In order to provide a context for what follows, we need once more to step aside from the purely philosophical development of China and look in more detail at the historical and religious background.
So far we have discussed a range of philosophies that all contributed significantly to the onward march of Chinese philosophy. The relative geographical isolation of China restricted the inward flow of new ideas, and only Buddhism, from relatively nearby India, had joined the main spectrum of Chinese thinking. Contact with Japan had come about in the ninth century CE when the Japanese monk Ennin had visited China, but the flow of ideas in that case was almost exclusively from China to Japan. There were also small communities of foreigners who practised Near-Eastern religions, mainly in the capital, Chang An, who are generally thought to have been involved in trade. Zoroastrians are documented as being in China as early as the sixth century CE, while in the early part of the Tang Dynasty Nestorian Christians and Manichaeans are found in the historical record – a Nestorian Christian memorial inscription dating from 781 still survives in modern-day Xi’an. There were also small numbers of Jews living in China, and in the north-west of the country sizeable Muslim populations developed thanks to the overland trading route, the Silk Road.
None of these religious communities became influential in China, however, so from the time of the neo-Confucian developments of the Sung Dynasty the indigenous philosophy of China went unchallenged until the first concerted approach from the West, marked by the arrival of the Roman Catholic Jesuit mission to Beijing in 1600, in the final period of the Ming Dynasty. This turned out to be the beginning of a long – and for the Chinese, unhappy – relationship with the emerging Western powers.
Christianity did not spread widely in China, either from the Nestorian community of the Tang or from the Jesuit mission, whose influence was a technical and scientific one, based upon the Jesuits’ expertise in Western natural philosophy. They established an astronomical observatory in Beijing which survives to the present day, and also made their mathematical skills available to the Chinese court. From then on there would be tension in the court between the Confucian traditionalists and those who felt that the West had techniques to offer the Chinese. The main thrust of government and administration, however, continued on the neo-Confucian lines of the Sung philosophers, and China as a nation continued to regard itself as the whole of the civilised world, to whom all other countries should pay homage and, more practically, tribute. Even the emperors of the Qing Dynasty (1662–1912), although they were Manchus who had conquered the ethnic Han Dynasty of the Ming and rendered their Han subjects second-class citizens, nevertheless took over the Ming civil service more or less unchanged and themselves became the most Confucian of rulers, skilled in the literature and calligraphy of China.
These nouveaux Chinois rulers, despite their own foreign origins, became traditionally Chinese even to the extent of maintaining the traditional Sino-centric view of China as Zhong Guo, ‘the Middle Kingdom’, and lording it over the unenlightened barbarian kingdoms. This policy led directly to the fierce conflict with Great Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century. As the British expanded their empire in the eighteenth century, they began to trade with China, and by 1793 were looking to balance the trade in Chinese exports to Britain by some comparable exports of British goods to China. Pressure for this advance was fuelled by the products of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and supported by the British government of the day.
The year 1793 marked the eightieth birthday celebrations of Qian Long, the Qing emperor, and Lord Macartney was sent as an ambassador to Beijing to convey Britain’s congratulations on the occasion. The British demands presented by Macartney were an exchange of ambassadors between the two countries, the admission of British ships to more ports on the Chinese coast, the fixing of trade tariffs and the making available to the British of an island base similar to the Portuguese base at Macao. However, the British had failed to understand what the attitude of a Chinese emperor would be. They assumed that Britain, as a powerful modern state, could negotiate with China as an equal party; Qian Long, on the other hand, saw Britain as just another tributary state paying homage to the Middle Kingdom. The only concession Lord Macartney secured from Qian Long was release from the obligation to make the nine-fold kowtow to the emperor. As for the rest, Qian Long knew for a certainty that China was wholly self-sufficient and had no need to trade with barbarians. The emperor wrote to the British king in terms including the following:
You will not be able to complain that I had not clearly forewarned you [about the restriction of British trade to the port of Canton only]. Let us therefore live in peace and friendship and do not make light of my words.
Despite the implied snub, the British decided to reply, and in 1795 wrote a letter to the emperor, accompanied by gifts. The emperor replied in kind, but it was made quite clear in his reply that, rather than gifts, ‘tribute had been sent by the King of England to the “Son of Heaven” ’.
Such mismatches between the attitudes of the British and the Chinese were to lead to ever-increasing friction between the two empires, complicated by the fact that at this time the ‘British’ forces in the area were actually the armies of the British East India Company, a private organisation.
Two major conflicts then arose in the nineteenth century, known as the First and Second Opium Wars, in which British and other European trading and commercial interests were ranged against the Chinese armies and navy and the Chinese suffered significant military defeats.
The First Opium War (1841–42) was settled by the Treaty of Nanking, according to which the Chinese were required to pay to Britain an indemnity of 21 million silver dollars, to open five Chinese ports to British trade and to cede Hong Kong to the British. In addition to these impositions on China, there was considerable economic and trading disruption in South China. Some trade had been carried out in the Shanghai area, but after the war ended, much of this was transferred back to Canton, and poverty and hardship rose sharply around Shanghai. This led to the eruption of perhaps one of the most unexpected Chinese revolts against the Imperial government.
During the Qing Dynasty there had been a pattern of Buddhist- and Daoist-inspired rebellions against the regime, with groups such as the White Lotus sect and the Society of Heaven and Earth carrying out sporadic revolts and getting crushed each time by the Imperial armies. Now, however, a new indigenous rising took place, inspired not by the traditional anti-establishment movements but by Christianity. Its leader, Hong Xiuchuan, came from the Hakka people of south China, and was born in 1814 in a village about thirty miles inland from Canton. It is worth considering this ‘Tai Ping’ rebellion, since not only is it one of the great ‘what if?’s of more recent Chinese Imperial history, having nearly overthrown the Qing Dynasty, but it also sheds light on the relationships between the Confucian system and the increasing exposure of the Chinese Empire to Western culture.
Hong was educated in the Confucian classics, and entered the civil service examinations several times, but without success. On one occasion when he was in Canton for the examinations, a Chinese convert of a Protestant missionary, Robert Morrison, handed to Hong a book about Christianity. Hong pocketed the book, but the historical record does not reveal whether or to what extent he read it. On the basis of what happened later, however, it is probable that he did at least glance at its contents before filing it away with other miscellaneous papers when he got home. It then seems that in the depression of yet another examination failure, Hong fell ill for a period of some weeks, during which time he claimed that he had had visions of being in a vast palace where an old man sat enthroned; the old man handed Hong a sword and commanded him to cast out demons to protect his brothers and sisters. Also in the vision was a middle-aged man whom Hong had to address as ‘Elder Brother’, and who accompanied him on his quest. Hallucination merged at that point into delirium, and Hong sprang from his bed, striking out at all around him.
Hong appeared to be greatly changed by these events, and he set off to open a school in a nearby village and become a teacher. Six years later, in 1843, a relative visited him and unearthed the book from the pile of documents in which it had languished since Hong’s vision. The relative saw what the book was, and teased Hong about owning such a work. Then, apparently for the first time, Hong read the book in detail, and in astonishment saw how the Christian doctrine in the book explained his vision, the old man representing the Christian God and the ‘Elder Brother’ being Jesus. The demons Hong had been commanded to defeat were the idols which the book said should be thrown down.
So inspired, Hong immediately baptised himself and his relative, founded a ‘Society of God’ and set out to fulfil the command from the vision. This immediately set him in opposition to his Confucian contemporaries, since in Hong’s view, the idols which were to be destroyed included family ancestral tablets. To a Confucian, this action would have been the antithesis of everything for which Confucianism stood, and he rapidly lost pupils from the school he had set up. So Hong was forced to take his new beliefs elsewhere, where he almost immediately got into further trouble when he desecrated a Daoist shrine, thus offending a specifically religious sector of society. He then returned to his native village, while a Hakka colleague, Feng Yünshan, continued to a place called Thistle Mountain, where he set up as a teacher to the sons of local farmers and continued to recruit members to the Society of God.
Hong, meanwhile, was busy writing what would become the scriptures of his movement, and he recognized that the doctrine of the role of God as an omnipotent father whom all should worship was in direct opposition to the Confucian tradition that only the emperor was able to conduct the Rites to Heaven and Earth. Hong explicitly posed the question: ‘God the Heavenly father is available to all; how can any prince monopolise the right to worship?’ Having come to this point in his thinking, Hong tried to seek more information from the publishers of the book which had started all this off, and in 1847 he contacted an American evangelist in Canton, the Reverend Issachar Roberts. Roberts doubted Hong’s understanding of Christianity, and was also unsure of his sincerity, and when Hong asked for baptism – in case his self-administered rite had not been effective – Roberts refused. Rebuffed, Hong returned home, but then heard of Feng’s success at Thistle Mountain and joined him and the three thousand supporters he had gathered.
From that point the Society of God grew rapidly and became unpopular among traditionalists because of its attacks on shrines and temples in the neighbourhood of Thistle Mountain. A turning point in the Society’s fortunes came when one of the wealthier landowners in the area sent men to seize Feng and present him to the local magistrate on charges of disturbing the public with false teachings. Despite Hong’s efforts to have Feng released under the provisions of a new edict on religious toleration which the French had extracted from the emperor, Feng remained in prison. With both Feng and Hong absent the leadership vacuum was filled by two charcoal-burners who claimed to be possessed by God and Jesus, and were accorded positions by the Society above that of Feng.
This changed the dynamic of the Society at the same time as it continued to expand at a pace that inevitably widened its sociological membership. Prosperous landlords joined, one of whom, Wei Changhui, took the opportunity to fortify his farm as a base from which to raid his rivals’ fields. This fatefully linked religious enthusiasm and armed force in the Society. Conditions in Guangdong province were such at the time that the Society of God attracted little attention from the authorities, who had more pressing problems of control to deal with, but in 1850 matters came to a head. Militia were dispatched by the authorities to arrest a known outlaw, but the troops involved took it upon themselves to rob the local inhabitants as well. However, the intended victims were not just a group of simple charcoal-burners, but keen members of Hong’s society, and they routed the militia. One of the Society’s more prosperous members was also travelling through the district en route to Thistle Mountain, and when he came across one of the defeated militia’s camps, he sought revenge on behalf of the Society by detaining the leader’s concubine. This act led directly to a declaration of war, made at the farm of Wei Changhui.
By 1851, the Society had declared a new dynasty, called the Tai Ping Tian Guo (
) or ‘Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace’ at a village called Yong-an (literally, ‘eternal peace’) in Guangxi province. The choice of this village, with its auspicious name, was probably not accidental, and the term Tai Ping Tian Guo itself was intended to resonate at a theological level. Hong himself wrote a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew including the passage:
Tian Guo refers to what is above in the sky and what is below on earth, for both are the Divine Father’s Kingdom of Heaven. Do not be deceived into thinking that it refers only to a kingdom in the sky. So when the Heavenly Elder Brother says ‘the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand’ he is predicting the establishment of Tian Guo today by the Heavenly Father and the Heavenly Elder Brother.
The term ‘Tai Ping’ was less rigorously applied. The Chinese term implies a degree of uniformity or equality, and in theory this was the official view among Hong’s followers, but in practice the Tai Ping Tian Guo was to have an aristocracy, albeit one in which the term ‘emperor’ was reserved for God, with Hong ranked as Heavenly Prince, or Lord, and sundry other princes and guardians. This aristocracy also maintained concubines with official titles, whereas the rank-and-file followers were expected to be celibate. Then, as the dynasty consolidated itself, the aristocracy adopted court dress in the style of the Ming Dynasty, and imposed draconian punishments for any rank-and-file member who was felt to have insulted the dignity of the members of the hierarchy.
The Imperial government could clearly not tolerate such actions, and sent a large army to Guangxi province to eliminate the threat. They surrounded Yong-an, but the Tai Ping broke the siege and marched towards the provincial capital, Guilin. This was the start of a campaign in which the Tai Ping armies took control of a large area of south China. Two events frustrated their ambitions, however. Firstly, having captured the city of Wuzhang on the Yangtze River from the Imperial forces, they decided to extend their campaign further down the Yangtze to secure the wealth of Nanjing, rather than moving upstream into Sichuan, which they could have used as a springboard to attack the Imperial capital at Beijing. The decision was probably inspired by the fact that Nanjing had been the base of the founder of the Ming Dynasty when he defeated the Mongol Yuan Empire, but the state of the Imperial army after repeated defeats by the Tai Ping rebels was such that an attack from Sichuan would almost certainly have succeeded. The second event frustrating Tai Ping ambitions was the outbreak in 1857 of the Second Opium War, which unified China against the Western Powers.
The final act of the Tai Ping rebellion happened after the conclusion of the Second Opium War in 1858, and was accelerated by in-fighting among the aristocratic survivors of the Tai Ping Tian Guo, leading to final defeat in 1864. Confucianism secured this limited internal triumph and the rule of the emperor once again controlled the bulk of Chinese territory, but the Empire had suffered not only the shock of a nearly successful internal challenge based on an alien ideology, but also a devastating external defeat by the Western powers. The latter was made worse by the loss of face involved in the Treaty of Tientsin, by which the Second Opium War was settled, known by the Chinese as one of the ‘unequal treaties’.
The support attracted by the Tai Ping rebellion, and the speed with which it spread, show how easily a charismatic leadership could serve to rouse a disaffected population against the Imperial authorities, despite the fact that it espoused an alien ideology.