Ever Victorious: Foreign Adventurers in the Taiping Rebellion, 1860-1864 / הצבא המנצח תמיד: הרפתקנים זרים והמעצמות במרד הטאי-פינג, 1860-1864

The Taiping Rebellion, a civil war of epic proportions that took place in China between 1850 and 1864, was one of the most disastrous conflicts in modern Chinese history. Retrospectively, it is perceived as a major historical watershed with far-reaching repercussions for the power of the Chinese Imperial State. Leaving aside the widespread destruction of lives and property, it shook the central authority of the Qing Dynasty and encouraged the growth of peripheral military players who destabilized the government in the long run, indirectly leading to the Republican Revolution of 1911. In this article, I focus on a distinct aspect of relevance in the last stage of the rebellion (1860-1864): the involvement of a foreign militia comprised of Western and Filipino adventurers as an auxiliary force of the Chinese Imperial Army. Specifically, I dwell on the complex relationship among the leaders of the force, Frederick Townsend Ward and Henry Andrea Burgevine; the Chinese authorities both national and local; and the various treaty powers, particularly the British. As I show, the story of Ward's and Burgevine's service under the Qing Dynasty was comprised of three distinct episodes corresponding to three different armies that they commanded between 1860 and 1864. In each stage, they had a very different kind of relationship with both the Chinese and the British, with drastic repercussions for their performance, achievements, and failures. Through close examination of the history of Ward, Burgevine, and their army, I offer a theoretical model, which I call the "policy gap," that explains interactions between adventurers and states in different military and political settings.