God's Chinese Son

by Jonathan Spence

  Observe the separation of the men's camps from the women's, and let there be no exchanges of personal affection.

  Do not speak falsely of the laws of the state or regulations of the Sover­eign, nor pass on rumors concerning military secrets or army orders.

  Let every officer and soldier, regular or volunteer, from fifteen years old and upwards, carry with him the necessary military accoutrements, provis­ions, cooking utensils, oil and salt; let no spear be lacking its shaft.

  Let no able-bodied officer or soldier, regular or volunteer, usurp position or title and ride in a sedan chair or on horseback; neither let anyone improp­erly impress the people into his service.

  Let all officers and soldiers, regulars or volunteers, retreat to the side of the road and cry out, "Long live the Heavenly King and his son, the East King and his son, or the other princes" as the case may be; and let none stray out among the royal conveyances or the horses and sedan chairs of the royal ladies.

  Let no officer or soldier, male or female, enter into the villages to cook rice or seize food; let no one destroy the dwellings of the people or loot their property; also let no one ransack the apothecaries' or other shops, or the offices of the various prefectural and district magistrates.

  Let no one improperly coerce the people outside our ranks who sell tea or cooked rice to carry burdens for them; let no one fraudulently appropriate the baggage of any of his fellow soldiers throughout the army.

  Let no one set fire to the dwellings of the people, or urinate in the middle of the road or in private houses.

  Let no one unjustly put to death the old and the weak who don't have the strength to carry burdens.23

  The Taiping leaders use the carved wood-block printing facilities of Yongan to publish this and several other moral and military texts.2"1 To simplify their religious message, and make the unfamiliar history from another world accessible, the Taiping leaders create their own version of the basic and venerable Confucian educational primer, the Three Character Classic. Both style and content suggest the author is Hong Xiuquan him­self. In its Confucian version, the simple rhythms of the verses, with only three characters per line, and the carefully selected roster of basic Chinese characters, encourages literacy and religious knowledge at the same time. In its Taiping form, in the same format, the primer fills the same func­tions, but with a new religious focus. Rather than the story of God's anger as shown in the examples of Noah and the flood, or the destruction of Sodom, this basic Taiping text dwells on the survival of Israel and the flight out of Egypt, as presented in Exodus. The parallels of this saga to the Taiping flight and survival must have struck all the true believers:

  It is said that long ago

  There was a foreign country

  Which worshiped the True God— Israel.

  Their twelve tribes

  Traveled to Egypt.

  God protected them,

  And their descendants flourished.

  After the Egyptians turn against the Israelites, God rains plagues on Egypt, and helps Moses lead His people to safety:

  By day in a cloud,

  By night in a pillar of fire,

  The True God

  In person saved them.

  He caused the Red Sea

  Water to part in two;

  To stand like walls,

  That they might pass between.

  The people of Israel

  Walked straight ahead,

  As though on dry ground,

  And thus saved their lives.

  When their pursuers tried to pass,

  The wheels fell from their axles;

  The waters joined up again,

  And they were all drowned.

  Thus the Great God

  Displayed his great powers,

  And the people of Israel

  Were all preserved.

  When they came to the wilderness

  And their food was all gone,

  The Great God Bade them not be afraid.

  He sent down manna,

  In abundance for each of them;

  It was sweet as honey,

  And all ate their fill.25

  The primer then echoes the version of religious history Hong first wrote on Thistle Mountain during 1845, telling how the Chinese themselves, once believers in the True God, fell away from God's law and His word, until first Jesus and then Hong were sent down to earth, to destroy the demon devils and save the world from evil.

  To reinforce both the handbooks on military discipline and the moral injunctions, Hong issues his own extended version of the Ten Command­ments as God presented them to Moses at Mount Sinai. In line with the need for order in the city of Yongan, Hong emphasizes the problem of sexual impropriety and other antisocial acts, and presents his own para­phrase of the seventh commandment:

  The Seventh Heavenly Commandment: Thou shalt not commit adultery or be licentious.

  In the world there are many men, all brothers; in the world there are many women, all sisters. For the sons and daughters of Heaven, the men have men's areas and the women have women's areas; they are not allowed to intermix. Men or women who commit adultery or who are licentious are considered monsters; this is the greatest possible transgression of the Heav­enly Commandments. The casting of amorous glances, the harboring of lust­ful thoughts about others, the smoking of opium, and the singing of libidinous songs are all offenses against the Heavenly Commandment.

  A poem reads:

  Lust and lewdness most certainly constitute the worst of sins;

  Those who become monsters or demons, are truly pitiable.

  II you wish to enjoy true happiness in Heaven,

  You must curb your desires and painfully reform.26

  By the end of February 1852, Hong Xiuquan has ordered enforcement of this commandment to "all soldiers and officers throughout the army, high- ranked or low, male or female," and instructed the five kings and other senior commanders to carry out constant checks into their own units, to find any offenders against the seventh commandment. All those caught "as soon as discovered shall be immediately arrested, beheaded, and the head displayed to the public. There shall assuredly be no pardons."27

  In making this firm declaration about morality for the Taiping follow­ers, Hong Xiuquan has no compunctions about excluding himself, for clearly he enjoys the company of women. In the edict giving the correct titles for the five subordinate kings and the other Taiping officials, he orders that his wife Lai, the mother of his oldest two daughters and of his eldest son, Tiangui, be always addressed as "niangniang" or "empress."

  But in the following sentence of the same edict he adds that his other "senior imperial consorts" shall be addressed as "wang-niang," "princess- consort."28 The names of these new consorts are never clearly listed in any Taiping sources, but the Heavenly King must have chosen the first of them by February 1851, during the difficult campaign that followed the retreat from Jiangkou. For in that month, all the various "sisters-in-law" of the Taiping leaders were ordered to show no trace of jealousy to the Heavenly King, or to complain about his behavior—all those doing so would be put to death. Such "sisters-in-law," given the structure of family relationships established among the other Taiping leaders and Jesus, would have included Hong's own first wife, Lai.29

  This problem of jealousy is alluded to in another moral tract that Hong issues in Yongan, the "Ode to Youth," a lengthy poem in lines of five characters that outlines the basic patterns of deference and obligation owing to God, His son Jesus, and to all the members of human families according to their positions—parent, child, in-laws, or married couples. Though most of these are bland, or at least conventionally predictable, the stanzas on husband and wife are more personal in tone:

  The way of the husband is founded on firmness.

  In loving his wife he must have his own methods.

  If his wife is a jealous shrew

  He must never give way to fear or panic.

  The way of the wife lies in her o
bediences.

  She should not go against her husband's control.

  If she's the one who rules the roost

  It will bring misery down on the whole family.3"

  Hong Xiuquan himself, in the regulations issued in Yongan on correct nomenclature for various ranks in the Taiping hierarchy, refers to the correct titles to be given to his various "royal fathers-in-law" and "royal mothers-in-law," showing that his relationships with several women were common and accepted knowledge. Given Hong Xiuquan's "imperial" rank, perhaps this is not seen as being at variance with the morality and chastity that he imposes on his subordinates.31 But Hong has no intention of allowing gossip and speculation about his private life to spread among his followers. As he puts it in an edict issued the following year, all those who discuss the "family name, personal names, or comparative ranking" of the imperial consorts, or filter information into or out from the wom­en's palace quarters, shall be instantly beheaded.32

  The military fervor in Yongan, the constant exhortations and preach­ing, the titles and the promises, cannot hide the Taiping's deadly predica­ment. Despite the morale problems of the assembled Qing forces, the numbers of the government troops around Yongan grow steadily, and their repeated attacks whittle away at the Taiping outposts on the defen­sive perimeter. Regular Taiping sorties against the Qing base camps, though fought with great courage, are not successful, and slowly the Qing construct their own encircling wall around the city, severing the last Tai­ping supply routes and sources of food. The Taiping troops are forced to get their salt by boiling and filtering the soil from the floors of the former official salt depot of Yongan city, and to experiment with various methods for obtaining the sulfur and saltpeter needed for the manufacture of gun­powder. Among these are the crushing and filtering of old building bricks in an attempt to obtain the saltpeter accumulated there, and the manufac­turing of a chemical compound with the properties of sulfur by repeated boiling in alcohol and evaporation of either dogs' blood or horse dung.33

  Surely this cannot be the Earthly Paradise, although it has served its purpose, and given the Taiping time to harden their discipline and formu­late their doctrines. By the early spring of 1852, Hong and the Taiping leaders are preparing plans for their breakout. Either they keep these plans so secret that even the hidden Qing informers do not know about them, or the informers have all been identified and killed in the relentless hunts for traitors conducted by Yang Xiuqing. On April 3, Hong Xiuquan issues a new proclamation in poetic form to all the men and women offi­cers in his ranks, a proclamation that those used by now to his diction might correctly interpret as the call for a strategic withdrawal:

  Let the devil demons hatch their myriad schemes;

  How can they escape the sure hand of our Heavenly Father,

  Who in six days created all the rivers and mountains?

  Each of you who believes in the Spiritual Father will be a bold warrior.

  High Heaven has appointed you to slay the demon devils;

  The Heavenly Father and Heavenly Elder Brother constantly watch over you.

  Men and women officers, all grasp your swords,

  And give no heed to changing whatever clothes you happen to be wearing now.

  Unite your hearts, rouse your courage, and together slay the demons.

  Forget about your valuables and your bundles of possessions.

  Divest yourselves of worldly affections and uphold high Heaven,

  Shimmering in the light from the golden bricks and golden mansions.

  In high Heaven, in majestic splendor you will enjoy happiness.

  The least and the lowliest shall all don silks and satins,

  The men wear dragon robes and the women be garlanded with flowers.

  Let each be a faithful officer, glorying in the battle.34

  On April 5, 1852, in a carefully planned mass exodus, beginning at ten in the evening and ending before dawn, the main body of the Taiping army and their dependents leave the east gate of Yongan, where Qing defenses are weakest, cross the narrow stream that flows by the gate, and climb up into the mountain passes, heading toward the north. Before leav­ing the city, they have studded the ground with homemade mines made of gunpowder and charcoal, packed into wooden tubes and wrapped in inflammable hay or cotton wadding. As the rear guard leaves the city, it ignites long fuses made of plaited grasses or corn silk, and the erratically spaced explosions, smoke and din that follow help confuse the Qing pur­suers, just as the noise and glare of the fireworks had eased the Taiping capture of the city some six months before. The Taiping have also tied lumps of old metal and broken pots to dogs and pigs, and the terrified animals running through the smoking streets compound the din and con­fusion.35

  Despite these attempted diversionary tactics, close to two thousand peo­ple in the Taiping rear guard, trying to hold off the main Qing force, are trapped and slaughtered in the retreat. To avenge the deaths of so many of their companions, the units of the Taiping army that have marched ahead into the mountains turn back and, in the driving rain that has begun to fall, bury more mines in the soft soil of the pass, and bundle great piles of rocks into rough-and-ready cages of woven bamboo, which they secure to trees on the steep mountain slopes. As the Qing troops, closely bunched together, struggle up the rain-slick pass, the Taiping explode the mines and slash the ropes holding the cages, maiming or crushing hundreds of the enemy. They then open fire and charge, routing the Qing forces completely and leaving almost five thousand enemy dead. The surviving Taiping forces seize the reprieve offered by this providen­tial victory, and tramp up deeper into the mountains, sliding through the rain and mud toward their still unidentified promised land.36

  12 THE HUNT

  There are no shortcuts to the Earthly Paradise, especially when one has no idea where it is. The towns, hills, streams, and valleys of China spread out before one, in all directions. The demons, always at one's heels, can dictate the rhythms ot one s march, but not its purpose.

  As they leave Yongan and climb into the hills, the Taiping number around forty thousand. From the dead and dying demons they have seized Qing uniforms, banners, insignia, pouches, and other items. They have also found and carried off a cache of gunpowder, at least ten large loads, a crucial addition to their nearly exhausted stores. However ingenious, the extraction of saltpeter from old bricks and the attempts to make sulfur from blood or dung are inadequate for their needs on the march, which include the gunpowder for muskets, for mines, for cannon mounted on their boats, and the extra supplies for blasting down the walls of demon towns. Siege warfare should be easier for them since over one thousand experienced miners, employed once in Guangxi but now jobless, have joined them in Yongan.1

  As they leave Yongan, do they advance or retreat? The question is maybe not the right one. The point is that, with God's help, they have survived again. And also with the help of Big-head Yang, who as a bandit deserted them at Jintian, and as a Qing officer during the summer of 1851 stopped their troops from uniting with those of Ling Shiba; by 1852 Yang has realized that the Taiping presence helps his own prestige, and though he controls the Meng River south of Yongan he lets the Taiping move upstream to the north, and makes no attempt to use his stronger fleet to race up the river and cut the Taiping route to Guilin.2

  It is a mixture of chance and strategy that leads the Taiping forces toward Guilin, the capital of Guangxi, sheltered in its rice-rich valleys among the vivid forested peaks of karst and limestone. Guilin is a major city with strong defenses, and the walls will not fall as easily as those of Yongan. But the routes back into southern Guangxi are blocked by Qing forces, and with well-equipped Qing garrison armies holding cities to both the west and the east, it is the best Taiping strategy to drive straight through the center, moving from village to village rather than attacking other towns.3

  Luo Dagang, proven by now to be one of their subtlest and most inven­tive commanders, suggests the Taiping proceed with guile. He orders several hundred of his tro
ops to don Qing uniforms—seized from the prisoners or stripped from the fallen troops outside Yongan—and with Qing banners flying to approach Guilin in marching order, and bluff their way past the unsuspecting guards. By the chance of war, though no one in Guilin has yet heard that the Taiping have left Yongan, a commanding general is hurrying to Guilin with that news when he sees the marching troops dressed like his own army. Realizing that no Qing troops can or should be there, he gallops ahead of the Taiping columns and beats them to Guilin, alerting the defenders and ordering the great gates closed.4