God's Chinese Son (14 page)

I take up my writing brush and compose a poem, condemning this "Six Cavern

Shrine."

Those two demon devils should be killed, exterminated.

The mountain people here have reverted to being animals—

Wherever you go the men sing their songs and the women respond in kind.

Sinners end up with the reputation of achieving immortality,

And wildly promiscuous women become the village wives!

One day from the midst of the storm clouds the thunder will strike them

When Heaven can bear no more, what will become of them?
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Reading, writing, teaching, moving from house to house among his hospitable Hakka relatives, Hong spreads his message of sin, redemption, and remorse. Again and again, he tells of his dream and its significance. The simple religious service he has improvised back home in Guanlubu is formalized now, in the western mountain setting, and some of the ele­ments first used are gone. No longer, for example, is God's name written on a tablet or golden paper, and displayed with burning incense on the altar. Instead, during services, two burning lamps are placed upon the table, and three cups of tea to make a simple offering. The congregation grows and the Hakka women join their menfolk, though men and women sit in separate rows. Hymns are sung to God, for the people here are full of song, but these hymns speak of God's grace, and Hong's sermons underline the message with warnings against idolatry, and emphasis on Jesus as redeemer. When praying, all kneel together facing the light, which pours into the room, for in these mountain dwellings the walls are often open to attract the breeze. They keep their eyes closed, and one person in turn speaks their prayers aloud.
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I, Your unworthy son / daughter [here each person utters his or her own name] kneeling on the ground, with true heart repent my sins. I pray to the Heavenly Father and Great God, of extraordinary goodness and mercy, to forgive my former ignorance and frequent transgressions of the Heavenly Commandments. I earnestly beseech the Heavenly Father and Great God, to extend His grace and pardon all my former sins, and permit me to reform my faults and renew myself, so that my soul may ascend to heaven. May I henceforth sincerely repent and reform, not worshipping false spirits nor practicing perverse things, but obeying the Heavenly Commandments. I also earnestly pray to the Heavenly Father and Great God, to bestow on me constantly His Holy Spirit, to change my wicked heart and never to allow the devilish demons to deceive me. Constantly look after me, and never permit the devilish demons to harm me. I am blessed that every day there is food and clothing, and neither calamity nor hardship. In this world may I enjoy peace, and in ascending to heaven, may I enjoy eternal bliss. Blessed by the merits of the Saviour and Heavenly Elder Brother, Jesus, who has redeemed us from sin, we pray through him to our Heavenly Father, the Great God, who is in Heaven, that His will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Look down and grant my request. Amen.
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Within a few months, Hong has converted around a hundred people in the mountain area of Sigu. Those desiring to receive baptism first make a written confession of their sins, which they then read aloud; or they can offer an oral confession if they do not write. The written confessions are burned at the altar, the smoke rising up to God the Father.
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They then pledge themselves "not to worship evil spirits, not to practice evil things, and to keep the heavenly commandments." Water is poured over their heads, and Hong cleanses them of their past lives with these words: "We wash away all your former sins, slough off the old and give birth to the new." Those who have received their baptism then bathe their bodies in the river, drink the tea that has been standing on the altar, and wash their chest around the area of their heart, to signify that their inner and outer cleansing is completed. Henceforth at every meal they will offer up this simple prayer: "We humbly give thanks to the Heavenly Father and Great God, for His many blessings, for each day's clothing and food, for sparing us calamity and hardship, and helping our souls rise up to Heaven."
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Learning can be used in many ways. Although Hong has never received his licentiate's degree, and has resolved never to try for it again, he knows the language of the bureaucracy, and the forms that need to be observed. Thus when the son of his host and convert Huang Shengjun is arrested on a charge brought against him by a neighboring clan, Huang and his family turn to Hong for help. At first he urges them to pray to God for the young man's release, and this they do. But Hong reinforces these pleas for divine assistance with a polished petition to the local magistrate who oversees the case. The petition is effective and within a few weeks the prisoner is released and back at home. Shortly after his return, he too is converted to Hong's new faith.
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Everything does not always go so smoothly for Hong Xiuquan in Sigu. There are some kinds of "serious family troubles" at the Huangs, perhaps involving something more than the charges brought against their young son and his subsequent incarceration. Hong leaves the Huang's home for a period, and goes with his close friend Feng Yunshan to stay in a hut in the mountains. In that rural retreat he is insulted in some way by people's remarks about him—perhaps resenting his religion, his moralism, or his verbal attack on the Six Caverns Shrine. Not long after this, though Hong returns to the Huangs, Feng goes off to live in the larger town of Guiping, the county seat, where he has made new friends—the Zhangs, who are supervisors of the city's water ponds and dikes—and in six or seven days Feng spends much of his (and Hong's?) remaining funds.
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It is in November 1844 that Hong decides at last to leave. He has been in Guangxi for more than five months, and it is close to eight months since he first left home to tour the world and preach God's word. Even though he has managed to send one letter home, by the hands of relatives traveling to Canton, his family must be worried. There is another factor. Hong has been preaching that not to be a filial son is one of the six main sins against Heaven's True God. But as the basic Confucian texts on filial piety state, in volumes that every student reads as he begins his education, of all unfilial acts not to have a son to carry on the family line ranks highest. And as of now, Hong has only daughters.

Huang Shengjun, so long the sheltering host, sees Hong Xiuquan safely to Guiping township. They search for Feng at Zhang's home, but do not find him. Zhang tells them he has heard that Feng has already left for Guanlubu, and Hong accepts this as accurate, making no further attempt to track down Feng. Hong says farewell to Huang Shengjun and travels back to Guanlubu alone. This time he goes by boat, presumably paying for his fare and food with money given by the faithful of Guangxi. The voyage—downstream along the Xun River till it flows into the West River, which in turn leads straight to Canton—is fast and uneventful. In twelve days Hong is home, with his parents, wife, and daughters.
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When Hong gets back home the first thing he asks everyone is "Where is Feng Yunshan?" And they all say, "We thought he was with you." There has been a muddle, one which can be explained if not condoned. In Guiping town­ship, when Hong went to the house of pond and irrigation supervisor Zhang to ask him where Feng was, Zhang replied that Feng and one of Zhang's nephews had announced they were returning to Canton and Guanlubu. Without checking further, Hong took the story at face value, and returned, to be scolded by Feng's family for abandoning the son he had first converted and then persuaded to accompany him on his far-flung travels.
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There is little that Hong Xiuquan can do about it. He has neither the funds nor perhaps the energy or will to make the trip all the way back to Guangxi again. Besides, local village leaders in Guanlubu once more offer him back his old teaching job. He accepts, and supports his family by his teaching while he continues to develop the range of religious tracts that he first began in Sigu village with the Huangs of Guangxi.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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' 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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