When Hong gets back home the first thing he asks everyone is “Where is Feng Yunshan?” And they all say, “We thought he was with you.” There has been a muddle, one which can be explained if not condoned. In Guiping township, when Hong went to the house of pond and irrigation supervisor Zhang to ask him where Feng was, Zhang replied that Feng and one of Zhang’s nephews had announced they were returning to Canton and Guanlubu. Without checking further, Hong took the story at face value, and returned, to be scolded by Feng’s family for abandoning the son he had first converted and then persuaded to accompany him on his far-flung travels.1
There is little that Hong Xiuquan can do about it. He has neither the funds nor perhaps the energy or will to make the trip all the way back to Guangxi again. Besides, local village leaders in Guanlubu once more offer him back his old teaching job. He accepts, and supports his family by his teaching while he continues to develop the range of religious tracts that he first began in Sigu village with the Huangs of Guangxi.2
In his absence, it is Feng Yunshan who makes the moves that will most deeply color his and Hong’s own future lives. Feng was in fact in Guiping township all the time that Hong Xiuquan was there asking for him in November 1844, but staying with another member of the Zhang family, Zhang Yongxiu. A month or so after Hong left, Feng and Zhang decide to leave Guiping but not to return east, down the river, to Canton. Instead, they move due north, to the lower foothills of the mountain ranges that dominate this part of northern Guangxi province. First they stay in the village of Gulin, where the Zhangs have property. Early in 1845 they push northwest, along the valleys of the rivers that flow down there from the Thistle Mountain region, to a deeply secluded village where the Zhangs also have some land.3
All this time, Feng makes no attempt—perhaps he has no opportunity—to communicate with his family or with Hong Xiuquan back in Guanlubu. Instead, he preaches constantly the message of redemption that he has learned from Hong, and describes Hong’s dream in ever-growing detail, as he seeks to spread Hong’s personal encounters with his older brother Jesus, and with their Father, the One True God. As Feng makes fresh converts, and baptizes them in the way that he has also learned from Hong, the nucleus of a religious group is formed. He christens it the “Bai Shangdi Hui,” “God-worshiping Society.” A local family, the Zengs, come to believe his message with exemplary fervor. In 1846 Feng moves into the Zeng’s home, even farther north, in the heart of the Thistle Mountain area. Feng stays there into 1847.4
What is going on? In moving ever deeper into the mountains, Feng is moving ever farther away from the state, from the centers of Confucian education and influence, from the cosmopolitan urban markets, from the richest farmland and the powerfully connected landowners, and from the descendants of the Chinese families who first opened up the area and now call themselves the “original inhabitants.” Like Hong, Feng is a Hakka, and he mingles easily with the other Hakkas in the hills and mountains, and even with the mountain tribesmen among whom they dwell. Their beliefs may be “idolatrous,” but they are shifting, flexible. Their songs, their stories, their mountain love games, like those of the couple in the Six Caverns, may cry out for censure and reform; but many of these people are, if not literally the dispossessed, those exercising simple crafts or performing backbreaking tasks on the very edge of subsistence, just like those to whom Jesus seemed to be talking in his sermon on the mountaintop, in the words so faithfully transcribed by Liang Afa.
Among these earliest God-worshipers are miners who work either in the silver lodes that can still be found in Thistle Mountain, or in the coal mines that dot the region; there are carpenters, blacksmiths, and rice flour grinders, itinerant barbers and fortune-tellers, sellers of medicines, salt, opium, or bean curd, boatmen, fuel gatherers, charcoal burners, herdsmen, peddlers, as well as those casual laborers who get by from day to day as best they can.5 “My family was destitute and had not enough to eat,” one early God-worshiper later said of his upbringing in this region. “We lived by tilling the land, cultivating mountain slopes and hiring out as laborers, keeping to our station and accepting our poverty. At the age of eight, nine and ten I studied with my uncle, but my family was poor and I could not study longer. But I worked as a laborer in many schools and knew them well.” In such an existence, as the same man noted, “it was difficult to make ends meet each day; to get enough a month was even more difficult.”6 For this part of Guangxi was by reputation poor, and suffered extra blows from droughts at this same period, which brought famine conditions to many areas, leading some miners—desperate to appease their hunger by any means—to eat their own coal.7
Banditry made the hard life worse. Such areas as Thistle Mountain in Guangxi—Hua county, when Hong’s family first moved there in the seventeenth century, had been similar—were natural shelters for those outside the law, providing safe havens from which they could descend to rob the richer farmers or townsmen in the valleys below, before returning to their mountain fastnesses if the state responded by sending troops against them. But at the time when Hong first preaches in Sigu village, and Feng continues with his work in Thistle Mountain, the problems of lawlessness have been compounded by a new influx of bandits into the rivers and valleys of southern and eastern Guangxi.
Strangely, it is the British who largely lie behind this latest scourge. Having fought their brief but bitter war against the Chinese government to end the restrictive Canton system, open five new treaty ports, and gain independence for their missionaries to establish churches and spread the word of God, they now proceed to use the power of their steamships and their disciplined armored fleets to start ridding the South China Sea of the pirates who have preyed there for generations.8 Since 1805 when seven of the most powerful pirate leaders met to form a federation, the pirates have carved up the water world of the South China coast between themselves, with their own secret registration systems, signals, rules of conduct, and zones of operation. Within the pirates’ federation, the leaders strengthen their base of operations by marrying off their sisters, daughters, or captured women to other pirates, or create “fictive lineages” through adoptions that bond potential leaders to their own ranks through “family loyalties.” Bonds are forged, too, by the male leaders’ homosexual relationships with certain captives, who if the liaison blossoms might be promoted to their own commands.9
For many years the pirate confederation was led and held together by a woman, Shi Yang, a former prostitute from near Canton who became wife of one of the main pirate leaders, bore him two sons, and after her husband’s death married her former husband’s male lover, bearing a child to him also. Though she more or less retired from the pirates’ world after her second husband’s death in 1843, aged sixty-eight, she is still living as a wealthy widow near Canton, and runs a successful gambling house inside the city.10
Hong Kong, expanding rapidly as the base of British power, is after 1842 the center of this endeavor to clear the way for British trade, whether that trade be legal, in tea and silk, or illegal, in the ever-expanding sales of opium. Working sometimes independently, sometimes in uneasy conjunction with the Chinese authorities in Canton, the British seek to utilize the anti-piracy provisions of the law of the sea, and establish a pirate-free cordon around Hong Kong itself. Pirates caught within three miles of Hong Kong are tried in the British colonial court, and sentenced to death or transportation. Those caught outside those limits are either tried by the British or handed over to the Chinese for punishment.11 The appointment of a new assistant superintendent of the Hong Kong police in 1843, an Englishman who has served for years as a Chinese interpreter, brings a whole new range of British options, for he knows how to use local informers skillfully, and questions captured crewmen on the junks that cruise the Hong Kong waters for news of the pirates’ movements. The colonial government also institutes new registration laws for Chinese residing in Hong Kong, as well as for the crews and their womenfolk on all the lighters and ferryboats that cruise the harbor, and orders registry numbers clearly painted on their craft. With dubious justification under international law, the British authorities assume sweeping powers to enter any house or boat within the colony or nearby waters if it is “wholly or partly inhabited or manned by Chinese.”12
But as the British slowly begin to drive the pirates from the seas, the pirates take shelter inland along China’s rivers, especially the West River, which leads from Canton city to the heart of Guangxi province. Here, by the provisions of the treaties, the British cannot follow them. Nor can the scattered groups of ill-trained and ill-equipped river police of the Qing or provincial governments do anything to check them. There are only four largish government patrol boats, each carrying fourteen troops and sailors, for all the eastern Guangxi rivers, backed by eighteen other small boats, each with two sailors and two soldiers.13
Such puny forces can do nothing against well-armed, experienced seafarers, and they are frightened, too. The pirates are famous for their relentless cruelty to captured troops, for mutilating ransom victims in their friends’ presence to pressure their families into redeeming them, for seizing the bones from lineage burial grounds and holding the bones until the clan buys them back, and for slicing off the ears or setting afire the Qing dynasty patrol officers who fall into their hands.14 If cornered, the pirates have proved that their ferocity is only deepened. They have been known to grab a lighted fuse and race to the gunpowder magazines of their vessels if boarded by patrols or British sailors, blowing themselves and their assailants to eternity rather than face capture. And if, driven from their boats and floating in the sea after a fierce engagement, they find a Qing or foreign sailor in the water, they will smash their skulls against their attackers’ in a final attempt to kill them, or else lock their legs around them in a fierce embrace, so that both sink together thus entwined, to die upon the ocean floor.15
Hong Kong provides a haven of sorts, and source of fresh supplies and arms for such men, despite the British efforts to suppress them. Many pirates, disguised as ordinary merchants and fishermen, use the well-equipped Hong Kong docks to refurbish their vessels. Men like Chui-a-poo, working as a barber in Hong Kong, and used on occasion as a special agent by the British in their anti-pirate ventures, obtains from the British authorities a license to make gunpowder, which he then sells secretly to his pirate contacts.16 Among Chui-a-poo’s confederates are men like the Muslim soldier and deserter Yow-a-he, a half-breed born in Malaya to a Chinese migrant and a Malay mother, recruited and trained by the Ceylon Rifles, who deserts his regiment in Hong Kong, goes into hiding in a village, and sells his expertise and the names of his contacts along with the rifle issued to him in the name of her Britannic Majesty, Queen Victoria.17 In Macao, mixed marriages or liaisons between the Portuguese and the Chinese are common, and their offspring can swell the pirates’ ranks, none better known than “Big-head” Yang, born of a Chinese father and Western mother, whose forces later move inland and terrorize the region near Guiping.18
Even more complex are the dealings of the Chinese woman called Akeu, who not only conducts a successful trade in sugar, cooking oil, and cotton on ships she rents or buys outright from Chinese and from Western brokers, but also sells both opium and gunpowder to many of the major pirate gangs, commodities she obtains in volume from her lover Captain J. B. Endicott, owner of the United States opium-receiving ship the Ruparell.19 In the 1840s, as she raises her and Endicott’s children in a house she rents in Macao for $150 a year from a Portuguese landlord, she buys six-pounder guns from British master mariners on credit (at $130 for a pair), and obtains sea-spoiled opium at a discount from shipwrecked vessels. Akeu speaks some English, and has among her treasures a telescope by Cox of London, a silver watch by Guinaud Brenet, two sets of calibrated money-weighing scales, and a single-barreled English fowling piece.20 Confronted by a British patrol in Hong Kong harbor, and threatened with arrest for smuggling and abetting piracy, she jumps from the vessel to a waiting sampan and is poled to safety. But if a Chinese tries to double-cross her—as one does, by seizing two vessels of her fleet—she blackmails him with threats of vengeance from her “foreign friends” until he makes good her loss.21
The Anglo-Chinese Nanjing treaty settlement of 1842 has left the status of the opium trade unresolved. Allegedly illegal still, the sales of the drug expand, and move along the waterways beyond Canton. Probably by the time of Hong’s first preaching in Guangxi in 1844, and certainly by the time that Feng has reached the heart of the Thistle Mountain region in 1846, the first of the former pirate groups, now river bandits, are entering the region around Guiping, as “protectors” of the opium runners. This area of the country is new to most of them, and so they use local bandits from the hills, or local villagers bought or coerced into service, to be their guides.22
Guiping township is a natural center of such activity, for it is situated at a junction of two rivers, the Yu and the Qian, which flow in turn into the larger river Xun, the one that Hong, like thousands of other passengers each year, traveled along to go back home. Upstream from Guiping there are rocks and rapids and a maze of smaller tributaries. Downstream, prosperous commerce, and good passage for the larger vessels. The constant loading and unloading of the vessels makes it a natural focus for bandits’ attention, and the scores of little islands and inlets along the main stream’s course provide natural hideaways and shelters for water-borne plunderers. Shrewdly aware of the amounts of money to be made from drugs and ransoms and the protection rackets, Guangxi men and women provide food and shelter to the river bandits. By the middle 1840s some of these “Rice Hosts,” as they call themselves, have formed joint stock companies to invest in the rackets, drawing back a percentage of the profits in return.23
Many of the river bandits, too, were members of secret societies or brotherhoods during their seafaring days, and they bring their old allegiances with them to their new river domains. Strongest of the groups—really a loose confederation—are the so-called Triads, or Heaven-and-Earth Society. The initial formation of this brotherhood dated to the 1760s, when a group of restless, disaffected men—among them itinerant monks, teachers of Chinese boxing techniques, gamblers, candy makers, traveling doctors—who grew up in the southeastern provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, bonded together. They signed a blood covenant, adopted one of their number as their “teacher,” arranged themselves in a numerological hierarchy of “brothers,” and drank together a mixture of wine and the ash from burning incense to “unify their hearts.” Their plans were fluid, but included the recruitment of new members by the founding group, and the robbery of wealthy homes, storehouses, and county treasuries so as to amass the funds to “commence their great undertaking.”24
The spread of the Heaven-and-Earth Society was hard for the Qing state to stop with force because it was not simply either a rebellious or a religious grouping. It was, much more, a broad-based “brotherhood” that promised local people protection and support in harsh and troubled times. As one arrested member explained to the authorities:
The name Tiandihui [Heaven-and-Earth Society] comes from the fact that Heaven and Earth are the source of being for mankind. The only meaning is respect for Heaven and Earth. Originally, the reason for people’s willingness to enter the society was that if you had a wedding or funeral, you could get financial help from the other society members; if you came to blows with someone, there were people who would help you. If you encountered robbers, as soon as they heard the secret code of their own society, they would then bother you no further; if you were to transmit the sect to other people, you would also receive their payments of “gratitude.” Therefore, those who want to enter the society are many in number.25
Such mutual aid and “protective” activities slid easily into “protection rackets,” as the testimony of a local man named Xu in Guangdong province clearly showed. His business was peddling brewer’s yeast, which he bought from a store owner called Lai in Fujian, and carried back for resale in his hometown. Robbed one day by five men of all the silver he possessed, Xu hurried in desperation to Lai’s shop. Lai’s response was direct: “If you join the Tiandihui you can avoid being robbed on the road in the future, and I can also get back the silver that was robbed from you.” Xu agreed to be initiated into the Heaven-and-Earth Society, his money was soon returned, and most importantly he was told what to do when he traveled the region in the future. If approached by robbers again, he should at once hold up his thumb—code signal for the word for “heaven.” The robbers would respond by raising their little finger, to signify “earth,” and he would pass on his way, unmolested.26
Such quietly effective and inconspicuous identification signs were common throughout southeast China, though other variants were also used. Society brothers in teahouses would hold three fingers together when drinking tea or smoking their tobacco pipes. Or they would leave the second button of their outer garments unfastened, or coil their queues of hair up on their heads with the end sticking up through the center of the coil.27 They also used a choice of standard identifying phrases, unobtrusive to the uninitiated but immediately recognizable to brotherhood members: “We never met before, but from today we are mutually acquainted.” If asked, by robbers or strangers, where they were going, they were to say, “I’ve come from the east and am going to the west,” but if asked whence they came, then they were to say, “I have passed under the bridge,” in reference to their passage under the line of knives or swords held over their bodies as they passed through their initiations.28 Shared by members in all the southern provinces was a rhyming jingle they were also told at their initiations, so that they would never forget it: “Kaikou buliben / chushou bulisan”—“When speaking, never leave out the basic [word]; when extending your hand, never forget the three [fingers together].”29
The “basic word” they had never to forget was “Hong,” meaning vast or flood. This was the same character used as the family name of Hong Xiuquan, and though Hong’s family had used the name long before there was a Heaven-and-Earth Society, for the tens of thousands of initiated brotherhood members the character had a special aura as an invocation. This aura grew in power as the brotherhood expanded in extent and influence between the 1760s and the 1840s, and created and refined its own foundation myths; that same character “Hong” had in fact been one of the many names or pseudonyms of the brotherhood’s founder in the 1760s. It was also the first character of the imperial reign name of the founder of the Ming dynasty in 1368, Hong-wu, a symbol of great force and power that the brothers invoked as they spread their goal of “restoring the Ming by overthrowing the Qing” and created a fictional and patriotic lineage for their own organization that ran back into the seventeenth-century period of the Qing conquest of the Ming. Besides that, the character appeared in earlier Chinese Buddhist and messianic texts foretelling apocalyptic disasters, where it was often linked to a counter-vision of an age of “great equity” or “great peace”—Taiping.30
But never forgetting the “basic word” was not to mean that one should utter it out loud: rather the brotherhood members broke the character “Hong” into component parts, each of which could be represented by a Chinese number. Thus since “Hong” had three dots on the left-hand side, a two-dot form similar to the Chinese number “8” at its base, the form for “one” at its center, and a shorthand form of “20” at the top, brotherhood members would use the phrase “3–8–21” when speaking or introducing each other, or could combine the three dots and the two dots into the word “five” and identify themselves by saying “five and twenty-one.”31
By the time that Hong Xiuquan and Feng Yunshan are preaching in Guangxi, the Heaven-and-Earth Society has spread there both among the Hakkas and the original inhabitants. Just as the society brothers once did in the Canton delta region, they swell their numbers in Guangxi by forcing local farmers—with threats, or murders of those who show reluctance—to join them, and few dare refuse.32 Through their own contacts in Hong Kong and elsewhere, they too have access to Western weapons, which they ship inland by boat. It was a head of the local Heaven-and-Earth Society in Hong Kong, for instance, who bought the rifle off the deserter from the Ceylon Rifles, and other brothers used a house owned by a society member next to the schoolhouse outside the east gate of Canton city as the base for their communications with dealers in Hong Kong.33 On both the main rivers of Guangxi, and the smaller tributaries, they often set up “toll stations” to take their dues from those moving river goods and passengers. Others shift their major gambling operations, once flourishing in the area around Canton, to the towns around Guiping, openly flaunting their control.34 Perhaps it is the brazenness of this conduct that prompts Hong Xiuquan to list gambling as the sixth of his commandments, and to link it to both wine and opium, and Feng to find a ready audience when he repeats the same message.
For those Chinese who bitterly resent the river bandits’ power and choose not to join them, one alternative is to form their own militia groups, as local communities have for centuries past, not only in such famous gatherings as the righteous hosts of gentry and farmers assembled against the British troops on the hills above Canton at Sanyuanli, but in countless other regions and communities as well. By 1846 such militias are growing numerous, controlled by Chinese landlords, recruited at the village level from local residents paid in grain, often with village tax money, some of which was also paid by Hakkas.35
The migration of Hakka people to the Guiping region from the area north and east of Canton city has been a steady one for fifty years or more, long antedating the problems with the displaced pirates. But the movement continues as the social order cracks apart, so that in some areas, especially in the hills, the Hakkas now outnumber the original inhabitants. Since these Hakkas are often members of the Heaven-and-Earth Society, feuds become a feature of eastern Guangxi life in the 1840s, as the various groups clash over areas of residence and land use rights. “Revenge against those who speak the Hakka tongue” becomes a popular slogan among the local Chinese families.36 Hakka farmers—both men and women—in their hillside plots take weapons to their work, and rally in groups a hundred strong with hoes or spears if the alarm is given. The local tribal leaders, dispossessed by both groups, and themselves often corrupt or heavily in debt, watch from the sidelines but take no action.37
For beleaguered Hakkas in this tense environment, Hong’s message of salvation has a special resonance, and Feng Yunshan’s Society of God-Worshipers draws eager converts not only for its religious message but because its numbers and organization give promise of solidarity against threatening forces all around.38 As a poverty-stricken God-worshiper describes this chaotic process of divided and uncertain loyalties: “Bandit raids continued year after year, with unending robbing of pawnshops and attacks on towns. The country people were used to seeing [armed] bands and ceased to be afraid; so when they saw the troops of the God-worshippers arrive . . . they did not flee elsewhere. Because of this, they were oppressed by the militia and therefore joined us in bewilderment.”39
If the Hakkas of the Guiping region begin to flock in growing numbers to Feng’s God-Worshipers, it may also be because the ground for Christian faith there has been prepared by Karl Gutzlaff, the German missionary who cruised the Chinese coast in 1836, handing out his tracts with Edwin Stevens. Since that time, Gutzlaff has not only been developing a new technique for spreading his Redeemer’s words; he has also been serving as the interpreter and Chinese-language secretary to the newly appointed British superintendent of trade, and so is in an excellent position to know the state of anti-pirate campaigns and the social conditions of the Chinese countryside.40
Gutzlaff, unlike the more cautious missionaries in China, continues to think that one should do everything possible to understand the Chinese, in order to convert them: to “learn from their own mouth their prejudices, witness their vices, and hear their defence, in order to meet them effectually. . . . In style we ought to conform entirely to the Chinese taste.”41 Gutzlaff also believes that “the converts ought themselves to contribute towards the advancement of the blessed work, and the congregations formed become missionary societies to all around them,” so he creates in 1844 an organization of Chinese to work with him to achieve their common Christian goals, the “Chinese Union.” Claiming 37 members in that first year of operation, by late 1845 he reports the membership has jumped to 210. The following year, as numbers continue to rise, subsidiary posts of the union are formed in Guangxi province, among them one in Guiping county itself, whither Chinese preachers from the union travel in some numbers to spread the word, and report that “lots of people” in Guangxi are becoming “worshippers of Yesu” (that is, of Jesus), among them even converted pirates.42
Gutzlaff himself, as a member of the “Moravian Brethren” of Christians, has a profoundly open view of missionary endeavor. He believes that the Chinese Union, even if composed of largely untrained Chinese converts, can still spread the ideas of a shared spiritual brotherhood and the values of communal life, and that the central goal of conversion to Christ far outweighs any scruples about the specificities of particular denominations or churches, or whether the Chinese Christians still practice ancestor worship or make offerings to God the Father.43
Already in the 1830s, before the Opium War began, Gutzlaff had been publishing pamphlets in Chinese on religious, educational, and scientific subjects, and circulating them both in Canton city and along the coasts as he explored them on his illegal journeys. In the 1840s, as the Chinese Union grows and spreads, he immeasurably increases this production, and uses the considerable cash contributions that flow in to him from European supporters of his missionary endeavors to pay his union members to spread the tracts to inland China, especially Guangxi. These tracts are far smaller and hence easier to carry and distribute than the bulkier version of Liang Afa, even though Liang’s nine-chapter text was not always circulated as one volume, but sometimes as four or five bound clusters of two or three chapters, or even as nine separate stitched volumes of single chapters, which would have made them lighter but even harder to follow.44
Each of the more than fifty tracts that Gutzlaff or his Chinese Union members write or circulate in the 1840s has a simple theme. Some cite passages from the New Testament and elaborate briefly on them: “Blessed are the Poor in Spirit,” “Blessed are those who suffer for Righteousness’ sake,” “They that are in the flesh cannot please God,” “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself.” Some are on specific elements within the Christian faith: on repentance, prayer, Jesus’ love, the resurrection, everlasting life, God’s forgiveness of our sins. Some deal with specific verses or chapters from the Bible, such as Genesis, chapter 3, on the fall and expulsion of Adam and Eve, or the First Epistle of John, chapter 1, on the light and joy brought by Jesus to our lives:
That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ. And these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full. This then is the message which we have heard of Him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:3–5)
Other passages are chosen by Gutzlaff with special artfulness and pertinence, such as the opening of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, with its message of travel and expansion of the faith: “I am debtor both to the Greeks, and to the Barbarians; both to the wise, and to the unwise. So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you that are in Rome also.”45
While Feng Yunshan moves slowly deeper into the mountains of Guangxi, Hong resumes his life at Guanlubu. Tired of wandering, Hong earns his keep by teaching once again, and continues to work on his own tracts, two of which he finishes in 1845 or 1846. In the first, Hong draws on Chinese classical writings such as the Book of Rituals and the Book of Changes to explore how China once shared a vision with the rest of the world that was both compassionate and without local hostilities and divisions. In the time of China’s early sage rulers, “those who had and those who had not were mutually compassionate.” No one needed to bar their doors, and the world maintained a natural virtue as “men and women walked on different paths.” Human love for others extended far beyond the confines of the family: all the young were given the resources they needed to grow, all able-bodied adults received employment, all those disabled by disease were nourished, all the aged were cared for until their deaths.46
One of the human tragedies that broke this harmony was the spread of localism and special interests. Hong Xiuquan uses two lines from the thirteenth hexagram of the Book of Changes, “Human Fellowship,” to illustrate this point concisely: “Fellowship with people in the open, success. Fellowship with people in the clan, humiliation.”47 The language in which Hong expands on this idea seems full of his experiences both with his own family and community in Guanlubu and with the problems of the Huangs and Zhangs in Sigu village and Guiping on his Guangxi visit. Our lives and ways have become “intolerant and shallow,” writes Hong, and we have come to be ruled by selfishness:
Hence, there are cases where this country resents that country, and that country resents this country. Worse than that, there are cases within one country when this province, this prefecture, or this district resents that province, that prefecture, or that district; and that province, that prefecture, or that district resents this province, this prefecture, or this district. And beyond that again, there are even cases within one province, prefecture, or district where this village, this hamlet, or this clan resents that village, that hamlet, or that clan; and that village, that hamlet, or that clan resents this village, this hamlet, or this clan. The ways of the world and the minds of men having come to this, how can they do otherwise than to insult each other, to wrest things from each other, to battle with each other, and to kill one another, and thus perish altogether?48
Since all of us, in all countries and all clans, share the same Great God and Universal Father, why do we keep on with these absurd distinctions and conflicts?
How can it be that this perverse and unfeeling world cannot in a day be transformed into an honest and upright world? How can it be that this age so full of insults and violations, fighting and killing, cannot in a day be changed into a world where the strong no more oppress the weak, the many overwhelm the few, the wise delude the simple, or the bold annoy the fearful?49
In the second, and much longer, tract Hong pursues the same ideas of fractured harmony, but now he concentrates his energies on exploring the reasons that can be gleaned from China’s own history for the falling from a grace that all had once shared. Hong’s quest is for a continuity between past and present, for all interpretations that deny such continuity must, in their essence, be false. If we are told that something “is applicable to modern times and not applicable to antiquity,” then we can be sure that it represents “the false way, the evil way, and the small way.”50 The powers of the demon devil king Yan Luo are a case in point. People ascribe the power over life and death to this spirit, but he is only the same old “serpent devil” who deceived Adam and Eve, as he deceives us now by his endless transformations, but his power has never been anything compared to that of God.
The growth of superstitious beliefs of this kind can be traced epoch by epoch, ruler by ruler, says Hong, and he proceeds to draw on his earlier historical studies to do just that. First to slide away from worshiping the One True God were tribes on the periphery of China proper, like the Li and Miao, who began to venerate the demons. Then came early rulers of the founding Qin dynasty, who searched for secrets of immortality among the islands of the Eastern Sea. After them, the rulers of the early Han dynasty sought by sacrificing to the Kitchen God to transmute cinnabar to gold and managed to draw a throng of charlatans to their court; their successors of the later Han, and rulers of the Liang and Tang, sent their magic specialists to India in search of the Buddha and his bones. Most damaging was the ruler of the Song, who changed the name of the True God of All to the “Great Jade Emperor,” this being to Hong “the worst kind of blasphemy” of them all. Such absurdities have since been spread and elaborated through such books as the Jade Record.51
In contrast, writes Hong, the books brought by the foreigners to China show clearly enough how God’s plan really was conceived, and how erroneous these Chinese aberrations must be seen to be. The vast waters of Noah’s flood, proof of God’s wrath and spreading over the world for forty days and nights, show clearly enough that it cannot be the dragon devil of the Eastern Sea who brings rain to China, despite the sacrifices so many people make to him. When God called Moses to Mount Sinai, He warned him clearly not to let the people of the world set up any kinds of images, or worship them. The “real nature” of the demon devil evaporates on close inspection, in just the same way as bean curd turns out to be full of water. How ever could such a demon devil as Yan Luo be called divine? Even Jesus himself, our Savior and the Son of God, may be called our Lord (zhu) but not our God (di), even though except for Jesus’ Father none are as great as he is. How could one, knowing this, rebel against God’s commands and “join with the evil demons in rebelling against Heaven”? Nothing could be more pitiable, more sad, than that!52
While Hong Xiuquan writes and teaches, others are talking about him. It is known to some in Canton city that he has read and believed the tracts of Liang Afa, that he preaches, that he has friends who do the same. These men in turn tell members of the Chinese Union, who work with Issachar Roberts. Roberts came to China from Tennessee at the invitation and under the inspiration of Karl Gutzlaff, and was the first to return to Canton from Hong Kong after the Opium War of 1839–42: living in the suburbs of the city, dressing in Chinese clothes, erecting a small chapel with a bell tower, learning Hakka dialect, and gathering a small group of Chinese converts around him.53 A maverick whose affiliations with mission groups in the United States are often temporary and stormy, Roberts joins up with Gutzlaff’s Chinese Union in the mid-1840s, and gratefully accepts the small payments that Gutzlaff makes to him. For Roberts, the heart of Christian conversion and devotion lies in the act of baptism, and his own most lyrical writings describe the joys of thus greeting new Christians in the rolling surf off the shores of Hong Kong or in the flowing rivers of China. For choice, in the hot seasons of the south, Roberts takes the baptismal candidates out into the water at nighttime, when the moon is full and bright, immersing each one completely “in the spacious deep in imitation of the death and burial of his Lord,” before raising them once again “in imitation of the resurrection of Jesus.”54
A Christian convert from Canton visits Hua county in 1846, and urges both Hong and his cousin Hong Rengan to visit Roberts at his chapel and hear his preaching. Both Hongs are too busy with their own teaching to accept. But early in 1847 Roberts’ senior assistant, a convert and member of the Chinese Union, writes formally to Hong Xiuquan and urges him to visit. This time Hong accepts, and persuades Hong Rengan to accompany him. Roberts receives them cordially, and under his general supervision the two cousins read the Bible, in Gutzlaff’s translation, both the Old Testament and the New. Though Hong Rengan does not stay long, Hong Xiuquan perseveres, and asks Roberts (as Liang Afa some thirty years before asked Milne) to prepare him formally for the rites of baptism. Roberts agrees to take him in his care, and sends two of his Chinese converts to Guanlubu, to see what sort of reputation Hong Xiuquan has at home.55
As has happened before in Hong’s life, suddenly and without clear explanation something goes wrong. Just a few days before, baptism seemed assured. Hong had written out his statement of faith and purpose for Roberts, as baptists must, to prove the sincerity of their religious call, and Roberts found it satisfactory. Nothing untoward was said about him to the investigators in Guanlubu. Some contemporaries say that Hong falls into a trap, a trap laid by other jealous Chinese converts who work for Roberts. Knowing that Roberts hates those who claim they seek baptism only in order to gain employment or a stipend from the Christian missionaries, and fearing that Hong might be hired by Roberts and thus cost one of them his job, they tell Hong to ask Roberts for financial reassurance about the future. Guilelessly, Hong does just that, forfeiting Roberts’ trust and support. It sounds far-fetched, but times are hard for those with or without education living around Canton, and Roberts is famous for his sudden tantrums and zealous adherence—when it suits him—to the articles of his baptist faith. Roberts’ only comment on the matter is that Hong chose to leave before Roberts was “fully satisfied of his fitness.”56
Whatever did happen between Hong and Roberts, on July 12, 1847, Hong goes on the road again, without receiving the promised baptism. But he does not turn north for home and family in Guanlubu, as one would expect. Instead, almost penniless except for some borrowed copper cash, with his few possessions on his back, and his cherished demon-killing sword in a scabbard he has had specially made, marked with the single character of his dream-state name of Quan, he turns his steps once more toward the west, in search of Feng Yunshan, asking his newfound Chinese Union friends to tell his family where he has gone.57
Hong walks westward along the river, too poor to pay the boat fare, feeding as best he may. He has got as far as the river town of Meizixun, more than halfway to the Guangxi border, when ten or so men, dressed as an anti-smuggling patrol, block his way. When Hong has relaxed his guard, they draw out guns and knives, demand his money and his bundle of possessions. Such acts of impersonating government personnel have been growing in numbers, though certainly they are not new. When Hong was first an examination candidate, a gang killed a magistrate and his staff and then took over their office and their duties along with their insignia, and ran the county for several months before anyone arrested them. On other occasions, gang members rode in official sedan chairs and claimed to be functionaries, ending by ransacking people’s homes and assaulting their women.58 While Hong was living in Guanlubu, a hundred or more bandits just north of Canton city set up road and river barriers, apparently immune to government reprisal, demanding money from all travelers, and causing such disruptions to trade that honest merchants and opium smugglers alike have to reroute their goods due west.59 Qing government embassies to Annam can get to that neighboring kingdom only by paying “protection” to the local river bandits; and students from West Guangdong, however well prepared, cannot even get to Canton city to take the examinations.60
Perhaps if Hong had raised his thumb to represent the Heavens, worn the second button of his summer robe undone, stretched out three fingers together in a greeting, said truthfully that he was traveling from the east towards the west, or even murmured a coded version of his own name, then they would have let him be. But he has not been made privy to these mysteries, and the ten men rob him of his borrowed money, his sword and scabbard, and everything else he carries, leaving him only a single change of clothes.61
Despite this added blow Hong does not turn back. Instead he petitions the Qing prefect of the nearest city for aid. The prefect points out that Meizixun is not in fact within his jurisdiction, and thus he need bear no responsibility for Hong’s losses; but sympathizing with him nevertheless, he gives Hong a string of copper coins worth close to half an ounce of silver. With this assistance, as long as he contents himself with a single meal each day, Hong can afford to take a boat once more, at least for a few stages; and the enigmatic remark of a bystander who notes his dejected countenance strengthens his resolve: “A broken cord of course is mended with a line, and when the boat comes to the bank, the way opens again.”62
Once on the boat for Guangxi, Hong has a chance to meet more scholars. They pity his plight, admire his erudition, and listen with interest to his teachings on the One True God. Sometimes these scholars feed him, sometimes they give him tea, sometimes they give him cash, or persuade the boats’ captains to let him off his fare. Thus it is that, within a month, he reaches Sigu village and the Huangs. When they tell him Feng Yunshan, who visited them the year before to give them his new location, is now in Thistle Mountain, Hong at once turns his steps northwards, to the hills, accompanied by the young son of the Huang family he helped to spring from prison in 1844.63
It seems that Hong, far from being dejected or exhausted by his journey and his hardships, has never felt more triumphant, more sure of his power and of the One True God’s protection. For the first time, in a poem he writes on the wall of a roadside temple, instead of the regular character “Wu,” which he has always previously used for “I,” Hong refers to himself as “Zhen,” “I the ruler,” a term forbidden to ordinary subjects of the Qing, for its use is traditionally restricted to the emperors of China, and to them alone. By placing this character as the first word of the first line of his poem, Hong further emphasizes his own sense of his newfound glory; he reiterates this mood by using the same imperial personal pronoun twice more in the last four lines.
I the ruler, in the high heavens, am the Heavenly King;
You, here on earth, are devil demons.
Deceiving the hearts of God’s sons and daughters,
You shamelessly dare to let men worship you.
God has sent me the ruler to descend into the world;
What will the wiles of devil demons avail you now?
I the ruler, as commander of the heavenly hosts, will show no mercy:
You and the other devil demons must quickly flee.64
On August 27, 1847, Hong reaches Thistle Mountain and greets the astonished Feng Yunshan and the assembled God-worshipers. His God has brought him home.65