As a military general, he might be called a self-made man; by dint of his indomitable persistence and perseverance, he rose from his high scholarship as a Hanlin (Chinese LL.D. ) to be a generalissimo of all the imperial forces that were levied against the Taiping rebels, and in less than a decade after he headed his Hunan raw recruits, he succeeded in reducing the wide devastations of the rebellion that covered a territorial area of three of the richest provinces of China to the single one of Kiang Nan, till finally, by the constriction of his forces, he succeeded in crushing the life out of the rebellion by the fall and capture of Nanking.
The Taiping Rebellion was of fifteen years’ duration, from 1850 to 1865. It was no small task to bring it to its extinction. Its rise and progress had cost the Empire untold treasures, while 25,000,000 human lives were immolated in that political hecatomb. The close of the great rebellion gave the people a breathing respite.
The Dowager Empress had special reasons to be grateful to the genius of Tsang Kwoh Fan, who was instrumental in restoring peace and order to the Manchu Dynasty. She was not slow, however, to recognize Tsang Kwoh Fan’s merits and moral worth and created him a duke.
But Tsang’s greatness was not to be measured by any degree of conventional nobility; it did not consist in his victories over the rebels, much less in his recapture of Nanking.
It rose from his great virtues:
- his pure, unselfish patriotism,
- his deep and farsighted statesmanship,
- and the purity of his official career.
He is known in history as “the man of rectitude.” This was his posthumous title conferred on him by imperial decree.