—which posed the greatest challenge logistically—would begin in Jiangsu province and fight its way back inward toward Suzhou and Nanjing from the east. To realize this vision, he somehow had to find a way to position a loyal army clear on the opposite side of the rebel kingdom, but there was no safe circuit that could get them there, and sending thousands of soldiers right through the enemy’s midsection posed more danger than he cared to consider. But the question was, in a sense, moot, because before he could come to any decision as to how to plant a force on the opposite side of Nanjing, such a force had to exist in the first place. And even as he sent his brother back to Hunan to recruit more soldiers, he worried that they were tapping their home province too deeply and the well of strong young Hunanese men would soon run dry.4
And so, in a major departure from earlier practice, he cast his net more widely and authorized a willowy thirty-eight-year-old scholar from Anhui named Li Hongzhang to return to his home in central Anhui in order to muster an entirely new provincial militia that could supplement Zeng’s own forces from Hunan. Li Hongzhang was, like Zeng Guofan, a Hanlin scholar, part of the infinitesimal elite at the top of the examination system. He was eleven years younger than Zeng Guofan, and his father had passed thejinshiexamination in Beijing in 1838 in the same small group with Zeng Guofan, which had bonded the two elder men together for life. When Li Hongzhang had first arrived in Beijing in 1844 after passing his provincial examination, Zeng Guofan had agreed to serve as his teacher while Li prepared to take the jinshi, which he passed with distinction in 1847.5 Li Hongzhang was therefore tied to Zeng Guofan both through the friendship between Zeng and his father, which made Zeng something like an uncle to him, and, even more important, by having taken Zeng Guofan as his teacher. In Confucian parlance, a student and his teacher were like a son and his father.
Nevertheless, it had actually taken some time for Zeng Guofan to come to a point where he would trust Li Hongzhang with responsibility for an army. The brilliant young Li had lofty ambitions of his own, of which Zeng Guofan, as his teacher, was well aware. Despite their years of familiarity and even though Li Hongzhang’s older brother already served on Zeng Guofan’s staff, Zeng did not welcome his student when Li Hongzhang first came to the Hunan Army’s headquarters looking for employment in 1858. In fact, he ignored Li completely for the first month he was there. Frustrated, Li Hongzhang finally pressed an aide to ask the general why he wouldn’t see him or speak to him. Zeng Guofan replied to the aide with only slightly feigned sarcasm, suggesting that perhaps the Hunan Army was “too shallow a beach in which to harbor so large a ship as Li.”6
Over the following years, the general worked to break the younger man of his arrogance (having him dragged roughly from bed by guards when he overslept, for example), and Li worked to convince the general of his loyalty and humility. They had their disagreements, and Li even abandoned him for a time at Qimen, but by early 1862 their relationship was solid and Zeng Guofan decided that he was the man to entrust with a personal command second in size only to his own. Zeng Guofan had commanders who were more loyal and who were more experienced and skilled in warfare than Li Hongzhang, but none of them had achieved the high rank in the examination system that the Hanlin scholar Li Hongzhang had attained. When it came to generals, Zeng Guofan placed a great premium on their scholarship.
Starting in early 1862, Li Hongzhang began to mobilize a regional militia nearly identical to the one from Hunan. He used the same recruitment methods Zeng had pioneered in Hunan: personal recruitment in the home district, forming companies of soldiers from the same homes to serve under officers already known to them. By these means he pulled together several thousand Anhui peasants whom he brought to Anqing in February 1862 to be trained by veteran units of Zeng Guofan’s Hunan Army. The Anhui Army would follow the same lines of organization, the same methods of indoctrination, the same rules of camp and combat that Zeng Guofan had laid out for his Hunan troops. Li Hongzhang’s command was thus a nearly perfect mirror image of the military force Zeng Guofan had built around himself, with the same inner logic of personal relationships—only from a different part of the empire (though even that line was blurred by the absorption into Li’s force of some of the Hunan battalions that trained them). Otherwise it was a replica to scale, with the only significant difference being that it was subordinate; Li Hongzhang took orders from Zeng Guofan, while Zeng Guofan—despite the ritual of requesting permissions from Beijing—didn’t really take orders from anyone.
The empress dowager and Prince Gong ultimately decided to keep Zeng Guofan in their service after the execution of Sushun and the purge of his followers. They had no particular reason to trust this Chinese general over a loyal ethnic Manchu, but they also knew they had no hope of containing the Taiping without his army’s support (nor, given the delinquency of the traditional imperial forces, any possibility of reining him in should he defy their authority). And so, in late November 1861, two weeks after the execution of Sushun, they issued a series of edicts in the name of the child emperor, which reconfirmed the lofty civil and military appointments Xianfeng had originally granted to Zeng Guofan at Sushun’s urging: Zeng would remain the governor-general of the three provinces of Anhui, Jiangxi, and Jiangsu, and he would simultaneously be imperial military commissioner for those same three provinces.7 But the new regime did not stop there, and in a sign of their desperation to gain and hold on to Zeng Guofan’s loyalty, Prince Gong and the empress dowager even increased the honors, giving him military control of Zhejiang province as well. The governors of all four provinces—the richest and most densely populated in the empire—would fall under his direct command. No other Chinese official in the Qing dynasty had ever held such power.
The news of his further promotion arrived in Zeng Guofan’s headquarters before the news of the coup did, and it both stunned and mystified him. He received the edicts of reappointment and promotion on December 15, 1861, learning of his new responsibility for Zhejiang province just as it was crumbling under the rebel onslaught; Ningbo had fallen six days earlier, and the provincial capital, Hangzhou, was drowning in the siege that would break it in two weeks. It reawakened his old fears of inadequacy and failure. “This power is too great,” he wrote in his diary. “My stature will be too high, and my undeserved reputation has outgrown itself. This terrifies me to the extreme.” He had once been told that it was better to live a long life than a life of wealth and power, and only now did he finally understand what that meant. Awake in the middle of night, he sat at his desk and brooded over the fates of others in history whose reputations had grown so far beyond their actual merit. His conclusion was that they seldom came to a good end.8
Once he finally learned about the coup and the execution of the regents, however, the new surfeit of honors began to make more sense. On December 23, a letter from a friend in Beijing informed him that the imperial government had fallen into the hands of the unknown empress dowager, who now ruled “from behind a screen.” Three days later, a shipment of priceless gifts arrived in Anqing for Zeng Guofan: rare ceremonial robes, furs, silks, an imperial jade ring, carpets, and other treasures sent by the empress dowager.9The message was clear. He was embarrassed by the new government’s overreaching, desperate attempts to secure his loyalty and wrote repeatedly to decline the four-province military commission.10 When in February 1862 he learned that they had named him an imperial grand secretary as well, he sent a memorial to the throne asking the government to please refrain from giving his family any more honors until they had actually managed to reconquer Nanjing.11
Despite his protestations, however, once it was clear that the empress dowager would do almost anything to ensure Zeng Guofan’s continued loyalty, he began to make use of his new power. With complicity from Beijing, the early months of 1862 saw what was, essentially, a complete takeover of the civil administration of eastern China by Zeng Guofan and his protégés. While he held on to the top position as governor-general of Anhui, Jiangxi, and Jiangsu, he put his own trusted lieutenants into the individual governorships just below him. His loyal student Li Hongzhang became expectant governor of Jiangsu, the province that contained Shanghai, Suzhou, and Nanjing. His Hunanese neighbor Zuo Zongtang, the commander who had held open Qimen’s supply lines during the Anqing campaign, was named governor of Zhejiang province, with the important cities of Ningbo and Hangzhou. Two of his other protégés became the governors of Jiangxi and Anhui. The entire imperial government in the theater of war, including parts of its upstream hinterland, was now commanded by men, primarily from Hunan, whose strongest bonds of personal loyalty were to Zeng Guofan and no one else.12
Regarding these appointments, if a province was under relatively stable imperial control, as Jiangxi was, a handpicked governor meant that Zeng Guofan could redirect much of its tax revenue (drastically reduced from peacetime levels but still meaningful in the aggregate) to support the salaries and materials needed by his troops in the provinces where the heaviest fighting was taking place. But in provinces such as Jiangsu and Zhejiang that were under rebel control, the governorships functioned more like prizes dangled before a given general’s eyes; if he could reconquer his designated province from the rebels then he could take his seat of power in its capital and enjoy the life of power and prestige that would follow.
Of course, the imperial government was using exactly the same principle to impel Zeng Guofan himself. His powerful appointments and honors were the strongest incentive (really the only incentive) the central government could give him to sacrifice his life in a war to uphold the dynasty against the rebels. And Nanjing was the greatest prize of all. It was not just the rebel capital but the traditional seat of power of the towering governor-generalship of Jiangsu, Anhui, and Jiangxi. If the Taiping could be defeated, it could be his. As his brother Guoquan was recruiting new troops from Hunan to prepare for the campaign against Nanjing, and as his student Li Hongzhang was assembling the new Anhui Army, Zeng Guofan’s farthest gaze was fixed on the recovery of the Taiping capital and the eternal personal glory—for himself, for his dear brothers, and for the entire Zeng family and its descendants—that awaited them there. Above any other factor, this was what guaranteed Zeng Guofan’s continued loyalty to the Qing. For if the dynasty should fall, there would be no glory; there would be no power, no immortal inheritance for his sons. The government had led him into a position where the two goals—to recover the rebel capital for the dynasty and to gain the city of Nanjing for his family—were simultaneous and inseparable. And so, for the sake of his brothers and sons, he lashed himself anew to the Manchus even as their dynasty sputtered at the edge of collapse.
Things did not go well for Hong Rengan that winter. From the outset, his career in Nanjing had been riven by tensions. His unswerving loyalty to his cousin the Heavenly King pulled him in one direction, while the foreigners he tried to win over to the Taiping’s side pulled him in another. The missionaries demanded that he “correct” the rebel doctrines, while his own people expected him to gain the foreigners’ support in their war against the Manchus. Both, in their way, were proving impossible. The tensions had worsened rapidly during his absence for the Anqing campaign, and as Josiah Cox had seen, by the autumn of 1861, after his return, he was already close to the breaking point. The foreign missionaries were bringing him little but empty promises in Nanjing, while their countries’ diplomats treated the Taiping kings rudely and high-handedly, making outrageous demands that Hong Rengan had to answer for. They took advantage of the rebels’ constant appeals for friendship and gave nothing in return.
Hong Rengan had staked his reputation with his cousin on those appeals for friendship, and the many kings and commanders of the Taiping field armies continued to plead their affection for their British and American “brothers” because the Shield King had told them to. But as the appeals continued to fall on deaf ears, he came under attack in the capital. He was the target of whisper campaigns, embarrassed by charges that his cherished foreign missionaries were subverting the Heavenly King’s authority and that by protecting and encouraging them, he might even be a danger to the Taiping cause himself. By the time Cox visited him, Hong Rengan was trying to remove himself from the world of the foreigners; when he got too close to them, as with Cox, it was his worried brother who stepped in to try to protect him. By the winter of 1862, the only missionary left in Nanjing was Issachar Roberts.
And then even Roberts left him.
As the American preacher told it, he had to leave Nanjing because on January 13, 1862, Hong Rengan finally lost his mind altogether. On that day, said Roberts, the Shield King broke into his upstairs suite of rooms with a long sword in hand, “without a moment’s warning or just cause,” and murdered Roberts’s Chinese servant right where he stood. And then, “after having slain my poor harmless, helpless boy,” Hong Rengan turned on Roberts himself, trying to provoke the white-bearded missionary into raising his hand so he could finish him with the very same sword. Hong Rengan leaped “most fiend-like” onto the corpse of the servant, stomping his silk-clad foot on its lifeless head. Then he rushed at Roberts, shoving the bench on which he was sitting. When Roberts didn’t respond, Hong Rengan picked up a cup of tea and flung it into the preacher’s face. Then he grabbed the old man, shook him, and struck an open-handed blow across the right side of his head. Roberts turned, and Hong Rengan struck him again, on the left, hard enough to make his ears ring. The preacher took the blows without resistance until Hong Rengan finally let him drop and shouted at him “like a dog, to be gone out of his presence.”13
Roberts escaped on a passing British gunboat a week later, leaving behind all of his books and clothing in the rush. He turned up in Shanghai on January 30, wild-eyed and breathless, making his first appearance in the foreign settlement since his departure to join the rebels sixteen months earlier. He told anyone who would listen to him that Hong Rengan had gone insane. He published his account soon after arriving, with a long list of accusations: that Hong Rengan had murdered his servant, that he had tried to kill Roberts himself, that he had even stolen all of Roberts’s books and clothing. “I have hitherto been a friend to [this] revolutionary movement,” he wrote for all to read, but “am now as much opposed to them … as I ever was in favour of them.” The rebels’ chief foreign apologist would now be their shrillest critic.
It wouldn’t come out until later, but the American preacher’s story was mostly a product of his own eccentric imagination. Just as he had exaggerated freely to sing the praises of the rebels, so did he now do the same to excoriate them. The “slain” servant seems to have shown up later in Shanghai, quite alive. The books and clothing that Roberts accused Hong Rengan of stealing also arrived in Shanghai and were retrieved by the old missionary. And his story changed with retelling. In the original version, he said that Hong Rengan’s “coolie elder brother” had goaded him on as he murdered the servant, but over the coming weeks the brother would take on a larger and larger role in the incident. In June, a pamphlet published in Hong Kong stated that Roberts had finally admitted that Hong Rengan himself actually hadn’t attacked the servant; it was his brother who had beaten the poor man. Neither had the beating been entirely unprovoked; the servant had been found guilty of an indeterminate crime (one source said he had defecated in the king’s path), and Roberts had been trying to shield him from punishment. That was precisely the kind of favoritism that had already opened Hong Rengan to attacks from within the palace and from which his brother was likely to take a hand to protect him. There was no evidence to corroborate any assault on Roberts himself.14 It would appear that it was the Tennessee preacher who snapped that day, not the Shield King.
For his own part, Hong Rengan described the falling-out with Issachar Roberts as a minor incident, though he may have downplayed its importance to conceal his disappointment. All he said of it was that due to “some slight misunderstanding one day,” Roberts “made a precipitate flight from the city and every effort failed to win him back.”15 But no matter what actually took place between the Shield King and Issachar Roberts on that cold January day in Nanjing, from that point on, Hong Rengan’s side—and therefore the side of sympathy for the rebels on religious grounds—was no longer to be heard in Shanghai. The damage to Taiping foreign relations was serious. As one of their contemporaries put it with regret, the American preacher’s abandonment of Nanjing meant that “the principal link which has connected our Protestant missionaries with the Taeping movement is now broken.”16 There was no longer any direct line of communication—be it accurate, exaggerated, fanciful, critical, or otherwise—to connect the rebels to the world outside their realm.
The timing could hardly have been worse, coming just as the foreigners in Shanghai were bracing for the approach of Li Xiucheng’s armies. In such uncertain times, this was news to silence any voice that might speak in the rebels’ defense. Because for the time being, at least, it appeared that the Taiping’s most enlightened king—the gentle, round-faced darling of the foreign missionaries, the figurehead of a new regime to steer China into the global currents of the nineteenth century—had all along been nothing more than an illusion. And as the Shield King’s outer semblance dissolved into the ether, the dark being that stepped from the wings to assume its place was a monster, just like all of the others.
While Zeng Guofan patiently expanded and trained his forces in Anqing through the winter of 1861–1862, the gentry and local officials downriver in isolated Shanghai were left to fend for themselves. They had sent a small delegation up to Anqing by steamship back in November to beg General Zeng, with ostentatious tears in their eyes, to send his Hunan forces down to their coastal entrepôt and protect them. They promised that if he could defend Shanghai, between the customs revenue and the contributions from local businessmen, they could provide him with hundreds of thousands of taels of silver a month. But Zeng initially demurred; he was well aware of the wealth that existed in Shanghai, but strategically his focus was on Nanjing, and Shanghai was just too far on the other side of it. From the inland perspective of a Hunanese farmer, Shanghai was the end of the world. He told them to be patient and said that perhaps when Li Hongzhang was finished drilling his army in the spring he could find some way to help them. But that wouldn’t be for several months at least, and the delegation returned to Shanghai empty-handed.
Facing the near certainty of a Taiping attack during the winter months and with no assurance of protection from the British and French, the wealthy Chinese of Shanghai had nothing to fall back on but their expensive (and scarcely effective) foreign mercenary force under Frederick Townsend Ward. Driven by the continued promise of high pay and unrestrained plundering, the Salem-born filibuster had managed to continue his work despite the British government’s attempts to shut him down. After escaping from Admiral Hope’s flagship the previous summer, Ward had stolen back to his muddy base at Songjiang and reconvened the remnants of his tattered militia. There were only sixty-eight foreign mercenaries left after the earlier defeats and the British raids, but they still had their Napoleon field guns, and they still had the promise of riches if they could finally storm the gates of Qingpu, ten miles to the northwest.
Ward’s soldiers had already failed to take that city from the Taiping in at least four attempts over the previous year, and when they tried again that summer, they fared no better. They used the same spearhead strategy as before—their small foreign force would blast the gates with their artillery and storm the walls, and then a large imperial force would follow after them to invade the city and drive out the rebel defenders. But once again, the imperial reinforcements failed to materialize on time. The defeat was brutal, with Ward losing nearly a third of his already shredded force. Not that it gained him any sympathy from the Shanghai foreign community; Ward’s filibustering was a source of such maddening embarrassment there that the news of the small massacre at Qingpu was greeted with relief. Many hoped that this meant his ignominious career was finally over, and Shanghai’s North-China Herald declared that the fresh defeat at Qingpu, following on the heels of the earlier arrests, had finally brought the foreign militia’s “dishonourable career to a close.” Frederick Bruce reported to Lord Russell on July 3 his “satisfaction that the Foreign Legion has been disbanded.”17
But the last hadn’t been heard from Ward. As the troubles in the United States began to bleed over into the international community, he surfaced again. In late August 1861, a rumor spread in Shanghai that a local clipper named the Neva had been purchased by a group of Californians (“rather hard characters” as one resident described them) who had flashed an envelope with a Montgomery postmark, which they said was a letter of marque from Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. The China Daily PressandChina Mail in Hong Kong both reported that the leader of this gang of Confederate privateers was Ward. According to the reports, his group was going to outfit the Neva with guns taken from the U.S. munitions store in Shanghai (the master of which was a southerner) and then start sinking Union merchant ships off the China coast. 18
The United States had only one naval vessel in China at the time, the little USS Saginaw, which sailed full speed from Hong Kong to Shanghai to hunt down the Neva—but only after two of its officers with southern sympathies resigned when they learned their mission. In the end, the Neva turned out to carry not cannons but whiskey, though the earlier reports made enough of a splash back in the United States that Ward became suddenly famous as America’s man of adventure in China, or as The New York Times now called him, “the celebrated fillibuster.”19 On November 9, the New York Herald tried to dispel persistent rumors that he was serving the Confederates by publishing an editorial claiming Frederick Townsend Ward for the Union’s side. It said that Ward was in fact dead set against secession and quoted as proof a letter he had written to a friend in New York (one of the few surviving letters from his hand, in fact, since his descendants, ashamed of his sordid career, later burned most of his correspondence). “I trust that by this time the government have shortened some of the seceding rascals by a head or two, and retaken Sumter, or, at least, laid siege to it,” Ward wrote to his friend. “I only wish I could be with you to take a hand in the affair.”20
No matter which side he was on, the outlaw Ward was by far the most conspicuous of his countrymen in China at a time when the pressures of the U.S. Civil War were beginning to wear heavily on the community of the treaty ports. There were ten times as many British as Americans in Shanghai (“and a most disagreeable snobbish set they are,” wrote one Yankee), and though most of the Americans in China were northerners, their English neighbors were overwhelmingly pro-South. Nearly all Union naval power had been recalled to North America to blockade the southern ports—leaving only the Saginaw, which rotted out in December 1861 and left nothing at all. The American merchants in China were forced to depend on Her Majesty’s warships to protect their business interests, and they deeply resented the dependence. Fights broke out at dinner parties when Englishmen made cracks about their war.21
The bad blood between the British and Americans in Shanghai came to the boiling point in early 1862 over the so-called Trent incident. Near Cuba, in November 1861, a U.S. captain had chased down and boarded the British mail steamer Trent to arrest two Confederate diplomats who were among its passengers. Britain, outraged at the American boarding of a ship under its flag, came to the brink of declaring war on the United States. As British forces sailed for Canada in preparation to invade from the north, Admiral Hope readied his forces in Shanghai to seize the homes, ships, and assets of their American neighbors.22 (Though a hopeful rumor spread among the Americans that if that happened, Ward was going to launch his own preemptive attack on Hope’s ships, steal them, and turn their cannons on the British settlement.)23 The tension was eventually defused, but through the winter of 1862 every gun that sounded to announce the arrival of a steamer from North America saw a drove of anxious American patriots rushing down to the dock to ply the crew for news, desperate to know whether their country was at war with Britain. “In the event of a war,” one of them predicted, “business will be entirely broken up and nearly all the Americans in this place will make tracks for San Francisco.”24
Meanwhile, the Taiping were coming. The alarms first sounded on January 11, when the smoke of distant fires began to darken the horizon north of Shanghai. A new wave of refugees began arriving outside the city the next day, old women and children carrying their few possessions.25 The fires came closer. Bells were rung, cannons cleaned, and the foreign consuls held a secret meeting to plan a defense for the city. The local volunteers mustered deep into the night, watching from the lookouts with apprehension as the nearing glow lit up the landscape to their north. Americans dusted themselves off and joined ranks with the British and French. “[I]f opportunity occurs,” wrote one to his mother, “we will show the Englishmen that the clay we’re made of is not inferior to their own.”26
Their worry was real. Despite the easy repulse of the Taiping from Shanghai in 1860, there were scattered reports indicating that the rebels were now better armed and disciplined than the Allies expected. A British sailor named Goverston claimed on January 18 that he’d been captured and released a few miles outside Shanghai by a force of 15,000 rebels, who had plied him with drink and interrogated him about the city’s defenses. He reported that they had been carrying British and German muskets and that an Arab in their ranks had told him that there was another unit on the way armed with Enfield rifles, as well as a secretive detachment of European soldiers. By his account, the rebel troops were “very fine-looking men” who seemed well fed. (Then again, by his own admission Goverston had gotten so drunk in Shanghai that he’d overstayed his shore leave, so he might have concocted the whole account to avoid punishment.) Harder evidence to back up Goverston’s account came a few days later when a force of two or three thousand musket-toting rebels overran the town of Wusong ten miles to the north of Shanghai, capturing the outlet from the Huangpu River to the Yangtze Delta. A Royal Navy captain who witnessed the fighting reported that he was “quite astonished” at how well organized and equipped they were—compared not just to the paltry defenders of Wusong but to the elite imperial troops he remembered from the Peiho.27
Li Xiucheng had no desire to destroy Shanghai in the process of capturing it from the imperials, so he followed a strategy of wide encirclement, testing the resolution of the foreigners to resist his advance. In January, five main armies—some numbering in the thousands, some in the tens of thousands—occupied the towns surrounding Shanghai at a distance of several miles on each side. His supporters began pumping propaganda into Songjiang and Shanghai, large broadsheets promising safety and protection to all who came over to their side. In the broadsheets, Li Xiucheng pointed to the record of his army during its journey through Jiangxi and Hubei over the past year and its recent conquest of Zhejiang. “In all the places I have passed through,” read one, “I have given comfort and peace to the people who have pledged their allegiance, and rank and salary to the [officers of the militia] who have surrendered.”28 “You are advised,” it continued, “… to follow their example promptly, make up your minds like the sun and the moon, and come to us like running water.” As for the foreigners, he reminded them to stay out of the conflict and warned that any who gave aid to the resistors “will be like a flying moth dashing into the fire, seeking his own extirpation.”29
With the visible menace of massed troops in the distance and the threatened decline of trade as Shanghai’s lines of communication to the interior were slowly and forcibly cut off, Li Xiucheng hoped to get the imperial authorities in Shanghai to surrender without any need for a direct assault on the city itself. Dread settled over the city. Admiral Hope sent to Hong Kong for British reinforcements, and the consul in Canton relayed to London the news of Shanghai’s precarious position. “Our protective force is small,” he said, “with a wide space to cover, crammed to overflowing with a refugee Chinese population, among whom, doubtless, is a large proportion of rebel element, ready, in the event of an attack in front, to create a panic behind.”30
As new waves of refugees stumbled into the already overcrowded Shanghai foreign settlement for protection, reports came that 80,000 Taiping troops were on the march from Suzhou, planning to take boats downriver from Qingpu to Shanghai and arrive on or about January 25.31 The main body of British and French troops set themselves up to defend the walled Chinese city, while the broad foreign settlement with its masses of refugees was left to two hundred volunteers, some policemen with rifles and bayonets, and a contingent of Punjabi infantry at the farthest margin. On January 24, the day before the rumors said the Taiping would arrive, British and French authorities plastered the walls with their own broadsides in Chinese, announcing that Shanghai and its immediate area were under the protection of the Allies. Then they braced themselves for the coming attack.
But the Taiping didn’t arrive on January 25. And the next day, with still no sign of the coming army, Heaven—or Providence, as The North-China Herald called it—intervened.32 Shanghai lay in a subtropical zone that reached broiling temperatures in the summer and rarely went below freezing in the winter, but on January 26, 1862, as the city’s defense forces watched out over the horizon for the approaching enemy, snow began to fall. It would fall for three days, over rebels and merchants, over refugees and missionaries, burying the houses and walls and fields in pristine white. The rivers froze over with treacherous sheets of ice, and the narrow horse paths threading through the complex of paddies in the countryside were obliterated, so that movement became nearly impossible. It reached two feet in Shanghai and a foot in Ningbo, paralyzing the lower Yangtze region completely. By January 30, the eastern seaboard was encased in ice and frost on what should have been auspicious as the first day of the Chinese New Year (year 1 of the new Qing emperor’s reign, year 12 of the rebels). A Ningbo missionary in his solid home, fire blazing, still measured an indoor temperature of only thirteen degrees above zero at night, while out in the field, for mile upon mile, rebel soldiers hovered near death in their thin tents, shivering.33
The weather broke in early February, and as the snow and ice started to thaw, the weakened and dispirited Taiping forces stirred themselves back into motion. But now they found their problems of weather compounded by an unexpected resistance at Songjiang, the stepping-stone to Shanghai. It turned out that for the past several months, Frederick Townsend Ward—separately from his flirtations with his own country’s war—had been training a new militia there. This one was different from the one that had collapsed back in June, primarily because he had finally given up on trying to recruit deserters from the European ships and started training local Chinese troops from Songjiang instead. He kept a minimal staff of experienced Americans and Europeans from his earlier militia to do the training and serve as officers but otherwise relied on Chinese soldiers—and as a Chinese soldier cost only a tenth the salary of a foreign mercenary, it was a much larger force as well.
Most of Ward’s foreign officers had been with him since nearly the beginning, and his two lieutenants (who got to become colonels once he gathered enough troops to start calling himself a general) were both Americans like him. One was a whaler from Maine named Edward Forester, who’d been stranded by mutiny in Japan and later made his way to China.34 The other was a flamboyant southerner from North Carolina named Henry Andrea Burgevine, the son of a French officer who’d served in the Napoleonic Wars and wound up his career as a French instructor in Chapel Hill. Burgevine himself had served two years as a volunteer in the French Army in the Crimea, but otherwise his prior career, which would hardly seem to have destined him to be a mercenary, included stints as a newspaper editor, as a postal clerk, and, from age nine to seventeen, as a page in the U.S. Senate.35
Ward taught his Chinese troops to respond to English-language commands and to follow standard bugle calls. He outfitted them in European-style uniforms that by all accounts were quite smart, with matching knickerbockers and jackets in blue (for artillery) or green (for infantry), and green turbans all around. In the heat of summer they all wore white knickerbockers and jackets with red facings.36 Ward worked to train his men to fight and move in quick formation: to come into line, to form an infantry square, to fire only on command.37 It was an echo of the “Canton Coolie Corps” that had so pleased the British during their invasion of Beijing, except that these men would carry guns rather than supplies.
He equipped his men with cutting-edge weapons from the arms dealers of Shanghai: Enfield rifles from England, the same that were being sold by the boatload to both armies in the United States,38 along with smooth-bore British muskets and some Prussian rifles. With steady drill, they reportedly became good marksmen. Through the agency of his brother Henry Gamaliel Ward, who had followed him to China to get in on the action, Ward also began casting about for heavier artillery, even gunboats if they could be had. The money was there; his patron, Yang Fang, and his counterparts were flush with cash from their share of the foreign trade in Shanghai, and they were willing to pony up for the sake of their own protection. Despite the widely perceived immorality (and questionable legality) of making large-scale arms purchases for a Chinese force, Ward’s brother even made so bold as to try to buy the USS Saginaw from the American minister (who refused).39 When that failed, he tried to purchase a fleet of light gunships from the United States via his father, who set up shop in New York as a ship’s merchant in the hope of building up a family fortune in cooperation with his sons in China.
Ward was hardly alone in equipping Chinese troops with Western arms, for at least since the fall of Ningbo there had been a steady commerce of weapons sold to the rebels by foreigners. The arms weren’t the best of quality, but they easily outclassed the seventeenth-century matchlocks that had started the war, and they came in substantial quantities. The accounts of the secretive trade are hard to come by, but the records of captured shipments tell the tale well enough. In one instance, in 1862, the British firm Davidson and Company was caught running a ship via Singapore that turned out to carry three hundred cannons, a hundred cases of small arms, and fifty tons of ammunition for the rebels.40 In another, the account book from a captured American ship revealed that its firm had just supplied the rebels at Wusong with nearly three thousand muskets, eight hundred pieces of artillery, eighteen thousand cartridges, and more than three million percussion caps.41 The lower Yangtze region was a powder keg.
Ward’s revamped militia fought its first pitched battle on February 3, 1862, while the ground still lay under its frozen cover, and they managed to hold their own at Songjiang against an army of 20,000 Taiping soldiers.42 They laid out an ambush of hidden artillery batteries just outside the town and surprised the weakened rebel attackers who approached through the snow, mowing down more than two thousand of them before their commander called the retreat. Ward’s men captured more than seven hundred of the escaping rebels alive and sent them in chains to Shanghai to be executed by the daotai.43 Two days later, his militia went on the offensive, attacking a small hill halfway between Songjiang and Qingpu and forcing the Taiping commander to pull back from his positions there.
For the first time, the Shanghai gentry’s private army was showing signs of life. The acting Jiangsu governor, Xue Huan (the same official who had produced Ward’s false citizenship papers the previous summer), suggested changing the name of the force from the uninspired yet descriptive “Foreign Arms Corps” that they had been using to the more grandiose “Ever-Victorious Army.”44 The flowery title (wishful, as they had few actual victories) would be treated by some of Ward’s later biographers as a sign of the Chinese worship of their foreign military leader,45 though actually the new name, in replacing “Foreign Arms Corps,” was little more than an attempt to entice more Chinese, who generally disliked foreigners, to enlist in the force—and to make it more palatable to Beijing, so the new government, to which it was now finally unveiled, wouldn’t dwell on its loyalty to a non-Chinese commander.
In terms of that loyalty, though foreigners would always refer to the militia as “Ward’s force” or “Ward’s disciplined Chinese,” it was in fact a part of the local military structure and Ward took his commands from the Shanghai officials and bankers who paid him. His immediate orders came from the Shanghai daotai, Wu Xu, who, from a handful of surviving instructions, appears to have been quite respectful of him, addressing Ward as huixia, an honorific term for “general,” and elevating his name above the rest of the text whenever it appeared. But at the same time, his ingratiating respect was more than likely motivated by fear, for Wu Xu clearly did not trust Ward and his militia to act with any kind of restraint. In particular, he apparently worried about uncontrolled looting by Ward’s men. In one order sending Ward to attack Qingpu, Wu Xu pleaded with him to leave as soon as the fighting was over. “Do not allow the Ever-Victorious Army to enter the city,” he wrote. “That is the clean way to do things, to avoid trouble.” He then repeated himself again, to emphasize the point: “As soon as you break into the city, give it to [your imperial counterpart] and go back to Songjiang. Don’t let the Ever-Victorious Army enter the city.”46
Despite the dangerous elements of the force under Ward’s command, he was the best hope of the Shanghai gentry and they did what they could to maintain his loyalty. Yang Fang, the wealthy banker who had raised the funds to supply the force, even made so bold as to give his daughter Changmei in marriage to Ward in March 1862. It was an odd arrangement, for in Chinese terms she was damaged goods: her previous betrothed had died before their wedding, which made her all but unmarriageable to another Chinese husband while not even giving her the status of a widow.47 There is no record of what happened to the Chinese woman to whom Ward had been engaged the previous summer, when Hope had arrested him, but Changmei most certainly was not her. Primarily, their marriage functioned as a business arrangement. For the banker Yang Fang, it kept Ward close at hand and helped ensure his loyalty (and short of marrying her to the foreigner, his unlucky daughter had no value at all by the calculations of the Shanghai business community). For Ward, it was a means of ensuring that Yang Fang came through with his promises of funding for the militia. In the middle was Changmei herself, an enigma whose only lasting legacy is a bit of jewelry that now resides in a museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
In Shanghai, the aftermath of the snowstorm found the British and French scrambling to improve their own defenses. Admiral Hope and his French counterpart, Rear Admiral Auguste Léopold Protet (a fellow veteran of the embarrassing Peiho repulse), met on February 13 to sign a joint agreement to defend Shanghai from the Taiping advance, and they began sketching plans to clear out Hope’s long-cherished thirty-mile radius by organizing a land force that could take to the field against the rebels. Lord Russell had made it clear to Admiral Hope that Britain would not permit any intervention in the civil war save to prevent the torture and death of British subjects, but Hope, as was his wont, disregarded the standing orders and acted on the exigencies of the moment.
The forces at their disposal were scant; they had their gunships but only 1,550 regular troops, 650 of them British and the rest French, with a smattering of seamen in reserve.48 There were an additional 200 civilian volunteers, including the Americans. The Qing imperial forces in and around Shanghai, which formally numbered about 10,000, were universally considered useless. Such a meager Allied force might be sufficient to hold the fortified walls of Shanghai’s Chinese city against a Taiping attack, but it had no hope of beating the rebels in the field. Admiral Hope needed some way to increase his force, or else he would have to remain bottled up within the walls of Shanghai. And that was why, in one of the stranger twists of circumstance, Admiral Hope decided to take a new look at the renegade American filibuster whose militia he had previously been trying so hard to shut down.
As Ward appeared no longer to be trying to entice European sailors to desert their ships, and, more important, since his new Chinese force had actually managed to hold off a Taiping attack on Songjiang, Admiral Hope decided to put his hostility toward the American mercenary aside and try an alliance instead. Ward had no particular interest in protecting Shanghai, but support from Allied gunships would make his conquest of Taiping towns easier, so he agreed they should work together. By the end of February, Admiral Hope was already speaking of Frederick Townsend Ward in glowing new terms—no longer as a renegade or a filibuster but as a respectable expert “upon whose experience of the Chinese I am disposed to place very considerable reliance.”49
Frederick Bruce gave tentative approval to Hope’s plans to raise a land force, remarking in a letter of March 19 that “it requires but little experience in China to be assured that the effect of remaining on a strict defensive within the walls is to convince our assailants that we fear them, and are unable to meet them in the field.”50 But even though he approved Hope’s intention to drive the rebels away from the immediate region around Shanghai, he insisted that the Allies could hold on to only Shanghai itself and it was up to the Qing forces to garrison any towns that might be taken back from the rebels. As far as Hope’s proposal to cooperate with Ward, Bruce approved heartily. Following Hope’s lead, Bruce felt that the American filibuster’s hybrid force of foreign officers and Chinese soldiers was a model that might enable the Qing government to win the war. “I see no hopes of rescuing this country from universal anarchy and brigandage,” Bruce told Hope in the same letter, “except in the organization of a military force on improved principles; and I agree that Colonel Ward’s force affords a nucleus … which should be encouraged and augmented.”
Zeng Guofan, however, was extremely wary of letting foreigners fight the dynasty’s war. For one thing, he didn’t think they would be particularly effective. At Qimen, he had known that there were foreigners in Li Xiucheng’s campaign army but had dismissed them as “insignificant demons who have to be hired with money.”51 Loyalty, to him, was a far more effective motivator than greed. He did, however, recognize that foreigners might be a practical necessity in Shanghai. On February 20, soon after Ward’s first victories near Songjiang, Zeng Guofan conceded in a memorial to the throne that it might be in the dynasty’s interest to let the foreign mercenaries help defend Shanghai—and even Ningbo, where, he reasoned, they already lived and where they therefore might be expected to help with local defense for their own sakes. But he strongly advised the government against letting any of them campaign inland, especially to Suzhou or Nanjing. Since there were no foreign communities in those places, the Europeans would be acting on a purely mercenary basis, and this would open up serious dangers. “If they lose, we’ll be a laughing-stock,” he wrote. “But if they win, who knows what future dangers will ensue.” It was anyone’s best guess what they would demand afterward in return for their services. So he repeated that foreigners should be allowed only to protect Shanghai.52
Nevertheless, facing an insurmountable shortage of funds in Anqing, he finally came to the conclusion that Shanghai shouldn’t be left entirely to the foreigners to defend, because he needed it for himself. That is, as long as the international city operated independently, under the daotai, Wu Xu, and the governor, Xue Huan, the gentry of Shanghai could fund their own mercenary force and pay their taxes to the central government, but there was nothing in it to be gained for Zeng Guofan’s army—which risked mutinies if it didn’t start paying its troops more than the fraction of their wages they had been getting. “There are ten million people and ten billion riches in the single county of Shanghai,” he wrote to his brother on February 1, showing a change of heart, “and all the southeastern provinces put together can’t compare to its wealth and population. We have to find some way to preserve it.”53 Ten days later he wrote, “I hear that at Shanghai we can take in five hundred thousand taels a month; I can’t bear to sit by and watch it fall into enemy hands.”54
So Zeng Guofan and the Shanghai gentry finally found common ground. The gentry wanted Zeng’s army to come downriver to protect their homes and personal livelihoods, while Zeng Guofan, for his part, saw Shanghai as a means of funding his campaign forNanjing and as a possible base for launching an attack on Suzhou. Both sides were self-interested, but their immediate goals were the same, and in contrast to the brush-off he had given to the delegation from Shanghai back in November, by the spring of 1862 Zeng Guofan had decided he would try to send an army to Shanghai to break the Taiping siege. If successful, that army could be the third front in his strategy for cutting off Nanjing. The only problem that remained was how to get it there.
The Shanghai daotai, Wu Xu, solved the problem for him. In a quiet realization of the scheme that had been so firmly denied to Hong Rengan, Wu Xu managed to contract with a British firm, Mackenzie, Richardson & Company, to transport 9,000 soldiers and support personnel from Anqing down to Shanghai on British steamships. Both the imperials and the British authorities assumed (quite correctly) that the rebel shore batteries wouldn’t dare fire on a ship under the Union Jack. And in stark contrast to Harry Parkes’s curt lecture to the Taiping kings in Nanjing on the “rights and duties of neutrality” when he had told them the British couldn’t possibly transport supplies to their starving garrison at Anqing, Admiral Hope in this case readily approved the use of British steamships to move Li Hongzhang’s army, because it “would facilitate his plans for freeing Shanghae from the disagreeable proximity of the Tae-pings.”55
With three round trips in less than a month, by the end of April, Li Hongzhang’s army of 6,500 Anhui troops and their support personnel found themselves, with relative suddenness, encamped at Shanghai and ready to begin fighting their way inward toward Nanjing from the east. Li Hongzhang assumed power as the governor of the province, replacing Xue Huan and taking a position above the Shanghai daotai, Wu Xu, and in doing so he also took charge of the local imperial military forces—which meant that theEver-Victorious Army was now his to command.
Zeng Guofan was delighted by the speed and safety with which Li Hongzhang’s army had been moved, and he now had his loyal force on the other side of the rebel kingdom. But the expense of the move was an outrage: 180,000 taels of silver, representing roughly a third of the monthly Shanghai customs revenue, or the monthly salary of more than forty thousand of his soldiers. It was “shocking and pitiful!” he wrote in a letter home.56 It confirmed his opinions about accepting foreign aid, and he took it as evidence that China would have to build its own steamships so the foreigners couldn’t continue to take advantage of them. But worse than any issue of national pride, it cut to the bone of his civil responsibilities—for he was not just a military general but also the governor-general in charge of the welfare of the people who lived under his jurisdiction, and those 180,000 taels of silver represented an extravagant outlay of money from private donations, poured into the hands of greedy foreigners, at a time when the imperial coffers were bankrupt and he could barely supply his army in Anhui province, let alone provide for the general population under his control. And as he observed in the same letter home, as short as his army’s rations might have been at the time, in Anhui it was only the soldiers who had anything to eat at all.57
The government in Beijing had actually ordered Zeng Guofan to send his brother Guoquan to Shanghai, rather than Li Hongzhang. But Guoquan coveted the glory of recovering Nanjing even more than Zeng Guofan himself did, and he refused outright to take his forces anywhere except to the rebel capital—to the point of delaying his return from Hunan with the new recruits until it was clear that Zeng Guofan would send Li Hongzhang down to Shanghai rather than himself. So, once again, Zeng Guofan ignored the wishes of the central government, and with the promise that he would fight in the central theater, Guoquan finally returned to Anqing in March. The green recruits were assigned to garrison duty, while the veterans rallied to go on campaign with him once again.
Li Hongzhang’s Anhui troops were still getting ready for their passage to Shanghai when, on March 24, against a backdrop of misery and starvation in Anhui, Zeng Guofan saw his brother off from Anqing at the head of a concentrated force of 20,000 Hunanese soldiers on land and water, joined by 5,000 more under their younger brother Guobao. Eastward they went along the north bank of the Yangtze River as it faded into the distance. Ahead of them lay the heart of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and, deep within it, the citadel of Nanjing.58
As the Taiping approach stalled, Shanghai found itself under a slow and distant siege. The price of rice went up 50 percent. The price of flour doubled. The price of firewood more than doubled, thanks in part to the cold weather.59 But the feared assault by the Taiping hordes did not come. Instead, the encirclement of Shanghai wore on, and all waited to see what would come of it. The British authorities on the ground never questioned that neutrality allowed them to defend Shanghai from immediate threats, which clearly included the rebel armies that surrounded them. And in this they had full public support from their local constituents; the North China and Japan Market Report speculated that the entire Shanghai foreign community, save those members who were getting rich running guns to the Taiping, was now ready to see the Allies “test the neutrality clauses of the Treaties with shot and shell.”60
Joint operations between Ward and the British and French forces began on a small scale on February 21, 1862, with an assault on the village of High Bridge, about eight miles from Shanghai. Ward had 600 men under his command, and Hope and Protet brought naval forces numbering 500 total, which they landed on shore with a 6-pounder rocket tube. The battle was over quickly, with only one Frenchman killed before the rebel garrison abandoned the village.61 Pleased with the taste of success, they continued.
The reactions from the foreign population to the initial skirmishing were mixed. Some in Shanghai were delighted to see Hope taking an active hand against the rebels, none more so than the missionaries, whose giddy hopes for the advent of a Christian China under the Taiping had been dashed by the recent news of Hong Rengan’s madness. Their disillusionment had left them bitter, and some now resented the rebels with a venom proportional to the loftiness of their former hopes. In a private letter on March 17, the Anglican bishop of Shanghai expressed full approval for Admiral Hope’s operations and said he even wished Hope would go beyond the immediate defense of Shanghai. “It is said the authorities are only wanting to hear from Mr. Bruce, to knock [the rebels] out of all the walled towns in this Province,” he wrote to the American missionary Samuel Wells Williams. “Indeed I hope they will not stop short of Nanking. It is time the country should be rid of these monsters.”62 But others charged that the British were unleashing chaos by provoking Taiping reprisals in the countryside and driving refugees into the city. “[A] great part of the miseries that the people around Shanghai are suffering,” wrote another missionary to the New-York Evangelist, “must be laid to the policy that foreigners have pursued towards them.”63
Ironically, some of the strongest voices of condemnation for Hope’s newfound aggression came from the very Shanghai business community for whose sake, above all, he had taken up his fight. The merchants were hardly unanimous in their support for his actions, and many worried that this newly belligerent course of action against the Taiping would be self-destructive. The leading British trading firm, Jardine, Matheson and Company, wrote in its company circular on February 27, 1862, that “the policy the Allied Commanders are adopting will, it is feared, lead to disastrous consequences.” It recounted the circumstances of the joint attack on High Bridge by Hope and Ward and stated that such actions could only serve to “exasperate a foe by no means to be despised.” Given that “the whole country” beyond Shanghai was “in the hands of the Taepings,” it warned that “should this suicidal policy be persisted in,” it would “in the end materially interfere with, if not ruin, all trade.”64
Though some missionaries might wish for it, and some businessmen might fear it, Admiral Hope still had no approval from London to mount a war against the rebels. The British government’s policy was strict neutrality, so the fighting around Shanghai had to remain tightly restricted, responding only to the immediate threat to the city from the Taiping siege forces. Despite the blood that was shed in the small battles, both sides were still sounding each other out. “Fighting Jimmy” Hope had not, technically, gone on the offensive, and he hadn’t engaged in any fighting beyond the immediate vicinity of Shanghai. But how he wished he could.
The tipping point finally came, as it almost inevitably had to, by way of an accident. On April 23, the Taiping in Ningbo had a celebration.65 One of their commanders, by the name of Fan, had just returned from the provincial capital, Hangzhou, where he had been promoted. Things had been quiet in Ningbo for the past several months in spite of the sporadic fighting to the north around Shanghai, and trade between Chinese and foreign merchants was on the rise. The Hong Kong correspondent of the London Timeshad reported a week earlier that the Taiping at Ningbo “maintain the same peaceful attitude towards foreigners” as before and the region’s Chinese traders had “come to an understanding with the chiefs of the rebel garrison,” so they were returning to their businesses. The primary article of import was grain to feed the surrounding countryside, and Ningbo had begun to export Britain’s most desperately needed commodity, cotton.66 Indeed, cotton aside, the insatiable need of Zhejiang province for rice in wartime—and the ability of British and French ships to supply it cheaply from a bumper crop in Siam—meant that, notwithstanding a drop in silk and tea exports, the overall balance sheet for Ningbo foreign trade in the year ending June 30, 1862, would in fact show an increase of 82 percent over the previous year, when the city was still under imperial control.67 It was scarcely the devastation that Consul Harvey had predicted. As an alternative to the scattered hostilities near Shanghai across the bay to the north, the Times’ correspondent suggested hopefully that Ningbo “shows that there are other than warlike means of dealing with” the rebels.
Harvey himself, however, had steered even further to the extremes of prophetic doom. A letter he wrote to Frederick Bruce on March 20, which would be published in The Times a few months later, removed any qualifications he had ever put on his intense hatred of the rebels—and in it he admitted that he had cherished and nurtured that hatred since long before anything that had ever happened at Ningbo. “I now … take the liberty of declaring,” he wrote to Bruce, “once and for all (and for ten years I have firmly adhered to and been consistent in this opinion), that the Taeping rebellion is the greatest delusion as a political or popular movement, and the Taeping doctrines the most gigantic and blasphemous imposition as a creed, or ethics, that the world has ever witnessed.” On and on it went, until it reached its most damning conclusion: “Your Excellency may rest assured that we shall only arrive at a correct appreciation of this movement, and do it thorough justice, when it is treated by us as land piracy on an extensive scale—piracy odious in the eyes of all men—and, as such, to be swept off the face of the earth by every means within the power of the Christian and civilized nations trading with this vast empire.”68
In the course of the Taiping celebrations on April 23, at a little after ten in the morning, a salute was fired in General Fan’s honor at the eastern gate of Ningbo, which faced the river that divided the Chinese city from the foreign settlement. The guns were not well aimed, and a handful of projectiles sailed across the river, whistling through the rigging of the French gunship L’Étoile as they passed and landing in the foreign settlement, where they struck and killed two or three Chinese residents (the number was never clear).69The commander of HMS Ringdove, which had also experienced uncomfortably close musket fire in recent days, wrote to the Taiping generals to complain. He received profuse apologies the very same day. General Huang, the second of the two Taiping generals in Ningbo, promised that he would find out which soldiers had been responsible and “punish them very severely.”70
In Shanghai, Admiral Hope acted as soon as he heard that shots had been fired in Ningbo but before he learned about the apologies. He and the French admiral Protet dispatched a joint force under Captain Roderick Dew in the Encounter to ensure “proper reparation for this outrage.”71 On his arrival at Ningbo, however, Captain Dew learned about the apologies of the Taiping commanders and found them fully acceptable. In Dew’s opinion the situation had already been defused, so he wrote a friendly letter to Generals Huang and Fan on April 27 to accept their apologies. Their messages, he wrote, were “so satisfactory, and tend so much to impress on us your wish to maintain friendly relations with the English and French,” that he would not demand any further reparation other than removal of the specific guns that were aimed toward the foreign settlement, lest such an accident repeat itself. He reassured them that the British were neutral and that the rebels at Ningbo, as long as they remained friendly, “may rest assured that no breach of friendly relations shall emanate from our side.”72
But then, strangely, on the following day, Dew sent another letter to the Taiping commanders. This time he was no longer content with the apologies he had accepted the day before, and accused them of allowing “grave insults” to the British that were “a breach of the amicable relations which we have wished to maintain with your people.” He had been sent from Shanghai “with a considerable force,” he wrote, “to demand … an ample apology for these insults.” And now, on April 28, he demanded not just that they remove the guns from the gate where the salute had been fired, but that they remove all guns facing eastward in the direction of the foreign settlement, including a major new battery along the riverbank that was still under construction. They had twenty-four hours to begin dismantling the battery, he warned, or the British would do it themselves; and if they should be fired upon while doing so, “I shall look on it as an act of hostility, shall remove all foreign ships from the river, and our people from the settlement, and probably the capture of the city of Ningpo may follow.”73
The sudden reversal of Dew’s tone from friendly to hostile and the sudden retraction of his previous acceptance of the apology appear to have had two causes. The first was that he apparently figured out for the first time that there had been two incidents, not one: the shots fired earlier at the Ringdove and the salute that had killed residents of the settlement had been on different days. He decided that this constituted a pattern of aggression. The other reason was that new orders had just been received from London, and those orders were Lord Russell’s response, at long last, to the reports that had been sent to him back in January. As it turned out, the combination of Consul Harvey’s ominous predictions of the destruction of Ningbo, Admiral Hope’s intimations of Taiping atrocities at Hangzhou, and Harry Parkes’s testimony that a war with the Taiping rebels was fast approaching had secured exactly the response for which they all had been hoping.
As Lord Russell explained to the Admiralty after he read the reports, “The fall of Ningpo, if it has not been accompanied by all the atrocities which have been witnessed in the case of the capture of other cities, has [nevertheless] paralyzed all trade and industry, and has driven away the whole, or a greater part, of the peaceable population, and has scattered ruin and devastation far and wide.” Influenced by Harvey’s judgments, Russell decided that sharing a port with the Taiping was not an experience the British should allow to repeat itself. “The interests of humanity and commerce alike,” he concluded, “demand that the city and port of Shanghae … should be preserved from a similar fate.”74
But Russell did not draw the line at Shanghai. Similar protection, he decided, “should, as far as possible, be accorded to the other Treaty ports”—meaning that Ningbo would now fall under the umbrella of British military defense as well. Russell concluded by telling the Admiralty to inform James Hope that “the British flag is to be protected on the Yangtze by a naval force, and generally that British commerce is to have the aid of Her Majesty’s ships of war.”75 Admiral Hope was given free rein to engage the Taiping forces in Shanghai, in the treaty ports, and practically anywhere else in China where he deemed them a direct threat to British trade interests. Those orders reached Shanghai just before Captain Dew left for Ningbo, and judging from his change of heart on April 28, it would appear that he had decided, upon reflection, to take them as license to find cause for war.76
The Taiping generals wrote back to Dew’s second, threatening letter with a message as mollifying as the ones before. They apologized profusely, again. But they refused to remove the east-facing guns—which, they pointed out, were necessary to defend their city from the river. They said that their own people had suffered equally serious crimes and insults on the foreign side of the river, but they had never demanded apologies or reparations like this. This episode, they said, was simply an unfortunate and relatively minor accident. Nevertheless, they offered to remove all powder and shot from the guns at issue, stop up their embrasures, and open them again only if the city should come under attack. “We are inordinarily desirous of remaining on good terms with you,” they insisted.77But they maintained that they had to be able to defend themselves.
Captain Dew cherished their refusal of his demands. A week later, on May 5, Consul Harvey brought the news that the deposed Ningbo daotai (the one who had lost the city in December) had just returned from his nearby exile with a ragtag fleet of 150 small, armed boats under an erstwhile coastal pirate named Apak, along with a mob of peasants, men and women alike, armed with “pitch-forks, bamboos with spikes, hoes, and some even with bludgeons.”78 This “strange army,” as Dew described it to Hope, had come up the river with the intention of attacking Ningbo, and according to Harvey they were asking for British and French support. Furthermore, they planned to attack at exactly the point in the wall where Dew had just demanded that the Taiping remove all of their defensive guns; obviously, news of the friction at Ningbo had spread, and rather quickly at that. Captain Dew gave them his full approval, telling the daotai that “in consequence of the rebels refusing certain demands we had made, I should have no objection to their passing up” past the foreign settlement on their way to assault Ningbo.79 So up they came and made camp on the foreign side of the river with Dew’s blessing.
Dew then wrote once more to the Taiping commanders—first to reiterate Britain’s noncombative position (“we maintain a perfect neutrality,” he chirped)—and then to give them a perfectly impossible ultimatum: because they had refused to remove the battery of guns facing the foreign settlement, if they should now use those guns to fire on their attackers (who were going to attack from precisely that direction, for precisely that reason), he would deem it an act of war against Great Britain. “[I]f you fire the guns or muskets from the battery or walls opposite the Settlement, on the advancing Imperialists, thereby endangering the lives of our men and people in the foreign Settlement,” he warned them, “we shall then feel it our duty to return the fire, and bombard the city.”80He offered them a single option: abandon Ningbo immediately.
Later, it would seem obvious to the skeptics that the whole bloody denouement had been planned in advance.81 Indeed, even Harvey himself underscored the utter improbability of the timing when he wrote to Frederick Bruce on May 9 that this motley force of imperial loyalists had materialized “just at the point when our correspondence with the Chiefs had become as angry as it could well be without our actually coming to blows” and that it therefore presented an “extraordinary, but fortunate, coincidence … by far too good an opportunity to be thrown aside and lost.”82
The bombardment began early the next morning.