Known as known as the Tongzhi Resurgence, new rituals where intruduced after Zeng Guofan the chinese military leader suppressed the Taiping Rebellion, thus staving off the collapse of the Qing dynasty. A literati in his own right, in 1852 he was asked to help combat the Taiping rebels, who had reached the Yangtze River (Chang Jiang) valley and were threatening the dynasty's survival. The imperial troops being weak, Zeng and other members of the scholar-gentry organized local militias. His army seized the rebels' supply areas along the upper Yangtze and besieged and captured their capital, Nanjing, in 1864.The occupation of Nanjing in the wake of the Taiping Rebellion allowed the new staff to reshape the governance of the city. This effort took the form of a military occupation, supported by coercive power, with new institutions staffed almost entirely by men in leng's personal bureaucracy, not by "local elites" in the sense of literate men who had resided in Nanjing before the war. leng and his staff, however, represented their project as one of reviving the gentry class in general. The aims of reconstruction were thus similar to the utopian ideals of pre-war Nanjing literati. leng gave high priority to institutions (such as the examination system and local schools) that encouraged the study of Classics that in turn would provide models of proper social relationships (li), allowing government in the sense of restraint through mutual bonds and obligations. Making offerings to the gods listed in Qing statutes both displayed and enacted these li, allowing the twin benefits of supporting leng's power and discouraging rebellion. These rituals naturalized the activities of officials and elites, contributing to status and legitimacy that was distinct from (but not necessarily opposed to) the dynasty. leng's administration was "practical" precisely because it accorded with the utopian norms of li. The political aspirations of leng' s vision of government however extended beyond the borders of Nanjing. In fact state building derived from the historiography of the French Revolution, in which revolution casts aside the old regime with what one today would call Chinese Marxist overtones.
Between 1864 and 1865, Zeng Guofan introduced a series of measures to ensure that Nanjing homeowners could regain their property. In August 1864 he ordered property owners to bring their deeds to the Reconstruction Bureau. The bureau in conjunction with the county magistrate would examine the deed and the property. If everything seemed in order, then the officials were to write "examined" on the deed and affix the seal of the magistrate or the bureau to certify ownership. If the deed was missing, the person occupying the property could bring neighbors to the Reconstruction Bureau to testify that the occupant had lived there before the war. The bureau would then issue a permit that served as defacto title to the land.
This system had the opposite effect of the one intended. Instead of returning houses to their original owners, it created a means for squatters to obtain official sanction for their use of the land. The permits meant to settle disputes only complicated matters when the owners subsequently returned to Nanjing bearing original deeds. To mediate these conflicts, Zeng created Mutual Responsibility Bureaus in November 1864. The term "mutual responsibility" referred to a system of local control where groups of 100 households selected headman with responsibilities for tax collection and policing. Headmen were supposed to report problems to the overworked county magistrate. The reworking of this system in 1864 created an additional layer of surveillance. Instead of simply testifying, c1aimants had to submit written affidavits from witnesses. If after the property has been handed over, the real owner appears and submits clear and definite proof [of ownership], the people who had been handed the property after signing a bonded affidavit posing [as the true owner] must wear the cangue for two months and serve in military exile at a distance of 1300 miles from the capital. Severe punishment of false claimants is the means to protect the true owners.
These regulations suggest a bevy of competing claims for land in the city. Because suppression of the rebellion had killed so many people, it is likely that many of the disputes were between people with equaIly tenuous links to the property at hand. Nevertheless, returnees could (and often did) find their former homes occupied by soldiers, and because most of the deputies of the Reconstruction Bureau and the Mutual Responsibility Bureaus had arrived in Nanjing with the Hunan Army, they had a certain sympathy for the occupants. Although members ofNanjing's educated elite appear to have regained their property, survivors with less money or status probably had difficulties. As late as 1873, the Nanjing scholar Chen Zuolin still condemned neighbors who conspired to obtain property. Kathryn Bernhardt has demonstrated that in many parts of the lower Yangzi the need to resettle refugees conflicted with the desire to respect the property rights of returning landlords. In areas where many landowners survived, local administrators preferred to let land lay fallow rather than deal with the complications that arose when one party invested the money and labor necessary to make land productive and then the original owner appeared. See Kathryn Bernhardt. Rents, Taxes, and Peasant Resistance: The Lower Yangzi Region, 1840-1950, 1992, p. 131.
According to Zeng' s 1865 proclarnation, if the original owner did not resurface, the land was declared "official property", and the person using the land became a tenant who paid rent to the Reconstruction Bureau. The Bureau to Encourage Agriculture (quan nongju) kept track of land, distributed seeds, and lent work anirnals to impoverished farmers who settled in the prefecture. Supplying materials was expensive, especially in the first few years after the war. Although in 1865 the bureau spent a total of 21,000 ounces ofsilver (liang ) on payments to farmers, Zeng Guofan estimated that only ten to twenty percent ofthe available land had been reclaimed. Even in 1880 over fifty percent ofthe arable land in the prefecture remained uncultivated, although by then the actual area of cultivated land may have been higher, as one suspects that farmers attempted to farm land without reporting it in order to avoid paying taxes and rents.
Like Hu Linyi, Zeng Guofan, and others engaged in combating the Taiping, he saw ritual in general and the performance of offerings in particular as means of rebuilding civilization. In the rituals of the 'new regime', silk and wine were arranged on tables in the two main halls of the temple, and the singing of hymns accompanied the presentation of each offering. The lyrics to these hymns were collages of expressions from the examination Classics. The hymn both addressed and engaged the assembled crowd. The admonition to "take the li as models" hinted at negative consequences for those (like the Taiping) who should not make noise during the ceremony with a unique status of Confucius.(See Nicolas Standaert, "Ritual Dances," 2006.). At the same time, the lyrics appealed to the aesthetic sensibilities of the participant-observers, urging them to savor the beat of the drum, the melody of the instruments, perhaps the taste of the wine in the cup. Classical allusions in lines one, five, six, and eight afforded a chance for intellectual engagement. Offerings made this imagined contrast between the delights of proper rituals and the disastrous consequences of improper ones visible and concrete. As with the construction of Nanjing 's most elaborate buildings, the ceremonies honoring Confucius staged august spectacle against the apocalyptic backdrop of a destroyed city. This destruction gave phrases like "tenets that delude the world and mislead the people" particular potency, lending urgency to the tasks of reconstruction.
Despite leng' s claims that li linked his goals with those of Classical texts, in fact the alleged return to an imagined past justified sweeping changes in local government. leng engaged in state building through institutional innovations that allowed a group of officials greater military power, more money, more effective policing, and a higher level of discretion over the allocation of wood and labor than was possible before the rebellion. leng also engaged in state building through wider claims that gentry should take part in the activity of government. State building was the development of both new institutions and new representations, processes that were inextricably linked in leng's notion of government.
Zeng Guofan's method of governance was neither a stepping stone to modem nationalism nor a conservative revival of an unchanging Confucianism. It was a novel approach to rebuilding civilization following a cataclysm of unprecedented scope. Largely ignored by scholars and researchers to date, the governance of the Qing empire following the rebellion however deserves closer scrutiny.
Prior to the Taiping Rebellion Nanjing had been a center of silk weaving, with over 30,000 looms devoted to satin manufacture alone. This industry had relied on silk threads imported from Huzhou and Nanxun in northem Zhejiang, but foreign trade bad led to increased demand, thus raising the price of the threads to more than three times its pre-war levels. (See Lillian Li, China 's Silk Trade: Traditional Industry in the Modern World: 1842-1937. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981, pp. 31, 131. For example, the regu1ated price of warp silk for imperial use rose from .082 ounces of silver per ounce of silk to .265 ounces of silver per ounce ofsilk, an increase of 324%. See Shih Min-hsiung, The Silk Industry in Ch'ing.
In abrief and futile attempt to stimulate a new type oflocal industry, the production of silk thread in Nanjing, PrefectTu Zongying established a small bureau during the autumn of 1865. Deputies of the bureau purchased mulberry saplings from northem Zhejiang and distributed 35 saplings to each farmer who registered with the bureau. The farmers fed mulberry leaves to silkworms, which then produced cocoons that could be unraveled and spun into thread. Farmers could seIl the thread, or weave cloth and seIl finished goods, paying apercentage of their profits to the bureau. In 1871 Zeng Guofan attempted a similar experiment in the form ofa "Bureau ofMulberries and Cotton" (sang mianju) that in addition to distributing silkworms and saplings would also teach farmers proper techniques for raising mulberries and harvesting silk from silkworms.
These measures failed to stimulate Nanjing's depressed weaving industry. The thread spun in Nanjing produced a much coarser weave than Zhejiang threads, and the resulting "local silk" (tu si ) sold at deftated prices. Whereas Tu Zongying had envisioned individual households selling fmished goods to market (zi zhi zi shou), in fact fewer than 30% ofNanjing looms fell into this category. The remainder produced silk for agents of account houses that were able to afford Zhejiang threads. The continued operation of imperial silk manufacture in Nanjing was actually testimony to the city's relative destitution; skilled weavers were relatively cheap. Largely because of the . competition from eastem Jiangsu, Nanjing's silk weaving industry collapsed, leaving fewer than 4000 looms operating in the prefecture in 1881. The Imperial Silk Factories remained open untill 1894, but large numbers ofweavers lived in poverty. See Shih Min-hsiung, The Silk Industry in Ch 'ing China, 1976, pp. 47-49. The most likely reason for the revival ofNanjing's factories was thus low labor eosts. The high cost of silk thread contributed to the closure ofthe Nanjing factories in 1894.
As implemented in Nanjing, practical administration constituted a sustained project of state building. Zeng Guofan and his staff were able to make use of new modes of revenue collection, new forms of policing, new institutions for investment and management, and new agricultural initiatives. The rule that unclaimed land became govemment property made the state the largest landlord in the city. Zeng Guofan and his staff portrayed this mobilization of local forces as a moral good, a means to reinvigorate the economy and to relieve the suffering of the commoners. In addition to their practical administrative functions, bureaus also modeled avision of government that promoted local enterprise. In this context "state building" consisted ofboth administrative innovation and new representations of how the state should operate. In these representations the fortunes of the imperial house were less significant than the capacity of local officials to recruit talented men and employ them in the reconstruction process. The phrase "Tongzhi restoration" has obscured the extent to which local officials understood state power as reliant on the activities of actors outside of the imperial bureaucracy. The key axis was not the relationship between officials and the emperor, but rather between officials and educated elites, who in turn could organize activities at lower levels of the social hierarchy.
During a visit to Nanjing on Oeeember 19, 1868, the German geologist Ferdinand von Riehthofen turned off of one ofthe "few streets of business" and found himself among the "ruins" of the city, where "a meager population inhabited the rubble, suffering in the dirt and stench of their existenee." What particularly appalled Riehthofen's sensibilities was what he saw as the waste by government offieials, who were devoting precious resourees to the eonstruetion of atempie. Though he thought the strueture had a certain charm, Richthofen excIaimed: "How much better could labor and money be used in this large, destroyed city, where indescribable misery is the most noteworthy sight." (Richthofen, Tagebücher aus China, 1907, p. 65. 81 Jinlingfang chan gao sM ba tiao, 1865.)
Beneath Richthofen's dismissive attitude toward temples lay an important observation about the reconstruction ofNanjing. The relative dearth of private wealth meant that from 1864 to around 1870 the construction of large buildings depended on government funding. In addition, the land regulations dictating that uncIaimed land became government property afforded Zeng Guofan and the Reconstruction Bureau an opportunity to shape urban space aceording to their own priorities. The recent rebellion (as well as the ongoing war in North China against the Nian) weighed on their minds, and so they concentrated on construction projects that they thought would prevent social unrest.
On July 11, 1864, six days before Qing forces took Nanjing, an imperial edict ordered Zeng Guoquan to present an offering to the first Ming emperor and to report on the measures necessary for the repair of the complex.92 Zeng Guoquan did in fact make an offering on July 19, but the Nanjing Construction Bureau did not complete the project until1873. The ostensible reason for the delay was the cost of construction. The director of the Reconstruction Bureau reported on December 30, 1864, that woodworkers and masons had accompanied deputies of the Reconstruction Bureau and the Construction Bureau to inspect the site:
Following the destruction ofwar in Nanjing, the people have begun to return, and everything has gotten very expensive. The artisans [who inspected the site] estimated the cost of workman and construction materials, but [the price] is much higher than the usual cost of implementing repairs. At this time the work has not yet begun, and it is difficult to determine the exact [cost] of each item.
The deputies calculated that reconstruction of the buildings on the site would require over 120,000 ceramic roofing tiles (wa Pe) and 34,500 bricks. Deputies ofthe Construction Bureau thought they could assemble workmen to fire these products in kilns on the outskirts ofNanjing but that they would have to import wood and decorative porcelain from Jiangxi and Hunan provinces. They estimated the total cost of materials and labor at over 20,000 ounces of silver, a sum to be paid from the budget of the Reconstruction Bureau.
Ritualising the dead.
Over the course of post- Taiping reconstruction, the numbers of people inc1uded in Nanjing 's various shrines for local figures swelled to the tens of thousands, a phenomenon repeated throughout the vast area of central and southern China where war had been waged. The work of reconstruction inc1uded labors on behalf of the dead: collecting and disposing of bodies, determining whether a person's manner of demise suggested ally or enemy, constructing shrines and composing biographies. These activities designated increasingly large and diverse groups of people as defenders of the dynasty. Post-war enshrinement depicted relatively ordinary people as exemplars, defining their virtues in terms of their heroic deaths on behalf of the state. Officials and the various elite groups in Nanjing had come to view the continued existence of the Qing state as resulting from multiple acts of bravery by thousands of people.
Enshrinement (ru si ) meant that officials made offerings before the spirit tablets of the people so honored. They could also provoke literary reflection in biographies, poems, and reminiscences. Such writings invoked the spirits of the dead, elaborated on the virtues that allowed particular souls to merit enshrinement, and suggested ways that offerings to the dead might shape the world of the living. The governors who drafted memorials, scholars who wrote works of local history , and residents who worked to locate the deserving dead employed certain c1iebes about ritual, claiming it could "console loyal souls" (wei zhong hun ), "display loyalty and virtue", and "exhort virtue and encourage loyalty". Such fixed phrases are helpful as means of interpreting the wide variety of activities linked to enshrinement. The following sections consider first the expected effects of enshrinement on the soul, second, the ways enshrinement facilitated the expression of different views of loyalty to the dynasty, and third, the ways in which returning elites of Nanjing engaged in the process of creating models of virtue. These acts redefined the place of Nanjing and its residents in the new empire.
How to afford souls the proper care was a vital question for the living in post-war Nanjing. The construction of shrines and the performance of rituals inside them thus became crucially important modes of depicting the recent past. The processes of enshrinement did not rely on a coherent ideology or a single set of ideas about the soul. Officials and residents of Nanjing alluded to a broad normative literature on funerary ritual without endorsing any particular text. Writings from throughout nineteenth-century China , inc1uding gazetteer accounts and commentaries on c1assics, made frequent reference to souls, which departed the body at death and could come to reside in the underworld. Some texts described a person as having multiple souls, each consisting of a different state of qi: the yang soul (hun) represented through spirit tab lets in ancestral temples, the yin soul (po) venerated at the grave and a third state of transition (fing) of ghosts traveling through the underworld until their souls became settled. As qi, souls were capable of coalescing or dispersing, of becoming agitated or refined, heavy or light. Despite wide regional variations in funerary ritual, its thrust was to provide appropriate care in different stages of death as souls left the body and took on new states. Untended souls might linger or cause havoc in the terrestrial world.
Following the Taiping Rebellion, souls required special attention because of the violent nature of their deaths. In peaceful circumstances, descendants cared for the souls of their ancestors in lineage temples. One liturgy of rites in ancestral temples recorded in genealogies from Jiangning Prefecture referred to "settling" the fing soul. The Taiping had destroyed ancestral temples in Nanjing , leading to the worry that the fing souls of ancestors would have "no one on whom to rely". Officials used similar language in documents relating to Qing enshrinement practices, suggesting that they viewed state shrines as offering support for souls of those who died heroically. Post- Taiping offerings were thus a form of death ritual that could in theory help to calm the souls of those who had been killed in the war but had not yet received appropriate ministrations.
In fact after the end of revolutionary war in 1864, the soldiers, officials, refugees, and residents in Nanjing confronted tens of thousands of corpses. Nanjing 's new administrators were careful to single out virtuous souls, but the disposal of corpses did not always elicit the same discrimination. as at the former site ofthe Great Camp of Jiangnan, there was a concentration of bodies that could be identified as "bones of the loyal" (zhong gu ). Similarly, commanders of the Hunan Army ordered that their troops be buried in a single location outside the Yifeng Gate.
The literature on death ritual is extensive. Some have argued that the three souls were all aspects of a single personality. See Rarre1, Stevan. "The Concept of Soul in Chinese Folk Religion." Journal of Asian Studies 38:3 (1979):519-528. Myron Cohen defends the idea of three souls (pp. 182-183), and also treats what he ca11s "the Chinese idea of salvation" in "Souls and Salvation: Conflicting Themes in Chinese Popular Religion," pp. 180- 202 in James L Watson and EveIyn Rawski, eds., Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). On fing as a transitional state between hun and po (pp. 55-56) as we11 as a survey of gazetteer writings on death ritual in North China in the Nineteenth Century, see Naquin, Susan. "Funerals in North China : Uniformity and Variation," pp. 37-70 in Watson, Rawski, eds., Death Ritual, 1988.
Nanjing's new administrators also sought out one Taiping corpse: that of the former Heavenly King- Hong Xiuquan who died on June 1, 1864. They exhumed his rotting remains from the grounds of his palace. Hong's corpse was not in a coffin, but wrapped in yellow satin embroidered with dragons. Two women were buried with him; leng ordered all three bodies burned.By 1874 these efforts had collected a total of 30,522 bodies in fifteen locations around Nanjing.Because of the belief in the problem of the restless souls a City God Temple was constructed early in the post-war period, in 1864. Because one of the responsibilities of the god was to police the unseen world of spirits, the ubiquity of corpses (and their presumably restless souls) may have lent urgency to the task of establishing administration in the City God's realm.
The construction of shrines was thus another step in the c1eansing of the city. It supplemented the care of souls in general, but also singled out particular individuals and c1asses of people among the dead. The particular individuals chosen for distinction changed over time, reflecting shifts in Nanjing 's post-war population. These shifts had important political consequences for the living, but the imagined consequences for the dead were equally compelling in the wake of the war. By making offerings to these souls, officials and residents of Nanjing tried to ensure that those who died for the dynasty would receive exalted treatment in the afterlife. Shrines were thus places for rewarding the fallen. Even in the early twentieth century at the annual qingming festival, city residents would lead the City God in a procession to the li altar.
In addition to the performance of offerings. other measures contributed to the care of loyal souls. Imperial prescripts authorizing enshrinement referred the names of the people enshrined to the Boards of Rites. War. and Civil Appointments for consideration of posthumous awards. In theory these awards provided for burial and funeral expenses. and in some cases they also conferred honors on descendants of those enshrined. Meaning usually soldiers and officials (usually those whose careers had already been extremely successful).
The Board of War handled military officials and those holding degrees from the military examination system. Military officials generally received a brevet rank one class higher than their rank at time of death. but the protocols for civil officials were more complex. (For this see William Frederick Mayers, The Chinese Government: A Manual of Chinese Titles. Categorically Arranged and Explained with an Appendix (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh. 1897). p. 69.)
Posthumous awards brought renown and money to the families of the fallen. These sums could in theory console the dead in much the same way as the rituals performed by government officials, allowing offerings to take place in family shrines. Relatives of the dead thus had incentives to make sure their fallen family members were included in Qing shrines. Those who fought to preserve the state could thus expect security in the afterlife.
And care of souls was thus intended to help to heal the damages inflicted in the rebellion. official rank in the Qing bureaucracy was graded according to 9 classes, with 1 being the highest and 9 the lowest. Each class had two levels, usually rendered in English as «A" and «B." (See Wolfgang Franke, Sino-Malaysiana: Selected Papers on Ming and Ch'ing History and on the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, 1942-1988, Singapore: South Seas Society, 1989, p. 237.)Thus for those living in Nanjing in the period following the Taiping War, enshrinement of the virtuous dead thus became one of the most important ways of articulating political power. Emperors (whether Ming or Qing) were secondary to the remarkable events of the rebellion. Souls were central figures of this recent past, and the ritual practices dedicated to these souls made them present in the city. By celebrating the virtues of these souls (constructing shrines, selecting people for inclusion, writing accounts of their death), different groups asserted their significance in both Nanjing and the state.
These multiple constituencies recall the overlap of empire, province, and city in early nineteenth-century Nanjing . By building shrines and making offerings to the souls of those killed by the Taiping, the city's various elites rewrote this history, focusing not on rebellion, but on chastity and loyalty. Rather than Heavenly Capital, Nanjing became the discursive seat of pacification.
The population of Nanjing immediately after the defeat of the Taiping in 1864 consisted mostly of soldiers, so leng Guofan's first priority in the construction of shrines was to honor those people who took part in the battles that ultimately led to victory. Throughout the course of the Taiping War, military officials, censors, governors, and (after 1861) the Loyalty and Righteousness Bureau had submitted names for enshrinement when no shrines existed in Nanjing . It was only in 1866 that the censor Zhu Zhen proposed the construction of a shrine for natives of Nanjing who had been killed in the war. Acting on an edict of June 2, 1866, Li Hongzhang ordered a shrine set up as an annex to the Guandi Temple , which had been recently erected on the site of the former Ming Imperial Academy.
They built five rooms (shi) in an east-west line. The central hall was for the officers and soldiers who died in 1853 when Nanjing fell to the Taiping. Two halls to the east honored those who had fallen defending the Great Camps of Jiangnan between 1853 and 1860 as weIl as those who died in defense of Zhenjiang and Yangzhou. The hall to the West commemorated gentry and commoners (shen min *,~) from Nanjing who perished, as weIl as persons from elsewhere killed in Nanjing. The hall to the far West honored military officials stationed in Zhenjiang and Yangzhou slain in the war?' The site thus called to mind overlapping geographie allegiances. It displayed loyalty to the dynasty, Nanjing 's status as the hub of a regional theater of battle, and individual contributions of residents of the city opposed to the Taiping. In fact, according to the 1874 gazetteer, five halls were not enough. Upon its completion in 1868, the complex had 81 rooms. SJLXZ, 1874, p. 11/2b (762).
Another notable change from the early nineteenth-century was the number of constituencies that state ritual practices in Nanjing now served. At one level, Nanjing's literati had fmally achieved the goals they had articulated in the early nineteenth century: formal inclusion in both ritual and administrative practice. However, those elites whose family histories had been tied to Nanjing now shared the city's symbolic centers with soldiers from the middle and lower Yangzi regions. As in the early nineteenth century, enshrinement helped make Nanjing the hub of a broader geography and a place where qi could accumulate. In the words ofthe 1874 gazetteer, "As for the utmost extremes of misfortune and chaos [as well as the completion of pacification, Nanjing was a focal point for all of it"
From these examples, it is possible to compile a list of the main characteristies of loyalty and virtue as described in biographical compilations. Biographers represented their subjects as particularly sensitive to the overlapping obligations of family and dynasty. From this acute sense of duty, the exemplars deliberately chose death. Death, when it came, was violent and sometimes very painful, a detail that made the decision appear even more virtuous. Although these deaths were in part the result of the war, the biographies emphasized moral judgment and determination over the specific circumstances of the rebellion. Post-war enshrinement thus located the strength of the polity in the figures of soldiers, militiamen, and poor women as well as officials, literati, and the monarch.
In the numbers and diversity of people included, in the association of small acts with dynastie survival, and in the views of the past they contained, shrines and biographies redefmed political community. They located the history ofthe Taiping Rebellion in stories of people, people whose souls eould still be venerated. The vigor of the state seemed to depend on their vigor, and the diversity of subjects asserted that the virtues depicted were to be emulated by all rather than merely admired.
As Nanjing's literati recovered from the war, the care of souls generated renewed activism, and provided new opportunities for the discovering and manifesting of virtues among both the living and the dead.