Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War is a book detailing the history of the Taiping Civil War published in 2012 and written by Stephen R. Platt. Powerful and informative, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom fulfills its purpose in telling the story of a terrible catastrophe.
Platt begins his book by stating that the Taiping Civil War, “The war that engulfed China from 1851 to 1864 was not only the most destructive war of the nineteenth century, but likely the bloodiest civil war of all time” (xxiii). That is, the Taiping Civil War saw the rebels of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom facing off with what was left of the two-centuries-old Qing dynasty of the Manchus. The Taiping Civil War saw the deaths of at least twenty million people, making it claim at least thirty times the number of lives when compared to the American Civil War. Platt writes that the Qing Empire at the time was not backwards, for they were integrated into the world’s economy. However, they were still exploited by foreign powers, seen excellently in the Opium War. Platt describes that the Taiping Civil War occurred at roughly the same time as the American Civil War, which caused Britain to pay close attention to world affairs, for it didn't want to lose two of its major trading partners. In the end, it was neutral in the American Civil War (as Abraham Lincoln made it clear that the war was about slavery) but helped the Qing Empire fight against the Taiping Rebels. All in all, at the time the world was divided over the conflict, as those who wanted to support the Taiping cited their Christianity as well as the notion that they were acting as liberators, freeing the peasants from the Manchus. Platt states that he believes the Taiping Civil War to be a civil war, and he states that the phrase “Taiping Civil War” gives the side of the Taiping a negative connotation. “In writing about this conflict, Western historians have long taken the side of the dynasty, at least in their choice of terminology. The Taiping were indeed rebels, but to call the entire war the Taiping Civil War is to cast the rebels forever in the wrong, and to lay all blame on them” (xxviii). Platt details that both sides were very destructive, and the CCP of the People’s Republic of China are sympathetic to the Taiping, unlike Western historians: some historians treat “the Taiping as proto-Communist peasant rebels … referring to the war as ‘the Taiping Revolution’ or ‘The Taiping Uprising.’ I hope it will become clear to the reader of this book that just as it is unfair to suggest that the Taiping were solely responsible for the devastation of the war, it is likewise an exaggeration to claim they were building some kind of peasant utopia” (xxviii). Platt maintains that if neutrality is what the audience wants, it would be best for the Taiping Rebels to be referred to as members of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, seeing that the rebels basically established a country during the war (please note that I will refer to the conflict as the Taiping Civil War and the soldiers rebelling the Taiping Rebels, not due to any personal biases, but because I find those terms to be easier to understand than their counterparts). Platt ends the preface by stating that for those personally involved in the war, the Taiping Civil War provided them with “the deliberate choices from which one can never turn back, the acts that, once committed, can never be undone, and the relentless erosion of options in a time of crisis-until nothing else remains but to push forward into the cataclysm, in hopes of somehow finding peace on the other side” (xxviii).
Platt began his book by writing of Hong Kong in 1852. That is, it “was a diseased and watery place, a rocky island off the southern shore of the Qing Empire where the inhabitants lived in dread of what one described as ‘the miasma set free from the ground which was everywhere being turned up.’” (7). While most lived in poverty, a select few lived in mansions. One of the people of Hong Kong at the time, Theodore Hamberg, was a missionary who indirectly was one of the causes of the Taiping Civil War: the leader of the Taiping was strongly influenced by him. Platt jumps forward a little bit when it comes to chronology, detailing that in 1853 the Taiping Rebels burst into one of China’s major cities, Nanjing, slaughtering 20,000 Manchus. After successfully taking the capital, they moved on to Beijing, the capital of the Qing Empire. Karl Marx wrote that the Taiping Civil War could have been expected, as when China was finally introduced to the world, social upheavals were inevitable. He also painted the conflict as being one of class struggle, writing that if it goes correctly, it “‘will throw the spark into the overloaded mine of the present industrial system and cause the explosion of the long-prepared general crisis, which, spreading abroad, will be closely followed by political revolutions on the Continent.’” (11). The roots of the Taiping Civil War occurred when the Manchus (who came from the north of China) established themselves as the rulers of China. Many disliked them due to them being foreigners, but most didn't rebel. Regardless, when internal issues sparked up, they found themselves in trouble. Various newspapers reacted differently to the news of the Taiping Civil War. For instance, the London Times justified the soldiers of the Heavenly Kingdom, detailing that they want only liberation from their despotic masters. Hong Rengan, the assistant of Theodore Hamberg, had a cousin named Hong Xiuquan. Hong Xiuquan was nine years older than him and was exceedingly intelligent. They lived “in neighboring villages about thirty miles from the provincial capital of Canton, close enough to see the White Cloud Mountains northeast of the city on a clear day. The villagers were mostly relatives from their clan” (13). Though their families were poor farmers, they still were able to afford some education. Upon realizing Hong Xiuquan’s academic vigor (he studied the Confucian classics beginning at the age of seven, and “distinguished himself immediately and in a few years had memorized the Four Books, the Five Classics, and the other texts required for the civil service examinations. By his early teens, he had also read widely in Chinese history and literature and was so bright, his family believed that he could understand the ancient texts at first reading without assistance”), they decided to invest heavily in his potential success in the civil service examinations (13).
Despite Hong Xiuquan’s intelligence, he failed the civil service examinations (which, as expected, were extremely difficult) thrice. Feeling like a failure due to knowing his family had put their hopes in him, he suffered a complete mental breakdown. Platt describes that after failing his third civil service examination in 1837 (the first one he took was in 1827 - if you failed the examination you had to wait years before the retake) he “had to be carried home … he collapsed into bed … He apologized to them that his life was over and he had let them down; then he closed his eyes and lost all strength. They thought he was dead. But eventually he woke up and began telling them about strange things he had seen while he was asleep” (14). In his dream a powerful man gave him a sword for killing demons and ordered him to cure the world of perversion and depravity. His visions continued for forty days, and they also involved a vision that saw Confucius being yelled at by a divine entity for failing to teach the Chinese people the correct values. His visions became so intense that Hong Xiuquan’s “brothers kept the doors to the house locked during those weeks, and they would sometimes catch Hong Xiuquan leaping about his room, shouting, ‘Kill the demons!’ and slashing wildly at the air” (15). After “recovering” mentally by regaining his composure, Hong Xiuquan seemed to have physically changed, as he was “more handsome, with fair skin and high nose. His gaze had become ‘piercing and difficult to endure.’ His voice boomed … Healthier and sharper of mind than ever before, he returned to his teaching and his preparation for the civil service exams … In 1843 he sat for the examination in Canton for the fourth time, and failed yet again” (15). After his fourth failure, he came across a Christian pamphlet. After reading it, he interpreted that his visions were in fact divine revelations: the characters in his dreams included Jesus, God, and Confucius. That is, he saw the old man in black with the golden beard who commanded him to kill the demons and to purify the world as God, the middle-aged man as Jesus Christ, the “demons” as “the idols worshipped by the Chinese in their Confucian and Buddhist temples,” and his family as the misguided Chinese people (16). His first convert was Hong Rengan. They later converted their family (though Hong Rengan’s older brother beat him with a stick for dishonoring Confucius) and spread to other villages to spread their doctrine. By 1847 there were approximately two thousand believers, and their numbers climbed exponentially in 1850 when it was rumored that believing in the religion was an antidote for the current epidemic. They were able to form an army in 1850 when the Hakka (an ethnic group) got into a fight with the natives of Guangxi province and subsequently asked Hong Xiuquan for aid. The Hakkas tried to get some land, but the settlers didn't want them there. This alerted the authorities, who viewed the Taiping believers as potentially dangerous. Later, “Imperial soldiers laid siege, firing on the God Worshippers from outside, but they managed to slip out in the middle of the night and in the morning the imperials fell on a nearly empty town. Troops dispatched to pursue them were cut down in the woods, and the imperial soldiers wreaked their frustrated revenge on the unfortunate townspeople who stayed behind” (18).
Since Hong Xiuquan and many of his followers survived, Hong Xiuquan declared himself on January 11, 1851 to be the Emperor of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (or the Heavenly King). He also appointed four lieutenants (each for each direction). From 1851-2 the Taiping slowly absorbed more land, quickly growing their numbers by appealing to those which loathed the reigning Manchus. Hamberg, upon hearing of Hong Xiuquan, wanted to publish an article showing his morality in English. Before he could do so, Hong Rengan faced setbacks when it came to evangelizing (his hosts found an opium pipe in his room; he alleged his friend had left it there). Hamberg then died due to the so-called “miasma” which was in fact dysentery. He was thirty-five years old. The Taiping Rebels eventually became a large threat to the Manchus, and they decided to focus on putting down the threat. That is, any member of the rebellion would put their family in danger if they kept up with their behavior. For instance, Qing officials “set up suicide stations: pavilions with tools for killing oneself (daggers, ropes), emblazoned with placards calling for supporters of the insurrection to choose a quick self-imposed death over the eventual capture and dismemberment that would bring greater shame to their families” (21). From 1854-5, the governor-general of Canton executed tens of thousands of potential Taiping supporters. A British official described that “‘Thousands were put to the sword, hundreds cast into the river, tied together in batches of a dozen,’” not to mention that decapitation was a popular method of execution (efficiency and speed) (21). Platt writes that the execution “teams worked with revolting efficiency, and this witness counted sixty-three men decapitated in the space of four minutes before he had to stop watching. ‘I have seen the horrid sight,’ he wrote, ‘and the limbless, headless corpse, merely a mass of flayed flesh among headless trunks, that lay in scores covering the whole execution-ground.’ There were chests for sending the severed heads of the prisoners … as proof of effective punishment, but so many were executed that their heads wouldn’t fit, and the executioners eventually packed only the ears (the right ears, specifically), which alone filled the box to overflowing.” (22). As seen in the prior instance, Qing officials were also responsible for extreme instances of brutality. Platt then notes that Hong Rengan had much experience when it came to foreign travel, making him a vital resource for Hong Xiuquan. Britain, as stated before, didn't get involved in the American Civil War while participating in the Taiping Civil War. They had a large influence on the Taiping Civil War as a whole, seen in their large number of soldiers and ships. Lord Elgin, a British official, invaded Tianjin to show the might of the military. Platt tellingly details that the vast majority of British subjects wanted war with China due to it “insulting” them by refusing their trade deal while ignoring the evidence that their country was ruining the lives of millions of people who didn't know the truly devastating effects of narcotics. Elgin, fighting the Taiping Rebels (the British would help the Qing Army), stated that “‘there is little or nothing of popular sympathy with the rebel movement’ in the areas he visited-though he admitted that most of the places he had actually visited were under imperial control. On the other hand, the Chinese he spoke through with Wade seemed to have no particular loyalty to the Manchu government either, and he gained the impression that ‘the general attitude of the population does not argue much enthusiasm on either side of the dynastic controversy,’ as they viewed the ongoing civil war ‘with feelings akin to those with which they would have regarded earthquake, or pestilence, or any other providential scourge.’” (42). Lord Elgin regretted his invasion, saying that China was woefully unprepared for modernization, seeing that it had its own major problems to deal with already.
In one incident, a British ship tried to forcibly land on the Chinese coast, which led to disaster: many of the soldiers were untrained and the Chinese were hiding, waiting for them to enter so that they could shoot them down quickly. That is, “When the fort guns went silent in the early evening, the British officers took it to mean that the forces manning them had fled, as they had the previous year. Instead, it turned out to be a ruse to entice the landing party to storm the beach; this time, the defenders were prepared for the kind of attack that had surprised them the last time. There were two trenches in front of the walls filled with water and mud, wide and deep, with a vicious abatis of iron spikes immediately behind them. But those mattered only if the marines could even get to the trenches; the landing had been delayed for so long that by the time their approached shore the tide was all the way out, and the thick mud of the exposed banks seized the feet of the attackers or caused them to fall, slipping in their thin-soled shoes, helplessly shot to pieces by the gunners on the fort” (46). All in all, the attempted battle was a complete disaster for the British: they were pulverized by cannons, and many people drowned in the mud. While some soldiers were able to escape, many didn't: boats with survivors were commonly blown apart by cannon-fire. At the end of the day, there were more than four-hundred British casualties. As expected, some white supremacists were angry, describing that it was improper for the British to have been killed by an inferior race (but is the opposite somehow okay?). The American interpreter and missionary Samuel Wells Williams stated that the loss for Britain would cause massive problems for China in the future (they would get revenge), which was proven to be correct. After the Taiping got even more land, they set up a palace for Hong Xiuquan. He also remained somewhat insane, as his visions continued. He continued to believe that he was chosen by God to destroy the Manchus but lived a life that didn't suggest such a belief: he lived as a recluse in his palace and had many concubines while forbidding even married couples to copulate. Regardless, he then appointed various kings like the Shield King (a fancy name for Hong Rengan). In merely one incident of bloodshed in the Taiping Civil War, the Taiping Rebels attempted to invade Hangzhou (the force was led by the Loyal King whose actual name was Li Xiucheng). The Taiping Rebels took over the city, and before they even succeeded, corrupt Qing officials robbed the homes of their own people for loot before escaping with their private militias. Also, tens of thousands of women, following traditions and Confucian principles, reacted to the chaos by behaving like how a “proper” woman should: suicide. Platt writes that “The city’s women … 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. Female 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” (67). The invasion of Hangzhou caused Qing officials to panic and to subsequently focus their troops on the region. The ruse successful (the Taiping Rebels wanted to lure Imperial troops from Nanjing), the Taiping Rebels focused their energy on invading Nanjing. They were successful, as the “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. Dropping their weapons and flags in the rout, the remnants of the imperial army fled on foot” (67). This disastrous defeat saw the deaths of some important commanders on the side of the Qing Empire: the leading general He Chun, upon losing, ended his life by consuming raw, unprocessed opium. Another leader, Zhang Guoliang, drowned in the chaos of the battle.
By 1860, the Taiping had made numerous impressive gains, causing the civilians to panic: they were worried that they would be slaughtered after the war was over by either the Qing or the Taiping Rebels on grounds of disloyalty. To be specific, the Taiping Rebels approved long, untamed hair. The Qing officials, on the other hand, mandated that all males were to “shave the tops of their heads and grow a single long braid down the back known as the queue” (70). In an attempt to appease both sides, civilians tried to make their hair in a way that allowed for both hairstyles: “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 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.’” (70). This elegantly illustrates that the people most affected by war are generally civilians, showing the stupidity and heinousness of it. Those who had substantial holdings and some wealth, on the contrary, were much more concerned about the Taiping than the Qing: they wanted to keep whatever they owned. To deal with a potential invasion by the Taiping, they frequently committed suicide (seen in Suzhou, for instance). If they didn't kill themselves, they frequently moved elsewhere. To their disappointment, Qing soldiers were frequently the ones who would rob them: angry at defeat, they took their anger out on the people they were supposed to protect. Platt mentions that missionaries commonly approved the behavior of the Taiping Rebels, as the Rebels were supposedly Christian, thereby giving them the right to do as they wished. The Rebels eventually took over Suzhou. When they did, they came across rotting corpses from the battle. Platt hauntingly details, “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 boats forward into the grim mass” (80). When the Taiping Rebels took over areas like Suzhou, they demonstrated their utter disdain for Confucianism by mutilating status and ornaments honoring the past. The Taiping Rebels justified the war by stating that while atrocities were committed by their side, most of them were done by recruits who lacked a sense of discipline and proper religious instruction. Furthermore, they said that the Qing officials did much worse things than them. Also, they alleged that most of the civilian deaths occurred due to suicide, not to massacre. The Taiping promised the missionaries that they could end the war in two years and bring in a golden era of peace and wisdom. Edkins, a missionary, was quickly persuaded by their words, writing that “‘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 justifiable or otherwise in so far as the movement itself is so.’” (81). Edkins later wrote that the Taiping was a great group, for he stated that they didn't really believe that Hong Xiuquan was the brother of Jesus: it was only that they believed that he served a purpose similar to Jesus by improving the world and getting rid of the enemies of humanity.
Some time after, Britain’s relationship with China persisted to be tumultuous and tense. In an effort to win Britain’s favor, Li Xiucheng ordered that any Taiping soldier who harms a foreigner is to be executed. Furthermore, he tried to maintain the safety of foreign citizens, telling the people of Shanghai to hoist yellow flags atop their doors: if they were to do so, Li Xiucheng promised that their property would remain undamaged and untouched. Li Xiucheng also wrote to various foreign ministers, telling them that the Taiping meant no harm to their countries and their people, seeing that what they were dealing with was a domestic issue. In the battle of Shanghai (August 17, 1860), the Taiping force, rumored to be absurdly large, was in fact relatively small, composed of only a few thousand people. The Taiping were soundly beaten by the French and British. The French committed atrocities even worse than the Qing officials: they committed wholesale slaughter. That is, “An eyewitness report published a few days later in The North-China Herald and relayed from there back to the papers in London described a panicked scene, with French soldiers rushing ‘frantically among the peaceful inhabitants of the place, murdering men, women, and children, without the least discrimination.’ The French atrocities were at least as awful as those of the imperialists. ‘One man,’ the correspondent wrote, ‘was stabbed right through as he was enjoying his opium-pipe. A woman, who had just given birth to a child, was bayoneted without the faintest provocation. Women were ravished and houses plundered by these ruthless marauders without restraint.’ Another witness estimated that the French left tens of thousands of Chinese homeless in the course of defending against a lightly armed Taiping force that numbered, by his estimate, 3,000 at most” (93-4). After this terrible event, the Taiping were held in high esteem by many people, as they seemed to be more tolerant and open-minded than their Qing counterparts. After some more fighting, the Emperor told the European ambassadors who were willing to help them fight the Taiping to kneel (in Chinese, this is known as “kowtow,” which literally translates to “to knock one’s head on the ground”) to him, as that was an ancient tradition. Indeed, this tradition was practiced for centuries: China, before becoming isolationist and therefore technologically weak, was a very powerful country which once had the capability of exploring the world and spreading ideas (before the child emperor at the time was convinced by a bunch of xenophobic advisors that a lightning storm was a sign from the gods to not go to other areas). Even during total war, Qing officials still largely refused to make necessary changes to its system, which took a large toll on its prosperity. Platt writes that the European ambassadors refused to kneel, for doing so was degrading for them. Also, the Emperor was unwilling to allow them to not kneel, as he took it as a personal insult (even as he needed their help). Platt describes, “The question of kneeling was, however, a concession that the commissioners could not make. The humiliation to the emperor would be too great to sustain, for the prestige of the dynasty rested on ceremonies that acknowledged the emperor’s eminence over his Chinese subjects and foreigners alike” (105). The Emperor ultimately refused to compromise, and quickly moved from the Summer Palace to the Forbidden City, which was located in the north of Beijing. Fooling everyone into thinking that he was staying, he “slipped out the back gate and abandoned the capital altogether, fleeing for the safety of the northern mountains with a large retinue of servants, palace women, and Manchu advisors accompanying him. Not a word was said publicly, and the performance at the imperial opera hall still went on as usual that evening as if nothing had happened” (106-7). Of course, it quickly became known that he had escaped. When the news finally broke out, the people of Beijing panicked and tried to flee. To be specific, fear was so prevalent that “The price of renting a cart doubled and kept rising until there were none left. The government dissolved as officials abandoned their offices, and the civil defense bureau put up proclamations around the city announcing that any resident of Beijing who managed to catch a looter was authorized to beat him or her to death on sight. The city practically emptied of all its wealthiest inhabitants, as all those with the means to leave Beijing hired carriers to take them north, out of the range of the coming assault” (107).
When the foreigners (the British, the French) burst into the city, they lost their discipline and began mass looting. Lord Elgin described that the worst of the looting was committed by French soldiers. Later, one of the emperor’s brothers, Prince Gong (left in the capital to make peace with the soldiers) released some war captives who had been mistreated and neglected, as well as issuing corpses back to the public eye (one of the people who died after being released was a journalist for a large newspaper who, upon his release, was malnourished and had maggots in his wrists, while others had their hands beaten to the point of bursting). When the soldiers realized the abuse of war prisoners, they demanded the Manchus to be systematically executed. Lord Elgin reasonably explained to them that to punish innocent civilians wasn’t going to punish the Emperor at all: instead, he took it upon himself to destroy something of great value to the Emperor. That is, he ordered the British army to make the Summer Palace into a blazing inferno. Platt writes of General Zeng Guofan, arguably the most important general on the Qing side. He was a relatively traditional scholar who followed the Confucian teachings. He also suffered from ill-health: he was plagued by illnesses such as fits of vomiting, insomnia, heart palpitations, and symptoms of depression. Zeng Guofan didn't aspire to be a general when he was younger: he was a bookish, scholarly man who wanted to focus on knowledge, not combat. Zeng Guofan’s father wanted to become a government official, but failed repeatedly: by the time he passed even the lowest examination, he was already in his forties. Zeng Guofan, on the other hand, was highly successful, though he did go through numerous failures: “Zeng Guofan, however, showed far greater talent … he managed to pass that same examination the year right after his father did, while he was just twenty-two years old with a full career ahead of him. It hadn’t been effortless-he had failed six times before he passed-but with concerted effort and a willingness to punish himself, he managed to climb his way up the ranks. The following year, he passed the provincial exam that had forever eluded Hong Xiuquan and then went on for the top examination in the empire, administered by the emperor in Beijing. After failing it twice, he passed with brilliance in 1838, winning the coveted jinshi degree and an appointment to the Hanlin Academy” (115). The Hanlin Academy was an extremely powerful and respected institution and was reserved only for the best of the best. It was so selective that it only contained roughly one hundred students and faculty from a total population of 400 million. That is, “The senior Hanlin scholars were the custodians of interpretation of the Confucian texts; they chose the questions for the examinations and oversaw the administration. They tutored the emperor and the young princes who might someday be emperor themselves. Those men were the monarch’s brain trust, the think tank that converted ancient and arcane philosophical texts handed down over millennia into meaningful policy and governance” (115). Zeng Guofan continued to rise to power, and Platt writes that the main obvious difference between Zeng Guofan and Hong Xiuquan was that one failed while the other succeeded: while Hong Xiuquan became quite insane, enraged, and heartbroken after failing the civil service exam repeatedly, Zeng Guofan was grateful to the Qing Empire for giving him the mere opportunity to succeed. Zeng Guofan’s mother died during the Taiping Civil War (she peacefully passed away) and he was eventually offered the position of the head general. He was quite wary, for he didn't like the potential of corruption, insincerity, and cruelty. Regardless, he was continued to be asked to accept the position, as one of his teachers in Beijing, Tang Jian, said that Zeng Guofan’s specialty was knowing how to allocate resources (ex. soldiers) efficiently. He eventually took up the offer (though he refused it multiple times beforehand in private letters).
Zeng Guofan massively reformed the army. Beforehand, it was composed of two sections: the hereditary banner armies and the Green Standard. The hereditary banner armies were dedicated to the Manchus (that is, the elite). While having only a small number of people compared to the Green Standard, they were the ones making the executive decisions that would impact everyone. The Green Standard armies were composed of everyone else (the vast majority of the official army belonged to this category, and most of the people in this army were ethnically Chinese). Zeng Guofan knew that the way soldiers were being trained at that point in time was utterly absurd: the Qing officials were so bad at using resources wisely that they expected soldiers to train themselves and to bring their own weapons and horses. Zeng Guofan described that the people of the Green Standard had little loyalty to their country, for they had very little to lose. He notes how bad the situation was by writing that “‘even if Confucius himself came back to life, he could spend three years and still not manage to correct their evil ways.’” (119). He also said that the average soldier was “poorly trained, lacked courage, and had no martial skills to speak of” due to mismanagement (119). Zeng Guofan implemented many reforms, including: (1) recruiting people who came from rural areas (he believed that those who lived in cities were spoiled, insincere, and undisciplined), having soldiers fight next to people from their immediate community at home (to decrease the chance that they’ll flee in terror; also, if they do desert, their family at home, who are always identifiable by the other soldiers and by documents, will be severely punished), (3) maintain harsh and consistent discipline (every subordinate officer is to treat the older officer as his father; soldiers are told to be strict but fair to those lower in the hierarchy), (4) bettering the pay for soldiers (someone in Zeng Guofan’s army would receive a salary nearly triple of that of the wage of a soldier in the Green Standard), (5) offering incentives (capturing enemy people and property had generous awards), (6) improving military education, and (7) maintaining harsh punishments to deter greed and dishonest behavior (lying to superiors about capturing enemies, for instance, would cause you to be beheaded and to have your decapitated head hung in public for everyone to see and mock). It was very difficult for Zeng Guofan to get the resources he needed, but “By February 1854,” he “had thirteen battalions of land troops ready to fight, supported by ten naval battalions with a fleet of more than two hundred war boats, a hundred river junks bearing supplies, and one large, grand vessel for a flagship” (127). Zeng Guofan, as stated before, was primarily a strategist. Unsurprisingly, he was not physically adept: he could barely ride a horse and his strategies would frequently fail. Regardless, he turned things around in 1854 when he drove the Taiping Rebels from Changsha: it was described by Platt that “Four days of incessant attacks against the rebels’ mudworks ended in a slaughter, with reports of ten thousand rebels killed and a thousand boats captured. The remainder of the Taiping force began to pull back in a wide retreat to the north, leaving Changsha safe for the time being” (128). After this tremendous victory, Zeng Guofan was still quite unpopular: people became paranoid he would try to seize power (which he never did in his life and would never do).
While Zeng Guofan tried to improve the Qing Army, a major problem it faced was opposition and suspicion from the peasantry: the Taiping Rebels were generally more disciplined than Qing soldiers and were, therefore, more likely to not engage in atrocities. That is, “One witness in Changshu county, about sixty miles west of Shanghai, described the parade of a rebel army through his town in the autumn of 1860. Curious townsfolk peered out from behind their gates as the Taiping officers passed, resplendent in their bright, colorful silks. They wore jackets of fox fur and capes of squirrel hide and rode slowly past on a succession of several hundred horses, as men with banners and spears lined the road. He estimated that 10,000 Taiping soldiers passed through altogether, and noted that they caused no harm at all to the townspeople” (154). The Qing Army then followed, and, unlike the Taiping Rebels, caused havoc and engaged in forced conscription. While the Taiping Rebels might have generally been better than the Qing Army, they had many undisciplined soldiers who would frequently engage in atrocities. Said soldiers would do terrible things so long as there was no higher official present (undisciplined units may invade a territory before the arrival of the general). Platt writes that their atrocities were so terrible that they “nearly justified the thousands of suicides that preceded their arrival. One witness in Zhejiang province’s Xiangshan county described the rape of a new bride by dozens of those men, who disemboweled her groom-their primary target, because he had a shaved forehead in the Qing style-and left both of them for dead. Another in the same province reported, ‘There were those who would cut open the stomach and drink the blood, and others who chopped off the four limbs. Some would dig out the heart and eat it … my pen cannot bear to write this.’ … If the Qing officials had already fled the city, another person reported, the vanguard troops would just murder a few cowering citizens and dress their corpses up in the clothes left behind by the imperial ministers, to invigorate the army that followed behind them” (155). Despite the general depravity, Platt notes that the Taiping Rebels still had a better sense of justice than the Qing: those who committed crimes and depravities would be swiftly put to death upon the arrival of a just official. The Taiping Rebels, upon conquering a territory, would generally pass some laws like the following: it is forbidden to smoke opium, practice foot-binding (said practice would cripple a female’s feet but were once thought to be an essential part of being female), and worship gods save the Christian one. Another aspect of life in the Heavenly Kingdom under the Taiping was an examination system that featured Christianity, not Confucianism. Furthermore, these exams were much easier than their Qing counterparts: while it is possible for forty to fifty students to pass the Taiping exam out of a hundred, only one can be expected to pass the Qing one.
Near the end of December 1860, the Emperor received aid from the Russians: ten thousand rifles and eight cannons. Zeng Guofan in the summer of 1860 led a raid against the vital city of Anqing which was being held by the Taiping Rebels. Unfortunately for him, Hong Xiuquan led an army from Nanjing in October 1860 to launch an assault on the Qing Army. In an astounding feat, the Taiping Rebels were able to travel two-hundred miles in eleven days by merely walking. Along the way, they annihilated pockets of Qing resistance. Zeng Guofan, upon hearing of the news, became terrified and requested an official, Guoquan of Anqing, for help. He stated that if they receive no help they will have to simply fight to the death. He also writes that while he was disappointed with his life when it came to scholarship (he felt he didn't study everything he wanted to learn), he felt relieved that he didn't commit any indecencies: “‘I look back on my fifty years,’” “‘and though I regret that my scholarship is still incomplete, at least I am guilty of no great crimes.’ His final words were moral advice for his family: he asked Guoquan to ‘guide our younger brothers and sons and teach them to be diligent within, and modest without, to guard against arrogant habits. Beyond this, I have no other will.’” (198). Waiting for a potential attack by Hong Xiuquan’s army, he felt great relief when they didn't. The next morning, however, saw a clash between the two armies. The fighting lasted for two days: “The first day, the two sides fought to a standstill. The second day was a bloodbath. Bao Chao’s men were fewer but far better rested and equipped, and the Loyal King, with an eye on further objectives, finally called a retreat and pulled his weary men back into the mountains, disappearing once again into the fog and leaving four thousand dead and wounded behind him on the valley floor” (198-9). Zeng Guofan remained in the same position for the winter and still worried about surprise attacks from the Taiping Rebels. Later, he became more concerned upon learning that his soldiers might run out of supplies. To prevent deprivation, he led with his commander 9,000 soldiers eastward to break through the Taiping Rebels. Unfortunately, that effort was vastly unsuccessful: “The rebel garrison managed to sneak out under cover of darkness and set fire to Zeng Guofan’s camp, burning it to the ground and scattering his soldiers into the night” (200). Falling into despair upon falling back into Qimen with almost no supplies, he believed he was going to die, and “told his sons that the situation he now faced was as bleak as in January 1855, when he had lost his naval fleet at Lake Poyang and tried to commit suicide” (200). Zeng Guofan instructed his sons to not join the military, for his own experience as a scholar as the chief commander of the Qing Army was very unpleasant. In his own words, he stated that he regretted his decision to take the Emperor’s offer of power: “‘At its root, leading an army is not something I was good at,’” “‘Warfare calls for extremity, but I am too balanced. It calls for deception, and I am too direct. How could I possibly manage against these monstrous rebels?’ He told them to avoid following any path like his own, save for the quiet Confucian scholarship that was his only true pride. ‘All you should do is pursue your studies with a single mind,’” “‘You must not become soldiers,’” “‘And you need not become officials, either’” (200).
Platt then writes more of Hong Rengan. While he was a scholar in a sense, he “did not have Zeng Guofan’s strategic sense, nor his instinct for discipline and order. But he had faith in the power of ideas and composed a series of poems while on campaign to inspire his followers. ‘A brush stands erect like a weapon,’ … ‘It sweeps away the thousand armies, and what is left of their formations?’ Hong Rengan’s campaign writings marked a sharp contrast with the image he projected to his foreign missionary friends. Gone was the genial, self-deprecating preacher. Replacing him was the voice of a man who would lead a nation” (209). However, Hong Rengan made a massive mistake by splitting his army (12,000 were assigned to watch the supplies while the others were ordered to fight), and Zeng Guofan utilized the opportunity to defeat them. When the soldiers at Jixian Pass surrendered, a Qing official, Bao Chao, slaughtered all who were inside: 3,000 in total. For another stockade, Bao Chao spared only a senior Taiping commander, “a veteran officer who was beloved of his men and invaluable to the Brave King. Bao Chao spared him so he would still be alive when they dismembered him under the Anqing wall for the benefit of the garrison inside” (211). Later, Zeng Guofan’s younger brother, Zeng Guoquan, oversaw the surrender of the Taiping Rebels who were guarding the water passage at Waternut Lake. After the rebels surrendered by giving up all their weapons, Zeng Quoquan ordered them all to be mercilessly butchered as efficiently as possible. That is, “The next day, July 7, the 8,000 rebel soldiers in the Waternut Lake stockades surrendered all of their weapons: six thousand foreign rifles, eight thousand long spears, a thousand gingals, eight hundred Ming dynasty matchlocks, and two thousand horses” (211). Once they were utterly stripped of weapons, they were murdered: in Zeng Guoquan’s own account, eight thousand people were efficiently executed in just a single day: ten prisoners would be decapitated at a single time to prevent resistance. The slaughter began at seven in the morning and finished at sundown. Zeng Guofan, upon hearing of his brother’s victory and the subsequent massacre, celebrated: “He wrote several letters to Guoquan over the following days-first more sanguine, suggesting his brother find a way to bury the thousands of corpses or else pile them onto old boats and send them down the river so the stink wouldn’t bring disease into his camp … On July 12, he tried to put his brother’s mind at ease by telling him that if Confucius were alive, he too would say that it was right to exterminate the rebels. By July 19, he sounded almost exasperated … ‘Since you lead an army, you should take the killing of rebels as your purpose’” (211-2).
The Qing Army continued to siege Anqing, and mass starvation and panic reigned supreme in the later stages. Over the months, the fighting raged ruthlessly. In the end, the surviving soldiers seemed to have left by digging a tunnel while living behind the civilians to their fate. Platt tellingly described that the suffering at Anqing was almost impossible to comprehend: “By the end of the summer, the daily rice rations were long gone. The vegetables and weeds from the gardens had been eaten. All of the animals, even the rats, were gone, and there was nothing left to sustain the starving thousands inside. Or, almost nothing. The victors who entered the city on September 5 discovered, to their horror, that the markets of Anqing had never closed. The price for human meat had reached half a tael per catty by the end, or about thirty-eight cents a pound” (215). Zeng Guofan told Zeng Guoquan to slaughter all who were related to the rebels, saying that compassion would only hurt their cause in the long-run. Platt writes that it was believed that sixteen-thousand people (almost all civilians) had survived, and Zeng Guofan’s soldiers either slew them all or killed the men: “The reports of what happened to them afterward differ primarily as to whether or not Zeng Guofan’s officers first separated out the women before they killed everyone who was left” (215). Around the same time as the end of the battle, August 22, 1861, Xianfeng the Emperor died. It is currently believed that he died of tuberculosis, but Zeng Guofan said that he died of shame: he alleged that he was the rightful king of China (though there was no empirical evidence to support it). After his death, the Manchus and Qing officials were concerned: one of the ways the Mandate of Heaven manifested itself was in the lifespan of the ruler; if Xianfeng’s rule was short and tumultuous, this did not bode well for those who were superstitious. Also, he only had one son for he was almost completely infertile (this obsession when it comes to rulers to have as many children as possible can be compared to rats breeding as much as possible to spread across a territory - humans frequently behave like parasites, though they are usually unconscious of the similarities): “In spite of the constant attentions of his eighteen concubines and wives through his years in the pleasure gardens of the Summer Palace, Xianfeng had managed to father just one son who could inherit his throne. That son was, in August 1861, only five years old” (217). Indeed, I find it to be ironic that the main concern for many at that point in time was having an heir while millions of people were faced with starvation and massacre: this is a common pattern followed by most societies for most of human history.
The Taiping Rebels, hearing of Xianfeng’s death, were overjoyed: they interpreted his death as his fall into Hell. On the Qing side, the mother of the heir became the regent/person in control, seeing that her son was too young. She had her rivals exiled and brutally executed: humanity’s true colors, indeed. Platt then talks more of foreign relations: the Taiping became ever more eager to secure foreign help and paid even more attention to preventing atrocities. Platt writes that when Liu Xiucheng’s armies took over Hejiang’s capital city, Hangzhou in December 1861 after eight intense weeks of siege warfare (primarily effective due to starvation: 2.3 million people quickly consumed all the resources). Despite their massive victory, they largely left the residents in peace, winning the approval of many: this created an impressive contrast between them and the Qing Army (which they viewed as being savages due to their actions at Anqing): “On December 29, the inhabitants gave up their gates under circumstances depressingly similar to those of Anqing, with thousands dead of starvation in the streets. But there the similarity ended. Prior to the fall, Li Xiucheng’s men had fired arrows into the city wrapped in messages promising not to harm the people and giving them a choice of joining the Taiping or going free. The tactic largely seems to have worked” (238). Even a Qing loyalist who was present noted that LI Xiucheng ordered his soldiers not to harm the civilians and that most of the violence at Hangzhou was committed by Qing officials and those still loyal to the regime: “the Manchus in the garrison city had burned themselves alive, while many of the Chinese imperial officials had slit their own throats, but the ordinary people came to relatively little harm in the capture of the city” (238). In another instance, in an attempt to demonstrate their mercy and compassion, the Taiping gave a Qing official who hanged himself (in his mansion) an honorable burial. Despite the efforts of the Taiping, British officials helped the Manchus, not them. The Taiping eventually had an army of more than a million, and Zeng Guofan responded by recruiting even more people into the Qing Army. The empress dowager and her son, Prince Gong, gave Zeng Guofan even more power and honors, which he disliked: they had no choice, for Zeng Guofan was by, at that point, the biggest factor keeping the Taiping Rebels at bay. Unfortunately for the Taiping, the last of the Christian missionaries (basically the negotiators) left, stripping Hong Rengan, who was held in high esteem by many foreigners, of his base of support. The Taiping, led by Li Xiucheng, later invaded Shanghai and was noted to be well equipped by a British naval officer. The British fought against the Taiping when they arrived and sent captured prisoners to the Qing authorities to face summary execution. Zeng Guofan was somewhat suspicious of foreigners, for he didn't want them to make China into a colony akin to India. The Taiping were defeated in Shanghai due to foreign intervention, and foreign opinion turned against them even more. However, the Taiping’s reputation improved when a soldier wrote in a newspaper that he had seen the Qing Army cruelly torturing and murdering people: “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 … clasped her infant to her bleeding heart, and died holding it there … 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” (286-7).
The soldier who witnessed this apologized for doing nothing, and when the story (even if it wasn’t true, it portrayed accurately the barbarity of war, as described by Platt) was published, foreign opinion turned against the British, stating that they were supporting barbarians (Platt interestingly details that news of the massacre alone wasn’t enough to provoke international outrage: only the news of the deaths of children elicited the response - what does this say about society’s standards and our species as a whole?). The Saturday Evening Post criticized Britain, saying that they had no right to judge America’s civil war if they supported baby killers: “‘It appears,’” “‘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’” (289). The article also said 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!’” (289). Stories like the former made the public against the war, causing the British to eventually (later, of course) quit their efforts in aiding the Qing Army. But it didn't matter, for the war had turned in the favor of the Qing Army, as seen in how they captured the Brave King. That is, on May 13, the Brave King tried to regroup with another unit to form a numerical advantage over the Qing Army. Unfortunately for him, he was betrayed by one of his colleagues who was offered his life in exchange for delivering the famed general to the authorities. Oblivious to the betrayal, the Brave King entered the city Shouzhou and was immediately captured by the Qing. He was then executed. Before his death, he said that he felt sorry and wanted to apologize to his soldiers for failing them: “‘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.’” (293). Things became even worse for the Taiping Rebels, as the Qing Army made stunningly rapid gains in territory when it came to places like the Yangtze River. The Qing Army then planned to raid Nanjing, and also bought ships from Britain to crush the rebels. Platt then writes that the Taiping Civil War has caused millions of people to lose their homes and to become refugees: “In Shanghai alone, by 1862 there were one and a half million people crammed into the Chinese city and the foreign settlement in hopes of finding protection from the war outside” (304). Due to the high population density, bacteria and disease spread extremely quickly. When cholera struck in May 1862, all hell broke loose: “They started with cramps, absent other symptoms. Then came vomiting. But the worst by far was the explosive, violent diarrhea that came later, pale and milky, that tore its victims inside out. Death often came in a matter of hours … By June, it was a full-blown epidemic, ripping through the miserable hordes of refugees on their boats, in their hovels of straw matting, crowded into the building and streets. In the small foreign community, it killed ten or fifteen Europeans a day of the two thousand or so who lived in Shanghai and wreaked havoc on the crews of the military ships” (305). Things became even worse later on: in June, hundreds were dying in agony daily. By July, the daily death toll was in the thousands. Platt details that at the peak of the epidemic, cholera killed 3,000 daily. Due to how many had died, their bodies were difficult to dispose of, and were left lying around on the streets.
Because cholera wasn’t understood very well back then, the epidemic continued for quite some time, killing even more people. All in all, it was possible, as calculated by foreign intelligence, that one-eighth of Shanghai’s population had died of cholera. Zeng Guofan’s health, already frail, also worsened, as he became anxious, very stressed, and depressed. He wrote himself that he was concerned about his young brother Guoquan, and that “Anxiety burned my heart. I repaired to my inner chamber and tried laying out scenarios on a Go board [to distract myself]. Then I paced back and forth, circling the room. At eleven o’clock I went to bed but could not fall asleep. Sometime after three in the morning I finally slept, and had nightmares” (309). Zeng Guofan continued to be tormented over the weeks by fear over the battle of Nanjing: in one incident, by the time he was notified that Li Xiucheng was taking an army of 100,000 rebels to Nanjing to fight Guoquan, said army had already been moving for three weeks. Fortunately for him, his brother was alive, though he did suffer a nonlethal facial wound. Guoquan eventually succeeded in taking Nanjing from the Taiping Rebels: “His men managed to breach most of the enemy’s tunnels before they could do any damage, and when the earthwork defenses did give way, their backup fortifications held … without an effective waterborne supply route, Li Xiucheng had had to use the stores from the city, which had endangered the survival of the capital. The army he sent against the Hunan naval forces had failed to break their hold in the junction of the river and moat, so the Hunannese supply lines had stayed open while his own were blocked” (311). Due to the lack of supplies (besides food, there was clothing to worry about), the Taiping Rebels surrendered. Zeng Guofan also met misfortune: his health continued to deteriorate until he could barely function (he was extremely tormented by self-doubt, remarking that if he could die peacefully and not be cursed by future generations, he would be grateful) and was so worried about his younger brother Quoquan that he scarcely thought about another one of his younger brothers, Guobao, who had gone to Nanjing with 5,000 soldiers. To be specific, Zeng Guofan had already lost a brother, hence his deep concern for his remaining siblings: one of his brothers was killed in the Taiping Civil War. Guobao died of typhoid at the age of thirty-four; Zeng Guofan learned of his death on the morning of January 11. Zeng Guofan continued the war regardless, not allowing his grief to affect him, and he definitively broke ties with mercenaries from Europe. He viewed them as indecent and uncivilized due to their different cultures, not to mention that they were completely oblivious to the teachings of Confucianism. The war remained in a favorable position for the Qing Army, and they executed many Taiping Rebels upon capturing them. That is, they promised the Receiving King, the Esteemed King, and others safety if they were to surrender, similar to their ruse at Anqing. When the Esteemed King surrendered, he was quickly captured, taken to a basement, and suffered decapitation via saw. As for the Receiving King, he was also decapitated and mutilated: he and the other prisoners had their hands and bodies slashed into bloody messes and were dismembered indiscriminately.
The British official who negotiated the surrenders of the Esteemed King and Receiving King was livid with horror upon learning of their fates, for he promised them safety: the foreign community shared his sentiment. To be more specific, he was so angry that he resigned almost immediately and said that the leading Qing official who oversaw their executions, Li Hongzhang, should be executed. This event supported the same attitude which the Anqing massacre sowed into the public conscience, and Britain found itself extremely troubled. However, its main desire when it came to the support of the Qing remained the same: expansion and profit. “In his heart Bowra knew-just as Lord Elgin had before him-that the conquest of China was what his countrymen really wanted; they just couldn’t stomach the truth of their own dark will. The home government were like ‘fools or children,’ he wrote, who would issue grand orders and then ‘grumble at the bill.’ They ‘habitually share the plunder, assist the encroachments, and protect and honor the adventurer, and yet in the same breath, pity the victim, denounce the expedition, and condemn the policy.’ If England was going to demand the continued expansion of commerce in China, he thought, it had damn well better not pretend horror at the bloodshed and territorial conquests that were the certain price of its desires” (333-4). As for the reaction of the Qing Empire towards this, they couldn’t care less: victory was already imminent. While famine continued to ravage the lives of countless people, Zeng Guoquan was finally able to take Nanjing for the Qing Army: he captured a vital stone fort on June 13, 1863 by utilizing the darkness. This had the immediate effect of having Nanjing completely surrounded, and the Taiping Rebels fought back. On June 30, when the Qing Army rushed to fight, the Taiping Rebels responded by utilizing guns and artillery batteries. While more than two-thousand Qing soldiers were wounded or killed, the Qing Army still remained victorious. Famine began to occur in the city, and Hong Xiuquan suffered from extreme paranoia: “his mad cruelty” mandated that “For the crime of communicating with anyone outside the walls, people were now being pounded to death between stones or flayed alive in public” (342). Zeng Guofan ordered Guoquan to prevent anyone from leaving the city to ensure that starvation occurs at a quicker rate and to punish the supposed traitors for their crimes by killing them once the city was taken. The famed Brave King, a fearsome military commander of the Taiping, later died when he was betrayed and murdered by the Qing Army. Even worse, the Taiping lost Hangzhou and Suzhou, completely obliterating the hope of potential escape for the inhabitants of Nanjing. The siege saw the Qing Army digging a tunnel to enter the city. They eventually succeed in breaching the city by using a bomb to blast open a wall.
By the time the walls had fallen, Hong Xiuquan was already dead: he most likely died of disease more than six weeks prior. Some say that he said that God would give them manna to deal with their lack of food: he gathered up materials that were in fact dangerous to consume. Upon eating some, he fell ill and died (again, this isn’t confirmed, but it’s likely). Li Xiucheng escaped the city with his family, disguising themselves as soldiers. While they were able to be undetected for three days, they were eventually exposed by people who wanted the potential bounty for turning him in. His capture marked the complete ruination of the Taiping Rebels, as their generals were dead, their land all but lost, and their rulers subject to the direct will of the Qing Army. Upon the capture of Li Xiucheng, the Qing Army broke discipline: they had endured years of pain and impatience, and they did as they will by releasing their anger and vengeance upon civilians. Upon entering the city, they looted everything valuable and slaughtered people for sport: the secretary of Zeng Guoquan noted that “the elderly had been slaughtered with abandon. So had the sick and the infirm, who couldn’t serve as forced labor. Most of the dead bodies he saw lying across the streets were those of old people, but there were countless children as well. ‘Children and toddlers,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘some not even two years old, had been hacked up or run through just for sport.’ As far as he could tell, there wasn’t a single woman left in the city under forty years old. The living prostrated themselves on the ground. They showed signs of mutilation by soldiers who had tortured them to reveal the locations of hidden loot. ‘Sometimes they had ten or twelve cuts on them,’ he wrote, ‘sometimes several times that. The sound of their weeping and moaning carried into the distance all around.’” (351). As stated above, most of the women in the city were raped or forced to marry the soldiers. In one sordid instance, a sixteen-year-old girl named Huang Shuhua had her family murdered in cold blood in front of her by a soldier. The soldier then said that she would be his wife: he was a member of Zeng Guofan’s army, and he had come from Zeng Guofan’s home county of Xiangxiang. When he kidnapped her and was on the way back to his home, she, full of fury, murdered him before hanging herself.
Li Xiucheng, upon being captured, was tortured (Zeng Guoquan personally interrogated him, using an awl and a knife to cut off a piece of his arm) and forced to speak by Zeng Guofan, who censored what he said in the interview in an attempt to paint the Qing Empire as honorable. He was then taken to the Qing capital and executed. Zeng Guofan by the end of the war was the most powerful person in China. His army obeyed him and him alone, not to mention that he was held in high esteem by them and had much military experience. Despite his might, he let go of his power willingly and without being told to do so, as he still believed in the Mandate of Heaven and the aristocratic system that reigned in China. While he was capable of calmly ordering the executions of thousands, on the inside, “the man known only to his brothers, his sons, and a handful of close friends, was a man of deep reverence and quietude who was often wracked by uncertainty and depression. He was a general who had never asked to be one. He was never truly sure of his own command or certain of his power. He was a man who wanted most of all to go back to his books and lead a quiet life of moral scholarship. And for that man, a grasp for power at the end of the war was utterly unthinkable. Skeptical as he may have been of the corruption, greed, and incompetence of the government bureaucrats in Beijing, Zeng Guofan never questioned the legitimacy of the emperor himself” (356). A major reason Zeng Guofan let go of almost unlimited power within China was directly tied to military experience: he found the potential of failure, death, and the prospect of massive responsibility to be stressful and painful. After he quit his position and disbanded the army, he was verbally assaulted and mocked by the very officials whom he had saved by winning the war. Depressed by their suspicion and their treatment of him, he spent the rest of his life as a sad, confused man: “For the scant eight years that remained of his life, they would give him no rest, would approve no retirement or pause in his duties, as his beard turned white and his eyesight dimmed into blindness. His diary in the years after the war was suffused with expressions of regret. His dream of returning to his scholarship, his home, his life of contemplation was deferred, and deferred again, until he found himself once again looking forward wistfully to the release that would come with death. ‘I would be happier there,’ he wrote in a letter home in 1867, ‘than I am in this world.’” (358). Platt states that the most commonly cited death toll for the Taiping Civil War is between twenty-thirty million people. The Qing Dynasty, surprisingly, survived the Taiping Civil War, continuing on for five decades until it finally fell due to its own corruption, stupidity, and mismanagement. In its place rose a nationalistic movement, and a few decades later, China would become totalitarian in nature.
Platt ends the book by writing that some people criticized Britain’s policy of helping the Qing as being unintelligent, as they were largely propping up something which was going to fall. Platt writes that if there is any lesson at all to the Taiping Civil War, it is that cultural misunderstanding and pretentious arrogance in attempting to understand all cultures could be disastrous: “For in a certain sense, the blame of the war’s outcome might be laid at the feet of our intrepid preacher’s assistant, Hong Rengan. After a few years among the missionaries in Hong Kong he believed that he knew the hearts of the British and could therefore be the one to build a bridge between his own country and theirs. This belief … ultimately proved the ruin of his own people” (364). British ambassador Frederick Bruce can also be criticized, as he came to the hasty conclusion that the Qing were virtuous only after a short stay at Shanghai and Beijing. If he didn't get the British to intervene, perhaps things would have been different (and maybe better). Platt tellingly writes that the Taiping Civil War is “a tale of how sometimes the connections we perceive across cultures and distances … can turn out to be nothing more than fictions of our own imagination. And when we congratulate ourselves on seeing through the darkened window that separates us from another civilization, heartened to discover the familiar forms that lie hidden among the shadows on the other side, sometimes we do so without ever realizing that we are only gazing at our own reflection” (364).
Personal thoughts:
Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War by Stephen R. Platt is a detailed, informative, and powerful look at the Taiping Civil War. Platt’s writing is superb, and his descriptions of the events and the people humanize the situation, clearly showing that the conflict was not one-dimensional: both the Taiping Rebels and the Qing Army had massive issues, and it is impossible to know if things would have been better if the Taiping Rebels had emerged victorious. One of the few things I want to criticize about the book is how in the end Platt writes that different cultures make people vastly different: while it is true that said cultures condition learned behavior, we (as a species) have infinitely more similarities than we have differences. That is, while we do behave differently in some fields (our schedules, belief systems, diets, and geographic locations), we share most of our aspects in common, like our anatomy and genetics. Just to reiterate, at the end of the day we are one species, and therefore obligated to cooperate with each other and to avoid cruelty and callousness as much as possible, even if doing so would lead to personal gain. I highly recommend Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom to anyone interested in the Taiping Civil War, war (in general), politics, foreign relations, and historical figures.
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