Reclaiming the Land

Just a few years after meeting with Lin Zexu in Changsha, Zuo Zongtang returned to the provincial capital for a rendezvous of a different sort. Now about forty years old, he was summoned to the city to attend to a matter of great urgency. In the summer of 1852, tens of thousands of followers of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom had entered Hunan from the southwest, seeking to strengthen their movement by expanding into new territory and increasing their numbers. The Taipings, a group energized as much by their material needs as by their anti-Manchu ideology, found the province to be