Zhang Zhengmo became a convert, and Bai the traveling sect leader became his teacher, explaining the True Master’s doctrine to him and helping him plan for his next steps. Zhang donated what small amounts of money he could to his teacher, and started hoarding weapons. He also began actively recruiting other disciples to become his own students just as he himself had first been recruited: by telling them the tale of the True Master’s coming, and asking those who believed him to start raising money, to collect weapons, and finally to go forth and continue spreading the word to others.
The region of China where Zhang Zhengmo lived was an internal frontier of the empire, a heavily mountainous territory where the provinces of Hubei, Sichuan, and Shaanxi pressed up against one another and where government control had always been tenuous. Known as the Han River Highlands for the fierce tributary of the Yangzi River that carves a deep path through it, the region had an inhospitable topography that ensured it was one of the last areas in central China opened up to settlement. Its society was less firmly grounded as a result. Dense with old-growth forests and steep, heavily vegetated hills, it was attractive to the fringes of Chinese society—bandit gangs lived comfortably there, and criminals could easily find sanctuary.
But it was also, because of its late development, one of the few regions left in eighteenth-century China with excess land for clearing and cultivation. The population boom of Qianlong’s reign saw a massive influx of poor settlers, pioneers driven from the crowded southern and eastern parts of the empire who meticulously cleared its hillsides to plant crops, or who took up occupations in the hills making charcoal or working as hired laborers. By the time Zhang Zhengmo came to adulthood there, the region’s population had grown many times over and pressures on the land had increased beyond what it could possibly support, forcing competition between settlers over water and other necessary resources.9 Fitting with its tradition as a frontier society, such conflicts were more often than not settled with violence.
The Han River Highlands were a fearful and unstable place to live in the late eighteenth century, with little security from the region’s scant government supervisors, and so the White Lotus warnings of a coming apocalypse—and the promise of safety for those who followed their teachings—found ready acceptance among the settlers. By 1794 the government was aware of the increased sect activity in the region and knew in general terms that religious groups were planning for some kind of insurrection, so provincial authorities went to work trying to dismantle the White Lotus cells before they could cause trouble. The crackdown began in 1794, focusing initially on groups based in the neighboring provinces of Sichuan and Shaanxi and then expanding into Hubei. There was nothing subtle about Qianlong’s instructions for handling the White Lotus. In an edict in September of that year, he ordered that all captured sectarians should be punished according to the nature of their guilt. For spiritual leaders, that meant execution by cutting them into pieces. Those who spread the White Lotus teachings or played major roles in stirring up trouble would be beheaded. Mere followers, Qianlong ordered, should be arrested and shipped off to Manchuria as slaves.10
As instructed, the local government authorities (such as they were, for government presence had always been thin and so much of the work was done informally by village headmen) began organizing forces to round up White Lotus practitioners. Within a few months they had managed to arrest twenty teachers and more than a hundred of their followers. However, the brutality of their exhaustive house-to-house searches only made the tense situation worse. There were not enough regular troops to support such a broad operation, so local thugs were hired to conduct the searches. They demanded bribes of guilty and innocent people alike, threatening to have them arrested as sectarians if they didn’t pay up. Those who somehow managed to prove that they were not White Lotus followers—or at least who paid the thugs what they asked—were given placards to put on their doors marking them as “good people.” Everyone else, however, remained suspect, vulnerable to the gangs hunting for religious sect members, fearful of the savage punishments that would follow if anyone were to accuse them of being religious subversives.11
Like many others who shared his newfound spiritual beliefs, Zhang Zhengmo heard about the searches and abandoned his home before the inspection gangs could reach him. He returned to his native county, nearby in the same province, where he had a greater chance of secrecy and knew the lay of the land better. He continued recruiting followers as he went. By the late winter of 1796—just three years after Macartney’s dire prediction that a revolution was about to explode in China—Zhang had converted, by his estimate, more than a thousand other men and women to his religion. His planning had been patient, but on the fifteenth of February, still two months from the planned date for the general uprising, he learned that local authorities were mounting a renewed crackdown that seemed likely to reach him.12 Fearing arrest, he preempted their arrival. He called his immediate followers together and told them the time had come.
Zhang’s followers took to the roads, where they soon joined up with other cells that had grown around other recruiters with whom he had contacts. In just a few days, more than ten thousand White Lotus believers converged under Zhang’s leadership, carrying swords, guns, powder, and other supplies on their backs. They plundered villages to take supplies, conscripting their residents and stealing their food. This caused no moral discomfort to Zhang’s followers, because unbelievers, as they had been taught, would be destroyed when Buddha returned anyhow, so there was no reason to refrain from harming them now. Amassing forced conscripts and new converts, and soon numbering upward of twenty thousand, they set up barricades to block the roads from government soldiers. Then they took to the hills.
The first base for Zhang Zhengmo’s army was the mountain estate of a wealthy convert, but Zhang worried that the site was too vulnerable to attack, so he led his followers deeper into the mountains, to a strategic pass he knew they could hold. They built a camp with thousands of shacks of grass and wood, planting white banners and adopting white headbands to identify themselves as rebels.13 For weapons, they had swords and knives, along with an arsenal of three hundred matchlock rifles and six cannons carved from chestnut wood, which they supplemented by preparing hundreds of poison-tipped crossbow arrows. They set up a perimeter defense, laying makeshift land mines along the paths leading through the mountains to their camp and building a series of stone guard towers, manned by sentries equipped with guns and cannons as well as hewn logs and heavy rocks to crush attackers.14
In spite of the two years of advance preparation, however, they were poorly led. Zhang Zhengmo was reluctant to take his followers down from the hills, fearing that they would be slaughtered by the government soldiers who surely waited for them in the forested valleys below. So they dug in and remained in place as the months passed, sending down occasional raiding parties to bring back supplies. Winter gave way to spring, then summer, and in the dense heat of June a plague killed two or three thousand inside the camp.
By July they were still unable to move, but Zhang knew from his scouts that a cordon of government troops was slowly closing in. He burned his name registers in hopes that some of his followers could escape without leaving a record of their involvement. They had no real master; Zhang realized that he was no proper religious teacher. He had never even laid eyes on the rumored True Master, though the others all thought he had. They looked to him alone for guidance, so he lied to them, showing them an old sword he happened to own and telling them it had been given to him personally by the True Master. He tried to give them what faint hope he could.
When he had called for the uprising to begin, Zhang Zhengmo thought that all of the White Lotus followers from miles around would come to join them. But after the initial stage they had stopped coming, so he guessed that the others must have been captured and killed. There was no longer anywhere for his followers to go to escape, and no one who was coming to help them. Maitreya had not come. The kalpa had not turned.
He held out for two months longer, but when the government troops finally broke through to his encampment in September, he led his followers in kneeling down before them in surrender.
Before Zhang Zhengmo was executed, a government interrogator demanded to know why he and his followers had rebelled. “You are all peasants,” the interrogator said. “You receive the blessings of the emperor. He relieves you of taxes and tribute grain. He relieves your debts. When there is a flood or a drought he gives you aid. You have a human heart, and you should feel gratitude and abide by the laws. So why, under the banner of these evil teachings, did you start a rebellion? In the end, what was it you wanted?” Zhang did not contradict him (facing imminent execution, he had little choice). “We have indeed received blessings from the emperor,” he replied. “We had warm clothes and could eat our fill. We were peasants, and we were grateful.”15
But, Zhang went on, he had not initially joined the White Lotus for any reason of anger or seditiousness. “It was at a time when I was ignorant, that I first began to practice this religion,” he told his questioner. “It was only because I wanted to encourage people to do good deeds and to avoid misfortune. But then the investigations and arrests intensified, and I saw that when people who practiced our religion were captured, all of them were charged with heavy crimes. So I became afraid.” In other words, it was the vicious crackdown on the White Lotus sect that caused him to rebel. This was the crux of his confession, and it would be repeated many times over by others in his same situation—the only reason he rose up against the government, he said, was because he was afraid of it.
Taken alone, Zhang Zhengmo’s rebellion might have been unremarkable—one of a long history of attempted peasant uprisings, reckless bursts of defiance against cruel local officials that typically ended with pathetic failure and in most cases brutal execution of the leaders. But Zhang and his followers had not been nearly so alone as they thought. Unknown even to those who were caught up in it, as soon as Zhang Zhengmo launched his own uprising, the “black wind” had begun to spread. The vast range and appeal of the apocalyptic rumors that had seized Zhang’s imagination and redirected the course of his own life only became known for real once the spring of 1796 arrived and he took up his arms. As the news from Zhang’s county spread by word of mouth through the province, other uprisings began exploding spontaneously all through the hill counties of the Han River Highlands. He didn’t know it, but he was the spark that had set the woods aflame. By the time the government soldiers broke through into Zhang Zhengmo’s camp, his home province of Hubei was fully engulfed and waves of rebellion were spreading across the unprotected borders into the neighboring provinces of Sichuan and Shaanxi. By the time the government forces finally captured him, the White Lotus uprisings had already spread so far and so quickly that in the grand scheme of things he no longer mattered at all.
On February 9, 1796, the first day of the lunar new year and just six days before Zhang Zhengmo’s uprising began, Qianlong gave up his throne. The abdication had been planned for a long time, as far back as his enthronement in 1735, soon after which he had issued an edict saying that he hoped to rule for as long as his grandfather Kangxi had—sixty-one years—but no longer. Keeping his word, on the surface at least, at the close of his sixtieth year as emperor he staged an elaborate ceremony of abdication in which he formally stepped down from power and his son Jiaqing was made the new ruler of the empire.
The abdication, however, was meaningless. Jiaqing was indeed enthroned as emperor, and beyond the confines of the capital all calendars recorded the new year as Jiaqing Year 1. But within the capital, which was the place where the emperor really mattered, it was the beginning of Qianlong Year 61. Two calendars were kept, two sets of imperial annals, one reflecting the new emperorship of Jiaqing, and the other the continued reign of Qianlong as the “supreme retired emperor.” Qianlong thus continued to rule in reality while his son ruled only in name. Jiaqing was a figure with no real power, and there was nothing he could do about it.
It might have been better for China if the abdication had been sincere. For as effective a ruler as Qianlong had been in his prime, already by the time of the Macartney mission in 1793 he was nearing the end of his useful reign. Not that the British travelers noticed any outward signs of weakness. Macartney judged him to be “of great bodily strength . . . little afflicted with the infirmities of age,” and along with noting his “full and clear” eyes, Staunton wrote that he “marched firm and erect.”16 But they only met him briefly and were distracted by the novelty of the grandeur in which they found themselves. Others who spent more time at court in the years to follow would see something different. The year after Macartney’s visit, a Korean diplomat reported to his superiors that the emperor was acting erratically. Among other odd behaviors, on one occasion he ordered breakfast immediately after having finished his breakfast. He appeared to be slipping into senility. Three years later, in 1797, another Korean envoy reported that in the evening Qianlong could no longer remember what had happened in the morning, or what he had done the day before.17
One of the great dangers of a weak emperor in China was that factions from within the court could vie for power—not to usurp the emperor directly, but to assume imperial powers in his name. Such a process began to play out in the final years of Qianlong’s rule, accelerating with the decline in his mental clarity. The official who quite masterfully insinuated himself into the real seat of power in Qianlong’s dotage was Heshen, the Manchu courtier whom the British had known as the “Grand Choulaa.” Heshen had first caught the Qianlong emperor’s eye in 1775, when he was a young imperial bodyguard stationed at the gate to the inner court of the Forbidden City. He was an effete and startlingly good-looking man. A Korean who saw him in 1780 described him as “elegant in looks, sprucely handsome in a dandified way that suggested a lack of virtue.”18 Within a year of their first encounter, Qianlong was fully smitten with Heshen and gave him a stunning series of promotions, including an appointment to the Grand Council—the elite inner circle of the emperor’s advisers, which operated outside of the regular government’s supervision and could in some cases act in the emperor’s name.19
Over the two decades that followed, Heshen held on to his special position as Qianlong’s favorite minister and steadily accumulated greater powers and influence. In 1780, at the age of thirty, he was made president of the Board of Revenue, one of the six branches of the imperial government, with oversight of the imperial treasury. In that same year his son married Qianlong’s favorite daughter, joining their families together. In 1784 he became president of the Board of Civil Affairs, another of the six branches of the government, with oversight of the entire system of civil service appointments. His relationship to the elderly emperor was so close that as Qianlong’s faculties began to slip, Heshen increasingly spoke and acted on his behalf. By the 1790s, even an outside observer like George Staunton could see that Heshen “enjoyed, almost exclusively, the confidence of the emperor,” and that he “might be said to possess, in fact, under the emperor, the whole power of the empire.”20
As it happened, Heshen was also terrifically corrupt. In a time when corruption was eating through the ranks of government like a disease, he was unrivaled in the sheer audacity and extravagance of his misconduct. Through his positions of power in the capital during the 1780s and 1790s he was able to treat large swaths of the government bureaucracy as his own personal patronage network. Far from the Chinese ideal of government by humble scholars selected on the basis of virtue through merit-based exams, the officials he put into place in—to give just one example—the Yellow River Conservancy, which handled all funding for flood control over the course of China’s second-longest river, were chosen by himself, and he expected them to pay him handsomely for the privilege. The conservancy presented ample opportunity for embezzlement from the roughly six million taels of silver the government spent each year on preventing the Yellow River from flooding, and by the tail end of the eightee
nth century, with Qianlong drifting away and Heshen ascendant, only about one-tenth of the funds the government gave the conservancy actually made it into public works projects. The rest went to enriching the officials themselves, who spent the money on elaborate banquets and expensive gifts for Heshen. Even worse for those peasants who suffered in the broad floodplain of the river known for its destructiveness as “China’s Sorrow,” the officials in the Yellow River Conservancy found that it was in their best interests to allow the river to breach its dikes periodically, just to make sure that government funds would continue flowing into their pockets.21
Heshen’s corruption was vividly apparent to others at court, but to make an accusation against him or anyone in his inner circle was to invite ruthless punishment from him in retaliation. A truly upright Confucian official would accept such risk of unjust punishment stoically, but to make an accusation against Heshen also risked the far more grievous effect of criticizing the emperor himself for having trusted Heshen, which amounted to saying in effect that Qianlong had lost control of his government. If some thought it, none dared say so publicly. Thus the criticisms of conscientious officials were reserved for those lower down on the ladder of power, provincial officials attached to Heshen, while he himself remained untouchable.22
When the White Lotus rebellion began to spread, its remarkable speed and range were only partly attributable to the fact that there were so many more believers preparing for the apocalypse than even an individual sect leader like Zhang Zhengmo could have imagined. The other reason, in a perilous harmony with the first, was that there were also far fewer government forces on hand to respond to the initial uprisings than there should have been. Due to an outbreak of violence between Han Chinese settlers and the Miao minority group in Hunan province to the south of Hubei in 1795, most of the regular government forces that would normally have been stationed in the region of the first White Lotus uprisings had been transferred down to Hunan. The transfers left only skeleton garrisons in Zhang’s native province, entire counties with fewer than a hundred government soldiers each.23
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