19

NEW WORLDS

It is in April 1859, during the time of drift and indecision in Taiping government and war following Elgin’s visit and departure, that Hong Rengan reaches Nanjing, and greets his cousin the Heavenly King, whom he has not seen since 1849. The Heavenly King is amazed and overjoyed, for Rengan too is family, in both a literal and an emotional sense. He grew up next to Hong’s ancestral village and knows his relatives. He was among his cousin’s earliest converts, and one of Feng Yunshan’s closest friends. He knows Hong Kong. He knows the foreigners and their ways. He knows the Bible intimately, but believes in the revelations of the Heavenly King, and in his cousin’s kinship with God and Jesus. And so within days of Hong Rengan’s arrival, Hong Xiuquan names his cousin to high rank in the Taiping nobility, makes him a commanding general of the Taiping armies with the honorary title of “Supreme Marshal,” appoints him “Leader of the Ministers,” “Chief Examiner,” “Minister of Appointments,” and “Head of Foreign Affairs.” And in mid-May 1859, the Heavenly King makes the final leap of faith: he enfeoffs Hong Rengan as king, the “Shield King,” to take the place of the other founding leaders who have died.¹

Hong Rengan has had a strange and often dangerous life since last the cousins met. While Hong Xiuquan built up his following in Thistle Mountain, Rengan continued to take the lower state examinations—five times in all—but always failed. When in 1850 Qing troops raided Hua county to arrest the followers or relatives of Hong Xiuquan, Rengan set off to Guangxi, but he could not get through the Qing lines, and the war was so mobile that he never was able to join his cousin. Leaving Guangxi, but unable to return home, Rengan drifted to Hong Kong, where he began to work for foreign missionaries.2

Hearing of the Taiping capture of Nanjing, and their establishment there of the the Heavenly Capital, Rengan traveled—like Roberts—north to Shanghai, but also like Roberts was unable to get through the Qing forces to reach the Taiping base, and the Triad Society occupiers of Shanghai would not help him. So after a brief period during which he “studied astronomy and astronomical calculations in a foreign school”—perhaps with Alexander Wylie, a talented mathematician and astronomer who had been in China since 1847—in the winter of 1854 he decided to return again to Hong Kong and seek longer-term employment with the missionary society there. The trip back, on a steamer that made the entire journey in four days, was a revelation to Hong Rengan, and plunged him into verse:

The ship flies like an arrow through the raging billows;

Swept along in the wind’s force, my determination grows all the stronger.

The sea becomes the field of battle, the waves are the military formations;

Their crests toss against the stars and the moon, like billowing banners and flags.³

In Hong Kong, Rengan continued for four years to study astronomy and work with the missionaries, and he slowly began to mingle on terms of trust and friendship with many of the talented group of Westerners who crowded the little colony at this time: among those from Britain whom Rengan came to know were James Legge, the first translator of the Confucian classics; William Milne, son of Liang Afa’s first teacher and reviser of Morrison and Gutzlaff’s Bible translation projects; William Burns, who had just completed his translation of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress; and Benjamin Hobson, preacher and physician, author of books in Chinese on surgery, midwifery, and children’s diseases. He also remet Issachar Roberts and several other American Protestant missionaries, among them E. C. Bridgman, who translated for minister McLane on the Susquehanna’s Nanjing voyage. Among new acquaintances were a number of German and Scandinavian missionaries from the Basel Missionary Society, including the Swedish-born Theodore Hamberg, a fine orator and preacher, expert in Hakka dialect, and early co-founder of the Chinese Union with Gutzlaff, with whom Rengan shared a brief written record of the Taiping movement’s founding, and to whom Rengan dictated a much longer account of the movement’s growth and glory. He also talked often with Yung Wing, the first Chinese to have traveled to the United States and received an American college degree, who was trying to work out how to combine his knowledge of the West and China in either the world of administration or business.4

Of all Hong Rengan’s friends in Hong Kong during this period, the most important was undoubtedly the Scotsman James Legge. Legge, the youngest of the seven children of an Aberdeen tradesman, initially taught mathematics, until he was ordained as a Congregationalist minister and traveled to Hong Kong in 1843, where he headed the Protestant Theological Seminary, which had been founded to “train a native ministry for China.” By the time Rengan returned to Hong Kong in 1854, Legge was already well on the way to amassing what has been called one of the most “extensive and important collections of sinological literature in all of the western nations in the nineteenth century.”⁵ Rengan worked with Legge both as a Christian catechist—to help in the conversion of other Chinese—and as a scholarly assistant. Hong Rengan was lucky in this friendship, for Legge was a man who trusted the Chinese and saw much good in them, and was constantly using his ministry to learn as much as possible: in Legge’s words, “Several hours of every day were spent in visiting them from house to house, and shop to shop, conversing with them on all subjects, and trying to get them to converse with me on one subject.”⁶

Years later, after Hong Rengan’s death, Legge remembered him as “the most genial and versatile Chinese I have ever known, and of whom I can never think but with esteem and regret.” And Legge wrote further that Hong Rengan “was the only Chinaman with whom I ever walked with my arm round his neck and his arm round mine.” Sometimes they preached together at the same church service, and when Rengan spoke of trying to join his cousin in the Taiping capital, Legge urged him to “remain quietly in Hong Kong as a preacher.”⁷

Perhaps it was with Hong Rengan that Legge was strolling in the summer of 1857, as Lord Elgin arrived, and Hong Rengan with whom he shared his thoughts on the future:

On the 2nd July of that year I was walking out on Caine’s Road in the afternoon with a friend, when we saw a steamer coming through Sulphur Channel. At first we thought it must be the mail, but it proved to be the Shannon, with Lord Elgin on board. As she steamed into the harbour, and she and the Admiral saluted each other, and the thunder of their guns reverberated along the sides of the mountain, which were then all fringed with mist, I said to my companion, “There is the knell of the past of China. It can do nothing against these leviathans.”8

James Legge, because of his formidable knowledge of Chinese language and his theological erudition, had been entrusted by the Protestant missionaries, along with the celebrated translator Walter Medhurst, “to deliberate on the rendering of the names of the Deity into Chinese.” This led to a further bond with Hong Rengan, for throughout his long and productive life Legge always championed the use of “Shangdi”—High Lord of All—for the translation of the name of God, a choice that fitted perfectly with the belief of the Taiping, who had consistently used the same term, from the time they named their first assemblies the “Bai Shangdi Hui,” God-worshiping Society.⁹ As part of his methodology in proving his theological positions, Legge drew heavily on the way that Paul in the Epistle to the Hebrews had elaborated on the story of the priest-king Melchizedek. Such an early Christian methodology seemed to Legge a perfect example of the way later commentators on the Bible message could “confirm the good and supplement the deficient.” By this logic, Confucianism was not seen as fully antithetical to Christianity, since the term shangdi can be found in various early Chinese texts. Thus in Legge’s mind, “progressive revelation in the Biblical text affirms the possibility that God could leave a witness elsewhere in the world, even if this witness was quickly distorted by other corrupting influences.”¹⁰

Along with a small number of other missionaries such as Karl Gutzlaff, Legge also had a special interpretation of the prophetic passage in Isaiah, chapter 49, verses 11 and 12:

And I will make all my mountains a way, and my highways shall be exalted.

Behold, these shall come from far: and lo, these from the north and from the west; and these from the land of Sinim.

To these missionaries, “Sinim” referred to China, and implied that for over two millennia God had anticipated including the Chinese people in His kingdom. Legge preached on this very theme in the later 1850s.¹¹

The Hong Kong in which Hong Rengan resided during the 1850s—especially the waterfront area of Victoria—was becoming a boom town, despite the pessimism over its prospects that had accompanied its founding in 1841, and the terrible death toll taken of the earliest Western settlers and troops from fever. Legge attributed much of this new prosperity to the dislocations caused by the Taiping and the secret societies around Canton, placing “the turning point in the progress of Hong Kong” to 1852 and 1853. In those years, wealthy Chinese families fled to Hong Kong to escape the fighting and disorder on the mainland; houses were in demand and rents rose; the streets that had been comparatively deserted assumed a crowded appearance; new commercial Chinese firms were founded; the native trade received an impetus. The British Royal Engineers installed well-planned roads, drains, and harbor facilities, and the colonists planted groves of shrubs and bamboo to improve the air; these changes, along with the streetlamps and their staff of lamplighters, the handsome post office where the mail was brought by clipper from Bombay, the new churches and substantial houses, gave some imposing aspects to the new settlement, though visitors grumbled that both rents and the prices in the only good hotel were excessively high.12

The little colony itself exhibited the worst and the best of the West and China, and a certain blending of the two cultures. For Chinese as for Westerners there was gambling, work in the illegal opium trade, the coolie trade with its racketeering and kidnapping, savage fights between rival gangs, daring robberies by those who used the colony’s new drains as secret channels past the guards above the ground, and a social “order” in which for a time there were more brothels than respectable households. The prevalence of crime and violence meant that “the gallows found constant employment” for Western and Chinese alike, since British criminals guilty of capital crimes were hanged in public along with their Chinese counterparts.¹³ But there were also the first successful entrepreneurial Chinese businessmen rising to prominence in trade, property, and in shipping, Chinese studying British law, and young Chinese girls being trained to a high level of English-language competence in special schools. Even if some of these girls, when grown to womanhood, formed irregular liaisons with the Western traders there, for others there was the model of Daniel Caldwell—once the fearsome head of the Hong Kong detectives in charge of suppressing piracy, now promoted to registrar general of the colony—who had publicly taken as his wife a Chinese Christian convert. As a bemused James Legge expressed it, “I sometimes fancy Britannia standing on the Peak, and looking down with an emotion of pride on the great Babylon which her sons have built.”¹⁴

In January 1857 Hong Rengan had a chance to witness one of the more complex cases in the young colony’s history—the attempted mass poisoning of the Western residents, which was traced swiftly to the bakery of a Chinese resident of Hong Kong named A-lum. James Legge himself ate the poisoned bread twice—“early in the morning and again at breakfast time”—but survived because the second meal of poisoned bread made him vomit violently. Yet even in the midst of the terror, hysteria, and cries for vengeance, Hong Rengan would have seen that A-lum was not lynched, as many at first had believed he would or should be. Instead Alum was brought to trial before a British court and acquitted, since he was able to prove that the poison had in fact been placed in the dough by two of his bakery employees, perhaps at the instigation of Chinese in Canton who hated the British for their attempt to enforce their rights of residence in the city. During the trial, and for a short time afterward when he was held in protective custody, A-lum kept order in the jail and supervised the management of the Sunday Christian services there, preparing the prayer books in advance and maintaining “perfect order among all who attended.”15

Hong Rengan, with money given to him by members of the missionary community, left Hong Kong in the summer of 1858 to travel to Nanjing. The timing of his journey was probably determined by the death of his mother that same summer, which released him from the pressing obligations of filial piety. But since he was, in the deepest sense, moving into the unknown, he left his wife and young son, and one of his brothers, in the care of the Legge family until he should send for them.¹⁶

Having left his family in safety, Hong risked taking the traditional route that centuries of Chinese had followed, moving north from Canton city up the East River to the Jiangxi border, and then down the Gan River into central China. Here in the autumn of 1858 he linked up with a subordinate general of the Qing commander Zeng Guofan, campaigning in the region. But when the Taiping troops routed the Qing, Hong was unable to move across the lines to join them, and instead lost all his baggage and was forced to flee northwest, to the Huangmei area of Hubei. Ever resourceful, he gained temporary respite and needed funds by serving as medical adviser—perhaps using skills taught to him by Benjamin Hobson—to a Qing magistrate whose son was ill. When he heard the news of Elgin’s fleet moving down the Yangzi River after its visit to Wuchang, Hong was able to place aboard a British ship a message to his Hong Kong friends, telling them how he was faring. In early 1859, using his recent wages to buy a stock of goods, he passed back through Qing lines posing as a merchant, and reached the Heavenly Capital in late April 1859.¹⁷

After living for so long in Hong Kong, Hong Rengan has much to share with his Heavenly King. He presents his thoughts to his ruler in a long memorandum of May 1859. The Heavenly Kingdom needs a post office, so the mail will arrive on time. Tied up in bundles, paid for by the weight, the letters should move in vehicles driven by fire and steam that stop for no one till they reach their destination.18 New houses should be sturdy, tall, and built in rows, though old houses can all be left the way they are. Banks can be formed to issue notes at 3 percent, speeding transactions and protecting travelers from bandits, for no one seeing merchants pass without their piles of silver will dream they carry money. Roads will be wide and straight and transport swift, the rivers dredged. Five- to ten-year patents can be issued for ingenious manufactures, with the longer time spans for most useful items, but inventors of “useless items” will be strictly punished. The system of life and property insurance, now practiced in foreign countries, can also be used in the Heavenly Kingdom. Houses, ships, merchandise, one’s own existence, can each be guaranteed against loss from water or from fire, by payment of a simple premium.¹⁹

The Heavenly King’s notations in the upper margins of his Shield King’s memorandum show that he approves of all these things, even if the precise details of how or when they can be implemented are not yet firm. Hong Xiuquan also approves other plans of Rengan’s, such as examinations for physicians, the abolition of slavery, the forbidding of infanticide, the banning of all plays and dramas, and an end to laziness.²⁰

Only two of Hong Rengan’s suggestions are rejected by the Heavenly King, on the grounds that they are not practical at present. One is for the establishment of a network of newspapers in different regions, and of special assistants to the Heavenly King, whose only role will be to make sure that all news from different places in China and beyond reaches him promptly and is free from tampering. In his marginal comment, Hong Xiuquan notes that such a procedure “can not be carried out now, lest the demon devils continue to set us against each other.” After the devils are all killed, one can proceed with such a scheme.²¹ The other is the suggestion of the Shield King that capital punishment should be left to God’s divine judgment, rather than to men, so that all can follow the sixth commandment, which stipulates, “Thou shalt not kill.” The Heavenly King responds in a marginal note: “Our Holy Father’s sacred edict instructs us to behead the evildoers and sustain those who are upright. Thus killing demons and those who have committed crimes is something that cannot be avoided.”²² But despite the Heavenly King’s apparent support for the other new reforms, nothing is undertaken at the time. There are armies on the march, most of the leading generals are away and, as Hong Rengan tells a visitor to Nanjing, nothing could be done till all were reassembled in the capital, “as it required the consent of the majority to any measure before it could be carried out.”²³

Caught between his pragmatic views and his deep and abiding admiration for Hong Xiuquan, Hong Rengan cannot but appear ambivalent to foreign missionaries who meet him. As he rises from his sofa to greet them, says “How do you do” in English, and shakes their hands, he is the affable host. Yet he is dressed in a long yellow damask robe, embroidered with dragons, wears a gilt crown set with precious stones upon his head, has crowds of boys to fan him, and rows of his subordinates before him, dressed in green or yellow robes with their flowing hair bound up in silken kerchiefs.24 Hong Rengan does not agree with every one of the Heavenly King’s articles of faith, he tells the Western missionaries. The two central revelations of Hong Xiuquan, received in 1837 and 1848, most certainly are “real,” says Hong Rengan, though it is not completely clear “how they should be understood.”²⁵ He does not, however, believe in the visions of the dead East King, Yang Xiuqing, though Hong Xiuquan “will not allow them to be questioned.” As to the meaning of Hong’s being the younger brother of Jesus, that is because Hong “regards Christ as the greatest of God’s messengers, and himself as second only to him”; and it is in this light that he believes himself to be the brother of Christ and God’s son.²⁶

If offerings—whether of rice, or tea, or meat—are made to God when the Taiping offer up their prayers, they should be seen as “merely thank-offerings, not propriatory,” Hong Rengan explains. Similarly, the burning of written prayers after they have been chanted aloud is the action of those still new to the faith, and will eventually be abandoned. The Lord’s Supper is not observed in Taiping territory, and wine is never drunk during religious services; baptism—which may be administered by any of the faithful—consists of a sprinkling of water followed by a washing of the chest. When one speaks of the Heavenly King’s birth in terms of his “descending to earth,” that should be understood as meaning “nothing more than natural birth, with a divine commission.” The Heavenly King does not accept that God is immaterial; to Hong Xiuquan, God is material and he “does not brook contradiction on this point.” Nor will Hong Xiuquan change any of the terms for God that he has been using in his works. When Hong Rengan protests that the term “True God” should not be used, since God cannot be called either true or false, the Heavenly King rebuffs him. The Heavenly King reserves the final word on all matters of state, “but on most affairs not connected with religion he looks with contempt, remarking that they are ‘things of this world’ and not ‘heavenly things.’ ”27

Hong Rengan’s own study in Nanjing, which he allows a visiting Englishman to enter, perfectly reflects the overlays of cultures between his former life in Hong Kong and his current life in the Heavenly Capital. Though the Englishman is sarcastic about the condition of the Shield King’s possessions, he still manages to capture the mood and the variety:

Turning through a small door to the left you come into the Shield King’s own Sanctum, which is quite a museum in its way. It is a large cheerful room facing a garden of flowers. The principal article of furniture is a large bed of Soochow manufacture, covered with jade and other ornaments, and hung with yellow curtains. The King takes a siesta in this now and again. Tables line the sides of the chamber, and support a most extraordinary conglomeration of different articles. There is a telescope on a moving pedestal (broken), a gun box (gun gone), three Colt’s revolvers (all useless from rust), a box of gun caps, ditto of Vestas, two solar lamps that can’t be made to light, and a cake of brown Windsor soap; the Woolwich Manual of Fortification, a book on military tactics, and the Holy Bible; any amount of Chinese books, comprising all those valuable works published by foreign missionaries, quires of yellow paper, five or six clocks, an alarum, broken barometer, heaps of proclamations, ink stones, gold pencils, and dirty rags. On the other side, piles of books suffering from moth, a hat box with the dragon hat inside, fans mounted in silver, jade stone drinking cups and saucers, gold and silver cups, platters, chopsticks and forks, three English Port wine bottles, and one ditto of Coward’s mixed pickles. At various places are suspended an English naval sword, some dragon caps, a couple of Japanese knives, two French plates, and an old engraving of the Holy Well in Flintshire. Lying on the bed is a mass of silver ingots tied up in cloth. Chairs and stools with marble seats are placed round a marble table, and an attendant dressed in spotless white crape, with blue jacket pulls a punkah [fan], and so keeps you beautifully cool. Here the Shield King will give you a pretty dinner and lots of wine. He told me that when the Heavenly King prohibited wine, he applied for a dispensation asserting that unless he drank he could not eat, and that the dispensation was immediately granted.²⁸

Surprising though the wine drinking may be in the atmosphere of the Heavenly Capital, the Shield King’s openness to foreigners stands in studied contrast to the aloofness or hostility showed to the Hermes, Cassini, and Susquehanna five years or so before both by the Heavenly King and by Yang Xiuqing. Trying to express his feelings on this matter, Hong Rengan writes in his memorandum to Hong Xiuquan of the most sensible way to handle foreigners:

Insulting expressions are used in verbal quarrels; they have no real meaning in high-level affairs and are apt to cause disasters. Even when we apply such expressions to nearby small countries, such as Siam, Annam, Japan, and the Ryukyu Islands, they are bound to be resented, because regardless of their low stations, human beings are not willing to be considered inferior; even if they admit their inferiority, they do so because of compulsion, not out of wholehearted submission. If wholehearted submission is to be won, it must be won not by power but by the perfection of government within and the demonstration of faith without, for that is the only way.29

In his same memorandum, Hong Rengan seeks to widen the Heavenly King’s knowledge of foreign countries through brief vignettes of their major attributes. The British tend to be intelligent, he writes, though “proud by nature,” and have attained their reputation as “the most powerful nation” through the stability of their institutions and ruling family. They respond well in conversation to such concepts as “equal status, friendship, harmony, and affection.”³⁰ The United States of America not only has righteousness, wealth, and power but refrains from encroaching upon her neighbors. Surprisingly, if gold or silver is discovered there, foreigners are allowed to come and dig for it. The country has no beggars, proof of its virtue. Men called “chiefs of the country” serve for five years then “retire to live in comfort” while the various component states choose a new leader by putting the names of their choices into large boxes. It is accepted by the American people that those they choose as rulers will be “worthy and capable,” and that the “decisions reached by the majority are considered just.”³¹

Germans are primitive—they “resemble people of ancient times”—but are devout and conscientious; Scandinavians, “serene” of countenance under their pale hair, are broad-minded and friendly; France, the source of the arts and technologies now adopted by the other foreigners, is itself too steeped in mystical religion to be truly praised; Russia has embarked on great reforms, and given its vast size will soon be a major force. Japan, recently opened to trade with America, has been speedily acquiring new techniques, and “will certainly become skillful in the future.”³²

In case the Heavenly King is worried that the foreigners will use the chance of entrance into China to cheat the Taiping out of their wealth, Hong Rengan suggests that the Taiping follow a self-conscious policy of preferential treatment for their own subjects:

With foreigners, one has to devise ways to hold one’s own. For instance, if they and we each open a store, we should not be required to pay rent, whereas the foreigners should be made to pay rent; we should use few workers, while they employ many; we should sell our products at a lower price, while they have to sell at a higher price. Thus we shall be benefited, while they suffer losses. We can prosper indefinitely, whereas they will collapse. How long can they maintain themselves in such a situation?33

Following this line of reasoning, Hong Rengan begins to develop the germ of a plan that the Taiping armies should try to make a bold march on the city of Shanghai to the southeast. Once in Shanghai, the Taiping should use one million ounces of the silver stored in their common treasury to buy a fleet of twenty modern steam vessels. With this fleet at their command, they could steam back up the Yangzi, raise the Qing siege around Nanjing, reopen the campaign to the west, and regain control of the key cities along the riverbank that they had been slowly losing to the Qing counterattacks.³⁴

As the seeds of this plan develop, the Heavenly King assigns Li Xiucheng to direct the military side of operations. The choice is a shrewd one. A skimpily educated farm worker when he joined the Taiping troops on their 1851 march toward Yongan, Li has risen rapidly through the Taiping ranks because of his natural brilliance as a military commander in their campaigns in west and central China, till in December 1859 he is named Loyal King, equivalent in rank to Hong Rengan.³⁵ Outspoken and generous—and apparently the only senior Taiping leader who wears spectacles—Li is trusted and admired by his troops and by the foreigners he meets.³⁶ It is not clear whether it is he or Hong Rengan who formulates the exact details for the eastern campaign of 1860, but whoever plans it, it is Li who carries through the most dazzling part: a swift dash with several thousand troops across the Yangzi delta to seize the great city of Hangzhou, and create a diversion to relieve Nanjing. There follows a forced march back to Nanjing, where the great Qing encampments, fatally weakened by the transfer of the troops sent to relieve Hangzhou, fall into the Taiping hands. And that accomplished, Li leads a renewed push eastward to seize Suzhou, which falls to the Taiping forces on June 2. And finally, his troops are massed before Shanghai, with every expectation of a quick and easy capture of the Chinese section of the city.³⁷

The Loyal King, Li Xiucheng, has an optimistic view of Westerners—which echoes those presented in the memorandum of Hong Rengan—and believes them susceptible to reason. Since the Westerners have expressed their interest in neutrality in the Taiping battles with the demons, and since the Taiping forces have expressed their willingness to trade in all the Western goods save opium, alcohol, and tobacco, there should be no reason for the Westerners to do anything but welcome the Taiping soldiers when they drive the demon Qing from the Chinese city of Shanghai. Li believes that the foreigners in Shanghai will actually welcome him, and that the Chinese citizens will yield up their city with only minimal resistance, just as the citizens of Suzhou have done.38

As Li advances on Shanghai in mid-August 1860, with a military force of around three thousand men, he sends letters to the foreign envoys stationed there to clarify his views. All foreign residences, and all foreign merchant buildings, will be left unmolested if they simply post a yellow flag as an identifying mark. Yellow flags should also be hung in all foreign churches—both Protestant and Catholic—so that his troops (who may not recognize the buildings by their architecture) leave them undamaged. As a further proof of his good intentions, Li orders the execution of one of his Taiping soldiers who has killed a foreigner—even though in this case the foreigner was in fact fighting alongside a squad of Qing demon troops. To make doubly sure, however, while the Taiping forces are engaged in storming the Chinese city, all foreigners are advised to stay indoors until the battle is concluded.³⁹

Li Xiucheng is shocked and bewildered when Western leaders abandon their stated position of neutrality, and during three days of heavy fighting use the concentrated fire of their artillery and small arms to stop his men from taking the Chinese city of Shanghai. Li’s soldiers seem equally unprepared for the fire unleashed on them by the Westerners, and stand motionless at first, “like men of stone, immovable, without returning a single shot,” while the bullets shred their ranks.⁴⁰ In a letter ringing with bitterness and disappointment, on August 21, 1860, Li addresses the consuls of Great Britain, the United States, and other countries:

I have, however, taken into consideration that you and we alike worship Jesus, and that after all, there exists between us the relationship of a common basis and common doctrines. Moreover I came to Shanghai to make a treaty in order to see us connected together by trade and commerce; I did not come for the purpose of fighting with you. Had I at once commenced to attack the city and kill the people, that would have been the same as the members of one family fighting among themselves, which would have caused the demons to ridicule us.

Further, amongst the people of foreign nations at Shanghai, there must be varieties in capacity and disposition: there must be men of sense, who know the principles of right, and are well aware of what is advantageous and what injurious. They cannot all covet the money of the demon’s dynasty, and forget the general trading interests in this country.41

The setback before Shanghai marks the moment at which the 1860 eastern campaign, hitherto so brilliant in its execution, turns out to be disastrous in its consequences. By seeking to divert their demon enemies, the Taiping end up by fragmenting their own energies and fatally antagonizing the foreign powers. Not only do the British and French commanders now demand that the Taiping keep clear of Shanghai around a radius of thirty miles; they also forbid the foreign merchants to ship any more supplies or arms upriver to the Taiping garrisons. This decision in turn leads to the Taiping loss of their crucial inland river base at Anqing, for as soon as Qing patrol boats assisted by British ships prevent merchants or smugglers from unloading at the Anqing wharves, the ultimate fate of the city is sealed. The well-led and disciplined Xiang army forces, under the command of the former Hunan gentry leader Zeng Guofan and his brother Zeng Guoquan, are able to tighten the siege and starve the city into submission, killing almost every single member of the Taiping garrison forces, more than sixteen thousand in all. With the fall of the river garrison of Anqing in September 1861, the Taiping lines of communication with inland China to the west and north lose their crucial anchor.⁴²

But in August 1860 the fate of Anqing is still more than a year away, and Hong Xiuquan himself makes no specific comment on the course of the eastern campaign. He neither praises Hong Rengan and Li Xiucheng for the raising of the Nanjing siege and the capture of Suzhou, nor upbraids them for the setback at Shanghai. Hong does still appear to harbor dreams for a great new “northern campaign,” one that perhaps will at last bring down the pillars of the demon’s kingdom, for the forces led by Lord Elgin have seized Peking in September 1860, burned the emperor’s summer palace to the ground, and forced the emperor himself to flee beyond the wall. But when Li argues that such a northern campaign cannot be undertaken at this time, Hong Xiuquan, though “full of righteous indignation,” lets his general have his way ⁴³

Neither the problems in Shanghai, the use of force against the Taiping by the Western troops, nor their steady patrolling of the Yangzi River causes the Heavenly King to waver in his absorption with the True Religion. Indeed, Hong has found a new book now to supplement his rewritten Bible, a book that according to the Shield King, Hong Rengan, becomes his favorite reading at just this time. The book is Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), by John Bunyan.⁴⁴ One of Hong Rengan’s missionary acquaintances from his Hong Kong days, William Burns, has translated the book into Chinese, and published it in Amoy in 1853. Short summaries of Pilgrim’s Progress have been printed in Chinese before, but now the Heavenly King can follow Christian’s journey to the new Jerusalem in all its solemnizing detail, aided by ten carefully rendered illustrations. Possibly Hong Rengan brings the book with him in 1858 and gives it to his sovereign, but Hong may have obtained a copy earlier, for the book has been circulating widely, and besides the 1853 edition there have been others printed in the mid-1850s in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Fuzhou.⁴⁵

Chinese illustrations to Pilgrim’s Progress. In the mid-1850s Hong Xiuquan read John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which had just been translated into Chinese by Protestant missionaries. He later declared that the book was his favorite reading. The edition that Hong read contained ten illustrations specially prepared for the Chinese translation, of which the first and the last are shown here. In the first the figure of the book’s hero Christian, weighed down by his burden of sin, is seen as he leaves his wife and children and sets out on his pilgrimage to the Heavenly City. He is pursued by two of his neighbors, Obstinate and Pliable, whose long queues of hair are clearly visible. In the second picture, having crossed the last great barrier, the River of Death, Christian and his travelling companion Hopeful enter the gates of God’s eternal kingdom, as the angels blow their trumpets and salute them joyfully. Credit: Library of Congress.

The man called Christian in the Pilgrim’s Progress is presented by Bunyan as being the product of a dream, but a dream so vivid we can understand with all our souls how Christian staggers under the weight of his guilt and sin, till freed by faith and the words of the evangelist who watches over him. To make his way toward his New Jerusalem, he gives up all the comforts of home and wife and children, and risks suffering, torture, and death. Many of his closest companions die along the way, and others—feigned companions—turn out to be deceivers, lost in idleness or faithlessness. The illustrations heighten the emotion of various episodes: Christian’s baby in his mother’s arms, stretching out his hand toward his disappearing father; the burden falling off Christian’s back as he prays before the cross of Jesus; and Christian, flanked by the guardian knight and shepherds, gazing through a telescope toward the New Jerusalem.46

Narrow is the gate through which Christian must pass before his adventures are well begun, and many are the distractions and false detours before he reaches it.⁴⁷ “Earnestly exhort all the people of the world to enter the narrow door,” Hong tells his family and his ministers in his proclamation of March 1861, for “this day is the heavenly day of great peace, prophesied long ago in the Gospel, and now proven. The narrow door lies in the Holy Edict of the Father and the Elder Brother.”⁴⁸ Though Hong Xiuquan now never leaves his palace and the shelter of its double row of yellow walls, every morning new edicts in his own hand, in vermilion ink on yellow silk, are posted at one of the gates of his Heavenly Palace, the gate called “Holy Heavenly Gate of the True God.” These texts now deal mainly with religion, including the relationship and nature of God and His Son or Sons.⁴⁹

As Hong explains in an edict he gives to yet another visiting Protestant missionary, asking him to take it back with him to the city of Shanghai and share it with all the foreigners there, it is Hong’s son Tiangui, the Young Monarch, who henceforth will “regulate affairs appertaining to this world,” while Hong Xiuquan himself will lead the peoples of the earth “to the Heavenly abode.” The revelation of 1848 is clear at last: “The Father and the Elder Brother descended into the world in order, through me and the Young Monarch, to establish endless peace,” and thus will “heaven, earth, and man, the past, the present, and the future” be as one.50 These broadenings of Hong’s claims are reflected in the preambles to the proclamations of 1860 and 1861. First they are addressed to Hong’s inner family and his court officials, but then he begins to address them to “all the western brothers and sisters” so that “Chinese and Westerners, in eternal harmony, shall observe the agreements, and peace and unity shall reign and our territories widen.” The last ones are addressed to “all the officials and people of this world, one family.”⁵¹

Hong’s comments on the eastern campaigns, and on the Taiping’s prospects of eventual victory, are couched exclusively in celestial terms. When Hong goes to Heaven, he tells his people in other proclamations of June 1861, he confers on the progress of the war with the East King and the West King. Together they plan their strategies, together they lead their troops victoriously into battle.⁵² On some of these journeys the Young Monarch, Tiangui, now twelve years old, joins his father and the East King. Hong tells his son to fear nothing, for his Heavenly Grandfather will be always by his side. To reinforce this support, Hong changes his son’s name to Tiangui Fu, “Heaven’s Precious Happiness.” The character “Fu” shall henceforth be tabooed for ordinary use, like the characters within the names Jehovah and Jesus, and when writing Fu all people will add an extra stroke at the center of the character.⁵³

Though Tiangui is still so young, his dreams begin to intersect with his own father’s. He has already predicted the second great relief of the Nanjing siege by the Taiping troops in 1860, by dreaming that two huge serpents surrounded the city, but that with his own sword he was able to slay them. His proud father celebrates the fulfillment of this dream by establishing a full Taiping holiday in its anniversary commemoration.⁵⁴ In poetry and prose Hong Xiuquan also celebrates his son’s achievements, linking them to his own dream triumphs:

Father and son, Grandfather and grandson, sit in the Heavenly Court;

Peace and unity consume the serpents and the tigers.⁵⁵

“God and Christ guided and directed me, and having decapitated the snake-tiger-dog devils, the Father and the Elder Brother guided me eastward to rule the rivers and mountains. Being of the same family, and the same clan, I returned victoriously.”⁵⁶

God also calls to Hong through Hong’s wife, the Second Chief Moon. “Tell your husband,” God tells her in a dream, “to ease his heart and breast. Great peace will flow across the world, and immediately it shall be seen that the road to the heavenly hall of great peace is open. One day the southern heavenly door will open. Close your ranks for the great battle and eternal glory.”57

Sometimes, too, Hong’s visions blend with his mother’s, as well as with those of his son and wife. Before the great Taiping victory at Suzhou in 1860, Hong tells his followers, his own earthly mother saw all three dead kings, East, West, and South, “depart to exterminate the demons,” and as they marched before the Golden Dragon Palace they cheered aloud, “Ten Thousand Years.”⁵⁸

At dawn, one day in October 1860, Hong Xiuquan records, he sees in a dream sent to him by his Holy Father “countless heavenly soldiers and generals faithfully placing before me their tributes of sacred articles and treasure, and I smiled happily and silently.”⁵⁹ Two days later, God comes to Hong again in another dream. Hong is walking with two women down a road. The road ahead is blocked by four yellow tigers. Seeking to save the women, Hong turns back. The tigers pursue him, and he fights them savagely with his bare hands; as they fight, the tigers change into human form, and Hong wakens abruptly, with a start. Between dreaming and waking he writes a poem:

Now the four tigers have been killed and cast away,

And, throughout the world, officials and people rejoice as I return in victory.

The road to Heaven lies open with the demon tigers crushed.

High Heaven arranges the unity of all existence.⁶⁰

Hong sleeps again and returns to the scene of the battle. Now he sees the four tigers sprawled there, dead. But lying with them are new apparitions, two black dogs. One of the dogs is clearly dead as well, but one still shows signs of life. When Hong strikes it with his hands, the dog cries out, in a human voice, “I’m afraid.” Hong replies, “I have to kill you,” and in his dream beats the dog to death. Hong wakes rejoicing. He knows now, he tells his followers, that he and his son will reign a myriad years.⁶¹