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.[1] 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.[2]
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
- ↑ McClellan, The Story of Shanghai, p. 49.
- ↑ Chungwang, Autobiography, pp. 35 f. A. Wilson, p. 66, coupling with this account the statements of Bruce that the rebel attack took them by surprise, believes that Shanghai was kept out of Taiping hands by mere accident. In the case of a fait accompli there is question whether the policy of intervention would have been followed. The possession of Shanghai was one of the chief imperialist advantages because of the volume of its trade. Why the Taipings did not take it in 1853 is a mystery, the clue to which will probably be found in the early experience of the Taiping-wang with the Triads in Kwangsi. Had the Taipings but reached forth their hands and secured the revenues, the imperialists would certainly have had a vastly more difficult financial problem and might have lost the war.
