God's Chinese Son (33 page)

The heart of the response received from two senior Taiping officials, as translated by the American Protestant missionary E. C. Bridgman who is acting as one of McLane's interpreters for the trip, clearly states the Tai­ping view of their cause:

Our Sovereign, the T'ien Wang [Heavenly King|, is the true Sovereign of Taiping of the ten thousand nations in the world. Therefore all nations under heaven ought to revere Heaven and follow the Sovereign, knowing on whom they depend. We are especially afraid that you do not understand the nature of Heaven, and believe that there are distinctions between this and that nation, not knowing the indivisibility of the true doctrine.

Therefore we send this special mandatory dispatch.

If you can revere Heaven and recognize the Sovereign, then our Heavenly Court, regarding all under heaven as one family and uniting all nations as one body, will certainly remember your faithful purpose and permit you, year after year, to bring tribute and come to court annually so that you may become ministers and people of the Heavenly Kingdom, forever basking in the grace and favor of the Heavenly Dynasty, peacefully residing in your own lands, and quietly enjoying great glory. This is what we, the great ministers, sincerely wish. You must tremblingly obey; do not circumvent these instructions.
⁶
'

Captain Buchanan responds at once that he finds this message "couched in language so peculiar and unintelligible as to cause |him] much astonish­ment," and that he accordingly encloses "a historical memoir of the U.S. of America, together with a drawing of their National Flag, which his excellency, the Commissioner, desires may be submitted to your Chief authorities, to prevent any misapprehension on their part."
⁶⁴

That same day of May 30, at noon, a party of eight Americans leaves the
Susquehanna
without Chinese permission and travels on foot along the west wall of Nanjing. Denied entry to the city by the guards at the various gates, they push on farther than either the British or the French had presumed to do, curving around below the southern wall to the marshes and an abandoned fort that stands there, and passing through an almost ruined and deserted suburb before coming out at the famous porcelain pagoda.
⁶⁵

The pagoda tower itself is still intact, with its shining porcelain tiles, but the circular stairway that once led to the summit of the nine-story structure—and would have given a clear field of fire or observation over the city—has been ripped out, and lies in a heap of rubble at the foot of the building. The myriad Buddhist images that once graced the build­ing—idols that they are to the Taiping—have all been defaced and muti­lated, and the decorations stripped from them. An attempt by one of the bolder Americans to clamber up and remove the golden sphere from the pagoda's summit is foiled almost before it begins, although the bravado of the attempt long lingers in Taiping minds.
⁶⁶
The result of this unautho­rized excursion is that all eight Americans are arrested by Taiping officials and face a series of tense interrogations, both in the suburbs and subse­quently in the city, for the remainder of the day and into the evening. The Chinese interpreter used by the Taiping grows so terrified of the menace in the exchanges that by the end he is too frightened and tired to be coherent, so the final questions are put in writing. It takes the issuing of three sets of permits and papers by three separate Taiping officers before the small groups of Americans are taken out through the western gate, and returned to the
Susquehanna
,
⁶⁷
While they are being interrogated, a note is delivered to their ship stating that the Taiping authorities will not guarantee that those making similar unauthorized trips in the future might not be killed by Taiping troops.
⁶⁸
The next day the
Susquehanna
raises anchor and leaves the city.

Summarizing these events to the secretary of state, McLane dwells on the unreasonableness of the Taiping beliefs and practices, their "mon­strous misapprehension of scriptural truth," and their incapacity to see any foreign intercourse in "terms of equality."
⁶⁹
But when he comes to balance off the Qing against the Taiping, it is hard for him to see either side as the worthy one:

Thus is presented the melancholy spectacle of an enfeebled and tottering imperial government, ignorant, conceited, and impracticable; assailed at all points by a handful of insurgents, whose origin was a band of robbers in the interior, whose present power is quite sufficient to drive before them the imperial authorities . .. but who are, nevertheless, unworthy [of| the respect of the civilized world, and perhaps incapable of consolidating civil govern- merit beyond the walls of the cities captured and pillaged by a multitude excited to the highest pitch of resentment against all who possess property or betray a partiality for the imperial authorities.
⁷⁰

The only solution to McLane seems to be to "enlarge the powers and duties" that the United States exercises in China, so as to enforce the current treaty stipulations and prevent the abuse of the flag. By "such enlargement of the
protectorate
character of the existing treaty, the interior should be opened to us, where we would extend the moral power of our civilization and the material power necessary to protect the lives and prop­erty of our people."
⁷¹
Such an activist policy would enable the United States "to give a truly Christian direction to that movement, which though now shrouded in heathen darkness, is yet founded on the text of the Bible," and also to "offer to the American manufacturers a market more valuable than all the other markets of the world to which they have yet had access."
⁷²

The Taiping leaders, for their part, have now had a chance to meet with the representatives of the three most important Western commercial and missionary powers in China. Despite the apparent closeness of their shared religion, the gulf has grown, not narrowed. The Taiping's own view of their favored status under God clearly weighs at least as heavily in their minds as the brotherhood of all mankind.

What magic intersection of timing, fate, and providence can found our Earthly Paradise upon the rock? The homage demanded from the foreign visitors, and the excoriation of Emperor Xianfeng and all his followers as demon dogs and foxes, cannot hide the realities of boundaries that shift in response to the exigencies of war, and of a Heavenly Capital that turns in upon itself.

The Taiping leadership has followed an ambitious strategy, which has worked only in part. To capture the Demon's Den of Peking city, they have dispatched in May 1853 a dedicated Taiping army of some seventy thousand veteran Guangxi men and new recruits on a northern march, but God has not blessed the enterprise. The Qing forces have kept them guessing with false intelligence reports designed to suggest the advance of huge Qing armies to the south, while their real troops and local militia forces mount spirited defenses of small towns, slowing the marchers unex­pectedly. The terrain of northern China is unfamiliar, and progress fur­ther hampered by the Qing government's appointment of a special officer whose only task is to keep all boats on the northern shore of the Yellow River as the Taiping troops approach, making it impossible for them to repeat the triumphs of their earlier 1852 campaigns on the Yangzi.
¹
Even when the Taiping troops do capture medium-sized cities, Qing command­ers have now been instructed to burn all their stocks of food and gunpowder if the Taiping storm their walls—and though some are reluctant or too tardy to comply, those who do so reduce the chances of the Taiping resting and restocking their supplies. Forced much farther to the north­west than they have planned, the Taipings at last cross the Yellow River, but are caught unprepared by savage winter weather, which freezes many in their tracks or leaves them maimed from frostbite—"crawling on the snowy, icy ground with their legs benumbed"—for they are southerners, and not equipped with proper winter clothes. Reinforcements, sent to their aid, are also checked or turned back by local Qing forces, for the Taiping have not kept a main supply route from north to south open and defended at any point on the vast battlefield.
²

Astonishingly, by late October 1853 one of the thrusting Taiping col­umns pushes to within three miles of the outskirts of Tianjin, from which they might have opened up a path to nearby Peking, but they can get no farther. New Qing and local forces, including Mongol cavalry, are sent against them. Despite the initial enthusiasm of many local people for the Taiping message, and the military help of secret societies and the members of new rebel organizations like the Nian—who are also locked in struggle against their landlords and the government—the Taiping blunt their pop­ularity. Their search for food and clothing grows desperate, and the mas­sacre of all one town's civilian population sends a wave of fear ahead of them.
³

Swiftly though the Taiping can build defensive redoubts, for they are veterans at this kind of warfare—throwing up earthworks, digging ditches, and crisscrossing open ground with foxholes in a single day of frenzied work—the Qing are learning to encircle these encirclements, recruiting thousands of local laborers from the farming population to build a solid ring around the Taiping forces. By May 1854, with the rem­nants of the Taiping vanguard forces thus encircled, the Qing commander orders a long ditch built to divert the waters of the Grand Canal to a dried-out riverbed that flows near the Taiping fortified position. The work takes a month, but slowly as the water enters its new channel the Taiping camp turns to mud, and then to a lake; the soldiers can neither sleep nor cook, their gunpowder is waterlogged and useless, and as they climb onto roofs, cling to ladders, or float on homemade rafts, the Qing troops pick them off in groups and execute them. So, ingloriously, die the warriors after fighting and marching over a one-year period for close to two thousand miles.
⁴

Had the northern campaign had full call on all Taiping resources, per haps it might have succeeded, and the criminals' province been renamed. But it is matched by a parallel campaign to the west, planned and executed on a similar scale; swiftly, also, this western campaign splits into two, as part of the army fights for a strategic base in Anhui province, on the northern shore of the Yangzi River, while the other part moves upriver to recapture Wuchang city, and extend the Taiping river and supply lines to China's southern hinterland. This Wuchang campaign then subdivides, as one group of Taiping armies regains, loses, and recaptures yet again the city of Wuchang, while others push southward into Hunan, seeking once more to seize Changsha. This Hunan campaign splits in its turn, as General Shi Dakai swings south to attack Jiangxi province, southwest of the Heavenly Capital.

Some of these campaigns succeed and some do not: Changsha cannot be taken, nor can Hunan be held, for the gentry of Hunan have learned in full measure how to recruit, train, and pay militia armies, while Zeng Guofan, a Confucian scholar-bureaucrat at home to mourn his parents, joins forces with the reinstated governor Luo Bingzhang, and by integra­ting their land and naval forces slowly build a formidable fighting force.
⁵
Wuchang, however, is recaptured by the Taiping general Chen Yucheng, aged eighteen at the time, nephew to a senior Taiping veteran but already a brilliant military strategist. The city becomes their inland base, easy of access up the Yangzi River from the Heavenly Capital.