The History of China - #350 - Taiping 25: Rings Within Rings

Episode Date: October 9, 2026

In the summer of 1861, the strangest siege of the war took shape on the banks of the Yangtze. As Heaven itself sent forth cosmic signs – of victory or disaster, no one could be quite sure – an imperial army had a rebel city completely surrounded.Only for a different rebel army to surround that imperial ringing army.But they were, all of them, deceived... for somewhere out past the hills, another ring was made... Inside the walls, the gardens were planted, the rations were holding, and the markets were open for business.They would stay open to the very end…Time Period Covered:Apr.–Sept. 1861 CEMajor Historical Figures:The Qing:The Xianfeng Emperor [1831–1861]Yixin, Prince Gong [1833–1898]Imperial Commissioner Zeng Guofan [1811–1872]Zeng Guoquan, commander of the siege of Anqing [1824–1890]Zhu Hongzhang, commander of the Guizhou divisionCommander Bao Chao [1828–1886]Duolonga, Manchu cavalry general [1817–1864]Zuo Zongtang, general holding Jingdezhen [1812–1885]Hu Linyi, Governor of Hubei [1812–1861]The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom:Hong Xiuquan, the Heavenly King [1814–1864]Hong Rengan, the Shield King [1822–1864]Chen Yucheng, the Brave King [1837–1862]Li Xiucheng, the Loyal King [1823–1864]Li Shixian, the Attending King [1834–1865]Lai Wenguang, commander at Huangzhou [1827–1868]Liu Canglin, commander at the Jixian PassYang Fuqing, commander of the last relief armyCheng Xueqi, the Brave King's vanguard commander; defected to the Qing [1829–1864]The British:Frederick Bruce, British Minister to China [1814–1867]Harry Parkes, interpreter & negotiator [1828–1885]Major Works Cited:Fairbank, John K., ed. The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 10: Late Ch'ing, 1800–1911, Part 1.Jen, Yu-wen. The Taiping Revolutionary Movement.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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We'll talk about some new laptops, including the RTX Spark. Windows Weekly. You'll find it at twit.tv slash www and wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to the history of China. Episode 350, Rings Within Rings. When they fight over land, the slain filled the fields. When they fight over a city, the slain filled a city.

This is what is called leading the land to eat human flesh. Death is not punishment enough for such a crime. Mengza, Mencius, in the Liloe, circa 4th century BCE. What then is my counsel? To do what our ancestors did in the war against the Kimbre and the Teutons. A war nothing like as grave as this one. When driven into their towns and brought to the same wants, they kept themselves alive on the bodies of those whose age

made them useless for war, and did not give themselves up to the enemy. Critognatus of the Averni, besieged at Elisha, 52 BCE, in Julius Caesar's The Gallic War. At dawn on the 5th of September, 1861, the sun and the moon came up over the horizon together, and the five planets visible to the naked eye hung in a single line across the sky. what classic Chinese astrology called Rueuehuehruh Wiching Lianzhu. The sun and moon joined like a jade disc.

The five stars strung like pearls. Across China, people got up early to see it. In Beijing, where a comet with a brilliant tail had hung in the northwestern sky through July, the residents had already read the heavens once that summer and had taken the comet to mean that their emperor would not be coming home. Now, though, some of the watchers said the pearls on their string promised that the dynasty would be restored.

Among these watchers was Zheng Guo Quan's secretary, a scholar named Zhao Li Yuan, who kept a diary. He looked up and could not decide what heaven meant by it all. He wrote that day, quote, I look up with reverence to heaven above and don't know whether to feel encouragement or fear." On a boat moored to the southern bank of the Yangtze,

25 miles upstream from a starving city. A man who had spent the year writing out his own testaments had written about the alignment in his diary the day before and chosen, for once, to read it as auspicious. He was right, as far as that went. The city his brother had been besieging for more than a year would fall to the two of them within the day. He did not know that a courier was already riding south from Beijing,

carrying news that would give the alignment another meaning entirely. The summer that ended on that morning, the summer of 1861 at Anqing, was the darkest of the war so far. He had not expected to see the end of it. In April, Zeng Wofan had been sealed inside a Taiping encirclement at Chimun. His last supply road cut when Jingda Jun fell on the 9th. And he had gathered 9,000 men to break out of the east, or die trying.

He managed to do neither, exactly. At the walled town of Huizhou, on the rim of the cordon, a rebel garrison well-stocked with foreign rifles, slipped out in the dark on the night of April 20th, and set fire to his camp, burned it out, and scattered the breakout force into the night. Zung fell back to Chimun with no food, no supplies, and no route of escape left. On April 22nd, he wrote to his sons in Hunan, a letter he described in his diary as his will,

his second in five months. The situation, he told them, was as bleak as January 1855, when he had lost his fleet on Lake Poyang and tried to take his own life. quote We are surrounded on all sides Our supplies are all cut off On top of that To meet with such defeats

The morale of our army is truly shaken And quote Then at what he took to be the end Came a professional self-assessment And it was a bad review Quote At its root Leading an army is not something

I was good at warfare calls for extremity but I am too balanced it calls for deception and I am too direct how could I possibly manage against these monstrous rebels he then ordered his sons never to make the mistake of taking his path continuing the quote you must not become soldiers and you need not become officials either end quote all they should do, the one pride he still claimed looking back on a life he judged a failure,

was pursue your studies with a single mind. Perhaps the most consequential general of 19th century China wanted it on record, in his own hand, that the whole military enterprise thing had been a mistake, and that scholarship was the only thing he'd ever really been for. He survived again because his subordinates wound up being better than his luck. Zhou Zhang Tang regrouped and counterattacked in mid-April and retook Zhengda-jun and the road along with it. From the siege lines came a letter from his brother Guo Quan, several thousand words long, pleading with him to get out of the quote-unquote cauldron his headquarters had become.

Holding one corner of the mountains at the cost of his life would do nothing for the war, while running the whole campaign from the river would do everything. Zung allowed himself to be persuaded. On May 3rd, he wrote home the sentence that governed everything he did for the rest of his life. Quote, The destiny of our family and the security of the empire both depend on whether or not we recapture unne. Qing." Two days later, he took an eastern road out of the mountains, with a thousand bodyguards,

and moved his headquarters onto a large boat off the southern bank of the Yangtze at Dong Liao, guarded by his own navy, in direct communication with his brother's siege lines, and dependent on no road that any Taiping column could cut. He had stopped distinguishing between the dynasty's survival and that of his own household. Everything now converged on Anqing, and on the question of how, a Taiping fortress of seven years standing, had come to be under siege at all. The city stood on the northern bank of the Yangtze, a brick-walled fortress covering more than a square mile, on high ground that fell away on every side.

The river sealed it to the south. Broad lakes closed the land to the east and the west, and six miles north, a mountain range climbed into the middle. and closed that approach as well, save for one fortified gap, the Gishien Pass. The river there was half a mile wide, but its deep channel ran so close under the northern bank that a ship's captain passing below could look straight up the barrel of a cannon on the city wall. Whoever held Anqing held the river, the northern approaches to Nanjing, and the base for every Taipei operation into Anhui and Hubei. Zhang Guafan could not be. pushed toward Nanjing without it. The Taiping could not reach back up the river toward

Wu Chang or toward Shedakai's roving army, far off in Sichuan, without it. Properly defended, it was all but unapproachable. But as of the summer of 1860, it was not being properly defended. Its master was Chen Yu Cheng, the brave king, who at 18 had led the vanguard into Wu Chang, and whose enemies called him the four-eyed dog for the two black birthmarks under his eyes. That spring, he had marched east with the bulk of his army to help destroy the great camp outside Nanjing, and had left Anqing to a garrison of some 20,000 unseasoned recruits from across Hunan and Hu Bay, under strict orders to hold the walls and never sort he out. Inside with them were the civilians.

four or five thousand women and perhaps twice that many children, the brave king's own family among them. So when Zheng Guo Quan brought ten thousand men down through the Gishin pass in the rain that summer, scattering the pickets, he could camp within gunshot of the walls against barely a shot of resistance. The siege of An Qing was part of the price of the greatest Tai Ping victory of the war. The brave king was spend more than a year trying to come home. Inside, at first, there was no alarm. The Taiping ran on Qing as they ran all their cities, as a military camp. Past the massive outer gates lay tidy quarters of steep cobbled lanes for the garrison and the civilians. And beyond them, long,

empty stretches of what had been housing, all torn down for firewood, for brick to build new redouts along the walls, and for open ground to turn into vegetable gardens. The city was well-provisioned. The gates were barricaded. The lookouts took their turns on top of the walls, and the garrison, which outnumbered the force outside two to one, settled in to wait for the brave king. Harry Parks stopped at Anching on March 24, 1861, two days after his conversation at Huangzhou on his way back down to Nanjing. By then, the Hunan Army's works had closed around the landward side of the city, and the people inside were on rations, though still fairly generous ones, a caddy of rice a day, about a pound and a third, with vegetables from the gardens and whatever small animals could be caught. He found them looking a little, quote-unquote, pinched, but healthy and visibly content, and in no particular hurry to be rescued. They asked whether the brave king meant to attack Hanco.

Quote, I replied that I believed he would avoid that port, end quote, Parks later reported. They then asked him to tell Hongran Gan, when he reached Nanjing, to send them rice, cooking oil, and salt.

And there, the anxiety behind the smiles began to show. After he'd gone back aboard, messengers came out to the ship with a handful of gold bangles to secure his goodwill. Parks, insulted at being taken for a man who could be bought, sent them away in a temper, and no one from the city came near his ship again.

When the kings in Nanjing later asked whether a British ship might run supplies for their garrison, he refused them flat, with a lecture on, quote, the rights and duties of neutrality, end quote. The siege had its own commerce all the same. It had sat deadlocked so long that a market had grown up outside its walls. Were the people inside, bought whatever they could, from the men who were keeping them in there. The Hunan army was nine months behind on its payroll, and its soldiers wanted money as badly as the city wanted food. Hunan had as many men inside the walls fighting for the rebels as it had outside them in the trenches.

from the same regions, speaking the same dialects, divided mainly by the side each had chosen in the first years of this war. Until their officers gave the order to attack, they watched one another warily and did little business. The courier Chen Yu Cheng had sent from Huangzhou to Nanjing to ask whether he might attack Han Koh in the face of Parks' warning, did not come back in time to matter. April came, and Li Xiu Chung's army did not. And, with no word from the capital, the brave king made the decision himself.

He left a garrison at Huangzhou under one of his most faithful officers, Lai Wan Guang, to watch for the loyal king's arrival, and took his best troops back down the river to break the siege of An Qing on his own. On April 27th, he reached the Gishien Pass with 30,000 men. Anching was his city, his base, his granary, his command. A British naval officer, watching from his ship's deck, called what followed a, quote-unquote, strange sight. Driving the outnumbered Hunan army back inside their own works, the brave king's men began a new line of fortifications around the outside of Zang Guo Quan's. the rings nested the brave king's new perimeter

drawn in a wide arc around the already existing siege works the siege works drawn around the walls of Anching and the walls around the garrison and the civilians of the core the besiegers had become the besieged now I'll admit where my own head went

reading about this my first thought was the siege of Munster You know, the Anabaptist New Jerusalem of 1534, which some of you might know from Dan Carlin's hardcore history. So I went and I looked that up, but it turns out that wasn't quite right. The Prince Bishop's Army at Munster starves the city out, sure. But nobody ever came to besiege the besiegers. A much closer match is 1900 years older. Elysia, in 52 BCE, where Julius Caesar trapped the Gallic king

Verking Gederex inside a hilltop town, built one ring of works facing inward to hold him, and then a second ring facing outward against the Gallic Relief Army he knew was coming. Two walls back to back. That's basically Anching in the summer of 1861. The Brave King's men threw up heavy timber stockades at the Gishien Pass, and 18 more around Waternut Lake on the city's eastern flank. They took nominal command of the water and began ferrying supplies across to the garrison on pontoons and even makeshift rafts.

For a few days, at the end of April, the whole war compressed into those circles on one riverbank, each pressing on the next. Zeng Guo Quan's lines faced both ways, as Caesars had, and they held as well. Three days of hard assaults failed against the Hunan Army's high walls and deep moats. And meanwhile, the brave king discovered that the system of rings had one more layer than he'd counted on. Out of sight of anyone watching from the river, Duolonga's cavalry, 30 miles to the north. The same horsemen who had turned him back in November, still astride the road to Tongcheng and Nanjing. The outermost ring at Anqing was imperial after all.

The brave king had come as the city's savior and found himself one more ring of the siege. On May 1st, help reached Tongcheng. 20,000 Taiping reinforcements under the personal command of Prime Minister Hongran Gan. He had been ordered into the field hard on the heels of the Brave King's November failure against Oolonga, and his military task was plain enough

to support Chen Yu Cheng and break that cavalry. But the shield king had gone reluctantly, suspecting the orders had more to do with palace politics than with the war itself. He felt the jealousy of the heavenly king's own family, the young heir above all, who resented his hold over Hong Xiu-Cuan, and his resentment of the fighting kings, who had endured the winter campaigns while he stayed comfortably in the capital with his family, writing about government and entertaining foreigners. Raising the army had been the easy part. He'd gone south first into the Taiping-held country of southern Anhui and Jhajiang, to collect soldiers and officers, and the war still ran so strongly in the rebels' favor

that they seemed to appear without end. Zeng Guafan himself marveled at the numbers, reckoning that the rebel armies had multiplied more than ten times over since the fall of the great camp, and complaining that whenever the militia and the end of the army, imperial armies broke, most of the survivors simply joined the rebels. For the shield king, as for the loyal king in Zhangxi, men came in faster than anyone could have recruited them. By the time he crossed back north of the river and turned west toward Tongcheng, he commanded an army nearly half the size of the entire Hunan army. He was a scholar-turned general of another kind.

He had nothing like Zung Wofan's strategic sense. What he had was a belief that ideas could move men. And on the march, he wrote poems to rouse his followers. The genial, self-deprecating preacher his missionary friends knew was nowhere in them. When the heavenly king and his heir sent him off with a golden brush, a dragon robe, boots, and a hat, he wrote a poem about the brush A brush stands erect like a weapon It sweeps away the thousand armies

And what is left of their formations Another of his poems went Da Hui Xin'un The dipper dims where tartar's reek has blown Who will make earth Heaven new the spheres or throne A man of metal sheds no hero's tears.

The bold forget no washerwoman's loan. His will bears up the realm. His heart would rise. His breast nets all the cosmos as its own. The day he's home, folk soothed, the guilty felled. The grass and trees shall sing the rain he's sown. If you want a $3,000 a month payday for life, what would you feel free to do?

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Raffle number RAF-157-3916. Please play responsibly. The plan the two kings made was sound, and its execution destroyed the campaign in three weeks. On May 6th, Hongran Gan's army advanced south in two columns, and both were savagely beaten back by Dolonga's cavalry. Then, Chen Yucheng, hearing that his support was blocked, made perhaps the worst mistake of his entire campaign. He split his army. He left 12,000 men to hold the stockades, 4,000 at the Gishian Pass, 8,000 at Waternut Lake,

and took the rest north to crush Dolonga between himself and Hongran Gan, hammer against Anvil. He didn't expect to be gone long. At dawn on May 24th, the combined attack went in, two columns striking from the north, one from the south, straight into an ambush. A spy had carried the plan to the other side. Dolonga's horsemen swung around to fall on the brave king's rear.

The attack came apart, and Chen Yu Cheng was driven back into Tongcheng in disorder and with heavy losses, cut off from the 12,000 men he had left holding the rings at On Ching. Zhen Yu I's reconstruction tells it rather less kindly to the brave king. His own column, the left, never arrived, and the center and right met Duolonga's five columns with their flank left open. That defeat ended Hongran Gan's first venture as a field commander. Orders came from Nanjing recalling him to the capital. Harry Parks' second visit there had rattled the Heavenly King badly enough that he wanted his

foreign minister home. The Shield King went back to his true portfolio, carrying now a military failure, and the court made sure it was entered against him. For his part in the route, the Heavenly King, formally degraded him one rank. At the Gishien Pass, meanwhile, the brave king lost his vanguard commander. On May 30th, Cheng Shui, a Tongcheng man, went over to the Hunan army. He was brave and able, and he would make a considerable career on the imperial side.

As soon as Zeng Guo Fan heard that the four-eyed dog had come to An Qing, he'd sent Bao Chow's army over the Yangtze to his brother's aid. Boucho's men gathered on the northern bank at the end of May, came east through the mountains, and fell upon the four orphaned stockades outside the Gishien Pass. They needed just over a week. On June 7th, three of the stockades surrendered, and every one of the three thousand men inside was killed. The fourth lasted a few more days, but ended up.

the same way. From all four, exactly one prisoner was kept alive, the senior Taiping commander, a veteran his soldiers loved, and the brave king could least afford to lose. Spared, also he could be dismembered beneath the walls of Aung-Ching, where the garrison itself could watch. He was, in all likelihood, Leo Chang Lin, a Guangxi man, one of the original god-worshippers, and the ablest of the brave king's generals. Zheng Guo Fan wrote of him in a letter home two days later, calling him Mr. Changlin and the venerable Chang. Quote, I respect the man and therefore call him shen-seng. I love the man, and therefore call him venerable, and quote. The 18 stockades at Waternut Lake held out longer and fell to hunger rather than assault.

At the beginning of July, out of food, they signaled that they would surrender. Zeng Guo Quan, younger than his brother, and never as hard, feared a ruse and ruled that the rebels send out their weapons first. On July 7th, they did, and the inventory is a census of what the war had become. 6,000 foreign rifles, 8,000 long spears, 1,000 jingles, 800 Ming Dynasty matchlocks, and 2,000 horses. The officer who took the surrender was Zhu Hong Zhang, who commanded the Guajo division in Guo Quan's army, and he left his own account of what came next. Guo Quan came to his camp to consult him.

The prisoners were nearly as numerous as the entire siege force, force. Too many fierce rebels, Guo Quan said. What are we going to do with them? Zhu answered, Slaughter is the only good way. Guo Tuan said, even for slaughter, some means must be devised. Zhu supplied it. The camp door shall be opened slowly, and the rebellious bandits admitted ten at a time. Thus, it will only take half a day to kill them all. Gouhuan's answer was the whole of his part in it. That my heart cannot bear.

I commission you to do it. Zhu went back to his camp, made his preparations, and supervised the slaughter himself. From seven in the morning, until well after the sun went down, finishing by lanternlight. The official report called it a battle. Zhu put the dead at more than 10,000. Guo Quan's report to his brother said 8,000, which is the figure the weapons count more supports. Zheng Guo Fan was delighted. His brother's victory made him think An Cheng might finally be taken, and his first letters afterward were practical.

Buried the thousands of dead, or put them in old boats and float them down river, before the smell spread disease through the camp. But he could tell the killing was weighing on Guo Quan. and the letters turned to reassurance. On July 12th, he assured his brother that Confucius himself, were he alive, would approve of wiping out the rebels. By July 19th, his patience had worn thin. He wrote, quote, Since you lead an army, you should take the killing of rebels as your purpose.

So why regret killing a lot of them? End quote. 12 days before the lake stockade surrendered, he had already written to Gwotren about what they should do when the city itself fell. He wrote on July 25th, quote, When we conquer the city, the proper thing to do will be to kill a lot of people.

We should not let compassion lead us to air in the grand scheme of things. What do you think? End quote. This was the man who, that winter, had raged at his brother's officers for paying their starving laborers in moldy grain, and who had written that what he hated most was an official without love for the people.

The July letters do not contradict that letter. They come from both the same brush and the same doctrine, and they mark as edge. The people, Zenguo-Fan meant, were the ones on his side of the moat. Through all of it, the city was still being fed. foreign steamers were now running up the newly opened river to Hanco in numbers, and some of them were glad to anchor off Ancheon's Rivergate on its southern face,

where the siege lines could neither see nor reach them, and sell rice, oil, salt, and weapons, at hugely inflated prices to the soldiers who came down to the water to buy. Zung Wofan's patrols could fire across their bows and no more. The treaty protected the ships. His captains did not know how to handle a blockade runner under a foreign flag that refused their orders, and sinking one could mean a new war with Britain in the middle of this one. A British emissary was supposed to visit his camp in May,

and Zung prepared himself to, quote, treat him like a person, not treat him as a devil, and quote, in the hopes of getting the deliveries stopped. The emissary never came. By early June, Zung was writing home about foreign ships passing up and down the river every day. One had put salt and oil ashore for the garrison only a week before. He wrote, quote, Here we suffer through this siege, but the rebels are still being supplied without break, and quote.

And two days later, quote, If the foreign ships can be stopped, we will see our day of conquest at On Ching. But if they can't be stopped, There is nothing we can do." In mid-June, one of his brother's spies reported that the latest ship had unloaded nearly 200 tons of rice, enough to keep the city alive for more than a week in a single hull. So, Zung filed a complaint. He wrote to the Governor General at Wu Chang, who forwarded it to Beijing,

where it landed with Prince Gong and the new Office of Foreign Affairs. now only months old. On July 18th, the prince wrote to Frederick Bruce, protesting the landings and asserting that imperial forces could board foreign ships trading into rebel territory, seize their cargoes, and arrest their crews. Bruce doubted the smuggling was happening at all. But if it was, he did not think it proper business for Britons. He worried more that it would provoke a full imperial blockade of the river

and choke off legitimate trade. On July 23rd, he told the British consul at Shanghai to put the foreign merchants on notice. Imperial gunboats would fire on any ship that tried to get through to Aunging, and a ship that was fired on could expect no protection from the Royal Navy and no claim for compensation.

He complained to London a week later, quote, Nothing is so difficult as restraining foreigners in a country where the government is unable or unwilling to assert its own rights." The shipments stopped. It was Huangzhou all over again, in a darker register. No order came from London, and no shot was fired.

A protection was withdrawn. Word of it went to the merchants through a consulate, and a besieged city's food supply ended with a letter. The legitimate trade Bruce meant to protect was also, how the dynasty paid its debt. 40% of the customs revenue on trade in foreign ships was earmarked for the British and French indemnities. In March, the lien had stopped an army.

In July, it starved a city. Zenguo-Fan spent the midsummer refusing orders. Li Xiu-Chung's forces south of the river were melting away eastward, vanishing overnight from towns they had held, plainly gathering towards some design in Jha Jiang. The court ordered Zhou Zong Tang detached to defend Jha Jiang's capital, and Zeng refused. It ordered one of his admirals to Guangdong, and he refused that too.

He would not release a single man that An Qing required. The southern arm of the Great Pinsor, meanwhile, closed the Western Campaign's account. Li Xiu Cheng's army, swollen now with several high. hundred thousand new recruits, most of them untrained, armed with whatever they'd brought from their farms, came into Hubei in the first days of June, two months late for the rendezvous, and took Shinguo in almost the same week the Gishian stockades were falling downstream. He had counted on finding the brave king in Hancoe across the river, ready to strike Wuchang from both banks.

But the brave king was gone, Hanco was untaken, and Wuchang had had had to strike Wuchang from both banks. was untaken, and Wu Chang had had three months' warning. Getting so much as a letter across the river between the two Taiping armies proved nearly impossible. Zeng Bufant's navy held the water, so Li Xiu Cheng wrote to Lai Wang Guang at Huangzhou, saying he knew next to nothing of what the brave king was doing across the river, and asking for word at once, and gave the letter to the new British consul at Hancoe to deliver. The consul kept it as a souvenir. It ended up in the British Museum.

With no word from the North Bank, the raw recruits he did not trust against Baucho's veterans. And with reports that Bao Cao was coming for him, Li Xiu Cheng abandoned the Western campaign at the end of June and took his enormous army back east through Jiangxi. The pursuit nearly caught him at a tributary of the gun. until a wind came up behind the crossing so fierce that no boat could follow for four days. He turned toward Jhajiang. Hong Rang's design had ended without a battle at its objective.

One arm stopped by a few sentences at Huangzhou, the other arriving two months late and then leaving without a fight. Jun Yu One doubts the departure had to happen at all. He has Lai Wan Guang's full report on the northern bank reaching Li Xiu Cheng at Xin Guo Zhou on June 15th. Together with news of his cousin, Li Shi's Xin's defeat in Jiangxi, and a plea for help. He has Wu Chang still weakly held, well within reach of the army, Li then commanded. And he calls the decision to turn back the grossest military blunder of Li Xiu Cheng's entire career.

Hong Run Gan, looking back on it from captivity, blamed the loyal king for the loss of Aang Qing more than the brave king. Li Xiu Cheng's own explanation was his recruits, too raw to meet Bauchao, who, by the intelligence he was acting on, had already reached Huangzhou. But in reality, Baucho had not. Chen Yu Cheng tried once again. Unable to break Duolonga's line all summer, and after pleading for reinforcements in Nanjing in person, he gathered what remained of his army, the forces Hong Rang Gan had left behind, and a fresh army Yang Fu Qing had marched across from the east, and took them on one last long circuit. Northwest, down through the mountains along the Hubei border,

and back in along the riverbank below the cavalry's reach, well over 200 miles in the broiling heat. on August 24th, he came back through the Gishien Pass. His men reoccupied their old ground and threw up new stockades, more than 40 of them, for an all-out assault on the siegeworks from behind. Cheng Shui Qi, who had gone over in May, was on the other side of the lines now, helping Zeng Guo Quan take the forts that linked the relief army to Tong Cheng. To stop anyone escaping by wall, Zenguofan's navy portaged gunboats overland from the river into Waternut Lake and

blasted apart any raft that put out from the eastern gate. In the last days of August, calculation gave way to desperation on both sides of the siege lines. The starving garrison poured out against the inner face of the works as the relief army stormed the outer face, row upon row. The living climbing over the dead poured entrenchments whose gunners blasted new gaps in the ranks as fast as they filled for seven days and nights. It was Alicia's last act, almost to the letter. The Hunan Army's warboats took the last of the Taiping food boats on the lake.

Then on the night of September 3rd, it stopped. The guns fell away. in the silence north of the city, a glow appeared and spread, and finally roared up into the dark. The brave king finished at last, burning his stockades at the Gishian Pass and marching away, leaving on Qing to its fate. Whether his family was still inside the walls when he turned away is not settled. Platt has him fighting that last week to get them out of the city. Jan Yu Wen, following Zhu Hong Zhang's memoir,

has them brought out across a pontoon bridge to his headquarters back in the previous spring. Most of what remained of the garrison seems to have gotten out on that final night, through a tunnel dug beneath the wall, perhaps under cover of the burning stockades. They left behind the civilians. They also left, on the walls, a few cadaverous gunners chained to their cannons, men who could not run. When the Hunan army came through the gates on September 5th, under the aligned planets, no one fought them.

Zenguo Fan's report to the throne said the city had been taken by blowing up its wall. Nearly everyone else who left an account contradicts him. Zhu Hongjan says the last of the garrison. escaped through a tunnel. Augustus Lindley, the Englishman who served the Taiping and wrote their history, says they left by agreement. The city handed over in exchange for the soldiers' lives. Jun Yu Wan notes that the Hunan Army, quote-unquote, unaccountably, let the last of the garrison march away north on the fourth, and reads Jew's tunnel as very possibly an allusion to the same arrangement.

What the veterans found inside went beyond anything they had imagined. After the foreign ships stopped coming and the lake stockades fell, no food at all had entered on Qing. The rice ration ran out. Then the vegetables in the gardens. And the weeds. Then the animals, down to the rats. In the last days, groups of starving men had come out to surrender.

on the promise of their lives, and had been beheaded as soon as they reached the Hunan army's camps, their bodies thrown into the Yangtze, and all the while, trade inside the city had gone on. Zhao Diwan's diary records what the victors discovered. At the end, the going price of human flesh in Anqing had reached half a tail per caddy. Roughly 16,000 people had lived through the siege, nearly all of them civilians. The Zung Brothers Memorials reported some 16,000 rebels killed. The Zung Brothers Memorials reported some 16,000 rebels killed. Zeng Guofan's advice of June was followed.

The accounts of what happened differ mainly on one question, whether the women were set apart before everyone else was killed. Jen concludes that everyone inside was killed whatever their age or sex. A modern history of the Hunan army has the women carried off, and the men and boys slaughtered. Zhao Li Yuan, who was there, wrote that the children were spared, and that the soldiers took more than 10,000 women, and that several dozen killed themselves. On the morning of September 5th, the sky had been keeping a secret from everyone who read it.

The Shienfung Emperor had died at Zhehe on August 22nd, a month after he turned 30, having never returned to the capital he'd fled. Tuberculosis may have killed him. The courier reached Zeng Guelfon on September 14th, nine days after his victory, and broken. Zung wrote, quote, "'Heaven has collapsed.

The earth has split open." That night, he could not sleep for thinking of his sovereign, quote, My emperor, from the time he came to the throne until today, over the course of 12 years, never knew a day when he wasn't consumed by worry over our dangers. Now, An Qing is finally conquered, and the long hares have begun to weaken. It looks as if the war has reached a turning point. But, my emperor did not look. live long enough to hear the report of victory. So his dejection and melancholy will follow him into

eternity." End quote. For the dynasty, the loss had a harder edge than just one minister's grief. A monarch's health and length of reign were read as signs of heaven's pleasure in his rule, and the Manchu House had staked much of its claim on having given China two of the longest reigns in its history. Shen Feng's great-grandfather, Chan Long, had governed for 63 years. Now, a son of heaven had died young, sick, and in exile from his own capital, leaving the throne to a single son, five years old. The Taiping heard the news from a foreign visitor from Shanghai, and greeted it with open delight.

Hong Rang Gan, back in his ministry, issued a proclamation of magnificent, venom. Quote, Xien Feng, the demonic imbecile, was a gambler and a drunkard. He exhausted the treasury, squandering it like dirt and sand. The summer palace was his resort of debauchery, end quote.

The heir, he wrote, was, quote, a little demon who is several years old, and will find it difficult to continue the demon rule. And that this was precisely the time for us to seize the opportunity to uphold heaven, And quote. Others had been saying much the same in Beijing itself. A doctor attached to the new British legation in Beijing had reported months earlier that the capital's elite, no rebel sympathizers, professed, quote, no love for or confidence in the stability of the present dynasty.

End quote. It had been a good one once, they told him, but its virtues, quote, have become effete through luxury and debauchery. and they consider that its time has come, and quote. At An Qing, Zenguo Fan moved his headquarters off the boat and into the conquered city. His memorial on the victory gave the credit away. The Hunan army had besieged An Qing for more than two years, he wrote, and quote, its strategic plan was originated by Hulinyi alone, and quote. Hulini, governor of Hubei and the city.

the ablest administrator of the Hunan army had, died at Wu Chang on September 30th, coughing blood at 50. Zung wrote, quote, most painful to my heart. Hereafter, of all my colleagues, there will be no other one whose mind accords with mine as well as his, end quote. Chen Yucheng fell back to Luzo, 90 miles north, cut off from his capital and from every other Taiping station. Hongran Gan, looking back years later, put the loss plainly, quote, so long as An Qing was preserved intact, so long was the heavenly capital not in danger, end quote. And far to the north, beyond the great wall at Drahe, eight regents, a five-year-old emperor, two imperial widows, and an absent brother, were about to settle in the space of

about 10 weeks. Who actually ruled the Qing Empire? All that is next time. The morning, the maneuver, and the coup. Thanks for listening. Hey there, I'm Travis Hoyum, one of the hosts of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. Each weekday on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, we talk through the business news you need to know and the stories moving stocks on Wall Street. On weekends, we game plan personal finance strategies and dive into the industry's shaping tomorrow and host the experts, authors, and executives that understand them. Tune in for insights and a long-term perspective on investing and, of course, stock ideas, plenty of them. To quote a listener, it pays to listen. Check us out and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.