I've heard it said that the Qing might've fallen had the Taiping armies decided to move to besiege Beijing immediately instead of Tianjin. Why did the Taiping delay?
When the Taiping arrived at Nanjing in March 1853, it is estimated that the army that besieged the city totalled some 500,000 people, camp followers included. How many were equipped for combat is difficult to assess, but even half that number might be a decisive threat to whatever Qing forces might be mustered in north China. There is a document, supposedly authored by a scholar named Qian Jiang in January or February 1853, which proposed exactly that, advocating the establishment of Nanjing as the Taiping capital and then sending forces north to secure the Grand Canal, taking Kaifeng and Jinan and then heading for Beijing. The dubious authenticity of this document, whose precise chain of provenance seems obscure, would suggest perhaps that it was the result of a contemporary or near-contemporary asking the exact same question as you have, and asserting that the Taiping should have gone north and if only they'd listened to this totally sensible advice. Augustus Lindley, the Taiping's British eulogist, went further in completely denouncing the decision to establish a capital at Nanjing:
The occupation of Nankin has proved fatal to the success of the Ti-pings hitherto. Insurrection, of whatever kind, to be successful, must never relinquish the aggressive movement; directly it acts upon the defensive, unless possessing some wonderful organization, its power is broken. The principal element of revolutionary success is rapidity of action, and when once this is forsaken, the consolidated strength of an established constitution is advantageously brought to bear against rebellion.
The Tien-wang, by settling down at Nankin and commencing to defend his position, committed a vital error, and one that lost him the empire. If, instead of so doing, and affording his enemies time to rally and recover from their wild panic, and concentrate their forces, he had aimed at the one terminal point, Pekin, beyond all doubt, the very éclat of his victorious march would have carried him with an almost resistless triumph into possession of the capital, and the consequent destruction of the Manchoo dynasty would have given him the empire. The very fact that for years afterwards, in spite of this unfavourable re-action, the Ti-pings have been enabled, not only to hold their own against the Imperialists, but to have utterly crushed them—had it not been for the intervention of England—proves how easily they might have followed up their first advantages.
Two courses were open to the Ti-pings, either of which, judging by their career, would have led to the extinction of the oppressive Manchoo rule. The first was, without a pause, to have continued their march upon Pekin, abandoning each city as they seized it, and while enriching themselves from the captured stores and treasuries, and strengthening their forces by the crowds of discontented wherever they might pass, not to have permitted the slightest reduction of their numbers by detaching isolated garrisons.
The second would have been to have abandoned Nankin, and concentrated all their forces in the southern provinces,—Kwang-tung, Kwang-se, Kwei-chow, and Fo-keen,—a part of China, more than any other, bitterly opposed to the Manchoos, and more important still, the native provinces of the principal Ti-ping leaders. In this case, the whole of the country south of the Yang-tze river could in a short time have been completely wrested from the Manchoos, and then, if unable to obtain the whole empire, they would at least have established a southern kingdom in perfect integrity—and how superior this course of action would have been to the irregular one they pursued!
It was not only a great mistake, but a great absurdity for the Tien-wang to establish a capital, and set up a new dynasty before accomplishing either of the foregoing courses.
But while Lindley explained the nature of the mistake, he does not seem to have been able to offer an explanation of its cause. As such, it has fallen to modern historians to attempt to determine a motive for what seems, on the surface, to have been such a gross strategic blunder.
The explanation that has found most purchase in Taiping scholarship of the last few decades is that articulated by the late Rudolf G. Wagner in his 1982 monograph Reenacting the Heavenly Vision: The Role of Religion in the Taiping Rebellion. Wagner argues that Hong Xiuquan’s visions of heaven in 1837 were treated as a prophetic revelation by the Taiping, laying out a schema whereby the Heavenly Kingdom was to organise its institutions, its army, its social agenda, and critical to our purposes, its military strategy.
In particular, Wagner suggests that Hong Xiuquan’s battle with the demons in heaven served as the basis for the Taiping plan of campaign between 1851 and 1853: in the vision, Hong fought against the demons until enthroned in the eastern part of Heaven, after which the demons retreated to Hell; so in real life, the Taiping would fight towards the east, where the Heavenly City (Nanjing) would be retaken and liberated from the ‘demons’ (Manchus). In turn, it was presumed that this key victory would effectively spell the end for the ‘demons’, who would soon melt away after this great success. The Taiping thus entered a period of extended complacency after capturing Nanjing, assuming – evidently incorrectly – the imminent collapse of the Qing state without much need for further action on their own part.
This is, on its face, a pretty convincing argument to explain why the Taiping offensive fizzled out so rapidly – that the capture of Nanjing was not simply a stepping stone on the way to defeating the Qing, but rather it was conceptualised as the integral part of the Taiping’s victory, and they simply didn’t have a plan beyond that because they didn’t think they would even need to. This argument was accepted by Jonathan Spence when he wrote his 1996 narrative history, God’s Chinese Son, which is the other place where this suggestion is articulated at length.
But, neat as this explanation is, I do have some issues with it. Be warned that the above is the last part to be rooted exclusively in published scholarship; the remainder is based on my own research.
The critical issue that makes or breaks Wagner’s argument is one of sources. Hong Xiuquan’s visions appear in a number of texts, but the two most complete narratives of his visions of Heaven are The Visions of Hung Siu-tshuen, written by Theodore Hamberg on the basis of testimonies by Hong Rengan and published in 1854, and the Taiping Heavenly Chronicle, attributed to Hong Rengan and which claims to have been written in 1848 but which was published in 1862. Most English-language historiography has accepted the Chronicle’s claimed date of composition, and Wagner in particular assumes that its narrative of the visions was, following its creation, conceived of as the sole authoritative edition, and that its implications were clearly and widely known at least among the Taiping leadership. As such, his argument relies on the Chronicle being truthful about its date of composition.
Which means that if doubt can be cast on that, the argument starts having trouble. I am not the first person to have suggested that the Taiping Heavenly Chronicle was composed, or at least heavily revised, much closer to its date of publication than 1848. Jian Youwen, the old doyen of Taiping studies, suggested this in his Chinese (1955) and English (1973) overview histories of the Taiping, and a 2018 article by Huan Jin approaches the Chronicle as a piece of propagandistic history devised for a 1862 context rather than an 1848 one, though comes short of explicitly declaring it to be a late composition. For my part, a comparison with other Taiping writings on the visions shows that the Chronicle’s depiction of the visions aligns mainly with the later (i.e. post-1856) corpus of texts. Indeed, this later corpus of texts is characterised by a greater focus on Hong Xiuquan’s personal role in affairs and, critically, the visions as a source of legitimacy and political direction, which are much more muted in earlier texts.
This has very specific implications for the way Wagner, and in turn anyone deriving their approaches from his work, interprets the narrative of the visions. In particular, it becomes entirely plausible – and I would argue quite probable – that the version of the visions presented in the Taiping Heavenly Chronicle was not used as the basis of a prescriptive, prophetic policy agenda from 1848 onwards, but rather that it was written in 1861/2 as a retroactive justification of existing Taiping policy. In other words, the Taiping followed the plan laid out in the visions so closely not because they were successful in putting that plan into action, but because the ‘plan’ was actually written after the fact.
It’s also possible to draw on some contemporary documents to suggest that this was the case. After taking Nanjing, the Taiping had a number of scholars write treatises extolling the virtues of Nanjing and approving of its selection as capital which were then published, which could well be read as an attempt to seek post-hoc justification for the decision. After all, if the plan was always to take Nanjing, why get a bunch of local Confucian scholars to write statements of support for the decision – with reference to Confucian intellectual currents rather than the Bible or Hong’s own prophecies – and publish those statements for a wider audience?
And so, the argument that the Taiping stopped at Nanjing because they had a fully coherent plan of action up to that point but no further is made markedly more doubtful. What, then, explains the decision, other than just a simple miscalculation? I will offer four possible factors, all of which may have contributed to some extent or another.