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Opium and the Heavenly Kingdom, episode 13

Brothers Kill Brothers

In 1856 the Taiping break the Qing camps outside Nanjing and the Heavenly Kingdom has never been stronger, until Yang Xiuqing, speaking as God, demands the title of an emperor. The episode follows Hong Xiuquan and Yang into the killings that wiped out Yang and thousands of his followers and drove the Taiping's best general away, and asks who ordered the slaughter, giving the conflicting accounts their due. It leans on scholars and foreign observers; the Taiping's own voice on the killings is thin.

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Transcript

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

Last time, with its own armies failing, the Qing court turned to Zeng Guofan, a scholar official home in Hunan, chosen not for any gift for war but because he happened to be on the ground and knew the country and its people. He built an army unlike any the dynasty had: farmers recruited by officers from their own home districts, fighting beside their neighbours, and paid nearly triple the wage of the emperor's regular troops. When that army took back the river city of Wuchang in October 1854, the emperor announced that it was astonishing that "a mere scholar" could have done such a thing, and one of his counsellors warned him that a Hunanese with an army loyal mainly to himself "would not be a blessing to the empire." Meanwhile, down at Canton, the governor general Ye Mingchen answered a rising with a dragnet that caught an estimated seventy five thousand accused Taiping supporters, and with what a British consul called "a series of executions, among the most horrible for extent and manner, of which the world has any authentic records." Refugees and merchants fled down the Pearl River to Hong Kong, and the little British colony boomed. That was the dynasty fighting back, in its own way. Tonight we cross the lines and go inside the walls of the enemy it was fighting, at the very moment that enemy had never looked stronger. So let me remind you who these people were. The Taiping were the followers of Hong Xiuquan, a village schoolteacher who failed the civil service examination at Canton four times, then read a Christian tract and decided that the old man in his fevered visions had been God, and the elder brother who helped him slay demons had been Jesus Christ. Hong came to believe that he was the younger brother of Jesus, and that the demons were the idols in China's temples. Before long he was preaching against its Manchu rulers too, as the wrongful usurpers of China. In January 1851 he proclaimed the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, with himself as its Heavenly King, and his followers fought their way north until, by the time they reached the Yangtze, there were half a million of them. On 19 March 1853 they took Nanjing, the ancient capital of China, after a siege of only eleven days, and they slaughtered the Manchu garrison and its families inside. Two days later Hong announced that he had set up his court in the city. Taiping voices called it the Heavenly Capital, and that is what I'll call it when we are inside it with them. A Taiping army sent north that same year to take Beijing itself got within reach of Tianjin, before the Mongol general Sengge Rinchen walled in its camp and flooded it, drowning the army into submission. From the day he entered Nanjing, Hong Xiuquan all but vanished. He shut himself away from sight, and to his own people he became an unseen incarnation of God. His palace walls were inlaid with gold, and nearly everything his fingers touched, his chopsticks, his bowls, his writing brushes, was made of gold as well. Almost nobody was allowed in to see him except the women of the inner palace. From behind those walls his scrawled edicts, written in the vermilion ink of an emperor, were posted outside for the whole city to read. "Those who are against us will be killed," read one. "Those who obey us will be saved. No one will escape from the three of us, the Father and the sons." The sons were Hong himself and Jesus. Remember that picture: a king behind golden walls, whom his subjects almost never saw. It matters for everything that follows. Outside those walls, the dynasty had dug in. Just ten days after Nanjing fell, the Qing army that had chased the Taiping all the way from the south caught up and made camp south of the city, and it stood its ground there almost without a break from then on. A second great camp, under a Manchu general, sat across the Yangtze to the north, near the city of Yangzhou. The southern camp belonged to a far more capable man, a Chinese general named Zhang Guoliang. In the 1840s Zhang had been a bandit chief in Guangdong, the same region the Taiping came from, a kind of Robin Hood at the head of ten thousand men, whose slogans were to take from the rich to save the poor, and to kill the officials but spare the people. When imperial forces finally caught him, he went over to the emperor and took his men with him, and of all the Qing commanders, it was Zhang who really struck fear into the Taiping generals. His troops stayed safely out of range of the cannon on the city walls, and there were too many of them to scatter when Taiping horsemen swept out of the gates on raids in the dark. But Nanjing's massive walls and bricked up gates were too strong for the besiegers as well, and so the two sides settled into a stalemate, every advance by one side matched in time by revenge from the other. For all the soldiers camped around the city, the blockade was never tight, and it never really worked. And beyond the walls, the Heavenly Kingdom was a going concern. About a year after the British governor of Hong Kong steamed up to Nanjing to meet the rebels, another foreign steamer made the same trip, and a correspondent aboard wrote up what he saw. The city itself, he found, was under strict martial law, little more than a military camp, with the most rigid discipline and perfect order. Some of its streets were very wide, and kept cleaner than he was used to seeing anywhere in China. When he asked Taiping officers what it meant that their king called himself the brother of Jesus, they could not tell him, and were so plainly puzzled that he concluded nobody had ever asked them before. Upriver at the city of Wuhu, which was no longer a battlefield, he found people at their ordinary work, shops open and trade carried on as under the old regime, though the old prosperity had not come back. And he wrote that there seemed to be "nothing that can prevent their triumph", except quarrels inside the movement itself, and of those, he said, there was no sign at all. Hold on to that line. The foreign powers were watching the rebels closely. The British governor had come away from Nanjing advising strict neutrality between the two sides, and the American commissioners who studied the movement in 1853 and 1855 advised the same. The cabinet in Washington was so impressed by the lofty character of the movement that it authorized its envoy to recognize the Taiping as a government in fact, if he found the situation justified it. And a French envoy who visited Nanjing in December 1853 came away much impressed by the order and discipline he found there. It was not only the Taiping who were tearing at the empire. In 1854 and 1855, outside the imperial camps, nearly every one of China's eighteen provinces had thrown off the emperor's authority, and without setting up any government in its place, had simply destroyed the one that was there. Around Canton, rebels controlled every waterway in the province for two years, and the emperor's rule reached no further than the city itself. In October 1856 the commander of one rebel fleet even wrote to the British governor of Hong Kong, offering an alliance. Up the Yangtze, Wuchang, the river city whose recapture had so astonished the emperor, fell to the Taiping yet again. Then, in 1856, the Taiping turned on the camps that had hemmed in their capital since it fell. A brilliant series of Taiping victories smashed the imperial lines around Nanjing. For the moment, the imperial lines lay in pieces. This is the high water mark of the Heavenly Kingdom: its capital free, its enemies broken, the empire around it in pieces. And then, in that same year, came the coup, and the collapse of the Taiping leadership from within.

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

To understand what happened, we need to meet the man who actually ran the Heavenly Capital while its king stayed hidden. His name was Yang Xiuqing, and he had been among the God Worshippers, the congregations of believers in Guangxi, since before the rising. In those early days, members at prayer would sometimes be seized by a kind of fit and fall to the ground in ecstasy, crying out words of exhortation, rebuke or prophecy. The believers looked to Hong to tell them which of these words came from God and which came from the Devil. The ones Hong most often pronounced true were spoken by Yang. And Yang was said to heal the sick by praying for them, with many cured, the believers said, in a wonderful manner. Once, when imperial soldiers had Hong and his fellow founder Feng Yunshan trapped in a mountain hideout, it was Yang, in a trance, who told the brethren their leaders were in danger and sent them to the rescue, and the soldiers guarding the pass were routed. Yang did not only claim to hear God. In his trances he spoke as God the Father, in the first person, and the Taiping obeyed that voice as the voice of God himself. In the Taiping faith, the Heavenly Father and the Heavenly Elder Brother, Jesus, could come down to earth and speak through chosen men. Yang spoke for the Father, and another of the early leaders spoke for the Son. That gave Yang a very strange kind of power. As a minister, he served Hong. As the voice of the Father, he could command him. Once, at Nanjing, the Father's voice coming through Yang rebuked the Heavenly King for his harsh treatment of the women of his palace and ordered him beaten, and Hong knelt to accept the punishment before the sentence was lifted. When Hong named his kings, at the walled town of Yongan in 1851, he made his chief minister and commander in chief the Eastern King, with charge of all the states of the east. That was Yang. And Hong's proclamation added that every other king was to be under the superintendence of the Eastern King. The Taiping word for these rulers was wang, which English usually renders as king; under the Qing the same word was the title of an imperial prince. They were young men, none of them over forty in 1853, and with the enthusiasm and the recklessness of youth. There was a Western King and a Southern King, and the Southern King was Feng Yunshan, the founder who had first preached Hong's message in the hills, but he had died on the long march north. The Western King had fallen too, killed in the fighting in Hunan. That left three great captains beneath the Heavenly King when the Taiping settled into Nanjing. The first was Yang, who was made prime minister. The second was Wei Changhui, the Northern King, a powerful man who had brought some thousands of his own clan into the movement, and who now ran the board of war. The third was Shi Dakai, whom Hong called his brother and named assistant king, and who was given charge of public affairs and of dealing with foreigners. English usually calls him the Wing King, the title the Taiping gave him. On paper, the kingdom was governed by council. The kings sat as a privy council to the Heavenly King and as the supreme generals of his armies, and every important matter, every expedition and every plan of defence, went first to their council and then to the Heavenly King for his approval. Of all the young men Hong would make kings, all but two stayed entirely loyal to him to the very end, in victory and in disaster. Remember those three names, Yang, Wei and Shi, because two of them would soon be killed by their own side. With Hong withdrawn into his palace, it was Yang who took charge of the capital and the command of the armies. He ran them with a harsh discipline, beheading for fornication or drunkenness, and he began to experiment with a utopian scheme of communal land reform that he meant to carry into every region under Taiping rule. In Nanjing the Taiping shut the women up in separate buildings, and no man, not even a father or a husband, was allowed into them on pain of death. As a strategist, a commander and an administrator, Yang was the ablest man the Taiping had. It was Yang's name that went out on the great proclamations, calling on the Chinese to rise against their Manchu rulers, and Yang who signed himself general of the grand army sweeping away the Tartars and founding the new dynasty. In one of them he declared that in every city he captured he had put the greedy officials to death but harmed none of the common people, so that families could go about their business without alarm. By 1856, the Eastern King was running the Heavenly Capital as if it were his own domain. In Shanghai, rumours went round that the Heavenly King was dead, or had been pushed aside. He was neither. He was very much alive, behind his golden walls. That year Yang began to see visions of his own, in emulation of the Heavenly King. Think about what that means in a kingdom built on one man's visions. In the summer of 1856, speaking in a trance as the Heavenly Father, Yang summoned Hong and demanded that he too be hailed as the lord of ten thousand years, a salutation owed to an emperor alone. Hong himself had first taken that style, Myriad Years, along with an imperial seal, back in 1852, when his army lay before the walls of Changsha. Yang until then had borne the salutation of nine thousand years, one step below the throne. What he was asking for was to stand level with the Heavenly King. And in the Heavenly Kingdom there was no such place. Hong appeared to give way, and promised Yang the title. What happened next was done in the dark, and its circumstances are murky to this day. Here the sources disagree, and on the question that matters most: whether the Heavenly King ordered the killing. By one account, the Northern King and the Wing King were given only the task of putting the Eastern King down, and they killed not just him but his whole family and all his followers, twenty thousand men and women. By the other, the Northern and Eastern Kings, and some who supported them, were simply put to death for treason, and the stories of mass slaughter were very much exaggerated. Either way, Yang was the first to die. The Northern King's men struck, and Yang, the Eastern King, was cut down. His severed head was hung up for public display on a wall across from the Heavenly King's palace. Then the killing spread. Taiping troops massacred six thousand of the fallen king's followers, and every member of his family. The men who had fought their way together from the hills of Guangxi to the old southern capital were now killing one another inside it. The Wing King had been away from the capital when it began. He came back to find a slaughter, and when he protested at its scale, the Northern King turned on him, and he had to flee for his life, leaving behind a family that was then killed. He fled the scene of terror and made his way upriver to Anqing, the Taiping stronghold on the Yangtze. The Northern King did not outlive his victim by long. He was killed in his turn, and with him gone, the Wing King came back to Nanjing. It was Hong who had him put to death, before the year was out, and the Northern King's head was sent to the Wing King. In the chaos, men rose fast. A young officer named Li Xiucheng, who had been a poor charcoal maker in the Guangxi hills, was promoted into the top leadership of the Taiping armies. He is a name to remember. So the same year brought the Taiping a brilliant series of victories, and then the collapse of their leadership. The foreign correspondent had seen nothing that could stop them except quarrels inside the movement. Now those quarrels had come, and they had come as murder. Think for a moment about an ordinary believer in the Heavenly Capital that autumn. If the voice that spoke through Yang had truly been God's, what had the Heavenly King just done? And if it had not been God's, what else had they been told that was not true?

Of the five kings Hong had named at Yongan, only the Wing King was still alive. After the killings, Hong Xiuquan turned to the only people he could be sure of, his own family. He raised two of his own elder brothers, men with no record in war or in government, to the rank of king, and gave them a hand in running the court. The Wing King was a great fighting leader, second only to the Heavenly King in the Taiping army. He was dissatisfied with the subordinate rank he was now given. So the Wing King left. He led his army out of Nanjing, heading west toward the province of Sichuan, and he never came back. He took with him many of the kingdom's best soldiers. Far from the Heavenly Capital, he went his own way as an independent power, and he kept his army in the field until 1863, when he was captured and executed. Think about what Hong had lost in a single year: the man who ran his government, the man who ran his war office, and his greatest fighting general. And yet, from the outside, the Heavenly Kingdom still looked like a state. The year after the killings passed without any important military movement, while the Taiping government worked at consolidating its hold on the districts and cities it held. They held about three quarters of the large province of Anhui, a third of Jiangsu and a third of Jiangxi, with parts of Hunan and Hubei besides. In all, their territory covered at least seventy thousand square miles, with about twenty six million people. In the southern provinces, Taiping agents were at work stirring up the people to rise. On paper, the administration was tidy. The land was divided into departments, each department into four districts, each district into twenty five parishes, down to a village authority over every circle of twenty five families. Where the Manchu troops had been driven out, a regular monthly tax was set, considerably more moderate than the old one. The army had its own neat ladder of numbers: squads of twenty five, companies of a hundred, battalions of four hundred, regiments of sixteen hundred and divisions of sixty four hundred. By the close of 1858, the Taiping were reckoned to have between five and six hundred thousand men enrolled, and more than half a million women. The Taiping land regulations went further than any tax. All land was sorted into nine classes by what it produced, and fields were shared out by the size of each family, "so that all the people in the empire may together enjoy the abundant happiness provided by the Great God, our Heavenly Father and Universal Lord." At harvest, each local officer was to make sure the families under him had enough to eat, and put everything over into the public granary, wheat, beans, hemp, silk, fowls and money. For, as the regulations put it, "the whole empire is the universal property of our Heavenly Father", and when everyone gave everything to God, every family would be provided for, and every person "well fed and clothed." Every family of three or more had to give one member to be a soldier, while widows, orphans, the childless and the sick were spared, and fed from the public granary. And in every circle of twenty five families, the young were to go to church each day, to learn to read the holy books of the Old and New Testaments. Periodic examinations were held for literary candidates and to fill vacant offices, the Taiping version of the civil service examinations that Hong had once failed. It is a remarkable vision: a kingdom where the land belongs to God, the granaries are full, and no one goes hungry. Whether it ever worked beyond the page is another matter. In a country at war, the regulations were more a promise than a reality. Meanwhile the title of king itself began to cheapen. The rank of wang was reduced to a kind of feudal grade, open to the governors of cities and provinces and to the generals. In the beginning there had been five kings. Toward the end of Hong's reign there would be more than two thousand three hundred of them. At some point in these years, Hong made a promise never to appoint another king. It was a promise he would one day break, for someone he loved. Outside the walls, the dynasty was quick to take its chance. In the years after the coup, the imperial forces rebuilt their ranks and began digging a trench below Nanjing that would in time stretch forty five miles, guarded by more than a hundred camps. At the end of 1856 the Qing took Wuchang back from the Taiping once more, and at the end of 1857 they recovered Zhenjiang, the river city below Nanjing that commanded the Grand Canal. Things were going badly for the Taiping now, and the siege that their great victory had broken was slowly closing in again. The kingdom had land and people and paper plans. What it no longer had was anyone, apart from its hidden king, who could hold it together.

And that brings us to the one member of Hong Xiuquan's family who was nowhere near any of it. His name was Hong Rengan, and he was the Heavenly King's cousin. Years before, when Hong Xiuquan first found his new faith, Hong Rengan had been his first convert, along with their neighbour Feng Yunshan. The three of them baptized themselves in a river and took down the tablets of Confucius in their schoolrooms. Hong Rengan's older brother beat him with a stick for it, and his students abandoned the school. "Am I not the teacher?" Hong Rengan answered. "How is Confucius able to teach, after being dead so long? Why do you force me to worship him?" When his cousin and Feng went off to preach in 1844, Hong Rengan desperately wanted to go too, but his family made him stay home and teach, because he was only twenty two. He had to put the tablets back up to get his students to return, but even staying at home he baptized at least fifty or sixty converts of his own. He missed the rising itself. He arrived too late at the meeting place and found the God Worshippers gone, with imperial patrols hunting the stragglers. Qing agents burned his home village to the ground. He was kidnapped by a man who wanted the bounty on his head, escaped, and at last found refuge in Hong Kong with a Swedish missionary named Theodore Hamberg. Hamberg translated Hong Rengan's account of his cousin's visions into English and published it, hoping to convince readers abroad that the rebels worshipped the same God they did. In May 1854, Hamberg gave him money to travel to Shanghai, in the hope that he could slip across the Qing lines and up the Yangtze to his cousin in Nanjing. He loaded him down with gifts: Bible translations, books of history, maps of the world, of China and of the Holy Land, and a telescope, a thermometer and a compass. Hamberg's real hope was that once his friend reached Nanjing, he could follow and join the movement himself as a religious teacher, though only if the Taiping sent him a formal invitation. The journey was a failure. Hong Rengan fell out with his missionary hosts in Shanghai, who found an opium pipe in his room, though he said a visiting friend had left it there. And the rebels who then held Shanghai's old city, a secret society that sympathized with the Taiping, did not believe he was the Heavenly King's cousin, and refused to help him. He spent a few months studying astronomy and mathematics at a missionary school, then gave up and took a steamer back to Hong Kong. On the way he wrote a poem comparing the sound of the ship cutting through the waves to a host of ten thousand men in battle. His Swedish friend was not there to greet him. A few days after Hong Rengan left for Shanghai, Theodore Hamberg had died of dysentery, at the age of thirty five. He came back to Hong Kong in 1855, and this time it looked permanent. He found steady work as a catechist and assistant to the preachers of the London Missionary Society. A catechist is a lay teacher who instructs converts in the faith before baptism. His supervisor and closest collaborator was a Scottish missionary named James Legge, who was beginning a project to translate the whole of the Confucian classics into English. The two of them often preached together, first Legge in his newly learned Cantonese, then Hong Rengan in the Hakka dialect. And unlike his old days in the village, Hong Rengan now preached Legge's doctrine, not his cousin's. Legge did not lightly praise anyone Chinese, but he was deeply fond of his assistant, and called him "the most genial and versatile Chinese I have ever known." Another missionary described him as "a man of exceptional ability and fine character". A Chinese doctor trained in Edinburgh called him "a man of great intelligence and considerable fluency of speech." Years later, some would look back and wonder whether all that sweetness had been real, or only the clothing of a sheep, hiding a wolf within. Legge knew perfectly well that his assistant, then thirty three years old, was the Heavenly King's cousin, and he was not impressed by the rebels. He held that the Taiping were not true Christians, since their doctrine came from their Heavenly King rather than any church, and he could not accept Hong Xiuquan's belief that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. So he advised Hong Rengan constantly to put thoughts of Nanjing behind him, and to give his life instead to preaching and study in Hong Kong. Legge believed that if events went on as they were going, all of China would sooner or later be thrown open to the missionaries anyway. For a while, Hong Rengan seemed to take the advice. He visited prisoners in the jail and preached in the hospital. He taught Chinese history and literature at a college the missionaries had founded, and he led Legge through the classics he had once studied for his own abandoned dream of passing the examinations. In the missionary schools and their translated books, he learned about European and American ideas of political economy, science, medicine, government and even military science. He watched how a British colony was run: how life was ordered, what place trade had, what place the church had. And all around him Hong Kong was changing, as refugees fled the killing at Canton and wealthy merchants from the south moved their businesses to the colony. The newcomers built houses, drove up the rents, founded trading companies and filled the colony with new life, and the missionaries rejoiced that if they could not easily reach Canton, Canton was coming to them. The horror of the crackdown at Canton also cast the Qing government in a cold new light, even for foreigners who doubted the Taiping. On the mainland, the Qing would have executed him on the spot if they could catch him. In Hong Kong, he and Legge filled their days with books, sermons, and hikes in the hills above the city. But Hong Kong was a node linked to the wider world, and news came down the coast. And the news from Nanjing was not hopeful: the Heavenly Capital, he heard, was surrounded on all sides. Years later, he would describe his choice in his own words. "When I was in Guangdong and heard news that the Heavenly Capital was surrounded on all sides," he said, "I didn't hide from difficulty but risked my life to come to your aid." The gentle catechist the missionaries of Hong Kong so admired was going to risk his life to reach his cousin, a man who now badly needed an adviser he could trust. His popularity, it would turn out, cut both ways. But before we follow him, we need to go back up the Pearl River, to Canton. Because in October 1856, in the same year the Taiping turned on one another in Nanjing, a quarrel had begun at Canton over a small boat called the Arrow, and Britain and China were sliding toward a second war. Next time, we meet Harry Parkes, Britain's acting consul at Canton, and Ye Mingchen, the governor there, and we ask whether that little boat was a real grievance or just a pretext.

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