Commands are hereby issued to the brethren from afar that they may all understand the rules of ceremony.
Whereas God the Heavenly Father has sent our Sovereign down on earth, as the true Sovereign of all nations in the world, all people in the world who wish to appear at his Court must yield obedience to the rules of ceremony. They must prepare representations, stating who and what they are and from whence they come, after previous presentation of which only can audience be accorded them. Obey these commands.16
Bonham's response, delivered orally to the Taiping, is preordained: the "improper mode" of the document and the "very objectionable manner" in which it was written could not be accepted; "it was further stated to them in plain terms that productions of this nature could not for an instant be tolerated by the British authorities."17
As the interpreter Meadows elaborates in a conversation with the Heavenly King's brother-in-law Lai,
. . . while the English had, for 900 years, adored the Great Being whom he called the Heavenly Father, they on earth acknowledged allegiance to but one Lord, the Sovereign of the British Empire; and that, under no circumstances whatsoever, would they for an instant admit fealty to any other, though they were quite prepared to recognize as the Sovereign of the Chinese whomsoever the Chinese themselves might choose or submit to as such.18
Bonham, using the "boisterous" weather on the Yangzi as his excuse, but in fact fearing that some "difficulties in the way of ceremonial" might precipitate a quarrel with the Taiping leaders, stays on the Hermes, expressing his willingness to meet there personally with any of the subordinate Taiping kings. When they send Hong Xiuquan's brother-in-law Lai, Bonham stays on his ship and communicates in writing only, reasserting both Britain's neutrality in the current conflict, and reminding the Taiping leaders of the provisions of the Nanjing treaty of 1842—to which the British intend to adhere—and their firm determination to defend their property in Shanghai should any Taiping troops decide to attack that city. In the event, Bonham never goes ashore in Nanjing.
The interpreter Meadows, however, and Captain Fishbourne, do go ashore, and are well received and permitted to travel some distance within the walls. They are also granted lengthy interviews by the North King and the Wing King in a residence in the northern part of the city, not far from where the Hermes rides at anchor. After initial attempts to intimidate the two men—they are marched between double rows of Taiping retainers, ordered to kneel, remove their swords, stand while the officials remain seated, and to watch as the guides who had led them this far are publicly beaten for their daring—the interpreter Meadows responds to the North King's question whether he worshiped "God the Heavenly Father" by repeating his response that "the English had done so for eight or nine hundred years," and the atmosphere at once changes.1'' As Meadows then records his conversation with the leader who first sheltered Hong Xiuquan six years before in the hills to the east of Thistle Mountain:
He stated that as children and worshippers of one God we were all brethren; and after receiving my assurance that such had long been our view also, inquired if I knew the "Heavenly Rules" (Teen teaon). I replied that I was most likely acquainted with them, though unable to recognize them under that name, and, after a moment's thought, asked if they were ten in number. He answered eagerly in the affirmative. I then began repeating the substance of the first of the Ten Commandments, but had not proceeded far before he laid his hand on my shoulder in a friendly way, and exclaimed, "The same as ourselves! the same as ourselves!" while the simply observant expression on the face of his companion disappeared before one of satisfaction as the two exchanged glances. He then stated, with reference to my previous inquiry as to their feelings and intentions towards the British, that not merely might peace exist between us, but that we might be intimate friends.20
To Captain Fishbourne, the Taiping he meets seem "clever, decided, and determined" but also "civil and good-humored." They accept the Bibles (both English- and Chinese-language versions) that he offers them with a grave and moving gratitude, and look thoughtfully through copies of the Illustrated London News that he gives them, and are delighted when he says they can take copies home with them. Taiping visitors gaze in admiration through the spyglass that he demonstrates for them, and clamber up the ship's rigging or examine the ship's steam boilers and engines when Fishbourne at times allows them on board the Hermes. The Taiping are pleased to see the Westerners wear their hair long, like themselves, and one brave youth even takes off Sir George Bonham's top hat to see if the plenipotentiary himself has the same hairstyle as the rest. Informal trade flourishes, the Taiping trading jade and silver for the crewmen's two-edged swords, and offering to trade silver for musical boxes.21
Despite the formalism of the initial Taiping document on Britain's subservient status, the apparent sincerity and openness of the Taiping troops and officers they encounter seems to lull the British into a sense that all is moving calmly in the direction of mutual understanding. They spend their time working on their diplomatic statements and collecting copies of all the Taiping publications they can find—amassing twelve in all.22 Accordingly the reply to their diplomatic initiatives that they receive on board the Hermes on May 2—hand-delivered by the Heavenly King's brother-in-law Lai—leaves them dumbfounded. The missive is signed with the names of Yang Xiuqing, East King, using his fully panoply of titles, and of the West King, Xiao Chaogui (no Westerners are yet aware that Xiao died in combat at Changsha eight months before). As translated rapidly for Bonham by the interpreter Meadows, Yang's message reads:
A decree to the distant English, who have long recognized the duty of worshipping Heaven (God), and who have recently come into the views of our royal master, especially enjoining upon them to set their minds at rest and harbour no unworthy suspicions.
The Heavenly Father, the Supreme Lord, the Great God, in the beginning created heaven and earth, land and sea, men and things, in six days; from that time to this the whole world has been one family, and all within the four seas brethren: how can there exist, then, any difference between man and man; or how any distinction between principal and secondary birth? But from the time that the human race has been influenced by the demoniacal agency which has entered into the heart of man, they have ceased to acknowledge the great benevolence of God the Heavenly Father in giving and sustaining life, and ceased to appreciate the infinite merit of the expiatory sacrifice made by Jesus, our Celestial Elder Brother, and have, with lumps of clay, wood, and stone, practised perversity in the world. Hence it is that the Tartar hordes and Elfin Huns so fraudulently robbed us of our Celestial territory (China). But, happily, Our Heavenly Father and Celestial Elder Brother have from an early date displayed their miraculous power amongst you English, and you have long acknowledged the duty of worshipping God the Heavenly Father and Jesus Our Celestial Brother, so that the truth has been preserved entire, and the Gospel maintained.. ..
Now that you distant English "have not deemed myriads of miles too far to come" and acknowledge our sovereignty; not only are the soldiers and officers of our Celestial dynasty delighted and gratified thereby, but even in high heaven itself Our Celestial Father and Elder Brother will also admire this manifestation of your fidelity and truth. We therefore issue this special decree, permitting you, the English Chief, to lead your brethren out or in, backwards or forwards, in full accordance with your own will or wish, whether to aid us in exterminating our impish foes, or to carry on your commercial operations as usual; and it is our earnest hope that you will, with us, earn the merit of diligently serving our royal master, and, with us, recompense the goodness of the Father of Spirits.
Wherefore we promulgate this new decree of (our Sovereign) Taiping for the information of you English, so that all the human race may learn to worship Our Heavenly Father and Celestial Elder Brother, and that all may know that, wherever our royal master is, there men unite in congratulating him on having obtained the decree to ruler3
In a curt repl
y to "the Insurgent Chiefs," Bonham rejects the document, "part of which," as he puts it, he is "unable to understand, and especially that portion which implies that the English are subordinate to your Sovereign." Should either the Taiping or anyone else, he adds, "presume to injure, in any manner, the persons or property of British subjects, immediate steps will be taken to resent the injury in the same manner as similar injuries were resented ten years ago, resulting in the capture of Chinkiang, Nanking, and the neighbouring cities." (The British had, in fact, not captured Nanjing in 1842, merely threatened it with their artillery, but this is not the time for historical niceties.)24 Ordering the anchors of the Hermes raised, Bonham has Fishbourne set lull steam for Shanghai, which they reach in thirty-three hours. On the way to Nanjing the week before, when nervous Taiping garrisons, misled by the Qing propaganda, fired on the Hermes, Bonham practiced complete restraint and refused to run out his guns. On the homeward journey, when the same thing happens, he orders the Hermes to return the fire.21
Bonham's mind is now made up. While the cultured missionary-interpreter W. H. Medhurst reports to him, after perusing the twelve Taiping tracts acquired in Nanjing, that the Taiping appear to be "in some respects better" than the Europeans, Bonham brushes the suggestion aside. As he tells his superiors in Whitehall, the Taiping religion appears to him a "spurious revelation," with a true Old Testament base perhaps, but "superadded thereto a tissue of superstition and nonsense."26
The reports and tracts brought back to Shanghai by the Hermes fascinate the foreign community and cause new waves of speculation, defensive preparations, and bewilderment. One wealthy British wit—acting as if Hong Xiuquan has deposed the ruling dynasty—renames his racing pony "Rebel Chief late Emperor," entering it for the May races, which it wins. 27 The Qing officials are also perturbed by reports that Bonham has traveled to Nanjing to "dine with the Taipings," but are reassured by Bonham in a personal note that such was not the case.28 The French, who have their own sizable foreign area in Shanghai, are anxious to repeat the initiative of the British but find it hard to make the journey to Nanjing, since there is only one French steam-driven man-of-war in the region, the Cassini. The captain of this vessel, Franjois de Plas, is not only an experienced career officer but a recent convert to the Catholic faith, who successfully petitioned the French government to assign him a ship in which he might visit "every point of the globe in which pious missionaries have tried to spread God's word."2 ' In France in 1851 de Plas slowly assembled a group of officers and midshipmen who shared his sentiments and goals, and traveled in person to Rome, where the Pope blessed his project. For de Plas, the Cassini, with its two paddle wheels driven by 200-horsepower engines, six cannon, specially constructed chapel, and crew of 120, is a true vessel of God. 50
De Plas is torn constantly by his own desire for action, the need to defend the Catholic community farther down the coast in Ningbo as well as those in Shanghai, visits for patrol purposes or refitting the ship to Macao and Hong Kong, and the contradictory instructions and requests of the French consul in Shanghai.31 The confusion of the period is compounded when, in September 1853, Chinese secret-society members—not acting in any coordinated way with the Taiping armies—seize much of the Chinese city of Shanghai, causing the Qing officials either to flee or to take refuge with the foreigners in their special concession areas. Though the foreign community has prepared for such a contingency some time before with the training of militia and the construction of ditches and communicating roads, the disruption of trade leaves them in continuous anxiety.32 For the French residents, there are several complicating factors. Firstly, the French concession area is the actual neighbor of the Chinese city, where the secret societies now hold sway, and hence it is almost impossible to avoid daily tensions and clashes, or problems over sharing out the jurisdictions of roadblocks and bridge defense with the British. Secondly, the French have taken it upon themselves, ever since the treaty settlement of 1842, to be the guardians of the Catholic missionaries in China. Hence the grim news of the maltreatment and the killings of Catholic Chinese converts by the Taiping in Nanjing and other cities, gives de Plas an added urgency to go to Nanjing, and see if he can get some formal diplomatic agreements and promises of religious toleration more effective than those acquired by Bonham.33
Captain de Plas also has trouble on his hands as he tries to moor the Cassini in such a position off the Shanghai waterfront that its guns can cover both the newly built Catholic cathedral at one end of the stretch and the French consulate at the other, while attempting at the same time to avoid the erratic fire kept up in the waterway between the boats of the secret societies and the Qing waterborne forces.34 The immense ransoms demanded by secret-society members from the Chinese Catholic converts in Shanghai—as much as ten thousand taels from certain wealthy families of the faithful—further compound his problems of when or how to intervene to protect his charges. And, as a strictly private agenda of his own, de Plas lives in hopes that the recently widowed British consul, Rutherford Alcock, a man of "elevated soul and an upright heart," will soon be converted to Catholicism for he seems to de Plas to be "not far from abjuring his protestant faith."
It is only in November 1853, six months after the British return, that Captain de Plas receives permission to attempt the voyage to Nanjing, to make a reconnaissance and help the French diplomats meet with the Taiping leaders. To his alarm, instead of the consul or a junior diplomat coming with him, the French minister M. de Bourboulon decides to make the journey in person, and to bring his wife with him. His wife, an Englishwoman and a Protestant, takes pleasure in denying the divinity of Jesus and insisting that he is nothing more than a great philosopher. Thus what might have been a simple if risky venture becomes one fraught with diplomatic and personal niceties. The minister placates de Plas by telling him the goal of the journey is nothing less than "the extension of French protection over the Catholics" of Nanjing.36
Leaving Shanghai on November 30, the Cassini is after a few hours shrouded in fog at the mouth of the Yangzi, and forced to anchor. Even after the weather clears, it is a delicate journey because of the deep draft of the vessel, the officers' and crew's lack of familiarity with the shifting sandbars and unpredictable currents, and the great flotillas of small junks—one of two hundred sails, another of close to three hundred— which despite the presence of numerous Qing patrol boats still crowd the river as they carry supplies to the Taiping capital or the outlying cities the God-worshipers control on the Grand Canal and the river shores. Not until December 6 do the French reach Nanjing, and anchor in the river outside the walls.3' Soon the Cassini is filled with Taiping emissaries, dressed in red and yellow robes, their hair hanging long around their faces below their scarlet hoods or turbans, or sometimes stuffed into a cloth bag or pouch around their neck. To the French Jesuit priest Stanislas Clavelin, who is on the Cassini to serve as an additional interpreter, the Taiping seem "honest and polite." Told of the French desire to have an interview with Taiping leaders, they take a day to decide, but the affirmative response comes by nightfall.38
Next morning Taiping guides with horses are at the waterfront to meet them. De Bourboulon's legation secretary and Clavelin, with his Chinese catechist to help in translation, and two ship's officers, make up the party, which rides for close to an hour and a half to the sound of gongs and under fluttering Taiping banners, past the city's huge outer walls, till they enter through the main western gate, and ride several miles more through the wide main avenue. Among many burnt-out houses, the shops are closed and silent. Groups of women pass, some richly clad, on their way to their units of twenty-five in the women's camps, loaded with the rice they have collected from the public treasury near the river bank. To Clavelin they seem to show "a calm resignation, a little sad no doubt, but nevertheless much less so than [one] would have expected, considering the sacrifices of all kinds that they have had to make."39 A group of thirty young Chinese teenagers, finely dressed and mounted on we
ll-formed ponies, caper around the Frenchmen, who are told these are the children of the Taiping leaders. Once a man presses close to Father Clavelin and opens his hand for a second, showing the priest a rosary clasped within, and making a rapid sign of the cross. It is the first evidence of the survival of Chinese Catholics in the city, among the God-worshipers.40
Other things about the Taiping order impress the French observers: the severed heads of opium smokers hanging in cages on the walls; the constant printing of the Pentateuch and Matthew's Gospel, and the holding of new examinations based on these and other religious texts; women petitioning for warmer clothing in the winter cold and being granted it from the common store, and the lanterns burning in the women's quarters through the nights. The impossibility of buying a set of Taiping clothes from anyone in Nanjing, since no one will trade such goods for cash, shows the Taiping control over economic life. The ten shots fired from cannon twice a day when the Heavenly King is at his prayers, and the apparent sincerity of other Taiping followers in their prayers and services, give an air of sanctity to the city.41 When finally summoned to the audience hall to meet with Taiping officials, the French are startled by the contrast with the mixed desolation and bustle of the rundown streets:
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