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Shanghai’s taotai , or circuit intendant. (In imperial China, the basic administrative unit was the district, controlled by a magistrate; districts then were grouped into departments, governed by prefects, and three or more departments became a circuit, placed under a taotai. Circuits were then organized into provinces.) Directly responsible for the lofty revenue of Shanghai’s customs house, and no more averse to embezzlement than the average Chinese bureaucrat, Wu Hsü was, according to the Herald , “an extraordinary man” who possessed “the purse of Fortunatus,… a small army of English friends, and a crowd of servants.… In his capacity as Taotai and Superintendent of Customs, he has constant intercourse with English officials, and pleases them by his affability and condescension.”
    To the great nineteenth-century Chinese statesman Li Hung-chang—who knew Wu Hsü in Shanghai and was himself to amass a fortune through corrupt dealings—Wu was “expert in accounting and skillful in hiding deficiencies.… [H]is hand is deft at adjusting transactions to his own convenience. He always succeeds in confusing outsiders.” Wu sharpened his skill at account juggling, bribery, and extortion—known to Westerners in China as the infamous “squeeze”—in the confines of the Shanghai customs house, which in 1854 had been transferred to an abandoned warehouse pending its move to a new, clock-towered headquarters. Through this renowned checkpoint moved massive amounts of opium (coming in) and tea and silk (going out), as well as food, textiles, and, of course, arms, to be sold at inflated prices to either the imperialists or the rebels. The extent of Wu’s wealth was hardly surprising, and while the Herald might claim that he was in reality Hsüeh Huan’s “mouthpiece and money-bag,” it is entirely possible that Wu was in a position of greater de facto power than the governor.
    But Wu Hsü needed to cover his activities bureaucratically just as much as Hsüeh Huan did, and to this end the taotai associated himself very closely with the successful banker Yang Fang. Yang was a native of Chekiang province who was also known to Westerners as Taki, because he headed a large financial house of that name. A director of the Committee of Patriotic Chinese Merchants, who came together to determine how best to apply their enormous wealth to the Taiping problem, Yang Fang’s contacts with Westerners in China had been just as extensive and far more informal than either Wu Hsü’s or Hsüeh Huan’s. Originally a native agent, or compradore, for Shanghai’s largest Western merchant firm—Jardine, Matheson and Company—Yang had made a fortune in banking that allowed him to purchase a mandarinate as well as a beautiful young girl for a wife (the sale of female children in China was still very common). Gregarious and by all accounts accommodating, Yang had taken the extra step of gaining a basic working knowledge of English, and both his yamen (office) and his home were frequented by foreigners from every walk of life.
    Together, Yang Fang and Wu Hsü were involved in a multitude of commercial activities in Shanghai, everything from a “Houseless Refugees Fund”—maintained by Western donations, only a portion of which reportedly made their way to the refugees—to fitting out armed river steamers for the suppression of pirates on the Yangtze and the Huang-pu. The two men’s experience with foreigners made them valuable to their Manchu superiors (although they were also considered somewhat tainted by their extensive dealings with the barbarians), and their mastery of every in and out of the Byzantine Chinese bureaucracy in Shanghai made them indispensable to Westerners wishing to do business there.
    Yet for all that they were the three most powerful men in Chinese Shanghai, Hsüeh Huan, Wu Hsü, and Yang Fang retained an air of nervous pragmatism. This skittish adaptability had been a large part of the reason they had