Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/276

Rh city on the eighteenth of August. The consuls stationed there decided to enforce neutrality and sent word to the Chungwang that he was not to take the city, and eventually he was repelled by the combined British and French official forces. The Chungwang asserts that the expedition to Shanghai was undertaken on invitation from some "barbarians" living there as well as by imperialists in correspondence with the insurgents. Prevented by inclement weather from making a speedy march into the city, and confronted by the fact that "Governor Hsueh had engaged one or two thousand devils to guard the city and decapitated the whole of the Imperialists who were in correspondence with me," the Chungwang was compelled to withdraw.

This act of the foreigners, who thus extended the doctrine of neutrality to embrace purely Chinese territory which could be reached by going around the settlements, was actually an abandonment of neutrality in favor of the imperialist side. The pitiable spectacle of desolation and distress at their very gates, and even more, the fear of a failure of supplies for the daily increasing population of Shanghai, led to still further extension of this anti-Taiping neutrality to a thirty-mile radius about Shanghai. Admiral Sir James Hope, returning from Peking, went up the Yangtse, February, 1861, with Harry