Podcast appearances and mentions of frederick townsend ward

Did you know that in that in 1850, Hong Xiuquan, a man who interpreted literal fever demons as religious visions from God informing him that he was Jesus's little brother and that he needed to overthrow the Qing Dynasty and take over all of China, almost did just that? He raised an army that fought imperial China for over decade and waged a war that left between 20 and 70 million people dead.  Perhaps the craziest historical event I've ever heard of that I didn't know anything about before starting this podcast.Hope you enjoy the sound of the new recording equipment! Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89vWant to join the Cult of the Curious PrivateFacebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :)For all merch-related questions/problems: store@badmagicproductions.com (copy and paste)Please rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcastWanna become a Space Lizard? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcast.Sign up through Patreon, and for $5 a month, you get access to the entire Secret Suck catalog (295 episodes) PLUS the entire catalog of Timesuck, AD FREE. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. And you get the download link for my secret standup album, Feel the Heat.

Last time we spoke Emperor Xianfeng died at the ripe age of 30 having spent a life smoking opium with his harem. Now the Qing dynasty was in the hands of his 5 year old son, but in reality henceforth until its collapse the Qing dynasty would actually to be controlled by the infamous Empress Dowager Cixi. Hong Rengan received a military defeat at Tongcheng and it seems he would never psychologically recover from it. Li Xiucheng went on the offensive and performed a grand eastern campaign taking multiple provinces. Zeng Guofan needed a new army created and chose his student Li Hongzhang to command it. The Anhui army was formed and it looked like the Qing side was going to win this civil war after all. The only thing that might turn the tide back for the Taiping was that ever sought after foreign support.   #33 This episode is The Taiping Rebellion part 10: The Ever Victorious Army   Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. Meanwhile back in Nanjing, Hong Rengan's life was becoming more and more miserable. He lost at Anqing and his rivals used his absence to take away his authority in the capital. His continued efforts at gaining western support was going nowhere, in fact it was earning him embarrassment. The foreign relations to the Taiping had become poisoned due a large part to the eastern campaign led by Li Xiucheng. Many of the foreign missionaries stopped visiting Nanjing and soon that direct line of communication that Hong Rengan cherished had slipped away. Shanghai was bracing itself for what it believed was a Taiping offensive against the city and Hong Rengan could do little to nothing to stop Li Xiucheng. As for Zeng Guofan, he knew Shanghai was extremely wealthy and must be protected from the Taiping, but Nanjing was simply more important and he could not launch two enormous campaigns simultaneously against both. Zeng Guofan elected to focus on Nanjing and perhaps once Li Hongzhang had built up his Anhui army he could deal with Shanghai.    For Shanghai, it looked certain the Taiping would soon attack, and the Qing had no assurances from the foreigners that they would help defend the city. They had no one to turn to, then our old friend the filibuster wannabe Frederick Townsend Ward. Despite Britain's attempts to stop the mercenary leader, he was still going strong with his HQ at Songjiang. He only had 68 foreign mercenaries left because of the constant harassment from the Taiping and British, but he did have some Napoleon field guns and a promise form his Qing benefactors that if he took Qingpu he would be rewarded handsomely. Way back when we talked about how Ward's ragtag group failed to take Qingpu from the Taiping and they attempted 4 more times with disastrous results. They just kept using the same strategy over and over, blast the gates with artillery, storm the walls and hope the Qing military followed through. Ward's defeats were brutal and he lost a third of his force for his efforts. The foreign community of SHanghai had zero sympathy for the filibuster, he was just a source of embarrassment. But then the American civil war broke out and a rumor emerged about a group of Californians purchasing the vessel, Neva and that it was a confederate ship now being run by none other than Ward. According to these rumors, the Neva was outfitted with guns stolen from US munitions stored in Shanghai and this said vessel was firing up Union merchant ships going around the Chinese coast.    The United States only had a single warship in China at the time, the USS Saginaw which hunted the so called Neva. When they finally caught the Neva, the so called guns it held were actually whiskey, it was just a merchant ship, but still the rumors persisted raising Ward as this legendary figure. Now this was all awkward as hell in Shanghai, the american population was overwhelmingly pro union northerners, while the British were more pro confederacy. The American merchants were dependent on the British warships to protect their business and this caused all sorts of conflict. During one particularly bad incident, the Trent incident of 1862 in which a US captain chased down and boarded the British steamer Trent trying to arrest two confederate diplomats, if you know the story you know the story haha. Long story short it was the confederates trying to go to Britain to make their case and the Union illegally arrested them, anyways this led Admiral Hope to get his naval forces at Shanghai to seize the homes, vessels and assets of the American community. This led to a rumor, Ward was going to pre emptively attack Hope's force. The entire American community in Shanghai thought they might go to war with Britain yet again, but this never came to be.    Meanwhile during all that chaos, the very real threat, the Taiping began to appear on the horizons of Shanghai on January 11th.  The alarms all sounded when smoke emerged due north of the city and a new wave of refugees began pouring in. The smoke began to get closer and closer prompting the foreign community to hold emergency meetings to plan a defense. The Americans, British and French put aside their quarrels and banded together to man the walls. The threat was extremely real, one member of the community had been captured and interrogated by the Taiping about the city defenses and this man reported that he saw the rebels were carrying British and German muskets and that there appeared to be an Arab military advisor and a small group of European mercenaries in their ranks. Then a force of around 3000 Taiping branding muskets seized the town of Wusong just 10 miles north of the city. One British captain reported witnessing the battle and said the Taiping were quite astonishing, very well organized and equipped far better than the Qing seemed to be at the battle of Peiho.    Li Xiucheng did not want to smash Shanghai into pieces, he wanted to do everything possible to take it mostly intact. Thus his strategy was to surround the city and bring her to her knees. Beginning in January, 5 Taiping armies each numbering in the thousands to tens of thousands began surrounding Shanghai at a distance of several miles each. Soon a propaganda campaign emerged between Songjiang and Shanghai, with written notices stating the Taiping would ensure the safety and protection of all those who joined their side. As for the foreign community, Li Xiucheng warned them to stay out of the conflict, and that anyone caught giving aid to the Qing “will be like a flying moth dashing into the fire, seeking his own extirpation.” Thus Shanghai was under siege and the communications to inland places were severed. Admiral Hope sent word to Hong Kong asking for reinforcements and the consul of Canton relayed the dire news back to Britain. The new wave of refugees brought far too many mouths to the city. 80,000 or so Taiping surrounded Shanghai and word was that more would be coming from Suzhou by the end of the month.   The main defensive body for the foreign community were British and French troops who manned the walls, alongside 200 volunteers, some police and a contingent of Punjabi infantry. In an unusual fashion, on January the 26th, snow began to fall, now do remember Shanghai lays in a subtropical zone rarely seeing temperatures below freezing. By the time the Taiping began to fully encircling Shanghai there was about 2 feet of snow in the area and this had a paralyzing effect in the lower Yangtze region. By the end of January the eastern seaboard froze. The weather would break in early February, but the Taiping were delayed greatly by all of this. The Taiping found an unexpected resistance at Songjiang, Ward's force. Now after losing so many battles, Ward had stopped simply recruiting westerners, he now began training Chinese instead. He had a minimal staff of American and European officers overseeing the training of his Chinese forces and because of the payment differences, they Chinese were paid a tenth of what the westerns were paid, he had a pretty large force under him. Ward taught his Chinese soldiers how to respond to english commands and standard bugle calls. The men were outfitted with european style uniforms, typically blue jackets for artillery men and green jackets for infantry. They were trained in the western fashion and equipped with cutting edge weaponry, British enfield rifles, some Prussian made rifles and the odd American rifle or pistol here or there. But the Taiping were also getting their hands on some western weaponry. One report in 1862 showed a ship was caught smuggling 300 cannons, 100 cases of small arms and 50 tons of ammunition to the Taiping from Singapore. Another report indicated the Taiping at Wusong had been supplied with nearly 3000 muskets, 800 pieces of artillery and 18,000 cartridges, a dangerous amount to be sure.   On February the 3rd, Wards new militia fought the Taiping managing to hold out at Songjiang against a force of 20,000 rebels. Their success was largely due to hidden artillery batteries they had placed outside the town which surprised the rebels during their approach, gunning down over 2000 men before their commander called for a retreat. Wards men managed to capture 700 Taiping alive and shipped them back to Shanghai in chains. Two days after the battle, Ward went on the offensive attacking a Taiping outpost halfway between Songjiang and Qingpu forcing the garrison commander to pull out. This was the first time the Shanghai gentry funded private army had any real success and this prompted them to rename the force to give it more inspiration, and thus it Wards militia became known as the famous “Ever Victorious Army” (EVA). Many of you may have heard of this force if you are American, its probably one of the very few things known about the Taiping rebellion in the west to be honest. The EVA force took orders from Wu Xu, their main benefactor, who by no means trusted his General Ward. Ward and the westerners continuously plundered where they went, despite Wu Xu pleading for them not to. In order to try and secure some form of loyalty from Ward, one of the wealthiest backers, the banker Yang Fang married his daughter off to Ward. The Chinese women had been betrothed to another, but the man died before the wedding making her unmarriageable within the Chinese culture. It was a mutual arrangement, for Ward he could pressure his wife to push the backers to pay up and for the backers they could pressure Ward to remain loyal.    Now after the snowstorm dissipated, and I refer to it as a snowstorm simply because my source does, but as a Canadian if you think 2 feet of snow is a storm wow haha. Admiral Hope and Rear admiral Auguste Leopold Protet signed a joint agreement on February 13th to defend Shanghai from the Taiping based on Hope's 30 mile radius idea. They formed a land force to take out into the field against the Taiping, although the British parliament had made it clear to Hope he was not to break neutrality unless it was to save the lives of British subjects. Hope as you can imagine disregarded the orders. Their force was not very large, 900 French and 650 British soldiers, some sailors as a reserve and 200 civilian volunteers including Americans. The Qing forces in Shanghai were around 10,000 strong. Hope had no…well hope to match the Taiping out in the field, but he believed he could hold the walls. If he wanted to perform any action out in the field he simply needed more men, and take a wild guess who he went to. Oh yes the man he tried to arrest on countless occasions, the wild filibuster Ward.    Since Ward now was recruiting Chinese rather than trying to steal away westerners, and given his recent military victories, Admiral Hope decided to form an alliance with Ward. Ward had zero interest in the defense of Shanghai, but Hope enticed him with gunships that could move his men to hit Taiping towns along the riverways, un gagnon gagnon. Frederick Bruce approved the alliance of convenience, but stressed while they could perhaps drive the Taiping out of the immediate area, they had to allow the Qing forces to actually push further and to garrison towns taken. Zeng Guofan upon hearing of all of this, disapproved and did not think it would prove fruitful. But he had no large cards to play in the east, and if the EVA held Shanghai, well that would be just dandy. And when Wards men won the battle for Songjiang on february 20th, zeng Guofan begrudgingly sent word to Beijing that it was in the dynasty's best interests to allow the bizarre foreign mercenary force to continue its work in Shanghai and even Ningbo if they could get there. But he also strongly warned them not to let the EVA forces campaign further inland, especially not against Nanjing. If foreigners were to help defeat Nanjing, what might they demand as a reward for such deeds.    Now give the Eva would be augmenting the Shanghai area, now Zeng Guofan felt perhaps he could dedicate some forces there, afterall if he could grab Shanghai it would be an enormous boost to his power. He approached the Gentry of Shanghai and they found common ground. They sought further protection and Zeng sought funding for his campaign against Nanjing. Thus Zeng Guofan tossed an army to try and break the siege of Shanghai, if they were successful that said army could later be used to cut off Nanjing. Another enormous benefit of this arrangement was Zeng Guofan obtaining what Hong Rengan so desperately desired. The Shanghai backers, nominally Wu Xu formed a contract with a British firm, Mackenzie, Richardsons & company to use their steamships. Now Zeng Guofan could move his forces unimpeded down river to Shanghai aboard British steamers. The Taiping could not fire upon the ships because of the Union Jack and in just 3 round trips, 6500 of Li Hongzhangs new Anhui forces were encamped in Shanghai ready for campaigning. Li Hongzhang then assumed his role as governor of the province and by proxy became the leader of the Shanghai backers, while Wu Xu would retain control over the EVA forces. Meanwhile, with Shanghai under Li Hongzhang's oversight, Zeng Guofan and both his brothers Zeng Guoquan and Guobao began a march towards Nanjing.   Shanghai was under siege, albeit from quite a distance, still this had an enormous effect on its economy, its very lifeblood. The price of rice went up 50%, flour and firewood doubled, but the Taiping were not attacking the walls, not yet at least. Joint operations between the EVA and foreign defenders began on a small scale in mid february with an assault upon High Bridge, 8 miles away from Shanghai proper. Ward had 600 men while Hope and Protet brought 500. The battle was a quick one, with only a single Frenchman killed before the Taiping fled the town. Then on April the 23rd a rather fateful action occurred at Ningbo. A taiping commander received a promotion, now General Fan and in his honor they fired a 10am salute from the cannons facing the river. The guns apparently were not well aimed as a handful of projectiles went across the river and hit the French gunship l'etoile as it was passing by. Admiral Hope and Protet used the situation to dispatch their forces led by Captain Roderick Dew aboard Encounter to retaliate against Ningbo. However when Dew got to Ningbo the Taiping profusely apologized and stated they wanted to remain under friendly terms and would make sure it never happened again. Hope and Protet were not at all content with this and sent word to demand the Taiping take down all the guns on the eastward facing wall of Ningbo. They were given 24 hours to comply or else the British would do it themselves. Well the Taiping refused to comply, because they obviously needed said cannons where they were to defend against the Qing, but they offered to take away the gunpowder from said cannons and to only provide it back if the Qing attacked. Then on May 5th a large group led by the disposed Ningbo gentry, got together a group of 150 small armed boats led by some pirates and peasants to come up the river to attack Ningbo and as they did so they asked the British and French for aid. Just as a mere coincidence their point of attack was the same eastern wall. Thus the British and French invited the motley group to their side of the river. Then Captain Dew sent word to the Taiping “If you fire the guns or muskets from the battery or walls opposite the Settlement, on the advancing Imperialists, thereby endangering the lives of our men and people in the foreign Settlement, we shall then feel it our duty to return the fire, and bombard the city.” It would turn out this was all a planned scheme go figure.    The motley group began approaching Ningbo, but then positioned itself in such a way as to push the European gunships between them and the city. Accounts differ, by the Europeans state one of the Taiping cannons fired first upon the Encounter killing 2 crewmen. It is also alleged that the person operating said cannon was actually a servant of one of the Shanghai gentry backers. Then the British and French ships began to bombard Ningbo before the combined allied party stormed the eastern wall. The motley group were actually the last to storm the city, leaving most of the bloody work to the europeans. According to an eyewitness account “in a few hours did more damage than the rebels did in the whole of the five months that they had possession, chopping off the heads of the unlucky rebels that he caught.” The British press went right to work demonizing the Taiping, a lot of which was based on witness accounts from specific men responsible for trying to break the neutrality stance of Britain. There was also a need to create a narrative to control China in general. Britain had turned its attention squarely to asia since the American civil war had broken much of their trade. The Times declare “the only route to Great Britain's economic survival lay down the path of the Taipings Annihilation”. The Times carried on stating the tea market was being ruined allegedly by the Taiping, and to compensate Britain would have to raise the tax rate on tea to preserve revenue. This would bring hardship to the tea drinking working class of Britain who were already suffering from the textile depression. Thus the stance of neutrality was hurting the good people of Britain, boy oh boy do you see the parallels to today's politics.    The warmongers won the day and Britain's government's hands were tied, thus Britain was dragged into a proxy war with the Taiping. The European coalition, EVA, the Qing and Li Hongzhangs Anhui army were now an allied front embarking on a large campaign to push the Taiping out of the Shanghai region. The beginnings of the campaign were largely successful as a result of the superior firearms, by May 16th a combined force left Shanghai and Songjiang marched upon Qingpu. They bombarded the town for 2 hours using 40 artillery pieces, including a 68 pounder and 4 giant 110 pound naval armstrong guns. Its gates were blown to splinters and 3500 of Wards Chinese EVA troops stormed the town as “god save the queen” was blasted by the military band. 4 days later Admiral Protet led an assault upon South Bridge which lay due south of Songjiang and was shot right through the heart by a Taiping sniper. His death enraged the French who took out their vengeance upon the nearby town of Zhelin where they massacred 3000 civilians, including women and children before raising it to the ground.    While the allied force proved very capable at seizing walled cities, holding them was another matter entirely. They simply did not have enough manpower to hold everything they took. After taking Qingpu, Li Xiucheng sent a large force from Suzhou to hit Songjiang, since the EVA force was absent. Ward turned back to hit Songjiang with 2000 EVA troops, leaving 1500 to garrison Qingpu, which fell under a siege to more Taiping. The garrison of 1500 men held out for a month, but ultimately were forced to torch the city and make their escape. In the summer of 1862, the British and French handed over a group of Taiping prisoners over to Qing forces and according to an eyewitness sat by idly while the Qing performed horrible atrocities. Here is part of the harrowing account: “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; when, at the sight, she gave one heartrending, piercing screech that would have awakened pity in a tiger, and after it had been in that state dashed on her breast, she, with a last superhuman effort, released her arms from those holding her down, and clasped her infant to her bleeding heart, and died holding it there with such force that they could not be separated, and were thus thrown together on the pile of other carcasses. 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 of Chinamen.“May God forgive England for the part she is taking in this war”    The foreign press ran rampant stories of the horror and brutality, many still trying to stop their nations from taking an active role in China. Others pointed out the savagery to be a justification for colonizing China. Admiral Hope's vision of creating a 30 mile radius around Shanghai proved impossible. The allied coalition did not have enough men to garrison the places they took from the rebels and given the gruesome events at Qingpu and the death of Protet, Hope was forced to toss the towel. Soon the forces pulled back to the walls of Shanghai and Hope was replaced by Rear Admiral Augustus Leopold Kuper. Captain Dew likewise was reprimanded for his part in the escalations to war. Ward could not be reprimanded of course, but his EVA force was left to fight on its own, something he did not mind too much as the British and French forces often stopped his men from plundering.   While things were going badly for Shanghai, Zeng Guofan was enjoying an amazing campaign. Duolonga's cavalry were harassing Chen Yucheng in northern Anhui for him to flee to Luzhou. From Luzhou Chen Yucheng had an extremely bold strategy, he began calling upon Taiping forces and Nian groups to launch a four pronged campaign going north through Henan and Shaanxi provinces with the ultimate goal of hitting Beijing. Three of the four armies marched north as planned early in 1862, but Chen Yucheng found himself stuck in Luzhou, under a siege by the forces of Duolonga and the Xiang army. His communication to the other 3 armies were cut off and his provisions were dwindling. On may 13th, he took 4000 men and broke out of the siege trying to flee north, but Duolonga's cavalry force gave quick pursuit. Chen Yucheng headed for the city of Souzhou which one of the army groups had been sent to attack. The army was led by Miao Peilin, someone Chen Yucheng had gotten to defect during the siege of Anqing. Chen Yucheng reached Shouzhou before Duolonga's cavalry cut him to pieces, much to his relief. But as he entered the city, Miao Peilin was nowhere to be found. It turns out, because of the severing of communication, Chen Yucheng had no idea that Miao Peilin had been defeated at Shouzhou already back on April 25th, his entire army surrendered to the Qing. Miao had turned back over to the other side, once a defector always a defector as they say. A large reason he was allowed to defect back was because he promised to deliver to the Qing a Taiping general, ie: Chen Yucheng.   Chen Yucheng was taken prisoner and before he was executed in June of 1862 he had this to say to his captors. “It is Heaven's will that has brought me here, and there is nothing that can be said of my past. I have long enjoyed the reputation of a victorious commander, but now I would prefer to look to the future. For the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to lose me, one single man, it will be as if the mountains and the rivers of the kingdom have been reduced by half. I bear a great debt of gratitude to my Heavenly Dynasty and will not surrender. 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.” And so the Brave King was dead.   The death of Chen Yucheng and the preoccupation of Li Xiucheng with the Shanghai front left Nanjing vulnerable. The Taiping garrisons along the Yangtze river between Anqing and Nanjing would have no hope for reinforcements from the north nor the east, and Zeng Guoquan was on the march towards the Taiping capital. As Zeng Guoquan advanced, Taiping garrisons simply abandoned their outposts and forts, setting fire to their stockades before fleeing. It was an absolute disaster for the Taiping. They had always known the Qing forces would strike Nanjing from Anqing, but they never expected it to come this soon. By late May, Zeng Guoquans forces were reaching the Nanjing outskirts. Zeng Guoquan first seized an important junction in the riverway that controlled Nanjing's moat. Then on May 30th, he attacked a small hill just outside the southern gate of Nanjing.   The hill was known as Yuhuatai “terrace of flowering rain”, and it held a fort at its top. While Nanjing had been so heavily fortified, people literally said it was impenetrable, it did have vulnerabilities and Yuhuatai was one of them. The hill was over 300 feet high, around a mile across and about a half mile away from Nanjing southern gate. From atop the hill one could peer into Nanjing, the perfect base of operations one would want when sieging such a grand city. Zeng Guoquan had 20,000 men with naval support to provision him. Zeng Guoquan dug in and began to send word back to his brother asking him to help procure western arms. Zeng Guofan was surprisingly not impressed with western arms. He wrote about how he found them quite finicky, overly complicated and prone to breaking down after 20-30 shots. He wrote back to his brother ‘the way to achieve victory is to be found in men, not in arms. Bao Chao has no foreign guns and no foriegn powder, yet he repeatedly achieves great victories. He Chun and Zhang Guoliang had foreign cannons with their Green standard force's siege of Nanjing in 1860, but they did not prevent their defeat. A true beauty doesn't fuss over pearls and jade, and a great writer needs no more than brush and ink. If a general is truly skilled at war, why should he go grasping for foreign weapons?””. Despite his views on the matter, Zeng Guoquan's persistent pleas eventually led him to purchase foreign arms from agents at Canton and Shanghai. Still Zeng Guofan insisted the foundation of their armies should rely on Jingalls, bird guns, Chinese made cannons and the good old sword and spear.    One thing Zeng Guofan did realize though was the dramatic advantage of steamships. While in Anqing in 1862 he purchased a small steamship from Shanghai and gathered all the Qing scientists and engineers he could to the city to try and reverse engineer it. The ship soon broke down and none were able to repair it. But by the summer one engineer managed to build a working prototype steam engine and a year later Anqing would create a 28 foot long steamer. Meanwhile Prince Gong was also enthralled by the power of the steam engine and was trying to procure the purchase of some ships from Britain. While Britain wanted to keep the facade of neutrality going, especially after the Shanghai embarrassment, the idea of selling steamships to the Qing was an interesting one. If they provided ships, perhaps Britain's interests in China could be secured simply by protecting major waterways like the Yangtze. Prince Gong found a agent to try to get the ships, one Horatio Nelson Lay. Lay went to work approaching Captain Sherard Osborn, the captain of the Furious during the second opium war. He offered the captain a 4 year contract stating the man would take orders only from the Qing emperor and no other in China. These orders would go first to Lay, who would take up residence in Beijing.   Now a nit picky piece of information here. Unlike the civil war in America, where Britain granted belligerent status to the confederates, in China no such recognition was ever made. This was because the British parliament wanted to officially remain neutral. But because there was no official belligerent status for the Taiping, this meant they were not protected by Britain's foreign enlistment act, which prevented the selling of things like, gunships to any party that was at war with a nation Britain had friendly relations with, ie: the Qing. Thus Britain was free to sell gunships to the Qing to be used against the Taiping. Ironically at the same time Lay was trying to procure a naval force from Britain, so was James Bulloch of the Confederate states of America. Lay would find success whereas James would find failure. Now there were some hiccups for Lay when it came to the foreign enlistment act. It was forbidden for British subjects to enlist in the national militaries of foreign states, thus captain Osborn would require special permission from the crown.    But wouldn't you know it, in August of 1862 the foreign enlistment act was suspended suddenly and parliament went into recess over the entire summer and would only reconvene in february. Thus Lay and Osborn were able to serve the Qing and were allowed to hire British crews for the ships. Four months later, Lord Palmerston's government issued a second order making it lawful for any British officer to enlist in the service of the Qing emperor to quote “to serve the said Emperor in any military, warlike, or other operations, and for that purpose to go to any place or places beyond the seas, and to accept any commission, warrant, or other appointment from or under the said Emperor, and to accept any money, pay, or reward for their services.” There was one twist to all of this, anyone who served the Qing would have to resign or take a leave of absence from the Royal Navy. As you can imagine this meant that anyone who took the job would go unregulated and be unaccountable for their behavior, basically they were becoming much like Ward's mercenaries. By the time february came, all the work could not be undone, though the Tory's tried to reverse everything accusing Palmerston and the Whigs for getting Britain directly involved in the Chinese civil war. The entire thing was lambasted by multiple presses in Britain who pointed out rightfully, that Britain's finances were tied to the Qing paying reparations, and if the Taiping toppled the Qing the money might stop flowing.    The first 3 vessels to be sent to China were the Mohawk, Jasper and Africa, renamed the Pekin, Amoy and China. The rest of the ships would be freshly constructed and it would take roughly a year to get them all over there. It was to be 7 gunships and one store vessel, they would range from men-of-war to smaller steamers that could traverse shallow riverways. They would carry around 40 guns and a crew of 400. Interestingly the Qing had never before required a naval ensign, so Lay helped them invent one, a green and yellow ensign with a dragon in the middle. The ships lacked the latest iron armoy, but this was insignificant as the Taiping had no decent artillery to hit them. The fleets flagship, the Kiang-soo was a 241 footer that could reach 19 knots, a very fast ship for its day. The fleet was called the Anglo-Chinese expedition, though many Historians refer to it as the Lay-Osborn flotilla. Though for the common Chinese people who were witnessing their weak imperial government's willingness to pay foreign mercenaries to win their battles, they deemed it the Vampire Fleet. The year of 1863 would prove very fruitful for the Qing forces.    I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. It seems the rest of the world were now allied against the Taiping. Zeng Guoquan made an extremely bold attack upon Yuhuatai ushering in the deathrows of the Taiping capital. What could the Taiping do to stop it.  

Last time we spoke The foreign community of Shanghai did not take the Taiping advances lightly and fired upon the rebels as they approached the great port city. The filibuster Frederick Townsend Ward created a foreign mercenary team to fight the rebels with pretty mixed results. Hong Rengan tried to smooth things over with the foreigners to earn their support, but nothing was going the Taiping's way. Meanwhile Zeng Guofan was building up his Xiang army, falling into despair at the prospect that Beijing might be captured by foreigners. Yet this did not stop Zeng Guofans resolve to take Anqing, a major stepping stone to seize Nanjing. It seems Hong Rengans grand strategy was falling apart as a result of the foreign community, could he turn things around before Zeng Guofan crushed his plans?   #31 This episode is The Taiping Rebellion part 8: The Fall of Anqing   Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. When the Taiping generals and officers were around things went relatively well for the populaces that came in contact with the Taiping assaults. However as the Taiping armies moved onwards, large groups of bandits followed in their wake, many Taiping secretly amongst them. They would plunder, rape and murder, the usual as it were. Horrible atrocities were common, one account from Xiangshan county in Zhejiang province had a recently groom disemboweled before 12 bandits raped his bride and killed her as well. In the same province one story told that “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”. They would carry off women to rape and young boys to be made into future conscripts. Often the Taiping vanguards if they could not find Qing officials, they would kill citizens of a city and dress up their corpses in Qing official attire, to invigorate the rest of the army. Heads went on stakes, placards were nailed to them. The violence between the Qing and Taiping was becoming indistinguishable. But as so often in China, alongside the horror, taxes were collected, crops were grown, new officials were appointed, life simply went on.    The frank truth about this time period, is the Chinese commoners did not care who was in charge whether it be Taiping or Qing, they simply wanted the damn fighting to end so they could carry on with their lives, they just wanted some order and to be able to provide for their families. Facing so many new territorial gains and countless differing population under their control the Taiping established agreements with local leaders, such as the gentry class who were willing to play ball. Thus a lot of these territories held a lot of autonomy, that is if they paid taxes and made sure not to help the Qing. There was an interesting element of class struggle going on as well. Where the Qing ruled, the wealthy landowner gentry class or scholars generally called the shot. But where the Taiping ruled, you could join their ranks, no matter what class you came from and move up the social ladder.   Real control still lay outside the Taiping's grasp. Though the Qing were weakened by the European victory of them and even with the Emperor literally fleeing the capital, the mandate of heaven still remained and as long as it did, those loyal to it would resist the rebels. Hong Rengan and Li Xiucheng did not agree on a great many things, but one thing they certainly saw eye to eye on was the need to consolidate the fertile southern provinces, to take what was once the old Ming empire and use it to starve the Qing in the north. By autumn of 1860, Li xiucheng was forced to leave his command in the eastern provinces, to come to relieve Anqing from Zeng Guofan's siege. Hong Xiuquan actually sent orders for Li Xiucheng to march north to hit Beijing again now that it was weakened, but he refused, ironically similar to how Zeng Guofan refused Emperor Xianfeng. Instead Li Xiucheng insisted he should go west into Jiangxi and Hubei provinces, were several hundreds of thousands of people could be recruited into the Taiping ranks. He would use these men to lift the Anqing siege and this all meant a clash with Zeng Guofan in Qimen. Before Li Xiucheng left Nanjing for his campaign he told the citizens ‘if Anqing can be held, there is no need to worry, but if it is not firm, the capital will not be secure, everyone needs to start stockpiling food”.   In 1861 Hong Rengan took to the field under orders from the heavenly king, to help relieve Anqing. It was the first time he commanded an army, he himself had never really fought in a battle before. All the way over in Beijing, Prince Gong was begging Emperor Xianfeng to return to the capital, hell the war was over, the foreign barbarians had left, the sovereign was needed in the capital to reassure the people. Yet Xianfeng refused to go back to Beijing, he was furious that Pring Gong agreed to allow foreign envoys to be in Beijing, he could not be around them. Thus Xianfeng stayed at his hunting retreat with his empress and harem of concubines, busying himself by ordered his staff to make improvements to what had become his new home. Prince Gong meanwhile was received terrible reports from Zeng Guofan about difficult situation at Anqing. Prince Gong understood the Taiping menace was akin to a disease in ones inner organs, they were the most urgent problem the dynasty had to deal with, the foreigners were actually a secondary threat when compared. Thus he decided to do what was ever necessary to appease the foreigners  while everything should be directed at defeating the Taiping. Once the rebellion was over then they could do something about all the foriegn encroachment. At the same time he wondered if it was time for the Qing to seek aid from the foreigners to quell the Taiping. Russia unlike the others, was free from the obsession of neutrality and had been hassling Qing officials to offer direct military aid. The Russians also offered shipping aid, suggesting they could coordinate with the Americans to bring southern rice to Tianjin by ocean routes. The Russians were the oddball out when it came to foreign powers in China. They were still angry about the Crimean War and while the Americans British and French fought tooth and nail for maritime trade rights, Russia alone shared a land border with the Qing, one that was thousands of miles long. The Russians saw the enormous opportunity a weak Qing government offered them, they could perhaps expand their territory or develop cross border trade. Thus the Tsar sent representatives who offered Xianfeng rifles as early as 1857, and during the negotiations in Tianjin in 1858 they went a step further offering military advisors. All they asked was for a little control over the territory north of the Amur river, which was in the Manchu homelands.    As you can imagine Xianfeng didn't like that deal and said no, but then in 1860 when the Europeans defeated the Qing and forced them to sign the treaty of Tianjin, the Russian diplomat, Nikolai Pavlovich Ignatiev managed to negotiate a secret Sino-Russian treaty on the side. Ignatiev said he would help the Qing to not be toppled by the other Europeans, if Prince Gong granted Russia control over the north region of the Amur river, an area 300,000 miles large, that was bigger than Korea. The Russians offered a gift of rifles and 400 russians aboard steam powered gunships to coordinate with the Qing military and attack Nanjing. Prince Gong took the offer seriously and pressed the question over to many high ranking Qing officials, one of which was Zeng Guofan. There was a ton of bickering amongst those in support of the deal and those against, Zeng Guofan was one of those for it. Zeng argued Russian and China had no real qualms between another, and it was not unprecedented to accept such help, the previous dynasty after all accepted help from the Dutch to fight the Taiwan rebels in the 17th century. But Zeng Guofan also argued what he needed was not naval forces, no they needed land forces, there was simply no route by which to advance on Nanjing otherwise. He advised modifying the offer to such means. Zeng Guofan finished by arguing what they really needed was to improve their own technological abilities, so they would not need external help in the future. “If we study how they make their cannons and ships, it will be of great benefit to us in the long run.” In the end Xianfeng agreed to taking 10,000 rifles and 8 cannons from the Russians, but declined naval services.    In february of 1861 Admiral Hope sailed up the Yangtze river to see if relations could be opened with the Taiping without permission from the British government. The government back home was bickering over the civil war issue, many demanded Britain must remain neutral, a few thought it would be a good idea to help the Qing defeat the rebels, they did after all have a treaty with them and expected the weakened dynasty to pay up, and a select few thought the Taiping cause might be just. Regardless Admiral Hope was enroute to Nanjing with a small squadron of gunboats and it took them two weeks to navigate 200 miles up the river to Nanjing. They were the largest foreign party to visit Nanjing and their lead negotiator was none other than the racist nutcase Harry Parkes. They reached Nanjing on February 24th, missing Hong Rengan who had left in early February to help Anqing. On march 1st, Harry Parkes explained the British sought trade along the Yangtze river as was their right under the new treaty they signed with the Qing. Regardless of which side held control over the river banks, Britain wanted to sail freely and they intended to leave a 6 gun paddle frigate, the Centaur in Nanjing to protect British subjects who might visit the city. The Taiping officials relayed the messages to Hong Xiuquan and he sent word back warning his followers not to allow the British to leave their gunboat, he could simply not allow this. Apparently Parkes had a screaming match with the officials saying “he must have another vision!”. And somehow this led to the Taiping agreeing, then Parkes warned them if they attacked Zhenjiang or Jiujiang, both under Qing control, they had best not harm any British subjects or property. In return he promised British forces would not interfere nor harm Taiping. After this apparently the officials just kept pestering Parkes for weapons and he had this to write about it all “The rebels want arms it is the same … on the side of the Imperialists, opium and arms, opium and arms, is the one cry we hear from mandarins, soldiers, and people, at every place we have yet come to.” Admiral Hope meanwhile observed the Taiping and concluded they were a destructive force that should be kept at arms length. He deduced “a period of anarchy, indefinite in duration in China, in which the commercial towns of the empire will be destroyed, and its most productive provinces laid waste.” To this end Hope urged that a 30 mile radius around Shanghai be defended to prevent the Taiping from entering the city.   By the end of March, Parkes demanded the Taiping not approach Shanghai with a 2 days march of the city or any other treaty port. Hong Xiuquan agreed to not let his forces within 30 miles of Shanghai, but made no promises for the other cities. Admiral Hope told the Taiping officials, Britain would put an end to any renegade British subjects helping the Qing as mercenaries, but would ask the same be done for the Taiping side. Speaking about those foreign mercenaries on the Taiping side, a British representative named Robert Forrest was sent from Shanghai in march of 1861 to go to Nanjing to investigate if and who were aiding the Taiping. It turns out there were around a hundred or so foreign men working as mercenaries for them. They were the same group of men that had been led by Savage before his death, now their leader was a man named Peacock. On the other side, the British consul reported they had caught 13 members of Frederick Townsend Ward's mercenary men at Songjiang and one of them said he had another 82 men under his command. 29 of these men were royal navy deserters. By May 19th, Ward was caught and arrested as he was trying to recruit more men in Shanghai. Since he was an American, the only person with jurisdiction over him was the US consul. When Ward was questioned the man said he was no longer American and now a subject of the Qing emperor. He was even engaged to a Chinese woman, though that would prove to be a quick ruse. On top of that the provincial governor of Shanghai happened to be a patron of Ward and produced papers proving his Qing citizenship. All of this was so convincing the US consul refused to prosecute Ward and he was set free to keep luring more foreigners into the service of the Qing. There was no real legal basis to go after Ward and a very frustrated Admiral Hope simply grabbed the man and locked him up on his flagship. But Ward jumped out a window and swam away.   Now back to the Anqing front, Zeng Guofan had begun his campaign against the fulcrum point to Nanjing in the summer of 1860. The city was the domain of the Brave king, Chen Yucheng. In the spring of 1860 he decamped with the bulk of his army to help Li Xiucheng break the Qing siege of Nanjing, leaving behind a garrison of around 20,000 to hold the city of Anqing. The garrison were unseasoned recruits mostly from Hunan and Hubei provinces. Zeng Guofan took advantage of Chen Yucheng's sortie by sending his brother with 10,000 men through the Jixian pass to prod Anqing. Anqing did not flinch, their defenses were quite strong and they were very well provisioned. Initially Zeng Guofans siege of Anqing was of little concern to the Taiping leadership. They knew the city was strong enough to hold out and took their time to gradually send a relief force in september of 1860. However, this was also part of Hong Rengans strategy's second phase. After consolidating the southern reaches of the Yangtze east of Nanjing, he directed the Taiping forces upstream. Once it became very apparent the foreigners in Shanghai would not sell steamships to them, which Hong Rengan was depending on to get the forces to hit Wuchang, he opted to simply march overland to capture the city.    After the fall of Suzhou, Chen Yucheng and Li Xiucheng formed a massive pincer operation against Wuchang. Chen Yucheng would take a 100,000 strong army around the north through Anhui while simultaneously breaking the siege of Anqing in early winter en route to Wuchang. Li Xiucheng would mirror this by going south of the great river hitting Zeng Guofans HQ in Qimen alone the way and send his forces to smash Zeng Guoquan at Anqing before marching on Wuchang. Now Zeng Guofan had staked just about all his forces on the siege of Anqing, he only had a defensive garrison at Qimen of 3000 troops. All of his troops were in danger of being cut off from their supplies and reinforcements. Cheng Yucheng went through Anhui recruiting some Nian rebels who help create feint attacks to confuse the Qing as to where they were marching. Eventually in late november his army turned south to hit Anqing, but between them lay the Taiping held city of Tongcheng and alongside it Chen Yucheng ran right into an enormous Qing cavalry force of 20,000 men led by the Manchu general Duolonga. Duolonga had been sent by Zeng Guofan to protect the approach of Anqing from its north and the cavalry force proved a major obstacle to the Taiping. Chen Yucheng was forced to take his men to Tongcheng for its walls protection and had to abandon his march upon Anqing. Remember the Taiping were rather weak when it came to cavalry, it was one of the few advantages the Qing held over them. Thus a force of 20,000 Qing cavalry was quite a force to be reckoned with.   Chen Yucheng held Tongcheng against the Qing through the winter and decamped in March around the same time Hong Rengan left Nanjing. He led his force northwest beyond the range of the Qing cavalry and then turned sharply southwest to rush over to Wuchang. Along the way his men had to smash several Qing militia forces while a Qing cavalry detachment tried to cut their way off. But by march 17th of 1861 Chen Yuchengs men got to Huangzhou on the Yangtze's northern bank just 50 miles downstream from Wuchang. There his men surprised the Qing garrison of 2000 men slaughtering them all. By capturing Huangzhou, Chen Yucheng had the perfect base of operations to attack Hankou and then Wuchang.    Meanwhile in Qimen, Zeng Guofan was anxious about the Taiping advances that seemed to be converging. The attending King, cousin to Li Xiucheng had captured Xiuning, 30 miles to his immediate east. He dispatched Bao Chao to take back the city while he was receiving news his brother Guoquan was not doing well at Anqing. Then terrible news came on November 26th, Li Xiuchengs entire army was approaching from the north. Zeng Guofan quickly dispatched riders to call for help, but his nearest forces had left with Bao Chao to take back Xiuning and Li Xiuchengs forces had appeared directly between them. All he could do was send a letter to his brother at Anqing stating “the rebels are only 15 miles from my Headquarters, just a stones throw and there are no obstacles to stop them….All we can do now is study our defenses and, when they come, try to hold out until someones comes to help us”. However Li Xiucheng did not immediately attack Qimen, he had no idea of the HQ's strength and paused to gather intel. This pause allowed Bao Chao to come sweeping in with his cavalry to smash into the Loyal King's army who were exhausted from their long march. Bao Chao's force was much smaller so he continuously harassed the Taiping army, but never fully dedicated his army to a full battle. Li Xiucheng simply took his men and marched into Jiangxi as per the pincer plan. Despite Li Xiucheng moving on, 3 smaller Taiping forces were still harassing Zeng Guofan and he suspected this was a feint to mask an offensive against Anqing. His HQ were severed off from their supply routes because of the Li Xiuchengs cousin, thus he had to disband his HQ and tried to march east, only to be attacked and pushed right back to Qimen.   Meanwhile Chen Yucheng awaited Li Xiucheng's forces to meet up with him at Hankou, but he was in a bit of a situation. Hankou was a new treaty port for the British and it just so happened Admiral Hope's expedition was on its way back from Nanjing. Harry Parkes showed up to pay a visit warning the Taiping not to cause any harm to the treaty port. Chen Yucheng spoke with Parkes, talking about the plan to take Hankou and Wuchang. Parkes had gone past these cities and knew they were weakly defended and because some British subjects were there stated this.  “I commanded his caution in this respect and advised him not to think of moving on Hankou because they could not take the city without seriously interfering with British commerce”. Thus Parkes basically threatened Chen Yucheng, that he would face the same fate as Li Xiucheng had at Shanghai. Chen Yucheng tried to negotiate, stating his forces would absolutely make sure not to hinder the British, but Parkes was adamant and Chen Yucheng was forced to agree not to advance on the city.   Now Chen Yucheng had no idea what to do, so he sent word back to Nanjing asking for instructions and thus the opportunity to smash Hankou was slipping away. The Qing cavalry that was chasing him across Anhui province made it to Wuchang sounding the alarm forcing him to dig in at Huangzhou. It would take months for Nanjing to give Chen Yucheng a message back and in the meantime Wuchang and Hankou would be heavily reinforced. Downriver at Anqing the siege had reached its 8th month. Zeng Guoquans trench lines surrounded the city with sequences of walls and moats about 2 miles from Anqing's walls. It was like an extra fortified wall around Anqing that defended against anyone coming out of the city or coming to relieve it. Zeng Guoquan even had riverine units blockading Anqing from receiving aid via the river, but there was a major flaw in this, foreign ships. At Anqing's southern gate, foreign steamships could drop anchor and unload food or weapons at very inflated prices for the people of Anqing. If Zeng Guoquan tried to stop them it violated the treaty of Tianjin, which the Taiping were trying to abide by to win over western support. And alongside this, believe it or not a small market emerged between the besiegers and besieged. Zeng Guofan had not dished out the payroll for over 9 months, forcing the besiegers to seek salaries elsewhere, thus many began to smuggle food into Anqing for money. War can be quite silly at times.   Back to Li Xiucheng, his army moved past Qimen in December and made its way through southern Anhui to see if Zeng Guoquan would back off of Anqing. Li Xiucheng also sent forces into Jiangxi and Hubei where hundreds of thousands of possible new recruits lay for the plucking. Slowly but surely, his army made its way to Wuchang to meet up with Chen Yucheng's army, but he was expected by April and he missed this deadline. By April most of his army was still in Jiangxi province, more than 200 miles away from the assembly point. By early May his forces got to the city of Ruizhou, 150 miles from Wuchang. But instead of carrying on, the citizens of Ruizhou begged him to stay and Li Xiucheng found himself doing so as he likewise recruited another 300,000 followers over the course of a few weeks. Now as incredible as it sounds, for him to gain so many, these were all untrained forces, given weapons yes, but not exactly trustworthy. Zeng Guofan understood this and he understood that such an army had a large mouth to feed.    Li Xiucheng would only arrive to Wuchang in June, 2 months late for the expected rendezvous. He expected Chen Yucheng to be in Hankou ready to launch an assault on Wuchang, but soon learnt his colleague had left and worse yet, he never took Hankou. By this point, Wuchang had enjoyed 3 full months of warning of the impending Taiping armies and had called up reinforcements. With such vast numbers of untrained men, Li Xiucheng did not dare approach Wuchang too close and set camp on the outskirts of its county. Chen Yucheng had left a garrison at Huangzhou to coordinate with Li Xiucheng, but when Li arrived in the area the river was being controlled by Zeng Guofans navy making it impossible to communicate with Huangzhou. In desperation Li Xiucheng turned to the British consul at Hankou to deliver a message to Huangzhou. The British consul kept that letter as a souvenir and did not deliver it. With no reply from Chen Yucheng, and with no idea where or what he was doing, Li Xiucheng had basically no options left when it came to Wuchang. He could not remain where he was, his new forces were untested and he did not believe they could take Wuchang. He received word Bao Chao was coming from the east to attack him and he knew such veteran troops could do carnage to his green forces. Thus at the end of June he abandoned the western campaign and took his goliath sized army into Hubei. Bao Chao tried to pursue him, but Li Xiucheng had a good headstart and made his way over land and sea eventually moving through southern ANhui and then into Zhejiang.   With Li Xiucheng failing to show up in time, Chen Yucheng had to act on his own. He received no further instructions from Nanjing about whether or not to attack Hankou so he decided to leave a garrison at Huangzhou and took his forces downriver to hit Anqing. On April 27th he made it to the Jixian pass with 30,000 troops easily scaring off the quite outnumbered Xiang troops there. Then he began the process of building fortifications outside Zeng Guoquans fortified encirclement…basically it was a fort, covered by another fort, covered by now another fort, infortception? So now there were 2 rings surrounding Anqing, meanwhile Chen Yucheng managed to sent rafts with supplies across the river to Anqing. After 3 days of trying to break through parts of Zeng Guoquans walls, Duolonga's pursuing force had gotten between his forces and the nearest Taiping held city of Tongcheng. This threatened Chen Yuchengs supply and communications line to Nanjing and without Li Xiucheng it seemed he would be unable to break Zeng Guoquans defensive lines. Thus Chen Yucheng looked like he was going to have to depart, but then on May 1st, a Taiping army 20,000 strong showed up led by Hong Rengan at Tongcheng.    By May 6th, Hong Rengan sent scouts to meet up with Chen Yucheng, but they were beaten back savagely by Duolonga's cavalry force. It was at this point Chen Yucheng made a grave mistake. He left 12,000 men behind to hold the encirclement defenses and withdrew with the rest of his men northwards to strike at Duolonga's cavalry in coordination with Hong Rengan from the north. On May 24th the two Taiping armies attacked Duolonga in 3 columns, 2 from the north and 1 from the south, but a Qing spy had revealed this strategy to Duolonga. Duolonga set up an ambush, using a detachment of cavalry going around Chen Yuchengs forces rear, falling upon the men and sending them into a rout. Soon Chen Yucheng's army was running to Tongcheng receiving massive casualties in the process. The rout also severed Chen Yucheng from his 12,000 men back at the encirclement of Anqing, leaving them helpless without leadership nor possible reinforcements. As for Hong Rengan, it was his first foray into military command and it would effectively be his last. At the same time Hong Rengan's army was receiving its defeat, the Heavenly King was hosting a visit from Harry Parkes and was greatly unnerved by it wishing for Hong Rengan to return to Nanjing to deal with such matters. Thus an order was sent out for him to return and he did so.   Chen Yuchengs blunder left 12,000 men in a terrible situation, 4000 were manning the Jixian pass and around 8000 were at Waternut Lake with only the supplies they had brought with them. They outnumbered Zeng Guoquans encirclement forces, but only by a bit and now the Qing would smash them. Zeng Guofan had ordered Bao Chao to help ferry his army across the Yangtze river to get over to his brother to help. The day after Chen Yucheng had fled to Tongcheng, Zeng Guofan and his brother's armies swept over the Jixian Pass force, breaking them within a week. On June 7th, the Taiping at Jixian Pass surrendered, Bao Chao's men killed 3000 of them. Then they went on to smash the Taiping at Waternut Lake, eventually defeating them by July 7th. 8000 Taiping surrendered, handing in 6000 foreign rifles, 8000 long spears, 1000 jingalls, 800 Ming dynasty matchlocks and 2000 horses, a very nice haul.    Zeng Guoquan had no idea what to do with all the prisoners, a force almost as large as his own who were very dangerous. One of his battalion commanders suggested they just kill them all and he made a suggested plan. They could open the gates of the camp and let the prisoners in 10 at a time so they could be beheaded in batches, “in half a day, we could be done”. What a monster. Zeng Guoquan didnt have the stomach for such a thing and left it all to the said commander who by his own accounts oversaw the butchering of 8000 POW's in the course of a single day. Apparently they started at 7am, and were done by sun down, my god. It seems Zeng Guoquan was deeply troubled by the slaughter and I don't blame him.    Despite the great victory, the siege of Anqing still ground on as Bao Chao and Zeng Guoquan smashed Taiping relief forces. It was the foriegn ships bringing provisions into the city that was making the difference. Zeng Guofan tried to send word to the British to stop making deliveries, but they kept ignoring his messages. By mid July he was fed up after finding out a foreign ship had unloaded nearly 200 tons of rice to Anqing, so he sent a complaint to Beijing. It seems his complaint worked like a charm, Prince Gong sent word to Bruce on July 18th protesting the British help of the Taiping at Anqing, demanding Qing forces be allowed to search every ship that went to the city. Thus Bruce halted any British ships from going to Anqing and in the late summer Zeng Guofan began to receive captured letters from Anqing defenders indicating they were finally running out of food.   Chen Yucheng tried one last time to try to lift the siege at Anqing, taking the remnants of his battered army along with the survivors of Hong Rengans he marched in a long northern sweep around Duolonga's forces to get to the Jixian Pass where his force reoccupied the defenses they had made there. Chen Yucheng planned for all out offensive leading him to perform a desperate mission to rescue his family from Anqing by river while Zeng Guofan's navy fired upon any and all ships departing from the city. August saw a symphony of gun and cannon fire with Taiping waves of men throwing themselves against Zeng Guoquans encirclement, row upon row of them pouring out from Anqing and from Chen Yucheng. The dead piled up against the defensive works on either side as the living clambering over them to try and kill the gunners atop. Then on the night of september 3rd, with the sound of guns, cannons and blades sundering the landscape, all went quiet as Chen Yucheng tossed the towel at last. He burnt the stockade at Jixian Pass to the ground and left Anqing to suffer its fate to the Qing.    Most of the defenders managed to escape Anqing during the battle, escaping through some tunnels made underneath Zeng Guoquans encirclement. The burning of the Jixian Pass stockades provided a decent distraction, though there is evidence that the great escape of so many Taiping was actually an arrangement made by a Qing commander. In exchange for handing over Anqing without a fight they perhaps let the Taiping defenders go. Regardless, all the civilians remained in Anqing alongside some poor defenders chained to the wall mounted cannons. The Xiang forces entered the city unopposed on September 5th. The depths of horror found within the city would leave a long last nightmare. After the foreign ships were banned form bringing provisions, the inhabitants of Anqing ate all the food, then the animals including rats, until nothing was left, all except for one thing. The Xiang forces found out while all the food had run out, the markets were still open for business, the business of selling human flesh, at around half a tael per catty, or 38 cents a pound. Around 16,000 people were left alive in the city. Zeng Guofan wrote to his brother asking what they should do with the people “When we conquer the city, the proper thing to do will be to kill a lot of people. We shouldn't let compassion lead us to err in the grand scheme of things. What do you think?” There are differing accounts of the slaughter, one states Zeng Guofans officers first separated the women and children from those being killed, another states all were treated the same.   I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. Zeng Guofan finally captured the great city of Anqing, a stepping stone to taking Nanjing. The Taiping pincer strategy failed utterly and now they were left in disarray. Can the Taiping come back from these defeats?

Last time we spoke Hong Rengan, the cousin of the heavenly king made a long pilgrimage to get to Nanjing. When Hong Rengan finally made it to Nanjing, the heavenly king rejoiced and began showering him with titles. Hong Rengan soon became the Shield King, but this drew jealousy and resentment from the Loyal king Li Xiucheng. Hong Rengan quickly went to work restructuring the movement, making dramatic improvements and began a campaign to win over foreign support. A grand strategy was formed to break the encirclement of Nanjing and it succeeded in a grand fashion, bringing the Taiping closer to Shanghai where a large foreign community awaited. However rumors spread that the Taiping wished to attack Shanghai creating fear amongst the foreigners they sought to ally with. Could Hong Rengang turn the tides in favor for the Taiping? #30 This episode is The Taiping Rebellion part 7: Ward's Mercenaries & the Battle for Shanghai   Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. Shanghai was not a typical Chinese city, it had a complicated division of jurisdictions such as the international city with each nation having its own military force and each foreign citizen was liable only to their nations authorities. Trading vessels came and left, exchanging not only cargoe but crews from all around the world. People from all walks of life came to Shanghai and much like Mos Eisley, “you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy”. Now in 1860, just 12 miles due west of Shanghai a group of irregular military men began to run drills in a muddy little village. There were around 200 Europeans and Americans in a unit, wearing a hodgepodge of uniforms. Some wore red coats and dark pants, typical British marine getup, other blue jackets with white bell bottoms, that of french sailors, others tattered fabrics of merchant crews. For weapons, many had colt revolvers others sharp repeating rifles and the reason they drilled was to capture the Taiping held town of Songjiang, 10 miles further away from Shanghai. Alongside Qingpu, Songjiang was a strategic walled town and a necessary stepping stone for one to invade Shanghai from Hangzhou or Suzhou. The motley crew of mercenaries were being paid for by a banker named Yang Fang at the incredibly high rate of 100 dollars per month per man. On top of their handsome salaries these men were promised rewards of a hundred thousand dollars if their unit was able to defeat the Taiping garrison at Songjiang alongside anything they could loot. The commander of this unit was an American named Frederick Townsend Ward. He was 29 years old, from Salem Massachusetts and had deep black eyes and a thatch of unruly raven like hair worn long over his ears.    Wards army was modeled on the so called filibusters, those American soldiers who frolicked in latin america in the 19th century. Ward was not drawn just by money but also the dream of establishing a new state to govern. Ward had been frustrated during his military career, he had failed to gain admission to West Point in 1846 and spent a year at Norwich university, a private military college in Vermont, without even graduating. His real military training came informally, in central america in 1852 when he enlisted with the infamous William Walker who led a small army of Americans to fight a civil war in Nicaragua to overthrow its government with the intent to form a new Yankee state. Ward fought hard for Walker, but left his camp to form his own, while Walker conquered Nicaragua and installed himself president in 1856. It was a short lived state to be sure, 4 years later the British captured Walker and arrested him for breaking neutrality laws. Meanwhile Ward traveled to Shanghai to launch his own venture against the Taiping, while his former mentor was executed by firing squads in Honduras.    The Taiping-Qing civil war was a fantastic opportunity for a would be filibuster and initially ward came to china to join the rebels and overthrow the Manchu. However upon making it to Shanghai, making contact with the Taiping proved difficult. Ward first found work aboard a french steamer named Confucius, hired by some wealthy Chinese merchants to protect them against Yangtze pirates. Eventually Ward and the captain of the Confucius found themselves employed by local military authorities, thus Ward ended up selling his sword to the Qing. They saw in him some leadership qualities and had him begin recruiting Europeans, Americans and Filipinos to create a mercenary force to defend the region outside Shanghai. His army was strictly illegal, a complete violation of the neutrality laws. His force of mostly deserters could not even be treated for wounds in Shanghai lest they be arrested.    Despite the small size of his force, the practically mythical belief in western arms being vastly superior led many of their enemies to simply surrender upon seeing a causasian opponent. Wards army was meant to be a spearhead for a 10,000 strong Qing force that followed behind it as they invaded garrisoned cities. Wards unit attacked Songjiang in april of 1860 and it did not go very well. With zero artillery to blast open the gates, Wards planned to sneak over the city walls under the cover of darkness using scaling ladders. Ward's men got so shit face drunk before their daring attack, that all their singing and swearing alarmed Songjiangs defenders when they approached. As they tried to climb, the Taiping cut them to pieces. After the failure ward sent men to purchase artillery pieces in Shanghai, managing to grab 2 pairs of half ton Napoleon field guns and Ward also procured a ton more men. Now he attacked Songjian again in July, this time with 500 troops, a great many being Filipino's. Under the cover of a fog, and less drunk the artillerymen bombarded the gate of Songjiang with 12 pound shells as the unit stormed the city. This assault proved to be a worse disaster than the last one. When they got through the outer gate, the found out the inner gate was undamaged. Thus Ward and his men were stuck in the wall, they couldn't get past the inner gate and could not bring their Napoleon cannons across the moat to hit it. The Taiping defenders were above them tossing stinkpots filled with burning sulfur all night long. Ward's men managed to budge the inner gate a couple of feet using bags of gunpowder, but they were being fired upon all the while. If it was not for their repeating rifles being so effective at close range, they probably would have not survived the night. Luckily they survived the night and soon their Qing backup showed up at dawn forcing the Taiping garrison to flee. Most of Wards 500 men were dead and all by 27 survivors were severely wounded.   It was a terrible victory, but the city was theirs and Ward set up his new HQ in a Confucian temple. With Songjiang as a base, he regrouped, recruited and set up a new offensive for August the 1st to hit Qingpu 10 miles northwest. It did not go well, turns out the Taiping in Qingpu had managed to assemble their own type of Ward army led by an English coastal pirate named Savage who rangled up several of his comrades along the Taiping to man some big guns. Wards Qing backup army also did not show up and during the fighting Ward took a bullet right through both of his cheeks. Wards extremely drunk lieutenant tossed the new recruits, made up of mostly greeks and italians to throw themselves at the walls of Qingpu again 2 weeks after the first failed attack, this time with the Qing backup showing up, but all they managed to do was stir up a Taiping garrison now reinforced to a whopping 50,000 men led by Li Xiucheng himself. Li led a surprise flanking attack that routed the Ward army, not only winning the battle for Qingpu but also threatening Songjiang as Li Xiucheng chased them all the way there. The Taiping harassed Songjians gates for over 2 weeks and the only saving grace for Ward was the fact Savage was alongside the Taiping and he got shot dead.    As we have seen, not all the foreigners were so hostile to the Taiping, Ward initially and Savage were willing to sell their swords to them. And in early july of 1860 as Ward had been preparing his attack on Songjiang, a small boat left Shanghai for the interior carrying 5 British and American missionaries who sought to contact the Taiping in Suzhou. One of them was Joseph Edkins and friend to James Legge, who was trying to find out if Hong Rengan had made it to Nanjing. The group ran into some Taiping units who told them Hong Rengan was the prime minister of Nanjing. The group were mortified when they got to Suzhou seeing the savagery committed there and as Griffith John described of seeing the ruined temples ““It is common to see the nose, chin, and hands cut off. The floors of these buildings are bestrewn with relics of helpless gods. Buddhist and Daoist, male and female. Some are cast into the canals, and are found floating down the stream mingled with the debris of rifled houses and the remains of the dead.” Li Xiucheng was in Suzhou at the time and he invited the missionaries for an audience. It was not a long meeting, but the missionaries found the man to be gentle, intelligent and he kept his soldiers well disciplined. They found themselves in agreement when it came to religious doctrine, but the missionaries knew the merchants of Shanghai cared for only one thing. Thus hey asked Li Xiucheng if he would allow the silk trade to continue under Taiping rule and Li Xiucheng replied that was exactly what the Taiping sought. Thus the group returned to Shanghai and countless newspapers in SHanghai began to publicize pro Taiping accounts. Edkins declared “They are revolutionists in the strictest sense of the term; both the work of slaughter and of plunder are carried on so far as is necessary to secure the end. These are evils which necessarily accompany such a movement, and are justifiable or otherwise in so far as the movement itself is so.” The idea the Taiping would be a state friendly to the west gained momentum. At the end of July, Edkins and Griffith returned to Suzhou for a second visit upon letters of invitation from Li Xiucheng and Hong Rengan.   This time they found an even warmer welcome, with Hong Rengan present draped in silk robes wearing an embroidered gold crown. Hong Rengan insisted they do not kowtow nor kneel as this was not the western fashion, but instead give him a hearty handshake, and he dismissed servants so they could talk informally. They talked of old times like old friends about missionary work, they prayed and sang hymns and talked of China's future. Hong Rengan said for his part all he wanted was to lead the Taiping towards a correct understanding of Christianity. The missionaries were delighted by all of this, a man they knew and worked with was in the seat of power and he wanted to bring real christianity to China. By November nearly all of the major missionary organizations in England joined together to sent a letter to the foreign minister calling for Britain to continue its strict policy of neutrality. In many ways the veil of the Taiping had finally been lifted and there gleamed a chance perhaps at some western support.    Now let us not forget, while the Taiping forces were launching this massive campaign to break the siege of their capital, the Qing were dealing with another campaign, the second opium war. Lord Elgin was writing back to Britain all the while and he had some interesting points to make. In one letter to Lord Russel in July of 1860 he wrote “We might annex the Empire if we were in the humour to take a second India into hand, or we might change the Dynasty if we knew where to find a better.” According to Putyatin, Elgin had privately said in his presence “Britain should recognize as Chinese Emperor one of the leaders of the rebel movement assuming he would agree to the favorable conditions of the Tianjin treaty.” He argued that it could give Britain the desired trade concessions, end conflict and perhaps prevent future wars. He took it a step further saying “if the capital of China were moved nearer to our military presence like Nanking … England could control the Chinese Empire with four gunboats.Let the north disappear or form a separate government, we don't have any trade interests there.”   Meanwhile his brother Bruce was anxious that the Taiping would still march on Shanghai. The two events were simultaneous, the war in the north with Elgins coalition marching upon Beijing and the loomed threat in Shanghai. Luckily for Bruce, Elgin showed up to Shanghai on June 29th of 1860 with a fleet of French and British gunboats. Bruce sighed with relief, surely his brother would look out for their interests in Shanghai. Yet the coalitionary forces had no intention of helping Bruce defend Shanghai, they were going to depart shortly to head north and hit Beijing. They departed and left a scant defensive force of a couple gunboats and some stray divisions of Sikh soldiers. The foreign community of Shanghai lamented they had been abandoned in their hour of need. Despite the work of the missionaries to present Hong Rengan as a friend and not foe, Bruce did not buy it. He assumed the missionaries were being duped, like he had been at the hands of the Qing. Despite his opinions of the Manchu, Bruce told those around him they were still the legitimate authority in China. Many tried to change Bruce's mind on the matter of the Taiping, but none succeeded.   In july of 1860 Bruce was brought a sealed letter addressed to the representatives of the US, France and Britain from Li Xiucheng. Bruce apparently refused to even open it. Then he received another letter, this time from Hong Rengan, but Bruce again refused to open it. These letters were fatally important, in the first Li Xiucheng notified the foreign authorities that the Taiping were on they way to Shanghai and intended to take possession of the Chinese held section of the city. He stated the Taiping had no quarrel whatsoever with their “foreign brethren” and pledged no harm to them nor their property. Any Taiping who harmed a foreigner would be put to death and he hoped the foreign representatives would call upon their people to stay indoors and hoist yellow flags above their doors to signify they were foreigners in said homes.    In the later afternoon of August 17th, the sky to the west of Shanghai suddenly grew dark with smoke. The next morning saw fleeing Qing soldiers rushing to the Shanghai gates pursued by Taiping cavalry. The British let in a few Qing in before they destroyed the bridge going across the moat. The Taiping advance guard surged forward as suddenly the British and French opened fire with their artillery. Alongside this, the Taiping were fired upon by a hodgepodge of differing muskets, rifles and such. The Taiping force was small, just a few thousand men, lightly armed with a few notable foreign mercenaries with them. The British and French gunners atop the walls, watched the Taiping hide behind buildings and other structures, with clear baffled faces. None of them shot back, then one Taiping detachment tried to advance forward waving Qing flags they had stolen, but they were shot at. Next another detachment rushed forward waving an enormous black flag that the Taiping used to drive reluctant troops with. One very lucky shell lobbed from half a mile smashed right in the middle of the unit flattening the flag bearer into the ground.   In a bewildered disarray the Taiping ran into houses for cover, but the wall artillerymen kept firing at them. As the night came upon them, word spread that Qing forces within Shanghai were executing Taiping POW's, prompting the British to demand they be surrendered over to them unmolested. Then the French frustrated it seems by the Taiping using all the houses for cover decided to simply start blowing them down with artillery. The next morning, French troops marched through the city firing their muskets at will. One eye witness reported to the North-China Herald “French soldiers were rushing frantically among the peaceful inhabitants of the place, murdering men, women and children, without the least discrimination. One man, 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 eye witness estimated the French left tens of thousands of Chinese homeless in the course of defending against 3000 lightly armed Taiping. The Taiping force retreated, but the suburbs of Shanghai burned for days as the Europeans claimed victory. The Taiping attack on Shanghai honestly did more to build sympathy for their cause, the news paper ran rampant stories about how the europeans fired upon a group who called themselves brethren and did not fight back.    Now we have not talked about a key player in all of this for awhile. On October 16th of 1860, General Zeng Guofan was in his HQ in Qimen of Anhui province sick out of his mind. He was vomiting heavily, suffering some bad heart palpitations, had a bad case of insomnia, just not doing all that great. At lunch he received a message that the emperor had fled to his hunting grounds in Manchuria and that the British and French armies were literally a few miles from Beijing. There was nothing he could do, he apparently broke down in tears feeling helpless. Zeng Guofan was stuck fighting a protracted rear action campaign against the farthest Taiping stronghold up the Yangtze river. Zhang Guoliang and He Chun were both dead, the siege camps around Nanjing were shattered. He knew he could do nothing to stop the european march on Beijing so he pulled himself together and focused on a task he actually could do something about.   Up until 1860, Zeng Guofan's Xiang army on the Yangtze played only a supporting role in the overall Qing campaign. Zhang Guoliang and He Chun's blockade of Nanjing was much more of a focus compared to that of Zeng Guofans offensives. Yet when victory seemed within grasp, Hong Rengan's daring plan was unleashed. The Taiping broke out of the encirclement and ran rampant marching east. In the leadership vacuum that ensued, Zeng Guofan's time had finally come. In June of 1860 Emperor Xianfeng appointed him as the governor general of Anhui, Jiangsu and Jiangxi the provinces most ravaged by the civil war. By late august the emperor named him imperial commissioner in charge of the military affairs in those 3 provinces and the new commander in chief of the Qing dynasty's forces in the Yangtze river valley. Boy oh boy the Chinese love bestowing so many titles on one person, that tradition just keeps living on. The frustrations of having to constantly provide for his Xiang army was beginning to ease as the desperate emperor had no one else to turn to. After years of scrambling to make his army's ends meet, while the Green Standard army enjoyed full funding and support, now Zeng Guofan was in charge of both military and civil administrations for the primary theater of war.    His years of service had shown him how ineffective the bureaucrats of the Qing government could be, how inexperienced and self-gratifying they could be, and he would not tolerate them to affect his campaign. He had refused orders in 1859 to chase down Shi Dakai into sichuan, and now in 1860 he was given new orders to abandon his campaign in Anhui and to rush over to instead protect Suzhou and Shanghai. He offered instead the excuse he did not have the forces necessary to help at the moment and would stay put where he was finishing his campaign. The strategy he was performing was one of encirclement. Now back in 1859 Zeng Guofan tried to explain to the Qing court that the dynasty was not facing one kind of rebel force, but rather 2. The roving bandits constantly moving, and the pretender bandits, those who actually sought to attack Beijing and take the dragon throne. Shi Dakai, the Nian rebels and numerous vagabond armies on horseback were roving bandits. The only way to fight roving bandits was to hold a position and try to blunt their momentum. But for the pretender bandits the most important being the Taiping with their capital in Nanjing, you could only defeat them by “severing their branches and leaves”. What he meant by this was you had to cut off their foraging armies, ie: their logistics, before crushing them. He pointed out that the Green stand army had failed to encircle Nanjing completely, there had always been a single pathway open. He argued Nanjing must be completely encircled and once that was met the Qing forces could gradually conquer the fortified cities along the Yangtze one by one. He sought to begin with the Brave Kings base of operations, Anqing in Anhui province. Anqing had been under Taiping control since 1853, and was the farthest stronghold up the Yangtze. It protected both the river and land approaches to Nanjing and thus was a major choke point. As long as it stood, the Taiping in Nanjing could not be properly sieged, Anqing had to be crushed.    Now this was not going to be any simple task, in 1860 Zeng Guofan had a force of 60,000 men while the Rebels had vastly more. Zeng Guofan could not contend with them in the open field. His intelligence reports indicated the Taiping were using irregular formations known as “crab formations”. This was a cluster of troops in the middle (the crabs body) and 5 lines reaching out on either side that could rapidly reconfigure itself as 2 columns, 4 columns or a crosslike configuration of 5 phalanxes, depending on the enemy. There was also the “hundred birds formation”, in which a large division would disintegrate into small clusters of 25 soldiers, each roaming freely, making it impossible for their enemies to figure out how large their force was. Then there was “crouching tiger”, usually applied to hill terrains where 10,000 troops would hide close to the ground in total silence and then ambush their enemy as they passed through a valley, suddenly leaping up like a tiger.   To defeat these innovative rebels, would require manipulation of the battlefield. In every engagement Zeng described the situation as being either a host or guest. The host always enjoyed the advantage, such as being defenders of a wall city. The same situation could be said of a fortified camp. If two armies were to meet in the open field, it was the first army to reach the site of battle that would be the host. Now having the weaker army, Zeng tried to ensure the Taiping would always be the guest, by trying to lure them into attacking his defensive works or if failing that to try and provoke them to make the first move. To that end he got his men to build up fortified camps always in close proximity to the Taiping in the hopes of drawing them in to make the first move. In June of 1860, when the Taiping were focused on their eastern campaign, Zeng Guofan had moved into Anhui from the west with his brother Zeng Guoquan who began a siege of Anqing. Guoquan had 10,000 Hunanese forces who pitched a camp near Anqing's walls, building high earth walls with 20 foot wide moats. The idea was simple, they protected their fronts to the city and their backs from Taiping relief forces. For further protection against relief forces, a 20,000 strong Manchu cavalry unit led by Duolonga was set up in Tongcheng, 40 miles north of Anqing while Zeng Guofan led naval forces to blockade the Yangtze river just a few miles below the city. In late July, Zeng took the rest of his forces, 30,000 men into the mountains south of Anhui where he formed his HQ in Qimen, which is in a valley around 60 miles southeast of Anqing.   However the summer of 1860 changed everything as the new war with the Europeans in the north erupted. Beijing sent orders on October 10th instructing him to send his best field commander, Bao Chao along with 3000 troops to help Prince Seng's banner forces fight the Europeans in the north, but Zeng Guofan believed without these men who would not be able to hold the encirclement of Anqing. It would take Bao Chao until January to reach the area of Beijing, far too late to be of help, thus Zeng reasoned it was useless. Alongside that, if the Taiping were allowed to break out of Anqing they could march upon Wuchang and threaten Hunan again. So Zeng cleverly sent word back to the Emperor asking him to choose another commander to come help in the north, and that message would take 2 weeks to get over to Beijing over 800 miles away thus earning him at least another 4 weeks time.   October was quite depressing and cold for Zeng Guofan. The Taiping in Anqing apparently had plentiful stores and could wait quite long for reinforcements. One of his most beloved commanders holding a garrison in the nearby town of Huizhou was overrun by Taiping raiders and reports indicated there were many Taiping forces encircling his base of Qimen. Then on November 6th, he received a letter from a colleague in the north, stating the Europeans had successfully invaded Beijing and burnt down the summer palace . Zeng wrote in his diary “I have no words to describe the depths of this pain,”. The eight banner army lost to the Europeans and now he was all alone commanding a breaking army, all he had left was this damn Anqing campaign. We will come back to the plight of Zeng Guofan soon, but now we will be venturing back to the Shanghai situation.   On August 21st, 2 days after his men were sent back from the walls of Shanghai by European grapeshot and shells, the Loyal King Li Xiucheng wrote a very angry letter to the British and American consuls there. “I came to Shanghai to make a treaty in order to see us connected together by trade and commerce. I did not come for the purpose of fighting with you.” Li Xiucheng accused the French of setting up a trap, stating a few of them had come to Suzhou earlier that year inviting the Taiping over to Shanghai to establish relations. He could not believe the French would be deluded by the Qing demons and betray them. He said he heard reports of the Qing sending large amounts of money to the French to defend Shanghai and it seemed they were sharing that money with the Americans and British since they opened fire on his men! He went on to say the event could be forgiven, in the case of his fellow protestants, but not the French, oh no there would be a day of reckoning for them when the Taiping took control of China. Yet he finished his angry letter swallowing his pride and said the Taiping still sought friendly relations with their christian brethren.    Though it was a letter from Li Xiucheng, in reality it was sentiment sent by Hong Rengan, whose entire strategy depended on gaining support from the British and Americans in Shanghai. They needed to buy steamships to control the Yangtze river. Yet Li Xiucheng hated Hong Rengan and began to talk within his inner circle about how foolish Hong Rengan was thinking the foreigners would ever help them. The unexpected conflict with them at Shanghai proved his point and thus a rift was widening more so between the 2 leaders. Hong Rengan for his part, blamed Li Xiucheng and not the foreigners, stating they must have heard of Li's belligerent attitude towards them before he showed up and thus they assumed he was going to attack. Despite the 2 men's bickering, they both knew Shanghai needed to be secured for its rich financial stores and to be a point of which the Taiping could purchase weapons from the west. It was now up to Hong Rengan to smooth things over with the foreigners.    A letter was sent to the foreigners of Shanghai stating they wanted to open up trade and that they had vast amounts of teas, silks and other desired goods. It asked why not make a treaty, perhaps with the United States? John Griffith went over to Nanjing and returned to Shanghai in December with an edict from the Heavenly King written in imperial vermillion ink on yellow satin, welcoming foreign missionaries to take up residence in Nanjing. An interesting gesture, given the British were so obsessed with having the same in Beijing only to be continuously thwarted by the Qing court. However the missionaries were reluctant to go, because no formal communications had been established between Nanjing and Shanghai, thus to go meant they would be at the mercy of the rebels. On December the 2nd, Lord Elgin returned to Shanghai in triumph after marching upon Beijing and getting Prince Gong to sign the treaty. He quickly learnt from his brother how the Taiping threatened the city. But the treaty had been signed with the Qing and the letters from Hong Rengan and the HEavenly king suggested the Taiping wanted no hostilities with the foreigners at Shanghai. Thus everyone expected no further conflict to occur and the European coalitionary forces that had marched on Beijing were disbanded and sent home. By the end of December, half the British forces were already returning to India and Britain with the others being stationed in Hong Kong, Tianjin and the Taku forts, just incase Beijing decided not to meet their end of the treaty terms yet again.    As for Shanghai, by the end of 1860, just 1200 British soldiers were left for the city and Elgin argued they were far too many. Elgin spent a good month in Shanghai before leaving China. Though his work with Beijing was over, he did have one last task before leaving, he wanted to gauge the possibility for Britain to form relations with the Taiping. The Taiping at this time controlled the riverway and thanks to the new treaty with the Qing, trade was finally open for business. Elgin was not too pleased to hear about the supposed defense that his brother erected against the Taiping. He was even more disgusted to find out about the damage caused by the French to the outer suburbs and population of Shanghai. Elgin tried to counsel his younger brother that the Taiping were not necessarily all bad, he said “as bad as the imperials and Taiping both are, the rebels might provide a brighter future. From what I have seen of the regions under their control, they exhibit honesty and power”. He also rebuked his brothers refusal to read the Taiping letters warning not to accede to any Qing requests for Britain to avoid contact with the rebels. “it will never do to come under any obligation not to communicate with them on the Yangtze. It would be wrong in principle … and impossible in practice.”    When winter came Elgin had to leave China, he had no time to make another voyage up the Yangtze, so he left orders for Rear admiral Hope to pay a visit to Nanjing to investigate if there might be a basis for relations between the rebels and Britain. Elgin knew it was a delicate situation, they had after all just signed a treaty with the Taipings enemy, thus he added a private note to Hope “at any rate it is clear that we must not become partisans in this civil war”. For his part General Hope after defeating the Manchu, was quite open to forming relations with the Taiping. Meanwhile the Taiping were consolidating their control over China's wealthy eastern province of Jiangsu. By September they controlled every county around Shanghai except for this under the protection of the foreigners. They were capitalizing on the people losing faith in the Manchu. They would make such proclamations as “The emperor of the Qing is the emperor of a lost country, and his ministers are all the ministers of a lost country. They extended their control over Jiangnan which encompassed the confluence of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui. Within Jiangsu province they held the capital, Suzhou along with the major cities of Wuxi and Danyang. They held Anqing, the capital of Anhui, and in Zhejiang they had the major trading city of Ningbo. I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. Hong Rengans efforts to gain foreign support were falling to pieces. Zeng Guofan was building up his army hoping to capture Anqing, a major stepping stone to take Nanjing. Who was going to win the battle for the east?  

Welcome to the last episode of 2021, dear listeners. We have another man with three names for you, which historically means prepare for awfulness. But this one is blessedly free of any of that, he's just a plain and simple badass. I mean, sure he kind of fought for some bad people, but he did a lot of badass stuff and didn't really do anything shitty on his end, so we can forgive him. Enjoy, and happy new year!

In the mid-19th century, as one country in the West was on its way toward the most famous civil war, another country in the East was in the grips of one far larger and more significant than any that had come before or would come afterward, if only in terms of numbers. By the end of this conflict, known as China's Taiping Rebellion, over 20 million people would lay dead, and China's relationship with the West would never be the same. While the man who started this conflict--a self-proclaimed prophet and younger brother to Jesus Christ named Hong Xiuquan--was forming the seeds of this rebellion within his tortured mind, the man who would change the course of the Rebellion itself was coming of age and beginning his habit of traveling the world looking for adventure and action. That man's name was Frederick Townsend Ward, and his influence would be felt and then eventually forgotten across the world, thanks to his largely omitted place within the ranks of great men who fought in this great conflict. This is the story of Frederick Townsend Ward, as well as the story of the fall of China as everyone--including the Chinese--would know it for nearly 100 years. This is the story of how an American adventurer became an American mercenary and then became a citizen of the Chinese Empire, and more importantly, a hero to its people, namely those living in the growing port city of Shanghai, largely thanks to his formation of the greatest soldiers China had yet to see: the Ever Victorious Army, whose elite training at Ward's hand would shape the future of China's military forever. History Impossible has been made possible by the following generous supporters on Patreon and PayPal: Elias Borota Matthew Dakus Gavin Edwards Peter Hauck Jose Martinez Mike Mayleben Judy McCoid Kostas Moros Molly Pan John Pisano Edmund Plamowski PJ Rader Martin Reddin Mark Reed Stephen Roblem Sam Emily Schmidt Ricky Worthey Steve Uhler

Stephen R. Platt‘s new book is a beautifully written and intricately textured account of the bloodiest civil war of all time. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (Vintage Books, 2012) is a deeply international history of the Taiping Civil War that situates the story of modern China within a broader, global history of civil war in the US and beyond. Platt refocuses our gaze on the crucial role of a cast of characters who shaped the war and its aftermath but are often overlooked in its histories. Rather than echoing previous accounts of the Taiping that focus on the visionary Hong Xiuquan, Platt thus highlights Hong’s lesser-known cousin, Taiping “Shield King” and keeper of pickles Hong Rengan; the long-haired and wily Frederick Townsend Ward with his tight-fitting black uniform and army of filibusters; and the reluctant and toothache-suffering general Zeng Guofan and his “Confucian scholar’s vision of an army.” (Though he appears only briefly, look out also for Queen Victoria’s unfortunately-named dog “Looty.”) Platt is equally at home when bringing readers into the theater of sieges and political treaties, and while developing very affecting and humane accounts of men and women in the midst of making very difficult decisions in exceptionally challenging circumstances. This award-winning book is well worth reading, both as a masterful history of modern China and a model of evocative and gripping historical writing. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephen R. Platt‘s new book is a beautifully written and intricately textured account of the bloodiest civil war of all time. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (Vintage Books, 2012) is a deeply international history of the Taiping Civil War that situates the story of modern China within a broader, global history of civil war in the US and beyond. Platt refocuses our gaze on the crucial role of a cast of characters who shaped the war and its aftermath but are often overlooked in its histories. Rather than echoing previous accounts of the Taiping that focus on the visionary Hong Xiuquan, Platt thus highlights Hong’s lesser-known cousin, Taiping “Shield King” and keeper of pickles Hong Rengan; the long-haired and wily Frederick Townsend Ward with his tight-fitting black uniform and army of filibusters; and the reluctant and toothache-suffering general Zeng Guofan and his “Confucian scholar’s vision of an army.” (Though he appears only briefly, look out also for Queen Victoria’s unfortunately-named dog “Looty.”) Platt is equally at home when bringing readers into the theater of sieges and political treaties, and while developing very affecting and humane accounts of men and women in the midst of making very difficult decisions in exceptionally challenging circumstances. This award-winning book is well worth reading, both as a masterful history of modern China and a model of evocative and gripping historical writing. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephen R. Platt‘s new book is a beautifully written and intricately textured account of the bloodiest civil war of all time. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (Vintage Books, 2012) is a deeply international history of the Taiping Civil War that situates the story of modern China within a broader, global history of civil war in the US and beyond. Platt refocuses our gaze on the crucial role of a cast of characters who shaped the war and its aftermath but are often overlooked in its histories. Rather than echoing previous accounts of the Taiping that focus on the visionary Hong Xiuquan, Platt thus highlights Hong’s lesser-known cousin, Taiping “Shield King” and keeper of pickles Hong Rengan; the long-haired and wily Frederick Townsend Ward with his tight-fitting black uniform and army of filibusters; and the reluctant and toothache-suffering general Zeng Guofan and his “Confucian scholar’s vision of an army.” (Though he appears only briefly, look out also for Queen Victoria’s unfortunately-named dog “Looty.”) Platt is equally at home when bringing readers into the theater of sieges and political treaties, and while developing very affecting and humane accounts of men and women in the midst of making very difficult decisions in exceptionally challenging circumstances. This award-winning book is well worth reading, both as a masterful history of modern China and a model of evocative and gripping historical writing. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices