The Taepings Resumed Active Operations With The Capture
Of Kiukiang And Ganking, And In March, 1853, They Sat Down Before
Nankin.
The siege continued for a fortnight, but notwithstanding that there was a
large Manchu force in the Tartar city,
Which might easily have been
defended against an enemy without artillery, the resistance offered was
singularly and unexpectedly faint-hearted. The Taepings succeeded in
blowing in one of the gates, the townspeople fraternized with the
assailants, and the very Manchus who had defied Sir Hugh Gough in 1842
surrendered their lives and their honor to a force which was nothing more
than an armed rabble. The Tartar colony at Nankin, numbering 2,000
families, had evidently lost the courage and discipline which could alone
enable them to maintain their position in China. Instead of dying at their
posts they threw themselves on the mercy of the Taeping leader, imploring
him for pity and for their lives when the gate was blown in by Tien Wang's
soldiery. Their cowardice helped them not; of 20,000 Manchus not one
hundred escaped. The tale rests on undoubted evidence. A Taeping who took
part in the massacre said, "We killed them all, to the infant in arms; we
left not a root to sprout from, and the bodies of the slain we cast into
the Yangtse."
The acquisition of Nankin at once made the Taepings a formidable rival to
the Manchus, and Tien Wang a contestant with Hienfung for imperial honors.
The possession of the second city in the empire gave them the complete
control of the navigation of the Yangtsekiang, and thus enabled them to
cut off communications between the north and the south of China.
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