The Devil Soldier Read online

  By mid-May the Chung Wang was approaching Ch’ang-chou, where he made short work of the outer defenses. The city itself held out for a few days, falling on May 20. A familiar scene then took place, as the Chung Wang recorded: “After entering the town, we did not kill or harm the people, but some were so frightened that they jumped into the water and were drowned.” The Chung Wang allowed his men a full two days’ rest, then proceeded southeast. The T’ien Wang’s deadline for taking Soochow was drawing nearer.

  From Ch’ang-chou the Taipings marched along the Grand Canal, an extensive manmade waterway built during the sixth and seventh centuries to connect the Kiangsu breadbasket with the northern provinces. Every stage of their advance brought the rebels deeper into a landscape which was strikingly unlike the rough, impoverished country of southern China, where their cause had originated. Kiangsu’s cultivated fields, bamboo groves, and freshwater lakes offered a life-style that had always been beyond the grasp of peasants in provinces such as the Chung Wang’s own Kwangsi. Approaching the town of Wu-hsi, the Taipings came within sight of the largest inland body of water in the region, T’ai Lake, its waters clearer than the muddy Yangtze and hemmed in by sloping hills. A sharp but relatively quick battle for Wu-hsi took place, and then the Chung Wang again paused for two days.

  The approach to Soochow brought clear signs that the retreating imperial armies, aware that their hope of halting the rebel advance was vain, were turning to their usual practice of plundering and burning as they departed. The Chung Wang met with decreasing resistance and an increasingly war-weary populace as he neared what was reputed to be the richest city in all China. Soochow, known for its fine textiles and beautiful women, was a showplace of complex ornamental gardens winding among extensive waterways spanned by delicate bridges. More important, it was the administrative center of the region, the possession of which lent its captors immense legitimacy in the eyes of the peasants. On his arrival the Chung Wang surrounded the city and made ready for an assault. But the imperialists were already gone. Remarkably, Soochow was conceded without a fight on June 2—the precise termination of the T’ien Wang’s one-month deadline. Upon entering the city the Chung Wang found that many Manchu officials were already on their way to Shanghai, and those who had not escaped he guaranteed safe passage back to their own people.

  In Soochow, as in every town or village they took, the Taipings destroyed Buddhist and Taoist idols, denounced the teachings of Confucius, and propagated the faith of Shang-ti. But in Soochow the Taipings found their revolutionary ardor far less welcome than in poorer districts. The citizens, said the Chung Wang, were “ungovernable and wicked and would not be pacified.” At last, in a signal demonstration of the power of individual leaders during the rebellion, the Chung Wang himself ventured into the villages around the city: “From all sides people came with weapons in their hands and surrounded us. All the civil and military officials with me turned pale. I was willing to sacrifice my life if the people of Soochow could be pacified; so when spears threatened my life I did not draw back. I explained everything and the people were convinced and everywhere ceased their activity and put aside their weapons.” In addition to civilians, large numbers of former imperialist soldiers went over to the Chung Wang’s standard. His army was gaining irresistible momentum.

  But not all Kiangsu’s residents were eager to live under rebel rule. As word of the remarkable events at Soochow made its way east, panic among imperial officials and peasants heightened. This was an experience wholly out of the ken of the province’s farmers and merchants. Clearly the Chung Wang’s Taiping horde was not to be stopped by the undisciplined troops under the command of local Manchu officers, who continued to desert in large numbers. After the fall of Soochow, a pair of the emperor’s senior servants in the region wrote (or, as the process was known, “memorialized”) to their master in Peking that “[t]he whole area is deserted, and there is no means by which to raise a hand [against the rebels].” The stream of refugees moving toward the coast became ever larger, their desperation ever greater.

  The hopes of these frightened thousands were fixed on what had been, until fairly recently, a muddy, comparatively unimportant trading town at the juncture of the Huang-pu River and Soochow Creek, a town that was now—through the bustling, often bizarre activities of its small multinational population—fast on its way to becoming China’s greatest emporium.

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  In old Chinese it meant “above the sea,” but in the last century and a half the name Shanghai has assumed a set of connotations that have little to do with geography. And the port that the Chung Wang approached in the summer of 1860 was hard at work building that reputation. One of five “treaty ports” that Great Britain had forced the imperial Chinese government to open to foreign trade and residence following the Opium War in 1842, Shanghai was an ancient city that had known no Western resident before that year. Plagued for centuries by typhoons and Japanese pirates, Shanghai was not one of southern China’s most fashionable cities. Soochow was more beautiful, Canton a greater commercial center, and almost any city had a better climate, especially in summer, when Shanghai’s dank air hung heavy with cholera, dysentery, and smallpox. The crowded inner city—enclosed by a three-and-a-half-mile wall in A.D. 1554—was a notorious sinkhole of filth and crime. For all these reasons, Shanghai ranked in the collective mind of the Chinese elite as less important than the other four treaty ports: Ningpo, Foochow, Amoy, and Canton.

  Yet Shanghai had advantages that the Chinese—who had long since abandoned any seafaring ambitions—had never appreciated. Located in almost the exact middle of the long Chinese coast, it was convenient to ships sailing to northern as well as to southern parts of the empire. Situated near the mouth of the eminently navigable Yangtze, it was a natural gateway to the interior. And there were other amenities. Shanghai’s climate might not have been the best, but the surrounding countryside was loaded with dozens of species of game, and the shooting was excellent. (Unacquainted with shotguns, the Chinese could hardly have taken full advantage.) On a more commercial level, the general lack of interest displayed by Chinese officials toward the affairs of Shanghai made it a haven for outlaws as well as a logical center for smuggling: Soon after the conclusion of the war which took its name from the drug, chests of opium began pouring into Shanghai, creating vast fortunes for those intrepid Western “businessmen” brave enough to endure Shanghai’s hostile climate and far from cosmopolitan atmosphere.

  These sporting traders, smugglers, and adventurers were the founders of Shanghai’s foreign community, which took root outside the walls of the inner (or, as it was soon known, Chinese) city in the years following 1842. The British were granted a corner parcel of land fronting both the Huang-pu and Soochow Creek, and they quickly set about civilizing it in typical fashion. Huge pilings were driven into the silt- and mud-covered bank of the Huang-pu, and the area was filled in with dirt. A long stretch of park was created, soon to be dubbed the Bund (an Indian term for “embankment”). In 1850 there were just over 175 permanent foreign residents in Shanghai, but there were already some twenty-five mercantile firms building large, bungalow-style headquarters along the Bund, which was destined to become one of the world’s great trading strips.

  In 1849 the French made arrangements with the Chinese government for their own “concession,” built on land between the British settlement and the Chinese city. And soon it was the turn of the Americans, who colonized the waterfront across Soochow Creek. (In the words of one early historian of the period, “the American settlement was not created, but just ‘growed.’ ”) Streets and roads that followed meandering creeks were laid throughout all three areas: only twenty to twenty-five feet wide and little more than mud tracks when the rainy season arrived. Large wooden gates were placed at the intersections of many of these roads (their closure at night was a safeguard against rioting by the Chinese), and a primitive system of oil-burning streetlights gave a slight sense of security to nocturnal wanderers. House
s were built by the score, open-air structures that, despite their occasional expense, were designed with the summer months in mind and could be immensely uncomfortable during Shanghai’s frequently brisk winters.

  No question of climate or terrain, however, could dampen the amazing spirit of Shanghai’s small but rugged foreign community, a spirit that was perhaps best symbolized by the fact that before the Western settlements had a municipal council they had a racetrack. The first version was built in 1850 and saw contests primarily between Chinese ponies, but by 1854 a new, larger track on the western edge of the British settlement had been constructed—complete with grandstand—and residents were soon bringing thoroughbreds from home and Arabians from India to compete. Before long foreign Shanghai had a library, a literary and scientific society, even amateur theatricals in a converted warehouse. But none of these ever achieved the popularity of the track. When races were not being run, it was open to the public as a bridal path, its infield was used for cricket matches, and it became the principal outdoor arena for the unique blend of Western civility and freebooting panache that was Shanghai society.

  In all, despite its climatic drawbacks and its inattentiveness to sanitation (in the early years of the foreign settlements most sewage was simply dumped over the edge of the Bund), Shanghai in the 1850s was a far more appealing place than one might have expected to find in an empire torn by a singularly savage rebellion. One visitor described the port’s foreign residents “riding or gyrating on the race course, as though they were being lounged. Those who prefer gossip to exercise frequent the Bund, a broad quay which extends the whole length of the Settlement, and which is crowded with Chinese porters all the morning and sprinkled with European ladies and gentlemen in the afternoon. The harmony and hospitality of Shanghai make it infinitely the most agreeable place of residence in China.”

  By 1860 there were still no more than a few thousand permanent foreign residents in Shanghai (living alongside the few hundred thousand Chinese who were crammed in and around the walled city), but there was another element that was increasingly affecting life in the settlements: transient soldiers and sailors. As trade in Shanghai grew—by 1860 more than two hundred foreign cargo ships might be docked in the port at any one time—so did the number of sailors wandering the streets of the city looking for work or, just as often, for a way to relieve their boredom between journeys. As for soldiers, England had once again gone to war with China in 1856—this time with the assistance of France—in an effort to force further trading privileges out of a Chinese government that had no wish to see foreign barbarians doing extensive business outside the five treaty ports. Although hostilities in this conflict were primarily confined to the extreme north and south of the empire, Shanghai was a common port of call for military units in transit.

  As might be expected, an entire industry devoted to the entertainment and intoxication of such men grew up in the foreign settlements. Brawling and general disorderliness became a very real problem. Because most of the city’s legitimate trade was carried on in the British settlement—and because that settlement had not only a police force but a jail and magistrates willing to put people in it—this problem was considerably worse in the American settlement and especially the French concession, where municipal revenue was raised in large part through the sale of licenses for brothels as well as gambling and opium dens. Many such houses became legendary, as did the whores who worked them. By the spring of 1860 the North China Herald, Shanghai’s outspoken proponent of British views and the official organ of the British consulate, had this to say to soldiers whose “thirst, which seems little short of that of Tantalus” drove them to drunken misconduct:

  As long as all this takes place among ourselves, and not too often, we cannot complain, but unfortunately curiosity carries the soldier among the Chinese, and it is then his peculiarities become dangerous; his martial bearing and winning ways are not appreciated by the ladies of China, as they are by those of his native country, damsels do not find the same attraction here in a red coat as they do elsewhere, his bargaining propensities are viewed with suspicion, and his presence in a Chinese shop is strongly objected to, the rough way in which he meets and overcomes obstacles, (Chinamen included) is repugnant to the Chinese mind, and the natives are beginning to find no amusement in the intoxicated soldier, and heartily to detest all those little eccentricities so common to his cloth.

  An attitude of arrogance toward the Chinese was hardly unique to drunken soldiers. Disdain for their hosts characterized many if not most of the Westerners in the Middle Kingdom. On the other hand, the recent decades of closer contact had done little to improve the opinion that those hosts held of their guests. To the average Chinese the foreigners were coarse “barbarians” intent only on exploitation; to the average Westerner the Chinese were stubborn upholders of a backward order. And no group aroused greater antipathy in the foreigners than the ruling Manchus and their hirelings in the treaty ports. Whether or not the Taiping cause had merit—and there were many foreigners, especially missionaries, who felt that its close approximation of Christianity was worthy of encouragement—the visitors certainly had no trouble understanding how it had grown so strong. As the North China Herald put it:

  The Great Rebellion, like an old fungus full of proud flesh, does not heal up; on the contrary, if popular rumors may be taken as an index of the matter, it continues to go from bad to worse.… The old foundations of this government are thoroughly rotten; its ranks and orders are broken; and its gorgeous decorations are in tatters. It is no mere ghoul that is devouring the body-politic. The evils are legion; year by year they multiply; and no mortal can tell when or what will be the end of these things.

  In the spring of 1860, as Shanghai’s already crowded Chinese city began to fill up and finally overflow with refugees from the west, the foreign community grew increasingly curious about the nature of the army that was headed their way. True, the possibility that the rebellion would adversely affect trade alarmed many Westerners. And, despite missionary pleas for indulgence of the rebels, the apparently blasphemous elements of the Taiping religion (primarily the T’ien Wang’s repeated references to the Supreme Lord as his “Heavenly Father” and to Christ as his “Heavenly Elder Brother”) became sources of deep concern in the settlements. But England and France were at war with China in other parts of the empire, and if a Taiping victory meant an end to Manchu corruption and obstinacy, it might be desirable. Thus few foreigners saw any reason in 1860 to abandon the policy of neutrality that had been their approach to China’s difficulties throughout the decade of rebellion—provided, of course, that the Chung Wang promised not to harm Western residents or interfere with their commerce.

  But this calm resolve began to erode with the arrival of ever more alarming reports from the field. In the beginning of June news of rebel movements around Ch’ang-chou finally reached the coast. The North China Herald’s correspondent put “the rebels now between Nanking and Ch’ang-chou at 140,000 (!) divided into seven large columns. This, with all the division and subtraction invariably to be applied to returns of the kind in China, still leaves it to be inferred that the Nanking garrison did break out in considerable strength.” From the city of Hangchow, conquered by the rebels, came tales of butchered Buddhist priests and general devastation: “Accurate statistics are difficult to obtain in such cases, but the reports generally concur in the statement that from fifty to seventy thousand lives were lost in a few days; and it is still more sad to think that a large proportion of these were suicides.”

  Such reports—accompanied by mounting rumors that Taiping spies were at work in Shanghai, preparing the city for conquest—had an alarming enough effect on the foreigners in Shanghai; their effect in the Chinese city and among imperial officials was devastating. Suspected rebel agents were captured in mounting numbers and dealt with summarily, as the Herald reported: “There have been many executions in the city during the week; the victims are said to be rebels. That they are obno
xious to the authorities from that or some other cause there is no doubt. On the bridge a short way up the Soochow Creek there are some twenty heads suspended. A most disgusting spectacle placed there to inspire terror into the minds of the dreaded rebels.” At length, knowing the exact value of the few imperial troops remaining in the region, the Chinese governors of Shanghai appealed to the British and French to land troops from their warships and garrison the city.

  The same Chinese government that was at war with England and France in other parts of the empire was asking for Allied help in Shanghai: It was a paradox not uncharacteristic of the rulers of China and certainly typical of the men who held effective power in the port of Shanghai. The imperial governor of Kiangsu, Hsüeh Huan, would ordinarily have exercised authority from Soochow, but he was now attempting to direct affairs in what little of the province he still controlled from the coast. Hsüeh had long experience dealing with both rebels and foreigners—he was the imperial commissioner for the five treaty ports—and it was widely rumored in the foreign settlements that his plan was to set the second group against the first. The “cunning commissioner,” as the Herald called him, was “a rising man, and it will be the making of him if … he can induce the barbarian commanders-in-chief to help exterminate the enemies of the Emperor, and to retake Soochow.”

  But a cardinal rule in the Chinese bureaucracy was not to acknowledge involvement in such schemes unless and until they succeeded. Hsüeh Huan therefore shielded himself by placing immediate responsibility for involving the Westerners in anti-Taiping activities on the shoulders of one of his most talented subordinates: Wu Hsü, Shanghai’s taotai, or circuit intendant. (In imperial China, the basic administrative unit was the district, controlled by a magistrate; districts then were grouped into departments, governed by prefects, and three or more departments became a circuit, placed under a taotai. Circuits were then organized into provinces.) Directly responsible for the lofty revenue of Shanghai’s customs house, and no more averse to embezzlement than the average Chinese bureaucrat, Wu Hsü was, according to the Herald, “an extraordinary man” who possessed “the purse of Fortunatus,… a small army of English friends, and a crowd of servants.… In his capacity as Taotai and Superintendent of Customs, he has constant intercourse with English officials, and pleases them by his affability and condescension.”