Whatever did happen between Hong and Roberts, on July 12, 1847, Hong goes on the road again, without receiving the promised baptism.
But he does not turn north for home and family in Guanlubu, as one would expect. Instead, almost penniless except for some borrowed copper cash, with his few possessions on his back, and his cherished demon-killing sword in a scabbard he has had specially made, marked with the single character of his dream-state name of Quan, he turns his steps once more toward the west, in search of Feng Yunshan, asking his newfound Chinese Union friends to tell his family where he has gone.57
Hong walks westward along the river, too poor to pay the boat fare, feeding as best he may. He has got as far as the river town of Meizixun, more than halfway to the Guangxi border, when ten or so men, dressed as an anti-smuggling patrol, block his way. When Hong has relaxed his guard, they draw out guns and knives, demand his money and his bundle of possessions. Such acts of impersonating government personnel have been growing in numbers, though certainly they are not new. When Hong was first an examination candidate, a gang killed a magistrate and his staff and then took over their office and their duties along with their insignia, and ran the county for several months before anyone arrested them. On other occasions, gang members rode in official sedan chairs and claimed to be functionaries, ending by ransacking people's homes and assaulting their women?8 While Hong was living in Guanlubu, a hundred or more bandits just north of Canton city set up road and river barriers, apparently immune to government reprisal, demanding money from all travelers, and causing such disruptions to trade that honest merchants and opium smugglers alike have to reroute their goods due west.59 Qing government embassies to Annam can get to that neighboring kingdom only by paying "protection" to the local river bandits; and students from West Guangdong, however well prepared, cannot even get to Canton city to take the examinations.60
Perhaps if Hong had raised his thumb to represent the Heavens, worn the second button of his summer robe undone, stretched out three fingers together in a greeting, said truthfully that he was traveling from the east towards the west, or even murmured a coded version of his own name, then they would have let him be. But he has not been made privy to these mysteries, and the ten men rob him of his borrowed money, his sword and scabbard, and everything else he carries, leaving him only a single change of clothes.61
Despite this added blow Hong does not turn back. Instead he petitions the Qing prefect of the nearest city for aid. The prefect points out that Meizixun is not in fact within his jurisdiction, and thus he need bear no responsibility for Hong's losses; but sympathizing with him nevertheless, he gives Hong a string of copper coins worth close to half an ounce of silver. With this assistance, as long as he contents himself with a single meal each day, Hong can afford to take a boat once more, at least for a few stages; and the enigmatic remark of a bystander who notes his dejected countenance strengthens his resolve: "A broken cord of course is mended with a line, and when the boat comes to the bank, the way opens again."62 Once on the boat for Guangxi, Hong has a chance to meet more scholars. They pity his plight, admire his erudition, and listen with interest to his teachings on the One True God. Sometimes these scholars feed him, sometimes they give him tea, sometimes they give him cash, or persuade the boats' captains to let him off his fare. Thus it is that, within a month, he reaches Sigu village and the Huangs. When they tell him Feng Yunshan, who visited them the year before to give them his new location, is now in Thistle Mountain, Hong at once turns his steps northwards, to the hills, accompanied by the young son of the Huang family he helped to spring from prison in 1844.63
It seems that Hong, far from being dejected or exhausted by his journey and his hardships, has never felt more triumphant, more sure of his power and of the One True God's protection. For the first time, in a poem he writes on the wall of a roadside temple, instead of the regular character "Wu," which he has always previously used for "I," Hong refers to himself as "Zhen," "I the ruler," a term forbidden to ordinary subjects of the Qing, for its use is traditionally restricted to the emperors of China, and to them alone. By placing this character as the first word of the first line of his poem, Hong further emphasizes his own sense of his newfound glory; he reiterates this mood by using the same imperial personal pronoun twice more in the last four lines.
I the ruler, in the high heavens, am the Heavenly King;
You, here on earth, are devil demons.
Deceiving the hearts of God's sons and daughters,
You shamelessly dare to let men worship you.
God has sent me the ruler to descend into the world;
What will the wiles of devil demons avail you now?
I the ruler, as commander of the heavenly hosts, will show no mercy:
You and the other devil demons must quickly flee.64
On August 27, 1847, Hong reaches Thistle Mountain and greets the astonished Feng Yunshan and the assembled God-worshipers. His God has brought him home.65
8 JUDGMENTS
For the first month they are together again, during the autumn of 1847, Hong Xiuquan and Feng Yunshan devote themselves to writing. They live in a Thistle Mountain village with the Zengs, a committed God-worshiping family who have supported Feng for over a year already. The two men elaborate the details and the divine significance of Hong's original dream of 1837, and meticulously chart their own travels and the steady growth in numbers of those who have come to share their beliefs in the period since 1843. Hong polishes and adds emendations to the tracts on the Heavenly Way that he has recently been composing in Guanlubu, for now the Bible in its entirety has become available to them, even if much of its message seems to remain opaque. Their writings are distributed for them by the adult son of the Zeng household, whose zeal exceeds even that of his parents. As their writings circulate through the Thistle Mountain area, they win fresh converts for the God-worshiping Society.1
Despite Hong Xiuquan's newfound confidence in his majestic powers, expressed in his writings on the temple wall the month before, much of his sense of mission is still focused on the need to banish idols and destroy
them. Thus it is that, at least initially for Hong in Thistle Mountain, the most overt use he makes of the Bible study conducted with Issachar Roberts during the summer is of two passages that underline Hong's own feelings, and amplify passages left unexplained in Liang Afa's tracts.
The first of these concerns the way that God chose to transmit His Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai. Whereas Liang Afa simply wrote that God "sent down" the Ten Commandments to Moses at Sinai, and ordered him to "teach" and to "explain" them to the people of Israel, Hong knows now, after reading Gutzlaffs translation of Exodus, that God wrote these commands for Moses "with His own hand." He knows too that it was "with His own mouth" that God said to Moses, "I am the Lord of All and the Supreme God; you people must on no account set up any images of things in heaven above or on earth below, or kneel down and worship them."2
The second passage Hong now uses is drawn from Psalm 115, which puts the Lord's prohibitions against idolatry even more strongly than Liang—with all his lengthy commentaries—chose to do.
Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory, for thy mercy, and for thy truth's sake. Wherefore should the heathen say, Where is now their God? But our God is in the heavens: he hath done whatsoever he hath pleased. Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men's hands. They have mouths, but they speak not: eyes have they, but they see not: they have ears, but they hear not: noses have they, but they smell not: they have hands, but they handle not: feet have they, but they walk not: neither speak they through their throat. They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them.3
In rewriting or embellishing his version of his dream, Hong also incorporates new elements that overtly attack Confucius. As recently as in his "Moral Exhortations" written in 1846 and 1847 Hong still had praise for Confucians, or at least for those Confucian scholars—
and a handful of their rulers—who themselves over the past millennia had had the courage to protest at China's slow slide to superstition and idolatry. His only regret was that they did not go far enough: "One cannot say these people did not have acute awareness; but what they destroyed, burned or criticized was limited to certain lascivious shrines, Buddhist practices, and improper sacrifices, so that everything they did not destroy, burn or criticize remains with us to this day."4 Now Hong incorporates an element of anti-Confucianism into his dream of 1837, adding a long passage of dialogue that shows the Sage in a foolish or dubious light. In this expanded version of the dream, Hong's Father, the One True God, praises both the Old and the New Testaments as being "pure and without error"; by contrast, all the Confucian books are condemned by God for their "numerous errors and faults" and are accused of bearing "the ultimate guilt for inciting the demons to do wrong." God adds the charge that Confucius, through his books, "muddled and confused" the people of China, so that his reputation exceeded the True God's in that land. And Jesus adds the criticism that Confucius caused harm to Jesus' own younger brother, Hong Xiuquan. At first "arguing stubbornly" against these charges, Confucius at last falls silent. Then comes the fall:
Confucius, seeing that everyone in the high heaven pronounced him guilty, secretly fled down from heaven, hoping to join up with the leader of the demon devils. The Heavenly Father, the Supreme Lord and Great God, thereupon dispatched Hong Xiuquan and a host of angels to pursue Confucius and to bring him, bound and tied, before the Heavenly Father. The Heavenly Father, in great anger, ordered the angels to flog him. Confucius knelt before the Heavenly Elder Brother, Christ, and repeatedly begged to be spared. Confucius was given many lashes, and his pitiful pleas were unceasing. Then the Heavenly Father, the Supreme Lord and Great God, considering that the meritorious achievements of Confucius compensated for his deficiencies, granted that he be permitted to partake of the good fortune of heaven, but that he never again be permitted to go down to the world.5
Now joined through heavenly experience to the ranks of those who condemn Confucius, Hong also draws from the tradition of the Heaven- and-Earth Society, which uses his own name in cipher form to elaborate their own claims. Now it is God Himself, not brothers of the rival society, who invoke Hong's majesty through the mystery of an arcane puzzle. God, in the revised dream, chants twice to Hong, His son. In the first chant God explains how Hong's new name Quan is composed of coded elements drawn from the characters for world and rule and treasure, punningly recombined. The word for "one thousand" also, "less one line, is now attached to Hong's person when one speaks of him." One thousand less one line has three variants, since the Chinese character for "one thousand" has three strokes. Two of these variants do not yield recognizable characters in the Chinese language, but the third yields a symmetrical cross, the same word used to translate the crucifix on which Christ died for all on earth. A third pun links Hong's name to the character for "sun," while a fourth couplet defies interpretation to the uninitiated:
"One long, one short, constitutes your given name. There is a knife which has no handle and no sheen."6
In a second coded chant, God offers Hong a clue to his understanding of the book that he will read on earth, and that will bring him to true knowledge, but not before he has walked in darkness several more years, and been mocked, humiliated, and slandered by those on earth:
The cow's hoof is one-oh-five:
People's eyes can see the flagon in the wine.
See your face, eighty measures long!
In other places too one truly is alone.7
Such a poem hardly seems the sort of thing to chant when bandits stop one and ask, "Where are you going to and whence do you come?" It seems too complex to remember for the uneducated, and too esoteric to be taken for a line of conversation. But an implication is floating in the code, an implication that Hong now knows new secrets beyond those of his earlier life, and beyond those Liang's tracts and then the Bible gave him.
The son of the Zeng family with whom Feng and Hong are staying is already famous, as a God-worshiper, for the zeal with which he has ridiculed and even defaced the images in local shrines. He joins with Feng and Hong when they pray to the One True God, asking Him to confer on them a strongly defended base area where they can all settle in peace. Whether because they receive an answer to that prayer, or because the Zeng family needs a breathing space from looking after them, in October 1847 Feng and Hong move to a village a mile and a half away, still deep in the mountains, to the home of another faithful God-worshiper, Lu Liu. Here, with the Zengs, they form a plan to smash the most important and immoral idol they have yet encountered.8
This spirit, who is described by the locals as being "amazingly effective," is called King Gan, and at least five temples or shrines have been erected in his name near Thistle Mountain. Like so many local presiding deities, his roots are historical, or at least are given the appearance of so being. When Hong questions the locals about this spirit's efficacy and origins, they answer him as follows: In the district of Xiang, some miles to the northwest of Thistle Mountain, there once lived a man named Gan, who put all his trust in a local magician or geomancer. Seeking reassurance about the future of his family line, Gan was told of the perfect burial site for himself and his descendants, but, said the geomancer, the site would bring maximum good fortune only if it was first sanctified by a "bloody burial." To assure the future of his line, Gan thereupon acquired the site and killed his own mother, so that she should be the first buried there, and prove the prophecy correct. Gan's other recorded actions were little better in Hong's eyes. It was said that Gan forced his sister to have intercourse with a local wastrel, and that he loved to listen to the lascivious songs of the mountain men and women, songs that roused them up to commit immoral acts.9
Since then, the local villagers tell Hong, King Gan has proved his power in many ways: those speaking ill of him are seized with a mysterious sickness of the bowels, which can be cured only by the lavish sacrifice of pigs and cattle to King Gan. Once, when the local magistrate was passing by King Gan's temple on official business, the force of the spirit pulled the magistrate out of his sedan chair, and prevented his departure until he gave King Gan an embroidered dragon robe. Even worshipers going to his temple to burn incense or light oil lamps in his honor bang gongs loudly as they approach, to prevent any chance of bumping into him by accident.10
In the past, Hong Xiuquan cleared his schoolrooms of Confucian tablets, purged his home of the little shrines and spirits he considered improper, and challenged the spirits in other shrines with poems of defiance posted on their walls. But now he decides to take more aggressive action, for this "clearly is the demon devil, and my first task is to save the people in the community," as he tells his friends." Accompanied by Feng Yunshan, the idol-smashing Zeng, and his newfound host Lu Liu, and grasping a stout bamboo pole in his hand, Hong sets out for the most important of the temples erected in King Gan's name, just over a day's march away. After resting nearby, the men are at the shrine next morning. Shouting abuse at the bearded image of King Gan in its dragon robe, and striking at it with his staff, Hong lists ten counts of immorality of which the idol has been guilty. This is the self-same devil demon that the Heavenly Father and One True God, on Hong's journey to Heaven ten years before, ordered him to slay. "Now do you recognize me the ruler?" shouts Hong. "If you recognize me, then straightaway you had best go back down to hell." And with his willing helpers, Hong topples the image from its resting place, stomping its hat, pulling out its beard, shredding its dragon robe, digging out its eyes, and breaking off its arms. Festooning the desecrated shrine with their triumphant poems, and posting on the wall a manifesto of defiance to the devil demon Gan, Hong signs his name: "Taiping Heavenly King, Ruler of the Great Way, Quan." The next day, the four men are home on Thistle Mountain.12
The incident greatly enhances Hong's local reputation, and Feng's too, as leaders of the God-worshipers. It a
lso builds local anger against them. When the desecration is discovered, local gentry offer a reward for the arrest of those who did it. Despite the fact that there have been complaints in the past about the God-worshipers as troublemakers, the local magistrate has no desire to get embroiled with fractious mountain dwellers, and he takes no action. Hong savors his triumph a little longer, but in December 1847 he leaves Thistle Mountain and returns to his friends the Huangs, back in the valley at Sigu village. Exasperated by the magistrate's inaction, a local licentiate called Wang Zuoxin sends a group of village militia up into the hills, and "arrests" Feng Yunshan, holding him captive in a local temple. Feng's host, Lu Liu, assembles a group of God-worshipers and frees Feng. The degree holder reinforces his militia and attacks the Thistle Mountain area once again, this time seizing both Feng and Lu. He takes them down to Guiping township, and hands them over to the magistrate in person, for trial.13
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