JONATHAN SPENCE
GOD'S CHINESE SON
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan
HarperCollins Publishers
77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
Published by HarperCollins 1996 135798642
First published in the USA by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1996
Copyright © Jonathan D. Spence 1996
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 00 255584 0
Set in Granjon
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Caledonian International Book Manufacturing Ltd, Glasgow
The author gratefully acknowledges the following for their generous permission to reprint copyright materials: Australian National University Press, Canberra, for excerpts from Prescott Clarke and J.S. Gregory, Western Reports on the Taiping: A Selection of Documents (1982), permission applied for; Cambridge University Press for excerpts from C.A. Curwen, Taiping Rebel: The Deposition of Li Hsiu-ch'eng (1977); Stanford University Press for an excerpt from Dian Murray and Quin Baoqi, The Origins of the Tiandihui (1994); University of Washington Press for excerpts from The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents, volumes 2 and 3, by Franz Michael, in collaboration with Chung-li Chang (1971); and Yale University Press for excerpts from Jen Yu-wen, The Taiping Revolutionary Movement (1973), and from Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (1993).
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
For Chin Annping, and to the memory of Chin Yu-fu
. . . and there shall be Beautiful things made new, for the surprise Of the sky-children.
—John Keats, "Hyperion"
endpapers
Hong Xiuquan's hand-written response to Joseph Edkins.
This only surviving example of Hong Xiuquan's theological thinking in his own handwriting dates from the spring of 1861. The writing in black ink is by the Rev. Joseph Edkins, who visited Nanjing at that time, and constitutes an argument for the incorporeality of God. Edkins argues that all references to God's form, as they can be found in John's Gospel, the epistle to Timothy, the Book of Revelation, Isaiah, and Exodus, must not be taken literally but must all be read as figurative (yu).
Hong's comments are written across the same sheets in red ink. His displeasure can be seen at the very start, as he scores out Edkins' title and suggests his own version. In the seventh line of the essay, seven characters down, Hong erases the reference to Jesus being God's "only" son, and substitutes the word for "elder brother" (xiong). If Jesus were God's only son, then clearly Hong could not be Jesus' younger brother, and the change takes care of that. In the middle of line twelve, Hong erases the word "figurative" (yu) in relation to God's form, and writes in the word for "real" (shi). He makes the same change at the top of lines thirteen and sixteen. The heavy red scoring in the middle of the essay shows Hong's displeasure with Edkins' reading of Revelation.
At the end of Edkins' essay (see back endpaper) Hong scores out the last line which reaffirms the incorporeality of God, and writes out a poem of his own to clarify his theological points to Edkins. (The poem is translated below, p. 289.) On the back of the sheet on which he wrote the poem can be seen the imprint, also in red, of the massive Taiping state seal. Some of this red ink has bled through the paper and marked the top center of the poem. The scattered blobs of red ink across the poem reflect, perhaps, the agitation of the Heavenly King as he wrote out his response.
This document is printed here by courtesy of the British Library, Oriental and India Office Collections.
Contents
List of Illustrations.............................................................. xi
List of Maps.......................................................................... xiii
Acknowledgments.............................................................. xv
Foreword................................................................................... xix
1 | WALLS.............................................................................. 3
2 | THE WORD............................................................. 14
3 | HOME GROUND........................................................... 23
4 | SKY WAR................................................................ 34
5 | THE KEY................................................................. 51
6 | WANDERING......................................................... 66
7 | THE BASE............................................................... 79
8 | JUDGMENTS.................................................................. 96
9 | ASSEMBLING........................................................ 110
1 0 | EARTH WAR.................................................................. 126
1 1 | THE FIRST CITY............................................................ 140
1 2 | THE HUNT...................................................................... 154
13 | THE EARTHLY PARADISE.......................................... 172
1 4 | THREE SHIPS................................................................. 192
15 | THE SPLIT........................................................................ 210
1 6 | THE KILLING................................................................ 234
1 7 I FAMILY CIRCLES........................................................ 246
1 8 | THE WRONG MAN....................................................... 262
1 9 | NEW WORLDS......................................................... 268
2 0 | PRIEST-KING ............................................................... 285
2 1 [ SNOWFALL.............................................................. 298
2 2 | PARTINGS...................................................................... 316
Notes........................................................................................ 333
Bibliography of Works Cited.............................................. 373
Index........................................................................................ 389
List of Illustrations
Endpapers
Letter of the British missionary Joseph Edkins, "covered with vermilion corrections" from Hong Xiuquan Frontispiece The Taiping seal Pages'10-11
Foreign Factory Site at Canton The American Factory in Canton Karl Gutzlaff Pages 40-41
Images from the Jade Record: The Sixth Layer of Hell "Life-is-short" "Death-has-gradations"
Page 175: A Taiping household registration document Pages 212-15
Scenes from the retreat and defeat of the Taiping Northern Expeditionary Forces, 1853-1855
Page 281: Images from Hong Xiuquan's 1853 edition of Pilgrim's Progress Page 313: The Ever-Victorious Army Pages 318-21
"Pacify the Southern Bandits": Qing paintings depicting their victories over the Taiping
List of Maps
Canton and the Foreign Settlement in the 1830s, page 6 Hong's Home Ground, page 27 Hong's First Journey, 1844,page 70
Areas of God-worshipers' Control, Guangxi, 1846-1850, page 112
The Battle of Jintian, 1851, page 131
From Yongan to Nanjing,157
Nanjing, the Heavenly Capital, 1853-1864
, page 187
Greatest Extent of Taiping Control, page 217
Shanghai in the 1860s,page 301
The Flight and Capture of the Loyal King, the
Shield King, and the Young Monarch, 1864, page 327
Acknowledgments
In my struggle to understand the multileveled worlds of Hong Xiuquan, I have been helped by many friends and scholars. They need feel no responsibility for the way this book is shaped, nor for the errors of fact or fancy that it may contain, but I trust they will accept my gratitude. During two visits I made to Beijing in 1991 and 1993, and subsequently on his own visits to the United States, Wang Qingcheng was a particularly generous guide, sharing his own voluminous Taiping works, answering my endless questions, and introducing me to his former dissertation student Xia Chuntao, whose own knowledge and generosity thenceforth were equally boundless. It was thanks to Wang Qingcheng also that my wife, Chin Annping, and I were able to meet several of her grandfather Chin Yu-fu's former colleagues and students, giving us a sense of the powerful impressions that great scholar left behind him. Wang also introduced me to another leading Taiping scholar, Zhong Wendian, who looked after me in Guilin, and taught me much of the Hakka point of view. It was Zhong Wendian who in turn eased my route toward Guiping, and introduced me to my Jintian guide Huang Weilin. And it was thanks to Huang that for the first (and last) time I was able to sample the odorous Guiping lizard wine, and in his company in the mud and sultry heat of a Guangxi summer day that I saw the ribbon waterfalls flickering through the dense foliage in the foothills of Thistle Mountain. In Nanjing, it was Mao Jiaqi and Zhu Qingbao who served as my guiding spirits as I searched in the sprawling, smog-filled, broiling Yangzi city for echoes of the vanished New Jerusalem. And as if to round off all those quests, it was Willie Ruff in his flame-red Porsche who blared me into Shelbyville, Tennessee, on another summer's day, to show me where the Baptist preacher Issachar Jacox Roberts stretched his spiritual muscles in the 1830s, before he heeded the call to China, and received his chance to teach the Bible to the future Taiping Heavenly King.
My special thanks also to Judy Chiu-ti Liu, whose combination of knowledge in Chinese Christian sources and classical Chinese made her an invaluable guide both to the newly discovered Taiping prophetic books and to the tracts of the early Protestant convert Liang Afa; to Laura McDaniel, for exploring the Baptist archives in search of Roberts, and the National Archives in search of renegades and diplomats; and to Min Ye, Richard Menard, Hong Xiang and her husband, Che Wei, Liang Kan, Wen-wen Liu, Yar and Mei Woo, Nicholas Spence, and others who helped with leads and translation. The staffs of many institutions and libraries were constantly helpful, not only in the various Yale collections, but in Harvard, New York, and Washington, D.C., and overseas, especially at the Oriental and India Office collections of the British Library in London (where Frances Wood, Linda Raymond, and Graham Hutt all went out of their way to help), at the British Library newspaper depository in Colindale, at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London, at the Public Record Office in Kew Gardens, and in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In Taiwan, I benefited from exploring holdings at the Academia Simca and at the Palace Museum, and received much help from Chuang Chi-fa, Ch'en Kuo-tung, and Wang Ai-ling. At various lectures too, in Academia Sinica as at Bryn Mawr, Harvard, Washington University in St. Louis, and McGill, scholarly questions or follow-up correspondence gave me new ideas or corrected old errors.
Among experts on the Taiping period or religious fundamentalism who answered my letters of inquiry or shared their own riches of information were Stephen Averill, Richard Bohr, Ralph Covell, Joseph Davis, William Doezema, Linda Gerstein, Norman Girardot, Steven Leibo, Jessie Lutz, Susan Naquin, Eileen Scully, Audrey Spiro, J. Barton Starr, Barendter Haar, and Yu Chun-fang. In Melbourne, Jack Gregory shared his thoughts and also gave me a precious copy of the invaluable book he and Prescott Clarke compiled on Western reports on the Taiping; in London, R. G. Tiedemann shared information from his ever-growing and long- awaited bibliography of Western-language materials on the Taiping; and on various occasions Rudolf Wagner shared his great knowledge of esoteric sources and unexplored archival treasures (which were sometimes in one's own backyard).
Some of the research, and much of the traveling and thinking that led at last to this book, were conducted while I was on a MacArthur fellowship. The parts that I wrote then I have now abandoned, but false starts are part of most absorbing ventures, and I am grateful to that free-fall fellowship for making such a period of experimentation possible. The chaos of my longhand drafts was reduced to order by the calm intelligence of my typist Peggy Ryan. Betsy McCaulley kept the world at bay when it had to be so. At Norton, both Donald Lamm and Steven Forman encouraged this project from its inception, and managed to keep me hard at work by the level of their excitement rather than by invocation of deadlines. And Chin Annping, through her love, energy, and unflagging common sense, ensured that I could be totally absorbed by Hong Xiuquan but not ensnared.
Foreword
The story of Hong Xiuquan and his Taiping Heavenly Kingdom is as strange as any to be found in Chinese history. Born early in the nineteenth century to a South China farming family of modest means, and for a time employed as a village schoolteacher, Hong soon found himself caught up in the turbulent crosscurrents of Western ideas that were being introduced to China during his youth. Of these, the most important to his fate were certain strands of Christian doctrine that had been translated into Chinese—along with the Bible—by a dedicated group of Protestant missionaries and their local converts. Some intersection of Hong's own mind and the pulse of the times led him to a literal understanding of elements of this newly encountered religion, so that the Christian texts he read convinced him that he was the younger brother of Jesus, imbued by his Father God with a special destiny to rid China of the conquering Manchu demon race, and to lead his chosen people to their own Earthly Paradise.
Borne aloft on the wings of such millenarian belief, Hong began late in the 1840s to assemble an army of the "God-worshiping" faithful, who by 1850 had coalesced into the Taiping Heavenly Army. It was at the head of this army that Hong fought his destructive yet triumphant way through southern and central China, until in 1853 his combined forces seized the mighty Yangzi River city of Nanjing. Here, in a community that was at once scriptural, imagined, and rooted in the soil, they created their Taiping New Jerusalem, which remained their base for eleven years until in 1864—after twenty million people or more in the regions under their sway had lost their lives in battle or from starvation—Hong and the remnants of his army perished in their turn from famine, fire, and sword.1
The roots of the apocalyptic visions that led Hong and his followers to this passionate catastrophe go back to the second millennium b.c. Before their emergence in that time period a different pattern of belief had prevailed in many cultures—most prominently the Egyptian, the Mesopotanian, and the Indo-Iranian. According to this prior understanding, the universe displayed a delicate but sustainable balance between the forces of order and prosperity on the one hand and the forces of darkness, chaos, and destruction on the other. In the words of The Prophecies of Nefertiti, the fluctuations of the river Nile were themselves proof of such a continuing pattern:
Dry is the River of Egypt, One crosses the water on foot; One seeks water for ships to sail on, Its course having turned to shoreland. Shoreland will turn into water, Watercourse back into shoreland.2
In those days, death was seen as a silence and a perpetual waiting, without hope of an awakening. Though there might be various forms of solace brought by burial with precious possessions, and from the attention of those who survived one, there was no way back to life. In the words of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, death took one to the terminus:
To the house from which he who enters never goes forth;
To the road whose path does not lead back;
But starting perhaps as early as 1500 b.c. the Persian seer known as Zoroaster or Zarathustra gave rise to a pattern of belief we have come to call millenarian, in that it promised the possibility of a final world in which there would be "cosmos without chaos," a world of "making wonderful," without imperfections, an eternal peace beyond history, a changeless realm ruled by an unchallenged god.4 Resonant and immensely powerful, these beliefs entered the thinking of many peoples, not least those of Syro-Palestine, through whom they inspired the biblical prophetic visions of Jeremiah, Daniel, and Ezekiel, and through them came down to Jesus of Nazareth and his later follower the author of the Book of Revelation. These teachers and prophets foresaw that before this new world was attained there would be a final, apocalyptic battle between the two forces, a battle in which, after much agony, the good would triumph and the evil be driven from the earth.
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