The History of China - #348 - Arrow War 2: Ashes of Perfect Brightness

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

For two days in mid-October, ash fell like snow atop Beijing. All that remained of one of the greatest cultural storehouses in all of human history, put to the torch as an extremely personalized punishment... after everything not nailed down inside it had already been looted off, of course. But the man it was meant to punish... wasn't even there. He'd already slipped out the back door of the Forbidden City weeks before - leaving an opera troupe to play on and cover his escape, as he left his own capital behind to its conquerors for the last time. What was left was a city ready to be conquered, a conqueror who didn't want it at all, and who would negotiate a very favorable credit-extension deal instead... with a computable interest in the survival of the government he'd just humiliated, and in the quiet of the very ports the Taiping had spent all summer marching toward. Time Period Covered:Aug.–Dec. 1860 CE Major Historical Figures:The Qing:The Xianfeng Emperor [1831–1861]Prince Gong, the emperor's half-brother; imperial plenipotentiary [1833–1898]Senggelinqin, Mongol prince; commander in the north [1811–1865]Zaiyuan, Prince of Yi, imperial commissioner [1816–1861]Muyin, imperial commissionerHengqi, Qing officialZeng Guofan, imperial commissioner against the Taiping [1811–1872]The Qianlong Emperor [1711–1799] The British:James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin, High Commissioner & Plenipotentiary [1811–1863]Frederick Bruce, British Minister to China [1814–1867]Harry Parkes, interpreter & negotiator [1828–1885]Henry Loch, Elgin's private secretary [1827–1900]Thomas Bowlby, correspondent of The Times [1818–1860]Gen. Sir James Hope Grant, commanding the British force [1808–1875]Rear Adm. Sir James Hope [1808–1881]Capt. Charles Gordon, Royal Engineers [1833–1885]Robert Swinhoe, interpreter [1836–1877]Lord Macartney, ambassador to the Qianlong court, 1793 [1737–1806]Lord Amherst, ambassador, 1816 [1773–1857]King George III [1738–1820]Queen Victoria [1819–1901] The French:Baron Gros, French PlenipotentiaryGen. Charles Cousin-Montauban, afterward Comte de Palikao [1793–1877]Felice Beato, photographer [c. 1832–1909]Jean Denis Attiret, Jesuit painter at the Yuanmingyuan [1702–1768] The Russians:Count Nikolay Ignatiev, Russian envoy [1832–1908] The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom:Hong Rengan, the Shield King [1822–1864] Major Works Cited:Giles, Herbert A. A Glossary of Reference on Subjects Connected with the Far East.Gros, Baron. Négociations entre la France et la Chine en 1860.Hake, Alfred Egmont. The Story of Chinese Gordon.Leavenworth, Charles S. The Arrow War with China.Platt, Stephen R. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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podcasts. Hello and welcome to the history of China. Episode 348. Ashes of perfect brightness. The men of Qin had no leisure to mourn themselves. And so it was those who came after who mourned them. But if those who come after mourned them, learning from them, they too will give those who come after cause to mourn. Du Mu, Rhapsody on the Uphong Palace, 825 C.E. Before history, one of the two bandits will be called France, the other will be called England. Victor Hugo, letter to Captain Butler, Hoteville House, 25th of November 1861. You see, I'm a guy of simple taste.

I enjoy dynamite, gunpowder, and gasoline. And you know the thing that they have in common? They're cheap. All you care about is money. This town deserves a better class of criminal, and I'm going to give it to them. It's not about the money. It's about sending a message. Everything burns.

The Joker. The Dark Night, 2008. For the better part of two days in the middle of October, ash fell on Beijing out of a clear autumn sky. It settled on the roofs of the Forbidden City, whose master had not slept there in weeks and never would again. On the shuttered mansions of officials who had fled north by cart at whatever price the carters demanded. On the stalls of the merchants who had stayed, and who had spent the first week of the month assembling a thousand cattle in goats with which to feast the conquerors, since feasting them had become the only policy left. Four miles to the northwest, 800 acres of palaces, temples, libraries, lakes, and gardens,

the accumulated delight of five emperors across a century and a half. The place where the reigning emperor had been born, and had lived nearly the whole of his life, were being systematically burned, building by building, by soldiers working methodically on written orders in the name of a queen on the far side of the world. It took two full days because there was so much of it to burn. When it was over, the men who ordered it signed a treaty that made them the Qing dynasty's creditors, with a lean on the very revenue the Tai Ping were marching toward. Our prequel, while set of episodes finishes out here. And with it, so too does the very world the Taiping thought they were fighting in. Last time left every party certain, as of the summer of 1859,

that the other side was about to fold. The court had read Sengalinchin's mud and iron triumph at Daegu as proof that the barbarians could be beaten after all. London had read the same battle as a treaty repudiated by ambush, restorable only at a scale that ended the argument permanently. London's scale arrived in the summer of 1860, the largest European force ever sent against China. British and Indian regiments under General Grant, a French corps under General Montaubon,

tens of thousands of men with siege artillery, cavalry, and a supply train that included, among its innovations, the new Armstrong breech-loading gun. Elgin and Gross sailed with it, resuming the diplomatic lead. Elgin summoned back to finish what his treaty had started, and carrying in his instructions the one demand his own 1858 self had been willing to soften, in which the imperial court had declined to accept.

Ratification at Beijing, in the Emperor's capital, with no further discussion on the point. where they landed is the first irony of the campaign. Beitang, the muddy, minor river mouth up the river from Daegu. The very servant's entrance the court had already offered Bruce the same year before. The great British-French expedition came ashore there on August 1st, precisely because it was the door nobody seriously guarded. And spent its first days in a wretched little township, one officer recorded as Dirty Beyond Exhibition. expression, wading out heavy rains on a strip of mud between the sea and the marshes.

Qing General Sengalinchin had considered the possibility of a landing there, and prepared for it after his own fashion. But the defenses at Be Tong were nothing beside the great works at Daegu, which had been the entire point. On August 20th, the Allied divisions moved down the causeway toward the rear of the Daegu forts. And interestingly, as previously mentioned, The assault on the Daghu approaches opened one day after the French troops burned the suburbs of Shanghai itself. The same week, the same two flags, both the dynasty's mortal enemies in the north, and its indispensable defenders in the south. And no one in either theater obliged to even try reconciling the two, because the policy containing them both had been built piece by piece across the past four years. The forts that had slaughtered Hope's gunboats in the river fell in a day when approached from the land behind them.

The series completed itself. Fewer than 30 Allied casualties at Daegu in 1858, more than 400 in 1859, and somewhat over 350 for the storming of the northern fourths on October 21st. The whole system, the staked channel, the registered mudflats, the trap that had made Sengalinchin the dynasty's living proof that the foreigners could be beaten, was simply taken from the direction that it had never been built to face at all. Inside the North Fort, the Allies found more than a thousand of the defenders already dead, among them Sungalinchin's second in command. They also found why the garrison hadn't broken when the magazine cache went up. The fort had been barricaded from the outside. No one inside could retreat. Within the hour, every remaining fort had run up,

a flag of truce. The Allies sent to ask what the flags meant, and got back a reply, Hope Grant called Evasive and Insolent, along with an invitation to come on and attack. So they did. At the outer northern fort, not a shot was fired at them. Ditches crossed, walls scaled, no resistance offered anywhere, and 2,000 men surrendered where they stood. Grant assigned the collapse, to the loss of both the General Commanding and his second, and to the severity of what had happened at the first fort. Felice Abiotto came through afterwards with his camera and began arranging the corpses,

composing the storming as though the forts had been taken from the water rather than from behind. The photographs that went home to Britain were of an assault that had, in fact, never happened. Two things came out of the dacu that this campaign was about to use. The first was a gun. The Armstrong was Britain's latest and greatest artillery weapon.

Breachloading, rifled, accurate at ranges and rates its targets had no category for. And Daegu was its debut performance against a massed enemy. The correspondence who walked the works afterward recorded what its shells had done to the men inside, one of them describing the interior as a mass of blood and brains, smell. smelling most fouly. The second is the man who wrote the most vivid of these dispatches. Thomas Boulby of the Times had become, over the campaign's first weeks, its open partisan, thrilled by the landings, thrilled by the commanders, and frankly awed by the Armstrong itself,

which he judged to be the most terrible anti-personal weapon in existence, and described it with the fascination of a man who's watching the future itself arrive and knows it. His editors printed it all, and the British public followed the march on Beijing substantially through his eyes. Thus, he wrote when the forts came down, in a ten-day-s campaign where the Beha forts taken. The disaster of the last year avenged, the Chinese War of 1860 brought almost to a close. The gun, and its admirer, had separate appointments ahead, three days apart. Sunga Linchin, by the accounts that we have, was fully prepared to kill himself.

The order that arrived instead sent him north to the city of Tongzhou on the road between Tianjin and Beijing. His instructions contradicted themselves. He was to first gather a grand army. It would reach nearly 60,000 with the Mongol cavalry attached, and with it he was to not attack, but to ensure peace while protecting the capital at his back. Hmm

At Tianjin, the diplomats resumed Elgin confiding to Balby, of all people, how anxious he was to be done and gone. Ever the reluctant conqueror still trapped in his role. The imperial court sent new commissioners, real ones this time. Senior Manchu advisors with the emperor's ear, one of them, Zayuan, no less than an imperial cousin.

Harry Parks, the sharp end of this war, since the Arrow incident itself, rode ahead of the army under a white flag to negotiate at Tongzhou, taking with him a small party that included Elgin's secretary, Henry Locke, an attachment of Sikh cavalry, and Balby himself. On September 14th, after eight hours at the table, the commissioners accepted every British term. A protocol was fixed. The army would advance to a marker called Five Lee Point, and stop. Elgin would proceed to Tongjo with an escort of a thousand to sign, then on to Beijing to exchange ratifications at last in the emperor's own capital.

Parks rode back to Elgin's camp with the news that the war was, in substance, over. But it was not over. For a reason, no one at the table had said aloud. The terms were acceptable to everyone, except the man that was required. to accept them. The sticking point, when Parks returned on the 17th to finalize arrangements, was the one this whole rewind has been circling since the Treaty of Tianjin, the audience of the Emperor himself. The commissioners insisted that any minister appearing before the Son of Heaven must kneel. Parks replied that British ministers were not the Emperor's ministers and would do no such

thing. The commissioners proposed compromises, Elgin standing at a distance not facing the throne directly, and Parks refused those two. It was the exact rock on which McCartney's embassy had broken way back in 1793 and Amhersts again in 1816. Except that this time, the embassy had 40,000 soldiers behind it and no intention of going home until they got what they wanted. And behind the commissioner's desperation, stood an emperor past any semblance of compromise. Platt preserves the scene of the commissioner Mu Yin, seeking an audience before leaving for Tongzhou,

and being turned away at the palace gate by a eunuch who said the emperor must not be disturbed. To which Mu Yin answered that the power of the empire was being lost, and they feared disturbing the emperor? He did wind up getting his audience, and asked, among other things, what should be done with officials who fled before the Allied advance? The Emperor's answer was simple. Behead them.

What Parks did not know, as the talks re-founded on ceremony, was that the ceremony no longer really mattered. The Shen Feng Emperor had already issued secret orders to destroy Elgin's party when it came forward to sign. Seng Galen Chin's army was in placing mass batteries and packing troops into the millet fields along the road to five-lea point, the site to which, by the agreed protocol, Lord Elgin was to advance with an escort of 1,000 men in peace to end the war. The trap of 1859 was to be rebuilt on land, with a treaty

signing as its bait. On the afternoon of September 18th, with the negotiations formally broken over the issue of the kowt, Sungalinchin soldiers instead seized, what was already in reach, Harry Parks, along with his entire party, 26 men, including Locke, Baudi, the one-man French Mission Scientifices, three British officers, and 19 Sikhs troopers, taken under the same white flag of truce that had carried Parks across the lines for weeks now. They were carted into Beijing like criminals. Parks and Locke, the prizes, were shackled in the board of punishments to await their

executions. The others were taken for interrogation to a place Lord Elgin would mark, the Summer Palace. The army that then stood between the Allies and Beijing was destroyed in an afternoon. On September 21st, outside Tongzhou, at the bridge of Ba Li Chiao, literally 8 Li Bridge, or about two and three quarters miles, out along the paved road from the city, Sung Galenchen committed his massed cavalry, tens of thousands of Mongol horsemen, the Empire's last mobile striking force, in a broad charging wave against an Allied column,

a mere fraction of its size. The Allied cavalry peeled aside, the guns wheeled to face the charge, and the Armstrongs, firing shells that burst inside the packed formations, instantly wrought a degree of havoc and carnage that these horsemen had never before imagined. possible. A Chinese account Platt preserves says the Mongol riders, who'd never seen battle before,

turned at the sound of the foreign cannons. The infantry behind them scattered ranks, and then everyone trampled one another. The British cavalry sithed through the wavering mass, and then the artillery worked over the retreat once again, methodically, bringing the men down as they fled, in the phrasing of one officer's diary, in clumps. By evening, The last field army of the Qing had ceased to exist as an organized force, and the road to Beijing lay open, behind the bloodied, ruinous proof that human bravery was no longer a battle's deciding element. The French general took his title from the bridge.

Montauban became the Comte de Balitiao. That evening, the Xienfung Emperor performed the last piece of theater of his entire reign. He moved from the summer palace into the forbidden city, a residence he had always disliked, and had its gates sealed behind him. And then, with the court unable to see him, he went out the back, and fled north for the mountain hunting estate at Jehe with his women, his eunuchs, and his advisors. While that same evening, the Imperial Opera performed on schedule so that none would be the wiser.

The next day, the secret broke. and the capital of the Great Qing Empire dissolved into chaos. Officials, the same class the emperor had ordered beheaded for fleeing, now fled by the ministry load. The price of a cart doubled, then doubled again, until there were none at any price. The government's Civil Defense Bureau, as its final contribution to public order, posted notices authorizing residents to beat looters to death on site. The wealthy went north. The gates were barred. Silver vanished. Food prices soared. And by the 4th of October, the merchants who remained had assembled their 1,000 cattle and goats and begun preparing to welcome the conquerors with a grand feast. Three cities in this arc have now met this

conquering army. Hangzhou destroyed itself. Sujo opened its gates. But when it's came Imperial Beijing, the pivot of the world. Plan to banquet. Every Sunday, we cover the week's tech news on this week in tech. Hi, this is Leo Leport from the Twitter Podcasting Network, inviting you to join me with Jacob Ward, Molly White, and Harry McCracken, as we talk about the end of the big lawsuit against Meta and what it means for us, Nvidia spending lots of money trying to get into the AI software game,

and real details on that. face attack, what you hear will shock you. You'll find it at twit.tv and wherever you get your podcasts. The Allies sighted the walls on October 5th and encamped two miles out. The next morning, an advanced force of British cavalry and French infantry rode for the summer palace, expecting to find the emperor in residence and end the war by his person. They found the gates open, the grounds undefended, and the buildings empty of everything but their treasure.

The British called it the Summer Palace, but their own reference books knew better. Jiao's glossary of reference on subjects connected with the Far East gives Yuan Ming as three words in translation, Round, Bright Garden. Yuan is round, which carries wholeness, completeness, the thing entire. Ming is bright. And it's not a palace, it's a garden. Is it even one garden? It's actually three.

Laid across the low hills, five miles northwest of the city walls. The garden of perfect brightness. Beside it, the garden of eternal spring. And beside that, the garden of elegant spring. Eight hundred acres in all, 650 named structures, 130 formal views. The emperor lived out there from February to October most years, and Qianlong, who spent the most on it had even been born inside. The buildings were never the point.

The hills had been raised and the lakes dug and the streams rerouted in order to make something. The south of China. Jiangnan rebuilt in the north out of the paintings and poetry that the emperors loved best. There was an island modeled on the Yueyang Tower at Dong Ting Lake. There was an orchid pavilion after the... one at Shao Xing. There was a terrace holding 90 varieties of peony, counted and kept since the days of the Kangxi Emperor. There was also a street. The market street at sitting

rocks and winding stream, where the court ladies and the eunuchs played at being shoppers and merchants, haggling over goods in a commercial district built inside a private garden for a man who'd never stood in a market in his life. Jean-Den-Ine-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-E-I-I-I-E-I-I-I-E Atire, the Jesuit painter who worked there for decades, neatly summarized the entire facility. He wrote, quote, There is but one man here, and that is the emperor. All pleasures are made for him alone. And in a hall called the One Yuan Ge, there was a copy of the Sikku Quan Shu,

the complete library of the four treasuries. Chan Long's inventory of everything in Chinese civilization, judged worth keeping, copied out by hand onto 36,304 volumes covering 3,503 works. Seven copies had been made and placed around the empire. This was one of the seven. Two of the other six were already gone. The copies at Jinjiang and at Yangzhou had burned in 1853, as part of the Taiping Rebellion in the year Hong Shuo Quan's forces took Nanjing. A third at Hangzhou still had a year left before the fires found it. What was to become of the copy in the One Yuan Ghe happened that October 18th?

The troops entering the gardens had no way of knowing this at the time, but none other than Lord McCartney himself had stood on these grounds back in 1793. He'd counted some 40 or 50 palaces and pavilions and put the audience halls at 150 by 60 feet, and then cataloged the many vases and aggots, European toys and spheres, auraries, clocks, and musical automatones that he found inside. He'd practically been given the whole tour,

and he'd found it all quite marvelous. And at that point, the looting began for real. Officers wandered halls of gold vases and jade carvings, comparing themselves to boys turned loose in a pastry shop, loading their ponies and donkeys down until their arms couldn't even close around what they held, pausing only long enough to urge passing Sikh patrols to hurry up and help themselves before all of it was gone. The French command had given their men free reign from the outset, while British commanders at first tried to hold their men in camp,

then gave up completely, and ordered all loot to be surrendered for auction and even division by a prize committee. The wanton sack of the greatest palace complex on earth wound up ending its first phase in an accounting exercise. With the officer who brought back the most jade, surrendering his horse load to the common pot, only to be chided by his friend for being such an idiot for having done so. Lord Elgin, walking through afterward, found himself genuinely revolted.

Not, he specified in his journal, by the plunder, so much as by the waste. The silks torn for no reason. The porcelain smashed where it stood. The mirrors stovven in by rifle butt. War, he wrote, was a hateful business. And the more he saw of it, the more he detested it. On October 8th, Prince Gong, the emperor's younger half-brother, left behind to make whatever

peace could be made, released parks and lock. And then, over the following days, what remained of the rest of the party came back through the British and French lines. Of those 26 taken, 15 of them did not come back alive. One Frenchman, four Britons, and ten Sikhs. The prisoners that had been held outside the board of punishments had been bound at the wrists with wetted cords

that then tightened as they dried, denied food and water for days on end, and left so long that their hands blackened, swelled, and in some cases burst open. The dead had been packed into quicklime for the most part, and by this point were identifiable only by their clothing. Thomas Balby of the Times, the campaign's great enthusiast, whose dispatches had cheered the whole enterprise toward Beijing, died the very second day after they reached Beijing of what the cords had done to his wrists. His body was thrown over a wall to the animals.

A Sikh imprisoned beside him gave the account, down to the gray check of the war. of the clothes he died in. What moved through the Allied camps when the bodies came back was fury, of a kind that commanders learned to fear, as it demands an object to be released upon. One general proposed sacking Beijing outright, said another, could we have had our way, every Mandarin in Pei King would have been strung up. Elgin's problem was to find a punishment that would fall on the sovereign who would ordered the crime, rather than on a city of ordinary people who very much had not.

A city that was, by the way, already abandoned, starving, and blameless of anything except its physical address. The dynasty had kidnapped a diplomatic party under a false flag of truce and tortured most of it to death, some of it on the very grounds of the emperor's own pleasure palace. Elgin set out the terms of repentance himself later. a money payment alone carried the taint of blood money to him, and in any case he judged, the Chinese government could not possibly pay such great indemnities in its then-dorganized condition.

Demanding the men responsible would certainly produce only some miserable subordinates. Demanding Sengalinchin himself was a thing that the Chinese government would never have conceded, and Elgin's own could not have enforced. But the summer palace was the emperors, in a way nothing else in China quite was. His birthplace, primary residence, his private world, the built form of the entire Qing's claim to rule all under heaven. And it had been, for three weeks,

his prison for the men his orders killed. Burn it, and the punishment fell in Elgin's phrase, not on the people, but on the emperor himself. To be perfectly clear, he demanded money to. 300,000 tales to be paid immediately for the victims and their families, on which no assent from Prince Gong was even required. The French asked 200,000 more for theirs, and Gong agreed to both conditions. The burning was not instead of the indemnity.

It was on top of it. Baron Gross protested, a useless vengeance, he called it, since it could remedy none of the cruelties they were deploring, and he asked. Elgin not to put it in the letter to Gong at all. Elgin ordered it anyway. The counterargument was clear enough. It was the deliberate destruction of one of the supreme artistic achievements of human civilization, a library, and a museum of culture as much as a residence, all to be annihilated as a message. And the message's designated recipient was a man who'd already run away. The arson took place over the 18th and 19th of October.

800 acres of palaces don't go up quickly, even when soldiers are working on them in round-the-clock shifts. A company of Punjabi infantry, in the course of the demolition, turned up a cache of hidden gold worth thousands of pounds and wound up carrying it all the way back home to India. A small Pekinese dog was found curled in a wardrobe inside the palace residence, was carried itself back to England, and lived out the rest of its days as a favorite of Queen Victoria, who named it, in the quintessentially cheeky Victorian manner, Ludi.

In a carriage house on the grounds, the soldiers opened a door back into the past, onto 1793. The gifts presented by Lord McCartney's Embassy, a full-sized British state coach, cases of scientific and astronomical instruments, two 12-pound English howitzers with ammunition, delivered all to the reigning emperor's great-grandfather on behalf of King George III, and stored there, pristine and apparently quite untouched, for 67 years.

Everything this couple of episodes has covered in the course of this rewind, the arrow, the parliamentary debates, the treaties, the mud at Dagu, stood in that carriage house in miniature. Two empire's entire failure to speak to, each other, warehoused, in men condition, just waiting for the flame. Among the officers who put it all to the torch, one more name for the years to come. A 27-year-old captain of royal

engineers called Charles Gordon, who wrote home that they had destroyed, in a vandal-like manner, most valuable property. He wrote, quote, you can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the palaces we burned. It made one's heart sore to burn them, end quote. clearly not every man at the burning enjoyed it and the ones who wrote about it honestly wrote a very strange conflicting feelings indeed several recorded the same doubled feeling exultation shading into something like dread an almost pure awe at the enormity and gravity of their actions A glimpse of what they were capable of glorying in and committing, and yet could never restore. And the interpreter, Robert Swinho, watching the roofs fall in one after another, read the smoke as prophecy. An ancient empire consumed from within by its own civil war, and now set a flame from without, with nothing left to turn to, going up in his image, in the ashes of its former self.

The men holding the torches understood, at least some of them, that they weren't just punishing the Qing, but watching the end of a dynasty. It was really the moment the 19th century's verdict on the Qing became legible to everyone, including in little more than 11 months' time and by other means entirely, to the Qing itself. For two days, the ashes snowed down upon Beijing. The city underneath that gray fall did what it had always planned to do. Nothing. The feast cattle waited and load in their pens,

unfeasted upon. Prince Gong was the emperor's younger half-brother, in his late 20s that autumn, capable, proud, and handed by his fleeing sovereign brother the single worst assignment in the empire, making peace with the men burning the family home, with no leverage whatsoever,

What he learned in those weeks became, in a real sense, the dynasty's foreign policy for its final generations. That the barbarians, monstrous as their demands and their reprisals were, performed their agreements, that they wanted trade and treaty rights, not the throne, and that a court, which could bring itself to deal with them squarely, might use them, might even survive by them. One of that was sayable at Raha, where the Emperor's circle quickly blamed every concession on traitors in their midst. But it was being learned in Beijing, by the little brother put on the spot.

The convention of Peking was signed on October 24th. Prince Gong conceding, with the palace smoke barely cleared and the first snows settling on the western hills, everything demanded. The Tianjin Treaty ratified whole, at Beijing, resident ministers and all, the new indemnities, the session of Kowloon opposite Hong Kong, the opening of Tianjin itself, and the whole rest of the 1858 schedule, the Yangtze ports, the missionaries, the trade. Two articles, though, had been added to the Tianjin draft. One was the provision about Kowloon, the other legalized emigration out of China, which is to say,

primarily the Kuli trade. And the opening of Tianjin was not merely one more port on a list. It was to act as the security on the debt. The port was to be opened forthwith, and the allies would hold Daugue and Deng Zhou until the indemnity had been paid in full. The French convention was signed the next day, and at that ceremony, Prince Gong even made a memorable joke. Baron Gross had begun by apologizing for not appearing in his dress uniform. His, he explained, had gone down in a shipwreck off Ceylon on the voyage out. The prince blushed slightly, showed Gross his own robes, and said that he had not been able to wear his best garments either.

The barons had perished by water, while fire had destroyed his own. Gross wrote the exchange down afterward, and added that the prince had already known that he, he'd argued against the burning of the summer palace. Out of everyone at the table, Gong had picked the one man who would truly feel the sting of his gallows humor. The emperor, from Jaha, had been consistent to the end about which concession was fatal to him.

It was the capital, the audience, the presence. A treaty signed beneath the city wall, he had said, was the shame of the ancients, while mere money was secondary. But in the studied judgment of history, the emperor had it exactly backward. The indemnities pushed from 4 million tales to 8 for Britain when the Allies had to fight their way all the way to the gates, and matched by France, thus totaled 16 million tales. By Platts arithmetic, that was roughly 80 times the silver actually remaining in the imperial treasury. The land tax that made up four-fifths of imperial revenue had been gutted by rebellion, both the Taiping and others.

The Grand Canal had been cut, the state salt monopoly disrupted, and its minds lost. There was, in the whole broken fiscal machine, just one revenue stream left capable of even servicing this new debt, and it was the customs duties on foreign trade at Shanghai and Canton. collected by, that's right, the foreign run inspectorates. The court had already done this arithmetic itself, and the British knew it, because the court had done it out loud to one of its prisoners. On September 26th, while in his cell, Harry Parks had been visited by the official Hung Chi, who spoke with him at length about the grand councils that had been held on the foreign question. The war party's case, Hung-she said, was a ledger. Something like 4 million tails a year came in from the foreigners as duties.

Against that, now stood the indemnities. $21 million in 1842, 6 million tails in 1853, and now some 10 million more? The demands very nearly equaled everything the trade had ever paid into the Imperial Treasury. Commercial relations, on those numbers, wound up. costing the dynasty more than it had ever returned. It didn't make any sense. The Prince of Yi, Sung Galen Chin, and most of their advisors, read that ledger and thus argued for war. Prince Gong, Hung Chi said, would be glad to see some other course, but no alternative had presented itself. Remember, Parks was at the time bound, starving, and expecting to be executed, yet found himself being briefed on the inner deliberations of the Qing

court. Suffice it to say, surprised as he was, he did write it all down. From the last week of October 1860, Great Britain and France were creditors of the Qing dynasty, secured on the trade of its ports, which is to say the powers who had just burned the Emperor's new palace now had a direct, computable, and compounding financial interest in three propositions remaining true. One, that the Qing dynasty survived to pay, Two, that trade at Shanghai flow on uninterrupted, and three, that nothing and no one disturbed the ports where the money was being made. The Taiping Kingdom had spent the summer being told that British policy was neutrality. But the fact was that, as of October 24th, whatever the dispatches might say, British policy was in fact a lean on the Qing Empire.

Count Ignatyev, the Russian envoy who'd spent this crisis making himself indispensable to both sides, as courier, counsellor, and honest broker to a court that trusted no one and allies who verified nothing, presented his bill within weeks. For services rendered in mediation, he requested the session to Russia of the entire territory east of the Asuri to the sea, a domain the size of California, Japan, or Sweden, on whose coast the Tsar's government had already founded a harbor town. The naval post went up on the second of that prior July, four months before Ignatiev presented the bill for the ground it stood on, and was given a name with zero subtlety whatsoever. Vladivostok, ruler of the east. He had also, once the Allies were inside Beijing,

offered to have the British and French dead buried in the Russian cemetery. His offer was accepted with gratitude. Thus, of the four empires that had come calling since the Arrow incident, the one that had never fired a shot, wound up taking the most land, and also supplying the graveyard. The Shienfung Emperor never came back. He stayed at Jehe, beyond the mountains, beyond the treaty, beyond the ministers now installing themselves in his capital, beyond the burned shell of the only home he'd ever known. And what became of him there and the empire that had to be governed around his absence,

well, that'll come later. It's enough, closing out this rewind, to mark what he'd become. The first emperor of his dynasty to lose his capital to a foreign army, now living out in a glorified hunting lodge, ruling via courier, while his brother in Beijing, learned to work with the barbarians, and his generals in the South fought on against the other enemy with the only army the empire had left. Because that's right, the Taiping Rebellion never stopped for any of this. On October 16th, in a Cold Valley in Anhui, a courier reached the camp at Chimun and handed Zangua Fan, up since dawn, ill, worn down to the nerves, 60 miles from An Cheng and 800 from everything that we've been described.

describing today, the official notification that the emperor had departed for his royal hunting grounds, and that foreign armies stood at the gates of Beijing itself. It would be that December that the two halves of this story finally shared a harbor. Lord Elgin steamed into Shanghai in triumph, treaty in hand, and there learned the details of how, in his absence, the city had been held against the Taiping advance, by none other than his own little brother, In London, the Foreign Secretary had received the news of the fall of the Daegu forts and the repulse of the rebels at Shanghai on the same day. And the Times, gamely attempting to explain how an empire could storm a government's capital

while defending its richest city, reached for, of all things, zoology. Its leader ran, quote, Generally speaking, when the population of a country is split into two factions, an invading force would be disposed to coalesce with one of them. But the politics of China resemble the zoology of Australia and exhibit an inversion of all ordinary rules." It came across a lot funnier in London than it did in Nanjing. Hong Rangan had staked the Heavenly Kingdom's future on the foreign brethren from afar. But those foreign brethren had just become the dynasty's bondholders,

and nobody had even bothered to tell them. next time the rewinds over and the Taiping Rebellion resumes with the two wars that we've been discussing separately beginning at Oncheng on the Yangtze and in the offices of Shanghai to merge into their final form thanks for listening