Zeng Guofan was a scholar by training, but when the Taiping Civil War broke out, he joined his fellow scholar-landowners in raising militias to fight the rebels after the dynasty's actual military failed. Eventually, Zeng's militia absorbed its neighbors, becoming the Xiang Army, and he took it upon himself to reconquer the state the rebels had carved out in the Yangtze river valley.

Zeng, like the other scholars of Imperial China, was a Neo-Confucian, and one of the tenants of the philosophy is strict self discipline. Zeng would always spend an hour in contemplation in the morning, walked a thousand paces after every meal, never starting a book until he finished the one he was then reading, keeping a diary every day, and so on. Furthermore, there were several arts the Chinese gentleman was expected to master in the process of self-cultivation, and one of them is the game weiqi, commonly known in the west by its Japanese name, Go. Every day, Zeng played a game of Go with his subordinates, and if you squint, his strategy reflected the closest thing he had to prior military experience. Points in Go are assigned for holding territory on the board, and enemy stones are removed by encirclement, not by direct attack as in chess.

Since Zeng had no experience leading armies in the field prior to the war, it's unsurprising that he was a poor battle commander, suffering disastrous defeats at Jiujiang and Three Rivers, the latter leading to a suicide attempt on his part. He did, however, possess a keen strategic mind. The fighting in the Taiping Civil War took place mostly along the wealthy and fertile Yangtze river, so many cities were heavily fortified. The progress of the war largely came down a series of sieges; Chinese walls were too thick to breach with the cannons available, so it was necessary to surround enemy strongholds, whereupon they could be forced to surrender. Zeng Guofan himself was threatened with encirclement by Chen Yucheng as he besieged Anqing, but his cavalry commander, the Manchu Duolonga, managed to outflank the Brave King; it was encirclement within encirclement within encirclement, the same way you win in Go.