Jottings from the Granite Studio

On this date in 1864, Zeng Guoquan, the brother of the late-Qing statesman and official, Zeng Guofan, ordered his engineers to blow a section of the wall surrounding the Taiping capital, Tianjing (Nanjing). The wall caved and government troops charged into the city. The Taipings gave some resistance but soon Nanjing was in complete chaos as Taiping officials and commoners committed suicide or fled for their lives, taking what ever they could with them. The Qing troops, frustrated after a long siege and an even longer campaign against the Taiping forces, vented their anger on the city and its people. Fires broke out as soldiers looted homes and businesses. Disciplined troop movements broke down almost immediately into bloody street-to-street and house-to-house fighting. As the Taiping military threw off their uniforms to flee or to confuse their attackers, Qing soliders started killing indiscriminately. Nearly 20,000 people died in the retaking of the city. Like many such events, some accounts put the number higher. It’s hard to know for sure.

Hong Xiuquan, the leader of the Taipings, had died on June 1 and his son, the Tiangui Fu, took his place as the titular head of the Taiping movement. Donning Qing army uniforms, the prince and a small entourage escaped amid the smoke and confusion–a getaway for which Zeng Guoquan was criticized at court. The Tiangui Fu was finally captured on October 25, 1864, effectively ending the Taiping Rebellion.

In history classes in the US, the Taiping Rebellion unsurprisingly gets swallowed up the American Civil War. Not to understate the cost of that bloody and savage conflict, the deadliest in US history, but during the same period of time somewhere between 20 million and 30 million people lost their lives as a result of the Taiping Wars. By comparison, total US casualties for ALL conflicts from 1776 down to Iraq totals around 1.3 or 1.4 million. For illustrative purposes, 30 million is equal to the entire current population of California. No matter how you look at it, it was a horrific and tragic loss of life.

Because of the demands of nationalist state building, the Opium War get a lot of attention, but anyone who does research on 19th-century China will tell you that THE catastrophic turning point was the Taiping Rebellion. It swallows up sources and people like a giant archival black hole. You can follow a family or a town or a person through the records of time, but if the sources lead you to southern and central China in the 1850s and 1860s, you’ll often find the trail goes cold, lost in a fog of violence and war. From the perspective of late-Qing history, after the Taiping, everything changes. Central control began to weaken as vestiges of the provincial armies raised to fight the Taiping (after the Manchu banner troops proved useless) remained, as did the provincial transit taxes used to pay for those armies. Whole areas were depopulated and then repopulated. The Qing military and central administrative structures had proved almost useless in the face of such a threat–a lesson not lost on the imperialist powers–and it was left up to provincial officials and local leaders to muster the forces necessary to end the Taiping threat.

Apocryphal histories even suggest that after the fall of the Taiping, Zeng Guoquan and other anti-Taiping leaders urged Zeng Guofan to take his armies and march northward to proclaim a new dynasty that could replace the decrepit and corrupt Qing. The new Tongzhi emperor was but a boy at the time and it’s likely that the Qing simply didn’t have the troops to stop Zeng’s “Hunan Braves”. But Zeng Guofan was a real company guy, and he had no interest in the job. Too bad. Foreigners in Shanghai were positively nauseous at the thought of such a strong leader taking over. Fortunately for the imperialists, the Qing stayed in power…such as it was. Perhaps not coincidentally, the 1860s also marked the beginning of the Cixi era in Qing government. We all know how well that little experiment turned out.

Thus little came of the suggestion for Zeng Guofan to take over, and a grateful Qing government ended up enfeoffing Zeng, along with his brother Zeng Guoquan, and Zeng proteges Li Hongzhang, and Zuo Zongtang. (Yes, that General “Tso”: The Chicken guy.)

As for Hong Xiuquan and the Taipings? Stories of their exploits and zealotry in battle were favorite bedtime tales for a little fat kid from Hunan born thirty years after the fall of the Taiping. But that’s a story for another post.
——————
Sources:

• Hummel, Arthur W. Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, Volumes I & II (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1943)
• Spence, Jonathan, God’s Chinese Son (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996)
• “U.S. Casualties of War”, Wikipedia, accessed July 18, 2007.