Fall of Nanjing II

Zeng Guoquan had a dream. He dreamed that he was climbing up
a high mountain peak, all the way to the summit. When he got to the top,
however, he couldn’t find any path to continue forward, so he turned around.
But when he did, he saw that there was no longer any path behind him either. He
told his secretary about this dream on a grim, rainy day at the end of March.
“I fear it is not auspicious,” he said sadly. His army’s supplies were nearly
exhausted—for, as it was turning out, the devastation of the countryside bode
even worse for the Hunan Army siege forces than for their enemies. Even though
their supply line along the Yangtze remained open and uncontested, by the
spring of 1864 there was no longer much food that could come to them from it.
The soldiers were surviving on rice gruel, nothing more. He worried that his
battalion commanders, ashamed of being unable to provide better for their men,
were no longer keeping discipline in the camps. “Our food is about to run out,
and there’s nowhere around to gather more,” Zeng Guoquan confided to his
secretary. “If we don’t break this city in a month, our whole army is going to
crumble to pieces.”

Inside the city, it was a different world. By April, broad
expanses of land at the northern end of Nanjing sprouted green as the seedlings
of the garrison’s first crop of wheat broke through the surface of the newly
cultivated soil. In contrast to the landscape for hundreds of miles all around
them, theirs was an oasis of fertility and cultivation. The results of their
labor were viewed with envy and bitterness by one of Zeng Guofan’s admirals
peering through a glass from a distance. Even as the rebels inside the city
looked forward to a bountiful harvest, his own men faced the prospect of
starvation if they didn’t bring the siege to a conclusion soon.

Zeng Guoquan’s forces managed to hold on into the early
summer, but pressure was beginning to mount from Beijing, where the government
was running out of patience. It demanded that Nanjing be conquered without
further delay. But Guoquan wanted full credit for recapturing the city, so he
resisted suggestions that Li Hongzhang’s Anhui Army be brought up to Nanjing to
supplement his Hunan forces. As commander in chief, Zeng Guofan was torn
between the anticipation of victory, and concern that his brother’s army at
Nanjing would collapse from lack of supplies while he continued to stubbornly
refuse help. He berated his brother’s vanity. “Why must you have sole credit
for conquering Nanjing?” he wrote to Guoquan on June 19. “Why should one person
be the most famous under heaven?” Zeng Guofan knew Beijing court politics
better than his younger brother, who had no such experience, so he finally
invited Li Hongzhang to join in the assault on Nanjing—knowing that a failure
to do so would invite charges that his family put their personal ambitions
above the good of the empire. Li Hongzhang, out of respect for his teacher’s
predicament, politely made an excuse not to come and allowed the Zeng family to
continue as the sole force against Nanjing while blunting the criticisms from
the court.

By this time, Zeng Guoquan’s siege works at Nanjing had
expanded to a breadth of scale that was stunning by any standard. The Hunan
Army had built a three-mile road for supplies through a bog, connecting the
river to hard ground within two miles of Zeng Guoquan’s headquarters on
Yuhuatai. Charles Gordon visited him there as a private citizen after the
Ever-Victorious Army was disbanded, and from the lookout atop the hill, gazing
over the silent rooftops of Nanjing, he could see that there would be little
resistance if and when the wall was finally breached. “For miles the wall is
deserted entirely,” he noted, “only here and there is a single man seen, miles
from any support.” All was quiet, and “a deathlike stillness” hung over the
vast city.

The lines of vallation encircled the rebel capital as far as
the eye could see: mile after mile of continuous wooden breastworks punctuated
by mud forts—more than a hundred of them—each with a few hundred men inside. In
some places they ran dangerously close to the wall, just a hundred yards or so,
but nobody was shooting at them from above. Indeed, a sense of quiet and repose
(some would say boredom) permeated the muddy camps. Makeshift shops had sprung
up, where enterprising locals sold goods to the soldiers. There were no visible
sentinels. It wasn’t that the Hunan troops were lazy, just that there wasn’t
anything they could do for the time being other than wait and pass the time.
The real work was being done underground and out of sight.

In the absence of any guns that could penetrate the wall,
the Hunan Army relied on a more ancient method of defeating a walled city: they
dug under it. Zeng Guoquan’s miners sank a series of pits around the city wall.
Where the moat was interrupted or ran widely enough from the wall that they
could begin their digging inside its reach, they dug down fifteen feet or so
before starting inward horizontally toward the city. But where the moat
protected the wall, they had to angle downward as deep as ninety feet
underground to skirt safely below it. To screen their efforts from the spotters
who made occasional appearance on the wall, they threw up stockades in front of
the digging—but as each tunnel lengthened, the rubble hauled out by the miners
piled up higher and higher until it finally rose above its concealing stockade.
There was also the problem that as the shallower mines lengthened, the grass on
the surface above them turned brown, leaving a telltale path for which the
spotters were specifically looking.

The tunnels were about four feet wide and seven high,
propped up internally with frames of wood and tree branches. If there was no
water above them, the miners punched vertical holes through the surface for
ventilation—which prevented suffocation but again risked attracting the
attention of the spotters. Meanwhile, from inside the city, the Taiping were
slowly digging their own countermines outward, guided by those same spotters.
And when they managed to puncture the wall of an incoming mine, they used
bellows to blast it full of noxious smoke or flushed it with boiling water or
sewage to drown the miners and render the tunnel useless. In the one instance
where the Hunan Army’s mine did get close enough to the wall for them to
detonate a charge, it didn’t generate enough explosive force and failed to make
enough of a breach to allow the Hunan troops inside. In that case, the rebels
simply built a new wall behind the existing one, to block off the point of
damage.

By June, the Hunan Army had sunk mines at more than thirty
sites around the city wall with nothing to show for their efforts except four
thousand dead miners. But on July 3, they finally captured the Fortress of
Earth at the base of the Dragon’s Shoulder on the eastern side of the city.
Like the stone fort on Yuhuatai to the south, the Fortress of Earth looked
right over into the city, but it did so from an even higher vantage point and
from an even closer position that practically touched the side of the wall.
With the fort in hand, Zeng Guoquan’s forces set up a battery of more than a
hundred cannons on the slope of the Dragon’s Shoulder and began pounding a
constant barrage over the wall, night and day, the guns bellowing over the ramparts
and blasting the buildings and ground surface on the other side, sending the
spotters and miners scurrying for safety. They began filling in the gap between
the fort and the wall with rubble, earth, and bales of straw, hoping to level
the surface to the point where they could simply walk over it into the city.
And below the covering fire of their cannons, under the ground at the foot of
the Dragon’s Shoulder, Zeng Guoquan’s most ambitious tunnel yet grew longer and
longer.

The tunnel started about seventy yards out, its main artery
carving straight for the wall, groping forward at a rate of fifteen feet a day
through earth and stone. As it neared the base of the nearly fifty-foot-thick
city wall, it divided into several branches, each worming its way separately
underneath, sapping hollow chambers at intervals under the mammoth structure
above. The defenders knew it was there, but the incessant ground-shaking cannon
fire from the battery on the Dragon’s Shoulder made it impossible to
counter-tunnel against it. On July 15, Li Xiucheng led a blistering midnight
sortie out of the Taiping Gate with a few hundred cavalry, trying to storm the
stockade at the tunnel’s opening, but the Hunan forces drove them back into the
city. Three days later the tunnel was almost complete, and Zeng Guoquan gave
the order to load the chambers under the wall with explosives. This time,
desperate for a success after so many failures and fearing that the court had
lost its patience, he erred on the side of abundance. His men packed six
thousand cloth sacks under the wall, containing a total charge of twenty tons
of gunpowder.

They sprang the mine at noon on July 19. A battalion of four
hundred handpicked veterans crouched low to the ground just before the wall,
swords tightly gripped, steeling themselves to launch through the breach into
close-quarters combat. At a distance behind them on the slope of the Dragon’s
Shoulder, a thousand more were ready to follow. The lit fuse simmered and
worked its way slowly down into the pit, then disappeared into the dark mouth
of the tunnel. As time stretched out anxiously above ground—first five minutes
passed, then ten, then twenty, thirty—the fuse continued invisibly on its slow
path below, sparking along the rough floor of the mine and finally splitting
off like spider legs at the end to trace the last distance to its multiple
targets. Then, with a terrific shuddering of the earth, the massive wall went
up—and up—blasting outward and skyward in a thunderous convulsion of smoke and
stone that first obliterated the sky and then rained back down with a hailstorm
of granite rubble so deadly it crushed every man in the vanguard of four
hundred who crouched below. But when the black smoke cleared over their mangled
and broken bodies, it revealed a breach nearly two hundred feet wide, right
through the wall.

#

As the rumbling of the explosion echoed off into the
distance, the Hunan Army forces arrayed on the Dragon’s Shoulder gave up a
shout and started running down the hill, storming the breach with swords aloft,
clambering over the rubble and the bodies of their dead comrades to meet the
Taiping defenders head-on. The first troops to force their way through the
ranks of defenders made a beeline through the wide streets of the city, maps in
hand, straight for the palace of the Heavenly King. But Li Xiucheng had beaten
them there and spirited away Hong Xiucheng’s son the Young Monarch before they
could catch him. When the first Hunan troops arrived at the palace, they found
it eerily empty and quiet—for the Heavenly King was already dead. He had
perished more than six weeks before they broke through the wall, most likely of
disease, and was already securely buried in his robes of state when they got
there (Zeng Guofan would later have his body exhumed to make sure it really was
he). Confused, they reported to Zeng Guoquan that the Young Monarch had
committed suicide. Other units raced around the inside shell of the wall to
attack the gates from behind, driving out the rebel defenders and opening the
massive doors or raising ladders as the other Hunan forces poured into the city
from all directions.

In the chaos of occupation that evening, Li Xiucheng bid a
tearful good-bye to his family and led the Young Monarch with a small party on
horseback through the streets of Nanjing disguised as Hunan soldiers. With the
luminous glow of a setting sun directly behind them, they charged the breach in
the wall, broke through the line of surprised sentries, and vanished into the
gloaming.

When the Hunan troops couldn’t find Li Xiucheng, Zeng
Guoquan panicked. He wrongly believed that the Young Monarch was dead like his
father, but if Li Xiucheng had gone free, he knew he could re-form his army
elsewhere and continue his resistance. The long-fought conquest of Nanjing would
be for naught. The war would never end. But in the end they did catch him.
After charging the breach in the wall and evading the cavalry who chased them
into the night, Li Xiucheng gave the Young Monarch his best horse to help him
escape and was left with a broken nag that soon wore itself out and refused to
run any farther. He sent the child king ahead with the others, keeping only a
couple of horsemen in his own party, and took refuge in an abandoned temple on
a hillside twelve miles to the south of Nanjing.

The small rebel band had no supplies and no plan. A group of
local peasants eventually discovered them there, and when they realized who Li
Xiucheng was, they wept and knelt on the ground before him. They begged him to
shave his head so he wouldn’t be caught and tried to find a place to hide him.
But there were others in their community who figured out who this strange
visitor was and saw riches to be had for turning him in. Two of them
(“scoundrels,” he called them) captured him and turned him over to Zeng
Guoquan’s forces on July 22, just three days after his escape.

The whereabouts of the Young Monarch were unknown, but Zeng
Guoquan finally had the Loyal King in hand. He was the most coveted prisoner of
all, the last great military commander of the rebels. Without his leadership,
bands of Taiping soldiers might continue to fight and survive and even carve
out small kingdoms for themselves in remote corners of the empire, but they
could never conjure the momentum they had enjoyed under his leadership. With
his capture, the war was effectively finished.

The vaunted discipline of the Hunan Army broke down
completely when Nanjing fell. The militia soldiers were unpaid and barely fed,
and with this total victory in their final objective—after years of bitter
campaign away from their families and their homes—they broke ranks and laid
waste to the rebel capital in an orgy of uncontrolled looting. Zeng Guoquan
issued proclamations forbidding his troops to murder civilians or kidnap women,
but the commanders paid no attention (and in some cases even helped) as their
soldiers ran amok. The rebels who stood against them were butchered in the
streets, while younger women were dragged off and the remaining able-bodied men
were forced into service as porters to carry away huge loads of loot from the
city—gold, silver, silks, furs, jade. Even some of Zeng Guoquan’s own aides who
entered the city to investigate the looting were robbed and beaten by roving
gangs of Hunan soldiers. First the soldiers set fire to the palaces; then they
burned the homes. And then it was as if the whole city had gone up in flames. A
purplish red pall hung over the broken capital for days, until a heavy
rainstorm came pouring down on the afternoon of July 25 and finally washed the
city clean.

Zeng Guoquan’s secretary entered the city on July 26 and was
overwhelmed by what he found inside. All of the rebel males who were still
alive appeared to be carrying loads for the Hunan Army soldiers or helping them
dig up stashes of buried treasure. It looked to him as though they were being
set free afterward or at least escaping the city. But not the others. The
elderly had been slaughtered with abandon. So had the sick and the infirm, who
couldn’t serve as forced labor. Most of the dead bodies he saw lying along the
streets were those of old people, but there were countless children as well.
“Children and toddlers,” he wrote in his diary, “some not even two years old,
had been hacked up or run through just for sport.” As far as he could tell,
there wasn’t a single woman left in the city under forty years old. The living
prostrated themselves on the ground. They showed signs of mutilation by
soldiers who had tortured them to reveal the locations of hidden loot.
“Sometimes they had ten or twelve cuts on them,” he wrote, “sometimes several
times that. The sound of their weeping and moaning carried into the distance
all around.”

There was no question in his mind that all of this was the
work of his own army. He listed in his diary the names of several of Zeng
Guoquan’s commanders he knew had taken part in the massacre and looting,
writing in fury, “How can they face their general? How can they face the
emperor? How can they face Heaven and Earth? How can they face themselves?” An
unbreathable stench filled the air from the bodies that rotted in the streets,
and Zeng Guoquan issued feeble orders that the battalions should at least drag
corpses to the side of the road and cover them with rubble, so there would
still be an open path for travel through the city.

Little is known of what happened to the thousands of young
women who were taken from Nanjing, but one, at least, managed to leave a record
of what happened to her after the city fell. Her name was Huang Shuhua, and she
was sixteen years old. The soldiers came, she said, and “They killed my two
older brothers in the courtyard, then they went searching through the rooms of
the house. One of the strong ones captured me and carried me out. My little
brother tugged on his clothing, my mother threw herself down before him,
weeping. He shouted angrily, ‘All rebel followers will be killed, no
pardons—those are the general’s orders!’ Then he murdered my mother and my
little brother. My eldest brother’s wife came out, and he killed her too. Then
he dragged me away, so I don’t know what became of my other elder brother’s
wife. I was grief-stricken, sobbing and cursing at him, begging him to kill me
quickly. But he only laughed at me. ‘You, I love,’ he said. ‘You, I will not
kill.’ ”

The soldier tied her up and put her on a boat to take her
back home with him to Hunan. He was from Zeng Guofan’s home county of
Xiangxiang, the very place where Zeng’s army—indeed, his whole campaign to
bring order back to the empire—had originated. And now, after all those years,
the forces Zeng Guofan had conjured were finally coming home with their legacy.
At the soldier’s village, the young woman would face the horror of spending the
rest of her life as the wife of the man who had murdered her entire family. She
wrote down her story on two slips of paper one evening while they were still
traveling, as they stopped at an inn for the night. One slip of paper she hid
on her body; the other she pasted to the wall of the inn. Then she somehow
found the wherewithal to kill him, before she hanged herself.

Zeng Guofan finally took possession of Nanjing when he
arrived from Anqing on July 28, nine days after his brother’s forces breached
the wall. Despite the loss of control over their troops, for the upper echelons
of his army it was still a time for celebrations and the savoring of victory.
Officers under his brother took him around the perimeter of the wall in a sedan
chair, telling him tales of battles fought and won and showing him scenes of
destruction that still leached their smoldering vapors into the air. The
evenings were reserved for poetry and plays, for wine and song, for the sublime
intermarriage of remembrance and forgetting. Operas were performed before grand
banquets of more than a hundred tables, crammed with officers, secretaries, and
advisers. And soon the honors would pour forth from the dynastic government,
once the news of Zeng Guofan’s victory reached them in Beijing, and the
imperial capital went silent, and the empress dowager wept.

But the empress dowager was far away; within Nanjing, it was
the end of his war, not the dynasty’s. Zeng Guofan seeded his reports on the
fall of Nanjing with fabrications, claiming that a hundred thousand rebel
soldiers had been killed in the fighting, inflating the glory of his family and
his army, masking their looting and atrocities against civilians. He kept
careful control over what the court would know. To that end, from the day he
arrived in Nanjing he took over the interrogation of Li Xiucheng for himself.
The Hunan Army commanders had already secured a long confession from Li
Xiucheng in the week since he had been captured—pages upon pages detailing his
origins and the history of the war and explaining the tactical decisions he had
made, many of which they still did not understand. The honor of beginning the
questioning had fallen to Guoquan, who had taken to the job with undisguised
relish; his primary tools were an awl and a knife, and he managed to cut a
piece out of Li Xiucheng’s arm before the others made him slow down.

When Zeng Guofan took over the interrogations on July 28, at
last the two hoary, weather-beaten commanders in chief of the civil war faced
each other in person for the first time: square-shouldered Zeng Guofan on the
one side, the weary-eyed scholar, his long beard turning gray; wiry,
bespectacled Li Xiucheng on the other, the charcoal maker who had risen to
command the armies of a nation. It would be no Appomattox moment, however.
There was no wistful air of regret and respect between equals. For the defeated,
it was no prelude to reconciliation, to twilight years on a rolling plantation.
This war ended not in surrender but in annihilation. Zeng Guofan would spend
long hours of the following evenings editing his counterpart’s
fifty-thousand-word confession, striking out passages that didn’t paint his own
army in a good light and having it copied and bound with thread for submission
to the imperial government, before casually ordering Li Xiucheng’s execution—in
spite of orders he knew were coming from Beijing, that the rebel general be
sent to the Qing capital alive.

#

The last any foreigner saw of Hong Rengan was in Huzhou just
before the fall of Nanjing. A mercenary named Patrick Nellis was there, a crew
member from Sherard Osborn’s fleet who had been crimped into the rebel service
and was helping to defend the city. It was early in July, and the kingdom was
collapsing all around, though the walls of Huzhou still held for the moment.
Hong Rengan and another king spoke from a platform to an assembly in one of the
courtyards. The lectures seemed to go on for hours. Nellis didn’t speak any
Chinese, so he couldn’t understand much, just the names of a few places he
recognized: Suzhou. Hangzhou. They were losing. Jiangxi. They were going to
escape. After the speeches were over, Hong Rengan descended from the platform
and came over to him.

He spoke to Nellis in English, but his diction was slow and
halting from lack of use. The old fluency was gone. It had, after all, been a
long time since any of the missionaries had come to visit him at his palace.
And it had been a long time since he had entertained his foreign friends with
dinners of steak and wine, serenading them with hymns sung in English. It had
been a long time since he had reminisced with them about glad days past in the
emerald beauty of Hong Kong, or enchanted them with his brilliant hopes for the
future of the kingdom. That world was gone now. His hopes had all withered on
the vine.

He asked Nellis what his nationality was.

“An Englishman,” Nellis replied.

“I have never met a good foreigner,” said Hong Rengan.

They finally caught up with him in early October. After Li
Xiucheng’s capture in July, Hong Rengan left Huzhou to take over the protection
of the Young Monarch. Along with a ragtag escort of soldiers and horsemen, they
survived for nearly three months, making it all the way down to the southern
part of Jiangxi province, more than four hundred miles southwest of Nanjing and
only a hundred and fifty miles from the Meiling Pass, over which he had first
come from the south. In their search for a place of safety they were, by the
time the imperials scouted out their trail, closer to Canton and Hong Kong than
to the fallen capital they had left behind. Their flight ended in a remote,
mountainous country fifteen miles northeast of a town known as Stone Wall. Hong
Rengan was bringing up the rear of the ragged procession. The horses and men
were exhausted, so they stopped to make camp for the night. Instinct told him
to continue on through the darkness along the narrow rural paths, but they had
no local guide who could show them the way. The attack came near midnight,
without warning. A sentry must have fallen asleep at his post. The imperial
soldiers were upon them before they could put on their armor or mount up their
horses. Hong Rengan fled on foot into the night, alone, wildly running through
the trees and into the dark mountains. But he came in the end to a place where
the hills pressed together from both sides, and there was no passage to go
forward. There was no longer a path behind him either.