God's Chinese Son (19 page)
When Hong gets to Canton in the spring of 1848, he finds that Governor-general Qiying is no longer there, having been summoned to Peking by the emperor for a special audience. Hong visits his own family briefly, but does not linger. Within a month he heads back to Thistle Mountain, bearing the bad news of his mission's failure to Feng. Feng, in the meantime, has powerfully argued his cause and that of the God-worshipers with the local officials in Guiping county, and his arguments (backed by cash gifts to the magistrate from the local God-worshipers) have led to his release. But as the cost of his freedom the local officials of Guiping decide to remove Feng from their jurisdiction. They categorize him as "an unemployed vagrant," and order him to return under escort to Guanlubu, his village of birth and registration. So in the early summer of 1848 Feng and Hong pass, somewhere on the road or river, perhaps only a few feet apart as they head in different directions to find each other.
33
Now it is Feng who is with his wife and sons again after three years away, free to preach in his home. And Hong once again is far from his wife and daughters, and his father, who is ill and old.
In Thistle Mountain, the feuds, the fighting, the trial, Feng's release and Hong's return, all bring new passion to the God-worshipers. Now it is the local mountain dwellers, used to their local shamans' practices, and witnesses in the past to spirit possession among their number, who have the celestial visions.
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It is in the late spring of 1848, while both Hong and Feng are absent from Thistle Mountain, that a Hakka charcoal burner called Yang Xiuqing, drawn to the God-worshipers by his poverty and their message of salvation, becomes the mouthpiece for God the Father, who speaks now through Yang's voice as Yang enters a trance-like state, a voice that Hong accepts as authentically divine on his return to Thistle Mountain. It is in the autumn, when Hong has been back some months, that Xiao Chaogui, a Hakka peasant, also among the poorest of the poor and devoted to the new religion, becomes the vehicle by which Jesus Christ speaks to his younger brother Hong, and to all his other followers on earth. Again, Hong accepts this second intermediary with Heaven. Xiao's trances, in which Jesus speaks through him, can last an hour or more; but others, both men and women, have shorter dreams of Hong's impending glory.
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Jesus comes back to earth many times in 1848, and through the mouth of Xiao brings varied messages to Hong Xiuquan and the God-worshipers. He sings them songs newly composed by God; and patiently teaches God's poems to the congregation, word by word.
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At other times his message is doctrinal, as when he repeats the point that Hong has already mentioned in his own writings, that only their Father has the right to bear the name of Di, "Ruler of All," while both Jesus and Hong Xiuquan must claim no title higher than that of
zhu,
or "lord."
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Jesus tells Hong that the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin, also lives in Heaven, and that though God will not allow her to descend to earth again, because her message can be misunderstood, He knows her heart is good, and permits both Hong and Jesus to call her "sister."
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Jesus tells Hong of all the events in Heaven since Hong left eleven years before. They talk of Hong's young son, conceived and born in Heaven, but still unnamed, who lives in Heaven with his grandmother, the wife of God. They talk of the boy's mother, the First Chief Moon, of how she lives in turn with her divine in-laws, or with Jesus and his wife, and of how she yearns for her husband to come back to her. Once the First Chief Moon herself comes back to earth and chides Hong sadly—in Hakka idioms—for his protracted absence. She talks of the kindness shown to her and her son by Jesus' wife, and of Jesus' five children, three boys, two girls. Jesus' boys at eighteen, fifteen, and thirteen are older than Hong's heavenly son, as is Jesus' older girl, now sixteen years old. But Jesus' younger daughter was born since Hong was last in Heaven, and thus Hong's son has at least one younger playmate.
3
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The air of Thistle Mountain is thick with other holy visits, dreams, and portents. A martial host descends from Heaven and fights the bandits who plague the village of Sigu, home of Hong's friends and loyal supporters. Another time it is angels in yellow robes who descend to earth, and save Hong in the nick of time from devils carrying firearms, which they have aimed at him. At Siwang village, east of Thistle Mountain, it is Hong's celestial wife, the First Chief Moon, helped by her angels, who saves him from a mortal danger.
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While the God-worshipers are at their prayers, kneeling in their mountain churches open to the winds, from time to time, a contemporary records, "one or the other of those present was seized by a sudden fit, so that he fell down to the ground, and his whole body was covered with perspiration. In such a state of ecstasy, moved by the spirit, he uttered words of exhortation, reproof, prophecy."
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Those who travel up to Heaven take the Eastern Road, as Hong did in his dream. They see God in His majesty, still with black dragon robe, high-brimmed hat, and golden beard, as Hong too saw Him.
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They see the chief of the devil demons, square-headed and red-eyed, and learn that he is indeed the same as the demon devil of the Eastern Sea and the devil king on earth they call Yan Luo.
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As God did to Moses on the Mount at Sinai, writing the tablets of the laws "with His own hand," so now "with His own hand" he identifies the demon king to Heaven's travelers.
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And not unlike the way Jacob wrestled with the angel through the night near the brook of Jabbok, so does God allow Xiao, the poor peasant who serves as the vehicle for the voice of Jesus, to wrestle with the generals of the Heavenly Army, using the technique that the mountain Hakkas with their powerful forearms call "forming the iron-hand bridge."
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In all their travails, in all their battles, God and his son are with them, watching and advising.
After the New Year's festivals of 1849, Hong travels home to Guanlubu, and learns that his father has just died, asking to be buried by the God -worshipers rites. By the traditional Confucian rituals of mourning for the death of a parent, there are two essential paths Hong should now follow: for the three years of grief he should not cut his hair, and during the same period he should abstain from sexual intercourse even with his wife. These rules are meant to show the homage and respect one owes to the dead, who brought one into this world and nurtured one for the expanse of time one now returns to them by abstinence and grief. It is a time to tend the corpse and see to the grave's good ordering, to study and reflect. The rule that a man should not trim his hair or shave during the same period has a similar purpose of self-abnegation and respect, but politics have given the regulation a strange new twist. For since their conquest of China in 1644, the Manchus have ordered every Chinese man to follow the Manchu customary practice of shaving the front of the head, and braiding the rest of the hair behind in a long queue. Those failing to do so are branded as rebels and punished with death. But since 1644, in times of mourning, instead of being punished if they do not shave their foreheads and braid their hair, Chinese and Manchus are sternly punished if they do shave, and hence appear to put Manchu practice ahead of ancestral virtue.
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Hong follows one rule, but not the other. He lies with his wife as soon as he returns to Guanlubu, and does not shave his head. In the heat of early summer, when it is clear that his wife is pregnant, he says farewell to her. And, with his hair now thick above his forehead and flowing around his neck and shoulders, he leaves with Feng Yunshan once more for Thistle Mountain.
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By the late summer of 1849, when Hong and Feng are back in Guangxi, there are four distinct centers of the God-wor- shipers, grouped in a rough semicircle to the north and the west of the district city of Guiping. The four regions—measuring from their outer edges—cover an area some sixty miles from east to west, and eighty miles from north to south. One of the centers remains on Thistle Mountain, but now includes the prosperous village of Jintian on the plain at the foot of the mountains. One encircles the area of Sigu village, where Hong long found support from the God-worshiping Huang family. One, more to the northwest, includes a network of mountain villages under the jurisdiction of Xiang township, where Hong and Feng destroyed the image of King Gan. And one newly expanding area, northeast of Thistle Mountain, sprawls through the Penghua Mountain chain, incorporating the little market towns of Penghua and Huazhou.'
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Though the God-worshipers themselves are still seen by their neighbors and by the officials of the Qing state as mainly a religious group, not yet an emergency calling for direct military suppression, the area as a whole has been racked by at least a dozen risings of bandit groups connected to the Heaven-and-Earth Society. China itself has more than enough troubles in other regions, but Guangxi has become a focus for the court's concern, and messages of anxiety and resolve are constantly speeding between the southern officials and their rulers in Peking.
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The decision the same year by the commanding officers of Britain's China fleet—based mainly in Hong Kong—to make a final, all-out assault on the Chinese pirate bases in the South China Sea, brings yet more chaos. As the pirate bases are systematically destroyed, their boats blown up, and their storage bases and safe havens burned, the surviving pirates move upriver to Guangxi from the sea, linking up with those who followed the same route some years before.
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The four God-worshiping areas are separated from each other by intermediate zones of rugged territory that are controlled either by hostile, non-Hakka local inhabitants, by bandits, or by wary local officials. Journeying between the four areas is not easy. Hong Xiuquan, like other leaders of the God-worshipers, travels at night, between eleven in the evening and dawn, in a tight-knit group with covered lanterns, "all bunched together so that no one is out in front, and no one lingers in the rear."
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When one day in early autumn Hong violates these safety procedures, and rides off on horseback before his designated companions have collected together, he is yet again accosted by robbers, and lucky that he survives unharmed. For this impetuosity, he is publicly reprimanded by his elder brother Jesus—speaking through the lips of Xiao Chaogui—who asks how Hong dares to break such a simple order, devised by the Lord for the protection of the true believers. Hong is contrite, and offers up a public apology.
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Despite the risks, the leaders of the God-worshipers are always on the move. For their believers are scattered in isolated villages, and the True Religion blurs constantly with local folk practices, beliefs, and shamanic voices, just as the "converts" themselves are often suspect for their motives, devotion, or sincerity. Hong is aware of the dissensions between local groupings, and one of his tasks is to examine the prophetic utterances they have issued in their trances or their ecstasy, to "judge the spirits according to the truth of the doctrine" and to ascertain if possible which were true and which were false, which indeed "came from God and which from the devil."
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Some believers have undergone apparently miraculous cures, and if these cures come from Yang Xiuqing speaking with the voice of God, or Xiao Chaogui speaking with the voice of Jesus, then surely there is "earnestness and sincerity." But others speak against the word of God and "[lead] many astray," or act "under the influence of a corrupt spirit." In such difficult cases, no one, according to Hong's contemporaries, "was so able as he to exercise authority, and carry into effect a rigid discipline among so many sorts of people."
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In the Taiping's own text that records this era of Hong's work, Jesus declares (through Xiao), "It is because the hearts of the congregations are not totally committed to belief in the Doctrine that I want Hong and you others to go to different areas and dwell there. ... Those who currently believe the True Doctrine are few indeed—they may revere half of it, but they reject the other half. Are you able to win over all their hearts?" And though the leaders duly respond, "We cannot win them over completely," they accept the charge that Jesus gives them.
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Another reason for constantly traveling among the four base areas of the God-worshipers is money, the money for living expenses, for printing tracts, for helping the destitute or the victimized who are beginning to drift to the four areas from the surrounding countryside, for making or buying the simple weapons that are needed for local defense, for establishing emergency grain supplies in the face of the famine conditions endemic to the region, and for buying the freedom of those God-worshipers unfortunate enough to be imprisoned. Local gentry like Wang Zuoxin, angered by the disruptive and destructive effects of the God-worshipers on their communities, and by what they felt were affronts to fundamental Chinese moral values, were able in 1847 and 1848 to have Feng Yunshan imprisoned, and his colleague Lu Liu so mistreated that he died in prison. In the summer of 1849, following another clash and flaring of local angers, Wang Zuoxin is able to have two more God-worshipers confined to jail. One of the captives is the same young man Hong Xiuquan successfully petitioned the magistrate to release five years before, but now angers are deeper and stakes higher, and neither elegant petitions nor the arguments from international treaty law used to free Feng Yunshan are of any use. To raise the money needed for the two men's release, the leaders of the God-worshipers invoke the sufferings of Jesus on the cross, pointing out that though such suffering purified the sufferer, and might have to be endured by all God-worshipers in their quest for salvation, it was still right to evade it for the captured brethren. Xiao Chaogui, speaking again with the voice of Jesus, suggests that all those with stores of rice donate half of them to try and buy the men's release.
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At other times the God-worshipers exhort their congregations with moral arguments, blaming them for weakness of will, stinginess, and for cheating Heaven if they withhold their cash.
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They also urge certain of the wealthiest families among the God-worshipers, like the Shi clan, whose home is near the Huangs' in Sigu village, to give major donations to effect the release of the imprisoned men, telling the potential donors that it is the express will of God that they make these donations. In many of these exhortations the leaders now refer to God by the oddly informal name of the Old One on High; by doing this, the petitioners seem to have been emphasizing that this was all an extended family matter.
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At yet other times, without great subtlety, the appeals for cash donations from the congregations are made in the same breath as decrees ordering savage punishments for those guilty of immorality. Either enough money cannot be raised or the officials cannot be bribed, for the appeals for funds for these particular men's release stop by the end of the month, when the God-worshipers learn that their two imprisoned friends have been beaten or tortured to death. But within a month, two more prominent God- worshipers are arrested at local gentry urging, and the process has to begin all over again.
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This whole grim episode shows that during 1849 the God-worshipers could not yet rely on a strong financial base, and underlines the importance of those wealthy families who had already joined the movement. One of these was the Shi family, Hakkas who provided not only large amounts of money but in the person of one of their young men, Shi Dakai, only nineteen at this time, gave Hong Xiuquan a passionately devoted follower, who was later to become one of his finest generals. The Wei family, from Jintian village, owned large holdings of rice paddy, and also operated a pawnshop or shops; they were apparently drawn to the God- worshipers because despite their wealth they were unable to rise in the local hierarchies, owing to their lowly status as the "runners" or junior lictors in the local government office, and because they were of mixed blood, having at some stage in the past intermarried with local Zhuang tribesmen. There was also the Hu family, who often gave shelter to Hong Xiuquan and had extensive landholdings in both Pingnan and Guiping districts, as well as having held minor military office.
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Yet the God-worshiping leaders, at least through the month of February 1850, did not want such backers' generosity to be widely known; and in that month, when the Hus offered to sell off their land, and to donate the proceeds along with their other property to the God-worshipers, so as to "further the Heavenly Father and Heavenly Elder Brothers' enterprise," they were warmly thanked for their loyalty and generosity but asked to keep the gift "completely secret" for the time being.
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Perhaps the agonizing and ultimately fruitless quest during 1849 for the release of their two imprisoned followers was the decisive factor that drove the God-worshiper leaders into a formal anti-government stance. Ever since his dream of 1837, Hong Xiuquan had been preaching against the "demon devils," even though it was never quite clear who these devils were, whether they were the physical forms of the followers of the devil king Yan Luo himself, or benighted Confucian scholars who closed their eyes to truth, or Taoist and Buddhist priests, or the shamans of local folk cults, or the sinners and idolaters who broke the various versions of Hong's or God's commandments. Sometimes Hong was totally inclusive in his definitions, as in remarks he made at Guanlubu in 1848 or early 1849: "Those who believe not in the true doctrine of God and Jesus, though they be old acquaintances, are still no friends of mine, but they are demons."'^ At other times his definitions edged into broader zones of criticism, closer to the Protestant idea of predestination, as in one of his favorite chants, which he composed during this same period:
Those who truly believe in God are indeed the sons and daughters of God; whatever locality they come from, they have come from Heaven, and no matter where they are going they will ascend to Heaven.
Those who worship the demon devils are truly the pawns and slaves of the demon devils; from the moment of birth they are deluded by devils, and at the day of their death the devils will drag them away.
By the end of 1849 or the beginning of 1850 it is the Manchu conquerors of China, and those officials serving them, who are now often identified specifically as the demons to be exterminated, and the Qing courts where God-worshipers are brought to trial on "trumped-up charges" are now described by Hong as presided over by "demon officials."
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' Part of the change lies in Hong Xiuquan's own mood. At this same time he is reported to have said, "Too much patience and humility do not suit our present times, for therewith it would be impossible to manage this perverted generation."
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Perhaps Hong thinks indeed that the God-worship- ers have shown more than enough patience in the face of local hostility, or the local officials' connivance with that same local hostility.
If the time for "patience and humility" was over, and if many people had become "the pawns and slaves of the demon devils," one could see the Chinese people as the enslaved ones and the Manchus as the demon devils. Such thinking was common in secret-society groupings such as the Heaven-and-Earth or Triad Society, with their mystical evocations of the fourteenth-century founder of the Ming dynasty, and their widely announced hopes of a Ming "restoration" that would overthrow the ruling Qing. Hong claimed not to accept all these myths, though his thoughts followed parallel tracks. He told his followers, "Though I never entered the Triad Society, I have often heard it said that their object is to subvert the Qing and restore the Ming dynasty. Such an expression was very proper in the time of Kangxi [ruled 1661-1722], when this society was at first formed, but now after the lapse of two hundred years, we may still speak of subverting the Qing, but we cannot properly speak of restoring the Ming. At all events, when our native mountains and rivers are recovered, a new dynasty must be established."
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In an eight-line poem written in the year 1850, Hong Xiuquan invokes images from the great founders of the Han and Ming dynasties to underline his political mood of excitement and belatedness: Both these earlier dynastic founders were men from poor fanning families who had risen by courage and tenacity to overthrow tyrannical rulers and found new dynasties that endured for centuries. Both were famous for fighting against alien conquerors or invaders. According to popular stories Liu Bang, while engaged in the bitter military campaigns that led ultimately to his establishment of the Han dynasty in 202
b.c.,
had been so exhilarated by the winds that sent clouds scudding above his head, likening their rapid motion to his own troops, and seeing an omen that his armies would carry all before them, that he laid out ritual wine on an extemporized altar to salute the wind's passing. While Zhu Yuanzhang, who was forty years old by the time he overcame his numerous rivals and founded the Ming in 1368, liked to compare himself to the autumn-blooming chrysanthemum, which comes into its splendor only when the other apparently more vivid flowers have flourished and faded. As Hong wrote: