For the first month they are together again, during the autumn of 1847, Hong Xiuquan and Feng Yunshan devote themselves to writing. They live in a Thistle Mountain village with the Zengs, a committed God-worshiping family who have supported Feng for over a year already. The two men elaborate the details and the divine significance of Hong’s original dream of 1837, and meticulously chart their own travels and the steady growth in numbers of those who have come to share their beliefs in the period since 1843. Hong polishes and adds emendations to the tracts on the Heavenly Way that he has recently been composing in Guanlubu, for now the Bible in its entirety has become available to them, even if much of its message seems to remain opaque. Their writings are distributed for them by the adult son of the Zeng household, whose zeal exceeds even that of his parents. As their writings circulate through the Thistle Mountain area, they win fresh converts for the God-worshiping Society.1
Despite Hong Xiuquan’s newfound confidence in his majestic powers, expressed in his writings on the temple wall the month before, much of his sense of mission is still focused on the need to banish idols and destroy them. Thus it is that, at least initially for Hong in Thistle Mountain, the most overt use he makes of the Bible study conducted with Issachar Roberts during the summer is of two passages that underline Hong’s own feelings, and amplify passages left unexplained in Liang Afa’s tracts.
The first of these concerns the way that God chose to transmit His Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai. Whereas Liang Afa simply wrote that God “sent down” the Ten Commandments to Moses at Sinai, and ordered him to “teach” and to “explain” them to the people of Israel, Hong knows now, after reading Gutzlaff’s translation of Exodus, that God wrote these commands for Moses “with His own hand.” He knows too that it was “with His own mouth” that God said to Moses, “I am the Lord of All and the Supreme God; you people must on no account set up any images of things in heaven above or on earth below, or kneel down and worship them.”2
The second passage Hong now uses is drawn from Psalm 115, which puts the Lord’s prohibitions against idolatry even more strongly than Liang—with all his lengthy commentaries—chose to do.
Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory, for thy mercy, and for thy truth’s sake. Wherefore should the heathen say, Where is now their God? But our God is in the heavens: he hath done whatsoever he hath pleased. Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. They have mouths, but they speak not: eyes have they, but they see not: they have ears, but they hear not: noses have they, but they smell not: they have hands, but they handle not: feet have they, but they walk not: neither speak they through their throat. They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them.3
In rewriting or embellishing his version of his dream, Hong also incorporates new elements that overtly attack Confucius. As recently as in his “Moral Exhortations” written in 1846 and 1847 Hong still had praise for Confucians, or at least for those Confucian scholars—and a handful of their rulers—who themselves over the past millennia had had the courage to protest at China’s slow slide to superstition and idolatry. His only regret was that they did not go far enough: “One cannot say these people did not have acute awareness; but what they destroyed, burned or criticized was limited to certain lascivious shrines, Buddhist practices, and improper sacrifices, so that everything they did not destroy, burn or criticize remains with us to this day.”4 Now Hong incorporates an element of anti-Confucianism into his dream of 1837, adding a long passage of dialogue that shows the Sage in a foolish or dubious light. In this expanded version of the dream, Hong’s Father, the One True God, praises both the Old and the New Testaments as being “pure and without error”; by contrast, all the Confucian books are condemned by God for their “numerous errors and faults” and are accused of bearing “the ultimate guilt for inciting the demons to do wrong.” God adds the charge that Confucius, through his books, “muddled and confused” the people of China, so that his reputation exceeded the True God’s in that land. And Jesus adds the criticism that Confucius caused harm to Jesus’ own younger brother, Hong Xiuquan. At first “arguing stubbornly” against these charges, Confucius at last falls silent. Then comes the fall:
Confucius, seeing that everyone in the high heaven pronounced him guilty, secretly fled down from heaven, hoping to join up with the leader of the demon devils. The Heavenly Father, the Supreme Lord and Great God, thereupon dispatched Hong Xiuquan and a host of angels to pursue Confucius and to bring him, bound and tied, before the Heavenly Father. The Heavenly Father, in great anger, ordered the angels to flog him. Confucius knelt before the Heavenly Elder Brother, Christ, and repeatedly begged to be spared. Confucius was given many lashes, and his pitiful pleas were unceasing. Then the Heavenly Father, the Supreme Lord and Great God, considering that the meritorious achievements of Confucius compensated for his deficiencies, granted that he be permitted to partake of the good fortune of heaven, but that he never again be permitted to go down to the world.5
Now joined through heavenly experience to the ranks of those who condemn Confucius, Hong also draws from the tradition of the Heaven-and-Earth Society, which uses his own name in cipher form to elaborate their own claims. Now it is God Himself, not brothers of the rival society, who invoke Hong’s majesty through the mystery of an arcane puzzle. God, in the revised dream, chants twice to Hong, His son. In the first chant God explains how Hong’s new name Quan is composed of coded elements drawn from the characters for world and rule and treasure, punningly recombined. The word for “one thousand” also, “less one line, is now attached to Hong’s person when one speaks of him.” One thousand less one line has three variants, since the Chinese character for “one thousand” has three strokes. Two of these variants do not yield recognizable characters in the Chinese language, but the third yields a symmetrical cross, the same word used to translate the crucifix on which Christ died for all on earth. A third pun links Hong’s name to the character for “sun,” while a fourth couplet defies interpretation to the uninitiated: “One long, one short, constitutes your given name / There is a knife which has no handle and no sheen.”6
In a second coded chant, God offers Hong a clue to his understanding of the book that he will read on earth, and that will bring him to true knowledge, but not before he has walked in darkness several more years, and been mocked, humiliated, and slandered by those on earth:
The cow’s hoof is one-oh-five:
People’s eyes can see the flagon in the wine.
See your face, eighty measures long!
In other places too one truly is alone.7
Such a poem hardly seems the sort of thing to chant when bandits stop one and ask, “Where are you going to and whence do you come?” It seems too complex to remember for the uneducated, and too esoteric to be taken for a line of conversation. But an implication is floating in the code, an implication that Hong now knows new secrets beyond those of his earlier life, and beyond those Liang’s tracts and then the Bible gave him.
The son of the Zeng family with whom Feng and Hong are staying is already famous, as a God-worshiper, for the zeal with which he has ridiculed and even defaced the images in local shrines. He joins with Feng and Hong when they pray to the One True God, asking Him to confer on them a strongly defended base area where they can all settle in peace. Whether because they receive an answer to that prayer, or because the Zeng family needs a breathing space from looking after them, in October 1847 Feng and Hong move to a village a mile and a half away, still deep in the mountains, to the home of another faithful God-worshiper, Lu Liu. Here, with the Zengs, they form a plan to smash the most important and immoral idol they have yet encountered.8
This spirit, who is described by the locals as being “amazingly effective,” is called King Gan, and at least five temples or shrines have been erected in his name near Thistle Mountain. Like so many local presiding deities, his roots are historical, or at least are given the appearance of so being. When Hong questions the locals about this spirit’s efficacy and origins, they answer him as follows: In the district of Xiang, some miles to the northwest of Thistle Mountain, there once lived a man named Gan, who put all his trust in a local magician or geomancer. Seeking reassurance about the future of his family line, Gan was told of the perfect burial site for himself and his descendants, but, said the geomancer, the site would bring maximum good fortune only if it was first sanctified by a “bloody burial.” To assure the future of his line, Gan thereupon acquired the site and killed his own mother, so that she should be the first buried there, and prove the prophecy correct. Gan’s other recorded actions were little better in Hong’s eyes. It was said that Gan forced his sister to have intercourse with a local wastrel, and that he loved to listen to the lascivious songs of the mountain men and women, songs that roused them up to commit immoral acts.9
Since then, the local villagers tell Hong, King Gan has proved his power in many ways: those speaking ill of him are seized with a mysterious sickness of the bowels, which can be cured only by the lavish sacrifice of pigs and cattle to King Gan. Once, when the local magistrate was passing by King Gan’s temple on official business, the force of the spirit pulled the magistrate out of his sedan chair, and prevented his departure until he gave King Gan an embroidered dragon robe. Even worshipers going to his temple to burn incense or light oil lamps in his honor bang gongs loudly as they approach, to prevent any chance of bumping into him by accident.10
In the past, Hong Xiuquan cleared his schoolrooms of Confucian tablets, purged his home of the little shrines and spirits he considered improper, and challenged the spirits in other shrines with poems of defiance posted on their walls. But now he decides to take more aggressive action, for this “clearly is the demon devil, and my first task is to save the people in the community,” as he tells his friends.11 Accompanied by Feng Yunshan, the idol-smashing Zeng, and his newfound host Lu Liu, and grasping a stout bamboo pole in his hand, Hong sets out for the most important of the temples erected in King Gan’s name, just over a day’s march away. After resting nearby, the men are at the shrine next morning. Shouting abuse at the bearded image of King Gan in its dragon robe, and striking at it with his staff, Hong lists ten counts of immorality of which the idol has been guilty. This is the selfsame devil demon that the Heavenly Father and One True God, on Hong’s journey to Heaven ten years before, ordered him to slay. “Now do you recognize me the ruler?” shouts Hong. “If you recognize me, then straightaway you had best go back down to hell.” And with his willing helpers, Hong topples the image from its resting place, stomping its hat, pulling out its beard, shredding its dragon robe, digging out its eyes, and breaking off its arms. Festooning the desecrated shrine with their triumphant poems, and posting on the wall a manifesto of defiance to the devil demon Gan, Hong signs his name: “Taiping Heavenly King, Ruler of the Great Way, Quan.” The next day, the four men are home on Thistle Mountain.12
The incident greatly enhances Hong’s local reputation, and Feng’s too, as leaders of the God-worshipers. It also builds local anger against them. When the desecration is discovered, local gentry offer a reward for the arrest of those who did it. Despite the fact that there have been complaints in the past about the God-worshipers as troublemakers, the local magistrate has no desire to get embroiled with fractious mountain dwellers, and he takes no action. Hong savors his triumph a little longer, but in December 1847 he leaves Thistle Mountain and returns to his friends the Huangs, back in the valley at Sigu village. Exasperated by the magistrate’s inaction, a local licentiate called Wang Zuoxin sends a group of village militia up into the hills, and “arrests” Feng Yunshan, holding him captive in a local temple. Feng’s host, Lu Liu, assembles a group of God-worshipers and frees Feng. The degree holder reinforces his militia and attacks the Thistle Mountain area once again, this time seizing both Feng and Lu. He takes them down to Guiping township, and hands them over to the magistrate in person, for trial.13
The accusations that Wang Zuoxin levels against the God-worshipers cover a wide front. They have pledged themselves into a brotherhood, he charges, which now numbers in the thousands. Through their magical books they trample down the local gods of the land and grain. The Zeng family should be rigorously investigated for the evildoers they have been secretly harboring. For more than two years the God-worshipers have been deluding the country folk, leading them astray through their religious teachings and practices. They wish their believers to follow the teachings in a foreign book, called “An Old Testament,” thus abandoning the laws and regulations of the reigning Qing dynasty. They have desecrated temples and overturned and smashed to pieces the incense burners that are used in worship of the local gods along the shores of the rivers that flow through Guiping county. Describing the procedures by which he has acted, the licentiate Wang Zuoxin explains that first he invited the “local elders” to check with him if the charges were true. Convinced that they were, he then assembled a militia to make the arrest, and held Feng Yunshan in the temple till he could be handed over to the mutual security forces. It was at this point that the Zeng clan leaders and Lu Liu assembled their own men and counterattacked, forcibly releasing Feng. This prompted Wang’s own second assault on the God-worshipers in which he recaptured Feng and took Lu Liu into custody as well.14
Feng Yunshan’s defense is both moral and legalistic. Firstly, the God-worshipers are a simple religious group, in no way planning to cause trouble in the area, but merely seeking to worship their God in peace. To prove this, he gives the examining magistrate copies of the God-worshipers’ books and a summary of their doctrine. At the same time, he reminds the investigators that since the new treaties with the Western powers ended the old Canton system and the restrictions on foreign religion, proclamations by the governor-general of the two provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi have been hung in front of the churches of Canton and in other public places, quoting the emperor’s edict giving freedom to foreign missionaries and Chinese people to worship the One True God.15
Wang Zuoxin’s “invitations” to the “elders,” his “assembling” of the militia force, and his “arrest” of Feng Yunshan are typical of the actions of the various well-off families who live in the fertile farmlands that lie between Thistle Mountain and the township of Guiping as the God-worshiper ranks are growing. These local leaders are adept at trying to protect their home areas from traditional enemies of law and order, and more recently both from the Heaven-and-Earth Society and from the water pirates who are entering their inland rivers from the sea. Now they add the God-worshipers to the list.16
The ancestors of many of these influential families had migrated from eastern China at the time of civil war and fragmentation that accompanied the collapse of the Ming dynasty in the 1640s. Settling land, much of it taken by military force with connivance of the local authorities from the Yao inhabitants of the region, or bought at the cheapest prices, they assembled groups of Chinese migrant tenants to work their land and produce surplus crops of rice and grain that could be shipped in bulk down the rivers to Canton. Since many of this merchant elite were Hakkas, their success brought tension both with poorer Hakkas and with local Chinese families aspiring to higher levels of education and economic power. By the end of the eighteenth century such Hakka elite families might possess estates of hundreds of acres, as well as owning stores in several market and county towns, and bulk shipping businesses for rice transport.17 With their large incomes, such family heads could educate their sons to obtain the licentiate’s degree with ease, and in many cases also to win the higher national degrees; if they lacked the intellectual power to pass the examinations, these sons had wealth enough to purchase degrees from a Qing government always short of funds, and even to purchase offices in neighboring provinces.
Because they maintained their personal registration at the sites of their former homes, the men from such families could often serve in office in the Guiping region, even though technically one could not serve as an official in the province in which one lived.18 Such trans-provincial family linkages gave them extra prestige and influence with incumbent officials even when they themselves were not in office. And further local solidarity and lineage strength came from their building of assembly halls and lodges in the various market towns where family members congregated to run their overlapping businesses, putting some of their income into the central lineage treasury to maintain an impressive level of sacrifices to their ancestors.19
Since the various clerks and underlings in the bureaucracy were always after the merchants’ money—even going so far as to press loans upon them, connive at bandit raids on merchant shipping, or set up entrapments through prostitutes, to force them into debt and hence dependency—the fates of these wealthy families depended on the local officials’ support, as their grateful testimonies hung in the local temples showed. The officials, for their part, were willing to take the merchants’ side because the smooth transfer of bulk grain from Guangxi to the Canton delta region was seen as a high economic priority. Official support made “business smooth, life stable, and left nothing to worry about while trading.”20 The merchants’ influence could, through intermediaries, reach to the emperor himself, and bring crucial tax relief in troubled times. Merchant money, paid out judiciously, could also bring relief to their communities from bandit gangs and military procurers who, left unpaid, would take the grain and livestock and even kidnap local men or women.21
Intricate marriage connections were forged among these wealthy families, whose own dialects, lovingly preserved, acted as further buttresses to their local solidarity. Concurrently, they strengthened their reputation among both Hakka and non-Hakka local inhabitants by their construction of irrigation works, embankments, and bridges, paving the streets of the towns in which they lived, building multistoried cultural and religious halls (one soared five stories high), and establishing local schools and libraries. It was the members of such elites who were “the elders” Wang Zuoxin “invited” to check the charges against the God-worshipers, and by this period they were forming their own “pacification groups.”22
The most important of these families, in the fertile farming area of Jintian that lay on the road and river route between Guiping and Thistle Mountain, assembled seventy of their members to serve as “elders” in their pacification group. In their ranks were several Hakka migrants who had made their money from lead mines and pawnshops as well as farming.23 Such families of “elders” protected their long-range interests by imposing rigid limitations on lineage spending and expenses, as shown by the surviving records of one such family in Gucheng village, at the foot of Thistle Mountain. This elite family’s rules for self-discipline were not so different from those Hong Xiuquan was slowly forming for his God-worshipers: they forbade all their lineage members to visit prostitutes, tried to curb their gambling or drinking, and threatened with “incarceration for life” any family member who took opium. They controlled their lineage costs through meticulous regulations, estimating their expenses in jin, one jin being roughly equivalent to a month’s wages for a poor artisan or farm laborer, but a comparative trifle to a wealthy landlord or merchant:
As for all the expenses of the entire household, receiving a bride into the household must not exceed 30 jin, and giving a daughter in marriage must not exceed 20 jin. Make the cost of attending a school the same as giving a daughter in marriage, and make the cost of taking an examination the same as receiving a bride. The closest friends of the family can be invited in a small group and drink together, but do not accept gifts from them, and do not invite lots of other guests.
As for the cost of a funeral, for an elderly family member, do not exceed 40 jin. For others, do not exceed 20 jin. Do not use musical instruments for the ceremony, do not prepare expensive food for the funeral banquet, and do not have a Buddhist service for carrying a coffin out of the house. Follow these rules for any auspicious and inauspicious matters of the house. . . . The monthly amount of grain and rice for our house must not exceed 700 catties [about 1,000 lbs]. The volume of cooking fuel must not exceed 1,500 catties. The oil that is used for lamps and cooking must not exceed 20 catties, and salt must not exceed 10 catties. Soy sauce, vinegar, and tea leaves must not exceed 200 copper cash, and vegetables must not exceed 100 copper cash per day. . . . If there is anybody in this village or market area who goes ahead on his own and builds a temple or collects money from people and holds a festival for gods, do not list his name, because he is violating the rules. As for the building of bridges and paving of roads, make donations only if the project is confirmed to be beneficial, and is within our ability to pay.24
Such careful money management, in turn, gave them added prestige within the community, and extra money to contribute to formal militia organizations and to local county projects. Obviously, their community as a whole would be resistant to God-worshiping recruitment in a way that upland villages of Thistle Mountain would not, whether or not each was dominated by Hakkas who felt in some ways isolated either from the non-Hakka Chinese or from the local Yao tribesmen.25
Furthermore, there was a self-defining snobbery built into the leadership levels of the pacification groups and those who enforced the local law-and-order contracts in the name of the state: to be a leader in the pacification group was to be a member of the elite, and being in the elite entitled one to lead the pacification group. They were people who claimed to be “loved by the officials as if they were their sons and younger brothers” and in return “they respected the officials as if they were their fathers and elder brothers.”26 The methods they employed to identify, isolate, and eventually punish secret-society brothers in the Heaven-and-Earth Society could be applied unchanged to the God-worshipers: in each case what was required were finer distinctions than those based merely on factors such as socioeconomic status or educational level and examination success:
The regulations of the baojia [village registration groups] blend the rich, the poor, the wise, and the foolish in a given village all together into one group and enforce the same rules upon all of them. Meanwhile, niceties of ranking are all confounded and different levels of knowledge are discounted. To lump everyone together indiscriminately like this is as if one were cooping up chickens and ducks with a flock of fabulous luan birds and cranes, or as if organizing tigers and leopards to be in a group of dogs and goats. Their differences in background, and their mutual suspicions, would be obvious to everyone. If one wants to group people together, one should first choose those who belong to the same kind, then make a compact among them, and so give strength to their hearts. That is to say, through the compact, they will be able to gather together all their resources, and make the best possible use of them.27
To refine the categories properly, the same village regulations stated, one had to distinguish those who are truly “talented and knowledgeable” from those who are “foolish and cowardly” or “violent.” Associated categories separated out those “who know things” from “those who are afraid of things” and those “who like things to happen”—the implication being that this last group were “troublemakers,” linked specifically to the “wandering bandits from Guangdong province.”28
“Guest people” in a village—the phrase might mean Hakkas or could mean simply immigrants or outsiders in some cases—had to be checked out with especial care, and literally expelled from their villages if they proved to have bandit contacts. Every single person in every local village should be registered by name, household, family, occupation, relationship, marital status, and status as “native” or “visitor.” Anyone “trusted by the whole village” would be rewarded with the label of “publicly registered” and issued with a certificate to that effect to be hung on their door. Those not worthy of such trust would be given no such certificate, pending further investigation.29 Found lacking by these standards are certain powerful and extremely wealthy people, like the Wei family of Jintian, who have been excluded by this pattern of discrimination from membership in the pacification groups, and in return have refused to make more than the most token contributions to local public projects, and become eager members of the God-worshipers, who do not make the same kinds of distinctions.30
There is a tight meshing of the pacification groups and the government, and even though by no means all those who lead such groups have passed the examinations at even the licentiate’s level, anyone who has passed is likely to be in a leadership position. And few if any of those who have passed the examinations join the God-worshipers. Though there are many God-worshipers who are literate, they come from among the failed candidates, or from those who make their literacy serve in the edges of society: those employed in junior positions in the magistrate’s office or who can read the law codes enough to help plaintiffs in certain legal cases, some who practice types of medicine that demand a knowledge of old texts, merchants and pawnshop owners, clerks in shops or small businesses, and even—in a strange reversal of roles—those who secretly act as substitutes and take the examinations for men eager for the titles who have no hopes of passing.31
While Feng is still in Guiping prison, trying to construct a meaningful defense, Hong Xiuquan has been safely out of harm’s way, down in Sigu village with his distant relatives the Huangs. The charges against Feng are too serious, and the forces arrayed against him seem too powerful, for Hong to win his friend’s freedom with a simple elegant literary petition to the magistrate, as he had for the Huangs’ own son on his first visit to Guangxi in 1844. So instead Hong decides to press the curious new international law aspects of Feng’s defense by going to Canton city to plead the case of Feng in person before the current Manchu governor-general of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces, Qiying, by coincidence the very man who negotiated the 1842 treaty with the British on which Feng bases his claims for pardon. There is urgency in Hong’s journey, for magistrates customarily use harsh tortures on their prisoners in cases involving “heterodox beliefs,” and the prisons themselves are often death traps of disease—Lu Liu has already died, from either illness or maltreatment.32
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 mean-time, 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.34 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.35
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.36 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.”37 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.”38
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.39
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.40
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.”41 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.42 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.43 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.44 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.”45 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.46
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.47