Anqing (安庆, Ānqìng), the prefectural capital on the Yangzi River in Anhui province, was one of the most fiercely contested strategic points of the entire Taiping war. The Anqing Campaign, fought between 1860 and 1861, matched Zeng Guofan's (曾国藩) Xiang Army against the Taiping forces of the Ying King Chen Yucheng (陈玉成). Its outcome — the fall of Anqing to Qing forces on 5 September 1861 — opened the middle Yangzi to the Xiang Army's advance and made the final siege of Tianjing possible. Luo Ergang calls the campaign "the hinge of the war": after Anqing fell, no Taiping counterstroke could prevent the Qing from enveloping the capital from the west.[1]
Anqing's strategic position
Anqing sits on the north bank of the Yangzi, roughly 300 kilometers upriver from Nanjing. It commands the narrowest approach between the Dabie Mountains to the north and the Huangshan massif to the south, making it the controlling fortress for traffic between the middle and lower Yangzi valleys. For the Taiping, Anqing was the western shield of Tianjing — as long as a strong Taiping garrison held the city, no Qing army could move downriver to invest the capital without risking its flank and supply lines. For Zeng Guofan, Anqing was the necessary first step in a gradual encirclement: take Anqing, then reduce the remaining Taiping strongholds in Anhui, then converge on Tianjing.[2]
The Taiping had held Anqing almost continuously since 1853. It served as their administrative headquarters for Anhui province, a supply depot, and a base for operations in Hubei and Jiangxi. Its garrison was typically 10,000–20,000 men, with smaller detachments in supporting towns along the river. The city's walls, originally of Ming construction, had been reinforced by the Taiping with additional earthworks and artillery positions.
Zeng Guofan's plan
In 1859–1860, as Zeng Guofan consolidated his position in the middle Yangzi, he formulated what became his war-winning strategy. It was, by his own description, a method of "digging a trench to catch the fish" (掘壕捕鱼, jué háo bǔ yú): instead of launching repeated frontal assaults on Tianjing — which had failed for years — he would methodically reduce every Taiping-held city between his base in Hunan and his objective in Nanjing. Anqing was the first great object.
Zeng Guofan assigned the Anqing siege to his younger brother Zeng Guoquan (曾国荃), who commanded approximately 10,000 Xiang Army troops. Zeng Guofan himself established his headquarters at Qimen (祁门) in southern Anhui to direct the wider campaign. His strategy had three components: the siege corps at Anqing would isolate the city and starve out the garrison; a blocking force at Tongcheng (桐城), north of Anqing, would prevent Chen Yucheng from relieving the siege; and Zeng Guofan's own field headquarters would coordinate an outer ring of forces to engage Taiping relief armies before they could reach the city.[3]
The siege and Chen Yucheng's relief attempts (1860–1861)
Zeng Guoquan's troops established their investment lines around Anqing in the summer of 1860. They dug trenches and built breastworks in two concentric rings — one facing inward toward the garrison, the other facing outward toward any approaching relief force. Supply was the Xiang Army's advantage: the Yangzi carried rice, ammunition, and reinforcements from Hunan and Hubei. The Taiping garrison, by contrast, depended on what supplies had been stockpiled before the investment tightened and on what Chen Yucheng's relief armies could break through.
Chen Yucheng, the Ying King, was the Taiping commander responsible for Anhui's defense. He was perhaps the most aggressive Taiping general of the late-war period — a cavalryman by training who favored rapid marches, sudden flank attacks, and the concentration of overwhelming force at the decisive point. Through the autumn of 1860 and into the winter of 1860–1861, he mounted repeated attempts to break through to Anqing.[1]
His first major effort, in November 1860, involved a multi-pronged advance through the Anhui countryside. He engaged Qing blocking forces at Tongcheng and Guazhou but was unable to force a passage to the river. A second relief attempt in February 1861 initially succeeded in breaking through the outer Qing lines and reaching the north bank of the Yangzi near Anqing, but Zeng Guoquan's troops, defending from their entrenched positions, repulsed the Taiping assaults on the investment lines. Chen withdrew after suffering severe casualties.[2]
The decisive relief effort came in the spring of 1861. In April, Chen Yucheng gathered the largest army he could assemble — Luo Ergang estimates approximately 30,000–40,000 troops, including contingents under supporting Taiping commanders — and attacked the Xiang Army's blocking force at Tongcheng. Simultaneously, he directed the Anqing garrison to attempt a breakout and coordinated a naval operation on the Yangzi to disrupt Qing supply convoys. The fighting lasted for weeks. At Jixian Pass (集贤关), a fortified position on the approach to Anqing, the Xiang Army and the Taiping relief force fought to a standstill in some of the bloodiest combat of the late war. But the Xiang Army's logistics held while the Taiping's did not. Chen Yucheng, short of ammunition and unable to feed his army in the stripped Anhui countryside, was forced to withdraw in May 1861.[1]
The fall of Anqing (5 September 1861)
With the relief armies broken, the Anqing garrison was doomed. By August 1861, the defenders had exhausted their food supplies. Deserters crossing to Qing lines reported that the garrison was eating horses, dogs, and, in some cases, the bodies of the dead. The commander, Ye Yunlai (叶芸来), a Guangxi veteran and one of Chen Yucheng's most trusted subordinates, refused all offers of surrender and organized a last-ditch defense.
On 5 September 1861, Zeng Guoquan's troops launched their assault. Xiang Army engineers had tunneled under the city's western wall and packed the chamber with gunpowder. The explosion breached the wall near the Zongyang Gate (枞阳门). Infantry poured through the breach and engaged the weakened defenders in street fighting. Ye Yunlai was killed in the fighting, reportedly alongside his remaining staff. The garrison — perhaps 10,000–16,000 troops, already reduced from starvation — was largely destroyed; Luo Ergang records that approximately 3,000 survivors managed to fight their way out of the city and escape across the river, but the bulk of the garrison was killed or captured.[1]
The consequences of Anqing
The fall of Anqing was the Taiping state's greatest territorial loss since the capture of Nanjing in 1853. Three consequences proved decisive.
First, the middle Yangzi was now a Xiang Army highway. With Anqing in Qing hands, Zeng Guofan could move troops, supplies, and siege equipment downriver without opposition. The Taiping held no significant fortress between Anqing and Tianjing that could check the Xiang Army's advance.
Second, Chen Yucheng's army — the most effective Taiping field force in the central theater — was crippled. The Ying King had lost perhaps half his troops and much of his officer corps in the failed relief attempts. He retreated with his surviving forces to Luzhou (庐州, modern Hefei) in northern Anhui, where he would be betrayed and captured the following year.[1]
Third, Tianjing was now exposed. Zeng Guoquan's siege corps, having proved itself at Anqing, moved downriver and in May 1862 established its siege lines around the capital. The two-year countdown to 19 July 1864 had begun.
Debates
Scholars have debated whether Chen Yucheng could have saved Anqing by adopting a different strategy. Some military historians argue that Chen should have concentrated on attacking Zeng Guofan's headquarters at Qimen rather than attempting to break through the siege lines directly — a strike at the commander might have forced the Xiang Army to disperse its forces. Others contend that Chen was doomed by Taiping logistical weakness: no Taiping army, however well commanded, could sustain a prolonged relief campaign in Anhui while the Xiang Army controlled the Yangzi supply route. Michael concurs with this structural assessment, noting that by 1861, the Xiang Army's advantages in logistics, artillery, and entrenched defensive tactics meant that Chen Yucheng's relief operations were essentially attacks against a system rather than a single army.
A related debate among Chinese scholars concerns the Taiping's failure to coordinate the Anqing campaign with Li Xiucheng's eastern operations. Luo Ergang criticizes Li Xiucheng for concentrating on Jiangsu and Zhejiang rather than marching to support Chen Yucheng in Anhui — arguing that the Taiping leadership failed to recognize Anqing's strategic importance in time to concentrate adequate forces there. Other historians note that Li Xiucheng's eastern campaign was producing results (it broke the siege of Tianjing in 1860 and captured Suzhou and Hangzhou) and that coordinating armies across hundreds of kilometers without modern communications was operationally impossible.
Related pages
Sources used in this page
- Luo Ergang 罗尔纲, Taiping tianguo shi 太平天国史 (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1991).
- Franz Michael, The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents, Vol. I (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966).
- Philip A. Kuhn, Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796–1864 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).