God's Chinese Son (26 page)

Here the Taiping stay, either in the city itself, or campaigning, raiding, and destroying temples in the vicinity, for a month and a half. The leaders must not only restore morale but also attract new recruits to make up for their stunning losses. The greatest potential sources for such recruits are also the most problematical: the members of the various groups who—for ethnic, economic, political, or religious reasons—have turned against the state and its officials, and seek an often rough-and-ready version of a better life. In wooing such people directly, the Taiping leaders are taking a calculated risk, for whether or not such men will make true God-wor­shipers, or care about the Taiping's Heavenly Kingdom, has to remain unknown.

The proclamations posted in southern Hunan are issued in the names of Yang Xiuqing and Xiao Chaogui, the East and West Kings, who have already begun to prepare such materials in Yongan. The rhetoric they employ to denigrate the Manchu rulers and their minions is both force­ful and personal. The ruling emperor himself, Xianfeng, is referred to as "the Manchu demon" and "the Tartar dog," of "barbarian origin," and the "mortal enemy of us Chinese." By serving him, the followers of the Heaven-and-Earth Society are reminded, they not only obey the "old ser­pent devil" and shun the "glory of the Great God"; they violate their own blood oaths, which pledged them "with united hearts and united efforts to exterminate the Qing."
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But avoiding all references to the cause of restoring the Ming dynasty, which some secret-society brothers still espouse, Xiao and Yang urge on them the duty of supporting Hong Xiu­quan, the "True Sovereign," in his goal of "founding the state."
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In their earliest recruiting efforts, in the Guiping region of Guangxi, the Taiping leaders had begun to talk of a common "sacred treasury" and the need to donate to it. The secret societies, too, in the same areas as the God-worshipers, constructed their own appeals, often as songs or jingles, with a powerful social message:

The people at the top owe us their money;

The people in the middle are content to snooze.

The people at the bottom should go with us—

For that's far better than renting an ox to plow some worn-out land.

Playing on the same theme, the Taiping had their own version in Thistle Mountain jingle:

Those with millions owe us their money,

Those who are half poor-half rich can till their fields.

Those with ambitions but no cash should go with us:

Broke or hungry, Heaven will keep you well.
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Now Yang and Xiao expand these ideas and relate them specifically to Manchu abuses and callousness:

Whenever floods and droughts occur, [the Manchus| do not show the slight­est compassion; they sit and watch the starving people wander by until the bleached bones grow like wild weeds, for they desire to reduce the numbers of us Chinese. Moreover, throughout China the Manchus have unleashed grasping officials and their corrupt subordinates to strip the people of their flesh until men and women weep by the roadsides, for they desire to impov­erish us Chinese. Official posts are obtained by bribes, and punishments bought off with money; the rich hold the power and heroes despair.
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This oppression is one of the main reasons that the Taiping armies are on the march: "On behalf of God above we shall avenge those who have deceived Heaven, and for China below we shall free the common people from their miseries. We must wipe away the foul air of the Qing dynasty so that we can together enjoy the happiness of Taiping."
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The Taiping proclamations tie mockery of the Manchus to mockery of their racial ancestry and their pretensions:

We have carefully investigated the Manchu Tartars' origins and have found that their first ancestors were a white fox and a red dog, who copulated together and from their seed produced this race of demons. As their num­bers grew they mated together since they had no proper human relationships nor civilization. Availing themselves of China's lack of real men, they seized the country, established their own demon throne and placed the wild fox upon it; in their court the monkeys bathed and dressed. We Chinese could not plow up their caves or dig up their dens; instead we fell in with their treacherous plots, bore their insults, and obeyed their commands. Moreover, our civil and military officials, coveting their awards, bowed and knelt in the midst of this pack of foxes and dogs. Now, a little child only three feet tall may be extremely ignorant, but point to a pig or a dog and tell him to bow down to it and he will redden with anger.
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In other passages, Yang and Xiao link social humiliation to sexual subser­vience:

Chinese people should look like Chinese; but now the Manchus have ordered us to shave the hair around the head, leaving a long tail behind, thus making the Chinese appear to be brute animals. The Chinese have their own Chinese robes and hats; but now the Manchus have instituted buttons of rank on the hat, barbarian clothes, and monkey caps, discarding the robes and headdresses of former dynasties, in order to make the Chinese forget their basic origins. The Chinese have Chinese family relationships; but the former false demon, Kangxi, secretly ordered the Ta [Tartars] each to con­trol ten families and to defile the Chinese women, hoping thereby that the Chinese would all become barbarians. The Chinese have Chinese consorts; but now the Manchu demon devils have taken all of China's beautiful girls to be their slaves and concubines. Thus three thousand beautiful women have been ravished by the barbarian dogs, one million lovely girls have had to sleep with the malodorous foxes; to speak of it distresses the heart, to talk of it pollutes the tongue.
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The manifestos also invoke the kind of numerological wordplays that the secret societies use so often, and that Hong Xiuquan and the Taiping kings also use to emphasize their prestige. In telling their followers that "the demons' fortune of three by seven has ended," the Taiping leaders refer to an astrologer eighteen hundred years before, who predicted that in "three by seven decades," or 210 years, the dynasty in which he lived would come to its end. Applying the same time frame to the Qing, who founded their dynasty in 1644, this would make 1853 the year of the Man­chu fall. In that year "the true sovereign of nine by five" would rule triumphant—in other words, Hong Xiuquan. For the reference here is to the first hexagram of the
Book of Changes,
which declares, "Nine in the fifth place means: Flying Dragon in the Heavens. It forces one to see the Great Man." The Confucian commentary on this line elaborated that "things that accord in tone vibrate together. Things that have affinity in their inmost natures seek one another. Water flows to what is wet, fire turns to what is dry. . . . Thus the sage arises, and all creatures follow him with their eyes."
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It is in this same spirit of dignity and emancipation, of shared fellowship in the knowledge that all Chinese are God's children, even if they have unwittingly or even willingly served the Manchu demon, that the Taiping armies are fighting. Those who reject the Taiping message after it is offered to them will be "caught in the demons' net of delusion and in death become slaves and underlings of the demons, to bear their debauch­eries and evil poisons, to become bloated with leprosy, to become ugly and evil ghosts eternally consigned to the eighteenth layer of hell." For those who repent and join the Taiping, and for their descendants, there will be "unlimited happiness, eternal dignity, and eternal honor."
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The numbers drawn to the Taiping in Hunan, at least in part because of these messages, are large: according to one man serving in their ranks, in the three cities briefly held after the disaster at Suoyi ford, the Taiping gained respectively twenty thousand, "twenty or thirty thousand," and "several thousand" new recruits, bringing a total of at least fifty thousand new troops to their army.
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These secret-society recruits, toughened by years of hardship in this area of Hunan, and speaking the local dialect, can infiltrate towns ahead of the Taiping forces, posing as local militia members or as traveling merchants, and thus gauge the defenders' strength. Holding some of these cities for a day or two, dodging others altogether, and acquiring the mules and pack horses wherever they find them to speed their land advance, the Heavenly King, his Taiping veter­ans, and the new recruits drift between various prosperous towns in south­east Hunan.
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It is Xiao Chaogui, once the voice of Jesus, still the West King, and apparently recovered from his wounds, who breaks this circle of indeci­sion. In late August 1852 he leaves the city of Chenzhou, the current base for Hong Xiuquan and the Taiping forces, and with a small force of two thousand troops or less, cuts across Hunan by land, reaching the city of Changsha on September 12. For six days he leads his men in pounding at the walls and gates on the southern face of the city with cannon and explosive, and showering the city with fire-tipped arrows. Changsha's defenders are not much more numerous than Xiao's small force, for most of the Qing troops have been ordered deployed elsewhere, and Xiao's impetuous attack has been unexpected, the other Taiping armies having shown no signs of marching on the city. But the walls and gates are strong, the defenses skillfully coordinated. The West King, with his robes of office, and his fluttering banners, is a tempting target. On September 17, as he leads another in his series of attacks, a marksman from the walls fells him with a shot.
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Jolted by the news of Xiao's death, which reaches him a week later, the Heavenly King leads his entire army north, to press the siege at Changsha. He reaches the city walls in early October, after a ten-day march, and sees for the first time the powerful city which—but for the shattering ambush at Suoyi ford—might have been his four months before.
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His delay has been a crucial one to the city's defense; whereas only five to eight thousand troops were there when Xiao Chaogui made his surprise attack, Xiao's near success galvanized the state to send massive reinforcements, so that by the time Hong and his troops arrive the defenders' ranks have swollen to thirty thousand or more, and within another month reach fifty thou­sand. These new Qing arrivals are backed by the necessary resources: twenty thousand pounds of gunpowder, as many pounds of shot for their guns, and several heavy cannon to be mounted on the city walls.
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The defenders of Changsha are coordinated in their resistance by the governor of Hunan, Luo Bingzhang, whose official residence is in the city. Luo is from Hong Xiuquan's home county of Hua, and his life has been everything that Hong's has failed to be. Twenty years older than Hong, Luo excelled at his classical studies and converted his scholarship into examination success, rising by turns through every stage of the hierarchical challenges, from the county level to the provincial, and thence to the national level, where he attained the topmost degree of
jinshi
in 1832, ranking twenty-seventh in the second class, the highest-ranking student from the whole of Guangdong province. For this achievement he was selected for service with the elite of scholars in the Hanlin Imperial Acad­emy in Peking. Scholarly, honest, meticulous, Luo rose steadily in the ranks of the Qing bureaucracy, as Hong dreamed, preached, traveled, and began to gather the brethren in Thistle Mountain. At almost exactly the time that Hong donned his yellow robe and won his first great battle at Jintian, Luo was chosen by the emperor as Hunan governor and posted to Changsha.
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As governor of Hunan, Luo was blamed by Emperor Xianfeng for the Taiping victories in the southern part of his province, but he was not recalled. Instead, following a common Qing practice, he was "dismissed from office but retained at his post," and despite the formal appointment of a new governor in his place, he received a special commis­sion as "Coordinator of the Changsha Defenses."
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Now Luo watches from the walls as Taiping troops try, for two full months, to bring the city to its knees and kill the demons who are based within it.

The siege of Changsha is thus partly the story of two wills clashing, one steeped in the successful practice of Confucian virtue, one confidently in touch with God the Father. It is also a battle of techniques, as the

Taiping perfect their skills at building floating pontoon bridges to hold their forces together. They span the wide, swift waters of the Xiang that flow past the westward wall of Changsha with just such a bridge. While Shi Dakai, the Wing King, opens a second front to keep other Qing forces at bay to the west of the city, the two long stretches of this bridge give the besieging Taiping troops easy communication with each other, as well as access to a narrow island west of the city walls where they can camp and beat back any boats that seek to approach the city from the south with reinforcements.
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In their attempt to take Changsha, the Taiping use the skills of the Guangxi miners who have joined their ranks over the previous two years, as well as thousands of miners from Hunan who have recently come over to them. Gunpowder is no longer a problem, for they have accumulated massive supplies in southern Hunan. As the Taiping miners dig and sap the walls, the defenders sink great wooden vats into the ground to serve as their listening posts, often using blind men, whose ears have grown unusually acute, to listen for the far-off sounds of burrowing and pinpoint the miners' progress to the garrison troops. Though the Taiping seek to confuse these secret listeners by the constant banging of drums outside the walls, the distractions are not enough, and each time a tunnel is near completion, it is smashed open from above by the Qing defenders with huge iron balls, crushing those within, or else flooded with water or with excrement to flush out the exhausted sappers.
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Of ten major tunnels attempted by the Taiping at Changsha only three are completed, and though explosions within these successfully bring down stretches of the city wall, the Taiping still cannot fight their way past the defenders, whose ranks have swelled to fifty thousand by November, for as at Guilin the Taiping forces are too small to surround the city completely and prevent relief columns from arriving.
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