Accounts: Yung Wing Describing Zeng Guofan

In 1863, Yung Wing or Rong Hong, the earliest known Chinese graduate of Yale College received an invitation for a meeting with Zeng Guofan, a venerable Qing official and commander of the Hunan Army fighting the Taiping rebellion in the Yangtze Valley. Yung Wing just went from a tea district under the control of the Taiping and feared an interrogation or a reprimand, but the meeting turned out to be for an assignment to purchase machines for the future Jiangnan Arsenal – part of the Self-Strengthening Movement that Zeng supported.

During this meeting, Yung Wing described the imposing character of the Marquis of Yiyong. He wrote:

Zeng Guofan, as he appeared in 1863, was over 60 years of age, in the very prime of life. He was five feet, eight or nine inches tall, strongly build and well-knitted together and in fine proportion. He had a broad chest and square shoulders surmounted by a large symmetrical head. He had a broad and high forehead; his eyes were set on a straight line under triangular-shaped eyelids, free from that obliquity so characteristic of the Mongolian type of countenance usually accompanied by high cheekbones, which is another feature peculiar to the Chinese physiognomy. His face was straight and somewhat hairy. He allowed his side-whiskers their full growth; they hung down with his full beard which swept across a broad chest and added dignity to a commanding appearance. His eyes though not large were keen and penetrating. They were of a clear hazel color. His mouth was large but well compressed with thin lips which showed a strong will and a high purpose. Such was Zeng Guofan’s external appearance when I first met his at Nanking. 

Regarding his character, he was undoubtedly one of the most remarkable men of his age and time. As a military general, he might be called a self-made man; by dint of his indomitable persistence and perseverance, he rose from his high scholarship as a Hanlin to be a generalissimo of all the imperial forces that were levied against the Taiping rebels, and in less than a decade after he headed his Hunan raw recruits, he succeeded in reducing the wide devastation of the rebellion that covered a territorial area of three of the richest provinces of China to the single one of Jiangnan, till finally, by the construction of his forces, he succeeded in crushing the life out of the rebellion by the fall and capture of Nanking. The Taiping Rebellion was of 15 years’ duration, from 1850 to 1865. It was no small task to bring it to its extinction. Its rise and progress had cost the Empire untold treasures, while 25,000,000 human lives were immolated in that political hecatomb. The close of the great rebellion gave the people a breathing respite. The Dowager Empress had special reasons to be grateful to the genius of Zeng Guofan, who was instrumental in restoring peace and order to the Manchu Dynasty. She was not slow, however, to recognize Zeng Guofan’s merits and moral worth and created him a duke. But Zeng’s greatness was not to be measured by any degree of conventional nobility; it did not consist in his victories over the rebels, much less in his recapture of Nanking. It rose from his great virtues: his pure, unselfish patriotism, his deep and far-sighted statesmanship, and the purity of his official career. He is known in history as “the man of rectitude.” This was his posthumous title conferred on him by the imperial decree.

Bibliography:

Yung Wing. My Life in China and America. New York, New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1909.