God's Chinese Son (2 page)
Acknowledgments
In my struggle to understand the multileveled worlds of Hong Xiuquan,
I have been helped by many friends and scholars. They need feel no
responsibility for the way this book is shaped, nor for the errors of fact or
fancy that it may contain, but I trust they will accept my gratitude. During
two visits I made to Beijing in 1991 and 1993, and subsequently on his
own visits to the United States, Wang Qingcheng was a particularly generous guide, sharing his own voluminous Taiping works, answering my
endless questions, and introducing me to his former dissertation student
Xia Chuntao, whose own knowledge and generosity thenceforth were
equally boundless. It was thanks to Wang Qingcheng also that my wife,
Chin Annping, and I were able to meet several of her grandfather Chin
Yu-fu's former colleagues and students, giving us a sense of the powerful
impressions that great scholar left behind him. Wang also introduced me
to another leading Taiping scholar, Zhong Wendian, who looked after
me in Guilin, and taught me much of the Hakka point of view. It was
Zhong Wendian who in turn eased my route toward Guiping, and introduced me to my Jintian guide Huang Weilin. And it was thanks to Huang
that for the first (and last) time I was able to sample the odorous Guiping
lizard wine, and in his company in the mud and sultry heat of a Guangxi
summer day that I saw the ribbon waterfalls flickering through the dense
foliage in the foothills of Thistle Mountain. In Nanjing, it was Mao Jiaqi
and Zhu Qingbao who served as my guiding spirits as I searched in the
sprawling, smog-filled, broiling Yangzi city for echoes of the vanished
New Jerusalem. And as if to round off all those quests, it was Willie Ruff
in his flame-red Porsche who blared me into Shelbyville, Tennessee, on
another summer's day, to show me where the Baptist preacher Issachar
Jacox Roberts stretched his spiritual muscles in the 1830s, before he heeded
the call to China, and received his chance to teach the Bible to the future
Taiping Heavenly King.
My special thanks also to Judy Chiu-ti Liu, whose combination of
knowledge in Chinese Christian sources and classical Chinese made her
an invaluable guide both to the newly discovered Taiping prophetic books
and to the tracts of the early Protestant convert Liang Afa; to Laura
McDaniel, for exploring the Baptist archives in search of Roberts, and the
National Archives in search of renegades and diplomats; and to Min Ye,
Richard Menard, Hong Xiang and her husband, Che Wei, Liang Kan,
Wen-wen Liu, Yar and Mei Woo, Nicholas Spence, and others who
helped with leads and translation. The staffs of many institutions and
libraries were constantly helpful, not only in the various Yale collections,
but in Harvard, New York, and Washington, D.C., and overseas, especially at the Oriental and India Office collections of the British Library in
London (where Frances Wood, Linda Raymond, and Graham Hutt all
went out of their way to help), at the British Library newspaper depository
in Colindale, at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London, at the Public Record Office in Kew Gardens, and in the
Department of Prints and Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
In Taiwan, I benefited from exploring holdings at the Academia Simca
and at the Palace Museum, and received much help from Chuang Chi-fa,
Ch'en Kuo-tung, and Wang Ai-ling. At various lectures too, in Academia
Sinica as at Bryn Mawr, Harvard, Washington University in St. Louis,
and McGill, scholarly questions or follow-up correspondence gave me new
ideas or corrected old errors.
Among experts on the Taiping period or religious fundamentalism who
answered my letters of inquiry or shared their own riches of information
were Stephen Averill, Richard Bohr, Ralph Covell, Joseph Davis, William
Doezema, Linda Gerstein, Norman Girardot, Steven Leibo, Jessie Lutz,
Susan Naquin, Eileen Scully, Audrey Spiro, J. Barton Starr, Barendter
Haar, and Yu Chun-fang. In Melbourne, Jack Gregory shared his
thoughts and also gave me a precious copy of the invaluable book he and
Prescott Clarke compiled on Western reports on the Taiping; in London,
R. G. Tiedemann shared information from his ever-growing and long-
awaited bibliography of Western-language materials on the Taiping; and
on various occasions Rudolf Wagner shared his great knowledge of esoteric sources and unexplored archival treasures (which were sometimes in
one's own backyard).
Some of the research, and much of the traveling and thinking that led
at last to this book, were conducted while I was on a MacArthur fellowship. The parts that I wrote then I have now abandoned, but false starts
are part of most absorbing ventures, and I am grateful to that free-fall
fellowship for making such a period of experimentation possible. The
chaos of my longhand drafts was reduced to order by the calm intelligence
of my typist Peggy Ryan. Betsy McCaulley kept the world at bay when it
had to be so. At Norton, both Donald Lamm and Steven Forman encouraged this project from its inception, and managed to keep me hard at
work by the level of their excitement rather than by invocation of deadlines. And Chin Annping, through her love, energy, and unflagging common sense, ensured that I could be totally absorbed by Hong Xiuquan but
not ensnared.
The story of Hong Xiuquan and his Taiping Heavenly Kingdom is as
strange as any to be found in Chinese history. Born early in the nineteenth
century to a South China farming family of modest means, and for a time
employed as a village schoolteacher, Hong soon found himself caught up
in the turbulent crosscurrents of Western ideas that were being introduced
to China during his youth. Of these, the most important to his fate were
certain strands of Christian doctrine that had been translated into Chinese—along with the Bible
—
by a dedicated group of Protestant missionaries and their local converts. Some intersection of Hong's own mind and
the pulse of the times led him to a literal understanding of elements of
this newly encountered religion, so that the Christian texts he read convinced him that he was the younger brother of Jesus, imbued by his Father
God with a special destiny to rid China of the conquering Manchu demon
race, and to lead his chosen people to their own Earthly Paradise.
Borne aloft on the wings of such millenarian belief, Hong began late in
the 1840s to assemble an army of the "God-worshiping" faithful, who by
1850 had coalesced into the Taiping Heavenly Army. It was at the head
of this army that Hong fought his destructive yet triumphant way through
southern and central China, until in 1853 his combined forces seized the
mighty Yangzi River city of Nanjing. Here, in a community that was at
once scriptural, imagined, and rooted in the soil, they created their Taiping New Jerusalem, which remained their base for eleven years until in
1864
—
after twenty million people or more in the regions under their sway
had lost their lives in battle or from starvation
—
Hong and the remnants
of his army perished in their turn from famine, fire, and sword.
1
The roots of the apocalyptic visions that led Hong and his followers to
this passionate catastrophe go back to the second millennium
b.c
. Before
their emergence in that time period a different pattern of belief had prevailed in many cultures—most prominently the Egyptian, the Mesopota
n
ian, and the Indo-Iranian. According to this prior understanding, the
universe displayed a delicate but sustainable balance between the forces of
order and prosperity on the one hand and the forces of darkness, chaos,
and destruction on the other. In the words of
The Prophecies of Nefertiti,
the fluctuations of the river Nile were themselves proof of such a continuing pattern:
Dry is the River of Egypt,
One crosses the water on foot;
One seeks water for ships to sail on,
Its course having turned to shoreland.
Shoreland will turn into water,
Watercourse back into shoreland.
2
In those days, death was seen as a silence and a perpetual waiting,
without hope of an awakening. Though there might be various forms of
solace brought by burial with precious possessions, and from the attention
of those who survived one, there was no way back to life. In the words of
the Sumerian
Epic of Gilgamesh,
death took one to the terminus:
To the house from which he who enters never goes forth;
To the road whose path does not lead back;
To the house in which he who enters is bereft of light.
3
But starting perhaps as early as 1500
b.c
. the Persian seer known as
Zoroaster or Zarathustra gave rise to a pattern of belief we have come to
call millenarian, in that it promised the possibility of a final world in
which there would be "cosmos without chaos," a world of "making wonderful," without imperfections, an eternal peace beyond history, a changeless realm ruled by an unchallenged god.
4
Resonant and immensely
powerful, these beliefs entered the thinking of many peoples, not least
those of Syro-Palestine, through whom they inspired the biblical prophetic
visions of Jeremiah, Daniel, and Ezekiel, and through them came down
to Jesus of Nazareth and his later follower the author of the Book of
Revelation. These teachers and prophets foresaw that before this new
world was attained there would be a final, apocalyptic battle between the
two forces, a battle in which, after much agony, the good would triumph
and the evil be driven from the earth.
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.