The History of China - #337 - Taiping 14: Tears Enough to Swell the River

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

Three months after the biggest win of his life, Zeng Guofan tries to drown himself.Again.His fleet gets ambushed, split in half, & set ablaze by a 23-year-old nobody bothered to worry about – right up until he became the guy everybody worried about. The reward for surviving all that? A "promotion" in-name only... with no province, no funds, no friends, and a bureaucracy that somehow finds the – time mid-civil-war – to mock him personally. He loses his flagship, his files, his seal of command, and even a friend. And all the while, a much bigger disaster is assembling itself in Nanjing, completely without his input...Time Period Covered:Dec. 1854–Apr. 1856 CE Major Historical Figures:Taiping Heavenly Kingdom:Yang Xiuqing, the East King [c. 1821–1856]Qin Rigang, the Yan King [1821–1856]Shi Dakai, the Wing King [1831–1863]Lin Qirong, Taiping commander of JiujiangLuo Dagang, Taiping commander of Meijiazhou and Hukou Qing Dynasty:The Xianfeng Emperor (Aisin-Gioro Yizhu) [r. 1850–1861]Zeng Guofan, founder of the Xiang Army [1811–1872]Taqibu, Manchu commander of the Xiang Army's land forces [d. 1855]Peng Yulin, co-founder of the Xiang Army's naval forces [1816–1890]Hu Linyi, Xiang Army commander, later Governor of HubeiChen Qimai, Governor of JiangxiTao Enpei, Governor of Hubei [d. 1855]Zuo Zongtang [1812–1885] Major Sources Cited:Michael, Franz, and Chang Chung-li. The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents, Vol. I.Platt, Stephen R. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom.Spence, Jonathan D. God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan.Kuhn, Philip A. "The Taiping Rebellion." The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 10. Audio Backing Courtesy of:TabletopAudioCLS Productions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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and supports life-saving cancer research at the Princess Margaret. Feel free to buy your payday for life ticket today. Raffle number 155-214. Please play responsibly. And welcome to the history of China. Episode 337, tears enough to swell the river. To carry out a fire attack, one must have the means. The materials must be prepared long beforehand.

Sunza, the art of war, attack by fire. The soldiers starved and the generals were spent. We were penned in like prisoners, doubted by all and insulted by the crowd. Tears enough accumulated to swell the river. And still, we could not take that one pass. What bitterness! Zeng Guo Fan, recalling Jiangxi, Fire moves differently on a lake than it does on a river.

A river carries flame downstream and away, hands it off to the current like a piece of business it simply doesn't want. A lake keeps it. Poyang, in the winter months, held its fires close to the surface and let them drift wherever the wind decided, circling back sometimes on the very ships that had lit them. And on the nights this story is about, that geography mattered more than anyone on the water had the leisure to yet consider. It likely would not have been lost on Zungu Afan, if he'd had a moment to think about it,

that men had burned each other alive on the same water before, nearly 500 years before, in fact, in the late summer of 1363, when a monk-turned-warlord named Zhu Yuan Zhang met a much larger fleet under a rival named Cheng Yo Liang on this same lake, and burned it, and founded a dynasty on the ashes of it. Zung was not that February

in much of a position to appreciate that particular historical resonance. Instead, he was, was busy on the water itself. Or he was on a horse, spurring it towards the enemy lines, however he best could. The record cannot agree on the method. It agrees only on the intent, and on the fact that for the second time in ten months, the only thing standing between Zengue Afan and the end of his story was somebody else's hands. Three months earlier at Tian Jhajan, Zeng Guafan had broken. in an iron chain, burned some four to five thousand enemy ships, and driven the Taiping

westward expedition into a headlong retreat, the largest victory of his career thus far, and by any reasonable measure, a decisive one. The court's response to this had been rather mixed. First it had handed him the acting governorship of Hubert, only to take it back within a week, replacing it with a vice presidency of the board of war, a title with no province, or legal standing to raise taxes or command loyalty from a single green standard officer outside of his own Hunani's command structure. So he had an army. He just didn't have a place to put it.

He did, therefore, the only thing a man in his position could do, which was just keep fighting, and hope that enough victories eventually would become impossible for Beijing to keep on discounting. Chin Rhe Gong's beaten army had fallen back from Tianzha-jun towards Jiaoang, and Zeng followed the retreat downriver into Jiangxi with something like 15,000 men, expecting, not unreasonably, given the fall he'd just watched the Taiping take, that Zhugeang would break the way Wu Tong and Tian Jiajun had broken before. He would be in for quite the surprise.

Whatever was left of Chin Zhagang's column passed straight through the city without even stopping. Because Zhugeang already had a garrison commander, and he'd been sitting there for the better part of a year, making the place difficult to take. His name was Lin Chirang, a Guangxi man, one of the old Jientian faithful, unremarkable by most accounts until he was handed this specific city to hold, at which point he turned out to be one of the most stubborn defensive commanders in the entire Taipei army. He'd spent 1854 building gun platforms into the walls and drilling a garrison that, by the time Zung's army arrived outside of them in early December,

knew exactly how to defend its city. What was to come wasn't so much a battle as it was an ordeal, and it lasted the better part of two months. Commander Tachibu threw his infantry at the walls in column after column, four approaches at once, yet the columns came back thinner each time, cut apart by artillery firing from prepared platforms, and by musketry that never seemed to run.

run short on powder. Lin Chi Rong never gave Zheng's army the decisive engagement that it wanted. Instead, he wore it down, guns answering guns from a distance, matchlocks picking off anyone who got close, and at night, over and over, small raiding parties working the edges of the Xiong army camp with fire rockets, drums, and gongs. Enough noise and light to make every century think the assault had finally come, while never quite delivering it. It was enough to unnerve one. Ultimately, it costs Zung's men sleep more than it cost them any ground. An army that expects an attack every night for weeks

starts to fray from exhaustion alone, whether the actual attack ever lands or not. And by January, his men were worn thin in a way that no single afternoon of fighting could have possibly produced. He'd thrown 15,000 men against those walls, yet gotten nothing for it, No dramatic turning point, just weeks of attrition against a position that would not give, casualties mounting for ground that never actually changed hands. It was, by the standards Zeng had set for himself at Tian Jha Zhen, an absolute embarrassment. It would also turn out, compared to what was coming, to be the easy part of the campaign.

Jiu Zhang was the easy part because Jiu Zhang was a wall. and walls, whatever else they might be, or at least honest about what they are. They tell you plainly what they'll cost to take and let you decide whether or not you want to pay it. Zung decided that he couldn't, not head on, not yet, and shifted instead to the outworks. 25 kilometers down river, the Yangza let go of its water into the vast, shallow sprawl that was Poyang Lake, through a single narrow throat. And on either side of that throat sat the two positions that that made Zhou Zhang more than just an isolated city, the town of Huko on the eastern bank,

and the fortified camp at Mejiazhou across the water from it. Take those, the thinking ran, and Jiu Zhang would be cut off from the lake, from Jiangxi, from everything, but its own walls. And Zung's fleet, the weapon that had actually won Tian Jhajan, could do the cutting. He sent Lo Zanan and Hu Lian Yi, with the land forces to work.

work on Mejiazhou and brought his own war junks to anchor off the mouth of the lake in the first days of January. Mejja Zhou was held by Luo Da Gang, another of the Taiping movement's originals. The old pirate-turned-revolutionary, planted in this theater less because the East King needed the ground militarily, and more because Yang Xiu-Ching needed men he trusted personally holding the ground that mattered. And the whole position, Zhou Jiang, Meja-zo, Hu-Koh, and the raft forts'-floated. floating in the lake mouth between them, all answered to a single commander, who had installed

himself at Huko itself and who was, at that moment, the most underestimated man in the entire war. Zeng Guo Fan did not, at this point, think very much at all of Shedakai. The intelligence compilation his staff relied on for assessing the enemy's leadership, the great Rokes Gallery his secretariat had been assembling all year, had remarkably little to say about the man. And what it did say concerned administration, not war. It wasn't an unreasonable file to have compiled on paper. Shidakai was 23 that winter, younger than any of the other Taiping kings. Orphaned as a boy and running his whole family's

affairs before most boys' age had finished growing. A man with a local reputation for even-handedness, rather than the kind of ferocity that generates alarming dispatches. He spent much of the previous two years not fighting at all, but instead administering Anhui from the city of Aang Ching. Lightning taxes, cleaning out corruption, building the kind of competence that had actually persuaded the leadership back in Nanjing to walk back some of its more theoretical economic doctrines in favor of things that actually worked on the ground. None of this sounded like a man about to hand the most celebrated general in the empire the worst defeat of his life. But the file had missed something, and it had missed it because that something

was happening in shipyards rather than on battlefields. Shidakai had spent the autumn of 1854, watching the Xiang army's navy take apart every water force the Taiping had put in front of it, and he had drawn the obvious conclusion that nobody else in the Heavenly Kingdom's leadership seemed willing to act on. The war on the Yangza would be won by whoever held. the water. And the Taiping's floating mob of commandeered junks and cargo scows was not really a navy and never would be. So starting in November, he had begun building one. Real gunboats, laid down in Aang Qing, copied from captured Shang army designs down to the fittings, crewed by men who had extensively drilled in their operation. None of that had made it into

defiled Zung's staff was working up. He was about to find out what had. That was the man waiting at Hukho. The file was about to be revised. And that revision began on the night of January 8th, and it began with fire. Lu Raghang had no illusions about meeting the Shang Fleet gun for gun. On that arithmetic, the typing still lost every time. So, he didn't do that.

Instead, that night, he sent out more than a hundred small, small boats, lashed together in threes and fives, packed with straw and powder and oil, lit and loosed downstream onto the anchorage, while a thousand or more men on both banks screamed and beat gongs and arced fire arrows and fireballs out over the water. The shang crews fended the burning rafts off with bamboo poles and counted themselves victorious. And they were, in the sense that no ship burned that night. But then it happened again. And again, not the same attack, but some variation on it, night upon night, the boats or the rockets,

or sometimes just the noise, until the fleet, like the army up at Jiaojiang, was standing to arms every night and sleeping poorly through every day. Two forces, about 30 kilometers apart, being kept awake by the same obnoxious methodology. It does not appear to have struck anyone on the Qing side yet that this was, coordination rather than coincidence. Between the fire raft nights, the fleet ground forward against the lake mouth's fixed positions. And these were something new as well. The Taiping had moored enormous wooden rafts across the channel, timber platforms built up

with palisade walls and watch towers, in effect floating castles in the open water, mounting guns and garrisoned in strength, anchored to fortified batteries on both shores. For three weeks, the throat of Poyang Lake held. Then on January 23rd, the Shang forces attacked everything at once. Lozanan and Huleni against the Mejaja Jiao camp by land, the fleet against the rafts by water. And the land attack failed bloodily, but the fleet's gunnery finally told. The great rafts burned, and the mouth of the lake stood open. That same night, and here is where you can watch almost hour by hour the moment this campaign changes hands,

the defenders took several large junks, filled them with sand and stone, towed them out into the channel, and then sank them across it. By morning, the throat of the lake was a barricade of drowned hulls, with exactly one gap left open near the western shore, wide enough for boats to pass in single file, barred with a great cable of plated bamboo. To the Sean commanders, this read as desperation. The enemy, having lost its forts, was now corking itself into the lake. It does not seem to have occurred to anyone that a cork works in both directions. On January 29, the fleet attacked the gap. A battalion officer named Xiaouji San, a subordinate of the Navy's architect, Pung Yulin, and, by every account that survives him, hungry for exactly the kind of decisive stroke that had eluded the army all winter, led the light squadron against the

cable, Sampons and light gunboats, the fleet's fast teeth, some 120 vessels carrying 2,000 of its best fighting sailors. They cut the cable, and then they poured through. and on the far side, the water opened invitingly into the lake, and the Taiping ships stationed there gave ground rather than fight. As such, Xia Jai San did what any eager young officer would do with such an opening. He took it. The squadron ran deep into Poyang, burning as it went, 80 or more Taiping vessels destroyed in the first rush alone,

and pressed on under sail past Dagu Tang, kilometers from the mouth, chasing a fight that kept refusing to fully materialize. It was a door that had been left propped open on purpose. Behind them, Shed Akai's men closed it. More stone-laden holes into the gap, and floating bridges thrown across the channel and then packed with earth, sealing the narrow throat, where five centuries before, Zhu Yuan Zhang had performed exactly this amputation against Chen Yō Liang, locked his enemy's fleet inside this same lake, against this same shore, and let fire and hunger

do the rest, until Chun died with an arrow through the eye trying to force this same passage back out of the river. I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me. Whether anyone in Shedakai's command tent had that precedent consciously in mind, the sources don't say. In any case, the geography who remembers it for them. The Shung Army Fleet, without anyone in its command quite grasping the shape of it yet, had been cut cleanly in half.

The fast, lightly armed half, was trapped inside the lake. The slow, heavily armed half, the long dragons and fast crabs, the floating gun platforms and grain barges that carried the fleet's real weight, sat exposed on the river. And those kind of ships were not built to fight alone. They were built to be screened. by exactly the 120 boats now sitting on the wrong side of the sealed door. Zeng's own account put the outer fleet's condition in five words that really sum it up.

Rue Niao Chu Yi, Ruchong Chiu Zhu, like a bird stripped of its wings, like an insect stripped of its legs. End quote. Shidakai did not give this little bird time to understand what had happened to it. That same night, hours after the cable was cut, 30 or 40 small Taiping rowboats came down on the heavy ships at their Bali Jiang anchorage, in the dark, throwing fire. Against a screened fleet, such an action would have been suicide. Against this one, it was more of a harvest. More than 40 Shang army vessels burned before the survivors

could claw their way back upstream, falling back past Jiao to shelter at Guam Paija, west of the city, to lick their wounds, count their losses, and wait for dawn, as they tried to understand how a war they'd been winning for six months had just inverted itself in a single night. They would have in total 13 days to think about it, and the thinking didn't help. Because the fundamental arithmetic could not be thought away. The heavy ships could not fight without the light ones. The light ones were sealed on the lake, and every night was now an opportunity for the lurking Taiping. The second blow came at Guampaija itself on the night of February 11th, or possibly the early hours of the 12th.

The sources kind of split on which side of midnight to place it. And there's no way to know whether that's a real discrepancy or just two different clocks disagreeing about when the single continuous action began. whichever hour it was, it was dark. And it came the way everything now came. Dozens of small boats, low and fast, converging out of the night from more directions than a crippled fleet could answer. Throwing fire rockets and working spout tubes, which were pump-driven flame throwers, close-range weapons, which tells you how close they were really able to get here.

Sound, as many of you may know, carries rather strangely over open water and especially at night. And what the Anchorage would have heard first wasn't shouting, but the small boats themselves, oars, and then the hiss of the first rockets going up, and then faster than anyone could organize a response, fire finding pitch and canvas and dry timber all along the line at once. Throwing out enough light to blind as much as it illuminated. Black smoke rolling low across water too cold this time of year for anyone thrown overboard to last long in it. Firepower is a poor answer to boats that are already alongside you before anyone below decks understand that the attack had even started.

Among the ships taken that night was the largest one in the fleet. The flagship, Zeng Guelphan's own floating headquarters, captured, not burned, boarded with its captain and its sealkeeping officer killed at their posts, and every official document and piece of correspondence still aboard. His memorials, drafts, his private letters, the entire paper trail of a command that had, three months earlier, been the single most celebrated Qing force in the empire, now sitting intact in Shadakai's hands, to be read at leisure. Zung himself managed to get ashore, alone, by the accounts we have, scrambling into the

land camp while what remained of his navy fled upriver behind him. And then comes the part of the story that Zung's own staff had apparently learned by this point to watch out for. He did not write a memorial taking the blame the way that he had after Jingang. What exactly he did instead depends on which account you read. In one tradition, he went into the water, into the freezing February River for the second time in 10 months, and had to be hauled out by his subordinates yet again. In the other, he called for a horse, announcing his intention to lead the land forces against the enemy in person, which every man present understood to mean die at their head.

And it was two of his officers, Luo Zanan and Lio Rong, who stopped him, wrestled him down or blocked the horse or simply refused to let him carry it out. The record doesn't specify the mechanics, just the outcome. Later historians, it should be said, have wondered, allowed whether this second attempt carried a larger share of performance than the first. A man who genuinely means to drown does not usually fail at it twice with an audience present. Maybe. The distinction may matter less than it seems. Whether Zunquofan meant to die that night or meant to be seen willing to, the fact underneath it remains the same. A man who had built

an army to prove himself something other than what 13 years in the Hanlii's Academy had made him, standing now at the edge of a second catastrophe, and finding again, that the only thing between him and the end of the story was somebody else's hands on the reins. Hold on to those hands. We'll meet them once more before this episode's over. The Hulu original series Furious is coming to Disney Plus, starring Emmy Rossum. Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating serial killer. Both walk their own paths toward justice, and as their lives start to intertwine, the line between right and wrong begins to blur. Don't miss the three-episode premiere of the Hulu original series Furious on July 27th, only on Hulu on Disney Plus.

It was, in a strange way, the last time anyone underestimated Shadakai. The thin file on him didn't survive the night that made it obsolete. Zeng would later write plainly, quote, Among the rebel chiefs, Shi is the fiercest, and in beguiling the common people and magnifying his power, Shi is also the most cunning of them all. And quote.

Note what the second half of that verdict is actually about. Not tactics, not the trap at the lake mouth. No, what unsettled Zeng about Shed Akai, in the end, was the thing that the intelligence file had noticed, but misread as harmless. The man's ability to make people, the common people, the kind that an army swims through, he made them want him to win. Zuo Zhang, no admirer of rebels, put it, put it more bluntly yet, quote,

Known for cunning and ferocity, he has long held the hearts of the rebel masses. His talents and intelligence exceed all the others. And observing his conduct, he treats the winning of men's hearts and the seeking out of talent as urgent business, and does not much trouble himself with their heretical religion's crude doctrines. He is the rebel's true master, and the one I fear." End quote. A 23-year-old orphan who administered a province, like an accountant, had just outthought the most celebrated general in the empire, and there would be no more paperwork filed suggesting otherwise. Beijing didn't hear about any of that in a timely enough fashion to make use of it.

What Beijing heard, seven weeks later, was that Wu Chong had fallen, again. On April 3rd, the resurgent Western expedition rebuilt, reshipped, and rolling back downriver, one territory with the current at its back for the first time since Tianzhajan, all of it under Shidakai's overall direction, broke the forces of Hube governor, Tauan Pei, and took the city for the third time in this war. Tauan Pei did not survive the fall. As the walls went, he took his own life, the second Hubei governor this rebellion had killed at his post.

Six months of the Shung Army's most celebrated gains, undone in a stroke. After Hukho, it barely needed the emphasis. It read less like a defeat in its own right then like the last domino in a line that had begun tumbling long ago. And the court's answer to the Hubei problem, when it came, was its own small masterpiece of institutional spite. The governorship that had been placed in Zeng Guofan's hands and then snatched back within the week, too dangerous apparently in the hands of the Hunanese scholar who had

actually taken the city, would eventually be handed instead to Hulini, Zung's colleague, his collaborator at Meja-zo, a man of the same provincial network and the same essential project, who had spent the next year's grinding Wu-Tong back out of Taiping hands and building Hubei into the war's greatest supply base. It was, depending on the day you asked Zeng, either a vindication of everything he'd ever argued that this war could only be won by giving such men such provinces, or a demonstration made at his personal expense, that the court had understood the argument perfectly the first time and simply preferred to prove it with somebody who wasn't him. As for the 120 boats and 2,000 men sealed inside Poyang Lake, they did not come out.

Not that spring, not that year. The Inner Lake Squadron had become a strange, orphaned navy all its own, fighting its own war inside a hostile province, cut off from resupply, from the rest of the force that it had been the cutting edge of. And it was inside the lake, in the fighting that followed, that Xiaogie-san was killed by a cannon shot. The officer who chased the bait through the gap never came back out of the trap. The man sent to salvage what he'd left leaderless was the fleet's architect. Hung Yulin was in Hunan when the summons came, and by then there was no road left to answer it by. The Taiping tide in Jiangxi had cut the routes east, so Peng Yu Lin was forced to walk it.

700 Li, which is 350 kilometers or about 220 miles, on foot, alone, dressed in the rags of a wandering scholar begging his meals, straight through Taiping held country and every checkpoint on it, until he presented himself at Zhang's headquarters and took command of a trapped fleet. And then, in his slow, unglamorous, entirely characteristic way, he set about rebuilding it. Inside the lake, inside a province that wouldn't fund it, under a command structure that on paper gave Zung no legal authority to order any of this, until the orphaned little squadron had grown into a force of ten battalions and six hundred vessels. Poyang Lake's own navy. and increasingly the only thing keeping the Taiping from owning the water outright.

The two halves of the Shang fleet would not sail together again for two and a half years. And when they finally broke back out through the throat at Hukot and rejoined the river squadron, the shouts the crews sent up were recorded as rolling across the water like thunder. But that is getting well ahead of ourselves. because what came after Hu Kou, for Zhang Guo Fan, wasn't a battle. It was far worse than a battle, in fact, in that specific way that a slow humiliation is worse than a fast one, because at least the fast one is over quickly. He would spend the better part of the next year and a half stranded in Jiangxi province,

more than 10,000 men still nominally under his command, and no province willing to pay for a single one of them. It was Hunan all over again, the whole pre-Tien Jiajuno ordeal on replay, only without the excuse this time of not yet knowing what he could do. Jiangxi's governor, Chen Chimai, countermanded his troop movements, choked off his funds, and made obstruction into something close to his own personal provincial policy. When Zeng finally struck back the only way he could, going over everyone's heads with a memorial, to the throne itself in June of 1855. He won the exchange, but lost the war for it. The emperor read the indictment, flew into a rage,

and sacked Chen Chimai on the spot, at which point every official in Jiangxi understood, with perfect clarity, that the Scholar General in their midst was a man who could destroy their careers, but not protect them. And as such, they closed their ranks against him. The successor governed exactly as his predecessor had, and now the gloves were off.

They didn't just withhold support, they mocked him openly, methodically, in the language of the bureaucracy itself, which knows how to needle a man like Zenguo Fahn better than any street heckler possibly could. Documents stamped with his seal came back unrecognized. He had received no proper imperial commission, they said, and should stop styling himself as though he had. He had once been stripped of his rank, they said, and so had no standing to memorialize the throne at all. He had, they said, and you can almost hear the daggers behind the smiles here. Volunteered for this campaign, and a volunteer has no claim on official rations. His soldiers were cursed in the streets,

and on occasion even beaten. The war around him, meanwhile, went from bad to unthinkable. In August, Tatshibu, the bravest field commander the Shang army had, half a year now into a siege of Jojang that Lin Chirang simply refused to lose, collapsed in his camp beneath those unmoving walls, vomiting blood, and died. He was 39, and by the accounts that reached Zeng, he died less of any illness than of sheer accumulated impotent fury. Rage as a cause of death.

The 18th century physicians would have written it up without blinking, and in Tachibu's case, it's hard to argue that they would have been wrong. And then, that November, Shidakai came to Jiangxi in person. He crossed down out of Hubei with a force of perhaps 10,000. And what followed over the next four months was less a military campaign than a demonstration. A proof staged at the scale of a province of exactly the quality Zung's verdict would fix on. Seven prefectures and 47 counties fell within four months, and they did not all fall to assault. A remarkable number of them simply opened up.

Shedokai's army was disciplined, whereas the Shung army's reputation in Jiangxi was for forcible requisition and liberal administration of the lash. His administration was practical and light-handed, where the province's own officials were despised. And the local literati, the exam system gentry, the very class Zong's great proclamation had summoned to defend civilization itself against these god-worshipping barbarians, began in numbers of that horrified outside observers to come over. Men with degrees, with libraries, educated men. The force of 10,000 became, by the spring, a force approaching more like 100,000. And somewhere, in the correspondence of the loyalist gentry that season, appears the sentence that must have frightened Beijing more than any casualty figure.

Min Xin'en, Daeshir yichu. Quote, The people's hearts have all turned. The great cause is lost. End quote. In March of 1856, the last Xiang field force in the province,

under Zhou Feng Shan, was smashed at Zhang Shu, and the door to Nanchang stood open. Zhang Guo Fan moved into the provincial capital because there was nowhere else left to move, and the province closed around him. Of Jiangxi's 13 prefectures, eight were now gone,

and more than 50 counties along with them. The Shang army's writ ran to Nanchong and a shrinking handful of holdouts, and communication even with home now moved, when it moved at all, by courier, in cipher, in letters sealed inside balls of wax, and carried by men in disguise.

Some of them made it, others were caught. The ones that were caught were quickly killed. Zung, in the middle of it, set down what those months felt like from the inside in a line that even his enemies would later find hard to read unmoved. Quote, whenever I hear the spring winds furious howling, my heart wants to shatter. When I see the rebel sails driving upstream, I pace around the house and cannot stop." Decades afterward, Wang Kai Yun, compiling his history of the Xiang army, and no flatterer of Zheng Guo Fan, rather famously the opposite, read that same memorial late one night and

wrote in his own diary, styling, by the way, Zheng by his courtesy name, Di Gong, so that's who that is when it comes up. Quote, reading Di Gong's memorial tonight, I see how genuinely bitter his time in Zhang Shi was. it brings me to tears. The Chu Shi Biao itself, a famous document of the Three Kingdoms period of the third century, carries no such depth of sorrow.

End quote. And in April, the bill came due on the debt this episode opened with. Wu Tong, still in Taiping hands a year after its fall, had to be retaken. The man besieging it was Luo Zan. Zeng, encircled, and desperate, had written begging him to march east to Jiangxi's relief, and Lozanan had

started to come, but then turned back, because Hu Bei was collapsing at his rear, and there was no version of the war where both provinces could be saved by one column. He chose Hubei. He went back to the walls of Wu Tong, and in the first days of April, in a fog so thick the assault columns could not see the gates, the garrison sordied into the middle of his attack, and in the melee, Lozanan took a musket ball above the left eye. Somehow, he clung to life for three days. He was one of the two men, who, 14 months earlier, had put their hands on the reins of Zengue Fon's horse, and now he was gone, killed trying to win back the city whose loss had started this episode,

having chosen as his last significant act not to come to Zeng's rescue. There is no record of Zung holding the choice against him. There is ample record of what news of his death did to him. The men around him at Nan Chang describe him as weeping without restraint, for the friend, certainly, and perhaps also for the arithmetic, which now read, of the two hands on the reins, one remained. The Taiping, for their part, marked the season's harvest in their own peculiar idiom. A little song went around their camps that year, gleeful, counting off the Xiang army's fallen

commanders one nickname at a time. Poa loa, dao ta. The lo is smashed, the ta has toppled. A jingle for the deaths of Lozanan, Tachibu, and all the rest, sung in the territory where Zengu Fan's seal with. not recognized, and his soldiers were beaten in the streets. This was, in its own way, the Caps and Shoes argument turning back on the man who'd made it. Zung had written, in the proclamation that got him this army in the first place, that the

old order was a hierarchy as fixed and as necessary as the difference between a cap and a shoe, ruler above minister, each object in its proper place since the age of the sage kings. He had meant it as a description of what the Taiping were destroying. It applied just as well, it turned out, to what the Qing court was doing to him. The man who had won the largest battle of the war kept deliberately and indefinitely in a position with no place in it at all. Not a governor, not quite a general in any sense the bureaucracy would formally recognize. A vice president of a board that had no real authority over the war that he was the only one actually He'd said as much himself more than once in memorials listing the specific ways that he had no real power at all.

No real military command, since his men weren't regular troops, no governing authority, and so no way to raise money. No Imperial Commissioner's title to make provincial officials answer to him. The cap had been informed, with the full weight of ritual correctness, that it was, in fact, a shoe. Years later, he would compress the whole stranding into a single passage. And it's worth hearing entire, because it winds up being as close as this buttoned-up, careful, relentlessly self-editing man ever came to an unguarded cry. He wrote, quote, The soldiers starved, and the generals were spent.

We repent in like prisoners, doubted by everyone, insulted by the crowd. tears enough accumulated to swell the river, and still we could not take that one pass. What bitterness it was. End quote. Tears enough to swell the river. He was not a man who reached for images carelessly, and that he reached for this one is meaningful. The Anza, the great current this entire war was being fought along and for, the road that every army in this story rides down or claws its way back up, and Zeng Guo Fon, at the bottom

of his life, measuring his grief against its volume, and finding the comparison worth making. There would be no rescue inbound from Beijing. What loosened the noose around Nanchang, in the end, wasn't a victory of Zung's own, or a change of heart at court. It was an order from Nanjing in the spring of 1856. recalling Shidakai and his army east to join the great assault on the imperial siege camps outside the Taiping capital. The heavenly kingdom, at the very height of its power, was gathering its best commanders and its winning armies for the largest coordinated strike it would ever attempt. And what that stroke achieved, as well as what it cost, and what it set in motion in the

streets of Nanjing itself in the December dark of 1856, Well, that's a different story for a different episode. As of the spring of 1856, penned in Nan Chong with a fleet sealed in a lake in a command tent full of men he couldn't pay, Zeng Guo Fan knew none of it was coming and had no reason to expect it. He had only his caps and shoes, all on upside down, a war going out like a lamp, and his own accumulating tears rising by his own account like the river. Thanks for listening. Hey there, I'm Travis Hoyam, one of the hosts of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing.

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