The History of China - #340 - Taiping 17: Out of Kings

Episode Date: August 2, 2026

The Heavenly Kingdom, having recently killed kings three and four of its founding five – and misplaced the fifth – attempts to solve its acute leadership shortage. To that end, the Heavenly King turns to his own blood, promoting his brothers – both military novices – and handing supreme military authority to the upjumped royal harem-staffing administrator. Meanwhile, up his own backwater Jiangxi creek, the one man of Great Qing capable of destroying the rebels is finally handed a paddle by his enemies’ infighting... and promptly goes home to bury his father. Two governments, two indispensable men, and one season in which both of them simply choose to walk away.Time Period Covered:1856–1857 CE Major Historical Figures:TaipingHong Xiuquan, the Heavenly King [1814–1864]Shi Dakai, the Wing King [1831–1863]Hong Renfa, the Peace King [d. 1864]Hong Renda, the Blessings King [d. 1864]Meng De'en, Chief of Staff [d. 1861]Chen Yucheng [1837–1862]Li Xiucheng [1823–1864]Yang Xiuqing, the East King [d. 1856]Wei Changhui, the North King [d. 1856] NienZhang Luoxing, Lord of the Alliance [1811–1863]Li Zhaoshou [d. 1881] QingThe Xianfeng Emperor (Aisin-Gioro Yizhu) [r. 1850–1861]Zeng Guofan [1811–1872]Zeng Guohua [1822–1858]Hu Linyi [1812–1861] Major Works Cited:Kuhn, Philip A. "The Taiping Rebellion" in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 10.Michael, Franz, and Chung-li Chang. The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents, Vols. I & II.Platt, Stephen R. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War.Spence, Jonathan D. God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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join me every week on rule breaker investing. Fool on. And welcome to the history of China. Episode 340, Out of Kings. The three years The three years morning is the morning observed by all under heaven. Confucius, the Analects 17.

The sovereign's trust rested on no one, having been frightened by the east, north, and wing kings. He would not trust ministers of other surnames and trusted heavily only those who shared his own. Li Xiu Cheng, deposition, 1864. By the time the killing finally guttered out, Hong Xiu-Cen had managed something five years of war and betrayal hadn't yet done to him. He had run out of kings.

Of the five men who had knelt together at Thistle Mountain and sworn this movement into being, the West King, South King, East King, North King, and of course the Wing King. Four were now dead, and two of those four had died since September 1st. Feng Yun Shan and Xiaochui, you'll remember, had fallen years earlier in battle. The kind of death this movement had always known exactly how to mythologize. Yang Xiu Qing and Wei Chang Hui, on the other hand, had not. one had been cut down in his own palace by the other.

The other had, in turn, been hunted through the city he'd spent two months terrorizing and then butchered by it. His body divided and then placed onto stakes with the words Northern Trader posted to them. Even the official record couldn't quite decide what to do with him afterward. Young, ascended and absolved, kept his name on the rolls of the Taiping dead and living both, still listed as the movement's spiritual second in command. Way's name was simply removed altogether. Not condemned, not explained, just gone. As though a court that had spent five years building an elaborate theology of loyalty and betrayal had finally run out of language

for what he'd done and settled for erasing him instead. That left just one king. Shidakai, the Wing King, had arrived too late to stop any of it, had told Wei Chang Hui to his face that his slaughter would cost the Taiping more than Yang had ever from the palace, and had very nearly been the next on his hit list for doing so. He was, that autumn, the only man alive who had knelt at Thistle Mountain and could still plausibly be trusted not to have Hong Shoe Quan's own throat in mind. Hong Shoe Quan, heavenly king of a kingdom he had built specifically so that he would never again have to depend on anyone outside his own bloodline, now had exactly one man outside his own bloodline left worth depending on.

And it didn't go the way that he hoped. For a sovereign who ordinarily spoke in scripture and certainty, what survives of Hong's message to Shedakai that autumn reads like something closer to plain need. He wrote, quote, I am without assistance. Only you are both talented and virtuous, and reorganization is urgent, end quote. It's a remarkable thing to find in writing from a man who'd spent five years insisting he required no one's help but gods. A request, not a command, from the number one member of this court whose authority had never needed to be argued for. He had reason to be so plain. Whatever government still functioned in Nanjing that autumn was, in practice, now nothing more than Hong's own family business.

He had no chief of staff worth the name, no military coordination above the level of individual commanders improvising as they went, and, by every account that survives him, including his own increasingly strange writings from this period, a heavenly king who was himself withdrawing even further from the daily work of running anything at all. Someone competent needed to hold the center. And that autumn, there was exactly one candidate outside of Hong's own household who still drew breath and fit the description. Hong's answer to the problem of Shidakai was to try to make him, formally, what he'd already become by simple attrition, the senior surviving king. He offered a new title, The Righteous King,

pitched at the level the East and North Kings had once held, the kind of promotion that five years earlier would have been the single greatest honor this movement could confer. And before moving on from this, there is one little Chinese linguistic wrinkle here that is very much worth pointing out. Both the word for wing or assistant and the word for righteousness are exact homophones in Chinese. They both are e.

So even while Hong Xiu-Chun was offering Shedakhai a massive new promotion, it literally still sounded like the exact same title. Ywang versus the new Ywang. Perhaps it was, for that reason, that Shiddhak Hai wound up turning the offer down. Nothing in the record says why, in his own words, and it is worth resisting the temptation to try seriously supplying a reason, simply because the silence itself is uncomfortable. But it isn't that hard to guess what the last kingstanding might have been turning over in his mind, having just watched two more of the original five carved up over exactly this kind of proximity to the throne.

Rank, in this court, had not protected anyone that autumn. If anything, it had been what had marked them out specifically for death. Yang's own claim to be the living voice of God had ended at Wei Tongwei's hands. The details already buried under two hemispheres' worth of myth-making. Wei's fury at the same imbalance had ended with placards on the city wall and his own head in a box headed up river. Whatever Shedokai's actual reasons were, declining a bigger title was, at minimum, not obviously, the wrong call. Hong, thwarted in the gesture, but not in the need, split the difference in a way that wound up pleasing exactly nobody. Xi kept his old title, Wing King, or again, Yi Wang, with an addition that he could not have been comfortable to wear, Lightning of the Holy Spirit.

The same office, updated only in weather, that Yang Xiu Qing had once claimed for himself as the wind of the Holy Spirit. Whether Hong intended it as an honor or a leash, it draped the last king standing in language borrowed directly from the last king who had fatally overreached himself. And where Shue declined the promotion, Hong's own brothers took it up. Over the months that followed, formalized by the record that survives sometime in the new year, Hong Renfa and Hong Ren Da, the two who'd made the same hard road out of Guan Lu Bu to Thistle Mountain back in 1850, and had done nothing since but stay loyal and stay close, were raised to Peace King and Blessings King, or Anwang and Fu Wang, respectively.

Administrative advisors with authority at court that no one in the field either asked for or respected. It was, on paper, a tidy solution, two new kings to replace two dead ones, drawn from the one part of Hong's life that hadn't just tried to murder him. It solved almost nothing else. Neither brother had run so much as a company of troops, let alone a government fighting a war on four fronts, and both, by the account of the one Taiping general who left a detailed record of this period, spent their new authority amassing treasures and living well, while the actual armies in the field made their own decisions without reference to Nanjing at all.

Li Xiu Cheng had a name for the arrangement Hong Kong. had settled into, and it was not a flattering one. The clan, he called it, in which the sovereign placed all his trust. The brothers, yes, of course, but also sisters, in-laws, nephews by the dozen, cousins who'd walked all the way from Guangdong to Thistle Mountain years before, and were now, in this same round of appointments, being formally enrolled into the category of Taiping nobility reserved for a king's kinsman, the imperialian. The imperialian. clan. The category itself was nothing new. Yang's relatives had held that standing as had ways. What was new was that it now belonged overwhelmingly to one surname only. Competence had

nothing to do with admission. Blood was the only qualification that mattered. And blood, that autumn, was the one thing Hong Shuo Quan still believed that he could trust. Into this same vacancy, stepped a third man who deserves rather more attention than history has generally given him. Meng Da'un, whom Hong named Chief of Staff in the same round of appointments. Meng's actual qualification for the position that made him, on paper, commander of the entire Taiping military inside and outside the Capitol, was that he'd spent his career to that point as a member of the court's administrative staff, specifically, by the account that survives him, as the official responsible for supplying women to the heavenly king's harem.

The Qing Intelligence compilation that catalogued the rebel court recorded that the women's officers of every camp in Nanjing reported to Meng three times a day. He had never held a field command. He had, by one account, never even left to the capital. And yet it was Meng, not Hong's brothers and not Shadakai, who held the title of Commander-in-Chief. His second in command was named Li Kai Fang, and the field's assessment of the pair of them was that they were, in Li Xiu Cheng's own words, both men without ability, who were, moreover,

kept in hand by the Peace King and the Blessings King. The field commander's opinion of this arrangement did not require much reading between the lines. Li Xiu Cheng, recalling the period years later as a prisoner in Zheng Guo Fan's custody, put it about as bluntly as this war's own participants ever put anything. There was, he wrote, quote, no one at court to carry on the government, and the result was that the morale of the soldiers and people was broken and troubled, and quote.

Hong's brothers in his assessment were, quote, deficient in talents and had no plans, and quote. Mengda-un, he noted with something close to contempt, was, quote, a great favorite of the heavenly king, who had not been outside the capital, and quote. A chief secretary dressed in a commander's title, answerable to men who had never held a sword, and directing men who had spent years learning exactly how to use one. That this arrangement offended the actual soldiers doing the actual fighting, was, in Lee's telling, not really in dispute.

That it changed nothing about who they took orders from in practice was, in its own way, the more important fact. What happened next in Nanjing itself was stranger than either the promotion or the refusal. Despite turning down the title that would have made it official, Shedokai spent most of the next several months running the city's government anyway, and he did it like a man running from something as much as toward it. He lived, by the account that survives, in seclusion. He took no one's spoken word. Petitions reached him only in writing, and he answered them the same way, working through the nights and having his staff post the results on the wall outside his residence by the following morning.

A government conducted at the remove of paper and plaster, with no one, Not even the men bringing him the day's business allowed close enough to speak to him directly. It's a strange, almost monastic image for a man who, not long before, had been leading columns through Jiangxi in the field. And it says more about what the previous autumn had done to him than anything he might have put into words himself. He had just returned to a capital that had just finished eating itself. He now ran it like a man who expected to. to be devoured next. He had good reason for such expectations.

The Peace King and the Blessings King, resentful of the one surviving figure in this court whose authority didn't ultimately rest on being Hong's blood, spent that same stretch working to undercut him. Not openly, since open confrontation was precisely the pattern that had just gotten two kings killed, but in the smaller currency of suspicion and delay, that this court had already shown itself very fluent in.

Li Xiu Cheng, recalling the period years later, put it about as plainly as this court ever got. It was the brothers, quote, suspicions and obstructions, and quote, that eventually forced the one competent commander left in Nanjing out of the only job nobody else in the palace could actually do. None of this happened in a vacuum the war itself was willing to grant. While Nanjing sorted, or attempted to sort, through its own wreckage,

the armies in the field still had campaigns to run, supply lines to hold, and a Hunan army under Zungu Fan, with no interest whatsoever in wading out anyone's succession crisis. With the political center unable to direct so much as its own correspondence, let alone a war, the actual authority to run that war drifted to the one place. still capable of exercising it, the field itself. In October of 1856, while Shedakaai's own position in Nanjing was still being negotiated, while this year's reckonings were in some corners of the city still being carried out, two men, neither of whom had held meaningful command a few years earlier, were given titles

that would come to define the rest of this war. Chun You Chung, the same young officer who had fought his war, way up from a desk job to make his name at Wu Chang a year and a half before, became the second chief commandant. Li Xiu Cheng, a fellow villager of Chun's, the two men as it happened came from the same village in Tengxien, Guangxi, and had known each other since long before either wore any title at all, became deputy commandant. Both had until then held lesser ranks, heavenly general and executive general, respectively. Neither promotion came from a functioning court exercising considered judgment.

Both came from a heavenly king trying, in the middle of a crisis he could not otherwise manage, to put names to the men who were already doing the actual work. Lee had reason to need whatever help this new title could buy him. In the immediate aftermath of the purge, he found himself holding the city of Tongcheng in Anhui with fewer than 3,000 men. The figure is his own. Other accounts of the Tongcheng garrison run nearer to 6,000 or 7,000, perhaps. At whatever number, they were surrounded by that same account,

by more than 10,000 government troops dug into upward of 100 separate camps. Nanjing was quite simply not going to relieve him. Nanjing that winter could barely relieve itself. What saved him was a connection he'd already made months earlier and for entirely different reasons. Back in early 1856, well before the purge, Lee had fought alongside a Nien commander named Li Zhao Sho during the Tai Ping's Zhengjiang campaign, one of the southern Nien leaders operating at some remove from the main northern confederation. With Tongcheng surrounded, Li now leaned on that existing relationship. using Li Zhao Sho as his bridge to the chief Nian leader in the north, Zhang Lu Xing.

Zhang pledged his support. His forces, by the era's own inflated but-telling estimate, were said to number as many as a million, and their mere presence at his back put the government's forces in northern Anhui on the defensive, easing the pressure on Tongcheng before a shot had even been fired. Hey there, I'm Travis Hoyum, one of the hosts of Monty Fool, Hidden, Gems Investing. Each weekday on Motley Fool Hidden Gems investing, we talk through the business news you need to know and the story's moving stocks on Wall Street. On weekends, we game plan personal finance strategies and dive into the industries shaping tomorrow and host the experts,

authors and executives that understand them. Tune in for insights and a long-term perspective on investing and, of course, stock ideas, plenty of them. To quote a listener, it pays to listen. Check us out and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. The Nien deserved their moment in the sun here, because everything about them was a measure of how far the field had drifted from the founding faith. They were, in nearly every respect that had once defined this movement, everything that the Taiping were not. North of the Taiping's river war, on the plain where the borders of Anhui, Hanan, Shandong, and Jiangsu run together between the Hwai River and the Yellow. The Qing state had been losing its grip for decades before anyone in Guangxi ever had a divine vision. The name itself, Nien, a twist or a band, described the organization about as completely as the organization ever got.

Twisted bands of the local desperate. Salt smugglers running the untaxed trade across provincial lines. Demobilized militiamen, dispossessed farmers, village strongmen, and entire walled communities that had concluded, reasonably enough, that the dynasty could no longer feed or protect them and had stopped even pretending otherwise. Years of Yellow River flooding through the early 1850s had already ground the region down.

Then, in August of 1855, the river went further and literally rewrote its own map, bursting its dikes at Tongwa Xiang in Hanan, and swinging its entire lower course from the south side of the Shandong Peninsula to the north, one of the greatest hydrological catastrophes of the century, drowning not just cities but entire counties, wrecking the Grand Canal, and turning an already chronically hungry region into a bottomless pool of desperate recruits. By late 1855 and into 56, the scattered band,

had consolidated into something like a confederation, under a landlord and salt smuggler named Zhang Luo Xing, acclaimed by his fellow chieftains as Lord of the Alliance, or Mengju. His forces sorted loosely under five color-coded banners, each notionally some 20,000 strong. And that was the whole of it. No visions, no scripture, no heavenly father, no smashed idols, no sacred treasury,

No new calendar, no kingdom of any kind, heavenly or otherwise. Just horses, earth-walled villages, and a rating cycle timed to the agricultural year. Out across the plain, when the crops stood high enough to hide cavalry, back behind the walls when they didn't. The god-worshippers had begun their existence by burning ancestral tablets and refusing every compromise with the unconverted world. the Nien were very much the unconverted world, armed and mounted. An alliance between the two would have been unthinkable in the movement's Thistle Mountain

years, would have been, in the precise theological sense the Taiping had once cared about above all else, a spiritual pollution. Li Xiu Cheng, in the winter of 1856, did not have the luxury of caring, and by every indication never lost one minute's sleep over it. The Taiping court granted Zhang commissions and titles readily enough. What it never got in return from him was any semblance of obedience. Lee's own later verdict on the arrangement, written again from a Qing prison cell, with nothing left to lose by honesty, was withering. These men, he said of the Nien leadership, quote,

were only interested in promotions, but not in serving when called, and quote. That was the whole relationship in a sentence. Titles accepted, orders ignored, cooperation extended only exactly as far as it happened to serve Nien interests, and not one step further. What Lee actually got out of it was not an army he could command, but a weight that he could throw in a direction generally. Tens of thousands of mounted irregulars on the imperial flank, useful exactly. to the degree that their interests happened to run alongside his. Fortunately enough, that winter, outside Tongcheng, they did.

They did not wait for Nanjing's permission to formalize any of it either. In January of 1857, with no instruction from the capital and no court official present to sanction it, Chen and Li met in person at Zhongyang in the prefecture of Aang Qing to work out a joint strategy for the year ahead. The first of at least two such conferences the field commanders would arrange entirely on their own initiative, without so much as a nod from the men nominally in charge of directing them. The plan agreed to there was concrete. Chen Yu Chung's forces would strike the flank, cutting the government's supply lines,

while Li's forces and the Nien pressed from the front. It worked. The combined attack broke the government's government's government's government. grip on Tongcheng outright on February 24th, and the Taiping commanders pursued the retreating imperial troops north, opening what would become an ongoing, if famously undisciplined, partnership with the Nien. Li's reward was a further promotion to the rank of Marquis, He Tien Ho, the Marquis in Accordance with Heaven. Chen was raised the same season, to Cheng Tienyu. The Tick had entered the Heavenly Kingdom's honors post purge.

Every new rank it handed out now took the character, Tian, or Heaven, wedged into the middle of the name. Cheng Tian Yu and Hei Huan's own brothers, when their turn came, would come out the far side of their disgrace as Xin Tianan An and Yong Tian Fu. A court that had run out of language for its own dead was stapling Heaven in the same. into the middle of everything it could still name. As I said once before, the Taiping's were nothing, if not brand conscious. All of it earned in the field, by a coalition Lee had built himself, months before Nanjing had finished sorting out what it was to do with its own Dead King's titles.

Chen Yu Cheng, for his part, spent that same spring trying to make good on the position his own coordination had bought him. Between April and September of 1857, he pushed a new campaign into Hubei, aiming to win back the ground around Wutong his old command had lost the previous winter. Unfortunately, it all came to nothing. The Hunan army's Hulini, the same officer who had ground the city out of Taiping hands, turned him back this time as he would turn him back again the following spring. But the attempt itself is worth noting on its own terms. Whatever Nanjing was or wasn't doing about the war that autumn, the men who'd actually taken Wu Chang once already were still trying, on their own initiative, to take it back.

Whatever else can be said about the year that followed the purge, the actual fighting of it was, by this point, being run by exactly the men who were best at it, which was not, notably, the same list of men Hong Xiu-Tuan had just spent the winter promoting. Yes, it could not last. And by the first days of June, 1857, it didn't. Shedakai crossed out of Nanjing and over the river, a departure so lightly attended by the account of one Qing official watching from the far bank, that the crossing itself took but a single day.

Hardly the exodus of a man leading an army into exile. Whatever the size of the party that actually walked out of the gates with him, it was, at the start, modest. What it became, would not be. He posted a manifesto in the cities he passed through on the way out, and its stated purpose was modest almost to the point of self-effacement. He was leaving, he said, to press the Western campaign further and expand Taiping power there,

in order to repay the sovereign's grace and kindness. The real reason, he chose to say only in verse, in language built deliberately to mean everything to the people who already knew, and nothing at all to anyone who didn't. He wrote, quote, Last year, amid the disaster and turbulence, I hurried in anguish back to the capital, confident that my unwavering loyalty would be clearly understood by my holy ruler. However, things were not quite so, and imperial edicts were issued one, after the other. Dark suspicions abounded on all sides. How can my own brush record them all?

And quote. He did not name the brothers. He didn't have to. Everyone in Nanjing who read that poem posted in the street already knew exactly whose suspicions had done the recording for him. What happened next told Nanjing exactly what it had just lost. And it happened slowly. over the weeks and months that followed rather than in the single dramatic gesture of the departure itself. His own proclamation named the destination. On Qing, the Great River anchor upstream, the same prefecture where Li and Chun had plotted the year's campaign back in January. Anyone who wished to follow him, he'd said, should make for there. Soldiers did.

not some rabble of deserters, but the marrow of the movement. The old Guangxi men, veterans of the whole long road from Thistle Mountain, officers who had served under him in the Western campaigns and trusted his name the way they no longer trusted the capitals. How many in the end is one of this war's genuinely unresolved numbers. A single day's river crossing argues for a modest, initial party, while the various later tallies of everyone who eventually rallied to him at On Chang and after run to a hundred thousand and beyond. But the direction of the flow was never in dispute, and neither was what it drained. The Heavenly Kingdom's veteran corps, walking west out of the war's decisive theater behind the last of the original kings. Nanjing understood

what was happening, too late, and in the most non-jing way imaginable. That September, with Shi's veterans still streaming toward him, Hong Xiu-Cuan demoted the Peace King and the Blessing King out of the kingship that had driven Shia out in the first place, and sent riders after his former Wing King, carrying the seal of the office he had declined the autumn before, righteous king, offered now not as an honor, but as an apology.

Shed declined it a second time. He kept the troops, he kept the road, and he kept riding. He was never to return. Whatever loyalty kept his public language gracious to the last, whatever the private ledger actually said, the Wing King rode west that summer and out of Nanjing's government for good. And with him went the last person, person in the heavenly capital whose authority nobody could plausibly attribute to blood,

doctrine, or fear. There was one more attempt to say it out loud, and it came from the field. Li Xiu Cheng, back in the neighborhood of Nanjing and holding the dominant position there, put his own view of the problem in writing and sent it up to the heavenly king. By his own account, he asked the sovereign to select men according to talent, enact laws for the relief of the people, promulgate strict decrees, renovate court discipline, enforce rewards and punishment, treat people with compassion, and reduce the taxes in grain and money. And then the part that named names.

He advised him to re-employ the wing king and discard the peace king and the blessing king. He was asking, months after the fact, for Shadakai back. The only result of the memorial was that Li was demoted. And though he was soon restored to his rank, the lesson had been administered twice in the same year by the same sovereign. The fastest way to be punished in Nanjing was to be useful and say so. A demotion could not touch his actual power, and everyone involved knew it. What he left behind did not improve, and the sharpest, account of it may have come from the man who had just walked out.

A poem survives under the title, Our Court Suffers from Internal Misfortune, and it's attributed to Shadak Hai, written shortly after he left Nanjing, though its authenticity has never been established, and the scholars who print it do so on the grounds that no one has proved it a forgery either. Whoever wrote it, it gives as honest a picture of the mood inside those walls as anything for this period. quote, In the cities, few men will venture out, and fowls and hounds have no peaceful retreat.

Throughout the streets is blood. The forbidden palace has lost its shining glory, end quote. Hong Xiu-Cuan's own energies, meanwhile, were going somewhere else entirely, and had been, in truth, since the moment Yang Xocheng stopped being alive to notice. Whatever else Yang's trances and his claim to speak with, With the Heavenly Father's voice had cost this movement, they had also functioned for five years as the one form of scrutiny Hong Shoe Quan's private life could not simply overrule. With Yang gone, nothing stood between the Heavenly King and the 2,000 women of his own palace,

ministers, maids, and consorts alike, 88 of them by his own son's later count, and Hong was now at liberty to run his household exactly as he pleased. In 1859, a year into this reckoning, the principal publication to come out of his court was a set of writings addressed not to his generals or as ministers, but to his harem. 500 stanzas of discursive verse, meticulous and intimate by turns, regulating everything from how his women walked and dressed, to how they were to fan the insects from his body, one attendant at his head and one at his feet. The fan never nearer than five inches, never touching him, and warm as ginseng at night.

There would be no weeping in his garden, Hong instructed. No long faces. No raised or angry voices like dogs barking. No one was allowed to be jealous. There would, however, be beatings. And the 17th of the poems is a list of the occasions for them. under the title The Ten Beatable Offenses

Quote Serving without reverence The first beatable offense Stiff-necked and unteachable The second Raising the eyes to look at one's husband The third Addressing the king without reverence

The fourth A restless temper Not pure and still The fifth Speaking too loudly The sixth Having a mouth and not answering, the seventh. A face not showing joy, the eighth. Eyes dancing left and right,

the ninth. Speaking without ease, the tenth. End quote. The heavenly kingdom's official literary output in the year it lost a wing king and a veteran army was 500 stanzas on the correct running of its own sovereign's household and how everyone had better not forget to smile. Hong's attention that year was not confined to his harem. He was also hard at work reconciling the Bible against the memory of the men he'd just finished killing. The dead East King's charge had been that the Old and New Testaments were both full of errors and needed revising, and Hong now set out to prove him right on his own terms, starting where else, but at the beginning in Genesis. and concentrating on two categories of error.

Passages where God came down to earth, and passages where family members related to each other in ways unsuitable for the Taiping faithful. Where the Old Bible had God say, Let us make man. Hong's version has him say, I will make man. Where two angels came to Sodom at evening,

Hong instead writes that the true Lord God came down to Sodom. and God replaces the angels throughout the rest of the story. He was also having his two elder brothers retell the account of his own ascent to heaven. The story the entire Taiping venture rested upon in an even more elaborate form. It was, by any reasonable measure, an extraordinary use of a sovereign's remaining attention. And it's difficult to read as anything other than what it was, a man withdrawing from the government of an empire into the government of a household and a manuscript. All at the precise moment the empire most needed him not to.

Nanjing's paralysis was no mere private matter contained within its own walls. All this internal strife very much handed the other side an easy layup. Two provinces to the west in Jiangxi, Zeng Guo Fan had spent the better part of two years in a state that could fairly be called stranded. Since the disaster at Zhou Zhang in February of 1855, you recall his flagship being burned, his best ships bottled uselessly in Poyang Lake, his own second attempted suicide pulled back from at the last moment by his own officers, you know, the good times.

Well, since then, he'd been stranded for 18 months with more than 10,000 men and zero money to pay them, in a province whose officials mocked him publicly and as contemptuously as the ones back in Hunan once had. No one could possibly be blamed for looking at Zheng Guo Fan and assuming that he was a completely spent force. The Taiping armies had that spring stormed back up the river and retaken Wu Chong without him able to do a thing about it. What changed his fortunes was,

not a victory. It was Nanjing's own coup. Stephen Platt sets it plainly. It was, quote, only the bloody suppression of the Eastern King's coup attempt, end quote, and the lull that followed, which finally gave Zheng his window of relief. He'd done nothing to earn it. The men who might have finished him off in Jiangxi were that same season, either dead, in hiding, or 300 miles away, arguing over title. and wall-posted petitions, or, for all the war's newest kings actually knew of military

affairs, may as well have been publishing verses for a harem. We saw the first and largest dividend of that lull last episode. Wu Chang, ground at last out of Taiping hands in December of 1856. Through the winter and into 1857, the same slow turn ran through Jiangxi, and by the close of the year, Zheng had clawed back most of what the Taiping had won in the province, though not all of it. Jiu Jiang, the fortress that had broken him, held out until the following May. But enough that Zhang Shi finally stopped looking like the place that his career had gone to curl up and die. The reason was never any sudden brilliance on the Hunan army's part.

It was that the one force in China actually capable of destroy. destroying that army, had spent the better part of a year bleeding itself white instead. And then, in the middle of that turn, the man at the center of it went home. Zeng Guofan's father died on February 20, 1857. Word reached him in Jiangxi on the 6th of March. What he did then was not the act of a man negotiating anything. He wrote out a memorial requesting leave, sealed up his office, which was the same. without waiting for a reply, and simply went.

He and his younger brother, Guo Hua, left for their native Hunan to bury their father, and the Xianfung Emperor learned that his commander in Jiangxi had just walked off the job after the fact. The throne considered punishing him for it. Other officials interceded. In the end, Zheng was granted three months. To modern ears, that kind of obligation. and the weight of it can seem like convenient pretext. But it very much was nothing of the sort.

Or at least, it wasn't only that. In the Confucian order, this entire war was nominally being fought to defend. The death of a parent was not a personal loss to be weighed against professional duties. It was the first and most profound obligation any man could have. The requirement was withdrawal. Resign your posts, return home, and mourn formally and visibly for a period reckoned at 27 months, and it bound everyone up to and very much including the men running the dynasty's wars. The court could, in genuine extremity, formally override it and order an indispensable man to remain at his post.

the practice had its own name, Duo Qing, literally the seizing of the sentiment. The throne taking a man's grief away from him rather than a man politely setting it down. But invoking it carried a whiff of scandal for everyone involved, and a man who accepted it too readily advertised his own ambition in the act. Zeng knew every contour of this terrain because the war had already collided with his filial obligations once before, back when his mother had died in the summer of 1852, and he'd been home four months, and he'd been four months home in Hunan, his mother still unburied, when the order to take charge of the province's militia reached him the next January.

He hadn't wanted it. He drafted a memorial declining it on precisely those grounds, and wrote a friend in Beijing that same day that he could not abide the guilt of leaving his mother in the ground unhonored. Then he set the morning aside and accepted the charge anyway. That decision had produced the Hunan army. Five years later, with his father dead, his flagship lost, his treasury empty, and his host Xinjiang Shi treating him as a nuisance to be starved out, he was in no evident hurry to set anything aside for a second time. When those three months ran out, Zung did not come back.

Instead, he wrote again, and the second memorial is the most revealing document he produced that year. A full statement of the difficulties of his duties, as its title had it, and a renewed plea to be allowed to complete the morning term. Five years of command, he told the throne, had left him governing an army with no substantive provincial office behind it, no seal, no revenues of his own, no imperial commissioner's title, and therefore no standing whatever against the provincial officials who obstructed him. His men could not be given real posts because the Hunan army was not a real army.

He'd been begging hostile bureaucrats for every ounce of rice and every tail of silver his soldiers needed to eat and fight. And then, having laid all that out, he asked for the remedy in as many words. Examining today's situation closely, he wrote, without holding the post of governor, with the authority to supervise officials, one absolutely cannot govern an army. which means the timing of this episode's two great departures is worth getting exactly right, because the symmetry is actually stronger than it even first seems like.

By the time Shedakai crossed the river out of Nanjing that June, Zenguo Fan had been gone from his command since the first week of March. Within the same few months, and for entirely opposite reasons, both of this war's most capable men walked away from the first time. fight each was best suited to win. One, because his court could not stop suspecting him. The other, because his court, asked directly for the power that would have kept him in the field, had told him no. The heavenly king drove its last great general out with whispers. The great Qing let theirs go home in mourning clothes, still waiting for an invitation it had not yet

decided to extend. Neither government appeared to have grasped in the moment just what it had done. Li Xiu Cheng, years later, gave about as plain an account of what Nanjing had lost as this war has ever produced. Writing from a Qing prison cell, he set the whole of it down in a single sentence. He set the whole of the feeling down. Quote, The feeling of the people has undergone a great change. government affairs were in disorder, and each man was pursuing his own course. The sovereign had become mistrustful of others. The affairs between the East, North, and Wing Kings had so alarmed him that he was distrustful of ministers of other surnames, and put his confidence in his own family and relations.

There was a unanimous desire at this time to separate. However, they did not dare to separate on their own, since they had heard that whenever the Qing generals and soldiers captured Guangxi men, they decapitated them, sparing not a one. Hence, they banded closely together instead of dispersing. End quote. It's an interesting line to leave off on. The thing that had held the heavenly kingdom together in the winter of 1857

was not loyalty or doctrine or the sovereign's grace. Rather, it was the knowledge that the other side killed Guangxi-Mexam. men on site. It's the assessment of a man who would spend the rest of this war trying with Chen Yu Cheng at his side to be the unified policy Nanjing's own court could no longer produce for itself, and who had already shown at Zhongyang in January, that he and Chen didn't especially need the court's permission to do it. Whether two field commanders, acting largely on their own recognizance, could hold together what a sovereign, Two dead kings, two ornamental ones,

and a haram administrator with a general's title could not. That's where the war goes next. But until then, as always, thanks for listening.