Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/212

190 There remained two men of ability to help direct Taiping affairs, Ch'eng Yu-ch'en, who was then a minister of state and later the Yingwang, and Li Siu-ch'ing, later the Chungwang and sole prop of the state in its last days. The latter had joined the cause as a private in Kwangsi, had served with Shi Ta-k'ai in his Anhui campaign in 1854, and later was among those who led in the attack on the forces of Hsiang Yung which sent them reeling to Tanyang in 1856. After this he was put in control of important operations in Anhui, and some time later was promoted to be a wang. It was against his forces that General Gordon later fought. He was a man of clear insight and was faithful to the bitter end. Nor was he backward about expressing his opinion — generally a sane one — to the T'ienwang himself. He was inclined to attribute the final collapse of the movement primarily to the mistake of Hung Jen-kan (Hung Jin), who, in 1859, came from Hong Kong to join the movement, and so dominated the T'ienwang that other advisers could secure no consideration; and in a lesser degree to the disposition of the monarch to rely too much on divine interposition.

These internal rivalries and readjustments in 1856 so weakened the Taiping cause that if the loyalists had only taken advantage of them the war would have been speedily ended. They came to their climax, however, at the very time when imperial arms and morale had suffered a severe blow in the defeat outside Nanking, and Tsêng was too far away and too beset by enemies to move from Nanchang. No wonder that even the Chungwang was able to look back on this moment of peril and see the hand of an inscrutable providence so ordering affairs as to cause the defeat of the imperialists and the death of their general first, and the dissension of the chiefs and the uproar in Nanking afterwards, instead of having the disturbances first, with their almost certain