Decline, Fall, and Aftermath of the Qing Empire 107
Hong Xiuquan’s power was based heavily on his direct access to
divine revelation through his visions, and soon another Taiping leader,
Yang Xiuqing, began to have his own visions, which posed a threat to
Hong. This led to a bloody power struggle in Nanjing that decimated
the Taiping leadership in 1856. Despite this setback, Nanjing was not
recaptured by the government until 1864. By the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury, the Manchu banner forces were so weak and ill-trained that the
Qing court was forced to give several Chinese offi cials more military
power and authority than ever before under Qing rule. The man most
responsible for the eventual Qing victory over the Taiping forces was
Zeng Guofan, a conservative Confucian who saw the Taipings as a
much greater threat to the Chinese way of life than the Manchu rul-
ers. Zeng and several other Chinese offi cials recruited and trained their
own armies from their own home districts. These Chinese armies could
have posed a grave danger to the Qing court, but in the heat of the
Taiping Rebellion, the court had no choice but to give more power and
autonomy to its top Chinese offi cials.
An estimated twenty million people were killed in the Taiping Rebel-
lion, and there were several other rebellions that occurred during and
after the Taiping. In the middle of these rebellions, in 1858–1860, what
could be called a second opium war broke out when a joint Anglo-French
force invaded Beijing, burned the emperor’s Summer Palace, and forced
more unequal treaties on the Qing. This marked something of a turning
point in relations with the West, as Western governments now got almost
everything they wanted from the Qing court, including the right to have
diplomats reside permanently in the capital. Fourteen treaty ports were
now opened to Western trade, with whole sections of treaty ports com-
pletely under Western control. After 1860, Westerners also took over
the entire administration of China’s taxes on trade and commerce. The
once-great Qing Empire had become a semicolony of the West.
Western “coolie” (after the Chinese word, kuli, “bitter laborers”)
traders recruited poor illiterate Chinese men with false promises, or simply
kidnapped them, put them on virtual slave ships, and sent them to work
in gold mines, to build railroads in the western United States, or to work
on sugar and other plantations in Western colonies in Southeast Asia,
the Caribbean, and South America. Treated as indentured servants, these
workers were charged for their meals and transport and forced to work
for years to pay off their “debts” to their overseers. The Qing government
was powerless to protect its own citizens from this kind of exploitation.
The internal rebellions and the external wars of the nineteenth cen-
tury served to keep the court engaged in a daily struggle for survival,