The History of China - #345 - Taiping 22: Heaven Below

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

For a thousand years, Suzhou and Hangzhou stood as synonyms for the next best thing to Heaven itself. Well... that was before 1860. As of now, Hangzhou is a fire-gutted ruin, and Suzhou is next on the target list. But the army that does the most damage… is not the invader. The Taiping arrive to find the dirty work done ahead of them, by the very Qing forces assigned to defend the great southern city, and a vast number of the city having decided to "take matters into their own hands." As such, when a party of missionaries sails upriver from Shanghai to find out just what happened to Suzhou, they'll have to wade through a literal riverful of the dead. Time Period Covered:May-Aug. 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] The Qing:The Xianfeng Emperor [1831–1861]He Guiqing, Governor-General of Liangjiang [1816–1862]Xu Youren, Governor of Jiangsu [d. 1860]Zeng Guofan, Governor-General of Liangjiang (from June 8, 1860); commander, Hunan Army [1811–1872]Ma Dezhao, Qing commander The Foreign Missionaries:Joseph Edkins, London Missionary Society [1823–1905]Jane Edkins, his wife [1841-1863]Griffith John, Welsh Congregationalist missionary [1831–1912]James Legge, London Missionary Society, Hong Kong [1815–1897] Major 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

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. 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 pmcf walk.ca. Hello and welcome to the history of China.

Episode 345, Heaven below. Shang-you-Tientang, Xia-you-sou-hang. Above, there is heaven. Below, there are Su-Zhou and Hongzhou. Fan Chengda in the Wu-Jun-Zhe. Song Dynasty, 12th century.

I profess to be a rebel at heart somehow, and have a secret wish to welcome them. Jane Edkins, age 21, in a letter to her father from Shanghai, July 1860. On the morning of May 21st, at the east gate of Changzhou, a crowd knelt in the road and held up burning incense. There were several thousand of them, elders, gentry, and ordinary townsfolk. alike. And what they wanted was simple enough. The city's walls needed defending. The man leaving by that gate commanded the defense of the whole region, and the direction that he was going was far away from here. Kneeling in the road with incense in your hands is one of the oldest types of formal petition a Chinese subject ever had. Not so much a protest, but a plea. Offer.

in the posture of complete submission, and it was the strongest argument anybody in Changzhou had left. He Gwe Qing ordered his guards to open fire. The crowd, bloodied and panicked, scattered, and Huz retinue went on through the gap. Afterward, the governor of Zhang Su memorialized the throne that 11 people had been killed and more than 100 wounded, though other reports gave smaller numbers. Hugue Ching's title is itself noteworthy, since we've just spent an episode watching it change hands. He was the Governor General of Liang Jiang, the two Jiangs.

The same office the throne would hand Tuzhong Guo Fan on June 8th, hence its availability. He was the senior civil official of the entire war zone. The great camps commanders had reported to him through their six years of sitting the siege lines. and he had forwarded their optimism onto Beijing, along with his own, also attached. His headquarters were at Changzhou, because Nanjing, the office's proper seat, well, suffice to say,

Nanjing was unavailable at the moment and had been for seven-some years. It was the acting rebel capital, after all. That very detail tells you most of what the job had consisted of ever since he took it up. When the great camp came apart at its seams, the last substantive buffer between Hugui Ching and the war itself was effectively erased.

It was right here, right now, at his front doorstep. And Hugway Qing quickly found out that he didn't like that, not one little bit. So, the Empire's ranking official east of the mountains rode out, over the bodies of the people whose fatal mistake had been to plead for him not to. He explained afterward that he had gone to secure the supply lines and the customs revenue further east, which has the virtue of being the kind of excuse that is technically about logistics. Luckily, this is one of those vanishingly rare instances in world history that the,

in the near immediate words of his contemporaries, quote, unforgivably cowardly and extremely cruel and quote government agent does not get away with it. His excuses in the end did not save him. It took the dynasty two more years to get around to it, which for that court was actually fairly brisk, but it would eventually take Hugway Ching's head for that bloody morning on the Chongzhou Road. But well before then, he fled first to Sujo, where something happened that's almost too neat to be believed, yet finds its way into the record nonetheless. The governor of Jiangsu, Xu Yoh Ren, refused to open the gates to his own superior. That is, by the way, the same Xu Yoran, governor of Jiangsu, who had just written to Beijing about the 11 killed.

He shut the door on his boss demanding entry, and then he reported him for the whole, you know, mass murder. Think about what that refusal contains. A mere provincial governor, watching the Theater of War's Supreme Civil Commander arrive at his walls, as a fugitive, calculated that letting him in would cost more, in panic, in precedent, in the morale of a city about to need every reason to hold on for, dear life, then turning him away possibly could. So the governor general of Liang Jiang stood outside a city he nominally governed, but was denied entry to outright. And so, had no choice but to continue east toward Shanghai. Shanghai would surely receive him, because Shanghai, as will soon come to sea, would receive anyone and everyone. Behind him, the cities he had passed through prepared to face what was coming, with whatever they had left.

In terms of field armies, that was pretty much nothing. By the last week of May 1860, there was, frankly, no hiding it that between Li Xiu Cheng's columns and the richest cities in the whole of the empire, there was no longer an army in anything but name, and even that barely so. There were garrisons, militia, walls, and of course the human wreckage of the great camp itself, those tens of thousands of routed soldiers ambling vaguely eastward ahead of the typing advance, unpaid, unled, unfed, but all too well-armed. The distinction between the fleeing Imperial Army and the invading rebel one

was not always readily visible from inside the towns either or both, passed through. Remember how at Hangzhou, every subsequent armed group treated the previous sacking as a license of their own to elude a bit more? Well, the same rule was now being applied along the whole line of retreat, with the clarifying difference that this time, the men doing the looting primarily were Great Ching's own colors. Changzhou's turn came on May 26th. The city that had knelt to beg for a defense fell after the briefest resistance its abandoned garrison and hastily organized gentry militia could offer. Wooshee followed three days later. The pursuit was so fast and the collapse so complete that the campaign's hardest

logistical problem wasn't even enemy resistance in the end, but the sheer administrative volume of those surrendering. Green standard soldiers, militiamen, and the Great Camp's own scattered veterans were coming over not in ones or twos, but in whole blocks and regiments. At Suu Zhou alone, Li Xiu Cheng would accept the mass surrender of somewhere between 50 to 60,000 men and fold them into his own army. Again in numbers that he would later complain, at length, had cost him more in discipline than it bought him in strength.

And then there was Sujo. The saying was already a cliche when the Ming had ruled from Nanjing. Shang yo Tian Tang, Xia yo suhang. Above there is heaven. Below, there are Sujo and Hongzhou. That had been an idiom so axiomatically true

as to be taken as a simple statement of fact for at least seven centuries at that point. And is true today. So if you ever get the chance to visit either, take it. But as of March, 1860, with one of those Halcyon cities burned to a depopulated ruin, and the other about to receive the same army. Such a saying could only be said with the darkest of Gallo's irony. Between Hongzhou and Suzo, Sujo was the greater of the pair,

by the measures that mattered to an imperial treasury. Not only the ancient beating heart of the empire's silk production, but the hub of the Grand Canal's southern commerce, and home to the merchant houses and scholar gentry estates and famous gardens that had made its name a synonym for refinement itself for centuries. One of the largest cities on earth, its wartime population swollen with refugees from the Fighting Up River, running to something like two million people. The land tax and tribute grain of the Sujo regional loan carried a share of the dynasty's finances completely out of proportion to its size on the map. This was the prize Hong Ren Gan's whole eastern turn had been pointed at since the winter.

Zeng Guo Fan would have said that the contest goes to whoever can afford to wait. Hong Ran Gan was betting here the very opposite. And as of the summer of 1860, it seemed to be Hong's, bet that was paying off. The war was now arriving upon Suu well ahead of any force that could possibly stop it. It's difficult to overstate what the loss of this region meant

when the news reached Beijing. And the court's own actions are probably the best measure. The dynasty had absorbed the loss of Nanjing in 1853 and managed to remain functional. It had absorbed the loss of Wu Tong twice now. and of An Qing, and of provinces' worth of countryside across a decade, and still managed to soldier on. But Jiangnan was different, and everyone from the Shenfang Emperor down to the clerks of the Board of Revenue understood how. The Yangza Delta was where the empire's

money actually came from, the land tax and tribute grain of Jiangsu and Jijiang, the silk that anchored the foreign trade and the commercial taxes of the canal cities. A dynasty could lose battles indefinitely so long as it held Jiangnan, because Jiangnan could always be counted on to pay for the next army that needed raising. Losing it, on the other hand, meant that any subsequent war would have to be financed out of everything else, that Jiangnan was not. one might as well ask a body to run a race without lungs. That, as much as the smoking ruin of the great camp,

is what stood behind the throne's decision of June 8th. Hegwe Qing was stripped of the governor-generalship for the loss of Chongzhou, and by that point, news of Sujo hadn't even reached the capital yet. Handing Zeng Guelphan the powers the court had spent a decade withholding was no conversion to his theory of the war, per se. It was what desperation looked like when it had run out of orthodox things to try. Dated the same week, the Treasury's best province

finished bloodily changing hands. What happened to Suuzo before the Taiping arrived belongs right beside Hongzhou's militia and Hugui Cheng's bodyguard in this arched growing catalog of the ways the Qing order in Jiangnan hurt itself far faster and more completely than the rebels ever could. The city was plundered and partly burned, again by its own side.

Government troops under Ma Da Zhao, falling back westward from Wushi, went through Sujo on their way past and simply helped themselves. This was no defensive measure, nor did anyone bother trying to dress it up as one. It was just an army sacking the city it existed to protect. four days ahead of the enemy's own advance. The effect was to demonstrate to several hundred thousand people in the clearest way imaginable what the dynasty's protection was now worth.

The Taiping had at that point burned nothing in Suu. The government was handling all that for them. Anyone inclined to weigh loyalty against survival in the days that followed could do the arithmetic by the law. light of their own burning shop fronts, and it appears that a great many did. The city fell on June 2nd, and the manner of its falling completed the argument. There was no grand illusion here, no banners on hilltops nor sappers under walls. None of that was necessary. The generals had all gone. The government troops and a good many of the militia

had laid down their arms and surrender. Typing sympathizers already inside the walls, called down to their brethren in the morning, and went out to open the gates themselves. Ren Yu'an's own verdict is that the richest city in Jiangsu was surrendered without the shedding of a single drop of blood. Xu Yo Ren did not run. Having refused his superior, watched his suburbs burn, and held his post past the point where holding it meant anything at all anymore, he killed himself as the city changed hands. And then Li Xiu Cheng did something he had done once already that spring. He had the governor's body properly dressed and coffined, and had the coffin labeled.

Coffin of Governor's shoe, loyal official. Six weeks earlier, he had found Zhang Guil Yang in the water outside Don Yang, and buried him with full ceremony. Now, the governor who had shut the gates on his own Governor General got the same treatment from the man. who took his city. Twice in six weeks, the loyal king buried an enemy with honors, and both times he made sure somebody wrote it down. What did not happen next is the part contemporaries found hardest to believe, and the part that probably most needs a bit of sitting with.

Sujo was not Hongzhou. There was disorder in the transition. There's no version of a city changing hands in this war without it, and no pretending otherwise. But there was no general sack, nor citywide firestorm, and the evidence on this is unusually good. No damage to property or burning of houses, no loss of life on either side beyond holdouts killed in street fighting. And of course, those like Governor Shue, who took their own lives. And there were many of those. as at every city on this campaign's line of March, those whose station was fused to the dynasty's survival

killed themselves in droves as the walls changed over. Weeks later, visitors approaching Sujo by canal would spend a full night among the uncounted dead that still jammed the waterway like so much timber. The most sympathetic foreign account of the new regime would insist in its defense that these surely were all suicides and not murders, which is just an all-around strange thing to say about a waterway you have to push a boat through. We'll come back to who wrote that,

because that distinction, true or not, was about to matter enormously back in Shanghai. Li Xiu-Cheng posted proclamations promising protection to those who submitted, and then did the thing that separated this particular promise from every similar promise made over the course of this war. He then actually enforced it upon his own soldiers. Markets were ordered reopened. Residents who had fled were invited back.

The machinery of local administration, clerks, tax registers, the whole unglamorous apparatus that actually runs a city, was restarted. In many cases, with the same personnel who had run it the month before, just now under a different flag flying. The Taiping thus carved their new conquest into a province of their own, Su Fu, Sujo the Blessed, with the city as its capital, and then set about the entirely unrevolutionary business of assessing harvests and collecting taxes. One correction to the story as it's often told, which matters. matters a lot for how much credit the new regime gets. The famous tax reduction was real, but would only come some five months later, and from

the heavenly king over in Nanjing, rather than from Li Xiu Cheng's own opening administration. Partly in appreciation of how quiet the province had stayed, and partly in compensation for what the imperial troops had done on their way out. The Taiping administration of Suu is a fascinating case study. because it's virtually the only instance we ever get of what the heavenly kingdom was like as a government rather than just as an army or occupying force. We saw early ideations of it, beta tests, if you will, over the course of their long march up out of Guangxi, in cities temporarily taken and administered like Yong'an and Wu Chang,

though administered is doing an awful lot of work there. Yong'an they held for less than eight months, most of it surrounded, and Wu Chang they barely held for a month, before deciding it wasn't worth sticking around for the onrushing siege and stripping the place bare before shoving off downriver. And we have, of course, Nanjing itself, though its status as both the temporal and spiritual capital of the regime, all the while being actively under siege by the imperial army just outside, admittedly paints us a less than average picture of governance, which is rather the point. A decade in, the Heavenly Kingdom had never once run a great city

with no army at its gates and the intention of staying. But here at Suuio, we finally get a peek into that rarefied territory of just what might have been. And the picture is stranger than either its admirers or its admirers or its, its enemies would have preferred. The revolutionary program was real, and it was visible on people's heads. Submission to the Taiping meant abandoning the shaved forehead and braided Q the Qing had imposed on every Han male for two centuries, and letting their hair once again grow out. Which is why many documents and sayings of this time, government and wider populace alike,

refer to the Taiping's as the Tang Mao, literally the long. long hairs. While the dynasty's formal documents call this whole vast rebellion with peak bureaucratic distaste the Fani or hairy traitors. Growing your hair out was compliance, but it was also a wager with a body attached. Hair takes months to grow and minutes to inspect. And a man who wore the rebellion's mark wore it for any returning Qing column to read. The The peasantry of Jiangsu, having watched this war change its mind before, hedged the wager with a barber's ingenuity. Growing the top long for the Taiping, while keeping the braid coiled up and hidden beneath it,

ready to be unfurled, the crown shaved, and the whole allegiance reversed inside an hour should the dynasty's soldiers come back. Beneath that visible layer, though, the machinery Li Xiu Cheng sanctioned, looked less like the Heavenly Kingdom scripture and more like the dynasty's filing system. Household registration, door plates, permits, local headsmen answering for their neighbors, gentry and clerks kept on because someone had to know where the tax registers were. The kingdom that had once burned Confucian books was now employing the men who had memorized them, because governing the world's most overly administered country turned out to require administrators.

Whether that was pragmatism maturing into statecraft or a revolution running out of revolutionary content is a question that remains open to interpretation. 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. Who was overseeing all this? Last time, we introduced Li Xiu Cheng already in motion, a farmer's son who had given a decade to winning battles that ultimately had changed nothing, walking to Hongzhou in a dead man's coat because he'd run out of better things to do. That man was now the civil governor of the wealthiest region of China, quartered in a city whose name poets had been using as a shorthand for paradise for a thousand years. He took up residence in one of the famous gardens, the estate known, with an irony that nobody at the time needed pointing out,

as Zhou Zhang Yuan, the humble administrator's garden. That said, by the accounts that survive, including hostile ones, he was good at the job. Not a soldier play-acting at government, but a genuinely capable administrator who grasped that the region's value to the Taiping lay in its functioning rather than its plunder. Observers reported, with some surprise, that the city prospered more under the Taiping than it ever had under the Manchus.

The war had spent 10 years teaching this man one trade. It turned out he had a second one, and nothing before this would have given anyone any reason to suspect it. Let's step back and take in what the spring had actually delivered. Hong Ren Gan's plan had been designed to break a siege. In 90 days it had broken the siege, destroyed the only field army the dynasty maintained in the theater, killed its two best commanders, disgraced its senior civil official, and delivered the empire's economic heartland, its silk, grain, canal commerce, and tax base,

into Taiping hands, at a cost that was, by this war's standards, barely visible on the ledger. Nothing in the Tai Ping movement's entire history, not the march from Guangxi, not even the taking of Nanjing itself, had come so close to the feel of winning. In Nanjing that summer, it was possible for serious people to believe, for the first time since 1856, that the heavenly kingdom was not merely surviving this war, but close to concluding it victorious. They were not fools to believe it, even if they might seem so in our far, retrospect. We know things they couldn't have. Even if you haven't heard this tale to completion yet, we know its ultimate outcome. We know the Qing survives and the Taiping dies. But on the

evidence actually available as of June 1860, the Shield King's map was winning. Zeng Welfand received his June 8th appointment, along with what any ordinary official would have read as its obvious meaning. Zhang Su was his responsibility now. Zhang Su was on fire, therefore go east to Zhang Su. Zheng declined. Not an insubordination. He was, let's face it, constitutionally incapable of open insubordination of any kind. But in the immovably obstinate memorial writing, time-wasting, an exhaustibly annoying way available to a scholar official, who had spent 1859 laying out comprehensively exactly why this situation was definitely a trap. Marching east to save Sujo meant abandoning the slow strangulation of Anceng,

the city upriver of Nanjing, and the one his whole theory named as the root of the rebel position, because everything the Rebel Capital Eight came down the river past its walls. It meant becoming the guest, the one in a hurry, the one reacting to the enemy's map instead of his own. He had just watched the Qing Great Camp die of that very malady. It is worth remembering that this was actually the first regular provincial post Zengu Fan had ever held. Eight years of war, an army he had raised out of his own province's gentry. And until that week, no office that had ever let him tax anything. What he did with this newfound authority first is telling.

It was the fiscal thing. He routed the whole of Jiangxi's Li Jin, the transit tax improvised in 1853, and collected ever since by whoever could reach it, through a bureau of his own, outside the provincial financial commissioners control and around the Board of Revenue entirely. From then on, his subordinate commanders were authorized to set up Li Jean bureaus of their own and then live off them. So, the dynasty's answer to losing the province that paid for its armies was to hand one man the power to build a revenue system it itself could not see.

He declined to March East, but he did not decline. the money. In late June, the new governor-general of Liangzhang moved his headquarters south, not east toward the provinces in his title. He took about 30,000 men into the mountains of southern Anhui to a valley at the walled town of Chimun, 60 miles southeast of Anqing, within range of the siege that mattered to him, and pointedly out of reach of the disaster he had just been made responsible for. It was rugged country with few roads. Indeed, that was the point. The east, he was betting, could be lost and then recovered. The root of the whole operation could not. Whether that bet was strategic clarity or the most expensive stubbornness of the century remains to be seen

over the course of the next two years. But mark the shape of it. In the same season, each side's best strategist looked at the other's winning move and then declined to be baited out by it. Hongran Gan had refused to fight the siege on the siege's own terms. Zeng Guo Fan was now refusing to fight

the Eastern Campaign on the Eastern Campaign's terms. The rest of this war's entire story is largely about which refusal was right. Hongan God's plan had a second half, and it arrived that July in a small boat. Five British and American missionaries left the foreign settlement, bound 80 miles into the war zone via river and canal. Their leader was Joseph Edkins of the London Missionary Society, and he carried with him,

along with the usual freight of tracts and hopes, a personal errand. Word had dried up about Hongran Gan, and their mutual friend, James Leg, in Hong Kong, wanted to know what had become of him. So, when the party fell in with the detachment of Tai Ping cavalry on the riverbank, Edkins' first question was whether they knew the name. The answer, that the man in question was now Prime Minister of the Heavenly Kingdom, second only to the Heavenly King himself, landed on the Travelers as a thunderclap. The men who had known him as a mere catechist now heard this from strangers on horseback,

but were issued Taiping passports on the spot to go and see for themselves. The journey up gave them both halves of what the truth was, and it is to their credit that they wrote both down. The friendliness of the Taiping's was real. Griffith John, the Welsh Congregationalist in the party, described the rebel soldiers as, quote, Strong in muscle, free and bold in manner, and open in countenance, and quote. Which were not terms the British of 1860 used about Chinese people hardly ever.

And the fact that he reached for them at all aptly sums up that initial mood in the boat. Once they got to the temples, though, and they found the remains of the dismembered gods, the noses, chins, and hands hacked off the wooden deities, which these particular travelers read as a Protestant Reformation in progress rather than as vandalism, wrote John, quote, the floors of these buildings are bestroon with relics of helpless gods, and quote, and then on the fourth night out, approaching the Concord City itself, their boat slowed and stopped against a floating wall of the dead. The canal was jammed with bodies for hundreds of yards, and they had to push the hull through them in the dark,

shoving the corpses aside until sheer exhaustion forced them to rest, sleeping for some hours to recover their strength amid the putrid tide. The same sujo we just saw fire gutted and fallen from the inside, as experienced now from its choked waterline. Both realities true at once, and the men in the boat spent the rest of their lives. sorting out the proportion of the one from the other. Hongran Gan was in Nanjing,

but Li Xocheng held court in Sujuio, and he received them. Received them, in fact, with a six-gun salute, ranked attendants, drums, and gongs, and a red-carpeted hall. The full honors of a state visit, for five clergymen in a hired boat. The loyal king they met is worth,

setting beside the commander this story's followed since Hangzhou. A slight, keen featured man in spectacles and an imperial yellow silk robe, gentle in manner, almost scholarly, who talked doctrine with them and turned out to agree on the essentials, down to the calendar date of the Sabbath, which delighted everyone. And when the visitors, knowing what their mercantile neighbors in Shanghai cared about, asked whether the silk trade would be allowed to continue under Taiping rule. Lee answered that such trade was precisely what his government desired. They left him a gift of Chinese Bibles and went home in something close to rapture.

Edkins put his conclusion in the North China Herald for all of Shanghai to read. Quote, A great deal has been said about the cruelty of the long-haired rebels. But in this, there has been much exaggeration and misrepresentation. end quote. And the deaths at Sujo, he insisted, had indeed been suicide, not slaughter. Yet the whole of his writing reveals a more even-handed, even-hard assessment of the movement that he had just witnessed firsthand in both its open-handedness and its bloodthirst.

He went on, quote, They are revolutionists in the strictest sense of the term. Both the work of slaughter and of plunder are carried on so far as is necessary to secure the end. These are evils which necessarily accompany such a movement, and are justifiable or otherwise insofar as the movement itself is so. End quote. It's not that the killings didn't happen. It's the question of whether such admitted evils were permissible and necessary,

which depended entirely on whether the revolution itself was. It was a much more uncomfortable argument than the one his critics answered. But, as its evident impact on public sentiment became clear post-publication, also a persuasive argument. Then, at the end of July, something even better came down the pipeline. Personal letters of invitation. One from Li Xiu Cheng, and one from Hong Renggan himself. had been issued from Nanjing. Edkin's wife, Jane, was 21 years old.

They were newlyweds of just a year, yet she was frail enough that her family had worried about her making the voyage to China at all. And she had wept when he left for Suu the first time, and then wept again when he came home and told her of what he'd seen upriver. Of Hongran Gan's invitation, she wrote that it was, quote, the most endearing delightful news that ever rang in the ears of missionaries,

end quote. She wanted to go and could not, conceding that the scenes through which they would pass were too trying for a lady. Later, with the Taiping reported to be advancing on Shanghai, and the foreign commanders calling up volunteers to man the walls, she wrote to her father instead, quote, I profess to be a rebel at heart somehow,

and have a secret witch. to welcome them." Edkins and Griffith John went up the canal a second time and arrived at the beginning of August, and that meeting would wind up standing as the culmination of Hongran Gan's entire journey. The Prime Minister of the Heavenly Kingdom received his old colleagues from Hong Kong, draped in silk and crowned in embroidered gold. But then, visibly embarrassed by all of it, he refused their kneeling, insisted on shaking

taking hands after their own old fashion, dismissed his attendance, took off the crown, and sat down to talk. They spoke as old friends. They prayed together. They sang the hymns he knew from his mission days. And he told them, the number two of the entire rebel empire, in his own capital province, at the crest of the war, that he had never been so happy in his life as when he was but a preacher's assistant in Hong Kong. The kingship, he said, was not an office he could have refused. What he wanted was to lead the Taiping to a right understanding of religion, and beside that work, the fate of dynasties was secondary. In Hong Kong, James Legg, the friend whose errand had started all of this, wrote what the news meant to him. Quote,

There is then one individual at least among the insurgent hosts who is fully acquainted. with the truth, end quote. Everything Hongran Gan had promised his cousin about the foreigners rested on the belief that they could be talked to. On the evidence of that summer in Suuzo, he was right. The commercial question was tenser than the theological one, because Shanghai's living depended on it. The authority's first reflex, as the rebels swept toward the Silk Districts,

had been an injunction. British subjects were forbidden to trade with the insurgents, and the settlement braced for its immensely profitable commerce to strangle. But against that fear now stood Li Xiu Cheng's explicit assurance, carried down the canal by the missionaries, and printed in the herald itself, that trade was what the regime wanted. Which would prove true, the strangling or the assurance, was in July 1860, genuinely. unknown. What can be said now is only that the assurance was in character. Everything the new administration of Sufu had done in its first month pointed at a government that understood the region's value lay in its actually functioning. And for a certain kind of merchant, that pattern argued louder than any theology. There was other traffic on the

canals that summer, and it ran the opposite direction. For every mission boat working its way up towards Sujo, some uncounted number of other boats were going east. Families, servants, strong boxes, whole households of the Jiangnan gentry and merchant class, moving toward the one city in the region that the Taiping did not hold, and the Qing did not defend, the city that belonged in practice to neither. The sources count these people only later and indirectly in what they did to Shanghai. The canals themselves kept no ledger.

The boats went east, low in the water, and most never came back. Li Xocheng was looking east, too. Shanghai was the natural terminus of everything the spring had won. The port that turned Jiangnan's silk into silver, the door to the foreign trade Hongran Gan's whole program assumed, the last piece of the map. And on the strength of that summer, there was every reason in Sujo to expect the door to simply open just the way Sujo's had. The missionaries had come as brethren and gone home beaming.

The Shield King's theory of the foreigners had just passed its first live test. So, as the summer turned, letters and proclamations went ahead of the army, down the same canals the refugees were using, addressed to the foreign representatives at Shanghai, one from Li Xiu Cheng, the other from Hongran Gan. And next time, we'll follow them and their consequences. They carried assurances, that the Taiping came for the dynasties part of the city and no other, that foreign lives, property, and trade had nothing to fear,

and that the loyal king had backed the promise the way he backed all his promises that summer, with a standing order of death for any soldier who harmed a foreigner. He had spent the season demonstrating that he kept exactly this kind of promise. By June's evidence, the promise was even true.

He had never yet lost a negotiation he had been allowed to finish. Whether anyone at the other end of the canal intended to even let him start is what awaits us next. 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.