CHAPTER 4

SOUNDINGS

In the spring of 1860, the end of imperial civilization rolled toward Shanghai like a tidal wave. “The glow of the fires illuminates the sky,” wrote a Chinese observer near Shanghai, “and the cries of the people shake the earth.”¹ Throwing off their imperial cordon, the rebel armies reared up from the Heavenly Capital and coursed eastward, meeting no resistance from the dynasty’s shattered forces. Local militia defenses scattered in fright as Li Xiucheng’s men swarmed through Jiangsu province, conquering cities dense withrefugees from the years of fighting up the Yangtze River. After driving the imperials to Danyang, which they captured on May 19, they moved swiftly down the path of the Yangtze to capture Changzhou a week later and Wuxi three days after that. But it was Suzhou, the legendary city of gardens along the Grand Canal, that was the greatest prize, with its wartime population of two million providing a vast source of new recruits and its merchant homes flush with treasure. The Taiping army’s momentum was irresistible; when Li Xiucheng’s forces marched on Suzhou from Wuxi, arriving before the city’s walls on June 2, 1860, sympathizers inside the city simply opened the gates to welcome their new masters, and the Loyal King captured the city of gardens without a fight.

The Chinese who lived in the path of the rebel march faced the same choices as the millions already drawn into the war: they could fight if they were especially brave, joining neighbors in a militia to try to protect their village or town, though their ranks inevitably broke in the face of overwhelming rebel numbers; or they could show allegiance to the rebels by changing their hairstyle. The Qing required all males to shave the tops of their heads and grow a single long braid down the back known as the queue. The Taiping rebels, by way of defiance, refused to shave their heads and allowed their hair to grow long and wild on the top, often woven with ribbons of colored silk. Many peasants simply tried to appease both sides, growing their hair long on top when the Taiping took over but keeping their long braid wound up underneath to hide it, so that if the imperial troops should drive the rebels back, they could unfurl their queue and shave the top of their head again to avoid execution by the imperial side as “longhairs.”

Those of a certain station, however, had different choices. Their wealth and status depended on the survival of the dynasty, and with a rebel victory, they feared, everything would be lost. They were the ones most likely to commit suicide—which they did in droves as Suzhou and other cities fell. If they owned land elsewhere, they could try to move their families to safety (the elderly mothers, with their bound feet, were the most difficult to transport). But as the rebellion spread through Jiangsu province and down into Zhejiang, there were few places left for refuge. Those who could, pushed into the international city of Shanghai for protection under the small population of foreigners. But even there a sense of safety was tenuous, and apocalyptic rumors spread through the local population that a million Taiping soldiers under Li Xiucheng were on the move toward Shanghai, with a flotilla of ten thousand boats so large it took three full days to pass on the river.²

By the spring of 1860, the treaty port of Shanghai had more than half a million Chinese inhabitants, a figure that was rising quickly as new waves of refugees crowded the foreign settlements and created massive problems of sanitation and shelter. The city was divided into four sections, arranged along the Huangpu River at the easternmost reach of Jiangsu province, which emptied ten miles to the north into the mouth of the Yangtze and thence into the ocean. At the southern end was the old Chinese city, which had been Shanghai’s full extent before the coming of foreign settlements after the Opium War. It was enclosed by a roughly circular defensive wall twenty-five feet high and filled with narrow, twisting streets. It continued to be governed by the Qing civil authorities and was home to most of Shanghai’s population.

Moving northward along the Huangpu, one entered into the French concession, crowded with Chinese houses, and then the much larger British concession, which was home to the stretch of developed waterfront known as the Bund, bristling with piers, warehouses, and offices, where at any given time two or three hundred ships might be moored along the riverside. The British concession was laid out on a linear grid—with a racetrack, Protestant church, and customshouse—and covered a parcel of land comparable in size to the entire Chinese city. It nestled in the junction of the Huangpu to its east and the narrow Suzhou Creek (a tributary of the Huangpu) to the north. Finally, crossing the Suzhou Creek one found an amorphous and sparsely settled American concession, consisting mostly of swampland.³

The foreign population typically numbered about two thousand settled persons, with a transient population of ships’ crews adding another two thousand to the total, depending on the time of year and the state of trade. The British dominated the community, seconded by the French, while the mere handful of Americans had little to do (in calmer times, at least) but complain about being outnumbered by “arrogant stiff-necked Englishmen, full of Cockneyism and conceit.”⁴ Densely packed settlements called suburbs crowded just outside the protective walls of the Chinese city, especially on the riverward side, containing among them Shanghai’s wealthiest merchant homes, while the land to the west of the walls, away from the Huangpu River and toward the interior, soon gave way to small villages among cotton fields and orchards, and finally to what one resident described as a “queer flat lonely country” of muddy rice paddies intersected by narrow irrigation creeks.⁵

It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a beautiful city. Newcomers arriving from England with grand visions of “an El Dorado of wealth of hope and fortune”⁶ found Shanghai instead to be a dirty, overcrowded settlement of “ill built houses reeking with impurities and fevers and vile stenches.”⁷ One newly arrived missionary declared the city to be “one of the filthiest in this world. I have seen nothing to be compared to it in dirt and filth, it surpasses everything.”⁸ Another warned anyone who wanted to walk in the surrounding countryside that they would be overwhelmed by the “dung boats, dung tanks, dung buckets, dung carriers” that fertilized the rice paddies with human feces.⁹ But as unappetizing as it may have been to its foreign residents, it was the most advantageous port in China for seagoing trade. With ready access to both the ocean and the Yangtze River, it was an ideal point for exchange between the riverborne trade of tea and silk from China’s interior and the seagoing commerce in cotton textiles and opium, which were brought in mostly by British ships (the opium via India). Indeed, so immensely profitable was the traffic in tea and silk that the fastest merchant ships in the world had been built specifically for the purpose of dominating the China trade. But now, as the Taiping swept down the river, the British authorities in Shanghai issued an injunction against trading with the rebels, and fear set into the foreign community that their immensely profitable commerce was about to grind to a halt.

The ranking British official in Shanghai in 1860 was Frederick Bruce, Lord Elgin’s younger brother. He had retreated there after the Taku repulse in 1859, and insofar as he had failed to exchange the ratified treaty he could not properly be called an ambassador, but he was still plenipotentiary, and he now acted as the chief supervisor of British trade in China. He was deeply embarrassed by the British defeat at Taku, which was partly attributable to his own stubbornness in refusing to take the alternate route to Beijing that had been offered (which the American ambassador had done, with successful results). Bruce was therefore determined to walk a fine and careful line in his position of authority in Shanghai. With regard to the ongoing Chinese civil war, he was pedantic in his determination to act with perfect neutrality and have nothing to do with the conflict. To that end, he had issued the injunction against trading with the rebels, for he believed that such trade would constitute British support for the rebellion.

At the same time, he also tried studiously to avoid giving aid to the imperial side—which was somewhat easier to justify, since it was the imperials who had attacked his fleet. But the British had interests and investments in Shanghai, and the local Chinese officials were adept at playing upon them. The ranking Qing official in Shanghai was Wu Xu, a fat mandarin of about fifty years old who served as the daotai (the highest imperial rank at the city level, something like a mayor appointed by the provincial governor). Despairing of the imperial military’s incompetence against the Taiping rebels, Wu Xu had begun to hound Bruce for British support in defending Shanghai against their advance. If the Taiping captured Shanghai, he warned, they would shut down all foreign trade and drive out the British settlers. Bruce wanted to keep his distance from the imperial authorities to avoid any appearance of breaching neutrality, but he had heard the shocking accounts of anarchy in the streets of Hangzhou when Li Xiucheng had attacked it, and he began to worry that something similar might unfold in Shanghai.

There were already problems. The most imminent threats weren’t the rebels themselves so much as the legions of renegade imperial troops who had taken up quarters in Shanghai’s Chinese city and its suburbs after fleeing from Suzhou and Hangzhou. Bruce reported in June 1860 that the defeated imperialists “have revenged themselves for their defeat by pillaging the defenceless villages on their line of retreat,” and he worried that they would destroy Shanghai from within.¹⁰ In a repeated pattern, thieves—be they imperial soldiers, rebel sympathizers, or simply everyday bad elements—would raise the false alarm that the Taiping were attacking and then, in the bedlam that ensued, set about ransacking the homes of the rich.¹¹ “The beaten troops, the victorious insurgents, and the vagabonds of the city itself,” wrote Bruce, “all join in plundering the wealthy and respectable inhabitants.”¹²

Weighing the fearful possibility of chaos breaking out in the foreign settlements under his watch, Bruce decided that it was Britain’s moral duty to protect Shanghai—not just the foreign settlements but also the Chinese city they abutted. That part of Shanghai was officially the jurisdiction of the Qing civil government and not under foreign control, but he feared a humanitarian disaster if chaos in the imperial city should spread into the neighboring foreign settlement—and he thought a limited intervention by the British forces in place might stop this from happening. So he sent off to London for permission to set up defenses of the walled Chinese city “to prevent, if possible, the scenes of bloodshed and pillage being enacted here, which took place at Hangzhou, when that city was lately assaulted by the insurgents.”¹³

At the same time, he also made it quite clear that if the British did set up a defense of Shanghai, it would be strictly limited to the city itself. In writing to the foreign secretary back in London, Bruce mentioned that Wu Xu had tried to get him to send a preemptive British force out to Suzhou to check the rebel advance, and he had flatly refused. (Not so the French, who took a more cavalier attitude toward intervention; after hearing a report that the Protestant rebels had murdered a French Catholic missionary, they eagerly got up a force of 3,000 troops to march on Suzhou. Only Bruce’s refusal to lend British support scuttled the mission.)

Bruce was in a bind. To defend Shanghai, even only to protect British citizens and property, would effectively strengthen the hand of the very power that had sprung such an atrocious surprise attack on his fleet at Taku a year earlier. “No course could be so well calculated to lower our national reputation,” he worried, “as to lend our material support to a Government the corruption of whose authorities is only checked by its weakness.”¹⁴ But as the rumors of an impending rebel attack on the international city swelled and intensified, the British merchants clamored that something had to be done to protect them. It would be months before Bruce could hear back from London whether he might be authorized to defend the city, and so, on his own initiative, he began to call up volunteers. It seemed a nearly hopeless endeavor, though; there were only a handful of British cannons to be dragged together, along with a few hundred inexperienced volunteers to man the walls. And if the rumors were true, legions of rebels were on their way.

Though some hoped the Shanghai foreign settlement might serve as a model of European order planted in China, the complicated division of jurisdictions in the international city (each nation with its own military force, each foreign citizen liable only to his own country’s authorities) proved attractive to somewhat less orderly elements from abroad as well. As the trading ships sailed in and out, exchanging not only their cargoes but sometimes their crews, ne’er-do-wells from around the earth collected in Shanghai to dwell in the spaces between its laws. As one young American described it to his mother in dismay after a few years in the city, “The place swarms with Californians, Negro minstrels, gamblers, horse jockeys and the worst of both sexes fill the streets … the place promises in a short time to become a second San Francisco in its early days.”¹⁵

Some foreigners, however, were too sinister even for Shanghai. Such were the members of an irregular military force that had begun to drill in a muddy village twelve miles to the west of Shanghai in the spring of 1860, entirely unwelcome in the city itself. There were about two hundred Europeans and Americans in the unit, wearing a hodgepodge of uniforms that betrayed their motley origins. Some wore the sharp-cut red coats and dark pants of the British marines, others the blue jackets and white bellbottoms of the French sailors, still others the gray, tattered fabrics of the merchant crews.¹⁶ For arms, they had Colt revolvers and Sharp’s repeating carbines, and their objective was the Taiping-held town of Songjiang, about ten miles farther from Shanghai, which—along with Qingpu to its northwest—was one of two strategic walled towns that were necessary stepping-stones for any invasion of Shanghai from Hangzhou or Suzhou, respectively. Their patrons were a group of Chinese merchants in Shanghai led by a banker named Yang Fang who bankrolled the mercenaries’ salaries at a ridiculously high rate of a hundred dollars a month per man, more than enough to lure professional soldiers to jump ship and join the alcoholic dregs of the merchant crews who made up the bulk of the force. On top of the salary, the sponsors promised a reward of more than a hundred thousand dollars if the foreign contingent could defeat the Taiping garrison at Songjiang and drive it from the town—along with anything they could loot from the city.

The commander and organizer of the force was an American a few months shy of his twenty-ninth birthday named Frederick Townsend Ward. He hailed from the stormy gloom of Salem, Massachusetts, the shipping town that had once ruled the old China trade. By the time of Ward’s youth it had long been in decline, steeped in the fading and salt-eroded memories of its lost grandeur. Ward grew up in a decaying mansion just a few doors down from the House of the Seven Gables, where Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sister lived, the home Hawthorne brought to life in 1851 as a gothic embodiment of not just Salem but New England itself at midcentury. With impenetrably deep black eyes and an unruly thatch of raven hair worn long over his ears, Ward carried with him the melancholy darkness of his northern home.

The models for Ward’s army were the so-called filibusters, American soldiers of fortune who operated in Central America in the mid–nineteenth century and who—unlike the purely mercenary kind of soldier for hire—fought not just for the salaries they were paid but with the hope of establishing their own governments and ruling their own states. Ward had been frustrated in his early attempts to follow a traditional military career. He failed to gain admission to West Point in 1846 and spent a year at Norwich University, the private military college in Vermont, without graduating.¹⁷ His real military training came from a more informal route. Making his way to Central America in 1852, he enlisted under the notorious William Walker, who in the early 1850s raised a small army of Americans to foment a civil war in Nicaragua in order to overthrow its government and build a “Yankee state” there.¹⁸ Ward fought under Walker and served as his training officer in 1853, leaving after a year to launch his own career—too soon to see his patron finally succeed in conquering Nicaragua and install himself as its president in 1856. But because such forces operated outside the national militaries of the great powers, their successes were typically short-lived. By the time Ward started training his own filibuster troops outside Shanghai in the spring of 1860, British forces had captured Walker and put him under detention for violating the neutrality laws. Soon after Ward launched into his first battles against the Taiping in China, his mentor was executed by firing squad in Honduras, on the other side of the world.

The civil war in China was a fantastic opportunity for a would-be filibuster, and the port of Shanghai was, in a very real sense, the other end of a thread connecting through history back to the land of Ward’s birth. He had been to China once as a restless youth and made his way back in 1859 to get in on the war. Based on what he had heard about the situation from outside, his plan was to join the rebels in overthrowing the Manchu government.¹⁹ But from Shanghai it turned out to be difficult to make contact with the Taiping, so he found work on a French steamer named the Confucius, which some wealthy Chinese merchants in Shanghai had hired to protect their business interests against pirates on the Yangtze. It was but a short step from fighting river pirates to raising a land force to protect the outlying towns, and both Ward and the captain of the Confucius were brought in under the local military authorities as an adjunct fighting force, taking their orders from Bruce’s imperial counterpart the Shanghai daotai, Wu Xu.

In this manner, Ward wound up taking the dynasty’s side (if indirectly) and he began to recruit a mélange of Europeans, Americans, and Filipinos to fight in the region just outside Shanghai. He self-consciously styled himself an adventurer, dressing in a tight-fitting black uniform to match his long black locks, wearing no insignia, and carrying a swagger stick in lieu of a sidearm. His army was strictly illegal, a bald violation of the neutrality ordinance, and he enlisted so many deserters that his wounded soldiers couldn’t even go to Shanghai for medical help lest they be locked up and court-martialed.²⁰ But as long as he, and they, didn’t mind killing a few Chinese rebels in open combat, there would be a lot of money in it for all of them.

From the standpoint of Ward’s Chinese backers, the value of this foreign militia—despite its very small numbers in comparison to the enemy—was an almost mythical belief in the superior weapons and skills of foreign soldiers that dated back to the British victories in the Opium War. Most important, they hoped that the other side held such a belief strongly enough that they would simply retreat or surrender if faced with Caucasian opponents. Ward’s army was meant to be a spearhead, and an imperial army 10,000 strong would follow just behind it, to invade and garrison each city after the foreign troops stormed its gates. It wasn’t an entirely new tactic; as early as 1853 an American soldier reported meeting a Chinese commander near Canton who had dressed up his officers as Europeans to fool the rebels. The commander himself had been a servant to an Englishman and had traveled with him to England, where he had picked up a bit of the language as well as the dress. As he told his visitor, “Rebel man think me English—Merican, all same. On that wall, I number one man.”²¹ Such was the case with Ward’s militia: be they polished professionals or tottering drunkards, the important point was that they had white skin, foreign dress, and repeating arms.

Ward’s men made their first attack on Songjiang in April 1860 and did not prove their worth. With no artillery to blast open the gates, Ward planned for his soldiers to sneak up to the city under cover of darkness, throw up scaling ladders, and climb the walls to take the sentries by surprise. But the men got thoroughly drunk in preparation for their adventure, and as they approached Songjiang they made so much noise singing and swearing and arguing among themselves that they woke up the Taiping sentries, who cut them to pieces when they tried to climb the ladders.²² After a hasty bout of recruiting to replace the dead from that first debacle, and with the purchase in Shanghai of a pair of half-ton Napoleon field guns (the same smooth-bore cannons used widely by both sides in theU.S. Civil War), Ward went in again in July with about 500 troops, this time containing a greater number of Filipino “Manilamen” from the merchant sailing vessels. Under cover of a drifting fog, his artillerymen sighted their Napoleons on the eastern gate of Songjiang, and when night fell they blasted it open with 12-pound shells as the rest of the troops rushed into the breach through the darkness.

It threatened to be an even worse disaster than their first attack, though, for when they got through the outer gate they found that the inner one had been built at a right angle to the first and was untouched by the artillery barrage. They were stuck in the wall: couldn’t get through the inner gate, couldn’t retreat, couldn’t bring their Napoleons across the moat. They were open above to Taiping defenders who—though they couldn’t get a direct shot—dropped stinkpots filled with burning sulfur on them all night long.²³Ward’s men managed to budge the inner gate a couple of feet by igniting some bags of gunpowder they’d dragged along, and as they pushed one by one through the gap into a hail of fire (one Englishman’s head was split in two at that point), their repeating arms proved effective enough at close quarters to clear a way up the inner wall to a safe corner at the top of the gate, which they held through the night against the city’s defenders. Their imperial backup finally arrived after dawn, whereupon the Taiping garrison fled. Most of the 500 foreign mercenaries by that point were dead and all but 27 of the survivors seriously wounded.²⁴

It wasn’t a spectacular victory, but the city, after a fashion, was theirs, and Ward set up headquarters in the Confucian temple. With Songjiang as a base (and a hospital) he and his lieutenants regrouped and wooed new recruits from Shanghai, and on August 1, 1860, they set out to attack the other strategic city, Qingpu, ten miles to the northwest. This time it was back to failure again, for it turned out the Taiping in Qingpu had managed to assemble their own foreign force, under an English coastal pilot named Savage who brought several of his comrades with him to the Taiping side to man the big guns.²⁵ Ward’s imperial backup army never showed up, and in the fighting Ward took a bullet that punched through both cheeks and disfigured him for the rest of his life.

Under the incapacitated Ward’s lieutenant (and with fresh recruits from Shanghai, mostly Greek and Italian) the force threw itself on Qingpu again two weeks later, this time with the imperials behind them, but succeeded only in stirring up a reinforced Taiping garrison that now numbered nearly 50,000 men and drawing Li Xiucheng himself into the battle. Li led a surprise flanking maneuver that routed the mercenaries; even with imperial backup in tow, Ward’s men not only failed to take Qingpu but nearly managed to lose Songjiang as well when Li Xiucheng chased them back across the province, decimating the imperial troops along the way and harassing them from outside their own gates for nearly two weeks. The lone silver lining for Ward was that his counterpart, Savage, who had joined in the chase back to Songjiang, was shot in the fighting and died soon afterward in Nanjing.

Not all the foreigners were so hostile to the coming of the rebels. In early July 1860, as Ward was preparing to attack Songjiang, a small boat left Shanghai for the interior, carrying five British and American missionaries. Their goal was to make contact with the Taiping authorities in Suzhou, eighty miles distant along a hazardous water route by river and canal. Barely ten miles out from Shanghai, they skirted the last of the rapidly disappearing imperial guard posts and entered into the arena of the war. Refugees shuffled toward the safety of Shanghai amid the crackle of distant gunfire, while untethered village defense groups patrolled the riverbanks, threatening violence on anyone who dared land on their muddy shores. “Here and there a solitary old man or woman may be seen,” reported one of the travelers, “moving slowly and tremblingly among the ruins, musing and weeping over the terrible desolation that reigns around.”²⁶

The leader of the group was Joseph Edkins, a senior member of the London Missionary Society with a broad white sweep of a beard. His first posting had been in Hong Kong in 1848, and he kept up a close friendship with James Legge, with whom he liked to play a game of reciting entire books of the New Testament from memory (Legge usually won). Legge had recently written to Edkins that there had been no news from Hong Rengan since the letter from Elgin’s ship several months earlier and asked him to find out what he could about the fate of their mutual friend.²⁷ So when the party happened upon a detachment of Taiping cavalry riding alongside the river, Edkins’s first question to them was if they knew the name of Hong Rengan. Their answer—that he was now their prime minister in Nanjing, second only to the Heavenly King—was utterly astounding to Edkins and the others. A connection was now established, and the travelers followed the Taiping horsemen back to their camp, where they were delighted by the unexpected friendliness they encountered. Another member of the traveling party, a Welsh Congregationalist named Griffith John, described the rebels as “strong in muscle, free and bold in manner, and open in countenance,” terms never commonly used by the British to describe the Chinese. Excited and emboldened, the travelers left their hosts and pressed onward toward Suzhou with newly issued Taiping passports in hand.

These missionaries had long welcomed the destruction of the civil war, because they saw God’s hand at work in the Taiping armies. “Prophecy has said, ‘I will shake the nations,’ ” wrote Edkins a few months before his trip to Suzhou, “and in China there has commenced an era of change, when multitudes are suffering present calamities for the ultimate good of the whole nation.”²⁸ But it was one thing to reflect on such calamities from the relative safety of Shanghai, another to enter their midst. As the boat edged deeper into the war zone, the heady optimism of the missionaries ran up against countercurrents of horror. It was their fourth night, finally approaching the conquered city of Suzhou, that they would have forgotten if they could. For that was the night that their little boat slowed in its progress, the putrid smell of rot grew and thickened, and finally they came to a stop. Peering out into the twilight by the soft glow of their lanterns, all they could make out on the still surface of the dark water, for hundreds of yards in front of them, were the bodies of the dead—cold, nameless, and uncountable—that jammed the canal like so many logs. But there was no turning back. The missionaries pushed their boat forward into the grim mass, oars thudding dully in the blackness, until exhaustion finally overcame them and they had to sleep, there, in the unforgiving embrace of the multitudes.²⁹

The shaken travelers arrived the next morning at Suzhou, where they learned that the savagery of war was consuming not only the mortal but also the divine. The rebels had reserved a special kind of violence for the icons of China’s traditional religions, and Griffith John described temples where “It is common to see the nose, chin, and hands cut off” of the wooden deities. “The floors of these buildings are bestrewn with relics of helpless gods,” he wrote, “Buddhist and Daoist, male and female. Some are cast into the canals, and are found floating down the stream mingled with the debris of rifled houses and the remains of the dead.”³⁰ Other statues were removed from the city and set up on hillsides with rebel flags as decoys to lure the imperial troops into battle.³¹ But Griffith John’s unease at witnessing such violence was tempered by the joyful realization that here was proof that the Taiping opposed idolatry. The very zeal of their desecration of the Buddhist and Daoist temples was evidence of the rebels’ intent to instill China with Protestant Christianity. Such news would be anathema to the Catholics of France (as one analyst in London observed, “The French have reasons for fearing Tae Ping ascendancy; for an image is to them an image, whether baptized or unbaptized, and an image-worshipper is an image-worshipper”).³² But to the Protestants of England and the United States it was, as it were, a godsend.

Hong Rengan was still in Nanjing when they arrived, but Li Xiucheng held court in Suzhou, and he invited the missionaries for an audience. They found themselves welcomed with a six-gun salute and ushered along an aisle flanked by servants and officers standing at attention into a red-carpeted reception hall amid the celebratory clash of drums and gongs. To their eyes, the Loyal King seemed a gentle, almost intellectual presence, with “small keen features,” wearing spectacles and wrapped in an imperial yellow silk robe. Edkins pronounced him to have “the character of a good man,” who kept his troops well disciplined for the sake of “protecting the suffering people, who are the victims of this civil war, from injury and insult.”³³ (Others, in other contexts, found him to be animated with twitching wiriness and a restless, searching energy.)³⁴ The audience did not last long, but it was enough for the missionaries and the rebel general to find themselves in agreement on the basic tenets of their religions, and on the calendrical dates of their Sabbath. Satisfied, and knowing that their mercantile brethren in Shanghai cared less about doctrine than profit, they also asked Li Xiucheng if he would allow the silk trade to continue under Taiping rule, and Li replied that such trade was exactly what his regime desired. They left the Loyal King with a gift of Chinese-language Bibles and departed, in excitement, to return home and share the remarkable news.

Edkins and his companions returned straightaway to Shanghai, where Edkins breathlessly wrote up his experiences for publication. His report in the Shanghai English-language newspaper, The North-China Herald, was a forceful defense of the rebels against the imperial propaganda that had been circulating about them in the city. “A great deal has been said about the cruelty of the ‘long-haired rebels,’ ” wrote Edkins, “but in this there has been much exaggeration and misrepresentation.”³⁵ If they committed any crimes of war—murder, loot, pillage—he argued, it was only for the sake of survival, and besides, those crimes were the work of only the newest recruits, who hadn’t yet received proper religious instruction from their superiors; whenever a senior Taiping leader arrived, the criminals were promptly executed. He maintained that most of the deaths in the captured city of Suzhou (including those from the canal that haunted his nightmares) were victims of suicide, not murder. And the imperial forces were by far the worse offenders. Given time, a Taiping victory—which one of his informants predicted in two years’ time—would bring an end to bloodshed and disorder in China and usher in a new era of peace and morality. Edkins declared, “They are revolutionists in the strictest sense of the term; both the work of slaughter and of plunder are carried on so far as is necessary to secure the end. These are evils which necessarily accompany such a movement, and are justifiable or otherwise in so far as the movement itself is so.”³⁶ There was no question in his mind that the movement was justified, and therefore so were the unfortunate, but temporary, disturbances it caused.

Edkins spoke glowingly of the promise a Taiping China would hold for the Protestant countries of the West, dismissing concerns over their doctrinal oddities. It wasn’t that the Taiping were so blasphemous as to believe Hong Xiuquan was the divine son of God, he explained, only that they thought he served a similar mission to Jesus Christ, whom the Old Testament–influenced rebels didn’t quite understand had achieved apotheosis. They could be educated. Edkins admired the immanence of their religion. “The Deity is with them,” he wrote, “not an abstract notion, nor a stern implacable sovereign, but a loving father, who watches tenderly over their affairs, and leads them by the hand.”³⁷ If the Qing were to fall and the Taiping succeed, the Christian rebels could be counted on to “set on foot a more rigid and vigorous morality than that to which the Chinese have long been accustomed.”³⁸ It would be a moral state—and a Christian state.

Above all, in language calculated to appeal far beyond the circle of the missionaries and their supporters, he declared that it would be a state friendly to the West. The Taiping always referred to foreigners as “our foreign brethren,” he emphasized, and it “would be most pleasing to them” to open the entire empire to foreign trade. Furthermore, Edkins recounted, the Taiping “say that foreigners will be respected whenever they pass through their territory.” The coming of that future state was all but assured, he concluded, for “They seem now to be taking a hold of this empire with an iron grasp, and treading it like conquerors.” Not only was a Taiping victory inevitable, then, but the goal of the rebels to promote friendly diplomacy and welcome trade was exactly what the foreign powers had been demanding, in vain, from the Manchus for so many years.³⁹

Edkins’s most smitten convert was his young wife, Jane, who wept in sadness when he first left Shanghai and again with joy when she heard his account of Suzhou under the rebels. She was just twenty-one years old, and they had been married for only a year (she was so frail that her family had worried about her traveling with him all the way to China, but such was the lot of a missionary’s bride). “Is not this insurgent movement truly wonderful?” she wrote to her mother-in-law from Shanghai in July 1860. “These rebels keep sabbath as we do, they pray to God daily, they read the Scriptures, they break the idols, and they long for the time when, instead of those heathen temples, they shall have Christian chapels, and worship together with us … is it not a remarkable era in China?”⁴⁰Later, as rumors intensified that the Taiping were advancing toward Shanghai and as the foreign commanders called up their volunteers to defend the walls, she went further: “I profess to be a rebel at heart somehow,” she wrote to her father, “and have a secret wish to welcome them.”⁴¹

A few weeks later, toward the end of July, Joseph Edkins and Griffith John returned to Suzhou for a second visit after receiving two personal letters of invitation, one from Li Xiucheng and the other from Hong Rengan. Hong Rengan’s invitation was “the most cheering, delightful news that ever rang in the ears of missionaries,” wrote Jane Edkins, and she wished she could join their new expedition but conceded that “the scenes through which they must pass are too trying for a lady.”⁴² Griffith John wrote that the letters from Hong Rengan and Li Xiucheng “breathe a manliness and a kindliness of spirit … such as could never have been written by an unchristian Chinaman. I see in them a new element—an element which Christianity alone could infuse.”⁴³

In their return to Suzhou at the beginning of August, Edkins and John found an even warmer welcome than they had enjoyed on their first visit. Hong Rengan, draped in silk robes and wearing an embroidered gold crown, seemed almost embarrassed by his position. He insisted on greeting them after their own fashion—no kowtowing or kneeling, but instead a hearty handshake, and he dismissed his host of attendants and removed his crown to talk informally with them. They talked of old times, of old friends and the progress of the missions. They prayed together. They sang hymns that Hong Rengan remembered fondly from his days with the London Missionary Society, and he confided that he had never been so happy as when he was a preacher’s assistant in Hong Kong. They talked of China’s future, and he suggested that the rebellion was secondary in importance to the work the missionaries were doing—that China had to be Christianized no matter what happened to the dynasty. For his own part, he said that all he wanted was to lead the Taiping toward a correct understanding of religion. Yes, his cousin had made him a king, but it wasn’t an office he could refuse. He prayed, recounted Griffith John, “that all the idols might perish, that the temples should be converted into chapels, and that pure Christianity should speedily become the religion of China.” It was, to the visiting missionaries, “a spectacle never to be forgotten.”⁴⁴

The prospect of one of their native preachers ascending into the future government of China thrilled the international missionary community. The London Missionary Society’s Missionary Magazine gave notice of Hong Rengan’s rise in October 1860. “We feel assured,” wrote the editors, “that our readers will unite in fervent supplication to the God of all grace, that this individual … may be preserved amidst the perils of his high position.”⁴⁵ The Missionary Magazine and Chronicle laid out a brief biography of “this now distinguished Chinaman,” promising that the facts of Hong Rengan’s life would be sure to “awaken a lively and prayerful solicitude on behalf of a man so singularly raised by the providence of God to the highest post of honour and influence in the councils of the victorious leader of the Chinese insurgents.”⁴⁶

James Legge himself wrote that with his old and dear friend Hong Rengan in Nanjing, “There is, then, one individual at least among the insurgent hosts who is fully acquainted with the truth.”⁴⁷ Legge claimed that Hong Rengan had had only two goals when he left for Nanjing: “the correction of religious errors” among the rebels and “to commend a line of policy conciliatory to foreigners … to secure, if not their co-operation in the objects of the rebellion, at least their sympathy.” Here was the sum total of Western hopes for a new China: that it should be properly Christian and that it should be friendly to the West. By November, representatives from nearly all of the major missionary organizations in England joined together in sending a letter to the foreign minister calling for Britain to continue its policy of strict neutrality in the Chinese civil war, citing as justification the rebel movement’s “decided attachment to Christianity.”⁴⁸

The public press in Britain reverberated with celebrations of Hong Rengan to the reading public. An article titled “The Chinese Revolution” in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine announced that “We have now … an influential leader of the revolution, whose acquaintance with Christianity, and also with European habits … were acquired at Shanghai and Hong Kong from our own missionaries and those of the States.” Due to this “humble and poor missionary,” it read, the “glad tidings of salvation” were now “embodied in the state documents of the Taiping movement.”⁴⁹ Joseph Edkins had translated Hong Rengan’s treatise on government into English, and the article’s author went through a summary of Hong Rengan’s plans for the Taiping kingdom—the railroads and factories, the end of opium, the introduction of science—and concluded that, given the great hostilities between Britain and the Qing government, the time was ripe for “seeking peace with the new power” of the Taiping.

A separate article in The London Review announced, “This seems almost incredible, so total is the change from all that Europeans have been accustomed to expect and receive at the hands of men in power in China; but its correctness admits of no question.”⁵⁰Describing the visit between Joseph Edkins and the Shield King, its unnamed author declared, “Had any romance-writer, twenty years ago, pictured a scene in China, in which native and Englishman played the respective parts here described, what would have been thought of the probability of his conception?…had a missionary orator sketched it in anticipation for the year 1860, would not even zealous and confident Christians have regarded it as wild?”⁵¹ Only now, it seemed, could the British see the Taiping rebels clearly, for what they really were: “the Tae Pings are not a myth,” this writer proclaimed,

but a power. After ten years’ of changeful fortune, sometimes seeming, to the eye of Europe, at the threshold of empire, sometimes almost forgotten, they now stand up before us, counting their subjects by tens of millions; lords of the finest territories of China,—of those from which we cheer our tables with tea and enrich our toilets with silk; holding the Grand Canal and the Yangtze as Tae Ping waters; sitting royally in the traditional capital of the empire, and thence shaking a menacing hand against the foreign dynasty at Pekin. They are without doubt at present the most formidable native power in China, and, so far as we know, in eastern maritime Asia.⁵²

The veil, as it were, had been lifted.