God's Chinese Son Read online

  Despite these joys and studies, Hong's father will not let his son forget the world below. Hong must return to earth, his father says, the demons still are strong, and the people there debauched. Without Hong, how will they be transformed? Before he goes back to earth, Hong's father adds, he must change his name. The name of Hong Huoxiu is no longer fitting; it violates taboos. Instead of the Huo, or "fire," in Hong Huoxiu, the father orders him to use the name "completeness," quan. Hong himself can choose any one of three ways to use this name, his father tells him. He can keep the new name secret from the world, and style himself Hong Xiu. He can jettison both his earlier given names, and style himself Hong Quan. Or he can keep the non-tabooed given name, and call himself Hong Xiuquan. To prepare for the return to earth, his father combines Hong's new name with a formal title, reflecting his newfound power and dignity: "Heavenly King, Lord of the Kingly Way, Quan."45 And as another parting gift, the father chants two poems that he has composed for his son, to take with him on his journey back below. Their meaning now seems shrouded in mystery, he says, but one day they will become clear.

  Hong takes the gifts and says farewell to his wife and son, who cannot accompany him on the long journey to earth. They must stay in Heaven with Hong's parents, and Hong's elder brother, wife and children. There will they find comfort and safety till Hong returns from earth in glory. In final benediction, Hong's father reassures his son, "Fear not, and act bravely. In times of trouble, I will be your protector, whether they assail you from the left side or the right. What need you fear?"46

  Hong's earthly family have watched over him day and night as he sleeps and wakes and sleeps again. Now he is deadly quiet; now he shouts out excitedly, "Slash the demons. Slash the demons," pointing to "one here, one there," as they wing their way past him, and crying out that none of them can resist the blows of his sword. Now he leaps from his bed and runs around his room, shouting battle cries and moving his arms as if in combat; now he falls back again, silent and exhausted. Repeatedly, he sings the same two lines from a popular local song: "The victorious swain travels over rivers and seas /He saves his friends and kills his enemies."47 Sometimes he addresses himself as Emperor of China, and is delighted when others do the same. He writes out in red ink the words of his new title, "Heavenly King, Lord of the Kingly Way, Quan," and posts it on his door. For his older sister, Hong Xinying, he writes the four characters of an alternate title he has adopted, "Son of Heaven in the Period of Great Peace." To other visitors he sings aloud what he has learned to be "the sounds of high heaven." He openly contradicts his own father, and denies that he is his father's son. He argues with his older brothers. Father, sister, brothers, visitors, all feel the bite of his tongue, and hear his assertions of his duty to judge the world, to separate out the demons from the virtuous. He remembers and writes down poems that he composed during those sky-war days and nights. One goes:

  My hand grasps the killing power in Heaven and earth;

  To behead the evil ones, spare the just, and ease the people's sorrow.

  My eyes roam north and west, beyond the rivers and mountains,

  My voice booms east and south, to the edge of the sun and moon.48

  Another has these lines:

  With the three-foot blade in my hand I bring peace to the mountains and rivers,

  All peoples living as one, united in kindness.

  Seizing the evil demons I send them back to earth,

  And scoop up the last of the evildoers in a heavenly net.49

  His own closest relatives and the people in Guanlubu village murmur that Hong Xiuquan may be mad. His brothers take turns to see that the door to his room is kept shut, and that he does not escape from the house. Such precautions are essential. Chinese law holds all family members responsi­ble for any acts of violence committed by an insane person. If a madman kills, all his family members will pay the penalty.50

  Yet slowly Hong Xiuquan calms down. Family and friends grow used to his new name. His wife, Lai, bears him a baby girl. He returns to his Confucian texts, and begins to prepare yet again for the examinations. He resumes his teaching duties at a nearby village. The dream is beyond interpretation, and therefore by common consent it can have no meaning.51

  5 THE KEY

  It is in 1843, in the summer, that Hong Xiuquan realizes he has the key in his own hand; it has been there all the time for seven years. Enmeshed as he has been in the rhythms of state-sponsored ceremonial, examinations, and family, his dream has stayed fastened in his mind in all its detail, but still without clear explanation. A friend and distant relative named Li Jingfang, in whose family Hong has been teaching, drops by Hong's house, sees an odd-looking book, and asks for the loan of it, which Hong as casually grants. The book is Liang Afa's set of nine tracts, "Good Words for Exhorting the Age," brought home by Hong in 1836, and since then nei­ther read nor thrown away. Li Jingfang reads the tracts with rapt atten­tion. Returning to Hong's home, he urges that he read it too. Hong does.1 Liang's tracts fit the lock of Hong's mind in many ways, for they focus on the source of evil, and the meaning of the good.2 In their strange complexity, they talk to the world within his head and to the world of war that has been swirling around Canton from 1839 to 1842.

  It has been a strange and episodic war, fought over trade and money and prestige and opium, a war of threats and counterthreats, of bluster and evasion. The world of the foreign factories by the waterfront has been transformed and the British, driven from the city, have seized Hong Kong in recompense. At first in 1839 the Chinese seemed to have the upper hand. Exasperated by the ever-rising shipments of opium, grown in India under British supervision, they made the British give up all their stockpiles of the drug—20,283 chests in all—each chest containing forty balls of opium, each ball composed of three pounds of the refined opium extract, wrapped in heavy coverings of poppy leaves.3 The Chinese forced this surrender by blockading the foreigners in the thirteen factories on the Canton waterfront, cutting off all river contact with the outside world. Chinese troops lined the streets behind the factories, placed guards in the esplanade, and stationed three cordons of boats on the river, all the way from the Creek to the Danish hong. Every Chinese servant and cook, linguist and comprador, coolie and water carrier—some eight hundred men in all—was ordered to leave his job with the foreigners, or be beheaded. A great silence fell over the normally lively area, as the isolated Western men tried to clean their rooms and sweep the floors, fill their own lamps with oil, polish their silverware, wash their plates, and cook in whatever way they could their stockpiled food, their diet determined by their skills: boiled eggs and potatoes, toasted bread, and rice.4 As for the opium, the Chinese officials spent days disposing of it, mixing it in pots with lime and—after first apologizing to the spirits of the waters—flush­ing it out to sea. When all the opium was handed over, the British were allowed to leave Canton, and most other foreigners did the same.

  But British merchants were affronted, London roused. A fleet and troops were sent, Chinese forts and ships destroyed, treaties agreed at gunpoint, only to be broken, the factories reoccupied by British traders and again abandoned in the face of Chinese rage, and fears of massacre. By May of 1841 the shifting tides of war had sent Chinese crowds surging through the abandoned foreign factories, gutting all that lay between Hog Lane and the Creek, smashing or stealing the mirrors, chandeliers, and marble statues, the weather vanes and clocks, and burning what remained.5 Yet at the self-same moment the war, for the first time in China's history, brings British troops to the hills above Canton's walls— not now as isolated strollers or viewers of the fire, but fully armed and uniformed, backed by armored vessels in the river.

  The British fleet—led by the British ironclad steamboat Nemesis—sinks over seventy Chinese junks and fireboats, and their guns raze much of the waterfront that has not already been fired by the Chinese themselves. British and Indian sepoy troops, in a daring amphibious maneuver, land from the river north of Canton, march around the city
, and seize from the rear the four mountain forts that were meant to guard the city from all assaults. In a triumphant gesture of disdain, the British sailors cut the queues of hair off their Chinese captives, and take the clothes of several. Thus bedecked, in Mandarin robes, Chinese hats on heads, and dangling down their backs the severed queues of jet-black hair, they receive the plaudits of their countrymen.6

  As negotiations on the city's fate continue through sweltering days in May, British and Indian troops patrol the area of Sanyuanli, north of their encampment, on the road that leads to Hua county. There are incidents, clashes: troops march across the paddies full of ripening rice; gates are broken, food is stolen, clothes vanish. There is "foraging" for animals without due payment. Chinese women are accosted, raped. Graves are violated in the name of scientific curiosity—to see whether or how the Chinese embalm their dead. The small bound foot of a woman's corpse is taken from her coffin. The villagers of Sanyuanli bang gongs, assemble their irregular militiamen, most armed initially with little more than hoes, though some have spears. Other villagers join them from the northwest, and some of these have simple guns. More Chinese villagers come from the north, ten miles nearer Hua, some of them trained for water combat.

  It is scorching hot, the numbers grow: five thousand, seven thousand, seven thousand five hundred. Combat, when it is joined, is chaos, in a sudden swirling rainstorm that ends all visibility, makes swamps of paths and lakes of paddies, soaks muskets so they will not fire, leaves command­ers helplessly looking for their troops. The British lines hold firm, although some of their men are literally hooked out of the rain-soaked ranks by Chinese wielding weapons like enormous shepherd's crooks attached to bamboo poles, and badly wounded. The sepoys dry their sod­den muskets with the linings of their turbans, or are issued new muskets with percussion caps, less sensitive to moisture, that let the fire resume. The scattered troops are rounded up and reunited: the toll for the British, one dead and fifteen wounded. Deaths to the Chinese, many but unknown.8

  By the end of May 1841, each side feels poised for victory: the British, with their discipline and heavy guns, could blitz or occupy the city; the village militiamen, grown now to almost twenty thousand, from 103 different villages, could overwhelm the British with their numbers and their righteous wrath. Above the heads of both, a deal is struck by diplomatic means: the city will be saved, but pay six million taels in indemnity; the militias will disperse; the British will leave the hills. The prefect of Can­ton, She Baoshun, makes sure the terms are met. Grudgingly, the Chinese irregulars disperse. But, as they see the British also file away, the city spared, the ill-armed villagers claim a total victory.9

  After this settlement, in the examination halls of Canton, the staid envi­ronment is filled for a moment in 1841 with flying ink stones, hurled by the enraged scholars at officials they have come to fear and hate. This too is an aspect of the war, one that begins to divide the Chinese against themselves. For as a result of the fighting the belief is growing that the country is full of traitors, Chinese traitors to their race. New kinds of angers flare as the blame for humiliation and defeat is parceled out among the vanquished. To the examination candidates in Canton, as they shout their anger and hurl their only available projectiles, the carved ink stones, often of great beauty and antiquity, that constitute one of the scholars' "four treasures"—the others being the brushes, brush holders, and the ink itself—the enemy is their chief examiner, the prefect She Baoshun. For in persuading the militiamen at Sanyuanli to disperse, even though he doubt­less also saved the city from destruction, he seems to the educated candi­dates to have gone too far in appeasing the voracious foreigners. When he retreats, mortified, before the barrage, other emboldened students try to smash the sedan chair in which he flees.10

  At other times it is the officials themselves who spur the local Canton hunts for traitors, seeking out those who trade with foreigners, translate or teach Chinese, row or sail their boats, or-—most heinous crime of all— guide the British officers and their vessels through the ill-charted and shifting mud flats of the creeks along the Pearl River. Some of those accused of such collaboration are punished by means of sharpened wooden sticks thrust through their ears, the ends sticking straight up above their heads and topped with tiny flags, as they are hustled through the streets.11 The militiamen of Sanyuanli and elsewhere kill more than a thousand of their own countrymen as they seek out anyone who collaborated with the British; and the Banner troops of the Qing state, the "regular army" that was of little service in the fray, now roam across the countryside accusing of treason those whose property they covet.12

  As the British fleet moves northward, massing by the Yangzi River delta, probing Hangzhou Bay, attacking Shanghai, and finally laying siege to Nanjing, a new element enters the story. For now it is the Manchu officers of the ruling dynasty, fearing subversion from the Chinese in the very cities they seek to defend against the British, who launch pre-emptive strikes against their own people, killing Chinese on vague treason charges just at the news of the imminent arrival of the British forces. British troops see Chinese people fleeing from their "protectors" in the Manchu Banner armies, and if they force an entry find the streets within filled with Chi­nese dead. Not surprisingly, as they so swiftly learned to do in Hong Kong when the British seized it as a spoil of war in 1841, these Chinese survivors seem eager to work with the British and thus fan the very basis of suspi­cion about their loyalties.

  The self-reinforcing cycle of myth and fear increases as members of secret societies, bonded by blood oaths and secret passwords, and pledged to eventual overthrow of the alien Manchus and restoration of the long- defeated house of Ming, also flock to areas where the British have control. Though some are double agents, reporting back their findings to the Qing officials, many use the war and its dislocations to engage in piracy, contin­ued opium running, or other rackets under protection of the Union Jack. In other cities it is the Manchus who destroy their own women and chil­dren first, before taking their own lives by fire or sword or drowning.13

  No Confucian texts, no local histories, no Jade Record, can quite define these strange catastrophes. But in Liang's first tract, near the middle, a new voice calls out to Hong Xiuquan. It is the voice of a foreign sage or scholar named Isaiah, and this is how Liang records Isaiah's words:

  Why should ye be stricken any more? ye will revolt more and more: the whole heart is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither molli­fied with ointment. Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.14

  The fire that Isaiah cites has not only scourged the Canton waterfront but has consumed the Chinese warriors in new and terrifying ways. Some have been blown through the air in balls of fire when the rockets of the British ironclad paddle steamers hit the stores of gunpowder in the war junks' holds, their bodies tumbling back to earth in shattered fragments.15 Wounded Chinese troops have been scorched to death or blown apart as they fall on the gunpowder pouches slung around their waists, ignited by the slow matches for their newly issued matchlocks that they clutch in their inexperienced hands. Others have staggered naked out of their burn­ing clothes as the houses where they were sheltering caught fire or clung to the stern chains or rudders of their burning boats until the ships blew up or the intense heat forced their grip to loosen and they sank beneath the surface of the water.16 Never in the Canton Delta has there been heard a sound like that of February 27, 1841, when the British captured and set fire to the 900-ton ship Chesapeake, just below Whampoa. The Chinese had bought the ship the previous year from the Americans and tried to convert it into a man-of-war, hoisting the red flag of the commanding admiral on its mainmast, decorating the poop and taffrail with colored streamers, and filling it with gunpowder and munitions. When the
flames reached the magazine and the ship exploded, the sound could be heard for thirty miles. The ship split through as though severed by a giant saw, the flaming fragments were hurled high into the heavens, and set fire to houses far away.17

  Once again, speaking through Liang's translation, it is the man Isaiah who seems to have foreseen the nightmare, and to have given it his words:

  And the destruction of the transgressors and of the sinners shall be together, and they that forsake the LORD shall be consumed. For they shall be ashamed of the oaks which ye have desired, and ye shall be confounded for the gardens that ye have chosen. For ye shall be as an oak whose leaf fadeth, and as a garden that hath no water. And the strong shall be as fibers of hemp, and the maker of it as a spark, and they shall both burn together, and none shall quench them.18