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1864: Li Xiucheng, Taiping Rebellion general

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On this date in 1864, Qing commander Zeng Guofan had executed his opposite number in the destructive Taiping Rebellion, previously surveyed in these pages.

Stephen Platt‘s acclaimed 2012 history Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War depicts this war along with Li, the illiterate peasant farmer whose brilliance in command flowered as the Taiping undid ossified class hierarchies.

Li’s generalship kept the Taiping in the fight for a long, long time: the war spanned 14 years, with some 20 million estimated killed. In July of 1864 the central government finally overran the rebel capital of Nanking/Nanjing and put that city to a frightful sack. Here’s Platt on Li’s fate:

Zeng Guofan seeded his reports on the fall of Nanjing with fabrications, claiming that a hundred thousand rebel soldiers had been killed in the fighting, inflating the glory of his family and his arm, masking their looting and atrocities against cvilians. He kept careful control over what the cout would know. To that end, from the day he arrived in Nanjing he took over the interrogation of Li Xiucheng for himself. The Hunan Army commanders had already secured a long confession from Li Xiucheng in the weeks since he had been captured — pages upon pages detailing his origins and the history of the war and explaining the tactical decisions he had made, many of which they still did not understand. The honor of beginning the questioning had fallen to Guoquan, who had taken to the job with undisguised relish; his primary tools were an awl and a knife, and he managed to cut a piece out of Li Xiucheng’s arm before the others made him slow down.

When Zeng Guofan took over the interrogations on July 28, at last the two hoary, weatherbeaten commanders in chief of the civil war faced each other in person for the first time: square-shouldered Zeng Guofan on the one side, the weary-eyed scholar, his long beard turning gray;wiry, bespectacled Li Xiucheng on the other, the charcoal maker who had risen to command the armies of a nation. It would be no Appomattox moment, however. There was no wistful air of regret and respect between equals. For the defeated, it was no prelude to reconciliation, to twilight years on a rolling plantation. This war ended not in surrender but in annihilation. Zeng Guofan would spend long hours of the following evenings editing his counterpart’s fifty-thousand-word confession, striking out passages that didn’t paint his own army in a good light and having it copied and bound with thread for submission to the imperial government, before casually ordering Li Xiuceng’s execution — in spite of orders he knew were coming from Beijing, that the rebel general be sent to the Qing capital alive.

On this day..