Flashman And The Dragon

APPENDIX I: The Taiping Rebellion

The Taiping Rebellion was the worst civil war in history, and the second bloodiest war of any kind, being exceeded in casual-ties only by the Second World War, with its estimated 60 million dead. How many died during the fourteen years of the Taiping Rising can only be guessed; the lowest estimate is 20 million, but 30 million is considered more probable (three times the total for the First World War). When it is remembered that the Taiping struggle was fought largely with small arms and only primitive artillery, some idea may be gained of the scale of the land fighting, with its attendant horrors of massacre and starvation. Again, the word "battle" nowadays is frequently applied to struggles lasting over months (Ypres, Stalingrad, etc). Using the more traditional sense of the term, which covers only days, it can be said that the bloodiest battle ever fought on earth was the Third Battle of Nanking in 1864, when in three days the dead exceeded a hundred thousand.

So far as his account goes, up to the summer of 1860, Flashman gives an accurate, if necessarily condensed version of the Taiping movement and its astonishing leader, the Cantonese clerk Hung Hsiu-chuan, who fell into a trance after failing his civil service examinations, saw visions of Heaven, and became inspired to overthrow the Manchus, cast the idols out of China, and establish the Taiping Tien-kwo, the Heavenly Dynasty of Perfect Peace, based on his own notions of Christianity. He is said to have been much influenced by a missionary tract, "Good Words to Admonish the Age".

That Hung was a leader of extraordinary magnetism is not to be doubted, and he was materially assisted by the corruption and decadence of Manchu government; China was ripe for revolution. At first his small movement concentrated on attacking idolatry, but with the persecution of the sect for heresy, magic, and conspiracy, his crusade developed into guerrilla warfare, and the first rising in Kwangsi in 1850 spread into other provinces. With able generals such as Loyal Prince Lee, the Taiping armies fought with increasing success; their organisation and discipline far outmatched the Imperials, and after the capture of Nanking in 1853 they threatened Pekin and controlled more than a third of China, establishing capitals in provinces which they had devastated. Flashman saw them when they were at their peak and might still have accomplished their revolution, but the seeds of defeat were already apparent. For all their zeal and military discipline, the Taipings were poor social organisers and administrators; their rule was oppressive and haphazard, and they failed to attract either foreign support (although their apparent Christianity gained them some European sympathy at first) or the Chinese middle and upper classes. They also suffered from internal feuds and the degeneration of the once inspirational Hung, who after 1853 went into almost complete seclusion with his women and mystical meditations. Strategically, the Taipings made the mistake of never securing a major port through which they might have made contact with the outside world, and failing to concentrate their thrust at Pekin, the seat of Imperial power.

After the events of 1860, their decline was rapid. Tseng Kuo-fan organised the Imperial reconquest, aided by the Ever-Victorious Army under Ward and Gordon, and after Hung's suicide by poison in June 1864, Nanking fell, and the greatest rebellion ever seen in the world was over; six hundred towns had been destroyed, whole provinces devastated, billions of pounds worth of property lost, and countless millions were dead, including all the rebel leaders. Loyal Prince Lee and Hung Jen-kan were both executed in 1864. Other notable Wangs were:

The East King (Tung Wang), Yang Hsiu-ching, a charcoal burner who became a shrewd and ruthless general; also known as God's Holy Ghost. He was murdered in 1856 by

The North King (Pei Wang), Wei Chiang-hui, pawnbroker, who in turn was executed with twenty thousand followers by the Heavenly King in 1856.

The West King (Si Wang), and the South King (Nan Wang) were both killed in action in 1852.

Apart from these early Wangs ("The Princes of the Four Quarters") the principal leaders included the young and formidable General Chen Yu-cheng, who with Lee raised the siege of Nanking, and died in 1862; the redoubtable Shih Ta-kai, also known as the Assistant King (I Wang), executed in 1863; Hung Jen-ta (Fu Wang), elder brother of the Heavenly King, executed 1864; the Ying Wang (Heroic King), executed 1862; and most pathetic of all, Tien Kuei, the Junior Lord (Hung Fu), son of the Heavenly King, executed by the Imperialists in 1864; he was fifteen.

Among eye-witnesses of the Taipings, none is more interesting than Augustus Lindley, an intensely partisan young Englishman who defended them as moderates, contended that the Heavenly King had been elected, not merely self-declared, denied that his claim of relationship to Christ was meant to be taken literally, and defined as "anti-Taiping" all Britons of the Elgin school, the opium interests, missionaries, Roman Catholics, and merchants generally. He paints an attractive picture of Loyal Prince Lee, whom he met (and shared his indignation at being repulsed from Shanghai), and is a mine of detail about Taipingdom. He is at variance, however, with other contemporary writers, the most extreme of whom describe the Taipings as enslavers, destroyers of trade, living on loot, etc. * At this distance they look, as Flashman says, like a worthy movement gone wrong; in fairness, it has to be said that they included some sincere reformers, even among local commanders, and in some areas at least brought lower taxation and tried to encourage trade and agriculture.

As to the havoc they wrought, the one point on which most authorities seem to agree is that the Imperialist forces were worse. Jen Yu-wen described the carnage when the Taipings took Nanking (with 30,000 Bannermen wiped out and thousands of women burned, drowned, and cut down) as the first and last Taiping massacre; considering the scale of bloodshed in the war, it is difficult to accept this.

There is a considerable modern literature on the subject, and Chinese scholars have devoted close study to the writings and philosophy of the movement. (See Lindley, Ti-ping Tien-kwoh, 1866; Lewis B. Browning, A Visit to the Taipings in 1854 (in

* H. B. Morse, an eminently fair authority, is blunt: "The Taiping Government is not known to have organised any form of civil administration, even in Nanking. Levying of taxes was simplicity itself: it took everything in sight." (International Relations).-

Eastern Experiences, 1871); Franz Michael, The Taiping Rebellion, vol. i, 1966; Jen Yu-wen, The Taiping Revolutionary Movement, 1973; J. C. Cheng, Chinese Sources for the Taiping Rebellion, 1963; H. W. Gordon, Events in the Life of Charles George Gordon, 1886; Walter Scott (publisher), Life of General Gordon, 1885; Morse; Wilson, Blakiston; Forrest; Scarth; Cahill.)