Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/216

194 Some offensive movements were undertaken about the lake, but when Kian was besieged by rebels it was impossible to find men to send to its relief.

The ever present censors thereupon began to attack Tsêng for his poor management of Kiangsi military affairs and the emperor addressed a reproving inquiry to Tsêng. To this he replied on February 14, stating that without Lo Tse-nan and Yang Tsai-fu he was isolated in Kiangsi. His forces had been too few in the first place, and could ill afford thus to be scattered even for the defence of Hupeh. With the coming of P'eng Yu-ling he hoped later to make progress. Meanwhile he was badly hampered for lack of funds, and he could not now secure from the usual sources of revenue the 60,000 taels necessary to pay his little force of eleven thousand men. Rebels, by occupying most of the prefectures, had prevented the collection of the ordinary taxes, the sale of honors lagged, and the salt revenues from Chekiang were hard to secure. Having observed that the new internal trade or transit duties on goods, known as likin, had proved most profitable where it had already been established, Tsêng asked that likin be collected at Shanghai on goods going to places where the Shanghai trade flowed, and grant