Having explored the rise and fall of the Taiping, I was interested in finding out how it was experienced by people “on the ground.” What can we know of that? Tobie Meyer-Fong provides a richly documented overview in her book What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China.1
Meyer-Fong speaks of having studied and often lectured on the Taiping rebellion and “God’s Chinese son” to her amazed university students, who had never heard of such a thing. And then, in the midst of an unrelated research project, she stumbled upon a nineteenth-century prefectural gazeteer, just a few blocks from her home, in the Library of Congress! To her surprise, it documented the numerous deaths of local citizens during the Taiping occupation. This started her on a research trail that uncovered a variety of nineteenth-century sources. Together they compose a startling tapestry of horror, confusion, and inconsolable grief.
From reading her work, a few things stood out to me.
The lines in this civil war were far from clear. It was not just the Taiping v. imperial forces. The Taiping “side” was not a uniform and disciplined army of “true believers.” Local armies, regional militias, conscripts, and even foreign mercenaries entered the fray, and on both sides. Some towns changed sides multiple times. Family members and neighbors found themselves opposing one another.
Changes of allegiance made it difficult to determine who was who. The Taiping men let their hair grow (no longer shaving the front of their head, as required by Qing imperial law). So unshaved hair stubble might signify a recent change of allegiance to the Taiping, or a too-white pate might indicate a recent shaving, and a reversal of Taiping allegiance. Sometimes dialects or accents suggested allegiances. But to solidify the matter, the Taiping would sometimes tattoo the faces of prisoners or conscripts. One man’s facial tattoo is recorded: He was branded with “The flourishing kingdom of the Taiping.”
Terror reigned. In some regions, the putrid trail of death was everywhere. Bodies choked streams and rivers, or decomposed on roadsides. Bleached skeletons were strewn across fields. Many deaths were suicides of individuals and families who thought it more honorable to die by their own hand. The unnamed and unburied dead wreaked havoc in a culture deeply shaped by burial rites, tombs, and the veneration of ancestors.The war shredded the thick social fabric of family, village, and town.
There was a great sense of having been betrayed by the Qing government. Promises of security and protection had been of no avail. And the government’s post-war honoring of the dead and “martyrs” did not assuage those feelings of betrayal and grief.
Not surprisingly, records and testimonies show that the aftermath of the war left its deep imprint on society well into the 1880s. Two thirds of the twenty-four provinces of the Qing empire had been affected, and particularly those regions along the Yangtze River. Some towns had suffered massive losses of population and infrastructure. Property loss was incalculable. And refugees had flooded into the treaty port of Shanghai.
I haven’t seen the movie, but by studying the Taiping civil war, the director Alex Garland might have mapped some details onto his recent film “Civil War.” China’s experience is a chilling rebuke to any romanticized notions of violence and a second US civil war. “Blue States” and “Red States” are catchy demographic abstractions, election-night graphics masking the reality of our deeply intertwined society. And what might the Taiping uprising have to say to those who dream of reclaiming a “Christian nation”?
The battle for the city of Anqing
The Empire’s Terrible Swift Sword
The troubles for the Taiping compounded and transmogrified until Western powers joined with Chinese imperial forces to suppress the rebels in bloody warfare. And as the imperial noose tightened around the Taiping, the costliness of the civil war mounted.
The siege and capture of the rebel stronghold near Anqing opens a grisly window on the unfolding tragedy. When on July 7, 1861, eight thousand rebel soldiers surrendered to imperial forces at Waternut Lake, their numbers posed a problem for general Zeng Guofan. They must all be annihilated. But how might this job be managed? The general’s brother, being a practical man, scaled the cold blade of imperial practice to numerical efficiency. The rebels were led out of their stockade in batches of ten, and from seven in the morning until after sundown, they were systematically beheaded. The imperial sword was staggering drunk with blood.
The city of Anqing finally fell to siege in September of 1861. And when imperial troops entered the city, they found that the meat-market price of human flesh was at half -tael per catty, or about thirty-eight cents a pound. To this butcher’s bill was added an estimated sixteen thousand surviving citizens who were slaughtered.2 [1]
Suzhou would fall to imperial forces in December 1863. Nanjing would succumb in July 1864, after a long siege. And when Nanjing finally did give way, it was discovered that Hong Xiuquan, the Heavenly King, had died weeks earlier, apparently of illness. Li Xiucheng, the Loyal King, who had graciously received the missionaries at Suzhou, was executed in Nanjing on August 7, 1864. Hong Rengan, the Shield King, had earlier fled Nanjing, and was now escorting the heir to the heavenly throne, the Young Monarch, to safety. Imperial forces caught them some four hundred miles southwest of Nanjing, and on November 23 Hong Rengan was executed and cut to pieces.
The last foreigner to see Hong Rengan was a mercenary named Patrick Nellis. When Hong Rengan asked his nationality, Nellis answered, “An Englishman.”
Hong Rengan replied, “I have never met a good foreigner.”3
This was the man James Legge said was the only Chinese for whom he felt such affection and camaraderie that he would walk down the street of Hong Kong with his arm around his neck.
There was no Appomattox Courthouse conclusion to this civil war. The death toll has been estimated between twenty million and thirty million, many of them non-combatants. The longer-term population loss, including depressed birth rates, was millions more.4
In the end, the Taiping flame had been utterly quenched. We hear of no exiled remnant, no hidden covey of true believers. No Taiping scion in his mountain fastness, awaiting his appointed hour to ascend the heavenly throne. The annihilation of the Kingdom of Great Peace left a scorched shadow of horrors. Families, villages, and towns mourned the gaping chasms in their ancestral lines. Orphaned ghosts roamed the earth, bereft of honorable repose.
The World of a Tiny Insect
In 1860, as Protestant missionaries were probing and interrogating the Taiping kings for insights into their beliefs, aims, and motivations, a young boy was living through the terrors of social turmoil. Born in 1854 to a government official posted to the very town Jimmy and Sophie Graham (my great grandparents) would call their home for nearly fifty years, Zhang Daye would see it all. At the age of six he was carried off in the company of the women of his father’s household, fleeing to their ancestral home far to the south. Writing some thirty years later—right around the time the Grahams were settling into life in Qingjiangpu—he reflects on his childhood during the Taiping civil war, when he encountered warfare, death, and devastation. He had lived as a “tiny insect” in a world convulsed by wolves.
The trauma of those events had left an indelible mark on his life. While cities such as Suzhou, Zhenjiang, and Nanjing were repaired and reconstructed after the war, Zhang Daye had simply survived. He could not repair the damage he bore within. In this single life a generation’s terrors is written small, preserved in amber, and disclosed for us today in The World of a Tiny Insect.5
He had seen bodies—decapitated, floating, piled up, maggot blown, ravaged by jackals and wolves. He had heard ghosts wailing in the wilderness. He had seen bullets “dense as flying locusts.” As a tiny and insignificant observer of the battlefield, he had heard the bugles and drums, the guns and thundering cannons. He had seen the Taiping warrior galloping by on horseback, leading his troops into battle and crying, “Good brothers, charge, kill! … Charge, kill, good brothers!” He had come across a dying insurgent on the ground and delivered a callous kick. He had gazed with curiosity on the remains of a woman hacked to death. He had experienced life on the run—hungry, scared, living rough, dodging peril.
Zhang Daye’s quiet and privileged life as a government official’s son had been jolted into confusion, rootlessness, and moral trauma. Thirty years later, he still carried it within. Recalling those days, he sinks into dark melancholy: “As for me, I have been down-and-out all my useless life, and would probably have been better off dying early in childhood.”6
There are no foreigners in Zhang Daye’s account. No theological reflections. No social and historical analysis of the world of that tiny insect. Peeling back the coarse dressings that bound up his inner wounds, he displays the red and swollen scars of childhood memories.
Unfortunately for the ongoing Protestant missionary endeavor in China, the Taiping civil war had become a quiet but searing wound on China’s memory. A tragically misbegotten response to Christianity that would have consequences. And yet for Western missionaries, their involvement at its inception seems to have been airbrushed out of their memories.7
“It would appear from this….”
Tucked in a fold of this sprawling tapestry of upheaval is an interesting exchange that occurred between President Lincoln’s U.S. emissary to China, Anson Burlingame, and Prince Gong of the Qing imperial household. Burlingame had appealed to the Qing government that they prevent the Confederate ship Alabama, which was attacking U.S. commercial shipping on the high seas, from accessing China’s ports. Prince Gong agreed, and wrote to Burlingame in March of 1864: “It appears from this that by the rebellion of the southern parts of the United States against their government, your country is placed very much in the same position that China is, whose seditious subjects are now in revolt against her.”
The parallels between the Taiping rebellion and the U.S. Confederacy had been crisply noted. Mrs. Burlingame found this hilarious, and in a letter to her father, she commented: “I wonder what the ‘Southern chivalry’ will say to being put on a par with the ‘Taepings’!”8
What indeed?
Tobie Meyer-Fong, What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China (Stanford University Press, 2013).
Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (Vintage Books, 2012), 210-215.
Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, 353.
Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, 358.
Zhang Daye, The World of a Tiny Insect: A Memoir of the Taiping Rebellion and Its Aftermath, Translator and Introduction, Xiaofei Tian (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013).
Zhang Daye, World of a Tiny Insect, 85-90.
A point emphaticallly made by Thomas H. Reilly, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014), 164-165. I will explore this further.
Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, 320. Prince Kung to Anson Burlingame, March 16, 1864, in Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs, Accompanying the Annual Message of the President to the Second Session, Thirty-Eighth Congress, Part III (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1865), 377. One of the contributions of Platt’s book is to point out concurrence of events of the Chinese and U.S. civil wars.