In his absence, it is Feng Yunshan who makes the moves that will most deeply color his and Hong's own future lives. Feng was in fact in Guiping township all the time that Hong Xiuquan was there asking for him in November 1844, but staying with another member of the Zhang family, Zhang Yongxiu. A month or so after Hong left, Feng and Zhang decide to leave Guiping but not to return east, down the river, to Canton. Instead, they move due north, to the lower foothills of the mountain ranges that dominate this part of northern Guangxi province. First they stay in the village of Gulin, where the Zhangs have property. Early in 1845 they push northwest, along the valleys of the rivers that flow down there from the Thistle Mountain region, to a deeply secluded village where the Zhangs also have some land.3
All this time, Feng makes no attempt—perhaps he has no opportunity—to communicate with his family or with Hong Xiuquan back in Guanlubu. Instead, he preaches constantly the message of redemption that he has learned from Hong, and describes Hong's dream in ever-growing detail, as he seeks to spread Hong's personal encounters with his older brother Jesus, and with their Father, the One True God. As Feng makes fresh converts, and baptizes them in the way that he has also learned from Hong, the nucleus of a religious group is formed. He christens it the "Bai Shangdi Hui," "God-worshiping Society." A local family, the Zengs, come to believe his message with exemplary fervor. In 1846 Feng moves into the Zeng's home, even farther north, in the heart of the Thistle Mountain area. Feng stays there into 1847.4
What is going on? In moving ever deeper into the mountains, Feng is moving ever farther away from the state, from the centers of Confucian education and influence, from the cosmopolitan urban markets, from the richest farmland and the powerfully connected landowners, and from the descendants of the Chinese families who first opened up the area and now call themselves the "original inhabitants." Like Hong, Feng is a Hakka, and he mingles easily with the other Hakkas in the hills and mountains, and even with the mountain tribesmen among whom they dwell. Their beliefs may be "idolatrous," but they are shifting, flexible. Their songs, their stories, their mountain love games, like those of the couple in the Six Caverns, may cry out for censure and reform; but many of these people are, if not literally the dispossessed, those exercising simple crafts or performing backbreaking tasks on the very edge of subsistence, just like those to whom Jesus seemed to be talking in his sermon on the mountaintop, in the words so faithfully transcribed by Liang Afa.
Among these earliest God-worshipers are miners who work either in the silver lodes that can still be found in Thistle Mountain, or in the coal mines that dot the region; there are carpenters, blacksmiths, and rice flour grinders, itinerant barbers and fortune-tellers, sellers of medicines, salt, opium, or bean curd, boatmen, fuel gatherers, charcoal burners, herdsmen, peddlers, as well as those casual laborers who get by from day to day as best they can.5 "My family was destitute and had not enough to eat," one early God-worshiper later said of his upbringing in this region. "We lived by tilling the land, cultivating mountain slopes and hiring out as laborers, keeping to our station and accepting our poverty. At the age of eight, nine and ten I studied with my uncle, but my family was poor and I could not study longer. But I worked as a laborer in many schools and knew them well." In such an existence, as the same man noted, "it was difficult to make ends meet each day; to get enough a month was even more difficult."6 For this part of Guangxi was by reputation poor, and suffered extra blows from droughts at this same period, which brought famine conditions to many areas, leading some miners—desperate to appease their hunger by any means—to eat their own coal/
Banditry made the hard life worse. Such areas as Thistle Mountain in Guangxi—Hua county, when Hong's family first moved there in the seventeenth century, had been similar-—were natural shelters for those outside the law, providing safe havens from which they could descend to rob the richer farmers or townsmen in the valleys below, before returning to their mountain fastnesses if the state responded by sending troops against them. But at the time when Hong first preaches in Sigu village, and Feng continues with his work in Thistle Mountain, the problems of lawlessness have been compounded by a new influx of bandits into the rivers and valleys of southern and eastern Guangxi.
Strangely, it is the British who largely lie behind this latest scourge. Having fought their brief but bitter war against the Chinese government to end the restrictive Canton system, open five new treaty ports, and gain independence for their missionaries to establish churches and spread the word of God, they now proceed to use the power of their steamships and their disciplined armored fleets to start ridding the South China Sea of the pirates who have preyed there for generations.8 Since 1805 when seven of the most powerful pirate leaders met to form a federation, the pirates have carved up the water world of the South China coast between themselves, with their own secret registration systems, signals, rules of conduct, and zones of operation. Within the pirates' federation, the leaders strengthen their base of operations by marrying off their sisters, daughters, or captured women to other pirates, or create "fictive lineages" through adoptions that bond potential leaders to their own ranks through "family loyalties." Bonds are forged, too, by the male leaders' homosexual relationships with certain captives, who if the liaison blossoms might be promoted to their own commands.9
For many years the pirate confederation was led and held together by a woman, Shi Yang, a former prostitute from near Canton who became wife of one of the main pirate leaders, bore him two sons, and after her husband's death married her former husband's male lover, bearing a child to him also. Though she more or less retired from the pirates' world after her second husband's death in 1843, aged sixty-eight, she is still living as a wealthy widow near Canton, and runs a successful gambling house inside the city.10
Hong Kong, expanding rapidly as the base of British power, is after 1842 the center of this endeavor to clear the way for British trade, whether that trade be legal, in tea and silk, or illegal, in the ever-expanding sales of opium. Working sometimes independently, sometimes in uneasy conjunction with the Chinese authorities in Canton, the British seek to utilize the anti-piracy provisions of the law of the sea, and establish a pirate-free cordon around Hong Kong itself. Pirates caught within three miles of Hong Kong are tried in the British colonial court, and sentenced to death or transportation. Those caught outside those limits are either tried by the British or handed over to the Chinese for punishment." The appointment of a new assistant superintendent of the Hong Kong police in 1843, an Englishman who has served for years as a Chinese interpreter, brings a whole new range of British options, for he knows how to use local informers skillfully, and questions captured crewmen on the junks that cruise the Hong Kong waters for news of the pirates' movements. The colonial government also institutes new registration laws for Chinese residing in Hong Kong, as well as for the crews and their womenfolk on all the lighters and ferryboats that cruise the harbor, and orders registry numbers clearly painted on their craft. With dubious justification under international law, the British authorities assume sweeping powers to enter any house or boat within the colony or nearby waters if it is "wholly or partly inhabited or manned by Chinese."12
But as the British slowly begin to drive the pirates from the seas, the pirates take shelter inland along China's rivers, especially the West River, which leads from Canton city to the heart of Guangxi province. Here, by the provisions of the treaties, the British cannot follow them. Nor can the scattered groups of ill-trained and ill-equipped river police of the Qing or provincial governments do anything to check them. There are only four largish government patrol boats, each carrying fourteen troops and sailors, for all the eastern Guangxi rivers, backed by eighteen other small boats, each with two sailors and two soldiers.13
Such puny forces can do nothing against well-armed, experienced seafarers, and they are frightened, too. The pirates are famous for their relentless cruelty to captured troops, for mutilating ransom victims in their
friends' presence to pressure their families into redeeming them, for seizing the bones from lineage burial grounds and holding the bones until the clan buys them back, and for slicing off the ears or setting afire the Qing dynasty patrol officers who fall into their hands.14 If cornered, the pirates have proved that their ferocity is only deepened. They have been known to grab a lighted fuse and race to the gunpowder magazines of their vessels if boarded by patrols or British sailors, blowing themselves and their assailants to eternity rather than face capture. And if, driven from their boats and floating in the sea after a fierce engagement, they find a Qing or foreign sailor in the water, they will smash their skulls against their attackers' in a final attempt to kill them, or else lock their legs around them in a fierce embrace, so that both sink together thus entwined, to die upon the ocean floor.15
Hong Kong provides a haven of sorts, and source of fresh supplies and arms for such men, despite the British efforts to suppress them. Many pirates, disguised as ordinary merchants and fishermen, use the well- equipped Hong Kong docks to refurbish their vessels. Men like Chui-a- poo, working as a barber in Hong Kong, and used on occasion as a special agent by the British in their anti-pirate ventures, obtains from the British authorities a license to make gunpowder, which he then sells secretly to his pirate contacts."' Among Chui-a-poo's confederates are men like the Muslim soldier and deserter Yow-a-he, a half-breed born in Malaya to a Chinese migrant and a Malay mother, recruited and trained by the Ceylon Rifles, who deserts his regiment in Hong Kong, goes into hiding in a village, and sells his expertise and the names of his contacts along with the rifle issued to him in the name of her Britannic Majesty, Queen Victoria.1' In Macao, mixed marriages or liaisons between the Portuguese and the Chinese are common, and their offspring can swell the pirates' ranks, none better known than "Big-head" Yang, born of a Chinese father and Western mother, whose forces later move inland and terrorize the region near Guiping.18
Even more complex are the dealings of the Chinese woman called Akeu, who not only conducts a successful trade in sugar, cooking oil, and cotton on ships she rents or buys outright from Chinese and from Western brokers, but also sells both opium and gunpowder to many of the major pirate gangs, commodities she obtains in volume from her lover Captain ). B. Endicott, owner of the United States opium-receiving ship the Rupar- ell.19 In the 1840s, as she raises her and Endicott's children in a house she rents in Macao for $150 a year from a Portuguese landlord, she buys six- pounder guns from British master mariners on credit (at $130 for a pair), and obtains sea-spoiled opium at a discount from shipwrecked vessels. Akeu speaks some English, and has among her treasures a telescope by Cox of London, a silver watch by Guinaud Brenet, two sets of calibrated money-weighing scales, and a single-barreled English fowling piece.20 Confronted by a British patrol in Hong Kong harbor, and threatened with arrest for smuggling and abetting piracy, she jumps from the vessel to a waiting sampan and is poled to safety. But if a Chinese tries to double- cross her—as one does, by seizing two vessels of her fleet—she blackmails him with threats of vengeance from her "foreign friends" until he makes good her loss.21
The Anglo-Chinese Nanjing treaty settlement of 1842 has left the status of the opium trade unresolved. Allegedly illegal still, the sales of the drug expand, and move along the waterways beyond Canton. Probably by the time of Hong's first preaching in Guangxi in 1844, and certainly by the time that Feng has reached the heart of the Thistle Mountain region in 1846, the first of the former pirate groups, now river bandits, are entering the region around Guiping, as "protectors" of the opium runners. This area of the country is new to most of them, and so they use local bandits from the hills, or local villagers bought or coerced into service, to be their guides.22
Guiping township is a natural center of such activity, for it is situated at a junction of two rivers, the Yu and the Qian, which flow in turn into the larger river Xun, the one that Hong, like thousands of other passengers each year, traveled along to go back home. Upstream from Guiping there are rocks and rapids and a maze of smaller tributaries. Downstream, prosperous commerce, and good passage for the larger vessels. The constant loading and unloading of the vessels makes it a natural focus for bandits' attention, and the scores of little islands and inlets along the main stream's course provide natural hideaways and shelters for water-borne plunderers. Shrewdly aware of the amounts of money to be made from drugs and ransoms and the protection rackets, Guangxi men and women provide food and shelter to the river bandits. By the middle 1840s some of these "Rice Hosts," as they call themselves, have formed joint stock companies to invest in the rackets, drawing back a percentage of the profits in return.23
Many of the river bandits, too, were members of secret societies or brotherhoods during their seafaring days, and they bring their old allegiances with them to their new river domains. Strongest of the groups— really a loose confederation—are the so-called Triads, or Heaven-and- Earth Society. The initial formation of this brotherhood dated to the 1760s, when a group of restless, disaffected men—among them itinerant monks, teachers of Chinese boxing techniques, gamblers, candy makers, traveling doctors—who grew up in the south-eastern provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, bonded together. They signed a blood covenant, adopted one of their number as their "teacher," arranged themselves in a numero-logical hierarchy of "brothers," and drank together a mixture of wine and the ash from burning incense to "unify their hearts." Their plans were fluid, but included the recruitment of new members by the founding group, and the robbery of wealthy homes, storehouses, and county treasuries so as to amass the funds to "commence their great undertaking."24
The spread of the Heaven-and-Earth Society was hard for the Qing state to stop with force because it was not simply either a rebellious or a religious grouping. It was, much more, a broad-based "brotherhood" that promised local people protection and support in harsh and troubled times. As one arrested member explained to the authorities:
The name Tiandihui [Heaven-and-Earth Society] comes from the fact that Heaven and Earth are the source of being for mankind. The only meaning is respect for Heaven and Earth. Originally, the reason for people's willingness to enter the society was that if you had a wedding or funeral, you could get financial help from the other society members; if you came to blows with someone, there were people who would help you. If you encountered robbers, as soon as they heard the secret code of their own society, they would then bother you no further; if you were to transmit the sect to other people, you would also receive their payments of "gratitude." Therefore, those who want to enter the society are many in number.
Such mutual aid and "protective" activities slid easily into "protection rackets," as the testimony of a local man named Xu in Guangdong province clearly showed. His business was peddling brewer's yeast, which he bought from a store owner called Lai in Fujian, and carried back for resale in his hometown. Robbed one day by five men of all the silver he possessed, Xu hurried in desperation to Lai's shop. Lai's response was direct: "If you join the Tiandihui you can avoid being robbed on the road in the future, and I can also get back the silver that was robbed from you." Xu agreed to be initiated into the Heaven-and-Earth Society, his money was soon returned, and most importantly he was told what to do when he traveled the region in the future. If approached by robbers again, he should at once hold up his thumb—code signal for the word for "heaven." The robbers would respond by raising their little finger, to signify "earth," and he would pass on his way, unmolested.21'
Such quietly effective and inconspicuous identification signs were common throughout southeast China, though other variants were also used. Society brothers in teahouses would hold three fingers together when drinking tea or smoking their tobacco pipes. Or they would leave the second button of their outer garments unfastened, or coil their queues of hair up on their heads with the end sticking up through the center of the coil.27 They also used a choice of standard identifying phrases, unobtrusive to the uninitiated but immediat
ely recognizable to brotherhood members: "We never met before, but from today we are mutually acquainted." If asked, by robbers or strangers, where they were going, they were to say, "I've come from the east and am going to the west," but if asked whence they came, then they were to say, "I have passed under the bridge," in reference to their passage under the line of knives or swords held over their bodies as they passed through their initiations.28 Shared by members in all the southern provinces was a rhyming jingle they were also told at their initiations, so that they would never forget it: "Kaikou buliben / chushou bulisan"—"When speaking, never leave out the basic word; when extending your hand, never forget the three fingers together."2''
The "basic word" they had never to forget was "Hong," meaning vast or flood. This was the same character used as the family name of Hong Xiuquan, and though Hong's family had used the name long before there was a Heaven-and-Earth Society, for the tens of thousands of initiated brotherhood members the character had a special aura as an invocation. This aura grew in power as the brotherhood expanded in extent and influence between the 1760s and the 1840s, and created and refined its own foundation myths; that same character "Hong" had in fact been one of the many names or pseudonyms of the brotherhood's founder in the 1760s. It was also the first character of the imperial reign name of the founder of the Ming dynasty in 1368, Hong-wu, a symbol of great force and power that the brothers invoked as they spread their goal of "restoring the Ming by overthrowing the Qing" and created a fictional and patriotic lineage for their own organization that ran back into the seventeenth- century period of the Qing conquest of the Ming. Besides that, the character appeared in earlier Chinese Buddhist and messianic texts foretelling apocalyptic disasters, where it was often linked to a counter-vision of an age of "great equity" or "great peace"—Taiping.30
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