#338 - Taiping 15: The Summer of 10,000 Years

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. The next experience is Shopify.com. The opening lines of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. It took two blows to finish the job, the same way it had taken two to nearly finish Tsengguofan the winter before.

except this time the two blows landed on the other man and the man on the receiving end of them did not survive the experience. Chin Rha Gong got there first. Recalled from his own fighting in the east he turned his army back toward Nanjing and struck the northern of the two great siege camps that had throttled the heavenly capital's approaches on and off for three years running. Breaking the

Manchu commander Tuominga's forces at Yangzhou and clearing the north bank of the river. Then, joined by Shidakai, who had left Jiangxi behind at his heavenly king's urgent summons, leaving Zhang Guofan behind in it, still weeping into his memorials with no idea that any of this was coming.

Qin turned south. In June of 1856, the combined armies fell on the southern camp. the older and more dangerous of the two, dug in for years under a government commander named Xiang Rong.

What did three years actually mean for a siege camp like that? This was no mere blockade thrown up overnight and broken the following season. Rather, Xiang Rong's men had been sitting outside these walls since the earliest weeks after Nanjing fell in 1853,

long enough that an entire generation of Taiping administration had been built, staffed, and run in a capital that had never once, in its entire existence, been free of an enemy within sight of its own ramparts. Every policy this court had made, every title it had handed out,

every quarrel its leadership had found the energy to pick with each other, had been made under that particular pressure. The knowledge that the Qing demons were still out there, still watching, still capable in theory of ending this whole experiment by nightfall if the gates ever failed to hold. A court that has never known anything else could not possibly yet know what it would do with itself were that pressure to ever lift.

Xiangrong had been dogging this movement since Yongan, since Guilin, since the earliest and hungriest days of the great retreat through Guangxi. Five years of it now, on and off. The one government general who kept finding his way back into the story

no matter how many times the Taiping thought they'd shaken him off. He would not survive this either. His camp broken, his position untenable. he fell back on Danyang and was dead within seven weeks,

by his own hand in most tellings, though other accounts have him succumbing to his battle wounds and the opium he took against the pain of them. However his end actually arrived,

nobody then or since has doubted what caused it, and with him went the last serious government pressure on Nanjing's gates. The scale of it was almost too large to hold in one frame. Wuchang, still in Taiping hands from its recapture in the spring of 1855, the third time that

punished city had changed hands in the course of this war, and not the last. The Yangtze Open from Wuchang in the west clear to Zhenjiang in the east, some 400 miles of river, walled city after walled city under the same banner, the water a highway instead of a gauntlet for the first time since this war began.

Dacai's own forces, even while their commander was being recalled east, had by this point subdued most of the rich prefectures of Jiangxi, the same province where Zengguofan sat stranded, penniless, and surrounded. Which meant the Wing King effectively controlled the ground beneath the very man he'd broken at Poyang Lake, without either of them even needing to meet again to

prove it. Zheng Guofan, at this exact moment, sat stranded at Nanchang with his fleet bottled uselessly in a lake and not a coin to pay his own soldiers. The two halves of this war moving in such perfectly opposite directions that a man plotting

them on the same chart would have assumed that he'd made an error. This was, by any reasonable measure, the high-water mark of the whole rebellion. the Taiping had bled for since Jientian. Its capital, the river, the provinces, the momentum, had arrived all at once in the summer of 1856. It would also, before the year was out, cost the

movement most of the men who had built it. Not to the Qing, not to Zeng Guofan, or to any government army. No, to each other. To understand why, we have to understand what the siege had actually been holding together. Because it wasn't just city walls. Yang Shouqing did not look like a man who spoke with the voice of God. He'd come up from charcoal burning in Guangxi, poor and largely

unlettered, drawn to the god-worshippers the way desperate men are drawn to anything that promises the world is about to be rearranged in their favor. What he had, rather than birth or learning, was a trick, if trick is even the right word for something he may have believed as completely as anyone who was watching him, and it was this. At intervals, in front of the whole assembled court,

Yong would fall into a trance, and the Heavenly Father God would descend and speak through his mouth. It's been a strange thing to discuss and look at since the first time we brought it up, because that strangeness is pretty much the whole story.

Hong Xiuquan's authority ran in one direction only, down from a vision he alone had experienced years before all this had even begun, of ascending to heaven and receiving his commission directly from God. Nobody else had been there, and thus nobody could disprove it.

Nobody could verify it, contest it, or add to it. It was a closed loop, complete and unrepeatable. Young's authority, on the other hand, ran the opposite way. It arrived on demand, in front of witnesses, whenever the trance took him.

which meant that whatever the voice of God said in that room in that moment outranked anything Hong Xiuquan had ever said about anything including things concerning the Heavenly King himself. This imbalance had not always run this deep

and the fact that it had gotten there at all