The soldiers who have surrendered.

Answer: not enough food for everybody.

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The pact Andy Lau (one of Jet Li's lieutenants) made with the Rebel General was to allow the Rebel soldiers to disarm and return to a life of peasantry. And you should bear in mind a few things that are not explained in the movie-- because it can be taken for granted that Chinese audiences would know or easily find out:

1) The Taiping (Tai-ping is the name of the rebel kingdom/dynasty) Rebellion is a semi-religious crusade (whose leader considered himself the Brother of Christ)-- therefore the Taiping Rebels (at least the religious ones) are "fundamentally/ ideologically" opposed to the Qing Dynasty/ Government. The movie avoids any direct mention of Christianity-- perhaps to keep the movie PC as well as to keep the focus on the brotherhood (instead of the historical nature/ issue of the Taiping Rebellion).

2) Plundering/Massacring a surrendered city or army during the years of Taiping Rebellion was quite normal for both sides-- that's how China lost over 10% of its population over a few decades. That's why Rebel General of Suzhou specifically allowed himself to be killed and in return begged that his soldiers be allowed to disarm and go home.

3) The Suzhou Massacre did in fact happen after a surrender pact was made, though perhaps much less melodramatically (with the names of all involved being changed for the movie).


So Jet Li (& in fact any one on the Qing Dynasty's side) would NOT trust the Tai-ping Rebels to simply "switch" their loyalties like clueless peasants or mercenaries for hire-- and in this case, Jet Li would not even trust them to "stay down" while he takes down their Divine Leader in Nanking.

IOW, Andy Lau was the naive one.

Read some current affairs and you'll know that trying to recruit "surrendered" soldiers, like you're in some computer game, seldom works as smoothly in real life.


Why do people who don't care keep telling other people not to care?

I agree w/chilii, Philip & BBC. Based on what Pang said in the movie, he couldn't recruit them b/c even IF they were 100% willing to switch sides (something most religiously-motivated people aren't willing to do), he wouldn't be able to feed them.

The rations they got from the other commander + whatever they were able to scrounge up from the starving village (not much) would have fed 4000 soldiers for about 10 days. If you double the amount of soldiers to 8000, the rations would probably only last 5 days. If they weren't able to take the capital in 5 days, they'd be right back where they started (starving in a trench w/no morale), except now, they'd be starving in a trench w/no morale beside 4000 soldiers who were less than enthusiastic about fighting for the man who just killed their leader.

As to why he shot them all instead of letting them go, I wasn't exactly sure. My guesses included that he...
- Didn't want to risk them joining the army stationed in the capital
- Knew they'd starve even if he let them live
- Didn't trust them to simply lay down their arms & "go home" & didn't want to have to worry about them coming back after him.