Zeng Guofan

Chinese statesman and military leader

• Born: November 26, 1811
• Birthplace: Xiang Xiang District, Hunan, China
• Died: March 12, 1872
• Place of death: Nanjing, China

By suppressing China’s Taiping Rebellion, Zeng Guofan contributed materially to the survival of the imperial Qing Dynasty, and he and his protégés were responsible for a remarkable Confucian restoration that sought to modernize China technologically while keeping its traditional philosophical and moral basis.

Early Life

Zeng Guofan (tsehng GOO-oh-fahn) was born into an impoverished but well-educated aristocratic landowning family whose members claimed to be descendants of a disciple of the ancient philosopher Confucius. They lived in China’s central province of Hunan. Zeng’s grandfather bestowed a strong sense of realism on the young boy. His father, Zeng Linshu, struggled hard with his own education. His mother devoted herself to her husband and her son, who started to study at age four.

At the age of eight, Zeng Guofan started studying the Chinese classics and began to write compositions. At thirteen, his family arranged for him to marry a young girl from the Ou Yang family of Hunan. Zeng and his wife eventually had three sons and six daughters. Two boys and five girls survived to adulthood, and his oldest son became a diplomat.

Meanwhile, Zeng passed his first examination in 1826. In 1833, he earned his first degree during the same year that his father finally earned his own degree. On June 23, 1838, when he was twenty-seven, he earned the jinshi degree, which is comparable to a doctorate, and became a member of the prestigious Han Lin Academy in Beijing. As was typical for a scholar in imperial China, Zeng held a variety of government positions and steadily rose in rank. In 1843, he became examiner for Sichuan Province, a position that allowed him to pay off the debts he had accumulated during his studies, and help his family and fellow Hunanese.

Zeng was elevated to cabinet rank on July 29, 1847, and became acting vice president of the Board of Ceremonies in Beijing in 1849. It was a remarkable accomplishment for someone only thirty-eight years old. When his mother died on July 28, 1852, Zeng took temporary leave. Custom demanded he mourn her for twenty-seven months at his home in Hunan.

Life’s Work

In December, 1852, while Zeng was still in mourning, imperial orders to fight the Taiping rebels reached him. The Taiping Rebellion had begun in 1850 in the remote mountains west of Guangxi Province, bordering Vietnam. Under the leadership of Hong Xiuquan, who proclaimed himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ and Heavenly King, the Taiping rebels sought to erect a quasi-religious empire. Their stunning military successes led them north into Hunan in 1852. Shocked by the defeats of his armies, Emperor Xianfeng commissioned Zeng Guofan to raise a defense force in his home province. His order required an astonishing violation of the Qing law prohibiting leading government officials from commanding military forces within their home provinces.

In early 1853, Zeng recruited and built his Xiang (or Hunan) army, named for the river running through his province. To finance his forces, Zeng used the special Lijin tax. While the rebels captured Nanjing in March, 1853, and made that city the capital of their pseudo-Christian sect, Zeng had to learn how to be a military general—a task for which his classical education had scarcely prepared him. Meanwhile, he devoted his energies to raising his militia.

Zeng’s initial force of 540 boats, 5,000 marines, and a large number of infantry troops were unsuccessful against the Taiping, so frustrating Zeng that he attempted suicide. In 1854, however, two of his generals won a major victory against the Taiping and checked their advance into Hunan. Nevertheless, by the spring of 1855, Zeng was being outmaneuvered and was left isolated. He was encircled by a small force of troops and a few ships in neighboring Jianxi Province. He was relieved only in the summer of 1856. His counteroffensive in Jianxi was aided by internal dissent among the rebels that saw the murder of two of their subordinate kings and nearly saw the collapse of its leadership in May, 1857. When Zeng’s father died in early 1857, he resigned his command and returned home to mourn.

In 1858, Zeng was recalled from retirement by an imperial edict ordering him to halt the Taiping invasion of coastal Zhejiang Province. One of his most gifted protégés, Li Hongzhang, then joined his staff. Later that same year, Zeng’s Xiang army was defeated, however, and his brother Zeng Guo Hua was killed. In July, 1859, Zeng finally cleared Hunan Province of rebels. After the defeat of a large Qing army by the Taiping in May, 1860, Zeng was made imperial commissioner for suppressing the Taiping on June 8, 1860. Indicative of his trust in his subordinate commanders, who exceeded his own military capabilities, Zeng placed Zuo Zongfang in command of his forces south of Nanjing. Encircled again, this time at Qimen north of Hunan, Zeng was saved by Zuo’s victory in April, 1861. On September 5, 1861, Anqing, the provincial capital of Anhui, fell to his younger brother Zeng Guo Quan.

Zeng’s position was aided in November, 1861, when Prince Gong and the empress dowager Cixi assumed power in the name of Cixi’s six-year-old son, the new emperor Tongzhi. Both leaders trusted Zeng. Meanwhile, his generals Li Hongzhang and Zuo Zongtang continued to defeat the Taiping. Zeng reached Nanjing in June, 1862, and completed its encirclement in February, 1894, aided by his brother Guo Quan. The Taiping leader Hong Xiuquan died on June 1, 1864, and Zeng captured Nanjing on July 19, killing more than ten thousand Taiping soldiers. When Hong’s grave was discovered on July 30, Zeng ordered Hong’s body to be exhumed, beheaded, and burned.

While mopping-up operations against surviving Taiping continued, Zeng demobilized 120,000 troops of his victorious Xiang army in late 1864 as a display of loyalty. He was then made a marquis of the first class, the first civilian ever so honored, and was also made the governor of three provinces.

On May 27, 1865, Zeng became imperial commissioner for the suppression of the Nian rebels raiding the area between Shanghai and Beijing. He organized a static defense against the highly mobile rebels that failed to contain them. Sick and frustrated, Zeng recommended that he be replaced by Li Hongzhang, who was given his task. He was made grand secretary in 1867 and became governor of Zhili Province—the region around Beijing—in 1868, the same year in which Li defeated the Nian.

In 1870, Zeng was asked to negotiate with France in a difficult situation arising from the massacre of French missionaries in Tianjin (Tientsin). The following year, he was again named governor of the three Liangjiang provinces. Exhausted and seriously ill, he refused Western medical treatment but allowed his wife to be saved by Western medicine. In early 1872, he sent off the first mission of Chinese students to study in the United States. On March 12, 1872, Zeng Guofan died in Nanjing, at the age of sixty.

Significance

Beyond the triumph he won overseeing a military victory over the Taiping, Zeng Guofan excelled as a conservative reformer who significantly contributed to the unexpected restoration of the Qing Dynasty . Guided by the highest moral principles and ethical standards, Zeng exemplified the ideal of the Confucian scholar-statesman. His pragmatism and ability to support people of talent yielded remarkable results.

Zeng witnessed the superiority of Western weaponry and the scientific and industrial advances that made possible their production and ceaselessly promoted Chinese emulation of Western military science. He supported Chinese production of steamships, cannons, and other Western weapons. He established military arsenals at Anqing and Shanghai and helped Li Hongzhang develop the Nanjing arsenal and Zuo Zongtang develop the Fuzhou dockyards, imperial China’s most modern industrial complex. Zeng’s decision to promote the education of Chinese in America and his support for buying American manufacturing machinery for the Shanghai arsenal were visionary. Indeed, his vision was especially unusual, as his philosophy was quintessentially Confucian, nationalist, and conservative.

In twentieth century China, Zeng Guofan was most widely praised by the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, who promoted Zeng’s legacy as a model for anticommunist modernism and progress. Similarly, Mao Zedong’s communists vilified Zeng as a feudalist reactionary who failed to be aggressive against Western powers. Nevertheless, Zeng Guofan served both the imperial government and the Chinese nation with the utmost loyalty, devotion, and creativity. His leadership prevented China from breaking apart, and he promoted a balance between modern military and traditional values.

Bibliography

Hall, William James. Tsêng Kuo-fan and the Taiping Rebellion: With a Short Sketch of His Later Career. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1927. Still the only book-length biography of Zeng in English, this work gives a thorough and sympathetic account of his life, focusing on his struggle with the Taiping. It also summarizes his neo-Confucian philosophy and outlines his achievements.

Porter, Jonathan. Tseng Kuo-fan’s Private Bureaucracy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Study of the institutions through which Zeng sought to organize and finance his war against the Taiping; argues that Zeng created a rational government that anticipated twentieth century technocratic bureaucracy.

Spence, Jonathan. God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. Although this book focuses on Zeng’s great adversary, Spence discusses his contribution to fighting and defeating the Taiping and explains how Zeng’s capable subordinates helped destroy the rebels.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Search for Modern China. 2d ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. The most widely available book on modern Chinese history in English. Chapter 8 deals with Zeng’s achievements in the war against Taiping and Nian rebels. Chapter 9 describes his contributions to the Confucian reform movement and shows his portrait.

Wright, Mary Clabaugh. The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T’ung Chich Restoration, 1862-1874. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957. Discusses Zeng’s significant contributions to the remarkable recovery of the fortunes of the Qing Dynasty, his war against the rebels, and his work for the self-strengthening movement; especially valuable for the concluding discussion of Chiang Kai-shek’s propagandistic use of Zeng in his own twentieth century war against communists.

Yingjie Guo, and Baogang He. “Reimagining the Chinese Nation.” Modern China 25, no. 2 (April, 1999): 142. Examines the historical writings of Zeng and how these writings have spurred debate about the politics of Chinese identity.