Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/217

Rh him the proceeds. In the meanwhile he asked for help from the customs revenues at Shanghai.

The last named request involved too many other questions to secure a favorable response. Yet the emperor expected bricks to be made without straw, and again sent an impatient mandate ordering Tsêng to take effective steps after consultation with the governor. Tsêng's reply, March 27, was a cry of despair. Kian had fallen in the south; Chow Hung-shan, the new commander in the lake region, was proving incompetent and had lost his base, Changshu-chen. Worse than that, his defeated soldiers had fled in terror to Nanchang and there produced a panic among the populace, resulting in a great stampede, in which numbers perished; still worse, Ch'ing-shan and Jaochow were being abandoned and their defenders retreating to Nanchang. These events required Tsêng's presence to reorganise the army of Chow Hung-shan and calm the populace. Help was looked for from Hunan, whose governor was attempting to cut a road through Liling and P'inghsiang, and another through Liuyang and Wantsai.

A further memorial, after consultation with the governor, showed that the entire eastern and southern part of Kiangsi was in rebel hands, and bandits from Kwangtung had entered Kanchow in the south, which the viceroy of the two Kwang should be asked to relieve. Lo Tse-nan, they believed, should be brought back to Kiangsi. Financial help was of the utmost necessity, and they asked for 100,000 taels from the customs at Shanghai, and blank patents to official rank to be sold in