The Devil Soldier Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 thewalls 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