The History of China - #344 - Taiping 21: Borrowed Things

Episode Date: August 29, 2026

The stealth troops successfully sneak past the enemy lines in dead men's coats. The false flags planted on the hillside fool the city guard. The front gate assault diverts, while the sappers around back bring the walls down. I love it when a plan comes together, every single piece locking in like perfect clockwork... Except… it wasn't really the plan. The city that fell was never the objective – it was merely a diversion… a diversion that would leave 60,000 dead within a week. Time Period Covered: 1860 CE Major Historical Figures: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Hong Xiuquan, the Heavenly King [1814–1864] Hong Rengan, the Shield King (Gan Wang), Prime Minister [1822–1864] Li Xiucheng, the Loyal King (Zhong Wang) [1823–1864] Li Shixian, the Attending King (Shi Wang) [1834–1865] Chen Yucheng, the Brave King (Ying Wang) [1837–1862] The Qing: The Xianfeng Emperor [1831–1861] He Chun, Imperial Commissioner, Jiangnan Daying [d. 1860] Zeng Guofan, acting Governor-General of Liangjiang; commander, Hunan Army [1811–1872] Zhang Guoliang, commander, Jiangnan Daying [1822–1860] Zhang Yuliang, commander of the Hangzhou relief column Xu Yuren, Governor of JiangsuMajor Works Cited:Jen, Yu-wen. The Taiping Revolutionary Movement.Michael, Franz, and Chung-li Chang. The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents, Vols. I–III. 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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Episode 344. Borrowed things. Liar yo-jee, Luanar, Chu Zhi. Hold out bates to entice the enemy, feign disorder, and then crush him. Sunza, The Art of War, 1.20. The wave that crashes with great force soon spends itself and leaves peace.

Hong Xiu-Tuan, the heavenly king, to his cousin, 1859. 6,000 men walked for a month through a war that had no idea they were in it. That was Hong Ren Gan's plan reduced to its simplest moving part. It didn't depend on the disguise being clever, though it was. It didn't depend on the ruse being new. Disguising oneself in a dead enemy's borrowed uniform is an idea at least as old as Sunza himself.

It depended purely on the sheer audacity of the bluff, that nobody with the authority to stop the column would ever quite work out just what they were looking at. The containment line outside Nanjing ran 45 miles, and was dotted with more than a hundred guard camps. The thing about a line that long, though, is that it's far too long for there to be any single mind managing it. Local militia held one stretch, organized militia companies the next, green standard regulars somewhere in between. None of them talked to the other with any regularity, and none of them expected 6,000 of the enemy's best troops to walk past them dressed in.

as their comrades in arms. The loyal king's columns took what towns lay conveniently along its route, garrisoned them lightly, and then kept moving. That wasn't conquest in any conventional sense. It was closer to setting a belay line. A plan that needed its own road kept open behind it in case a fast retreat became necessary before the real work was done. They achieved all this with an organizational silence,

so total that we know very little about its inner workings over the course of this month's operation. But what the silence does confirm is that, in a province thick with Qing soldiers, nobody stopped them. Nobody, as far as the record shows, even asked why they should. The man leading the column had, you may remember, argued fervently against this plan just a few weeks earlier, and then watched as it was approved over his objections anyway. Li Xiu Cheng was not marching toward Hongzhou because he had come around to the brilliance of Hong Rang Gan's strategic acumen. He was marching because, to be frank, he had run out of better ideas, too. And because a farmer's son who had given a decade to winning battles

that had wound up changing nothing was, for once, being asked to fight one, that might. Whatever he thought of the shield king personally, and it was a lot. The two men needed the same outcome badly enough, that neither had the luxury of relitigating the argument while on the road. And so he marched, in a dead man's uniform, toward a city he had never seen, to break a siege by threatening a province that had done nothing to provoke him. on the theory of a court official who had never commanded so much as a company of troops before the previous spring. If that hits you strangely, it should. This was definitely not how armies are supposed to be run.

It was crazy, but it was just crazy enough to work. They came out of that month's silence on March 11th, arriving outside Hangzhou without warning. Hongzhou was no mere minor prize picked because it lay conveniently along a feasible route. It was the provincial capital of Jhajiang, one of the empire's great silk cities. Its lakes and canals already famous a thousand years before anyone had even heard of the Manchus or the English. Its wealth was the kind of target this campaign's whole second half. The wider turn east towards Sujo and the coast was built to exploit.

And here, the plan fundamentally changed character. For a month, the whole column had moved invisibly through enemy-held territory. And yet now, at their target, stealth was no longer the objective at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. Now, before the walls of the great and ancient provincial capital, their job would be to make as much noise as they possibly could. His men gave their first hours outside the walls to planting hundreds of Taiping banners across the surrounding hillsides. From atop the walls of Hangzhou, its defenders would awaken to the site of hilltops suddenly swarming with the banners of an army many times vaster than the one they were actually facing. A cheap and easy, but powerful early blow against the garrison's morale.

Then the main force struck the front gate directly, loud and in their face. All while Sapper bombers, the Taiping's specialty, worked underneath the wall in the other direction entirely, tunneling toward a stretch no one was watching, while all attention was locked on the main gate's assault. For eight days, the city sat besieged under the dreadful certitude that it faced a legion vast beyond hope. while the multitude it faced in reality numbered just a few thousand men and a great many flags. On March 19th, the sappers blew their charges. The section of the city wall came down, and with it, Hangzhou itself. I'm not going to fold what happened next into the story of Hong Ran Gan's strategic genius.

Hong Jo's own militia had been given eight days of warning, and no, real command to organize under. They broke formation and began looting their neighbor's homes before the Taiping troops had even finished widening the breach. The city's civil officials did much the same. Some of them led their own bodyguard detachments through the wealthiest quarters on the way out, ransacking whatever they could carry before abandoning their posts entirely and leaving no authority in place at all.

Neither Qing nor Taiping. mere anarchy loosed upon the world. Into that vacuum came ordinary residents, fighting the looters in the streets with whatever came to hand, and so that the dead of the actual battle were joined by the lynched, the burned, and the merely unlucky before the day was finished. Fires took hold in a city built largely of wood and paper, and spread, with the ongoing chaos ensuring that nobody could organize enough

to fight the mounting inferno. by nightfall, our provincial capital that had stood for centuries as one of the wealthiest cities in the empire had become, in the span of a single afternoon, a place where the only functioning authority left was the weapon in one's own hand. And then, as Hangzhou's women had been raised for generations to understand was the correct and virtuous response to a city about to fall to an invading army, they began killing themselves. By hanging, by poison, by knife, by drowning themselves in the household well. They were not the only ones. By the time the chaos burned itself out, Ren Yu-Wun puts the city's dead at around 60,000 people, most of them by their own hand. Among them was Dai Shi, a painter of some reputation who had been vice president of the

board of war before he retired. He was 70 years old. This was not new behavior invented under the pressure of this particular siege. Qing moral education had elevated a woman's suicide rather than her capture as the measure of a household's honor over generations. The dynasty itself had been handing out ever more posthumous honors for that choice through the years of this civil war, in city after city, as though virtue could be legislated into existence via reward. What was new, if anything, was the scale a single afternoon in Hangzhou managed to produce. We've been through several massacres this war already inflicted, at Yong'an, Wuchang, in the Tianjing

incident's own count of the dead. This one is different in kind. Nobody ordered the women of Hangzhou to die. The instruction was centuries old, embedded in the very architecture of Qing morality long before any of them had been born. The Taiping army's contribution was just to arrange, without intending it, a single afternoon in which that instruction would be carried out by tens of thousands at once. This was all supposed to be a diversionary tactic, not even the real thrust. Whatever the 6,000 Taiping soldiers had expected at Hongzhou, it wasn't a mountain of the dead awaiting their entry into the city. But nobody asked them, just like nobody had asked whether they agreed with what they were doing. The temptation running underneath everything Hong Rangan

has done since arriving in Nanjing is to read each of his ideas as proof of the same thesis. that a clear-headed, systematic mind applied to this war's real problems could outthink six years of stalemate. Nothing that follows will contradict it. The maneuver at Hongzhou was, on its own tactical terms, close to flawless. Banners on a hillside, sappers under a wall no one was watching. A retreat timed to vanish before any relief column could test it. But the plan bought its results substantially on the backs of people who had no part whatsoever

in the argument that produced it, and who didn't get a vote on whether their capital was worth using as bait. Admiring the design is not the same as forgetting what it cost. The trick is keeping both of them in the air. The Manchu Garrison commander, for his part, did not join the general collapse. Like most major provincial capitals under the chain, Hongzhou held its own walled banner garrison inside the larger city, a separate fortified enclave where a hereditary Manchu military caste lived apart from the Han population it was stationed to watch over. Generation after generation,

whether or not this particular generation had ever seen real combat before this month. When the outer city broke, that enclave was the one piece of Hangzhou with a reason to hold, which had nothing to do with orders from an already fled provincial government. Those men were defending their own households, not merely somebody else's jurisdiction, and it showed in how differently they fought. The commander pulled his troops back inside its walls, and there they held. Li Xiu Cheng's force was small by design. never meant to overwhelm a defended position by weight of numbers.

For six days, it tried and failed to break in. And after the sixth day, with no path through the inner wall, no reason left to stay, and time running out on the surprise factor, the loyal king ordered the assault abandoned. His men mounted commandeered horses, put their imperial disguises back on for one more use, and rode for Nanjing by back roads. leaving behind them a city that had, in little more than a week,

unraveled into fire-gutted chaos. They had accomplished what they came for, and the man meant to notice did. Hechun was the imperial commissioner, that made the siege of Nanjing his to win, and the great camps his to lose. It also made him, and this was what Hongran Gan had understood from the very beginning,

a man whose army's meals came from the fields of Jhajiang. That was the reason the plan had pointed at Jhajiang. Not because Heng Jiao was rich, though it was. Not because it was far, though it was. Because a commissioner can survive a great many things, but cannot survive standing still while his granary burns to the ground. He took the bait before the trap had even finished closing. Li Xiu Cheng had taken Guangda in late February, and was still somewhere on the road when,

on March 10th, the day before the column reached Hangzhou at all, Hechun ordered a major detachment south into Jhajiang. Something close to a quarter of the force holding the line outside Nanjing itself, sent all of a sudden to defend a province against an attack that hadn't happened yet, on the strength of what he was already afraid of. He gave that force a general named Zhang Yu Liang. Not to be confused with Zhang Guo Liang, who was still on the siege line where he belonged,

and who has spent 160 years getting the credit and the blame for this decision, because the two men's names are one character apart. Zhang Yu Liang's column marched hard, on back roads, in the same kind of secrecy Li Xiu Cheng had used to get there in the first place. No scout ever did get close enough to count 6,000 men rather than 60,000, and the banners that had been planted on that hillside went on doing their one job long past the point where anyone thought to doubt them anymore. By the time it arrived, exhausted, there was no Taiping army left to fight.

There was also no civil government left to hand the city back to, since that government had given its final hours to looting its own treasury rather than even attempting to defend it. So the relief force did what every other armed group to pass through Hongzhou that month had apparently also felt entitled to do. They looted whatever remained. The army sent to save the city arrived in time only to finish sacking it and marched back to the great camp, having burned its strength on nothing at all. What that maneuvered, cost him, Hachun would not have time to calculate before it mattered. A quarter of a siege force is no mere rounding error.

On a line built to hold because it had numbers enough to smother any single rebel breakout, a quarter gone was a quarter of the whole argument for staying put. And it did not come back quickly, because there was, by design, nothing at Hongzhou to hurry back 4. By the time the column had marched there and marched back again, the window Hong Ren Gan had built his entire plan around was already closing on schedule, without Hechun ever learning it existed until after it was already fully shut. That was the gap the rest of the plan had been waiting on. Over the following weeks, Chen Yucheng and Li Shi Xien marched their recalled armies back toward the capital, the brave king from An Cheng, Li Shi Xien from the county between Wu Hu and Ninguo.

Each was leaving thinly held behind him the ground he'd built into a personal base of operations over the years, and each was doing it by design. For Li Shishin in particular, this was not an abstract sacrifice. Last time, we watched him earn that command on his own initiative, holding Southern on way together on no resources but what he could forage and organize himself, and without needing his cousin's name to do it. He was being asked now to walk away from that achievement. On a timetable set by a plan he had no hand in designing, for the sake of a capital whose court had never given him a title he'd not already earned in the field twice over. He came anyway, the same way he had come to Zhongyang.

Whatever resentments were simmering in Nanjing that winter, and there were plenty, they did not, in the end, get in the way of the war being fought. That was still true in April. As for what walking away from southern Anhui would eventually cost, Anqing's reckoning is still more than a year off, and it can wait. What matters here is that the gamble paid off. By April, both recalled armies, were back on the outskirts of Nanjing, closing on a siege line that had given the previous

month to bleeding troops toward a city that no longer even needed saving. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, joined thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcf walk.ca.ca. What followed was not a battle in the usual sense of the word, so much as it was a collapse.

The Imperials thought they knew what kind of army they were facing. Zung Guofan's intelligence officers had cataloged this army's tactics years earlier as though it were a bestiary. The crab formation, the hundred birds, even the dreaded crouching tiger. But none of that showed up outside Nanjing that April in any form Zeng would have recognized from his files. What showed up instead was simpler and, in its way, all the more devastating. Three armies converging on a known point on a schedule fixed months in advance against an enemy who had already sent a quarter of his reserve chasing a diversion that no longer exists. existed. Chen Yu Cheng's force struck from one direction, and Li Shia's from another.

Li Xiu Cheng, back from Hongzhou, led the garrison troops who poured out of Nanjing's gates to meet him, and closed the final side of this triangle. Something over a hundred thousand Taiping troops came at the weekend southern camp from three directions at once, against a defense that had never planned to fight without the quarter of its strength returning from a city that had already burned. The loyal king's cavalry hit the retreating rear of the imperial line first and hardest, driving thousands of men back into the very trenches they had dug with their own hands over the years, so that the ditches built to keep the Taiping out became, in the space of a few days,

mass graves for the very army that had dug them. The waterways around the camp rose with the dead and overflowed their banks. What remained of the Imperial Force dropped its weapons, abandoned its banners, and ran. The men who had passed six years as besiegers passed the following weeks as the besieged in reverse, hunted along the retreat road as the pursuers became the pursuit. By May 19th, the Taiping had driven them all the way to Da Nyang, 45 miles east of Nanjing, and taken the city. Zhang Guilang was the bandit who had traded a Robin Hood's banner for an imperial commission a decade before.

Born in Gao Yao in Guangdong, a brigand in Guangxi at 18, 10 years of it before he surrendered and changed sides. He was the one man this dynasty fielded that Taiping General after Tai Ping General had learned to fear above any other. He was already badly wounded when Don Yang broke. He got onto a horse anyway and rode for the same. south gate, and the horse lost its footing crossing the river, and that was the end of him. He was 38. There is a rumor, which Jun Yu I chases down and dismisses, that he was murdered by his own commissioner, or by Tai Ping soldiers.

There's a quieter possibility that Jen leaves standing, which is that a badly wounded man on a horse in a river may have known exactly what he was doing. What's not in doubt is what happened afterward. Li Xiu Cheng found the body and had it buried with proper ceremony. We know that because he wrote it down himself, years later, under sentence of death. The man who had given six years to getting past Zhang Guilion put him in the ground properly, and then thought it worth remembering. He Chuan's death took six days longer and went considerably worse.

He was not at Danyang when it ended. He'd already gone back on horseback to Changzhou with a few associates. Three days after that, with the Taiping coming up on Changzhou, he went again into the hills to Hushu Pass. And there, on May 25th, the day before Changzhou fell, the Imperial Commissioner for the whole Jiangnan theater ate raw opium and died. Not because the way. war was lost.

Jen is unambiguous about the motive, and it was not despair. He was afraid of what his own government was going to do to him for losing. And then, the last thing, which may be the most purely Qing sentence in this entire episode, Governor Xu Yu Ren wrote up the death. In the memorial that went to Beijing, Hechun had not poisoned himself in a mountain pass to get ahead of his own executioner. He had died vomiting blood from a wound taken in battle. The paperwork was accepted.

The customary posthumous honors were granted. Between the two of them, the central theater of this war lost the last commanders the dynasty had left, who knew how to hold a line against this army. One was buried decently by the man who beat him. The other was buried under a lie told by the man who outranked him. Almost nothing in this campaign actually belonged to the Taiping. The uniforms that got 6,000 men past 100 guard camps unnoticed were stripped from Imperial dead. The horses that carried the columns home from Hangzhou were commandeered along the retreat.

Even the plan's central mechanism, a besieging general reading a rumor of a Taiping multitude and reacting to the size of an army that did not exist, worked only because of the plan's central mechanism, Zhang Guo Liang lent it credibility out of his own fear, filling in from his own imagination everything the 6,000 men and their hillside of flags could only ever pretend at being. This was, in a fairly literal sense, a campaign fought on borrowed things. Borrowed coats, borrowed horses, borrowed time, and in the end, a borrowed reading of the enemy's own fears turned back against him. Six years of dug earthworks and standing armies came apart at the hands of a force that owned almost nothing it used to make it happen.

Six years is a long time. The great camps went up within days of Nanjing's fall in 1853. The rebels smashed them once in 1856, in the last great victory before the coup that devoured the men who had won it. The dynasty gave three years to digging them back. 45 miles of trenches and more than 100 camps. Patient work by patient men, who by 1859 believed that they were close enough to finish the job for good. All of that came apart in roughly 10 weeks, between a column of disguised soldiers walking out of Pukuo in February, and two dead generals at Danyang in May.

Wars this long don't usually end their longest-running arguments so quickly or so completely. But this one did. The siege was over. Somewhere in a besieged camp that had passed six years learning to live with the sound of guard camps being dug and redug on its doorsteps, there must have been a morning when the guns simply were not there anymore, and nobody quite believed it yet. The sources don't describe that morning either. But the collapse produced was not the outcome. anyone sitting in Nanjing that spring had put much time into imagining. Six years of

Great Camp Orthodoxy had just failed for the second and final time, in the one theater the dynasty had staked the most on. That orthodoxy held that the regular military system, banner troops and green standard regulars ringing the rebel capital in ever more elaborate fortifications, would eventually starve or storm Nanjing into submission. There was, at that point, only one other command structure in the field with any real claim to have beaten this army in open engagement, and it belonged to a man we met last time. Zeng Wofan, the Hunanese scholar official, had built his Hunan army over a decade out of his own province's gentry and militia, and had passed 1859, writing down a private theory

of the host and the guest as it related to warfare, roving bandits and pretender bandits, patience as the only doctrine that worked against this particular enemy. Until this spring, that army had operated as a supplement to the Great Camp's siege, not a replacement for it. Zung himself held no provincial authority to match the private army he commanded. He could raise troops and he could fight battles. He could not tax a province, appoint its officials, or fund a campaign beyond what his own gentry networks were willing to lend him.

On June 8th, 1860, though, that changed. The throne, with no orthodox alternative left standing in the region, named him acting governor-general of Liang Jiang, handing him for the first time real civil power over the very provinces his army had been fighting through for years. That was the fusion of military command and administrative authority this war's whole remaining course would turn on. It was also a decision the court had avoided for most of a decade, because handing it was that much combined power to a single Han official outside the regular banner system

was not a step the dynasty had ever wanted to take. Zeng Kual Fon passed 1859, arguing, on paper, that the surest way to lose a war was to keep treating it as a string of separate emergencies rather than a single connected system. The host who waits beats the guest who breaks first, every time. Anyone in our hurry to move was making the enemy's argument for him. He got his chance to test that theory on the war's actual capital, only because the one Taiping official who had passed that same year arguing for the opposite approach turned out to be right. Fast, improvised, willing to put a provincial capital 150 miles from the real target on the table as bait, because the map,

not the weight was what mattered. Hong Rangan's plan worked as designed, in every particular, from the banners on the hillside to the three armies converging all on schedule. And its most durable consequence, more lasting than the fleet of steamships he had promised his cousin, or the coastline down to Hong Kong, was to answer the strategic question Zeng Guelphan's memorial had posed six months earlier in a,

Hunani's army camp hundreds of miles up river. A memorial nobody in Nanjing had ever read, arguing for a kind of patience, the Shield King's own victory had just made suddenly, urgently available to the one man in China positioned to use it. Two governments, sitting on opposite ends of the same stalemate had each produced a strategist capable of thinking past the next battle to the shape of the whole war. Both of them were right. Being right didn't mean the same thing for each of them. One man's theory had just been vindicated by an army he didn't command, in a battle he didn't fight, and handed the resources to be tested properly for the first time.

The others had just won, completely, and had nothing left to do but keep moving before the moment passed. One more thing, and I want to be straight about how much weight it will bear. Four years from now, Li Xiu Chang will be a prisoner in Zheng Guofan's camp, writing out an account of this war under sentence of death. Somewhere in it, he says of Hong Ren Gan that he had never proposed a single plan. What I have is that one clause, in translation quoted by Zhen Yu Wan, out of a confession, I've not read whole. Jen reads it as jealousy and files it with a resentment over the promotion, the seal, the titles,

the cousin who turned up in 1859 and outranked everyone by summer. So it's most likely a complaint about the appointment rather than a verdict on Hong Jo, and I can't move it any closer to this campaign than that. I also don't have the original. That confession was written in Zeng Guofan's custody at Zeng Guelphan's direction, and Zung had it printed,

in a version he had gone over himself before sending it up. That manuscript did not surface for another century. So, the document which the loyal king says the shield king never had a plan reached the world through the hands of the one man whose career that plan had made, which is either nothing at all or the whole episode in miniature. Borrowed coats, borrowed horses, borrowed fear, and now, possibly, a borrowed voice. Before the armies moved again, the court in Nanjing did something it had been slow to do.

It finally gave Li Shi Shan a title. Shi Wang, the attending king, conferred for this campaign, and for this campaign specifically, for the march out of southern Anhui on someone else's timetable, and the closing of the third side of a triangle outside a capital that had never much wanted him. Li Xiu Cheng did not know about Zeng Guo Fan yet, and probably wouldn't have found it especially interesting if he had. He had a war in front of him, not a theory of one, and it was already moving. By the time Beijing's Gazette carried word of Zeng's new appointment,

the returned armies were not lingering at the ruins of the Great Kempel. camp to admire what they'd done to it. They were already moving east. Down the corridor, Hongran Gan had described to a room full of skeptical generals back in winter, towards Changzhou, Wu Shi, and at the end of the Grand Canal, the city of gardens itself, Sujo. And somewhere past all that, on the coast, sat a port that Hongran Gan had given an entire memorandum to describing, for men who had never.

laid eyes on it, full of foreigners that he was certain would welcome the Taiping as fully as the people of Sujo were about to. Word of what happened at Hangzhou reached that port long before Li Xiu Cheng's armies did. Shanghai's foreign community heard it as rumor first, with confirmation following later. A provincial capital terrorized. Its militia and its own officials looted. it before the rebels had even finished breaching the wall. It's women dead by the tens of thousands rather than face capture. Frederick Bruce was the ranking British official in the city, and a man already embarrassed by an unrelated military humiliation of his own the previous year at the Taku forts. He filed it away rather than act on it, because acting on it would have

meant abandoning the strict neutrality he had staked his whole position on. But he did, did not forget it. When he petitioned London that spring for permission to fortify Shanghai's walled Chinese quarter, the case he made was Hongzhou, offered almost as a piece of evidence. The object he wrote was, quote, to prevent, if possible, the scenes of bloodshed and pillage being enacted here, which took place at Hongzhou when that city was lately assaulted by the insurgents, which is a curious sentence to find in the papers of a man committed to doing nothing. He was not moved by any affection for the government whose city had just burned. Writing to Lord John Russell that June, he was blunt about it.

Quote, No course could be so well calculated to lower our national reputation as to lend our material support to a government the corruption of whose authorities is only checked by its weakness, and quote. Hangzhou had furnished the evidence for both halves of that position at once. A dynasty whose officials looted their own treasury on the way out of the gate was not a dynasty worth fighting for. And a rebellion that could produce an afternoon like that one was no rebellion worth opening

the gates to either. Hong Ren Gan's memorandum on the foreigners had assumed they would read the Taiping's advance as an opportunity. Hangzhou, without either side quite intending it, had already begun teaching at least one of them to read it as a warning instead. Months before a single Taiping soldier came within sight of Shanghai's walls. That warning, and whether Li Xiu Cheng ever gets the chance to talk his way past it, is where this arc goes next.

Until then, thanks for listening. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcfwalk.ca.ca.