Chapter 37: The Fall of Anping

The sounds from behind the curtain grew louder. Xue Ziliang could hear heavy breathing. He raised his rifle and shouldered it. There was no one here he needed to capture alive. When faced with a potential threat, he preferred to let his bullets do the talking.

The Southern Min translator shouted again, this time adding, “Come out now, or we’ll shoot!”

Finally, a trembling female voice came from behind the curtain. “Don’t shoot!” A woman emerged. She was in her thirties and, judging by her clothes, a servant of some kind. She had probably hidden in the room, terrified by the sound of the cannons.

Seeing Xue Ziliang and his men, she immediately knelt and pleaded. Xue Ziliang couldn’t understand her words. He saw the translator exchange a few words with her. “She says she’s a servant here, and she was hiding. She’s begging you not to kill her…” the translator said.

“Take her out and hand her over to the prisoner detail,” Xue Ziliang said. However, as the woman was being led away, a sideways glance from her made him feel that something was wrong. Xue Ziliang shouldered his rifle and signaled for his men to conduct a further search.

A team member pulled back the curtain. Behind it was a couch, empty. But when they lifted the couch, they found a child hiding underneath.

“There’s a boy here!”

Xue Ziliang looked at the boy who was brought before him. He was about six or seven years old, with delicate features and well-made clothes. Despite the sudden disaster, he managed to remain calm and didn’t cry or make a fuss. He was clearly not from an ordinary family.

Xue Ziliang looked at him closely and suddenly called out in Japanese, “Fukumatsu!”

The boy was startled, his eyes widened, and he instinctively responded.

“Report to headquarters immediately. I have captured Zheng Sen,” Xue Ziliang said. As an ABC (American-born Chinese), he had no idea of the historical significance of the boy before him in the late Ming dynasty of the original timeline, but he was well aware of the importance the Senate placed on “Zheng Sen.” The identification manual for key figures of the Zheng clan, issued before the operation, had information on this boy, though his photo was missing.

“Send a few men to take him to the ship. Protect him well,” Xue Ziliang said. He knew this child was Zheng Zhilong’s eldest son, and his importance was self-evident. He then pointed to the woman from before. “Send this woman with him.”

At that moment, reports came in from all over that the entire mansion had been cleared. The leaders of the various teams came to report their search results. The mansion had not been too severely damaged. Although some areas were damaged, most of it was well-preserved. They had also found the accounting office and the silver vault, which had already been sealed. There was a large granary filled with a massive amount of grain, wine, oil, salt, and dried meat and fish, enough to feed several hundred people for a year. There was also an armory, which housed many weapons, from traditional swords and spears to Japanese matchlocks and European muskets—some of which were very rare.

“We found this at the entrance,” a corporal said, handing him a peculiar pistol. It looked like a revolver but was ornately decorated and exquisitely made. Xue Ziliang had some knowledge of antique weapons and knew it was a European-made wheel-lock revolver, a very high-tech item for the time that required a highly skilled craftsman a great deal of time to produce.

“I never thought Zheng Zhilong had such a fine thing hidden away,” Xue Ziliang said, aiming it and dry-firing it once. He was reluctant to part with it, but he still handed the pistol back to the corporal.

“Return it to the armory. Wait for the Planning Commission to take it.”

Ying Yu also entered the mansion. He was there to assess the effectiveness of the bombardment. Seeing Xue Ziliang smoking a cigar, lost in thought, he asked, “Old Xue, the defenses have been set up. The troops heading to Nan’an and Jinjiang have also been dispatched. I estimate the Ming forces on both sides won’t react. What else do we need to do now?”

“We wait,” Xue Ziliang said.

“Wait for what?”

“Wait for the people from the Planning Commission.”

“We need to set up a command post,” Ying Yu said. “This place isn’t suitable.”

Xue Ziliang agreed. The mansion, with its many doors and courtyards, was inconvenient for personnel to move in and out of. Besides, clearing the mansion was the job of the Planning Commission and the intelligence bureau; there was no point in them staying here. So, he led his men to the city tower to set up a command post.

Under the direction of intelligence agents, the army and navy soldiers conducted a thorough search of the Zheng mansion. Every body in the mansion was carried to an open space, where intelligence personnel, with the help of prisoners, identified and registered them one by one. For important figures, they also took photographs and fingerprints.

All captured prisoners were sent to Kinmen Island for detention, where a temporary camp had been established to house them. The Planning Commission’s special search teams and the intelligence bureau’s action teams, with soldiers in tow, searched and sealed the homes of the key members of the Zheng clan in Anping.

A grim silence fell over the city. The four gates were guarded by army and navy soldiers with fixed bayonets. “Typewriters” (Gatling guns) were mounted on the gate towers, and all entry and exit were strictly forbidden. The streets, apart from the passing soldiers, were filled only with civilian laborers conscripted by the paijia to fight fires, clear debris, and carry away the dead and wounded. Teams of “White Horse” and “Forlorn Hope” soldiers, speaking an incomprehensible language and carrying clubs and Japanese swords, hurried about under the command of their officers, carrying out searches and arrests. For the ordinary people of Anping, although they had been terrified since the bombardment began that morning, most had escaped unharmed, apart from a few unlucky ones who were killed by stray bullets. The Australians did not kill or rob; they were only concerned with searching and arresting the wealthy.

The bolder ones peeked through the cracks in their windows and doors, watching the outside. The prominent families associated with the Zheng clan were being arrested one by one. The city’s powerful and wealthy—the “upper class,” the “nouveau riche,” the “untouchable relatives of so-and-so” who had once been so arrogant and lived in luxury—the dead were thrown onto carts and dragged to an open space to be publicly displayed. The living had ropes tied around their necks and were dragged away in strings like rats. The noble ladies and young masters, who had once been so pampered, now walked barefoot and disheveled, weeping on the road. Anyone who walked too slowly was met with a blow from the escorting soldiers’ clubs. The common people, who had always lived in subservience, had never seen such a satisfying sight. Some had been slapped by these people, some had had their wives and daughters bullied by them, and others had been cheated or had their wages exploited by them. Now, they were both crying and laughing in their hearts, secretly thinking, “You have your day too!”

There were also those who had lived off the scraps of the powerful, who had acted arrogantly under the protection of others, who took pride in being a retainer of so-and-so or a servant of someone else, and who always had the phrase “Are you even worthy of the surname Zheng?” on their lips. Now, they were filled with both sorrow and fear. They feared that this turmoil would destroy the foundation of the Zheng family and they would no longer be able to live off the scraps. They also feared that the Kunzei would come to settle accounts with them for their past actions. Their hearts were in turmoil.

Xue Ziliang and Ying Yu were unaware of the various thoughts of the city’s inhabitants. They were more concerned with how much loot could be gathered here, as that was the main objective of this campaign. The Transmigrator sent by the Planning Commission to oversee the work had brought a large special search team with him.

Each small team of the special search team was equipped with two translators who could speak Southern Min and were relatively familiar with the situation in Anping. Some were naturalized citizens, others were recent collaborators. As soon as order was restored in the city, many collaborators, hoping for revenge or to get rich, emerged, volunteering to “lead the way to the wealthy households.”

The special search team had maps and lists, the result of over six months of hard work by the Foreign Intelligence Bureau. The role of the collaborators was simply to make the process faster and more accurate. However, the Planning Commission’s search team had received strict orders to only follow the map and arrest and search by name. They were not allowed to act on the denunciations of the collaborators. All denunciations had to be compiled into reports first, reviewed by a Transmigrator, and then a decision would be made.

The search was very fruitful. Many of the mid-to-high-level figures of the Zheng clan had residences in Anping. Although many of them were not at home, their families were captured in one fell swoop.

The commander of the Anping garrison, Zheng Zhiguan, who should have protected them, had escaped alone. The moment the shelling stopped, he had immediately gathered his family and servants, loaded his family’s gold, silver, and treasures onto carts, and, under the escort of his personal troops and household retainers, opened the city gates and fled directly to the county seat of Jinjiang.

The families of many generals, managers, and stewards were almost all captured, and their property fell into the hands of the Senate. Zheng Zhilong’s own mansion was not spared. Not only was all his property confiscated, but his wife in Anping, Yan-shi, his eldest son, Zheng Sen, and Zheng Sen’s birth mother, Tagawa, were all captured.

These prisoners were all sent to the prisoner-of-war camp for screening. There were collaborators everywhere, eager to sell out their former masters or seek revenge, making it very difficult for anyone to hide their identity. Many tried to disguise themselves as servants or commoners but were quickly exposed by the collaborators.

The public and private property confiscated from the various prominent households and warehouses was piled up like mountains, and was inventoried, packed, and shipped away one by one. A preliminary count showed that over 800,000 taels of silver and over 10,000 taels of gold were seized in Anping. From the Zheng mansion alone, over 400,000 taels of silver were confiscated. And this was without a thorough search. According to traditional Chinese methods of hiding treasure, wealthy families were likely to have hidden more gold and silver underground or in hidden wall compartments.

Xue Ziliang and Ying Yu, as the military commanders for the Anping direction, were not responsible for the specific looting operations in the city. Their mission in Operation Overlord was simple: occupy Anping and hold it until the command to withdraw was given. To this end, he dispatched several reconnaissance detachments towards Jinjiang and Nan’an counties and sent one army reconnaissance platoon each to the cities of Nan’an and Jinjiang to conduct harassing actions and test the reaction of the Ming forces in those counties.

The result was that both counties kept their city gates tightly shut, and the various garrisons in the counties remained almost completely motionless. The two groups of personal guards sent from Xiamen to escort the families had been defeated in brief battles.