In the year 1900 the armies of the European powers, the United States and Japan took the Forbidden City of Beijing in response to the attack on their embassies in China (an episode narrated in the spectacular film 55 days in Beijing), desecrating the hitherto inaccessible residence of Chinese emperors. After the assault, a group of soldiers were arguing in front of a tent about which of them had had the honor of being the first white man to set foot in the sacrosanct imperial palace. The store owner snapped at them that it didn't matter which one of them had been the first. After classifying them as mere looters, he informed them that none of them could claim to be the first target in the Forbidden City, since that honor belonged to Hua, the white god who came from overseas to fight for China. Huh he had not only been received with honors in the imperial palace, but his remains rested there.
The Hua The one the Chinese merchant was referring to was Frederick Townsend Ward, an adventurer from Salem, Massachusetts who had come to China in 1859 and who had led the Chinese imperial army in its fight against the taiping rebellion. Until his death in 1862 Ward had managed to build a native army led by Western officers fighting with modern methods and weapons. He was made a Mandarin, married the daughter of another Mandarin, and his merits were recognized by the Emperor, who built a shrine for him on his death in 1862.
The fact that Ward was not known to Western soldiers in 1900 and that he is also almost unknown today is due to a host of circumstances that have come together to blur and almost eliminate his legacy and make it difficult to sketch a biography of him. In the United States, his family was more concerned with claiming fees from the Chinese government for services rendered than with perpetuating his memory and publicizing his exploits. As for China, even during the imperial period (even recognizing the services rendered) it was viewed with mistrust due to its Western origin. But after the fall of the imperial family and the establishment of the Republic in 1911, the new government considered itself the heir to the Taiping revolution that Ward had fought and did little for its memory. And later, both the Japanese occupiers in 1940 and Mao's communist China in 1955 ruthlessly busied themselves destroying his mausoleum, desecrating and scattering his remains, and making all the documents referring to him disappear in the archives and in the consulate. of the United States in Shanghai.
Ward is a controversial figure; Accused by some of being a mercenary, the truth is that even hoping to receive a reward for his services, he was more concerned that his army did not lack the necessary funds to arm and fight than for his own personal benefit. . For the Manchu empire they defended, his men formed The Invincible Army ; for taiping rebels those who fought, were The Devil's Soldiers. Accused by Europeans and Americans of favoring the Chinese emperor's struggle to avoid Western influence and of being pro-Western by the Chinese, it is not easy to get an idea of Ward's true personality and intentions (some accused him that when he died he planned to constitute a independent principality with him at its head).
But beyond the opinions that the facts, ideas or purposes of Ward's intervention in China deserve, the truth is that in his scarce three years of presence in the country He played a very prominent role in events that would greatly mark the future of the country. To reconstruct his history, a brief introduction to the movement he fought against, the Taiping, is necessary.
The taiping phenomenon It had begun in 1850 and was an amalgamation between a religious cult that mixed concepts of Christianity with others typical of the cult of its leader with a political rebellion movement of the inhabitants of the poorest Chinese provinces against the Manchu dynasty that dominated with an iron hand. the country after overthrowing the Ming dynasty two hundred years earlier. The height of the Taiping rebellion came when they took Nanjing in 1860. From there they began a pincer movement that included the conquest of Shanghai. Although the armament of the Taiping was old-fashioned and obsolete, their advance was very rapid, since a good part of the imperial governors and main officials of the provinces that they found in their path chose to commit suicide at the risk of being brutally martyred and executed by the emperor. if they were defeated by the rebels. The road to Shanghai was open.
Shanghai had experienced a spectacular trade boom after being included among the five treaty ports allowing access to Westerners after the Opium War. The British had seen its potential due to its geographical location and first they and then the French and the Americans had settled there and built a multitude of docks and warehouses in the port of the city, as well as their own neighborhoods for each country.
When rumors of the arrival of the taiping army When they arrived in Shanghai, the authorities realized that between the suicides, desertions and executions of those suspected of helping the rebels, they did not have enough forces to put up a proper resistance. Connoisseurs of the weapons potential and the military genius of the Western powers set their eyes on them; however, as in the rest of China there was more than one conflict with these powers, the rapprochement could not be made directly but through merchants and officials who worked with the Europeans. Specifically the taotai (district governor) Wu Hsu and merchant and banker Yang Fang.
What both wanted was to form an army that would take advantage of European weaponry and tactical discipline to put an end to the taiping rebellion throughout the Chinese territory. But the British consul replied that while they would do whatever was necessary to defend their interests in Shanghai, they had no intention of meddling in the conflict beyond the city. It seemed that the wishes of the Chinese were not going to be fulfilled until a young American adventurer named Frederick Townsend Ward appeared.
Arrived in Shanghai in 1859 and a former naval officer, Ward had obtained a job as a first officer of the Confucius , a ship that belonged to the Shanghai Piracy Suppression Council and roamed the coast hunting pirates (i.e. essentially taiping rebels ). As such, and in charge of a group of men hired by the Council itself to watch for rebels approaching Shanghai, Ward had made contact with the taiping on several occasions. . Since these activities were carried out outside the official position of neutrality of the United States government and against the corresponding price, they could be described as close to those of a mercenary.
Ward's activities did not go unnoticed by the main funder of the Council for the Suppression of Piracy, who was none other than the aforementioned banker Yang Fang. The intentions of this and the taotai Wu Hsu of raising an army using Westerners to fight the taiping rebellion they were vox populi in Shanghai and Ward was more than willing to take on the task.
It is unknown if it was Ward who contacted Hsu or if it was the other way around, but the fact is that our protagonist launched his project to create a modern army with Western techniques and weapons to deal with the taiping threat … and we will dedicate the next entry in this series to the development of that adventure.