China

by John Keay

  The new British plenipotentiary arrived off Hong Kong in August 1841 along with a vastly increased task force and a heftier list of unnegotiable demands. From there the force proceeded to capture Xiamen (Amoy), recapture Zhoushan (Chusan) and then take nearby Ningbo. After wintering and receiving more reinforcements, in 1842 the fleet proceeded up the Yangzi. Manchu Bannermen offered fierce resistance, the British bombardments were often indiscriminate, and there was much looting by both sides. But Shanghai was found undefended; Zhenjiang’s fall meant that the Grand Canal was severed; and Nanjing was saved only by a last-minute offer of negotiations.

  The Daoguang emperor still hoped to buy off the British; but his negotiators found they could do little to avert capitulation. The Nanjing Treaty of 1842, while it left much for further discussion and recrimination, met the British demands and was ratified by both parties. The indemnity, now raised to $21 million and payable (plus interest) in instalments, would be a crippling burden on the empire’s shattered finances. Five ports, including Guangzhou and Shanghai (where a large ‘concession’ area was rapidly developed by, and exclusively for, the foreigners), were to be opened to both British trade and residency under the supervision of British consuls; Hong Kong stayed British; derogatory language as detected by Britain’s interpreters was outlawed; and opium was nowhere mentioned. In that the Chinese ban had been acknowledged by the British, the drug remained contraband; but in that the British had not forsworn the trade, the smuggling continued; indeed, it prospered greatly under the paternal gaze of the British navy.

  The Nanjing Treaty of 1842 was swiftly followed by others. With the mistaken idea that only by winning the support of competing nations could China hold the British in check, the Qing government signed treaties with the Americans and the French (and later other nations). Both these treaties included provision for missionary activity in China – Protestant Evangelical in the case of the Americans, Roman Catholic in the case of the French. They also elaborated on the practice of extraterritorial justice and, in the American case, allowed for a revision of the treaty after twelve years. Additionally both contained a ‘most favoured nation’ clause under which any concessions extended to others might also be claimed by the signatory nation. Since the British, in an 1843 supplement to the Nanjing Treaty, obtained an identical provision, the foreign powers, far from quarrelling among themselves, had a vested interest in supporting one another’s ever more outrageous demands.

  It was the American provision for treaty ‘modification’ after twelve years which would be invoked by the British in 1854 to ratchet up their requirements, including access to the Chinese interior and an ambassador in Beijing. Another war would back up these demands, and the inevitable concessions would follow. The so-called ‘Treaty System’ was thus a collaborative and progressive exercise in the diminution of China’s sovereignty through the appropriation of large sectors of its economy, its foreign relations, its society (in ‘the Treaty ports’ and concession areas) and its territory (in Hong Kong and later Manchuria and Xinjiang). Nanjing was just stage one.

  TAIPING AND TIANJIN

  The series of defeats suffered by the Qing in the 1839–42 Opium War, though the worst in the dynasty’s two centuries of rule, did not long go unchallenged. Exposed by the outsiders, in less than a decade the empire faced rebellions within on a quite staggering scale. The two catastrophes were of course related. Had the Qing not just been humiliated, their forces trounced and their economy fractured, the insurgencies might not have arisen. On the other hand, without foreign forbearance and eventual support, the Qing could scarcely have hoped to suppress them. Relations with the foreigners were becoming more complicated. Having crippled Macartney’s ‘old, crazy, First-rate Man of War’, the Western powers now opted to keep it afloat; rather than tangle with the wreckage, they would make it safe in the name of salvage.

  Nearly all of China was affected by the rebellions. ‘Red Turban’ armies fighting for a Ming restoration (Ming pretenders were never in short supply) terrorised Guangdong in the mid-1850s. Muslim separatists took over Yunnan from 1855; other Muslim revolts plagued Shaanxi and Gansu from 1862. A host of heavily armed peasant bands known collectively as the Nian rampaged across Anhui and Jiangsu north of the Huai River from at least 1851. On cue, the Yellow River, capricious as ever, burst its dykes, causing devastating floods that climaxed in 1855 when it opted for an old estuary north of Shandong. Meanwhile Triad fraternities flexed their muscles in the ports, taking over Xiamen and then Shanghai in 1853–55; they and other secret societies also mobilised among the rural masses; ethnic minorities rebelled in the hills; pirates infested the coast. And there were more. But all these outbreaks were localised and little coordinated. They paled into insignificance beside the Taiping upheaval, ‘one of the great pivotal events of Chinese history’, or, as contemporary writers in both The Times and the North American Review had it, ‘the greatest revolution the world has yet seen’.20

  Whether revolution, civil war or mere uprising, the Taiping movement spans the insurrectionist watershed between the dynastic challengers of the past and the ideological engineers of the future. It was both a nativist throwback and a radical new departure, a people’s revolution masterminded by ideological simpletons, an Asian peasants’ revolt flavoured by Judaeo-Christian messianism. In all its fury it raged for more than a decade (1850–64). From Guangdong and Guangxi in the far south it extended to within a few days’ march of Beijing, affecting sixteen out of the eighteen provinces and turning the heart of the country along the Yangzi into an extended battlefield. Its magnitude seemed at the time, and possibly remains, unprecedented. Sober analysts have tried to quantify the death toll: ‘twenty million people lost their lives’ (Reilly), ‘twenty million or more’ (Spence), ‘between 20 and 40 million people’ (Teng). Not all died in battle; the famines, retributive feuds and casual massacres that dislocation engendered took a heavy toll; so did power struggles and purges within the Taiping leadership. Thousands died simply from exposure, despite having burned whole libraries to warm themselves (including three of the four manuscript copies of the Qianlong emperor’s ‘Four Treasuries’). As ever, the greater the loss, the less certain the body count. Suffice it to say that, if the figures are even remotely accurate, more of the human race perished in the Taiping convulsion than in the First World War.

  Throughout its few turbulent decades the man at the heart of this phenomenon was Hong Xiuquan (1814–64), a member of Guangdong’s large Hakka community. The Hakkas claimed descent from one of the early waves of Han migration into the south – that which had accompanied the Eastern Jin dynasty when in 311 Luoyang fell to the Xiongnu as reported in that miraculously preserved letter of the Sogdian merchant Nanai Vandak. Hardworking and opinionated, some Hakkas had since migrated to south-east Asia; more would follow. But mostly they were marginal farmers subject to the fiscal, environmental and demographic pressures of the times. Of Hong Xiuquan, a good-looking youth and promising scholar, much was expected by his impoverished family and rural clansmen. But like countless other aspiring examinees, he found this weight of expectation insupportable when failure greeted his attempts to pass the district examinations. He tried four times, and on one of them, when entering the Guangzhou examination compound, he was handed a loosely bound collection of tracts containing translated extracts from the Bible, a production of the London Missionary Society’s Singapore branch. Hong took it and put it aside for later reference.

  Unlike the Jesuits in the seventeenth century – those polymath padres who had directed their talents and their proselytising towards the court and officialdom – the Protestant missions operated at a lower social level. Rather than pursuing a doctrinal accommodation with Confucian tradition and pinning their hopes on the top-down conversion of an empire, they looked to the saving of individual souls and the refutation of heresy. The Word of God, carefully translated, widely disseminated and selflessly advertised by their own example, was deemed sufficient unto the task; and in the
case of Hong Xiuquan, it did indeed work in mysterious ways. Hong, now a village schoolmaster, started having hallucinations and dreams. When later he thought to peruse the mission’s ‘Good Words for Exhorting the Age’, as the tracts were entitled, he realised that his dreams were in fact visions. The bearded gentleman with fair hair who had given him a sword was God himself; and the younger man who had taught him how to use it against evil demons, and who had then accepted him as a sibling, was Jesus Christ. Hong must therefore be the next son of God, China’s son of God; and clearly the sword meant that he had been entrusted with a weighty mission – to root out idolatry and so perform for China the redemptive miracle that his elder brother Jesus had worked in the Western world.

  Openly proclaiming his task, and proving an inspirational preacher, Hong converted Hakka friends and family in rural Guangdong and began destroying local shrines dedicated to Buddhist or Confucian worship. This proved controversial. He was obliged to flit between Guangdong and neighbouring Guangxi, where an early adherent had successfuly formed a satellite community of ‘God-worshippers’. In 1847 Hong was back in Guangzhou city, extending his acquaintance with the Bible through instruction from a Baptist minister from Tennessee. The Reverend Isaacher Jacox (sic) Roberts was the first to take advantage of the tolerance extended to missionaries under the Sino-American treaty. A difficult man, he would later report that Hong, though prepared for baptism, never actually received it; he, Roberts, had not been ‘fully satisfied of his fitness’.21

  Repairing to the ‘God-worshippers’ in the gorges of Guangxi, Hong resumed his recruitment of followers. His mission began to assume a more political and military character. Arms and gunpowder were hoarded, signals practised, troops drilled and plans laid. As well as proclaiming his visions and destroying more shrines, Hong and others in his hierarchy who were possessed of a basic education began to integrate their revelatory faith with their knowledge of China’s historical past. Their starting point, and the inspiration for their military organisation, seems to have been the Zhouli, or ‘Rites of Zhou’ – the ‘fundamentalist’ text describing a utopian society in which names corresponded to realities that had supposedly been composed by the Duke of Zhou and had inspired reformers ever since. In those far-off times, according to the ‘God-worshippers’, China had been the recipient of ‘the original doctrine of the Heavenly Father’. It had then shared it with the wider world, and there it had survived and been renewed. But in China, Heaven’s first home, it had been turned on its head by a succession of ‘devilish’ invaders after the fall of the Han dynasty. Zhongguo’s road had thus diverged from the true path. The Manchus – ‘imps’ or ‘demons’, the Taipings called them – were the latest manifestation of these ‘devilish’ usurpers and, like shrines and idols, they must be destroyed. Only then could there be re-established the taiping tianguo, the ‘Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace’. A tag by which the movement would be known, this phrase neatly combined the Christian tianguo, ‘Kingdom of Heaven’/‘Heavenly Kingdom’, with the Zhouist or Daoist taiping, ‘Great Peace’.

  Other contemporary movements, such as the Red Turbans and the Triads, also opposed the Manchu Qing as alien usurpers; they wanted to set the clock back to 1644 and restore the Ming. But the Taipings opposed the Qing as the last in a long line of heretical alien dynasties; the clock should go back to AD 221. This chimed, as it were, with important strands in recent thought. Eighteenth-century scholars equally unreconciled to the Qing had blamed the failure of the indigenous Ming on the Neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi (he of the ‘Four Books’ and the text-bound ‘investigation of all things’) or Wang Yangming (and his dangerously malleable ‘innate sense’ of what was right and humane). They too, therefore, had looked back to an earlier tradition and especially to the Han dynasty when the classic texts still retained a pristine quality uncorrupted by later editing. Practising what they called ‘evidential research’, these scholars brought to bear on the classics a more scientific approach in linguistics, geography and astronomy, and so restored a certain vitality to Confucian studies.

  Earlier another Ming loyalist, Wang Fuzhi (d. 1692), had pursued a similar line of anti-Manchu argument but with quite different results. Questioning the cherished belief that alien invaders always succumbed to zhongguo’s superior culture and were assimilated by it, Wang Fuzhi had proposed that Han and non-Han values were in fact incompatible; alien regimes had warped Chinese civilisation rather than being absorbed by it, and Confucius himself had foreseen as much. Therefore, wrote Wang, ‘destroying the [aliens] to save our people may be called humane, deceiving and treating them as they hate to be treated may be called loyal, and occupying their territory . . . confiscating their property . . . may be called righteous’.22 Wang Fuzhi sought only a rationale for opposing the Manchu Qing; but in such sentiments later writers have discovered ‘the first hesitant gropings towards the discovery of a “national” tradition’. Ethnocentric and exclusive, these gropings did not as yet amount to ‘a new organic tradition’ of Han assertiveness. But as an experiment to this end, the contribution of Hong Xiuquan and the Taipings would be significant, ‘albeit fantastic, visionary, and intellectually distasteful to upper-class Chinese of the time’.23 Whether by chance or design, the Taipings tapped into some of the sources of later Chinese nationalism – antipathy to Qing imperialism on the grounds of its alien origin, authenticity through alignment with an impeccably organised agrarian society, insistence on China’s centrality (even within Christianity’s universal ‘All-under-Heaven’), a yearning for social justice and gender equality, and the espousal of a common Han Chinese identity based on place, race and culture rather than dynastic mandates and historiographic sanction.

  After three years in and around Guiping in Guangxi, Hong and his associates had gathered disciples and recruits to the tune of about twenty thousand. Some had useful experience, having belonged to pirate and other insurgent groups or worked in the local mines. Many were Hakkas, both men and women. A few had a genuine flair for military tactics and organ-isation. Discipline was strict, with opium, alcohol, tobacco, gambling and sex outlawed on both religious and practical grounds. Money and possessions were pooled, foot-binding banned, pigtails cut and the hair allowed to grow. There were frequent prayer and instruction sessions; on the Seventh Day they rested and worshipped. Such practices could scarcely fail to attract attention, and in late 1849 the ‘God-worshippers’ narrowly repelled an assault by the authorities. Soon after, Hong officially declared himself ‘the Heavenly King’, and the whole community moved out of the Guiping area, heading north through the hills to the Yangzi watershed.

  What began as a migration turned into a crusade. The Taipings’ ‘Long March’ lasted over two years (1851–53) and took them from the obscurity of Guiping to centre stage in Nanjing. Sometimes compared to Moses’ Exodus or the Prophet’s hegira (hijra), in its military aspect the advance more obviously resembled the Arabs’ post-hegira jihad. Closer to home, the most remarked precedent was Huang Chao’s marathon progress of 879–80, when he led his rebel army north along much the same route to exterminate the Tang dynasty. Like Huang Chao, the Taipings had mixed fortunes. Despite fanatical onslaughts, they were forced to fall back before the well-defended cities of Guilin and Changsha. They gathered adherents and defectors by the thousand, but the larger the heavenly host, the greater the need for supplies and munitions. In this respect, while the capture of Yuezhou on Lake Dongting proved a breakthrough, that of Wuchang and Hankou, the twin cities of the Middle Yangzi, was the turning point. Now with guns, money, supplies and above all boats, the Taiping armies took to the river. Downstream, Anqing fell in early 1853, then – amid the slaughter of every Manchu they could lay their hands on – the high-walled metropolis of Nanjing. Zhenjiang at the river’s confluence with the Grand Canal followed. In March 1853 the ‘Heavenly King’ entered Nanjing in style, borne aloft in a golden palanquin and wearing the dragon robe of a Chinese emperor plus the tinsel crown of a Christian king.

 
Arrived in ‘the southern capital’, from where the Ming founder had proclaimed his rule, the Taiping commanders seem to have opted to follow his example. Instead of continuing their barnstorming advance to Beijing, they held back to institute the new Jerusalem and savour the fruits of victory. Momentum and surprise – not to say panic – were lost. When two months later the advance was at last resumed, smaller expeditionary armies, minus their Heavenly King, headed north to Beijing and west up the Yangzi, where Anqing and Wuchang had already been retaken by Qing forces. But the northern thrust was by now expected. Boats had been removed from the Yellow River to prevent a crossing and Banner troops massed to oppose the insurgents. The Taipings veered west to Kaifeng and received some assistance from the Nian rebels. By the time they approached Beijing, their lack of cavalry was telling. Worse still, the northern winter, a novel experience for Guangxi Hakkas, was setting in. They halted outside Tianjin and would get no farther. Reinforcements arrived in 1854 and the campaign resumed, only to peter out in a series of irrelevant sieges. It was abandoned in 1855.