Some offensive movements were undertaken about the lake, but when Kian was besieged by rebels it was impossible to find men to send to its relief.
The ever present censors thereupon began to attack Tsêng for his poor management of Kiangsi military affairs and the emperor addressed a reproving inquiry to Tsêng. To this he replied on February 14, stating that without Lo Tse-nan and Yang Tsai-fu he was isolated in Kiangsi. His forces had been too few in the first place, and could ill afford thus to be scattered even for the defence of Hupeh. With the coming of P'eng Yu-ling he hoped later to make progress. Meanwhile he was badly hampered for lack of funds, and he could not now secure from the usual sources of revenue the 60,000 taels necessary to pay his little force of eleven thousand men. Rebels, by occupying most of the prefectures, had prevented the collection of the ordinary taxes, the sale of honors lagged, and the salt revenues from Chekiang were hard to secure. Having observed that the new internal trade or transit duties on goods, known as likin,[1] had proved most profitable where it had already been established, Tsêng asked that likin be collected at Shanghai on goods going to places where the Shanghai trade flowed, and grant
- ↑ This likin tax (so named from the character li, meaning the thousandth part of a tael, this tax in theory being one per mille) had first been levied in 1853 near Yangchow by a high official, Lei I-cheng, who used the proceeds to pay the soldiers he was recruiting there. His success led to the adoption of the same tax in other places. Parker, in his China, 1st ed., p. 227 (2d ed., p. 245), states that it was first used unsuccessfully in Shantung in 1852. He adds that about the same time Hu Lin-yi, governor of Hupeh, applied it there, after which, 1854, the viceroy of the Two Kiang adopted it east of the canal, and it was gradually extended. If it was adopted in Hupeh under Hu Lin-yi as Parker maintains, it must have been long after 1852, in which year Hu was still obscure; if actually adopted there in 1852 another governor was responsible. My information is from Nienp'u, II, 17a, where the credit is given as above for its first adoption. This request of Tsêng's to extend the likin to Kiangsu would be superfluous if, as Parker states, it had already been in effect there two years before!
