God's Chinese Son

by Jonathan Spence

  To deepen his understanding of Christian missionary work in China, Stevens has talked at length with a Chinese Christian from Canton, Liang Afa. Born in 1789 to a poor family, Liang received only four years of schooling before he had to find work, first as a maker of writing brushes, and then as a carver of the wooden blocks used in book printing. Liang was plying this trade near Canton when in 1815 the Scottish Protestant missionary William Milne hired him—even though Liang was at this time a devout Buddhist—to work on the blocks of a series of religious tracts and sections of the Bible that Milne and his Protestant co-missionaries were currently translating. Among Liang's first tasks in this new employ­ment were the printing of Chinese versions of Deuteronomy and Joshua, by means of which he learned something of the Bible's content and struc­ture.9 This knowledge was soon deepened, for Milne was an exacting master who insisted that all those in his employ attend his daily Christian services, whether they believed in Christianity or not. Even though among the Chinese listeners "some would be talking, some would be laughing at the novelty of the doctrines preached, and some smoking their pipes," Milne was undismayed. Preaching in Chinese, he challenged his congrega­tion to see the falsity of the Buddhist ways to salvation, and to choose the harder yet truer roads of Jehovah and Jesus. After much internal struggle,

  Liang was won over, and on a November Sunday in 1816 he received baptism from Milne's hands.10

  Believing, Liang began to write. He called his first Chinese tract "An Annotated Reader for Saving the World." In thirty-seven pages he told of God's power as creator, and of His Ten Commandments, and used a variety of Paul's epistles to describe God's anger and His mercy. Carving the wooden blocks himself, Liang printed two hundred copies, and had just begun distributing them in and around Canton during the spring of 1819 when he was arrested by the Chinese authorities, imprisoned, fined, and savagely beaten. The officials also confiscated Liang's house and burned all the wooden printing blocks that he had made. Undeterred, over the ensuing months he converted his wife to Christianity and bap­tized her in person. Shortly thereafter, the couple prevailed on Robert Morrison to baptize their son."

  After Milne's death in 1822, Liang worked for the London Missionary Society as an evangelist and Chinese-language teacher, and was himself ordained as a preacher in 1827. During these years he struggled to com­pose a longer work in Chinese that would fully develop his ideas on Chris­tianity and serve as an introduction to the full range of his newfound faith, and in 1832 he was done. He titled his book Quanshi liangyan— "Good Words for Exhorting the Age"—and after asking the Chinese- speaking Western missionaries to check it over for theological faults, Liang printed the book in Canton the same year.

  In the nine chapters of this book, Liang tried to encapsulate all he had learned from his fifteen years with the Westerners. He quoted passages, both long and short, from the Old and the New Testament, transcribing the strange-sounding biblical names into Chinese characters by sound rather than sense, just as his missionary teachers had. He told of the fruit the serpent led Eve and Adam to eat and of their expulsion from the garden of Eden. He told of Noah's Ark and the great flood that destroyed almost everything on the earth. He told of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. He warned his people with the words of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and encouraged them with chants of Psalms 19 and 33. He recorded all of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount from Matthew's Gospel; and gave the last chapter of the Revelation of John the Divine, which sealed the book for all time with the terrible oath of the Lord. Liang commented on those passages, sometimes briefly, other times at length, as he explored the mys­teries of God's grace and the range of human failings; he offered his own ruminations on fate and faith; and, in chapter 6, wrote out his own spiri­tual autobiography for all to see.

  Liang Afa was an expert at the printing and distribution of tracts. He travelled constantly by boat and on foot among the villages around Canton, choosing the perfect blocks, hiring extra carvers when he could find them (bargaining with them for the best price), then collating their labors while another Christian Chinese friend, named Agong, stitched the works into neat volumes. The two men also learned to use the new lithographic press that the missionaries made available to them, and were soon able to pro­duce single broadsheets with an illustration on one side and a short text on the other, or lengthy and complex evangelical works.13

  By the time Edwin Stevens met him, in 1832, Liang had begun a pro­gram of roaming the countryside around Canton, traveling as much as 250 miles and handing out as many as seven thousand Christian tracts on a single journey. Protestant missionaries had already begun illegally to prowl China's coast by sea, dropping off Bibles or tracts wherever they could go ashore. Now Liang developed a new strategy: together with Agong, he began to follow the itinerary of the Qing dynasty officials who went from town to town to administer the local Confucian examinations, hoping thus that his tracts would reach the hands of the examination candidates, an influential audience—if not necessarily a sympathetic one.14 By the mid-1830s Liang had refined this strategy further, and began to hand out his tracts near the examination hall in Canton city, where those who had proved successful at the local towns' qualifying examinations met to be tested for the second time. In no other place in southeast China could one find a larger gathering of Chinese of proven education and of potential influence in their country's life.15

  Stevens quickly saw the benefits of spreading the Christian message by means of the printed word:

  To have any sort of access to ten or twenty millions, and to leave there the Christian Scriptures and books, which may preach during the necessary absence of the living herald, is very different from entire exclusion. Nay, who will believe that of the many thousand volumes circulated there during the last three years, all are forgotten before God, and will "return void?" May we not rather indulge the hope, that at this very time these tracts are giving instruction to the inmates of some humble Chinese dwelling on the coast; yea, even carrying the true light from heaven into some heart that was lost in the darkness of paganism?"'

  One need expect no political revolution in China, thought Stevens, "we do not speak of a growing public sentiment in China, as in other countries, which is soon to burst forth in a universal call for rational liberty and the natural rights of man." But the Chinese were "as intelligent and as wronged as the lamented Poles," and had a natural openness that—were their government leaders absent—led them to see the foreigners as their friends, and to be potentially open to the Christian message.17

  That being so, how close could a Westerner in this environment come to emulating Liang? In two lengthy and adventurous expeditions with Chinese-speaking Western missionaries, one in the spring and one in the autumn of 1835, Stevens put one side of these dreams of wider tract distri­bution into effect. Taking temporary leave from his Whampoa ministry, he shipped out of Canton on an American brig, cruising along the coast of China, as far north as the mountainous inlets of Shandong, exploring the narrow waterways and mudflats of the river Min in Fujian, negotiat­ing the wide stretches of the Woosung River that led him at last to see the serried masts of the Chinese vessels in Shanghai. The trips elated Stevens, both for the number of tracts distributed and for the beauty of China, especially the coastal reaches of Fujian, which few Westerners had ever seen before. And as the foreigners sailed back, out of the local residents' lives, Stevens could reflect how he had left behind him several hundred "volumes of books, which may teach the way of salvation," books that would remind the Chinese "of the kindness of foreigners, long after the noise of the present events had died away."18

  In the brigs' longboats, with a mixed crew of Lascars and Malays, lying under a tarpaulin slung aft among the piled supplies of rice, oil, vegetables, and meat, or else hiking on foot among the fields and villages of the busy countryside, Stevens travelled with his boxes of Chinese Christian books, prepared so laboriously by Milne, Liang, Morrison, and others: translated lives of Christ, commentaries on the Ten Comman
dments, collections of homilies, Gospel elucidations, hymns. He and his companions distributed several thousand copies on the first voyage, more than twenty thousand on the second. Chinese government war junks, full of troops, often shad­owed the brigs, and Chinese patrol boats glided along behind Stevens' longboat as he probed the inner waterways. Once a cannonade was fired at his boat, and two crewmen wounded. Mounted Chinese military officers sometimes warned back the Chinese villagers, plainclothes policemen mingled with the crowds, students from local schools cried out in protest against the anti-Confucian Christians, and one grim day the local officials shredded an entire consignment of his books in front of his eyes, dropped the pieces in a basket of loose-packed straw, and set them afire.

  But despite such interdictions the books left Stevens' hands as fast as they could be unloaded and carried ashore. On some days the crowds were eager and smiling, neat and courteous, as the decorous distribution proceeded; on others, they pressed around with such uncontrollable force that Stevens clambered up on walls to escape the grasping hands, or flung the books and tracts at random up into the air above the waving arms of the potential converts. Sometimes, in lonely villages, he laid a copy on the stoop of every home. Once a huge crowd stood sodden and motionless in the driving rain as—equally soaked—Stevens shared the word. Once the Chinese onlookers stood around him with fingers on their lips, showing him they had been forbidden by their officials to speak aloud to foreigners. Yet still they took the books, as did priests in Buddhist temples, and schol­ars in their homes. Sometimes, as if in anticipation of baptismal rites, the Chinese waded out through the water to his boat before he could go ashore, and asked him for their copies.19

  With these exemplars and experiences to draw on, Stevens by 1836 has other thoughts to ponder. As one spreads God's word in China, how much should one try to be, or act, Chinese? Stevens knows something of the different adaptive skills shown by different missionaries at different times. He has been privileged by two years' friendship with Robert Morrison, and has heard how that distinguished scholar-missionary, on first arriving in China, dined with his Chinese-language teachers, ate with chopsticks, "imitated the native dress also, let his nails grow long, cultivated a queue, and walked about the Hong in a Chinese frock and thick shoes," and even said his good-night prayers "in broken Chinese."20

  Although Morrison's "Chinese habits were soon laid aside," that was not true for Karl Gutzlaff, a missionary from Pomerania with whom Stevens traveled up the coast in 1835. Gutzlaff loved to dress in the Chi­nese garb of a Fujian sailor when he traveled, or in other variants of Chinese clothes. Thus arrayed, he looked to some Chinese so like them­selves that they thought he was a foreign-born Chinese. The confusion was compounded by Gutzlaff’s uncanny skill at Chinese language: he could pick up the nuances of each local dialect after only a short period of fierce concentration. Hearing Gutzlaff speak their dialect, baffled Chinese would peer under his hat, to see if he did not have concealed there the long queue of hair that all Chinese wore.21 Such ambiguity bore advantages and dangers. "If the Chinese costume were adopted," wrote Stevens after one of his trips, "this might prolong the time of detection, but would much more diminish personal safety"—for discovery was inevitable, and heavy punishment would follow.22 News of the illegal coastal journeyings had swiftly reached the emperor, who issued a strict denunciation of those who sought "to distribute foreign books, designing to seduce men with lies,-—a most strange and astonishing proceeding!" and likened their actions to those who earlier "clandestinely brought foreign females to Canton."23

  Suppose, whether in disguise or not, one were to penetrate the walls of Canton? There were some Chinese inside who would be sympathetic— that was certain—though it was hard to tell how many. The English- language newspaper Canton Register in the spring of 1834 had noted in detail how Gutzlaffs continuation of the Chinese Monthly Magazine, a journal first conceived and written in Chinese by Milne and Liang Afa almost twenty years before, was flourishing still. Each new issue of this journal, "written in the Chinese language by a foreigner" and "printed withinside the city walls," was "delivered from the Chinese press to the agent of the editor; sent by him to the subscribers; and by them distributed gratuitously" to the Chinese, thus "making its way among the native pop­ulation of Canton." Private initiative then took over and speeded circula­tion, for "portions of their contents have been copied, and hawked about the streets for sale. Parties of Chinese have been observed clubbed together reading and explaining them." The Canton Register editor focused on the scientific and commercial information that the Chinese were thus acquir­ing, and speculated that by such means the West could "get a hold of the Chinese mind." How could the missionary not reflect that by such means one might also get a hold of the Chinese soul?24

  By 1836 the pressures are mounting along with the sense of growing opportunities. Partly because of the emperor's edict attacking the illegal voyages, and also because of new activities by Catholic missionaries operating out of Macao, the local Canton officials have felt the need to act. In early 1836 their staff raid the workshop of a leading printer in Macao, and seize there "eight kinds of foreign books." The printer has been thrown in jail, his stock confiscated. The Chinese residents of the Macao and Canton region have been given six months in which to hand over to the magistrates all foreign books that teach the religion of "Yasoo" (Jesus) or of the Lord of Heaven. If they meet this deadline, they will not be punished, but after the deadline punishment will be severer1

  And there is a final factor. Even if one enters the city and hands out religious books, the motives of the Chinese accepting the books will be mixed; that much Stevens knows. For there is always idle curiosity and greed along with good will, as he has noted on his two coastal journeys. As if to balance those Chinese with open countenance, who seemed to understand the purpose of the books and offered little presents in return— white grapes, for instance, or pears, a pinch of tobacco, a handful of millet or a little mound of salt-fish roe—others fought among themselves to add a red-jacketed book to a brown-bound one, though each was otherwise the same, or offered the books they had just received for sale in the village streets before Stevens had even left; some pressed around, wheedling, beg­ging for opium (which the brigs indeed had carried), or for medicines from the supplies the missionaries had with them, showing that desire for cash or fear of potential sickness might be their motive more than any spiritual need.26

  But in summation, reflecting on the opportunities and challenges that tract distribution in such a land offers, Stevens acknowledges no limits to his rights or to his goals:

  We have a more sure mandate to preach the gospel in all the world, than the monarch of China can plead for his title to the throne. By what right are the millions of China excluded from the knowledge of Christianity? They are most unjustly deprived of even an opportunity to make themselves happy for time and for eternity, by an authority which is usurped, but which they cannot resist; and there they have been from age to age idolaters, and are so still, cut off without their own consent from that which makes life a blessing. Against such spiritual tyranny over men's conscience, and rebellion against high Heaven, I protest; and if we take upon ourselves the consequences of governmental vengeance, who will say that we do wrong to any man?27

  3 HOME GROUND

  Hong Huoxiu, the future Heavenly King, comes to Canton for the Confucian state examinations in the early spring of 1836. It is a month since he passed the qualifying examina­tions in the small rural township of Hua county, near which he dwells. Now he must compete with the brightest scholars from the whole of Canton prefecture, which embraces fourteen counties. As always, there are thousands of candidates assembling in the huge examination compound in the eastern part of the old city, and rigorous quotas ensure that only a tiny fraction will pass. There is a portent this year: snow has fallen, the first snow in Canton in forty-six years according to older resi­dents, two full inches, which for a startling while bedecked the rooftops
and foliage in shimmering white. Such portents can be read in many ways.1

  In the years that he has been preparing for the examinations, Hong has lived surrounded by his family—his father, who has remarried after Hong's mother's death, though there are no children by this second union; two elder brothers and their wives; and one older sister. Hong also has his own new bride, named Lai, whom he married after the first young woman his parents arranged for him to marry died at an early age. Hong is the scholar of the family, and his relatives all wish him well, even though there is too little income from the family farming to keep him as a full-time student. Hong teaches in the village school—where as well as small sums in cash the payment is in food, lamp oil, salt, and tea—to earn the extra that he needs.2

  Local practice gives to those who succeed in the examinations at Canton an accolade that reminds one of those reserved for the gods at their solemn festivals. Although tiers of other examinations still lie ahead, the country people see passing the licentiate's exams in Canton as the mental and social triumph that it is, the due reward for years of sacrifice and patient study. All those who pass the final rounds for this degree, once the awards are posted, assemble dressed in red caps, blue outer garments, and black satin boots, and proceed together in sedan chairs to the Confucian temple of Canton, to pay their homage to the sage. Thence they process to the offices of the educational director to express their thanks and receive their investi­tures: two gold flowers for their red hats, a red wreath, and a cup of celebratory wine. Leaving the hall one by one, with their relatives and friends crowded around them, they are escorted home "with drums, music and streamers," to worship their ancestors and pay homage to their par­ents. The next day, with presents all prepared, they pay formal visits to their tutors, who made the successes possible.3 Any young man can nur­ture dreams like these.