God's Chinese Son Read online

  Quite independently as far as we know, and somewhat later, a similar shift occurred in China. The elements of both balance and closure had been long accepted by the Chinese, finding their most famous expression in the Book of Changes during the first millennium b.c. According to this text, the creative forces are at best a "wavering flight over the depths." In cases of conflict, "a cautious halt halfway brings good fortune," and each earthly attachment, like fire, "flames up, dies down, is thrown away."5 In the fifth century b.c. work the Lao Tzu, which so influenced later genera­tions in China, paradox, balance, and the absence of dogmatism were essential to each other. "Turning back is how the way moves," the author wrote. "Weakness is the means the way employs." In all our varied exis­tences, "the myriad creatures carry on their backs the yin and embrace in their arms the yang and are the blending of the generative forces of the two."6

  But these apparently established certainties eroded in China also, just as they had in other civilizations. Linked often to a transformation of that same Lao Tzu text whose message had once seemed to be so different, by the second century a.d. in China the idea of a "Way of Great Peace"—a "Taiping Tao"—had begun to take hold, along with a "Way of the Celes­tial Masters." These movements had messianic elements, in that they looked to a supreme deliverer who would force the human race from the miseries of its current state, and end history as it had been known by instituting the period of Great Peace. "Come quickly, join with me!" ran one of these second-century texts. "My followers are numerous. ... I will not suddenly abandon you. ... I myself will change destiny. In this pres­ent age I will choose the good people. You must not select yourself; by [your] upright behavior and self control I will recognize you."7

  Between the third and sixth centuries these apocalyptic visions grew in sharpness and intensity, as different strands within Taoism and Chinese Buddhism complemented and reinforced each other. Now the coming period of destruction—marked by sickness, famine, the tyranny of cruel and arbitrary rulers, and often accompanied by a great and terrible del­uge—was given a specific time in the near future. Only a handful of the human race, guided by a celestial savior and his representatives on earth, would survive this terrible period. When it was over, the faithful would draw together into their own ideal community, in which they would live at last in peace and harmony.8

  From that time forward, both in China and in Europe, the millenarian and apocalyptic strains of belief stayed vigorously alive. And in both China and Europe, the proponents of these beliefs came to link them to radical political and egalitarian programs that brought numerous new followers from among the poor, and also led them at intervals into violent conflicts with the state. In China, across the whole span of time from the tenth to the nineteenth century, the state often blamed such uprisings on the fol­lowers of the "White Lotus Teachings," but in fact there was no one central teaching, rather a host of conflicting and competing centers of revelation and resistance.9

  In Europe, too, the many strands of millenarian belief that had so chal­lenged the Catholic church continued—with renewed intensity—after the Protestant Reformation. Transposed to the soil of colonial North America, the Puritan visionaries found what at first seemed the perfect setting for their various New Jerusalems and "praying towns." And though that vision faded in the face of eighteenth-century realities, even those who now attacked excessive liberty and equality still created their timetables for the end of the world and kept the worlds of Daniel and Revelation alive through their "federalist millennialism."10 Especially through Amer­ican Baptist missionaries, these impulses were carried back to China in the early nineteenth century, where they reinforced the message being brought by evangelical Protestant missionaries from the British Isles and central Europe. By the early 1830s these new forces were institutionally established in South China, ready to compete with indigenous Chinese elements for the loyalties of the youthful Hong Xiuquan. It is the outcome of that conjunction that is the subject of our story.

  I feel fortunate that I was introduced to the many levels of Taiping history by Jen Yu-wen, one of the greatest scholars of that strange upheaval, whom my teacher Mary Wright invited to Yale in the late 1960s, so that he could complete an English-language digest of his imposing three-volume work on the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom." But though I was fascinated by the Taiping, nothing then, or in the two decades follow­ing, led me to think that I would ever write on the Taiping myself. Not only Jen Yu-wen but literally hundreds of historians and editors in the People's Republic of China were at work on the Taiping, since the Com­munist authorities chose to view the Taipings as proto-socialists from whose experiences much could be learned concerning revolution, not least the fact that without the vanguard leadership provided by a disciplined Marxist-Leninist party, such peasant uprisings could never succeed. In addition, virtually all the known surviving Taiping documents had been translated into English in accessible editions, and it seemed to me that everything that could be known about the Taiping had been fully aired.

  In the late-1980s, however, I became aware of two Taiping texts— printed in Nanjing in three volumes during the early 1860s—that had been found in the British Library in London. These texts recorded a pro­tracted series of heavenly visions said to have been relayed through Jesus and his Father to their faithful Taiping followers on earth. Through the courtesy of the British Library, I was able to consult the new texts in the original and to make my own copy; and on a later visit to Peking I met their discoverer, Wang Qingcheng, and had a full discussion of their sig­nificance.12 I came to realize that the discovery of these texts made it possible after all to take a fresh look at the Taiping.

  One could of course argue that heavenly visions of the kind recorded in these newly found texts are not historical sources in any precise sense of the term. And yet the visions are fixed in space and time with such precision, and describe the behavior of specific Taiping leaders and their followers in such detail, that it seems to me they do illuminate the uprising in central ways. Furthermore they are so bunched as to offer us insight into two key Taiping periods: one group (those said to be from Jesus) being concentrated in the early years of the formation of the Taiping movement in the mountains of Guangxi province, and the other group (those said to be from God the Father) being focused on the early years of the Taiping rule in their New Jerusalem of Nanjing. The visions also relate to numerous other events in Taiping history: in the case of the two volumes dealing with Jesus' descents to earth, they give us much com­pletely new information about the rural society of the time; and in the case of the visions of God the Father they give essential information on the interconnection of events in Taiping history with the visits of Western­ers to the Heavenly Capital. Though to me the main interest of the new texts lies in the light they shed on Hong Xiuquan himself, they also help us understand the audience he attracted, and the way he and his followers responded to that audience. Such questions are of central importance as we try to grasp how millenarian leaders create a practical base from which to operate.13

  Writing about Hong, I learned almost immediately, was writing about texts as much as about a man, and most especially about what many see as the text of texts, the Bible. Since I am no Bible scholar, and make no claims to be, this was a daunting prospect. But I was raised for over a decade in schools where the Bible was read daily, and I could see that there was no denying the strength, the inspiration, and the sense of purpose that Hong derived from the Bible, even though his response was intensely personal. Partly this was because the Bible was mediated for him in the

  Chinese language, either through Chinese converts to Christianity or through Western Protestant missionaries with some knowledge of Chi­nese who had settled in China's southeast coastal towns. The fact that it was these random acts of translation, with all their ambiguities, errors, and unexpected ironies, that brought him to his faith and his sense of destiny, rather than any formal religious instruction, was doubly intri­guing to me.14 It not only reasser
ted the extraordinary dangers that may flow from the unguided transmission of a book so volatile, and thus high­lighted the central importance of the West to Hong's story; it also helped me understand how Hong, when he at last acquired the Bible, made it so peculiarly his own. And because it was his own, after a period of reflection, he felt free to alter it, so that he could pass God's message on to his followers in an even "purer" form.

  This book does not attempt to give a total picture of the Taiping move­ment, its formation, maturation, expansion, suppression, and effects on China as a whole. Many fine scholars have written on some or all of these aspects of the story, and I am happy to build on their work rather than attempt to duplicate it.15 Instead, I focus on the mind of Hong Xiuquan and seek to understand—as far as I am able—how it could be that this particular man had such an astounding impact on his country for so many years. It is my belief that Hong's visions were shaped in some fashion by the overlapping layers of change that the Westerners were bringing to China along with their Christianity; these constituted an aura perhaps, as much as an influence, but an aura that was dense enough to give Hong a range of new feelings about the religious and social beliefs that he had absorbed at home as a child. When context is combined with vision in such a way, it seems to me, we can get at least an inkling of the logic that lay behind Hong's actions. This is not to deny that Hong's attempts at the social and religious transformation of China were often both muddled and inept. But it should help us to understand why he pursued the dreams he did, and why so many were willing to follow and die for him as he sought to make the dreams reality.

  Many questions remain unanswerable, perhaps most crucially those linking Hong's own character to the Apocalypse he helped to cause. Did he have the faintest inkling, as he began during the 1840s to preach to small groups of farmers and migrant workers in the hills of Guangxi province, that the trail of events set in motion by his visions would lead to the deaths of millions of people, and would require a decade of the concentrated military and fiscal energies of some of China's greatest states­men to suppress? It seems unlikely, for by identifying himself with the heavenly forces, Hong came to believe he removed himself from the ordi­nary judgments of humankind. But if he had reflected on it, the Book of Revelation, which he studied with great care, would have told him that such catastrophes had been long foretold, and that the chaos and horror were just a part of the glory and peace to come. I cannot find it in me to wish that Hong had succeeded in his goals, but neither can I entirely deny that there was true passion in his quest. As the epigraph to this book suggests, in the words of Keats, which themselves build on those of the Book of Revelation, Hong was one of those people who believe it is their mission to make all things "new, for the surprise of the sky-children." It is a central agony of history that those who embark on such missions so rarely care to calculate the cost.

  West Haven, Connecticut May 15, 1995

  The great seal of the Taiping. This version of the Taiping state seal, measuring 20.5 centimeters square, was probably made in 1860 or 1861 during the last years of Taiping rule over their Heavenly Kingdom. The seal is in the form of an acrostic, and Chinese scholars have long debated the exact order in which the characters on the seal were meant to be read and interpreted. The most defini­tive recent interpretation, offered by Wang Qingcheng, suggests starting with the central characters at the top of seal, proceeding with alternating lines in the bottom half of the seal (fanning out from the center and reading from right to left) before concluding with the smaller outside characters in the top half. This yields the following reading:

  The Taiping state seal:

  [Of] God the Father,

  The Heavenly Elder Brother Christ,

  The Heavenly King Hong, the sun, ruler of the bountiful earth, [And] the Savior and Young Monarch, the True King, Guifu. Exalted for a myriad years, eternally granting Heaven's favor, Eternally maintaining Heaven and earth in gracious harmony and convivial peace.

  God's Chinese Son

  1 WALLS

  It's hard to be always on the outside, looking in, but these foreigners have no choice. They live crammed together by the water's edge, two hundred yards or so beyond the south­west corner of Canton's crumbling but still imposing walls. They climb often to the roofs of their rented residences, and gaze from there across the walls to the close-packed streets and spacious landscaped residences of the Chinese city that lie beyond. They are allowed to stroll along the west wall's outer edge and peer, past clustered Chinese guards, through the long dark tunnels that form the city's major gates. If times are peaceful, a group of foreign men by prearrangement meet at dawn and walk the city's whole outside perimeter, a walk that takes two hours or so if no one blocks the way. During the fire that raged all night near the end of 1835, and destroyed more than a thousand city homes, one Westerner clambered onto the walls to watch the flames; initially turned away by Chinese guards, he was allowed to return the next afternoon, and walk along the walls at leisure. But this was exceptional grace, and not repeated. Some, with permission, visit rural temples in the hills, which from their upper stories give a different angle to the view across the distant walls. Others scan old Chinese maps that let them place the city's major landmarks in the context of the unwalked streets.1

  In their frustration, the foreigners pace out the dimensions of their allotted territory. It takes them 270 steps to cross the land from east to west, and fewer still from north to south. Along the southern edge of their domain, where the Pearl River flows, there is a patch of open ground, and this the Westerners call their "square" or "esplanade." But 50 paces from the shore rise the solid fronts of the buildings where they live, and these fill almost all the space remaining, save for three narrow streets that inter­sect them from north to south, closed at night by gates. Here, in 1836, live 307 men—British and Americans, in the main, but also Parsees and Indi­ans, Dutch and Portuguese, Prussians, French, and Danes. No women are allowed to be with them, and the 24 married men must leave their wives in Macao, one hundred miles away, three days by sampan on the inland waterways where travel is the safest. Twice, in 1830, defiant husbands brought their wives and female relatives to visit them. But even though the women came dressed in velvet caps and cloaks to hide their sex, and stayed indoors all day, when they went out at night (a time chosen because the shops were closed and the streets seemed empty) to see the sights, excited shouts at once announced the arrival of the "foreign devil women." The local Chinese lit their lanterns, and blocked the roads till all the foreigners retreated back to their homes. And the authorities, threatening to cancel all foreign trade unless the women returned to Macao, won their point.2

  Not that the life lacks compensations. There is money to be made, by old and young alike, two thousand dollars in a few minutes if one deals in opium and a buyer is in urgent need, smaller but still steady sums from trade in tea and silk, furs and medicines, watches and porcelain and fine furniture. The foreign community publishes two weekly newspapers, printed on their own presses, which cover local news and feud and bicker over trade and national policy. There is a fledgling chamber of commerce, and two hotels where one can stay, for a dollar a night, in a four-poster bed, with hot water for shaving, but no mirror. There is fresh milk to drink every day, from the small herd of cows that the foreigners keep always nearby, either in local pasturage or aboard specially adapted boats that moor in the River. There is a small chapel that seats a hundred, a dispensary, and a branch of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowl­edge. There is even a new mail service, between the factories in Canton and the city of Macao, collected Wednesdays and Saturdays, five cents a letter and twenty cents a parcel, to replace the old letter boats, whose volatile crews sometimes tossed the mailbags overboard, and left them bobbing in the water until they were rescued (if they had not sunk).3

  The thirteen rows of buildings, known as "hongs," or "factories," rented from the small circle of Chinese merchants licensed by the state to deal with the forei
gners, are spacious and airy. Many of them were destroyed by the great fire of 1822, but they have been well rebuilt, of granite and local stone and brick, two stories high near the waterfront, rising to three stories in the rear, and are better protected from fire than before, with well-designed fire pumps ready in the yards. Arched passageways give access and privacy within each of the thirteen lengthy structures, which are divided into contiguous apartments, storerooms, and offices, and shaded from hot summer sun by long verandas and Venetian blinds; the men sleep well, despite the heat, on clean, hard rattan mats, or mattresses filled with bamboo shavings, unnostalgic for the feather comforters of home.

  Each building is named for the foreign nation that rents most of the space within it. So one finds the Spanish and the Dutch, the Danish and the Swedish hongs, the English, the Austrian Empire's hong, and, most recently, the American. But these national labels are not exclusive, and the small community is interlayered among the thirteen hongs. Some of the buildings have billiard rooms and libraries, spacious terraces jutting out toward the river to catch the evening breeze, and grand dining rooms with gleaming chandeliers and candelabra shining on the silverplate and spotless table settings. Meals can be sumptuous, with solemn Chinese servants in formal hats and robes, silent behind every chair.4 The inventory of one young American's personal possessions, as tabulated by watchful Chinese clerks, shows glimpses of this life: thirty knives and thirty forks, thirty glasses and decanters, one trunk of woolen clothes, shaving kit and mixed colognes, mirror, soap and candles, hat and spyglass, framed pictures, a gun and sword, fifty pounds of cheroots and 542 bottles of "foreign wine."s