21 SNOWFALL
Issachar Roberts leaves Nanjing on January 20, 1862, and seeks shelter on a British ship moored in the Yangzi River. In indignant letters to the press, he claims he has been greatly wronged by the Shield King, Hong Rengan, and that Hong Xiuquan is "a crazy man, entirely unfit to rule [and] without any organized government."1 Reporting Roberts' safe arrival at Shanghai in early February, the North China Herald shows little sympathy for the preacher it has already sarcastically dubbed "His Grace the Archbishop of Nanking" and a "sham Diogenes of former days, and would-be Plato among missionaries."2 Roberts' flight, to the paper's editors, is merely poetic justice for the man who had misled the public for years about the Taipings. "Even he who first lighted the match which has led to such a wide-spread conflagration of blasphemy and murder has at last fled from the monster he has conjured up—like Faust fleeing from the demon Mephistopheles."3
Roberts' flight from the Heavenly Capital comes just as General Li Xiucheng, determined this time to face down the foreigners and make up for the disastrous losses at Anqing, has massed new Taiping armies outside Shanghai. Confirmation of the nearness of the Taiping troops, their strength, and their readiness for combat comes to the Western community from two of their own, one drunk, one sober, but both experienced in the ways of war. The first of them, Charles Goverston, is a seaman on a British vessel, the British Empire, moored in Shanghai harbor. Given a forty-eight-hour "liberty" to explore Shanghai in early January 1862, as he explains subsequently to the British vice-consul, he overstayed his leave "through intoxication." Not yet "perfectly sober," he sets out "with a Chinaman who could talk English," to take a look at the vaunted Taiping, and finds them all too quickly. Suddenly surrounded by a squad of Taiping troops, only two or three miles from the shelter of the city, Goverston is terrified, indeed "the fright quite sobered him," though he swiftly returns to his former state when a Taiping officer gives him more "liquor to drink which quite capsized him." But thereafter, the terror gone, and no more drink provided, Goverston is held by the Taiping and questioned for four days through his Chinese companion-interpreter. The questions focus on whether there are French and English troops in Shanghai, where and how many, whether they are also in the Chinese city, and whether they have heavy guns. The interrogation finished, the Taiping give Goverston a message to take back to the foreigners: the Taiping request the French and British to withdraw from the city, which the Taiping are determined on taking. They undertake not to damage any European property, and not to plunder.
Neither too drunk nor too terrified to keep his eyes open, Goverston estimates the Taiping troops just in his area of confinement to number about fifteen thousand men: "The villages all around are full of them: every house crammed." Many of the Taiping are armed with foreign muskets, some with "the Tower-mark," others German-made. There are several Europeans with the Taiping forces, and one English-speaking "Arab" who acts as "servant" to a Taiping officer. The Arab tells Goverston there are other Taiping armed with the latest Enfield rifles. Goverston notes that the Taiping troops seem well fed and fit, "very fine-looking men" with "plenty to eat." But they treat their conscripted Chinese coolie laborers with great cruelty, killing those who cannot manage their loads; nor do they pay their foreign helpers, but promise that when Shanghai is taken they will "get lots."4
On January 20, 1862, another Englishman, Joseph Lambert, gives an even more detailed description of Taiping plans and troop strengths to the British officials. Lambert has been one of the supervisors, with a European "mate," on a fleet of forty-two boats sent by Chinese merchants under the French flag to buy silk up-country. Arrested by the Taiping, held for three days, and interrogated through an English-speaking Cantonese in the Taiping force, the foreigners are threatened with death, but are spared when their employer offers their captors two thousand dollars. Lambert is then ordered to return to Shanghai and buy muskets and powder for the Taiping forces, and to deliver four letters, to the English, French, American, and Dutch consuls. If he tries to evade the Taiping order, they will behead him when they enter Shanghai, for they will be sure to recognize him. The message for Lambert to deliver is blunt:
They said that if the French or English attempted to resist them when they attacked Shanghae, they would cut off the heads of all foreigners they could get hold of, and stop all the tea and silk trade; that if French and English did not interfere with them, all white men might go over all the country, and trade.
Lambert estimates the Taiping troops in the area where he was held captive at around forty thousand. They seem poorly armed—perhaps one in ten has a musket—but they have established "a regular iron-foundry," where they are casting the barrels for large guns.5
The information acts as a catalyst for the already nervous foreign community. The Shanghai land defenses are further strengthened by "zigzag redoubts" and gun emplacements that ring the foreign concession areas, manned by a force of four thousand troops, and with eight British warships now anchored off the Shanghai Bund. In the gun emplacements— twelve feet high, built with eight-by-eight-inch beams of Singapore hardwood, to be replaced by hewn stone at a later date when time allows—the allied troops mount swivel guns capable of firing 32-pounder shells. To prevent accidental explosions, all spare munitions are to be stored in an old hulk, moored out in the river. For these and the other necessary defensive measures, the foreign community pledges eighty-six thousand taels of its own money.6
The British "Shanghai Land-renters Association" meetings that assemble at the British consulate are attended by from thirty to forty-five wealthy merchants. Even on the eve of possible annihilation their plans for defending the city are intermeshed with shrewd schemes to make their investments pay. The defensive ditches, for instance, can serve double duty as drainage canals, so that the Chinese owners of the land will be happy to help defray the costs. Making their concession area a "city of refuge" for the wealthier of the fleeing Chinese has not only led to satisfactorily high rents but encouraged the Chinese "better class" to "subscribe freely towards the expense of the blockhouses." The blockhouses in turn will have excellent value as long-range investments, for they can always be used "in case of a riot, [to] keep the mob in check."7
One man at the meeting of January 15, 1862, Mr. J. C. Sillar, suggests that the British "enter into friendly communication with the Tae-ping leaders," and hand over the Chinese city to them, thus enabling "men who printed the Bible" to take over "the idolatrous native city," and "the city to change rulers amicably." Thus would the British not only purge themselves of a "national sin" but be able to prevent panic and terror among the Chinese refugees now in the foreign settlements—Mr. Sillar dramatically estimates the total of refugees to be 700,000—who would otherwise "rush down the streets in hundreds and thousands, and drown themselves in the river ... while the streets would be choked up with the bodies of those trampled under foot." But Mr. Sillar can get no one to second his motion, and a missionary's response that now is the time "for prompt and decisive action against the Tae-pings" is "received with acclamation."8
What nobody, Chinese or foreign, has figured into the careful calculations is the weather. The snow starts to fall on January 26, 1862, and it continues, steadily and unrelentingly, for fifty-eight hours, leaving at least thirty inches on the ground and on the rooftops, and drifts of infinitely greater depth wherever the wind can carry them. As the snow ceases, the hard frosts begin, and the thermometer slowly drops. By January 30, the temperature is down to ten degrees on the Fahrenheit scale. For three weeks the countryside remains buried in what the Shanghai weather report in the North China Herald calls a weather pattern "unprecedented in the meteorological annals of Shanghai for its severity and the low range of the thermometer."9
The snow is a disaster for the Taiping forces, which lack adequate winter clothing, and can neither force their way across country nor break the ice that blocks the river. "We could not move," General Li later laconically explains.10
With their momentum checked by the weather in the crucial early months of 1862, the Taiping forces fail to break through the strengthened defenses of Shanghai, whether to occupy the Chinese city or to subdue the foreigners themselves. And seizing the opportunity offered by the absent Taiping armies, in the late spring of 1862 Qing troops advance downriver from Anqing, led by the brother of Zeng Guofan, and capture a strategic base at the foot of Yuhua Hill between the Yangzi River shore and the south gate of Nanjing city itself. Abandoning the attempt to take Shanghai, Li Xiucheng and his troops exhaust their strength throughout the autumn of 1862 in assaults against the new Qing stockades and earthworks in their own backyard, but despite numerous sorties, and attempts to undermine the fortifications, all are unsuccessful."
Grim as conditions are for the Taiping troops, their sufferings hardly compare with those of the masses of refugees and homeless villagers who wander in the area, displaced again and again by fighting that seems to have no end. These farmers and small-town dwellers of the Yangzi delta have now to contend with at least eight different kinds of troops who march and countermarch around their former homes. There are the Taiping field armies themselves, secret-society or other irregular armies loosely affiliated with the Taiping, independent gangs of river pirates or land-based marauders, the local militias and peasant defenders of rural communities, the large Qing armies recruited by provincial leaders like Zeng Guofan and his brothers, Qing regular forces commanded by the officials of Jiangsu province, Western mercenaries hired by the Qing authorities and currently commanded by the American Frederick Ward, and regular military or naval forces commanded by the British, led by Admiral Hope and Brigadier General Staveley.
For more than a year now, foreigners and Chinese traveling the roads and creeks from Shanghai through Suzhou toward the Yangzi, or even to the walls of Nanjing itself, have grown almost accustomed to a range of somber sights. Across a fifty-mile swath of land one might see almost every house destroyed, wantonly burned by one side or the other, or stripped of its doors and roof beams. That wood then serves either as fuel for the troops, or as makeshift supports for temporary bridges across the myriad canals and creeks, or to shore up the defensive ramparts of some short-lived garrison stockade, erected around villages where every man and boy has been pressed into service by one army or another, and the women carried off, where "human bones lie bleaching among cannon balls" and only the elderly are left to pick among the debris.12 In what is left of these communities, "the houses are in ruins; streets are filled with filth; human bodies are left to decay in the open places or thrown into pools and cisterns there to rot." On many riverbanks, sometimes for tens of miles, every hut or house is gutted and the people sleep as best they may under rough shelters of mats or reeds.13
Anything that can be used for fuel, whether wood or straw, cotton stalks or reeds, has doubled or tripled in price. Villagers stand along the banks of the creeks, holding out small baskets of produce—eggs, or oranges, or bits of pork—but they are "principally old people, with countenances showing their suffering and despair."14 Other villagers, encountered on the way, have the four characters "Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace" tattooed deeply into their faces, proof that they have fled from combat and been recaptured by some Taiping general, and thus been warned not to stray again. Some have scarred and pitted cheeks, where they have tried to cut the same words out with a knife.15
Refugees pass by the travelers, some in small groups, others in crowds of as many as 350 people, men and women, old and young, children and the lame, some carrying their possessions, some flags or spears, some empty-handed. Western missionaries traveling by road or track walk through deserted villages where only animals pick among the ruins and the bodies lie scattered by the road. Those traveling by water find at times that their boats have to push their way slowly through the bodies of the dead, which float, decomposing, in the channels.16 For one missionary traveling in the country near Suzhou, worn by the sight of human bodies "till my heart was sick," the image that he knows will haunt his brain the longest is that of the "wasted form" of "a little child which had been starved to death, as it sat propped up in a kind of chair or crib, such as the Chinese use for children who are unable to walk "17
Even veteran British army officers, used to the sufferings caused by wars around the world, of which they have seen so many, and initially sarcastic about the sentimental China missionaries who they feel are prone to exaggerate the suffering they see around them, end up with very similar views. "In all such places as we had an opportunity of visiting," writes Garnet Wolseley, quartermaster general on the British expeditionary force, "the distress and misery of the inhabitants were beyond description. Large families were crowded together into low, small, tent-shaped wigwams, constructed of reeds, through the thin sides of which the cold wind whistled at every blast from the biting north. The denizens were clothed in rags of the most loathsome kind, and huddled together for the sake of warmth. The old looked cast down and unable to work from weakness, whilst that eager expression peculiar to starvation, never to be forgotten by those who have once witnessed it, was visible upon the emaciated features of the little children."18
Yet life goes on as people make their adjustments to the reality around them. One Western observer, out with a scouting party in the countryside a day or two after the snow has stopped, steps carefully around the corpse of a Chinese man with a spear driven clear through his skull, and finds himself on a path worn by villagers' feet through the deep drifts of snow. At the end of the track, a group of villagers have gathered, and are brewing tea amidst the ruins of their still smoldering homes. They are celebrating the dawning of the Chinese New Year, which falls the following day, according to the lunar calendar.19
Many of the Chinese refugees gravitate toward the city of Shanghai, their pace dictated by the prevalence of rumors concerning the nearness of Taiping or other troops: sometimes they "rushed pell-mell along the roads and through the streets like a herd of stricken deer," at other times "trudging along with their scanty bundles of food and apparel, fear depicted in their countenances."20 Alarmed at the possibilities of infiltration by squads of disguised Taiping troops among the refugees—a technique used by the Taiping in their recent capture of Hangzhou and many other towns—the Chinese authorities order the gates of the Chinese city closed against them. The promenade, or "bund," in the foreign areas is crammed, and, the danger of famine and disease rising, the foreigners take steps to quarantine their areas of control. The sepoy troops on the canals receive orders to raise the drawbridges, and the foreign police enforce a curfew forbidding all Chinese to be on the streets after eight in the evening.21 Foreigners have a password they must use if stopped by patrols, and Chinese with a proven right to residence are issued "pass tickets." All Chinese found at night without these tickets are arrested and evicted from the foreign-controlled areas.22
Captain Charles Gordon of the Royal Engineers, assigned to see to the defenses of Shanghai by the commanding British officer, General Staveley, is under no illusions about the volatility of the situation. He plans his defensive emplacements, redoubts, and ditches so that the British may be protected as well from attack by the Taiping outside the fortifications as from the Chinese residents or refugees within—"a contingency not unlikely to occur considering the disaffected state of some of the inhabitants."23 British scouting parties can see the flames of burning villages and the flags and troops in the Taiping camps. Surprising a Taiping looting party after the snow has melted, they are struck by the mundane needs of the Taiping troops, marching under their heavy loads of rice, peas and barley, cooking pots, beds and clothing, and driving pigs and goats ahead of them with their spears.24
Even by the summer of 1862 things have grown no better. The British consul reports, "We are once more overrun with refugees, and this time in greater numbers than ever. They are actually camping out on the bund in front of the house, and on the roads near the stone bridge. It is frightf
ul to see the numbers of women, aged and children, lying and living out in the open air, and not over abundantly supplied with food."25 Those country dwellers rendered destitute by the endless raids live in abject misery in Shanghai, if they ever manage to reach its walls. One shocked Westerner, signing himself simply "Humanitas," writes of stumbling into one such camp of Chinese refugees in the summer of 1862, after Li Xiucheng's latest assault on the city has been repulsed. The refugees are crammed into half a dozen bamboo huts off Hanbury's Road, all "emaciated and wretched in appearance" and some "dying of starvation and disease," lying on mud floors that flood with every rise in the tidal flow of the river. The living are mixed in with corpses "in all stages of decay," sometimes blending life and death in one family scene, as in the case of one still living mother, lying on the floor too weak to rise, her two dead and naked children "covered with slush and mud" lying by her side. Such living skeletons are fed only by an erratic system of donated "rice tickets," to buy more of which "Humanitas" appeals to the Shanghai residents to donate $500, of which he promises to provide one-third.26 As the cold at the end of 1862 ushers in a new winter, all foreigners going to watch the plays at the Chinese theater are asked to give the equivalent of their admission money "to provide food for the Chinese starving poor."27
It is just after the great snowfall of 1862 that the Westerners' dogs start disappearing. A black retriever is the first to go, in February, taken from the hospital area.28 "Teazer" is next, a light-brown long-legged bull mastiff with a stumpy tail and black muzzle.29 Then "Smut" vanishes, a black- and-tan bull terrier from the HMS Urgent, followed by two dogs together—both bitches—one a small white-and-black "Japanese," one a white long-haired "Pekinese" with black ears, called Chin-Chin, almost ready to bear her puppies.30 General Staveley's dog, a "liver and white pointer" with his name in Chinese characters on the chain collar around his neck, is lost on August 8.31 The brass-collared "Goc," large and white, with black spots, disappears on August 15, the day "Humanitas" stumbles upon the dead and dying refugees, and shortly thereafter the first Newfoundland to go, "Sailor," recently cropped, is taken from the London Missionary Society compound.3- Then, as winter returns again at the close of 1862, it is hard to list them all, the other Newfoundlands and setters, the bulldogs, pointers, spaniels, scotties: "Bull" and "Die," "Bounce" and "Tie," "Punch" and "Rover," "Beechy," "Toby," "Mus," and "Griffin," "Towzer," "Nero," "Bill."33
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