CHAPTER 3

THE SHIELD KING

As Elgin’s fleet made its successful entrance into Tianjin in the summer of 1858 and then tested the realm of the rebels along the Yangtze, Hong Rengan was making his way by a far more circuitous route across southern China toward Nanjing to rejoin his cousin. Leaving James Legge’s home in Hong Kong in May, he traveled first to Canton, safe (for him, at least) under British and French occupation, and then set out northeast through Guangdong province along the riverways leading into an ever-thickening succession of mountain ranges. The dense settlements that crowded under the commanding walls of Canton soon gave way to a landscape of scattered houses, villages nestled in the valleys, and terraced fields chipped into the sides of mountains. Inns and restaurants dotted the main thoroughfares, alive with the currents of rumor from wayfarers come down from the north. The best-traveled of those roads had signposts showing distance and direction, some paved by the grace of earlier dynasties that had mustered armies of laborers to mine boulders from the mountainsides and hammer them into cobbles.

For the most part, travelers through those parts were porters carrying wares to sell, and Qing soldiers patrolled the routes in search of bandits who lay in wait by night. Hong Rengan traveled as far as the trading junction of Nanxiong county and then turned north on an ancient stone road that led up into a wilderness of cliffs and craggy pines. Steps carved into granite climbed through switchbacks like spiral staircases up the sides of the mountains leading to the Meiling Pass, the gateway dividing the southern part of the empire from the Yangtze Valley. Beyond lay Jiangxi province and, beyond that, the Taiping capital of Nanjing. He entered the current of porters crossing the pass—they worked in pairs, fore and aft with a quick step, loads slung on a length of bamboo across their shoulders, singing to keep their rhythm—a nearly unbroken flow of humanity moving along the road like water in a river, one line coursing north and the other south. At the peak, the road squeezed through a twenty-foot-wide passage carved into the rock of the mountain, framed with a limestone archway where Qing sentries watched the traffic with a wary eye for rebel couriers. Hong Rengan, dressed as a peddler, was unremarkable to them, and he passed without incident.¹

In Jiangxi he continued northeast along the Gan River but soon came to the edge of the active war zone, just outside the realm of Taiping control, where a cordon of imperial armies was encamped. The armies were effective only by virtue of their massive size; there was scant overarching command, and unskilled officers had gained their posts through patronage rather than talent. Morale among the underpaid troops—many of them addicted to opium—was abysmal.² Easily enough, Hong Rengan managed to attach himself to one of the outlying units in order to join its march eastward toward the porcelain-producing city of Jingdezhen. But when Taiping forces attacked, the imperial unit dissolved in panic and Hong Rengan had to flee in the chaos and butchery of defeat, escaping with only the clothes on his back.³

He worked his way westward this time, away from the active fighting and up toward the Yangtze River where it coursed through Hubei province. The territory along the Yangtze had been fought over for more than five years now by the imperial and rebel sides, conquered and reconquered in turn, and for long stretches it was hard to tell that there had ever been a normal pattern of human life. Cities were emptied; houses had been stripped of wood to their window frames to make cooking fires for the passing armies.⁴Even in the more prosperous stretches of the river valley there was a quietness, a stirring of ghosts where a dense rural society had once lived, and the underpopulated farms were unable to muster enough hands to bring in what little harvest they could coax from the soil. On his route Hong Rengan met a soldier, whose name he later forgot, who had a plan to buy goods in the imperially controlled river town of Longping and then sell them to the rebels downriver in Nanjing. The soldier had no capital, but he did have contacts, extensive enough to be confident he could get through the siege lines with his wares. His plan seemed plausible enough that Hong Rengan gave him a piece of gold leaf he had kept sewn safely into the fabric of his jacket, and became his partner.⁵

While the soldier went to Longping to buy the goods for their trading scheme, Hong Rengan waited for him in the city of Huangmei, about fifteen miles to the northeast. The soldier had a contact there, a magistrate named Tan from his home village, and there were rumors that a Taiping detachment had been spotted nearby. Hong arrived too late to see the rebels—they had already vanished—but he spent a pleasant afternoon talking with Magistrate Tan, who found Hong’s intelligence and education so impressive that he offered him a job on the spot as his secretary. It was a coveted job for an unemployed scholar, especially in such times of uncertainty, but it was also a long-term position and Hong could only think of Nanjing, so he gave an ambiguous reply. In the end, he wound up offering his services as a doctor to Tan’s nephew, who had blistering headaches, and thereby made himself useful in the family’s home. At loose ends waiting for his partner and unable to travel to Nanjing without him, Hong Rengan stayed with Magistrate Tan’s family as the weeks, and then the months, passed.

New rumors came, murmurings that the Qing encirclement was tightening around Nanjing and the rebel capital would soon fall. Hong Rengan became anxious again and decided to leave Huangmei. Magistrate Tan, grateful for Hong’s treatment of his nephew, gave him a letter of introduction and enough money to resume his pilgrimage, and Hong put on his peddler disguise once again to make his way down to Longping alone.⁶ Movement was difficult, and imperial troops—of wildly varying degrees of discipline—were everywhere. A Qing patrol captured him in October, though they had no idea what a valuable bounty he was (they didn’t think to open the seams of his coat, where along with the gold leaf he had hidden an outline of his family history). They found nothing on him more incriminating than some medical texts but still kept him prisoner for several days—perhaps as a conscript, perhaps hoping for ransom—until he managed to escape.⁷ Some disaffected imperial soldiers then helped him get the rest of the way to Longping, where he stayed hidden in a house that served as a secret way station for Taiping refugees. The house’s owners, like many, had grown weary of the depravities of the imperial forces and gave their tacit support to the rebels. There is no record of whether he ever found his nameless soldier friend again or recovered his gold leaf.

In December 1858, he crossed paths with Lord Elgin. From his place of hiding, Hong Rengan heard that foreign steamships had been spotted on the Yangtze and that they were on their way back down to Shanghai. He ventured down to the waterfront in time to see Elgin’s fleet at anchor. He was acquainted with Thomas Wade, Elgin’s interpreter, from their days in Hong Kong, and tried to get on board one of the vessels to find him, in hopes that the British fleet might give him passage as far as Nanjing. He didn’t manage an audience with Wade, nor would the men he spoke to let him ride with them, but he did at least convince one of the British sailors to take back a letter addressed to James Legge and his other missionary friends in Hong Kong.⁸ It informed them that he was still alive and still trying to get to Nanjing.⁹ A few months later he surfaced again, finally making contact with a Taiping patrol in Anhui province in the spring of 1859. When he told them his story, they took him for a Qing spy and sent him under armed escort to the garrison in nearby Chentanghe. There, under interrogation from the garrison commander, he opened the seam of his jacket and removed the hidden scrap of paper that described his family history. It was enough to convince his questioner that he was, indeed, from the same village as the Heavenly King. The commander escorted him personally down the river on a Taiping boat, and he arrived at last at the Heavenly Capital on April 22, 1859, after nearly a year of travel.¹⁰

Nanjing was the grandest of China’s cities in its heyday, the original capital of the Ming dynasty, rich with temples, government offices, and trading houses laid out along wide avenues roughly following the four directions of the compass. A twenty-three-mile-long wall wrapped around the metropolis with towers and parapets reaching seventy feet high, now densely fortified with cannons at the point where the city’s northwest corner met the Yangtze River (and where imperial fleets huddled just out of range). As the Jerusalem of the Taiping, it had taken on a new character. Following their invasion in 1853, the rebels had torn down and burned most of the elaborate Daoist and Buddhist monasteries and forced the city’s residents into a short-lived segregation, with men and women living in separate communal residences, organized into collective work brigades with shared property and shared worship in Protestant churches. By the time of Hong Rengan’s arrival, marriage was again permitted, and though the Sabbath (on Saturday) was still fiercely kept, in other ways the puritanical ideals of the original movement had eroded. Opium had returned in force. Compared to its grandest days under the Ming, when the population had counted a million souls (more than all the capitals of Europe combined), the vast city now seemed nearly empty. After the bodies of the slaughtered Manchu population had been dumped into the Yangtze to float away downstream, the civilian residents of the city were allowed to come and go, and much of the population had drifted off to the countryside. For reasons of security, the city’s thronging markets had long been shut down—as Hong Rengan well knew, pretending to be a peddler was the easiest way for a spy to move around undetected. The resultant capital of the Taiping was lovely and overgrown, with grand palaces for the kings and ruins where the old temples had stood, the broad avenues even more coldly beautiful in their liberation from the press of life.

The Heavenly King’s palace was as magnificent as anything he had dreamed in his fevered visions before the war. Passing the drummers that flanked the main gate, visitors entered a cavernous reception hall in lacquered wood carved with dragons that wound their way up the pillars to the distant ceiling. The walls were inlaid with gold, and nearly everything that touched the king’s fingers—chopsticks, bowls, brushes—was fashioned from gold as well. His chamber pot was made of silver. Behind the main hall lay the vast inner sanctum where Hong Xiuquan lived, attended by a host of palace women, as distant from the daily workings of the capital as was his imperial counterpart in the Summer Palace outside Beijing.¹¹

By the time Hong Rengan arrived, his cousin had retreated from public life and was spending his days behind the palace walls reading scripture. Almost nobody was allowed to visit him save the women of the inner palace. His scrawled writings, in imperial vermilion ink, were posted on the walls outside to be promulgated throughout the city, and they showed that his visions had only intensified in the years since the first uprising. Some gave force and encouragement to the rebellion. “Those who are against us will be killed,” read one. “Those who obey us will be saved. No one will escape from the three of us, the Father and the sons.” (The sons were himself and Jesus.) Another read, “First, I strike at the edge of Heaven. Second, I strike at Hell. Third, I strike for the survival of the human beings. Fourth, I strike for annihilation of the devils.” Others brooded on the concept of sacrifice. “Be not afraid that the people of the world know not the truth. One day you may have to starve to death. One day you may have no road on which to travel.”¹²

Hong Rengan’s reunion with his cousin was, by his own account, bittersweet. It was eight years since they had last seen each other, and much had happened. The rumors that had reached Hong Rengan’s ears during his travels had not been hopeful. Despite the encouraging weakness of the Manchu government in the face of the foreign powers, Nanjing was surrounded. The mass of Taiping troops had left the city, marching in three separate armies on far-ranging foraging expeditions, while the imperials had concentrated all of their power on trying to sever the lines of communication that brought food and grain back to Nanjing. The Heavenly King’s removal from active leadership of the Taiping government had allowed a secondary king, the Eastern King, to take charge of the capital and the command of the armies with a harsh program of discipline (beheading for fornication or drunkenness)¹³ and to experiment with a utopian vision of communal land reform that he planned to implement over all the regions under Taiping rule. By 1856, the Eastern King ran the capital as if it were his own domain, and rumors in Shanghai reported that the Heavenly King was dead or had been usurped. He hadn’t, though; a bloody coup that year under murky circumstances ended with the severed head of the Eastern King being hung for public display on a wall across from the Heavenly King’s palace, while Taiping troops massacred six thousand of the fallen king’s followers and every member of his family.

Since the suppression of the Eastern King, Hong Xiuquan had needed an adviser he could trust, and now he found that adviser in Hong Rengan. The Heavenly King showered his beloved cousin with titles, promoting him swiftly through the ranks. Little more than two weeks after Hong Rengan’s arrival, he even went so far as to break a previous promise never to appoint another king and gave that rank to Hong Rengan.¹⁴ In full, Hong Rengan’s new grandiose title was “Founder of the Dynasty and Loyal Military Adviser, the Upholder of Heaven and Keeper of Order in the Court: The Shield King.” As “loyal military adviser” he joined the top echelon of Taiping military officers, and as “keeper of order in the court” his cousin put him in charge of the entire civil government of Nanjing, with rank equal to that of the deceased Eastern King. In spite of Hong Rengan’s long absence from the movement, assisting James Legge and Theodore Hamberg safely in Hong Kong while the rebel armies clawed and bludgeoned their way through central China, he was now being offered a position in the Taiping command that was second in power only to the Heavenly King himself.

Hong Rengan’s unexpected arrival may have seemed to his cousin a sign from God, but it sparked a dark resentment in others who had served the movement since the beginning of the war. Such was the case with a young but ambitious military officer named Li Xiucheng, who commanded the defense of Nanjing. Li, a poor and nearly illiterate farmer, had joined the Taiping not for religious reasons but simply out of the mixture of poverty and fear that abounded in southern China and gave the anti-imperial rebellion its astounding force. Li had grown up in mountainous Guangxi province, where the first uprisings had taken place. He wasn’t a God Worshipper, though everyone where he lived knew about the mysterious “Master Hong” who would later become the Heavenly King. Li’s family were dirt poor, scrabbling out a bare existence with hillside farming and a bit of hired labor and making charcoal, but even so “it was difficult to make ends meet each day,” he recounted, “and to get enough each month was even more difficult.”¹⁵

A branch of the Taiping army on the move from imperial pursuers camped in Li Xiucheng’s mountain village for five days in 1851, eating everything they could find, even what the villagers had hidden. But instead of resenting them as bandits, the nearly starving Li found something attractive in their communal provisions—the commander announced that anyone who became a God Worshipper could eat with them for free, so Li and his family joined them for a meal. When the army decamped from the village, Li and his family left with them. Like others who renounced their village lives to join the millenarian Taiping, the last thing Li did before leaving with the Taiping army was to follow the commander’s orders and burn down his own family’s house. There would be no homecoming until Jerusalem. And after just a few days of marching, he found himself in a predicament shared by all of the other farmers and villagers who joined the sinuous march of the Heavenly Army—they passed farther beyond their homes than they had ever been in their lives. They no longer knew the roads. The imperial forces were following behind. There was no turning back, even if they had wanted to.¹⁶

Uprooted from his life as a charcoal maker, Li proved a natural leader of men and a tactical genius in the raw. After the founding of the Heavenly Capital in 1853, he moved steadily up through the ranks of the army, from battalion commander to general. In the chaos that followed the Eastern King’s death in the coup of 1856, he was promoted into the top leadership of the Taiping armies, and by the time Hong Rengan arrived he was one of Hong Xiuquan’s most trusted generals. He was not, however, a king. And when the cousin arrived from his sojourn among the foreigners in Hong Kong and was suddenly promoted above Li Xiucheng after all his years of service, it planted a burning seed of jealousy. Li himself gained the rank of king a few months later, anointed as the Loyal King, but the lateness of the appointment and the Heavenly King’s clear preference for his cousin only nourished that jealousy, which continued to grow.

Hong Xiuquan was aware of the disaffection of his officers, so he called for the full congregation of Taiping leaders to assemble in the main reception hall to honor the appointment of the Shield King. Amid a clamor of drums and gongs he announced to his ministers that henceforth all matters in need of decision within the capital should be referred to the sole authority of the Shield King. As the crowd murmured its disapproval, he stood Hong Rengan on a platform to receive his seal of authority. Sensing the undercurrent of anger in the audience, Hong Rengan tried to turn down the appointment, but his cousin whispered to him that all would be well. “The wave that crashes with great force,” he said softly, “soon spends itself and leaves peace.” So Hong Rengan accepted the seal, and from his position on the platform he spoke to the crowd. With the self-possessed rhetorical power that had so impressed the missionaries in Hong Kong, he preached now to the congregation of Taiping leaders. He expounded on the policies of the Eastern King, criticizing them point by point and offering improvements. The crowd went silent. “They saw that I could stand in front of a multitude and hold forth flawlessly on doctrinal issues,” he later recounted, “and so they accepted me as their model of wisdom.”¹⁷

The rebel movement had flagged since its occupation of Nanjing in 1853, when the revolutionary momentum of the march gave way to a sedentary government with a bureaucracy, taxation, and all the other civil policies that fell so far beyond the purview of its leader’s apocalyptic visions.¹⁸ The Eastern King had built a promising, if harsh, civil government, but now it was in tatters. And though religion was the basis of Taiping ideology, it wasn’t enough on its own. The original core of the Taiping had been God Worshippers, but legions of followers who had joined later (such as Li Xiucheng) had been drawn by the promise of an escape from grinding poverty and, more abstractly, from the oppression of the Manchu imperial government. They participated in religious rituals because such participation was required and enforced; many surely came to believe deeply in the doctrines they were taught, but it is difficult to distinguish between dutiful observance and authentic piety.¹⁹ It was clear to Hong Rengan that commanding the loyalty of the movement’s followers meant giving them more than just the hope of spiritual salvation; they also needed earthly rewards, the promise of a better life in a new state.

It was on this foundation that Hong Rengan began to imagine a lasting structure for the future Taiping government and society, one that would weave together threads of Chinese tradition with his knowledge of the industrial societies of the West. He infused it with a prototype of ethnic nationalism that had simmered in China since the Manchus first conquered the empire. Indeed, Hong Rengan’s very first major proclamation as Shield King served to fan the flames of that ethnic resentment, calling on his people to “rejuvenate China and resist the northern barbarians”—meaning the Manchus—“in order to wipe out the humiliations of two hundred years.” Since the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644, he declared, “We mouth their language … we live together with their members, and our people suffer from the vileness of the Manchu dogs.”²⁰

The cause of Chinese liberation from the Manchus resonated not just with the followers of the Taiping but also with those who watched from outside. For the unusual Taiping religion might raise eyebrows among the more dogmatic missionary authorities, but there was little doubt abroad that the Taiping Rebellion was a genuine attempt to liberate the Chinese people—universally accepted as the natural and rightful rulers of the territory of China—from their alien overlords. Though some observers (such as the editors of the New Orleans Daily Picayune) might see the racial uprising as a threat,²¹ most in the United States and Europe sympathized with the will to freedom they saw in the Chinese insurgency. As one Shanghai resident put it, “Americans are too firmly attached to the principles on which their government was founded and has flourished, to refuse sympathy for a heroic people battling against foreign thraldom.”²² Western papers commonly described the Qing rulers as “tartars” from Manchuria, as the overlord class, as China’s imperial masters, as the conquerors. Or as one American missionary described the cause of the war, “A portion of the Chinese have risen to deliver their country from the domination of an alien race.”²³

Hong Rengan hashed out his vision for the future Taiping state in a document titled “A New Work for the Aid of Government,” which was the first truly global proposal for reform in China’s history. In the traditional dynastic vision, as carried on through the reign of the Qing dynasty, China’s rulers imagined their empire to be the center of world civilization, to which outsiders (barbarians) were welcome to come and trade, provided they acknowledged the cultural superiority of the Chinese throne. This was the worldview with which England had come into repeated conflict. In contrast, Hong Rengan knew from experience that the British were both militarily powerful and fiercely proud, so he suggested that in communicating with them the Chinese should stop using terms like “barbarian” and instead start expressing ideas such as “equality, friendship, harmony and affection.”²⁴

Similarly, he thought the traditional tribute model of diplomacy, in which foreigners were encouraged to come to Beijing to pay homage to the emperor as vassals, should be abandoned as a relic from the past with no use to the contemporary world. “Human beings are not willing to be considered inferior,” he noted with a degree of cultural relativism often thought to be absent from imperial China. If in the past others had pretended to treat the Chinese as superiors, he argued, it was only because they had been forced to, “not out of wholehearted submission.” There should be a new diplomacy of equals, so “friendly relations can be established with foreign countries.” The only lasting way to gain the respect of other nations, he wrote, was “by the perfection of government within and the demonstration of faith without.” That is, only by looking inward to reform and establishing itself as a model of government in the new era could China once again command the respect it had enjoyed in the past.²⁵

From his experience living in Hong Kong, Hong Rengan had come to view China as merely one state among many, with much to gain from studying the other powers of the nineteenth-century world. Foremost was the Christian religion, of the kind he had learned from Theodore Hamberg and James Legge in Hong Kong, which he believed was the key to the strength of Western countries. Without exception, he argued in his treatise on government, it was the Protestant Christian nations—England, the United States, Germany, the Scandinavian countries—that were the strongest and most prosperous in the modern world, followed by the slightly weaker French Catholics and Orthodox Russians, who still believed in “miracles and mysticism.” By his account, the states that hewed to Old Testament Islam or, worse, Buddhism, were uniformly weak, and many had become colonies of the stronger nations. He equated China under the Manchus to Persia, where the people accepted their slavelike status without complaint.

The “most powerful nation” in Hong Rengan’s eyes was Great Britain, whose ruling house he believed to have lasted a thousand years (making it more enduring than any dynasty in China). He explained that its strength derived from the intelligence of its people and its system of laws, which China should emulate. But his greatest admiration was for the United States (called the “Flowery-Flag Country” in Chinese by reason of its stars and stripes), which he termed “the most righteous and wealthy country of all.” The heart of America’s greatness was, he believed, in its magnanimity and sense of equality. Despite the United States’ military strength, he wrote, “she does not encroach upon her neighboring countries,” and when gold was discovered in California all comers were welcome. The acceptance of foreigners in the United States was so extensive that some even had become officials there. Hong Rengan also glowed about American democracy, especially the notion that all people (at least all “people of virtue”) should have a say in choosing their leaders and setting policies of the government. “Those elected by the majority,” he wrote, “are considered worthy and capable, and decisions reached by the majority are considered just.”²⁶

In his treatise on government, Hong Rengan also took the time to describe the breadth of his own foreign contacts. He listed his many missionary friends from the “strong” countries, including British missionaries such as James Legge and a handful of Americans he had met in Shanghai. He reserved a special place for the late Theodore Hamberg, who, he said, “was extremely fond of me.”²⁷ The catalogue of his foreign friends served two purposes—to Hong Xiuquan and the Taiping leadership, for whom the document was written, it carried the implicit promise that they would have foreign cooperation in their project of building a Christian state in China. And to the foreigners to whom it was eventually leaked (a writer in The London Review described it as “one of the most curious documents ever issued”),²⁸ it suggested that the new prime minister of the Taiping viewed them as brothers and that his future state would be the one to finally open wide the dusty gates of China.

But religion and international diplomacy were just a beginning. With remarkable prescience, Hong Rengan proposed that China must tap into the emergent global industrial economy if it wanted to be strong. Though he described the Holy Trinity (the traditional one, not the one including the Heavenly King) as the “greatest treasure” of a state, it was followed closely by a long list of “middle treasures” more material in nature, including steamships, trains, clocks and watches, telescopes, sextants, and revolving guns. Siam, he suggested, had learned how to build steamships and thereby made itself into “a country of wealth and civilization.”²⁹ The Japanese, unlike the Qing rulers of China, had opened willingly to foreign trade and “will certainly become skillful in the future.” And that, he believed, was exactly the path that a Taiping-ruled China should follow.

Hong Rengan’s treatise presented, for the very first time in a Chinese context, a vision of the country as a modern industrial power. He offered a litany of proposals that in one form or another would become catchphrases for later Chinese reformers into the twentieth century and beyond. The new China, he argued, would have to begin with a strong legal system, one based firmly on the rule of law. There had to be patent rights so that “imitators will be convicted and punished,” and Chinese entrepreneurs would then have the encouragement they needed to invent machines that could match those of the Westerners. He called for a revolution of transportation: steamships, which at the time were possessed solely by foreigners; railroads, for a country that had none (Chinese workers might have built the United States’ railroads in the 1860s, but when Hong Rengan wrote his tract there wasn’t so much as a mile of track in his own country). A hierarchical system of highways could link the provincial capitals to one another with major roads, while narrower ones would branch out to the townships and villages. If the government dredged the major rivers, boats powered by fire and steam could ship cargo and passengers to and from the deepest parts of the empire. Mines could be opened for a range of precious materials—“gold, silver, copper, iron, tin, coal, salt, amber, oyster shells, jade and precious stones”—with profits shared by the prospectors and the state (for all under the ground was God’s gift to mankind equally, but individuals needed personal incentive to do the work of finding it). Private merchants could apply for permission to establish banks and issue paper currency, which could be carried more easily than the Qing dynasty’s silver ingots and copper cash and would further fuel the development of the economy. He even called for the founding of Western-style insurance companies that could offer policies to protect people’s homes, property, and livelihoods.

The recommendations continued. He argued that developing China’s transportation infrastructure was necessary not just for the sake of creating economic wealth but also to allow for the free movement of information within the empire. His proposal called fornewspapers of every imaginable description, from local dailies to provincial monthlies that would report major news events as well as the prices of commodities in China’s various regions, with harsh punishments for false reporting. A government office would collect all of the newspapers and forward them to the sovereign in the capital—not so he could censure their writers but so he could learn the true circumstances of his kingdom.

Politically, however, Hong Rengan’s imagined state would be an unequivocal theocracy, and a fundamentalist one at that. There were benevolent aspects to this: inspired by the work of the missionaries he had known in Hong Kong and Shanghai, he called for the Chinese to develop Christian social institutions to provide for orphans and widows, the disabled and the destitute. They would be taught music and literature, and, when they died, they would be buried with kindness. “These poor people make their plans cautiously and they calculate deeply,” wrote Hong, “many of them are often persons of ability.”³⁰ The drowning of infants would be prohibited, as would the selling of children.

At the same time, it would be a harshly puritanical society, where the power of the government would be used to prevent sinful practices. Alcohol, tobacco, and opium would be strictly forbidden, along with dramatic plays and colorful Daoist rituals and Buddhist ceremonies that distracted the people from their work. Feng shui—the geomantic study of wind and water—was a superstition that stood in the way of mining and moving the land, and it should be eradicated. Lazy people would be turned in by their families and sent into exile, so their laziness wouldn’t infect anyone else. A range of punishments would keep offenders in line, though he believed the myriad methods of execution developed over the years in China should be abandoned. For the worst offenders, China’s many gradations and creative varieties of capital punishment should, he wrote, should be replaced by the single, decidedly Western, method of hanging—from a gallows, with proper advertisement beforehand so a crowd could watch.

But first a true state would have to be founded. And before that state could be founded, the war had to be won. In their younger years Hong Rengan and his cousin had talked about a plan for building a kingdom, and it hadn’t included the north. Their original strategy had been to set a foundation in Nanjing, expand their reach down the Yangtze River to Zhenjiang to seize control of the Grand Canal, and claim Anqing upstream to control the upper reaches of the Yangtze. Then they would consolidate the seven southern provinces, campaign westward to take Sichuan and Shaanxi, and thus would the kingdom be established—a southern empire stretching from the Yangtze River to the ocean. Its borders would match closely with the emotionally laden Chinese heartland, roughly the old boundaries of the ethnically Chinese Ming Empire. It would abandon the much larger expanse of the Qing dynasty, which had conquered vast territories in the north and west inhabited mostly by Manchus, Mongols, and Central Asian Muslims.³¹

That strategy had not been followed, however. After the fall of Nanjing, the Taiping forces got only as far as consolidating Zhenjiang and Anqing before abandoning the southern strategy and instead turning north toward Beijing in their failed attempt to cut the head off the existing imperial state. By the time Hong Rengan arrived, the Taiping capital was in desperate straits. The rebels had lost much of the southern territory they had conquered in the initial campaign. They still held the strategic Yangtze city of Anqing upstream, but imperial forces had retaken Zhenjiang (the ruined city where Elgin’s party had imagined themselves in Pompeii). More pressing, imperial forces had set up massive encampments of soldiers numbering in the tens of thousands at strategic points to the north and south of Nanjing and kept it under effective siege, with only a single supply line left open to bring grain and salt to the capital city.

These imperial troops were divided into two main camps, one north of the Yangtze River near Yangzhou and one to the south just beyond Nanjing. They were the leading forces of the central empire, the counterparts of Senggelinqin’s army in the north, and their commanders had been chasing the Taiping from the beginning. The southern camp had dug in just ten days after the fall of Nanjing, when the pursuing forces had finally caught up, and it had stood its ground almost continually ever since. Whereas a Manchu general named He Chun commanded the northern encampment, the southern one was in the hands of the far more capable Chinese general Zhang Guoliang, one of the emperor’s most valuable assets. In the 1840s, Zhang had been a bandit leader in the same region of Guangdong where the Taiping had originated (some sources have him born in the same county as Hong Xiuquan).³² A Robin Hood figure, his 10,000-strong army ravaged the province under the mantras “take from the rich to save the poor” and “kill the officials but spare the people.” But when imperial forces finally captured him in the early 1850s, he went over to the emperor’s side and took his men with him. He Chun was a talented commander, but it was Zhang Guoliang who really struck fear into the hearts of the Taiping generals.³³

Zhang Guoliang’s siege troops in the southern camp stayed safely out of range of the cannons on the city walls, and their numbers were too great to be easily scattered by Taiping sorties from the city that swept out in the dark of night on horseback. At the same time, Nanjing was too well fortified for the besiegers to have any effect against its massive walls and bricked-up gates, so for six years the two sides had been at a stalemate, an advance on one side matched eventually with retribution by the other. The pattern repeated on scales both small and large; a brilliant series of Taiping victories in 1856 smashed the imperial lines, but then came the Eastern King’s coup and the internal collapse of the Taiping leadership. In the three years since then, the imperials had rebuilt their ranks and commenced digging a containing trench below Nanjing that by 1859 stretched forty-five miles with more than a hundred guard camps along its length blocking access to the capital from the south and east.³⁴He Chun and Zhang Guoliang, in their twin camps, were preparing for what they hoped would be a final assault to crush the rebel capital.

In the face of resentment from the more experienced Taiping military leaders, Hong Rengan was surprisingly forthright in his new position as commander in chief. They grumbled that he just wanted power and fame, but he replied angrily, “When I was in Guangdong and heard news that the Heavenly Capital was surrounded on all sides, I didn’t hide from difficulty but risked my life to come to your aid. How can I be the kind of person who covets salary and prestige? Look—the capital is surrounded on four sides with only a single supply line open.… How can we contend with the enemy?”³⁵

Hong Rengan presented a bold plan to relieve the capital. The rebels would send a small expeditionary force in a wide, sweeping arc beyond the rear guard of the imperial armies down into Zhejiang province, to attack its weakly defended capital, Hangzhou. A hundred and fifty miles southeast of Nanjing, Hangzhou anchored the supply line that supported the southern camp. Because He Chun and Zhang Guoliang had concentrated all of their forces around Nanjing, they would have no reserves to save Hangzhou, so they would have to transfer forces from the great camps at the Nanjing siege to stave off the Taiping rearguard action. As Hong Rengan planned it, he would recall the roving armies under two of the Taiping’s most talented field commanders—Chen Yucheng, known as the Brave King, and a younger cousin of Li Xiucheng known as the Attending King—and have them return to the capital from their distant foraging campaigns. As soon as the imperial forces around Nanjing had thinned sufficiently, the expeditionary force atHangzhou could secretly retreat as the combined armies of the Brave King, the Attending King, and the Loyal King swept in from three sides to crush the weakened imperial camps between them and raise the siege.

The Loyal King agreed that the plan might work to break the siege but wondered what lasting good it would accomplish. It would, he said, reconcentrate the Taiping forces in Nanjing where they had few supplies. So Hong Rengan laid out the full scope of his revised strategy for winning the war. The rice-growing southern provinces, Sichuan in the west, and the Great Wall to the north were all at least a thousand miles from Nanjing, he noted, but the east—with the grand and wealthy cities of Suzhou and Hangzhou and access to the ocean—was far closer. “The land there is vast,” he noted, “and the treasuries are flush.” So that was the direction in which they must attack. Seizing on their momentum from routing the imperial siege camps (if the first part of the strategy worked), they could make an immediate turn east and conquer the cities between Nanjing and Suzhou in one swift campaign that would ensure them supplies, arms, measureless wealth, and new recruits.³⁶

But that would be just the beginning, and here Hong Rengan began to play upon his relations with the foreigners. With the wealth they gained from occupying Suzhou and Hangzhou, he explained, they could arrange to rent or purchase twenty steam-powered ships from the foreigners in Shanghai. Such a fleet would enable them not only to patrol the Yangtze River unopposed but also to lay claim to the southern coast along Fujian and Guangdong down to Hong Kong. The next step would be to send one column of soldiers from Jiangxi province along the south of the Yangtze River to invade Hunan, and another on the Yangtze’s northern bank to invade Hubei and seize Hankow, thus solidifying the Taiping’s command of the entire Yangtze River Valley and cutting the Qing Empire in two. The consolidation of the south would follow easily, and with troops and horses from the south they could finally capture Sichuan and Shaanxi and complete Hong Xiuquan’s original vision of a southern empire reuniting the heartland provinces of the Ming. Beijing and the northern provinces would be cut off from all grain tribute. As the new Taiping state took form in the south, the Qing dynasty would starve and wither away.³⁷

The success of his plan depended on a measure of support from the foreigners in Shanghai, in particular their willingness to supply steamships, but that was precisely why Hong Rengan was such a remarkable gift dropped into the lap of the Taiping leadership. He had better contacts among the foreigners, and a better knowledge of their customs and beliefs, than any other official in China, be he Taiping or imperial. The Heavenly King immediately seized on the opportunity Hong Rengan’s experience offered. It wasn’t just that Hong Rengan understood the foreigners after spending several years living and working with them; even more important was the fact that the foreigners knew that Hong Rengan understood them, that he was the only man in China who properly understood their religious practices, their science, and their culture. They would therefore look to him as someone who could be trusted to give them the open trade relations and missionary access they wanted. The Heavenly King put Hong Rengan in charge of foreign relations and encouraged him to invite their representatives for meetings once the siege was lifted.³⁸

On February 10, 1860, Li Xiucheng the Loyal King left Nanjing via the lone open route, through Pukou across the river to the north, with six thousand handpicked soldiers disguised in imperial uniforms stolen from the slain enemy in earlier battles. So weak was the coordination among the concatenation of forces on the dynasty’s side—local militias, organized militias, Green Standard forces—that Li’s men were able to seize and garrison several towns along their route before looping around to the southeast and finally arriving at Hangzhou without warning on March 11. The attack would have been a complete surprise if Li’s goal had been simply to invade the city, but he intended instead to terrorize it. His men first took the time to plant hundreds of Taiping banners in the hills outside the city walls to deceive the defenders into thinking their total forces were massive. Then his main force attacked the front gate of Hangzhou head-on while his sappers tunneled under the city walls and planted explosives, blasting open a breach on March 19.

Hell unleashed itself in the besieged city as its untrained militia defenders broke ranks and desperately looted the homes of their neighbors before running from the Loyal King’s onslaught. The leaders of the civil government abandoned their offices, some leading their bodyguard detachments in ransacking the city’s richest homes before making their escape as well, leaving no command in place whatsoever. As Li Xiucheng’s small force fought its way through the breach in the city wall, local citizens did battle in the streets with the looters who were supposed to be defending them, compounding the war dead with the lynched, the mangled, and the burned.³⁹ Fires raged. The city’s women, following generations of moral instruction on how to behave in times of chaos, began putting themselves to death—tens of thousands of them by the end. Like other Confucian governments before it, the Qing dynasty had celebrated female suicide as the pinnacle of virtue, and it ramped up its honors for women’s suicide in the course of the civil war.⁴⁰Female suicide became a kind of perverse defensive measure against the rebels. Fearing rape and murder when the Taiping entered the city, the women of Hangzhou acted as they had been taught: they hanged themselves, poisoned themselves, stabbed themselves with knives, and threw themselves into wells to drown.

The Manchu commander in Hangzhou retreated with his troops back into the inner garrison city, which held this time against the fierce but lightly manned attack by the Loyal King’s troops. Unable to break into the Manchu garrison after six days, Li finally had to abandon the attack and retreat overland back to Nanjing. But he had accomplished his objective, and the plan had worked perfectly. Zhang Guoliang heard the reports that Hangzhou was being stormed by a multitude of Taiping troops. He had no clear intelligence about the size of the attacking army, so he shifted nearly a quarter of his total siege force to relieve Hangzhou. Moving swiftly along back roads, again in disguise, the Loyal King and his troops rode on commandeered horses back to Nanjing, leaving smoking chaos in the city behind them. When Zhang Guoliang’s relief troops finally arrived at Hangzhou after their forced march, they found no Taiping presence there. Nor, for that matter, could they find any semblance of a civil government. So, like the others before them, they just looted whatever was left.⁴¹

By April, the main Taiping armies of the Brave King and Attending King had returned to the outskirts of Nanjing, and with Li Xiucheng leading the garrison forces who poured out from the city, they threw their full combined weight on the weakened imperial ranks.⁴² The southern camp dissolved in a panicked retreat as Taiping forces totaling more that a hundred thousand men overran them from three directions. Li Xiucheng’s cavalry smashed into the rear lines of the southern encampment from behind, crushing them into their own defensive works where thousands of imperial soldiers were cut down, their bodies left to choke the trenches they had dug with their own hands. The waterways overflowed their banks with the dead.⁴³ Dropping their weapons and flags in the rout, the remnants of the imperial army fled on foot. As the pursuers became the pursued, weeks of desperate retreat followed until the Taiping finally overran them in the city of Danyang, forty-five miles to the east. The Manchu general He Chun committed suicide by eating raw opium, and Zhang Guoliang, the Robin Hood who had taken the emperor’s side, drowned while trying to escape from Danyang.⁴⁴ In the central theater of the war, there were no more capable commanders left.