Chapter 147: The Naval Force

Minute by minute the time slipped past. The two thousand and more Taiping Army soldiers of the four battalions serving as the main assault force — Zhenlu, Xiongwei, Hujie, and Jinwei — quietly assembled in the darkness, waiting for the signal to attack: the enormous blast that was about to sound.

Last year, Li Dingguo's great army had besieged Xinhui for months on end, making the defenders thoroughly familiar with how to hold a city.

To prevent the Taiping Army from scaling the walls under cover of night, bonfires had been lit at intervals along the wall, and Qing soldiers patrolling back and forth never let up.

From time to time, Qing soldiers also hurled torches down from the top of the wall, using the light to check whether any Taiping troops lay hidden below.

Night gave the attackers a natural advantage and placed the defenders at a great disadvantage. From ancient times to the present, many siege battles had been fought at night, especially just before dawn, because that was when men were weariest and most off their guard.

But the Qing troops, who had stayed alert all night just as they had the day before, never got the Taiping night raid they had expected.

Xinhui had four gates, but the west gate had been completely sealed with boulders by the Qing army when Li Dingguo's great army attacked the previous year, and it had not been unsealed after Li Dingguo withdrew.

The defenders' main strength was therefore concentrated on the east, south, and north gates, while the west gate was held by only a handful of Qing soldiers and some able-bodied civilians.

From the mouths of surrendered Qing prisoners, Zhou Shixiang learned that there were now only a little over a thousand defenders left in the city. Apart from the two hundred-odd Bordered Blue Banner Qing troops who manned the cannons, the rest were all Green Standard soldiers.

The origins of these Green Standard troops were also mixed: the greater part were soldiers transferred from Guangzhou, and there was also a force of three hundred men who had come from Chaozhou, under the command of the Chaozhou Regional Commander Wu Liuqi.

In the writings of a certain later novelist, the Chaozhou Regional Commander Wu Liuqi was made out to be a great righteous hero who opposed the Qing and restored the Ming. Unfortunately, that novelist's portrayal of him was pure fabrication.

The real Wu Liuqi was an out-and-out traitor to the Han, a butcher who slaughtered his fellow Han people.

When the Taiping Army had made camp the day before, Zhou Shixiang had sought out Lin Youxian to ask about the defenders in the city. Upon hearing that there were Green Standard troops from Chaozhou inside, Zhou Shixiang had casually asked about these Chaozhou soldiers.

From Lin Youxian's account, he heard the name Wu Liuqi for the first time and learned of the man's life.

Wu Liuqi was a Hakka from eastern Guangdong. As a child he had studied the classics and read widely in history, but by nature he was a heavy drinker and a gambler.

Once he gambled away his family fortune and was pressed into service by the authorities as a postal runner. Later he fled to Fujian, and for several years after that he wandered through Jiangsu and Zhejiang, doing bandit work.

After the national calamity of the Jiashen year, Wu Liuqi and his bandit brothers threw in their lot with the newly enthroned Yongli Emperor.

Because the Yongli Emperor had only just ascended the throne and was locked in internal strife with the Shaowu regime in Guangzhou, and because he lacked civil and military officials, Wu Liuqi's arrival with his men was welcomed.

The Yongli Emperor, desperate for followers, immediately appointed him Regional Commander, allowing him to entrench himself on Nan'ao Island off the coast of eastern Guangdong under the title of a Ming Regional Commander.

In the tenth year of Yongli (the seventh year of Shunzhi), the Qing Prince of Pingnan, Shang Kexi, advanced from Nanxiong to Shaozhou. Wu Liuqi, hearing that the great Qing army had arrived, did not dare resist, and surrendered together with the Jieshi Regional Commander Su Li.

After surrendering to the Qing, Wu Liuqi, citing his years of holding Nan'ao and his familiarity with the terrain of eastern Guangdong, volunteered to serve as a guide for the Qing army, to help the Great Qing troops seize Chaozhou, which was held by Hao Shangjiu.

In the battle in which the Qing army took Chaozhou, Wu Liuqi and Kong Guozhi, who had come from Jiangxi, fought their way into the city one after the other.

The difference was that Kong Guozhi was subsequently transferred out of the city by the Qing Jingnan General Hahamu, while Wu Liuqi was kept in the city and took direct part in the great massacre of Chaozhou's common people.

Afterwards, Shang Kexi and Geng Jimao jointly memorialized the Qing court, saying that Raoping bordered Zhangzhou and Chaozhou, where sea bandits came and went; that Liuqi had led his naval force to submit, had recruited and pacified with skill; that the local militia he had trained were all crack troops, and that his provisions and weapons were fully stocked.

Since the rebel Hao had stirred up trouble, Liuqi had personally gone to the front and fought bravely to kill the rebels; they requested that he be given a rank as encouragement.

After receiving the memorial from the two princes of Guangdong, the Qing court issued an edict appointing Wu Liuqi as Assistant Regional Commander of Chaozhou, commanding one thousand troops garrisoned at Raoping to resist the sea bandits of the Zheng clan of Fujian.

When Hao Shangjiu was defeated and killed, Zheng Chenggong was in peace negotiations with the Qing court and stood by watching him die.

Later, seeing Hao Shangjiu destroyed, the Qing army grown powerful after occupying Chaozhou, and Li Dingguo retreating in defeat from Zhaoqing, Zheng Chenggong ordered his forces to withdraw from Chaozhou back to Fujian, adopting a defensive posture rather than the east-west coordinated offensive he had earlier agreed upon with Li Dingguo.

Last year, when Li Dingguo attacked Guangdong again, the Qing forces in Guangzhou were insufficient, and the Prince of Pingnan, Shang Kexi, seeing that the Zheng clan had not gone on the offensive in the direction of Chaozhou, transferred five hundred of Wu Liuqi's men to Xinhui to help defend it.

During the months of defending the city, these five hundred Chaozhou soldiers suffered heavy casualties, and now only three hundred remained.

Because the troops had been transferred by the Prince of Pingnan, Shang Kexi, Wu Liuqi did not dare recall them without his consent, and so they had remained in Xinhui.

"The Chaozhou troops served under the traitor Wu for years, entrenched on an island, and are skilled at handling boats.

Most of the soldiers are expert swimmers. This humble officer once heard Regional Commander Wu...

Wu Jinzhong say that the Prince of Pingnan in Guangzhou... Shang Kexi wanted to transfer these few hundred Chaozhou soldiers into the Guangdong navy, which is why he has delayed ordering them back east."

It had only been two or three days since Lin Youxian had been discovered feigning death and had surrendered, and he had not yet broken his old habits of address. Several times in the course of speaking he caught himself mid-sentence and forced himself to change his words.

The awkwardness of it amused Zhou Shixiang greatly.

Wu Liuqi, the Chaozhou Regional Commander, was still far away, and Zhou Shixiang had no mind to dwell on him. But the three hundred soldiers under his command, skilled in handling boats, had caught Zhou Shixiang's eye.

Guangdong at this time — especially Xiangshan County, the area that in later ages would become three cities and one special district — was dense with rivers and lay along the coast.

Having a naval force in hand would undoubtedly double the effectiveness of the Taiping Army's efforts to put down roots in Xiangshan.

Northerners ride horses; southerners ride boats.

When one lacks the strength to build one's own cavalry, and lacks the resources to forge an infantry capable of countering cavalry, then using the southerners' natural advantages to form a naval force for the Taiping Army is undoubtedly a wise choice.

At the very least, with a naval force in hand, if the Qing army wanted to wipe out the Taiping Army in a region as thick with waterways as Xiangshan, the difficulty would be no ordinary matter.

The apprentice Zhang Fulai had left behind in the tunnel brought out a message from Tie Yi: he would light the fuse and set off the explosion after half a stick of incense had burned, and asked the Battalion Commander to make ready to seize the city.

In this age there were no watches. The rich measured time with water clocks; the poor read the sky, listened for the night watches, or judged by the calls of animals, such as the crowing of roosters. But inside a tunnel, estimating time could only be done entirely by mental reckoning.

Half a stick of incense was roughly a quarter of an hour. After that quarter hour, whether Xinhui could be taken would depend on whether Tie Yi succeeded in lighting the fuse.

Apart from the Xianzhen Battalion, the officers of the other four battalions were all already on standby in camp. From top to bottom, everyone was tense beyond measure, each man lurking in the darkness and staring fixedly at Xinhui.

Some of the new recruits had long since covered their ears, afraid that their ears would be deafened by the blast.

By the time all preparations were complete, the sky was still dark, but a faint streak of dawn white could be seen on the eastern horizon.