Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/26

8 by voluntary enlistment from all parts of the empire. Officers might be Manchns or Chinese, but the rank and file were native, and it was evenly distributed through the eighteen provinces. When we think of it as a national army we are apt to be led astray. Peking did, indeed, have control of the appointment of officers of higher rank; but once established in his command, the officer had full charge of his own men and they formed practically an independent force, yet dependent, by an intricate system of checks and balances, on other officers and on civil rulers in the provinces. There was nothing to correspond to the unity of command found in national armies of the west.

This Chinese force, known as the Luh Ting, "Tents of the Green Standard," dates back to the pre-Manchu period when those invaders were struggling for power. Like the Banner troops its organisation was made on the basis of 7,500 men to a major division. Whether the minor divisions were in exact correspondence to those of the Banners is not clear, but is probable. When Shunchih established himself in Peking, we are told that there were at least three Chinese armies with no less than 150,000 men, fighting for him under native generals in the provinces. Some of these were assimilated into the Banners, as we saw above, but many were left out and became the nucleus for the Green Standard. It may be recalled that the new dynasty in the beginning of its career, created four princes from the four chief Chinese generals who supported them, namely, Wu San-kwei, Kêng Chung-ming, Shang K'o-hsi, and K'ung Yu-teh, and granted them fiefs in the southern part of China, in Yunnan, Kwangtung, Fukien, and Kwangsi respectively.