Chapter 182: Contest

As Zhou Shixiang had foreseen as the worst case before the battle, after failing to take the city by storm the Qing army switched to besieging it.

To achieve the goal of completely surrounding the Taiping Army, after returning to Guangzhou Shang Kexi conscripted several thousand more Qing troops from Guangzhou and the various prefectures and counties and sent them to Xinhui, placing them under the unified command of the heir Shang Zhixin and the commander Ban Zhifu, and forcibly requisitioned over ten thousand civilian laborers to construct an encirclement around Xinhui within just a few days.

The Taiping Army, still lacking the ability to fight the Qing army in a large-scale field battle, could only watch day after day as the Qing forces across from them built siege works, and as watchtowers, palisades, and military camps sprang up like bamboo shoots after rain all around Xinhui.

During this process, the Taiping Army did not fail to try to stop the Qing forces, but after two consecutive night raids failed and dozens of men were lost for nothing, the recovering Zhou Shixiang ordered every unit not to leave the city to fight on its own again; without his order, if so much as a single soldier left the city, the commanding officer of that unit would be held accountable.

Before returning to Guangzhou, Shang Kexi personally made the siege dispositions: his own Han Bordered Blue Banner troops surrounded the east gate; the Plain Yellow Banner Han troops under the Prince of Jingnan's command, together with part of the Green Standard, surrounded the south gate; Assistant Regional Commander Hu Guoli led the governor-general's and governor's standard troops plus part of the Green Standard to surround the north gate; and the remaining Green Standard forces, under Regional Commander Lin Shanzhi, surrounded the west gate.

The Qing encirclement consisted of no fewer than three defensive lines, each fully equipped, with more than ten thousand Qing troops distributed among them, cutting off all contact between Xinhui and the outside world and leaving the Taiping Army in the city completely ignorant of external conditions.

As the siege dragged on, although the city had not yet run out of grain, firewood became scarce, and the Taiping Army began dismantling houses in the city for no other purpose than to extract the timber for fuel.

On the Qing side, provisions and supplies dispatched from Guangzhou flowed in endlessly, more than twenty thousand civilian laborers and able-bodied men were available to be driven to work, and the Guangdong naval force stood ready on the river.

Apart from being unable to storm Xinhui's strong walls, the Qing army held the upper hand and enjoyed every advantage in most respects — this was also the greatest capital Shang Kexi had in deciding on the siege.

So long as no relief army came to the Taiping Army's aid, if the siege was pressed to the end, the victor would surely be the Qing army.

Not long after the Qing encirclement was completed, several dozen cannons transferred from Guangzhou finally arrived. After concentrating their cannon fire on the city walls without success, the Qing forces stopped bombarding the walls and only fired into the city every few days.

Correspondingly, the Taiping Army in the city fired out at them without pause, but the effect of both sides' bombardments was limited. After a few exchanges, both realized such shelling was meaningless, and the two sides tacitly ceased this futile effort.

To guard against any contingency, Shang Kexi personally sent an urgent order to Xu Erxian, the Regional Commander at Zhaoqing, commanding him to keep Gaozhou under strict surveillance, to draw off troops and garrison Luoding, and to ensure that the Ming army in Gaozhou did not advance a single step eastward.

So long as Li Dingguo's forces in Gaozhou did not move, Guangzhou had no worries about the siege of Xinhui.

Although there were several other Ming forces within Guangdong, in both troop strength and equipment they lagged far behind Li Dingguo's Gaozhou force, and these Ming troops were mostly in coastal areas, holding only the advantage of naval power; in a true land battle the Qing army did not fear them.

If these Ming forces really did come to relieve the Taiping Army at Xinhui, that was something Guangzhou would be glad to see.

The ten thousand-plus Qing troops besieging Xinhui could not storm the city, but annihilating these Southern Ming ragtag units would take no effort at all.

The course of events also set Guangzhou at ease.

After more than a month of siege, apart from Ming troops in Leizhou attempting to seize prefectural and county towns and marching east, no other Ming forces showed any sign of activity, and the Gaozhou Ming troops that Guangzhou worried about most had not stirred in the slightest.

Every indication proved that the Taiping Army holding out in Xinhui was nothing less than an isolated force — whether it had even been accepted by the Southern Ming ****** was itself an open question.

With no worries behind them, the Qing army finally fired a letter demanding surrender into the city on the 19th day of the sixth month — the 49th day of the siege — and received in reply eight large characters written in Zhou Shixiang's own hand: "We sons of Han will never surrender to the Tartars!"

On the 23rd of the sixth month — the 53rd day of the siege — the Qing army launched a probing attack on Xinhui.

This assault was commanded by Wang Guohui, Assistant Regional Commander of the Han Banners, and the main force used to storm the city was still the Green Standard, with only a small number of bannermen in support.

The Qing launched their attack at dawn, and the direction was not the previous east gate but the south gate. But the Taiping Army on the south gate had clearly long been prepared for this.

The defenders on the wall held their ground stubbornly, and at a critical moment Chen Mo, a squad leader of the Guard Battalion, led men down the wall on ropes to counterattack the Qing storming party, destroying more than a hundred scaling ladders and six shield carts the Qing had brought for the assault, forcing the Qing to abandon the attack.

Seeing that the frontal assault was ineffective and had cost countless men and supplies, Wang Guohui, after requesting instructions from Shang Zhixin and Ban Zhifu, ordered the Qing troops to pile earth in cloth sacks to build walls, set up timber palisades, and use mantlets as cover, employing Han Banner matchlock muskets to shoot down the Taiping soldiers while secretly organizing civilian laborers to dig tunnels in an attempt to burrow into the city.

Inside the city, the Taiping Army detected the Qing intention through large vats placed in the city to monitor underground sounds, and immediately organized men to dig a deep trench inside the city parallel to the city wall.

The trench was more than one zhang wide and over two zhang deep — converted to later units of measurement, more than three meters wide and seven meters deep.

Once the deep trench was dug, Zhou Shixiang gave the order that the moment any Qing tunnel broke through into the city, it was to be flooded with water; if flooding failed, it was to be blasted with the newly produced thunderclap bombs, with musketeers on both sides shooting down the enemy; and if neither method worked, soldiers from each battalion were to be organized to descend into the trench for hand-to-hand combat.

No matter how great the sacrifice, not a single Qing soldier was to be allowed to emerge from the trench.

Because the Taiping Army's defenses were properly laid, the Qing troops infiltrating through the tunnel were badly wounded in large numbers by thunderclap bombs suddenly thrown in before they could even show their heads.

The remaining Qing soldiers who rushed out found themselves inside the deep trench with nothing to climb on any side, trapped and unable to move, while Taiping soldiers with muskets on both sides of the trench shot them down.

After a desperate struggle, the Qing troops abandoned the effort and retreated in haste, leaving behind several hundred corpses.

After failing to take the city through the tunnel, to vent his frustration Shang Zhixin ordered the east and west batteries to bombard the city again.

Zhou Shixiang ordered the gunners on the wall to return fire and at the same time posted a rich reward: "Whoever can go out of the city and seize the Qing batteries shall be rewarded with fifty taels of silver per man."

Where there is a rich reward, there are bold men. Once again it was Chen Mo, squad leader of the Guard Battalion, who took the lead in organizing a death squad of eighty men.

Taking advantage of the deep night, they entered beneath the Qing main camp through the tunnel the Qing had dug, and after an hour of digging finally broke through.

Then the eighty Taiping warriors, led by Chen Mo, each carrying two thunderclap bombs, blasted and killed Qing soldiers all the way and set fires.

In the dead of night, the Qing troops did not know how many Taiping soldiers had come, and were dazed and disoriented by the thunderclap bombs; with fires breaking out everywhere, for a time they could not stop the infiltrating Taiping soldiers.

This allowed Chen Mo and his men to fight their way to the Qing army's east and west batteries, ignite the gunpowder stored there, and blow up more than thirty cannons of various sizes on the spot.

After returning to the city, a count showed that of the eighty warriors who had gone out, only thirty-six remained. This lesson also made the Qing army completely seal up the tunnels they had dug and abandon any thought of burrowing into the city.