Then and There Coming next Search

Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 10

The Heavenly King

Six years after his visions, Hong Xiuquan reads a Christian tract and decides he is the younger brother of Jesus, sent to rid China of demons. The episode follows Hong from that reading through the God Worshipping Society that grows among the poor of Guangxi to the rising at Jintian and the naming of the Taiping kings, and opens the season's second big question: was this a religious movement, a peasant revolution or a rising of Han Chinese against the Manchus. It hears the Taiping in their own later account of Hong's life, alongside scholars and foreign observers.

Listen in Apple Podcasts Spotify

Guangdong Guangxi China
Map drawn by Then and There on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines, rivers and lakes

Transcript

Hong Xiuquan
Hong Xiuquan. Ford & West Lith., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, Qiying, one of the officials who signed the Treaty of Nanjing, became the emperor's high commissioner for dealing with the foreigners, and within about two years China had signed four treaties, with Britain, the United States and France. Those treaties put foreigners under their own consuls' law, gave every power whatever any other power won, and let missionaries build churches in the five open ports. Opium was still against the law, yet every port on the coast had become a market for it, and at Shanghai and Canton it was carried openly through the streets. And in 1849, when the British came to claim their promised entry into the city of Canton, the people of Canton posted placards vowing to resist and paraded their militia every night, and the emperor declared he could not force the city against the unanimous opinion of its people. Shanghai was fast becoming the great port for China's tea: its share of the export rose from a seventh in 1846 to a third by 1851, and soon to well over half. We ended with a young man from a village near Canton who, back in 1837, had failed the state examinations for the third time, fallen ill and seen visions. Believing he was dying, he had called his family to his bed and told them his days were counted. In those visions he had been carried up to heaven, where an old man in a black robe wept that the people of the world took the gifts he had given them and used them to worship demons. The old man had given Hong a sword for killing demons. The old man told him, "Do not thou imitate them." The visions came and went for forty days, and then they stopped, and life went on. Hong had recovered, and gone back to teaching village boys their characters. His name was Hong Xiuquan, and this episode is about what he did with that dream. Before we go on, one new name to credit: this episode also draws on the historian Stephen Halsey, alongside the books we have been leaning on all season. And I will warn you now, this is where the season changes. Up to here it has been a story of ships and treaties and a war on the coast. From here on, there is a second war, inside China. It was the bloodiest war anywhere in the world in the nineteenth century. It starts with one man in a schoolroom, reading. So who was Hong Xiuquan? He was born in 1814, the son of a farming family in a village north of Canton, and he was clever, clever enough that his family and his village scraped together the money to keep him at his books. They were Hakka, a people we will meet properly in a moment. In imperial China, the road to everything, rank, office, honour, wealth for the whole family, ran through the state examinations, a ladder of tests on the Confucian classics that a candidate climbed from his county up to the capital. Hundreds of thousands of men sat the lowest level, and only a tiny fraction passed. Most spent their lives trying, and many ended up as village schoolteachers, which is what Hong became. Confucianism was the moral and political teaching of the ancient sage Confucius and his followers, built on duty to parents, rulers and ancestors, and it was the creed of the whole imperial state and of every man who hoped to serve it. The examinations had rungs. The first was a test held in the prefecture's chief city for the lowest degree, which made a man a licentiate, a gentleman scholar entitled to wear a scholar's robe and to sit the next rung, the provincial examination; above that came the metropolitan examination in Beijing. Hong never got past the first rung. He went up to Canton for it in 1827, again in 1836, and again in 1837, and he failed every time. Each failure was not only his. A family that had spent years of its earnings on one clever son's books lost its bet along with him. And somewhere along the way, on one of those trips to Canton for the examinations, someone in the street had handed him a set of Christian tracts called Good Words for Exhorting the Age. They were written by Liang Fa, a Chinese printer who had worked for the first Protestant missionaries and become one of their first converts, and they mixed sermons of his own with long passages of the Bible. The tracts held a good number of whole chapters of the Bible, in Robert Morrison's translation. Morrison was the first Protestant missionary in China, an Englishman who had come out to Canton in 1807 and spent years putting the Bible into Chinese. Hong glanced at them, put them away, and for years did nothing with them. Liang Fa's book was not an easy read. It was a jumble of Bible passages and the author's own sermons, warning against idols and calling men to worship the one true God and to be saved from damnation. Then, in 1843, six years after his visions, he took the tracts down and read them properly. And as he read, the tracts unlocked the secret of the dream. It all fitted. The old man in black with the golden beard who had commanded him in heaven was God. And the elder brother who had helped him fight and kill the demons was Jesus Christ. Which made Hong Xiuquan, in his own understanding, the younger son of God, the younger brother of Jesus, sent back down to earth to rid it of demons. And the demons were the idols. Every Buddhist and Daoist image, every clay god in a village temple, every spirit that ordinary Chinese families burned incense to, was a demon he had been sent to destroy. In Hong's reading, the God of the tracts was Shangdi, the Lord on High of China's oldest classics. China, he came to believe, had once worshipped the true God, and had been led astray. So to Hong this was not a foreign religion at all. It was China's own lost faith, coming home. Later, in the account his own people gave of his life, he is recorded as saying he had received his command from God himself, in God's own presence, and "the will of Heaven rests with me." It is hard to overstate what that meant to him. The failed candidate, the man the examiners had turned away again and again, had been chosen by the God of heaven. He did not wait for a missionary. Hong baptized himself, and then he went into his schoolroom and threw out the Confucian tablets. Those tablets were the plaques honouring Confucius that stood in every schoolroom, and a village schoolteacher who threw them out was throwing away his living along with his old faith. And that is exactly what happened. Hong soon lost his teaching post. His first converts were close to home. One was his cousin, Hong Rengan, and the other was a neighbour, Feng Yunshan. Hong Rengan was a younger cousin, himself a would be scholar and schoolteacher, and he is going to matter a great deal to this season, much later. For now, remember his name. He was nine years younger than Hong Xiuquan, from a neighbouring village, and he too had sat the examinations and never passed them. Feng Yunshan was a schoolteacher too, a friend who had failed the same examinations. And he turned out to be the most gifted organiser of them all.

Feng Yunshan
Feng Yunshan. Perinbaba, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Hong and Feng did not stay home. In 1844 they set out to spread their word to other villages and to scattered relatives. They walked west, out of Guangdong, the province around Canton, into the neighbouring province of Guangxi. Guangxi was poor, mountainous and wild, a frontier province of steep hills, thin soil and forest, where the emperor's government was thin on the ground and bandit gangs and secret societies were thick. Many of its hill people were not Han Chinese at all but Zhuang and Yao and other peoples of the southwest, and the Chinese settlers in the valleys were themselves divided, old families against newcomers. The secret societies were sworn brotherhoods, the best known of them the triads, which offered poor men protection and mutual help, ran smuggling and banditry, and talked of restoring the Ming, the Chinese dynasty the Manchu conquest had ended two centuries before. Some triad bands would later try to join the God Worshippers, and many of them left again, unable to live under the God Worshippers' rules. And after the Opium War, the hard times got harder: the British navy drove pirates off the coast and up the rivers into Guangxi, trade shifting away from Canton threw boatmen and porters out of work, and the bands of armed men grew. Hong did not stay out there long; by the next year he was back home. Back in his own village he went back to teaching where he could find it, and over the next two years he wrote out his faith in verse and essays: odes and tracts on the one true God, on the evils of idols, and on the virtues of the ancient sage kings. Those writings are worth a moment, because they show Hong before the war. They are moral and earnest, full of the duties of sons and the evils of gambling, opium and lust, and they look back to an age of the ancient sages when all under heaven were brothers and sisters under one God. That is the first face of Hong Xiuquan: a preacher of a stern, old fashioned morality, with a God borrowed from the foreigners and an ideal of peace borrowed from the classics. But by the time he was home in 1845, there was a new tone to his preaching as well. He had begun to speak of the Manchu rulers of the Qing as the wrongful usurpers of China. That is worth marking. The demons of Hong's dream were starting to have a political face. Feng Yunshan stayed behind in Guangxi. And it was Feng, not Hong, who built the movement. He settled in the hills around a place called Thistle Mountain, worked as a labourer and a teacher, and preached, and he gathered converts among the poorest people in those hills: farmers, miners and charcoal burners, and above all the Hakka. Thistle Mountain was a stretch of steep, forested hills north of the town of Guiping, in the east of the province, cut off and hard to reach, the sort of country where a sect could grow for years without an official taking much notice. Charcoal burners lived up in the forests, cutting wood and slowly burning it down in earth covered kilns into charcoal, which they carried down to sell in the market towns. It was hard, dirty, poorly paid work, done by men with no land of their own. The miners worked small pits in the hills, and they will matter later, because when the Taiping came to besiege walled cities, it was miners who dug the tunnels under the walls. So who were the Hakka? The word means guest people. They were descendants of migrants from the north who had moved south over the centuries, spoke their own dialect, did not bind their women's feet, and lived on the poorer hill land, among the older settlers but apart from them. The older settlers called themselves the local people, and in Guangxi the two fought, over land, over water, over everything, in feuds that by the late 1840s had become small wars of village against village. Feng's converts met in congregations, and the congregations became widely known as the God Worshippers, the worshippers of God. By 1847 there were about two thousand of them, most of them Hakka. Their worship was simple and their own. They prayed to the Heavenly Father, sang hymns, learned the Ten Commandments, and baptized new believers with water. And Hakka women, who had never bound their feet, worked in the fields beside the men, and they took their place in the congregations too. The rules were strict. Hong forbade opium, and even tobacco, and every kind of strong drink, and the Sabbath was kept. For poor men in a province awash with opium and bandits, that was not a small thing. A God Worshipper was sober, and he had brothers who would stand by him. That same year, 1847, Hong spent some months in Canton studying with an American Baptist missionary named Roberts, the first real teacher of Christianity he ever had, before Roberts put off baptizing him and Hong left for Guangxi. When Hong reached the hills and found Feng's congregations, he found a church that was already waiting for him. And though Feng was the founder, the brethren all with one accord acknowledged Hong's superiority and elected him as their leader. Hong had the visions. Feng had built the church. And from here on, Feng stood behind Hong. It was Feng's preaching, from village to village through the mountains of Guangxi, that had made the movement grow, as congregations sprang up there of their own accord. The God Worshippers smashed idols in local temples, and that brought trouble. The local gentry, the landowning degree holders who ran the countryside's affairs, saw a dangerous sect growing among the Hakka, and they used the law against it. Feng and another of the brethren were thrown in prison, mainly through the malice of a rich degree holder named Wang, who bribed the county magistrate to do it. Only Feng came back. The other man died in prison, through the brutality of the jailers. It was the brethren who had talked the same magistrate into letting him go. Then, at the end of 1848, Feng and Hong both left the hills and went home to Guangdong, and it was the middle of 1849 before they set out to rejoin the brethren in Guangxi. And while the two founders were away, the congregation in the hills was left without them, and frightened. Remember that; we will come back to what happened there. Meanwhile Guangxi was falling apart. Drought and hunger struck the province in the late 1840s, and bandit bands, some of them thousands strong, roamed the countryside, while the officials could barely hold the towns. And then, in 1850, came a pestilence. As the disease swept through the hills, word spread that the sick could be healed by praying to Hong Xiuquan's God, and the numbers of the God Worshippers exploded. At the same time the feuds between the Hakka and the local people grew vicious, and Hakka beaten in those feuds fled to the God Worshippers for refuge, willingly taking up their religion as they came. So by now the God Worshippers were not just a sect. They were a whole people within a province, with a faith, a leader, a grievance, and a growing number of men under arms. And not all of them were poor. A few men of property joined too, and brought their wealth with them. At Jintian, a village in the hills of Guiping county, a landowning family named Wei, who ran a pawnshop and had money and standing, threw in their lot with the God Worshippers. The son of that family, Wei Changhui, is going to become one of the leaders of the movement. And a young Hakka from a well off family in the same region, Shi Dakai, educated, quick and still in his teens, brought his own kinsmen and followers in. Hold on to those two names. In a few years, both of them are going to be at the centre of the worst night in the movement's history.

And now the question that will hang over the rest of this season. What was this movement, exactly? Was it a religion, men and women who had found a new God and would die for him? Was it a rising of the poor, hungry farmers and miners turning on the landlords and officials who squeezed them? Or was it a rising of the Han Chinese against the Manchu conquerors who had ruled them for two hundred years? I am not going to answer that now. I am going to show you all three, as they came, and let you weigh them as we go. And I will tell you now that the people who lived through it did not agree either. The missionaries saw one thing, the Qing officials saw another, and the men and women who followed Hong out of the hills may well have seen all three at once. In 1850 the God Worshippers began to arm. They gathered weapons, they drilled, they called the scattered congregations together, and in the second half of that year they fought their first battles with the local militias and with the emperor's troops sent to break them up. And from that moment, though nobody knew it yet, the largest civil war the world had ever seen had begun. When it ended, fourteen years later, in 1864, the kingdom Hong founded had been wiped out, it had almost brought down the dynasty, and it had left tens of millions dead. Tens of millions. Keep that in mind as we go, because the people who will pay for this war are mostly people who never chose a side. Three years after it began, the resistance of the Qing in the rich lower Yangtze country would collapse. So why could a sect of Hakka farmers and charcoal burners in the hills not simply be crushed? Part of the answer is where the dynasty's soldiers actually were. The Qing's own hereditary soldiers were the bannermen, Manchu and Mongol and some Chinese families organised into eight military divisions called banners since the conquest, settled in garrisons and paid by the state from generation to generation. Outside the capital they sat in walled quarters inside a handful of great cities, Canton, Hangzhou, Nanjing and a few others, guarding the dynasty's hold on the provinces rather than patrolling them. There were roughly a hundred and thirty thousand banner troops based in the region around Beijing. In Guangxi, there were none at all. What Guangxi had instead was the Green Standard Army, a Chinese constabulary scattered in small posts across the provinces, badly paid, often opium smoking, and better at guarding granaries than fighting campaigns. And remember the wider country they were rising in. The war with Britain and its indemnity had cost the dynasty dearly, and silver kept draining out of the country to pay for opium; as silver grew scarcer, farmers who earned copper coins but owed taxes reckoned in silver found the real weight of their taxes rising year by year. The emperor's officers in the south had spent the last decade being beaten by the British. Now they faced an enemy that believed God was on its side, and that would rather die than go home. In Beijing the court was new. The old Daoguang Emperor had died early in 1850, and his son, the Xianfeng Emperor, not yet twenty, now sat on the throne. Xianfeng was earnest, anxious and determined to be a stronger ruler than his father, and he began his reign by throwing out the ministers he blamed for bowing to the foreigners. He wanted firmness. What he got, within months, was a rebellion in the far south. At first the provincial officials had treated the God Worshippers as one more band among the dozens troubling the province, and not the most dangerous of them. By the end of 1850 that had changed. And when the reports from Guangxi got serious, the court reached for the most famous official in the empire. In October 1850, the court summoned Lin Zexu, the same Commissioner Lin of 1839, from his home, and appointed him high commissioner to put down the rebellion in Guangxi. This was the man who, in 1839, had shut the foreign merchants of Canton inside their factories until they handed over their opium, and then destroyed it on the shore at Humen. Lin had been blamed for the war and sent into exile in Xinjiang, in the far northwest, and only slowly brought back into favour; he had governed provinces again, and by 1850 he was at home, old and ill. He set out. But on the twenty second of November, he died on the road, before he ever reached the scene of the fighting. We have followed Lin Zexu since he first reached Canton to destroy the opium. He never got to face this second enemy, and it is strange to think what might have happened if he had. In his place, the court sent a string of other commanders, a Manchu grand secretary with the emperor's own commission among them, with orders to finish the rebels quickly. None of them could. Among the Qing generals in Guangxi was a tough professional soldier named Xiang Rong, who would chase the Taiping for years to come, and whose name we will meet again outside the walls of a much greater city. Meanwhile, the God Worshippers' message was sharpening. The Taiping proclamations to come would call China the land of spirits and its Manchu rulers demons, and say that the demons had usurped the land of spirits. And they would put the arithmetic plainly: the Manchu people, they said, could not number more than a hundred thousand, while the Chinese were more than fifty million. So there is the ethnic answer to our question, and the religious answer, wound together from the very start. The demons Hong was sent to slay were the men on the throne.

Through the second half of 1850 the God Worshippers were gathering at a village called Jintian, in Guiping county, in the hills of eastern Guangxi. They came by the thousands, whole families, many of them selling their land and houses and bringing everything they owned into a common treasury, because they did not mean to go home. The emperor's troops came to seize the leaders. And a congregation of farmers, armed with swords and spears, routed the outnumbered imperial soldiers. Over the following days the God Worshippers came together and found that they now numbered in the tens of thousands. Then, on the eleventh of January 1851, Hong Xiuquan declared the founding of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, with himself as its sovereign, the Heavenly King. Taiping means great peace, so the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. The name promised a kingdom of heaven on earth, and its followers called it by that name. The words great peace were old ones in China. Rebels and dreamers had used them for centuries to name a golden age of equality and plenty, and Hong had joined that old hope to his new God. Think about what Hong had just done. He had not declared a protest, or a reform. He had declared a new dynasty, with himself on its throne, against the Qing. In China there could be only one Son of Heaven. A man who claimed that title was either the next emperor or a dead man, and there was nothing in between. And now the movement had to live like an army. It took what it needed from the countryside around it. And Hong did not pretend otherwise. He said plainly that the rebels who levied contributions on the villages they took were no different from the agents the court in Beijing sent out to collect its taxes. There is the social answer to our question. To Hong, a rebel army living off the villages had as much right to their grain as the emperor's tax collectors did. It is worth saying that Hong himself was not always in the midst of his followers through these months. When the Qing troops closed in at the end of 1850, he was staying in a village some distance from Jintian, and a column of God Worshippers had to fight its way through to bring him out. The Taiping men stopped shaving their foreheads and let their hair grow, in defiance of the Manchu order that every Chinese man wear his hair in a shaved front and a long braid, and the Qing soon called them the long haired rebels. They were organised from the start like a military camp, men and women kept apart in separate camps, even husbands and wives, under a discipline that punished sex between them with death. Everything the believers owned went into a common store, the Sacred Treasury, and everything they needed came out of it. No one was to keep private wealth. That is the social answer again, in another form: a band of believers sharing everything, the rich families' money and the charcoal burners' labour in one store, under one God. One of the first proclamations warned that for that sin "There shall assuredly be no forgiveness," and ordered officers and soldiers to show the offenders no leniency at all.

Yang Xiuqing
Yang Xiuqing. Perinbaba, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Through the spring and summer of 1851 the Taiping fought their way across eastern Guangxi, with Qing armies growing around them. In September 1851 they broke out and seized a small walled town called Yongan, and there, for more than half a year, they were besieged. It was at Yongan that the Heavenly Kingdom got its shape. Yongan was a small market town, but it had walls, and food, and for the first time the Taiping had a town of their own to rule. They put out their own calendar there, a new reckoning of the year, which is something only a dynasty does. Hong issued his manifestos in imperial style, and the new kingdom framed its regulations, chose its officers and rewarded those who had distinguished themselves. Hong took a title that announced him as the king of the new dynasty of great peace. From now on, the name God Worshippers dropped away, and the movement called itself by the name of its kingdom, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. And then, in a single proclamation, Hong named his kings. It began, as everything Hong wrote began, with God. Hong told his soldiers that they should call him their lord, and nothing more. They must not call him supreme, he said, for fear of encroaching on what belonged to the Heavenly Father, and they must not call him holy, because only the Heavenly Father and the Heavenly Elder Brother, Jesus, were holy. Besides the great God, the Heavenly Father, the proclamation said, there was no one who could be called supreme, and no one who could be called ruler. The word it used for ruler, di, was the same word that formed part of the Chinese emperor's own title, huangdi, and so the Taiping would not give it to any man. That is why their sovereign was the Heavenly King, and never the emperor. Until then, the proclamation admitted, the soldiers had been told to call the top ministers and generals royal fathers. That had been a temporary indulgence to the corrupt customs of the world, it said, because only the Heavenly Father was truly entitled to be called father. It is a strange document to read. It is a king's decree, handing out kingdoms, and at the same time a sermon, anxious at every turn that no man take what belongs to God. Then came the appointments. The proclamation said, "We have now appointed the chief minister of state and general-in-chief to be designated the Eastern King, having charge of all the states in the Eastern region." There was a Western King, and a Southern King, and a Northern King, each set over his quarter of the world, and an Assistant King to help sustain the Heavenly Court. Feng Yunshan, who had built the whole movement in these hills, was the Southern King. The Western King was Xiao Chaogui, a farmer from the Thistle Mountain hills, of whom more in a moment. The Northern King was Wei Changhui, the son of the landowning family from Jintian. The Assistant King was Shi Dakai, the young Hakka from the well off family, and he will become the best general the Taiping ever had. Hong's own household was set in order too. His queen was to be styled the lady of all ladies, and his concubines royal ladies. The Heavenly King, it turned out, was going to live like an emperor. That too will matter, later. And then the line that mattered most. "All the kings above referred to", the proclamation said, were to be under the superintendence of the Eastern King. Not Feng the founder. Not one of Hong's own kin. The man set over all the other kings, the Eastern King, was Yang Xiuqing. Yang Xiuqing was a charcoal burner from the Thistle Mountain hills, poor and unlettered, who had joined the God Worshippers in the years when Hong was away. He had lost his parents as a child and grown up poor, and he could not read or write. But he was shrewd and commanding, and the people of the hills followed him. And in 1848, with Feng in prison and Hong in Guangdong, the congregation leaderless and frightened, Yang had fallen into a trance and begun to speak with the voice of God the Father himself. Another of the brethren, Xiao Chaogui, soon began to speak in trances for Jesus. When Hong returned, he accepted both voices as real. Later, when the pestilence swept the hills, Yang fell sick himself, deaf and dumb for weeks, and his followers came to believe he had taken the people's sicknesses on his own body to redeem them. Among his titles he would be called the Redeemer from Disease. Think about what that means. In a movement whose whole authority came from God speaking to Hong Xiuquan, here was a man to whom God spoke directly, out loud, in front of everyone. When Yang spoke as Yang, he was Hong's minister. When Yang spoke as the Heavenly Father, even the Heavenly King knelt and listened. And at Yongan, Yang showed everyone what that voice could do. A commander named Zhou Xineng was secretly plotting to betray the Taiping to the Qing, and Yang, speaking as the Heavenly Father before the assembled host, exposed him, and Zhou was put to death. Whatever you believe about where that voice came from, think about how it looked to the soldiers. God had seen the traitor. God spoke through Yang. One bishop, the Bishop of Victoria, wrote that Hong had made the rising a great religious movement, and had not turned a Christian brotherhood into a political rebellion. There is the religious answer, from a churchman. And maybe it was a religious movement. But look at the shape it had taken at Yongan. A Heavenly King who would not be called holy, at the head of a kingdom at war with the Qing, with a charcoal burner who spoke as God ruling over all his kings. Hold on to that arrangement, because one day it is going to tear the Heavenly Kingdom apart. So, after all that, what was it? We have seen a religion: a man who believed God had chosen him, congregations who prayed and sang and smashed idols, and kings who would not be called holy. We have seen a rising of the poor: charcoal burners and miners and refugees from feuds and famine, a common treasury, and a king who said his taxes were no worse than the emperor's. And we have seen a war of Chinese against Manchu: the demons of the dream given a face, and the Manchu rulers called usurpers of the land. My own view is that you do not have to choose, and the people who followed Hong out of the hills did not either. But keep all three in your head, because at different moments in this story, each one of them will be the one that matters. For now, in the spring of 1852, the Taiping broke out of Yongan and marched north, out of Guangxi, toward the Yangtze and the heart of the empire. They had held a besieged town for half a year, short of food and short of powder, and when they finally broke out on a night of storm and rain they cut their way through the Qing lines and kept going. They were no longer a sect hiding in the hills. They were an army with a king, a God, and a kingdom to win. And one man who should have been with them was not. Hong's cousin Hong Rengan, his first convert, had been made to stay at home in Guangdong when the others set out, and he was not with them now. His story, and the story he would tell the outside world about the Heavenly King, will take us somewhere very different. Next time, they go looking for the emperor's demons in his own cities.

Sources