CHAPTER 13

VAMPIRES

Compared to the nearly bloodless capture of Ningbo by the rebels in 1861, the recovery of the city in May 1862 was an abattoir. At first, the motley imperial forces held back and let the Europeans do the dangerous work. The British and French shelled the city with the combined artillery of six gunships (with a break at two o’clock so Captain Dew could enjoy his dinner), and then they sent an Allied storming party over the wall to open the gates from inside. The mob of bludgeon-wielding peasants and their pirate counterparts had to be goaded into crossing the river and entering after them, but once inside, they warmed to their task.¹ According to an eyewitness account published two weeks later in Hong Kong’s China Mail, the pirate army “in a few hours did more damage than the rebels did in the whole of the five months that they had possession,” while the daotai, newly restored to power in his city, spent the entire day after the Allied attack “chopping off the heads of the unlucky rebels that he caught.”²

Even more disturbing to the readers of that account than its descriptions of severed heads and entrails were the fears it fanned that the British were turning into mercenaries for the Manchu regime. For it alleged that “one of the principal murderers and torturers” at Ningbo was Consul Harvey’s personal servant (known to the foreigners as “Harvey’s boy”), a young man named Zheng Afu, who “was dressed up in silks, and who, stuck upon a pony, paraded the city with attendants, ordering them to execute unfortunates.” More to the point, it claimed that in the free-for-all following the invasion of the city, Harvey’s servant had been “issuing orders … to the English soldiers” and that those soldiers had actually been obeying him. The servant’s central role was corroborated by an unrelated account from a Chinese official in Zhejiang, who identified the same Zheng Afu as being the liaison between the British forces and the daotai’s pirate army and said that “Harvey’s boy” had, in collusion with Apak, lit the fuse on the morning of May 10 by secretly firing on the Encounter from the Taiping side of the river, killing two crewmen and giving Dew justification to launch a full-scale artillery barrage against the rebels in response.³ The question of who was serving whom was entirely unclear.

It was a shocking end to Britain’s promises of nonintervention, coming especially as many were pointing to Ningbo as evidence that the Taiping were genuinely friendly to foreigners and welcomed trade. The English-language papers in China (save the now very prointervention North-China Herald) printed livid complaints. “So much mystery and double-dealing has been practised by the allies to wrest this port from the Taipings,” read one article in the Overland Trade Report, “and so little regard for veracity pervades the official dispatches regarding their doings, that the truth is most difficult to arrive at, and has certainly never yet been published.… The mode of accomplishing this design reflects indelible disgrace on British prestige.” And from the Hong Kong Daily Press:“There never was a falser, more unprovoked, or more unjustifiable act than the taking of Ningpo by the allies from the Taipings. It should, in fairness, be recorded to the eternal disgrace of Captain Roderic [sic] Dew, of H.M.S. Encounter.”⁴

Half a world away, The New York Times published a report from its correspondent in Shanghai declaring the assault on Ningbo to be the end of Britain’s mere defense of the treaty ports and the new dawn of her colonial expansion in China. “There is a deep significance in these events,” he wrote. From where he stood, it seemed obvious that the Qing dynasty couldn’t survive without the sustained military support of England and France—and now those countries had shown that they were willing to provide it. “But will they do it for nothing?” he asked his American readers. “No. They will ere long become the virtual rulers of the empire.”⁵ His concern that the British (and secondarily the French) were setting up to take over China as they had done to India was widespread in the aftermath of the Ningbo invasion. However, this journalist dwelled less on the morality of the Allied breach of neutrality than on his own country’s lack of a role. “Should not the United States have something to say, too, in the control of these questions, in which they have such tremendous interests at stake?” he asked. (Or, as the same pages later put it, “if in this instance we hold back, we shall ere long find China ruled by England and France, to our disadvantage.”)⁶ The question of America’s position in China was, however, one that would have to wait until her own civil war was ended, until the time when the United States could resume its place in the competitions of the world. Until then, the correspondent could only lament the parallel he now saw at work between his own country and China, both nations weakened and laid open to foreign manipulation thanks to (as he saw it) the internal destructions of the Confederacy and the Taiping. “May our great rebellion and that of the Chinese,” he concluded, “soon be found hiding in holes and caves, and disturb our peace no more.”

If in the rawest sense Consul Harvey, Captain Dew, and Admiral Hope had unleashed their intervention for the sake of improving British trade, their efforts brought little advantage in the near term. After the city had been back under imperial control for a month, a pair of European merchants reported to the Daily Press in Hong Kong that the daotai had raised taxes to the point of being “almost a prohibition of trade” and the pirate fleet under Apak was “blockading the river, and preventing any produce being brought to this place.” As evidence to counter rumors that the Taiping had laid waste to Zhejiang province in the months before the recapture of Ningbo, they circulated the diary of a silk trader from their own firm who had traveled through the districts inland from the city while it was still under rebel control. He had found the region lively and fertile, with “crops in a flourishing condition” and the people generally “quite happy.” He said he had been “treated respectfully” by “friendly” people wherever he went and that things had been “quiet” (repeated twenty-one times in the course of the short diary). The rebels were indeed plundering villages, he observed, but they gave ample warning and “did not wish to interfere with any foreigners trading.” Even after the outbreak of hostilities, he wrote, “the rebels very friendly to foreigners; they treated us well.”⁷

The moral outrage surfacing in Shanghai and Hong Kong was at first scarcely to be heard in England itself, where public opinion was swinging hard against the Chinese rebels. Harry Parkes had made it clear in interviews and public appearances that the Taiping were a legion of monsters. Consul Harvey’s grim reports on the ostensible destruction of Ningbo, as if it had been wiped off the map, gained wide publication with little to dispute them.

By the summer of 1862, even Karl Marx wrote off the Taiping after reading Harvey’s dispatches. Marx’s final article on the global significance of the civil war in China was published in the Viennese paper Die Presse in July, and he spent most of it quoting from one of Harvey’s letters to Frederick Bruce. In the passages Marx quoted, Harvey declared that the truth of the Taiping “does not agree with the illusions of English missionaries who tell fairy tales about ‘the salvation of China.’…After ten years of noisy quasi-activity, they have destroyed everything and produced nothing.” The Chinese rebellion was a movement of violence and beheadings, Harvey wrote (and Marx quoted), of “hooligans, vagabonds and evil characters,” of “infamy on the women and girls, without any limit whatsoever,” of “terrorization” and “horror scenes.” In its sum, it represented an “enormous mass of nothingness.”

From Harvey’s testimony, Marx concluded that the Taiping were “devils” who were “not conscious of any task, except the change of dynasty.” “They are an even greater scourge to the population than the old rulers,” he wrote. “It seems that their vocation is nothing else than to set against the conservative disintegration [of China], its destruction, in grotesque horrifying form, without any seeds for a renaissance.” And in his disgust, he wrote off not just the rebels but the entire Chinese Empire—as had Lord Elgin—for being hopelessly lost to antiquity and therefore irrelevant to the rapidly changing world beyond its borders. “But only in China was such a sort of devil possible,” Marx concluded. “It is the consequence of a fossil form of social life.”⁸

The editors of the London Times wanted war. A year after calling Hong Xiuquan a “de facto Sovereign” with whom Britain should build trade relations, in May 1862 they declared the Taiping instead to be “the Thug of China, the desolator of cities, the provider of human carrion to the wild dogs, the pitiless exterminator, the useless butcher.” They denounced the British defenders of the neutral policy in newly scathing terms, singling out especially Thomas Taylor Meadows, the consul whose February 1861 letter in favor of the Taiping government had now finally become available in England. They called him a “Sinologue hugging his theory at home” and accused him of denying the “sounds of massacre and the glare of flame [that] are monopolizing the attention of every inhabitant of the place.” There was no question, they declared, that “it is time to attack these robbers.”⁹

What had changed in the intervening year, of course, was that Harvey, Parkes, and Hope had taught them that the Taiping were a force of mere anarchy. What had not changed, however, was The Times’ belief that China, together with India, would be Britain’s salvation from the U.S. Civil War. “If it be fated that America must pass away from us as a profitable customer,” its editors wrote a few weeks later, “…   then China and India together promise to rise up in its place, and to help us to pass, although painfully, through our difficulty.” Britain could now break free of its dependence on the United States (“with her prohibitory tariffs, her smoking mounds of burning cotton, her impoverished people, and her inevitably approaching bankruptcy”) by turning instead to Asia, where the real potential for the future lay. And although Britain was suffering from “the evil effects of having relied too confidently” on the United States, thankfully, they wrote, “the good seed we sowed, and harrowed, and watered in the Far East is springing up and bearing fruit.”¹⁰

In light of Harvey’s reports, The Times now declared that the only route to Great Britain’s economic survival lay down the path of the Taiping’s annihilation. The rebels had become a “dragon who interferes between us and our golden apples.” It was a simple humanitarian issue, as the editors now explained to their readers: if the tea market in Shanghai and Ningbo should be ruined by the Taiping, the British government would have to raise the tax rate on tea in order to preserve its much-needed revenue from the trade. That would bring great hardship to the tea-drinking lower classes of English society, including those who were already starving from the collapse of the textile industry in Lancashire. Politicians advocating neutrality who spoke in high-minded and abstract terms about the morals of foreign policy, they charged, ignore “all consideration for hardships to be suffered by the people.” England’s “pursuit of a perfect neutrality” cared not a whit “for the tea-consumers of England or the tea-producers of China, any more than we have for the cotton-spinners of Lancashire.” So intervention was a matter of humanitarian relief, not just for the peasants of China but also for England’s own poor. And even putting aside the matter of the suffering of the common people, they insisted that the fundamental economics alone, “as a matter of pounds, shillings, and pence,” dictated “that this dragon who interferes between us and our golden apples should be killed by somebody.”¹¹

But the editors of the London Times were just as removed from the violence in China as those whose moral principles they ridiculed, and the elegance of their view in the summer of 1862 that the Taiping were a humanitarian menace—and that it would therefore be to England’s honor to help the Qing government restore order to its empire—quickly withered in the face of the dark news coming back from Asia. For the floodgates were now open, and, with the blanket permission of Her Majesty’s government as his shield, Admiral Hope was launching Britain into a war against the Chinese rebels whose moral complications were nearly unfathomable.

In league with the Ever-Victorious Army under Ward, and with ready approval from Li Hongzhang, the Allies embarked on an ambitious campaign against the Taiping strongholds around Shanghai in the late spring of 1862. They initially met with success, thanks largely to a ridiculous mismatch of equipment. On May 13, three days after the assault on Ningbo, a combined force out of Shanghai and Songjiang accomplished what Ward’s militia had never been able to do on its own: it captured Qingpu from the Taiping, after bombarding it for two straight hours with forty pieces of heavy artillery including a 68-pounder and four enormous 110-pound naval Armstrong guns. After the British and French artillery blasted the south gate of Qingpu to splinters, 3,500 of Ward’s Chinese troops stormed the breach, scaring the shell-shocked defenders into retreat as the military band played “God Save the Queen.” There were scarcely any casualties on the Allied side.¹²

But the rebels soon showed they could fight back, and the Europeans found themselves drawn inexorably deeper into the war. Four days after the capture of Qingpu, Hope’s French counterpart, Admiral Protet, led an assault on the village of South Bridge below Songjiang. Early in the fighting, a rebel sniper shot the French admiral through the chest, puncturing a main artery of his heart, and he died that night after a massive loss of blood. Protet’s enraged French troops managed to capture the nearby fortified village ofZhelin from the rebels shortly afterward and took retribution for the death of their beloved admiral by massacring three thousand people there, including the women and children, before burning the entire settlement to the ground.¹³

Even the initial Allied victories against the Taiping were short-lived, however, for it was one thing to storm a walled city, another to hold it—and the Allies simply didn’t have the manpower for the latter. Right after the capture of Qingpu, news came that Li Xiucheng was bringing a large rebel army down from Suzhou to descend on Songjiang in the Ever-Victorious Army’s absence.¹⁴ Ward turned back to Songjiang with 2,000 of his men to help hold the walls against the rebel attack, leaving his lieutenant Edward Forester with only 1,500 to garrison Qingpu—which soon fell under siege as well. Admiral Hope had taken his gunships back to Shanghai as soon as the initial fighting for Qingpu ended, so Forester’s troops were alone. They managed to hold out for nearly a month, supplying themselves at one point by ambushing a passing French smuggling ship loaded with arms and ammunition for the rebels. But Forester’s European officers nearly mutinied after he turned down a Taiping offer to buy them out with gold, and he had to lock some of them up for insubordination. Then came a botched rescue attempt by Ward and Hope on June 10—which got hung up on Hope’s insistence that they torch the entire city to avoid having to garrison it any longer. It ended with the hasty retreat of Hope and Ward, the slaughter of all of Forester’s men (starting with his imprisoned European officers, whose heads were impaled on spear points by the rebel vanguard), and the capture of Forester himself by the Taiping, who stripped him naked and kept him prisoner for two months, until Li Hongzhang paid his ransom.¹⁵

From there, things only got worse. In the summer, a graphic account from a British soldier began to make the rounds of the world’s newspapers, describing what had happened to a group of rebel prisoners the British and French had handed over to the Qing authorities at Shanghai. According to his account, the imperial forces had butchered the prisoners as British soldiers stood idly by. That much alone wasn’t enough to provoke a crisis, but he also reported that this time their butchery had extended even to infants and unborn children. His account read in part:

A young female, apparently about eight months pregnant, who never uttered a groan or sigh at all the previous cruelties she had endured from the surrounding mob, had her infant cut out of her womb, and held up in her sight by one of its little hands, bleeding and quivering; when, at the sight, she gave one heartrending, piercing screech that would have awakened pity in a tiger, and after it had been in that state dashed on her breast, she, with a last superhuman effort, released her arms from those holding her down, and clasped her infant to her bleeding heart, and died holding it there with such force that they could not be separated, and were thus thrown together on the pile of other carcasses.

Another young woman among the prisoners awaiting her turn to be disembowelled, with a fine boy of ten months old crowing and jumping in her arms, had him snatched suddenly away from her, and flung to the executioner, who plunged the ruthless knife into his tender breast before his mother’s eyes. Infants but recently born were torn from their mother’s breasts, and disembowelled before their faces. Young strong men were disembowelled, mutilated, and the parts cut off thrust into their own mouths, or flung among the admiring and laughing crowd of Chinamen.

The author of the account begged forgiveness for his complicity. “But no more: I can write no more of these scenes,” he said toward the end of the letter. “I can now only regret for ever that I looked on the dreadful sight. I am no longer fit to be a soldier.” But it was his country which bore the greatest moral burden for the events that day. “May God forgive England,” he wrote, “for the part she is taking in this war.”¹⁶

The shocking story swamped the media of the English-speaking world, appearing in papers from Glasgow to Newfoundland and from Louisville to San Francisco. It had first appeared in an English-language paper in India, and its author was anonymous. Admiral Hope declared it to be “a pure fabrication,” though hardly anyone reported that. Even if it were, Hope’s rebuttal managed to stretch the bounds of credence even further than the original account had. His main evidence to contradict it was the word of Wu Xu, the Shanghai daotai who was Frederick Townsend Ward’s commander (and, typically, the executor of his prisoners). Without the faintest whiff of cynicism, Hope reported that Wu Xu had assured him that “the prisoners of all descriptions … have been treated with kindness and humanity,” and, as if they were merely a group of unruly children, that “far from treating them harshly it was his intention to take care of them till they could return to their friends.”¹⁷

At any rate, the gruesome account was immediately believable to a British public whose government had been painting the Manchus as a barbaric horde of murderers ever since the kidnapping of the European envoys in 1860. British opponents of intervention ran headlong with the story. “I argue not whether the rebels are idolaters, Buddhists, Confucians, Mahomedans, or pretended Christians,” wrote Colonel Sykes to the London Daily News, “they are human beings; they ask for our friendship, and the blood we shed in slaughtering them is reeking up to heaven in judgment against us.”¹⁸The Economist declared that “the true policy would have been to avoid all but the most necessary intervention … and to have discouraged strongly and steadily all English meddling in Imperial affairs.”¹⁹ Its editors now worried that Great Britain had been dragged so deeply into the Chinese war that there was no way to salvage her honor except by colonizing the country.

And though the account may have sparked anger and shame in Britain, in the United States it sparked a vindictive fury. Anti-British sentiment in the northern states was running high in the summer of 1862, thanks to the obvious preference for the Confederacy on the part of Palmerston, Russell, and other leading members of the British government. Absent the as-yet-unissued Emancipation Proclamation, British sympathizers could frame the American war as being one of national liberation, rather than a war over slavery (which both sides still allowed). Many liberals in Britain celebrated the resistance of the South against northern tyranny, perhaps none quite so blatantly as William Gladstone, the chancellor of the Exchequer, who would all but throw in his lot with the Confederates the following October by telling a cheering audience in Newcastle, “There is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and the other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either—they have made a nation.”²⁰

In contrast to the British government’s clear sympathy for the southern rebels in the United States—who at that point held the upper hand in their war—northern journalists used the bloody news from China to flog Britain (“John Bull”) for being perfectly willing to hire itself out to a brutal, barbaric regime in order to put down a movement far more innocent than the slaveholding Confederacy. From the August 30 issue of Vanity Fair:

Our excellent friend, BULL, has just now an army in China.

An army in China! For what?

Why, to put down the Chinese rebels, to be sure, who are trying to depose their august, sublime, high, and mighty monarch.

And what has JOHN to do with that quarrel?

Nothing!

Their playfulness gave way to a screed against Britain’s duplicity in the two civil wars: “O JOHN BULL! JOHN BULL!…You great beer-swilling Hogshead of Hypocrisies! Now you pray, and then you plunder—now you pity and then you pillage—now you mourn and then you massacre—now you blubber the Black Man, and then you disembowel the Yellow Man …”²¹

The Saturday Evening Post carried it further, asking how the British could even dare to pass judgment on America’s civil war after this revelation. “It appears,” they wrote, “that the English Government, which seems to regard the rebellion in the United States as a very praiseworthy thing, holds a different view of the Chinese rebellion.” It then printed a passage from the account of atrocities and concluded from it that “it does not become Englishmen to affect any great degree of horror at the necessarily distressing incidents of the present American rebellion, when their own history—from the first to the last—is such a constant record of blood, blood, blood!”²²

Into this maelstrom of anger, hypocrisy, and reprisal, James Legge reinserted himself. Hong Rengan’s old teacher and mentor in the London Missionary Society was still one of the most respected members of Hong Kong society, and with his translations ofConfucius (with which Hong Rengan had helped him) he was also on his way to establishing himself as Britain’s leading expert on China—in time, he would become the first professor of Chinese at Oxford.²³ Up to this point, however, he had mostly held back from making any public statements on the course of the rebellion or the career of his former assistant. But now, in reaction to the British intervention, he came out in public to add a voice of measured reason to the international debate over the war in China. In the fall of 1862, the leading missionary journals in Great Britain published a letter from Legge stating that he was bitterly opposed to the intervention and “much grieved to hear that our own government has approved … of Admiral Hope’s proceedings.” The British public had no idea what was really happening in China, he said, for the reports of the British papers had all along been twisted and one-sided, “intended to justify the most violent and vigorous proceedings” against the Taiping rebels.

But he was not writing to defend the Taiping themselves. Indeed, Legge had never held the rebel movement in much esteem, not since the days when he had tried to discourage Hong Rengan from going to Nanjing to rejoin his cousin. So strong had been his opinion then that Hong Rengan had waited until Legge was away on home leave before making his final departure. The bond of affection between the two men had not waned in the following years, though, and Legge took a keener interest in the movement once he learned that his favorite Chinese person had become the Shield King and chief minister of Hong Xiuquan. He took care of Hong Rengan’s brother and nephew until they were ready to go to Nanjing. And he kept up an occasional correspondence with Hong Rengan over the years, warning him more recently by letter that the tide was shifting and terrible things were being said about the Taiping in the West.

In his public letter, Legge admitted that Hong Rengan had never managed to win him over to the movement. Despite some early optimism, he had remained obstinate in his disregard for the religious aspects of the rebellion, and he was particularly dismayed by the news that Hong Rengan had taken multiple wives. As if writing a eulogy for his lost friend, he lamented that Hong Rengan had not proven to be up to the enormous task before him. Surely, he wrote (in reference to Issachar Roberts), Hong Rengan was not guilty of the charges that had been leveled against him. But nevertheless, “he has made shipwreck of faith and of a good conscience,” and Legge did not believe that the Chinese rebels would ever reach true Christianity, even with Hong Rengan to guide them.

But—and this was the salient point of his letter—neither did that mean that Britain should be free to commit violence against them. The Taiping’s friendliness to the Western nations was genuine, Legge maintained, and “Had we been willing to enter into negotiations with them in 1860, or even last year, we should have found that their calling us ‘foreign brethren’ had a real, good, substantial meaning in it.” But now, with Admiral Hope’s blind launching of hostilities, that great opportunity had been lost. The imperials were every bit as cruel as the rebels, if not more so, and the foreign intervention would serve only to encourage and perpetuate that cruelty. “We shall kill our thousands on the battle-field,” Legge warned, “and the governors of provinces will kill their tens of thousands in the execution areas.… Our high officers will be the ministers to so many butchers of human beings.”

The time of the Manchus in China had passed, said Legge, like that of the Stuarts in England or the Bourbons in France. Their reign could not be prolonged. The only moral course available to England in China was to withdraw herself and return to neutrality. No matter what terrible things might come, it was China’s war, and England had no part in it. “But let not us call those rebels whom it calls rebels,” Legge concluded plaintively. “Let not us lend our armies and fleets to do for it what it cannot do for itself. If we only did what was right, China would, by-and-by, in God’s providence, come to a better state than it is in at present. Whatever betide, a nation is no more justifiable than an individual, in doing evil that good may come.”

As it turned out, without even need of the public outcry from abroad to hasten its end, Admiral Hope’s campaign to clear the thirty-mile radius around Shanghai proved completely untenable on military grounds and quickly collapsed. Absent a major commitment of additional troops from back home that was not forthcoming, the combined forces of the British and French in Shanghai were simply too weak to hold a garrison against the rebels, even when they coordinated with Ward. And so, after the death of Protet and the gruesome debacle at Qingpu, Hope was forced to admit defeat. He pulled his ships back to Shanghai, abandoning the Allies’ sites of victory to Li Xiucheng, and gave up on any objective beyond the immediate defense of the city.²⁴ But then again, that had been his basic charge all along. Of Hope’s tendency to exceed his instructions, The Spectator, back in London, observed ruefully that “The chronic Indian disease, disobedience of English orders, has extended to China.”²⁵ By October, Hope would be removed from service in China altogether, replaced by the far more moderate and diplomatic Rear Admiral Augustus Leopold Kuper (whose appointment followed rumors in England that there wasn’t a single flag officer willing to take over the troubled China command).²⁶ Captain Dew of the Encounter was formally reprimanded by the Admiralty for having exceeded his orders at Ningbo. The Royal Navy would no longer take a direct role in fighting the rebels.²⁷ Frederick Townsend Ward, beholden to no foreign government, was left to keep fighting on his own, but he didn’t mind that, since the British and French troops, for all the usefulness of their heavy artillery, had tended to get in the way of the looting.²⁸

Never in the entire war did things go as well for Zeng Guofan as they did that spring. First of all, for reasons having nothing to do with the foreign intervention at Shanghai and Ningbo, Duolonga’s cavalry made great progress in their harassment of the Brave King, Chen Yucheng, in northern Anhui. After losing Anqing in September, Chen had retreated to the city of Luzhou, ninety miles to the north, which had been under rebel control since 1858. From that base, he began calling up Taiping forces and allies from the Nian bandit armies for a planned four-pronged campaign to the north into Henan and Shaanxi provinces, with a likely final goal of driving on to Beijing to take advantage of the weakness of the new government there.²⁹ Three of the armies marched north as planned in the early months of 1862, but the Brave King found himself holed up in Luzhou, under siege by Duolonga and other Hunan Army forces. They cut off his communications completely, so he had no news from the other campaign armies that would let him know where they had met with success or where he should take his own army if they escaped the siege.

On May 13, with supplies in Luzhou dwindling, the young Brave King took an army of 4,000 and broke through the Hunan siege camps on the north side of Luzhou. Duolonga’s forces fell on the abandoned city behind him as the Brave King led his men on a forced march northward, through night and day, to rejoin the closest of their companion armies—which, according to the plan, had been sent to attack the city of Shouzhou, seventy miles to the northwest. That army was under the command of an imperial defector named Miao Peilin, a militia chief from northern Anhui who had come over to the Taiping during the Brave King’s initial march through the region, when he had tried to break the siege of Anqing in the fall of 1860.³⁰ Miao Peilin’s army had played a major role in supporting the Brave King during the failed Anqing campaign, and his was one of the four columns for the new push northward. When Chen Yucheng reached the gates of Shouzhou, he was relieved to see that Miao’s army was there to meet him, and they controlled the city. Oddly, however, Miao himself was nowhere to be seen.

In the absence of communications, Chen Yucheng did not know that Miao Peilin had been soundly defeated at Shouzhou and on April 25 his entire army had surrendered to the imperials. Miao had gone back over to the dynasty’s side, his life spared in exchange for promising to deliver the rebel general. And so, when Chen entered through the gate of Shouzhou to rejoin his companions, they immediately took him prisoner. In June, he was executed. In his one statement of confession, the Brave King showed no remorse, only sadness for his men. “It is Heaven’s will that has brought me here,” he told his captors, “and there is nothing that can be said of my past. I have long enjoyed the reputation of a victorious commander, but now I would prefer to look to the future. For the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to lose me, one single man, it will be as if the mountains and the rivers of the kingdom have been reduced by half. I bear a great debt of gratitude to my Heavenly Dynasty and will not surrender. The general of a defeated army cannot beg for his life. But as for the four thousand men I command, they are veterans of a hundred battles, and I do not know whether they are still alive. You can cut me to pieces for the crimes I have committed, but this has nothing to do with them.”³¹

While this was happening in northern Anhui, the Allied campaign outside Shanghai all but rolled out a carpet for Zeng Guofan’s brother Guoquan in his march on Nanjing. In response to the joint campaign of Ward and the Allies, Li Xiucheng was forced to transfer his forces to the east, and he led his main army from Suzhou down to Songjiang to take command of the less skilled forces that were ranged around Shanghai. That shift—which was nearly simultaneous with the destruction of the Brave King’s army in northern Anhui—left the Taiping garrisons along the Yangtze River between Anqing and Nanjing without any hope of reinforcement from the north or the east, just at the time that Zeng Guofan’s brother was starting to fight his way through them toward the rebel capital.

A few months earlier, nobody could have predicted such hostility near Shanghai, let alone the presence of effective forces there opposed to the Taiping, and so the sudden drawing off of Taiping strength to the east came as a surprise to all involved. As the rebel garrisons on the Yangtze fell back from Zeng Guoquan’s advance, abandoning their forts and setting fire to their stockades, he was bewildered by their lack of resistance and wondered what they were preparing for him down the road.³² What he didn’t realize was that they were preparing nothing, because the bulk of the Taiping armies had moved out of range. The outmatched garrison forces were falling back to Nanjing for their own safety, and for that he had Admiral Hope to thank.

It was a disaster for the Taiping. The rebel kings had known all along that Zeng Guofan’s forces at Anqing would pose a threat from upstream, but they had never imagined that an attack would come so soon. Not Hong Rengan, who admitted later that “The Imps were upon us before we were nearly ready. They caught us unprepared.”³³ And most of all not Li Xiucheng, who took the safety of the capital and the sovereign as his personal responsibility. In the Loyal King’s own rueful words, the Hunan Army’s unchecked progress down the Yangtze River from Anqing in the spring of 1862, through a succession of unready garrisons right up to the doorstep of the capital itself, was as smooth and as swift as the splitting of bamboo.³⁴

By late May, Zeng Guoquan’s forces were on the outskirts of Nanjing. Avoiding the heavy shore batteries along the city’s northwest side, his naval support secured positions on opposite sides of the river just southwest (upstream) of the city. On the south bank they also captured an important junction that gave them control of the city’s moat. Guoquan took his men overland, down below the city, and came at it from the south under the protection of the naval forces, which screened them from above.³⁵ On May 30, 1862, with Li Xiucheng still fighting Ward and Forester for control of Songjiang and Qingpu two hundred miles away to the east, Zeng Guoquan’s forces pushed all the way to the base of a small hill just outside the south gate of Nanjing.³⁶

The hill they targeted, which was guarded by a stone fort at its top, was known as Yuhuatai, or the “Terrace of Flowering Rain.” It was a name bestowed in happier times, when a monk who preached on the wooded hill was said to have pleased Heaven so immensely that petals of flowers fell from the sky and swirled around him like a bright shower of rain. Now the trees had all been cut down to build stockades and watchtowers. There were no flowers. And the only rain was the damp gray drizzle that turned the brown earth below them into mud as the Hunan soldiers staked out their positions and began digging trenches at its base.

The impassive gray facade of the Nanjing city wall spoke of sheer invincibility to any soldier standing on the ground sixty feet below its battlements. But it had its vulnerabilities, and Yuhuatai was one of them. The sharp little hill, just over three hundred feet high and half a mile across, sat directly across from the Nanjing wall’s south gate. That gate had been the primary point of landward defense for the city under the Ming, who had built it in grand fashion: a multistory granite edifice with nested courtyards and barracks for several thousand troops, horse ramps running up to it from behind, and enough width atop the rampart to race two horses abreast without fear of disturbing the gunners at their embrasures.

But with an insufficient garrison, which now numbered a fraction of what the Ming planners had built it for, the gate was less a site for the projection of power than a point of relative softness along an otherwise unbroken wall of granite. And from the base of Yuhuatai to the massive reinforced wooden doors of the south gate lay a perfectly flat stretch of only half a mile. A man on foot could cover it easily in eight or nine minutes; a galloping horse, in one. From a watchtower on the side of the hill, an observer could see right over the top of the Nanjing wall into the vast city that spread out behind it—the tiled roofs of the palaces, the ruins of the old Manchu city, even the back of the wall as it wrapped around the city’s northern side in the far distance.³⁷ With naked eye he could track movement atop the south gate, and with a spyglass he could count the heads of the defending soldiers on the parapet. The long gray slab of the wall stretched away on both sides for what on the ground was miles, but from there, it was as if you could embrace the whole capital in your arms.

Yuhuatai was the base Zeng Guoquan wanted for his siege of Nanjing. The hill’s defenders in their stone fort were as yet untouchable, but he planted his army right at its foot. He had fewer than 20,000 men under his command, including the naval support that kept open a corridor from the river for supplies, but they dug themselves in deep with an interconnected series of ten heavily barricaded camps between high earthen walls at the edge of the city. Once fully entrenched—though outsized and outnumbered—they were immovable, like a small, hard parasite fixed to the back of some gigantic mammal.

Considering the difference between the matchlocks and swords of the Hunan Army and the modern arms sold by foreign weapons dealers, Zeng Guofan was remarkably unimpressed by what the foreigners had on offer. He had seen a few Western guns and found them finicky and complicated, prone to breaking down. You had to be careful when using them, he believed, and after twenty or thirty shots they had to be repaired.³⁸ But his primary objection to them was philosophical; he dismissed outright the notion that weapons of any kind could make a difference in the war. “The way to achieve victory is to be found in men, not in arms,” he wrote to Guoquan when his brother asked to get some foreign guns for the Nanjing camp. Take Bao Chao, he said, who “has no foreign guns and no foreign powder, yet he repeatedly achieves great victories.” Meanwhile, He Chun and Zhang Guoliang, the generals of the Green Standard’s siege of Nanjing, had had some foreign cannons in the spring of 1860, “which did nothing to prevent their defeat.” Military strength was a matter of talent, said Zeng Guofan, not tools. “A true beauty doesn’t fuss over pearls and jade, and a great writer needs no more than brush and ink. If a general is truly skilled at war, why should he go grasping for foreign weapons?”³⁹ He did eventually cave in to his brother’s persistent requests and sent agents to Canton and Shanghai in 1862 to purchase some foreign rifles and gunpowder for the camp at Nanjing. But those purchases were small, and he continued to insist, adamantly, that the traditional weapons of war—gingals and bird guns, swords, spears, Chinese cannons—had to remain the foundation of his army.⁴⁰

As skeptical as Zeng Guofan may have been about imported small arms, he was well aware of the terror that the larger foreign equipment could strike into Chinese who had never seen such things before. This was true for the British guns such as the Armstrong, with its five-mile range, and it was especially true for the steamships that pushed upstream with such swiftness and agility through waters in which Chinese boats couldn’t even make headway (there was a vast employment of river-dwelling men along the Yangtze to pull boats physically, by ropes, against the heavy current; their heavily planted footsteps over the centuries had worn deep, smooth grooves into the rocks along the shore).

Initially Zeng Guofan saw no use for steamships in his campaign against the rebels, except perhaps to carry the mail up and down the Yangtze.⁴¹ In the summer of 1861, he wrote to the Xianfeng emperor that the Hunan Army already had a solid advantage over the rebels on water and its only weakness was on land, where no steamship could help them.⁴² But by the spring of 1862, the transportation of Li Hongzhang’s army by steamship to Shanghai had convinced him that there were genuine military uses for the vessels as well and the Chinese shouldn’t be beholden to foreigners, who could charge whatever they wanted for rental.

Independently of whether he could use them himself, he believed that the very strangeness of the foreign ships and cannons constituted their primary advantage, and that was an advantage that should be deflated. As the Shanghai merchants knew when they hired their foreign mercenary corps, and as the Chinese commander near Canton knew when he dressed up his men like Europeans, ever since Britain’s victory in the Opium War the coastal population of China had held an almost mystical belief in the superiority of foreign armies and their ships and guns—which in Zeng Guofan’s opinion was due only to smoke and mirrors. China, he thought, should cut through the illusion. “The British and French can take exaggerated pride in the speed of their steamships and the long range of their foreign cannons, because they alone possess them,” he wrote to Prince Gong, “and the Chinese tremble with fear because they’ve rarely seen such things before.” So he encouraged the Qing government to buy some, if only to diminish their power to strike terror into the Chinese. “If we can buy them and make them our own,” he wrote, “the Chinese will become accustomed to seeing them and they won’t be afraid of them anymore. Then, the British and French will lose their edge.”⁴³

He started the process himself at his headquarters in Anqing. In February 1862, he purchased a small steamship from Shanghai and invited a handful of Chinese scientists and engineers to set up shop in Anqing to figure out how it was made. The ship soon broke down, and they could not repair it.⁴⁴ But by that summer, one of his engineers managed to build a working prototype of a steam engine. After inspecting it carefully and watching how the steam was used to move the wheel, Zeng Guofan wrote in his diary, “I am delighted that we Chinese can now use these cunning foreign techniques. Now they can’t treat us so arrogantly on account of our ignorance.”⁴⁵ A year later, their efforts at Anqing would result in a little steamer all of twenty-eight feet long that could make decent headway against the Yangtze currents.

The experiments of Zeng Guofan’s engineers at Anqing had no immediate military value, but in the summer of 1862, while they were still developing their first small engine, his hope that Prince Gong might be able to purchase a few full-sized steamships from abroad became a real possibility. After Admiral Hope’s failed attempt to intervene directly in the war, Frederick Bruce had been looking for some way to help the Qing government bring order back to its empire without exposing England to further embarrassment. So he supported a suggestion of British personnel at the Shanghai imperial maritime customs that the Qing government be allowed, through Prince Gong at the Office of Foreign Affairs, to purchase a few steamships from Great Britain. No such permission had been granted by the home government in London itself, but Bruce hoped they might agree that this was the best way to enable the imperial government of China to defend itself and protect the treaty ports without the need of relying on British forces to do it for them.

The man tasked with commissioning the steamers in England was Horatio Nelson Lay, a high-strung British linguist named (apparently in vain) after the illustrious admiral Horatio Nelson, who was no relation. He had learned to speak and read Chinese as a diplomatic translator and starting in 1859 had been employed at Shanghai by the Qing government to oversee the collection of customs duties. In the summer of 1862, he was home in England for a visit and received a letter from his successor at the imperial customs service authorizing him to purchase some steamships on behalf of the Chinese government.⁴⁶ It was an informal arrangement, and Lay had no contract, just an assurance that the Office of Foreign Affairs would come through with funds when the time came. From that rather basic assignment, however, Lay concocted what was, in the words of one of his contemporaries, “a magnificent scheme for regenerating China and exalting himself.”⁴⁷ He decided, in short, to commission an entire fleet of advanced warships for the Qing government, with a full crew of European sailors and marines to man them.

Lay was quite sensitive to the mercenary issue and bristled at the suggestion that he was somehow a servant of the Qing government. He worked “for them,” as he liked to put it, “not under them.” His views on the relative status of Chinese and Europeans were among the more chauvinistic to be found at the time; as he put it in an open letter to Lord Russell: “the notion of a gentleman acting under an Asiatic barbarian is preposterous.”⁴⁸ Lest his point somehow be misconstrued, he went on in that letter to clarify that “there is no such thing, at present, as equality between the European and the Asiatic.… The Chinese are, when compared with ourselves, but children; fractious, vicious children they often are, but it is as children and not as grown-up men that they should be treated.”⁴⁹Such views, another of his contemporaries later suggested, “quite unfitted him for working with the Chinese, either under or for them,”⁵⁰ but for the time being he considered himself to be the Qing emperor’s agent in England, and he demanded to be treated as such.

In pitching his scheme to the British government, Lay said little about the Taiping or the confounding issue of neutrality in the civil war. Instead, he emphasized the ways in which a flotilla of gunships might serve Britain’s long-term interests in China—by ensuring security for commerce on the Yangtze, for one thing, and by suppressing piracy on the coast. Eventually, he also thought, they might somehow open up the interior of China to British exploration, though the connection there was unclear (especially as the ships were to be under imperial control). He also pledged that the fleet would introduce steam power and telegraphs to China “under Chinese auspices” and that it would therefore “insure wholesome reforms in the administration of the Government throughout the Empire.”⁵¹ (He sidestepped the fact that it was only Hong Rengan, the prime minister of the Taiping, who had ever expressed any interest in such things.) Finally, he emphasized repeatedly and passionately that this would be not a mercenary force but rather a British fleet, with British commanders and sailors, which would work for (but not under) the emperor of China.

The Qing government might be paying the costs of the fleet, but Lay personally chose its commander, a decorated Royal Navy captain named Sherard Osborn who had been captain of the Furious during Elgin’s first mission to China. According to the four-year contract Lay drew up, Osborn would take his orders only from the emperor and no other authority in China. Those orders from the emperor, moreover, would be transmitted exclusively by Lay, who would reside in the capital as a sort of naval chief of staff. Reflecting either Lay’s opinion that all Chinese were children, or only that the emperor himself was a literal six-year-old, he stipulated that he would personally judge all of the emperor’s orders and decline to transmit to Osborn any that lacked “reasonableness.”⁵²

And here is where it became so important that Alexander Dunlop had withdrawn his motion in May 1861 to recognize the Taiping as belligerents (which, it may be recalled, he did only after repeated assurances from Palmerston and Russell that England was, and would always remain, neutral in China). Without belligerent status, the Chinese rebels were not protected by Britain’s Foreign Enlistment Act, which explicitly prohibited British firms from selling gunships to any party at war with a power with whom Britain was at peace. As the Qing were the only recognized power in China, British firms were perfectly free to sell them gunships to use against the Taiping rebels. By way of contrast, at precisely the same moment that Horatio Nelson Lay was in London trying to commission a war fleet for the Qing emperor, the chief naval agent of the Confederate States of America, James Bulloch, was in the same city with exactly the same purpose, and Lay succeeded where his American counterpart would fail. There were two recognized belligerent parties in the United States—both of which were technically at peace with England—and therefore Britain’s shipmakers were legally restricted from selling gunships to either of them.⁵³

The only way in which the Foreign Enlistment Act posed any kind of obstacle to Lay’s Chinese scheme was in its application to Sherard Osborn and his crew. In its most basic form, the act forbade British subjects to enlist in the national militaries of foreign states, and Osborn’s commission as commander of a Qing naval fleet would therefore require special permission from the Crown. Parliament still intended Britain to remain neutral in China, but Palmerston and Russell managed an end run around the expected objections of the lawmakers by suspending the act through two orders in council issued after Parliament went into recess in the summer of 1862, which guaranteed that they couldn’t come up for discussion until Parliament reconvened the following February.

The first order in council, issued in August 1862, suspended the Foreign Enlistment Act specifically so that Horatio Nelson Lay and Sherard Osborn (as named) could serve the emperor of China. It granted them permission to equip the emperor with armed ships and also gave them exclusive authority to recruit a British crew for the ships. Such crew members could enlist only under Lay and Osborn, nobody else. Four months later, Palmerston’s government issued a second order that dramatically broadened the original permissions to make it lawful for any British officer to enlist in the service of the Qing emperor, authorizing them “to serve the said Emperor in any military, warlike, or other operations, and for that purpose to go to any place or places beyond the seas, and to accept any commission, warrant, or other appointment from or under the said Emperor, and to accept any money, pay, or reward for their services.”

However, there was one twist to the recruitment process. Though the British government could grant Osborn and Lay the right to enlist British subjects for the Qing navy, it could not grant them Chinese commissions—which were entirely in the power of the Qing emperor and for which they would have to wait until they had arrived in China. But before they could leave England, they would have to resign or take leave from their Royal Navy commissions in order to enlist with Osborn. So in the interim, Osborn would sail to China with a crew of sailors and marines who effectively held no national commissions whatsoever and who would therefore be every bit as unregulated and unaccountable in their behavior as the mercenaries they were intended not to be.

The reaction in the papers came first. Russell and Palmerston’s turnaround in policy in China seemed almost perverse: overnight, Britain had gone from being the enemy of the Manchus to being their national arms dealers and would-be saviors. Punch magazine put it best: “our gallant friend Sherard Osborn … is to be sent off to smash, pound, and annihilate any Taepings who come near our Treaty Ports. We are sure he will cover himself with honours—not so sure that we can cover Lord Russell’s propositions with a shield of logic.”⁵⁴ Colonel Sykes, the former East India Company chairman, wrote to the London Daily News in bafflement, “Mr. Bruce and Consuls Medhurst and Harvey have repeatedly, in official documents, stated that the Imperial Government is the most corrupt and impotent on the face of the earth; and facts, in the torture and murder of our officers, and the murder of their captives in war, and the treatment of their prisoners in gaol, show them to be bloody and pitiless; and yet the object of our policy is to restore to efficient action a Government with such characteristics.”⁵⁵

By the time Parliament reconvened the following February, the authorization of the fleet was a fait accompli, but it still came under harsh criticism. On the first day of the new session, February 5, 1863, the Conservative leader, Benjamin Disraeli—hardly a sentimental moralist—took Palmerston to task for his sudden reversal of policy in China. “[T]he noble Lord who made war against the Tartar dynasty is now supporting the Tartar dynasty,” he declared, “and making war against these rebellious subjects of the Emperor of China. We have completely changed our position. We are making war against the Taeping insurrection.” In the same speech he chided Palmerston for failing to intervene on behalf of the South in the U.S. Civil War (which he termed “a great revolution”),⁵⁶ yet, he went on, the case of China showed that Palmerston was perfectly willing to get involved in the civil war of a country far less intimate with England than the United States. Nobody in the government seemed to have any clear idea who the Chinese rebels really were, he lamented, or what they really represented. “Who are the Taepings? What are the Taepings?” he asked. “Sir, I maintain that we have nothing to do with the Taepings. Whether they are patriots, or whether they are brigands, is nothing to the people of England. The status of the Taepings is a question for China, not for England.”⁵⁷

From the Liberal side, Colonel Sykes brandished a copy of the Taiping Bible in Chinese and defied anyone to call the Taiping blasphemers, while declaring that the “Tartar boy Emperor” to whom England was giving its military support actually had almost no influence “beyond the walls of Pekin.”⁵⁸ Three days later, he asked in the House of Commons if equivalent permission had been granted to British officers to enlist under the Taiping, and Austen Layard, the undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, replied that it hadn’t, adding snidely that “the Government had not the honour of being acquainted” with the “Taeping Emperor.”⁵⁹

But the dominant view of the fleet in England was optimistic. In a polite debate at the Royal Geographic Society in December 1862 attended by “every one interested in Chinese matters,” Harry Parkes, Horatio Nelson Lay, and Sherard Osborn discussed the fleet and the future of China with William Gladstone, the chancellor of the Exchequer. Lay waxed poetic on the flotilla’s potential to defuse the civil war in China and bring about the expansion of trade. Osborn told the audience that he was going to China “to spread peace, and not to shed blood” and he hoped in due time “to report that Nankin has been taken without the loss of one Taeping life after the assault was over.” The icing on the cake was Lay’s proposal, in one of his loftier flights of fancy, that the Taiping might be convinced to abandon China altogether and be transported as colonists to the islands of the eastern archipelago, “where there is waste land, and food, and labour, and a congenial climate.” Gladstone, showing a change of heart since his eloquent and strenuous opposition to Palmerston’s China war in 1857, gave Osborn and Lay his full and heartfelt approval, telling them to go forth “to carry to the Chinese the blessings, and not the curses, of civilization.”⁶⁰

The Times too gave Osborn’s expedition its blessing, observing that although the British might feel a stronger affinity for the Americans than for the Chinese, nevertheless “We have almost as much material interest at stake in the battles between the Taepings and the Imperialists in China as we have in the contests between the Unionists and Secessionists in America.” And with the coming departure of Osborn’s fleet, the end of the Chinese war seemed the one closer at hand. “[T]here are a great many markets opening or closing in China as victory vibrates,” said The Times, “and the tall chimneys in Lancashire may even yet feel the good effects of Imperial victories before they are allowed to experience any results from the vicissitudes of the next American campaign.”⁶¹

Britain’s shipmakers were delighted to have the Qing dynasty’s business, and they put their best work on display. Though the first three vessels were bought secondhand and were therefore ready almost immediately (the Mohawk, Africa, and Jasper, now renamedPekin, China, and Amoy), the rest had to be commissioned from scratch, and their construction would take a year. Lay decided to wait for all the ships to be finished and the legal paperwork to be complete before sending the squadron to China.⁶² Once complete, there would be eight ships, including seven gunships and a store vessel. The gunships ranged in size from large oceangoing men-of-war to smaller paddle steamers with shallow draft that could skim China’s muddy rivers (those had to be shipped in crates to Asia and assembled there). They would carry forty modern guns and a crew of four hundred, which Lay insisted would be exclusively “European officers and seamen, of the very best character.” The Qing Empire had never needed a naval ensign before, so Lay invented one for it, in green and yellow with a little dragon in the middle.

By the time the ships were ready to sail to China in the summer of 1863, it turned out to have been worth the wait. They may have lacked the latest iron armor (unneeded, at any rate, against the largely feeble artillery of the Taiping), but otherwise they were the very state of the art. When the fleet’s 241-foot flagship, Kiang-Soo, was first tested in Stokes Bay near Portsmouth in May 1863, it hit a peak speed of nineteen knots on the measured mile and averaged seventeen over four runs in one of the best performances ever recorded. It was rumored to be the fastest naval ship on the planet.⁶³

In England, polite names were given to this powerful squadron of warships. It was known generally as the Anglo-Chinese Flotilla and its mission the Anglo-Chinese Expedition, emphasizing the gentlemanly cooperation it represented (or so its advocates claimed) between Great Britain and the imperial government in China, to protect their common trade interests and combat piracy along the coast. Later historians would call it the Lay-Osborn Flotilla, after the two Britons behind its inception. But in Shanghai at the time, where it was obvious that the fleet’s sole purpose was to put down the Taiping Rebellion and where the foreign population reeled at Britain’s newfound willingness to play mercenary for China’s discredited imperial government, there was another name for it: the Vampire Fleet.