God's Chinese Son (50 page)

There are many old people and children but no fighting troops. There are many court officials and civil officials, many people who expend food and supplies. ... The capital cannot be defended. It is closely besieged by Gen­eral Zeng's troops, with deep moats and strong forts. There is no grain or fodder in the city, and no relief comes from outside. We should give up the city and go elsewhere."
⁶

Hong's answer to General Li is at once evasive and sublimely confident:

I have received the sacred command of God, the sacred command of the Heavenly Brother Jesus, to come down into the world to become the only true Sovereign of the myriad countries under Heaven. Why should I fear anything? There is no need for you to petition and no need for you to take charge of the administration. You can do as you like; remain in the capital or go away. If you do not serve in [my] invincible Kingdom there are those who will. You say that there are no troops; but my Heavenly soldiers are as limitless as water. Why should I fear the demon Zeng? You are afraid of death and so you may well die. State matters are nothing to do with you.
⁷

General Li, though he remains loyal to the Heavenly King, has grown suspicious of this kind of language. It seems to him to have disturbing connotations in the military sphere, and to exacerbate a problem that has been growing steadily ever since Hong Xiuquan ordered his troops and followers to drop the name Taiping, and instead to use the one word "Heavenly," to pay proper homage to God the Father. As Li later phrases his unease:

The Heavenly King always used heavenly words to admonish people. We, his officials, did not dare to challenge him, but let him give what names he wanted. Calling them "Heavenly Dynasty, Heavenly Army, Heavenly Officials, Heavenly People, Heavenly Commanders, Heavenly Soldiers and Royal Troops" made them all into his personal troops and stopped us from calling them our troops. Anyone who spoke of "my troops" or "my soldiers" would be reprimanded thus: "You have treacherous intentions! This is the Heavenly Army; there are Heavenly Officials, Heavenly Troops, and this is the Heavenly Kingdom. How can they be your troops?" If one did not call them "Heavenly Soldiers, Heavenly Kingdom and Heavenly Officials" he was afraid that people were going to take his Kingdom from him.
⁸

There are still enormous Taiping armies campaigning south of the Heavenly Capital, but slowly the Qing drive wedges of their own forces between those troops and the Heavenly King. Hong Rengan, the Shield King, is sent out in early 1864 on a mission to the region around Lake Tai, to gather supplies and "urge upon the troops the necessity of hastening to the relief of the capital," but he finds few willing to follow him, despite his kingly rank and fame: "the Heavenly Troops were fearful of the lack of provisions, and the greater part of them would not respond to the call."
⁹
By spring, the Qing troops are massed around Nanjing in such force that Hong Rengan is unable to return to his Heavenly King, and has to make his own base in the city of Huzhou, south of the lake, two hundred miles from Nanjing."
¹⁰

Li Xiucheng makes yet another bold foray out of the Heavenly Capital in January 1864, and tries to reopen a route for supplies by breaking the Qing siege of the grain distribution center at Changzhou." Failing in that design, he develops a new strategic plan, ordering four route armies under separate Taiping commanders to move south into Jiangxi province and obtain grain supplies there. Though these armies fight effectively enough to cause a diversion to the Qing, they cannot stop the steady forward advance of Zeng Guoquan, backed by foreign forces with their armored and shallow-draft steamships, from slowly driving the Taiping out of city after city. The last large grain shipment gathered by the Taiping forag­ers—more than thirty thousand pounds in weight—is seized by Qing forces within sight of the Heavenly Capital's walls in late February 1864, and in the next three months the remaining supply depots that might have been able to help Nanjing are lost in turn.
¹²

One by one, the Qing armies have captured every strategic hill around Nanjing, and despite fiercely fought sorties by Li and other Taiping gen­erals, the hills cannot be recaptured. The Qing have also completely surrounded Nanjing with a double line of breastworks, which snake across the country, three hundred yards apart. The breastworks are bolstered by about 120 forts, spaced at quarter- to half-mile intervals, each fort garri­soned with its own force of Qing troops." No one can now leave Nanjing, save for occasional Taiping soldiers scavenging for edible weeds, who are let down from the city walls on ropes to make their meager harvest, often under the indifferent eyes of the Qing besiegers, or small groups of fugi­tives from the city, who risk their lives to flee across the no-man's land to the shelter that—as a propaganda gesture—has been promised by Zeng Guoquan to women and children who manage to escape. With the desper­ation of the poor who tyrannize the poor, gangs inside the city watch at the city's gates, not to stop but to rob those who are trying to flee of their possessions, before releasing them to their uncertain fate.
¹⁴
The women who make it through the lines are placed in special stockades by the Qing commanders, where, Gordon observes, the "country people ... take as wives any who so desired."
¹⁵

No one can come or go by river either, for not only are the flats between the city walls and the river patrolled and guarded, but all foreign mer­chants have been forbidden by their governments to send supplies by boat to the beleaguered city, and only a handful of the most reckless foreigners risk the heavily armed Qing patrols to bring in supplies of food. Running in loads of rice, cooking oil, and charcoal to Nanjing from either Hankou or Shanghai is now as profitable as selling guns and ammunition for the latest generation of Western drifters. A foreign ship that is known to have made such runs successfully becomes in turn a sure mark for other water- borne Western desperadoes, who might board the vessel, kill the crew, and take the accumulated piles of silver.
¹⁶

Edging ever closer to the capital's huge walls, much of the war moves underground, as the Qing commander orders his men to dig tunnel after tunnel, while the Taiping countertunnel in their turn, filling the Qing tunnels with water and sewage, or battling hand to hand, only to be driven out in turn by clouds of poisonous smoke forced into the tunnels' openings by Qing troops with bellows. By the late spring of 1864, over thirty tunnels have been started or are near completion. Some are on a truly massive scale, as observed by Charles Gordon on a visit to the Qing defensive perimeter:

We went down to the mines and found a gallery driven a hundred and fifty yards fifteen feet below the ground, four to five feet wide and about seven feet high; it then divided into branches twenty yards from the wall, and had small shafts at intervals for ventilation. The gallery was framed with wooden supports and brushwood, some fifteen feet being driven each day.
¹⁷

The longer tunnels can be easily seen by Taiping observers on the city walls, either because the vegetation above them dies, or because there is no way for the Qing to hide the excavated earth. But the Qing drive their encircling earthworks ever nearer to the walls, closing in to a distance of less than thirty yards in some places, from where they can direct a murder­ous fire from massed cannon at any Taiping defenders who try to interrupt the tunnelers' work.
¹⁸

In the spring of 1864 General Li Xiucheng, according to his own account, tells Hong Xiuquan, "There is no food in the whole city and many men and women are dying. I request a directive as to what should be done to put the people's mind at ease." But starvation stirs no fears in the Heavenly King. He has read the sixteenth chapter of Exodus with care, and knows God will preserve the Taiping faithful, just as He pre­served the children of Israel for forty years in the wilderness of Sinai, by scattering manna on the ground amidst the dew each morning. Since at least 1862, Hong has been ordering his subjects to emulate the children of Israel and store ten bushels of manna every year to see them through their times of trouble. Though it is not exactly clear what manna is—the Bible says it is small and white, with a scent of coriander and a taste like honey (Exodus 16:31)—the two phrases used in the Chinese Taiping Bible to describe it are
Tianlu
and
Ganlu,
one of which means simply "sweetened dew" and the other a kind of medicinal herb.
^19;
Hong Xiuquan replies to Li, "Everyone in the city should eat manna. This will keep them alive," and issues the order: "Bring some here, and after preparing it I shall partake of some first." When no one knows how to respond to this com­mand, "the Sovereign himself," in the words of General Li, "in the open spaces of his palace, collected all sorts of weeds, which he made into a lump and sent out of the palace, demanding that everyone do likewise, without defaulting. He issued an edict ordering the people to act accord­ingly and everyone would have enough to eat."
²⁰
Thereupon the Heavenly King begins to eat the clotted weeds within his palace.

Hong Xiuquan falls ill in April 1864, a few months after his fiftieth birthday. He rallies in May, but soon is sick again. The nature of the sickness is not clear. General Li Xiucheng, not surprisingly, says it comes from "eating manna" and because "when this man was ill he would not take remedies." His cousin Hong Rengan says it was "a lingering illness of twenty days." His son Tiangui Fu merely says his father "succumbed to sickness."
²¹
In a decree of May 30, Hong Xiuquan—or someone in his name—announces that the time has come for him to visit Heaven and request that his Heavenly Father and Heavenly Elder Brother send a celestial army to defend the capital.
²²

There is no great fanfare at Hong's death, which comes quietly on June 1, 1864. He is wrapped in a simple shroud of yellow silk by one of the palace women and buried in the bare ground, as he has taught the Taiping to do with their dead. No coffins are needed when one will rise so soon to Heaven. Hong indeed has long before ordered that coffins be aban­doned and that the word for "death" be tabooed amongst his followers, who should use instead the phrase "ascend to Heaven" or "find one's happiness."
²³

Five days after his father's death Hong's son, the Young Monarch, Tiangui Fu, takes his seat upon his father's throne; his Taiping ministers, having first prayed to God, then pay homage to him as their new king. While the Qing carefully plan their final assault, the Young Monarch has his six-week reign. As he recalls, "Court matters were under the control of the Shield King, and military affairs in the hands of the Loyal King. All decrees which were issued were drawn up by [these two], and I was directed to subscribe my name to them."
²⁴
Yet given Shield King Hong Rengan's continuing absence in Huzhou, to the south, the Young Mon­arch is essentially in the hands of his Loyal King, Li Xiucheng. "After the Young Sovereign came to the throne," says Li, "there was no grain for the soldiers, and there was chaos in the armies. ... The Sovereign was young and had no ability to make decisions," and as a result "no one, civil or military, in the capital, could think of a solution."
²¹

It is noon on July 19, 1864, when the Qing general Zeng Guoquan gives the signal to fire the explosives in the tunnels under a section of the eastern wall of Nanjing. The force of the colossal explosion hurls sixty yards of the massive fabric into the air. The Qing troops pouring through the breach are checked briefly by the Taiping, but soon all is chaos, retreat, and slaughter. At first the Young Monarch stands bewildered in his palace, while his four young wives cling to him to stop him ixom fleeing. But breaking away from them he runs through the crowds with his two young brothers to the Loyal King's palace. With what horses they can muster, and bodyguards clustered around them, the four try to escape the city through different gates in turn, but are always turned back. Hiding out for a time in an abandoned temple on the western side of the city, perched on a hill from which they can see the movements of the Qing forces within the town, the members of the Taiping royal party don Qing army uniforms prepared for this emergency; and seizing a moment in the gath­ering darkness when the Qing forces are fully occupied with rape and looting, or with setting fires to cover up the looting that has already taken place, they break through a gap in the wall near the eastern gate and race for safety. In the chaos the two young brothers of Tiangui Fu are left behind, and meet their deaths among the ten to twenty thousand victims of the night.
²⁶

As the rest of the group rides rapidly to the south, away from the burning city, the horse of the Loyal King, Li Xiucheng, collapses, and the others gallop on without him. Exhausted and bewildered, Li climbs a hill at dawn and shelters in an abandoned temple, where he falls asleep. He wakes to find that peasants from a nearby village have robbed him of his hidden valuables; soon after, others, angry at his inability to buy them off, turn him over to the Qing. He is interrogated, writes a lengthy confession, and is executed. Before he dies, he begs the senior Qing officials to stop the slaughter in Nanjing, and to spare the old Taiping veterans from