sense and strength, and of all manhood; for they threw themselves on the ground before their leaders and piteously implored for mercy with cries of Spare my life, Prince!—spare my life. Prince! … The insurgents who described their conduct declared that not one, old or young had been spared.
Whether those in Chihli were actually much better is very doubtful, for, when the comparatively small force of Taipings, sent north after the capture of Nanking, reached the borders of that province, the emperor had to send for Mongol tribesmen to hasten to the rescue of Tientsin under their formidable leader Senkolintsin.[1] Assuredly enough Bannermen were to be found in Chihli to rout the insurgents if they had been skilled in war. And, useless as it was, this Banner force was a serious drain on the provincial revenues. Careful tables by Wade[2] show that the pay and allowances of officers and men for the Banners in China proper amounted to a grand total of 13,785,020 taels[3] per annum, or, with Manchuria, Ili, and Turkestan included, just under sixteen million taels. If the tables of Parker are correct, this represents more than a third of the entire receipts for the pre-Taiping years and at least half of the expenditures which he includes.[4]
Considering now the Chinese army, we find at the outset one striking difference in the fact that this was drawn
- ↑ Peking Gazette for Nov. 7, 1853.
- ↑ Chinese Repository, XX, 404.
- ↑ A tael an ounce of silver, Chinese weight. The standards are local, but in general are about an ounce and a third. Here the standard is the Treasury tael.
- ↑ Parker, China, pp. 198 f. The receipts are given in this budget as taels 46,871,000 and expenditures as taels 31,522,800. He reckons the entire army expenditure at only tael 19,599,100 and believes that the Bannermen at Peking require only two or three millions. I am inclined to think that his budget only includes payments for Peking, Manchuria, Mongolia, and Turkestan, but not those for the provinces, which were paid by the provincial treasuries.
