God's Chinese Son (15 page)
Guiping township is a natural center of such activity, for it is situated at a junction of two rivers, the Yu and the Qian, which flow in turn into the larger river Xun, the one that Hong, like thousands of other passengers each year, traveled along to go back home. Upstream from Guiping there are rocks and rapids and a maze of smaller tributaries. Downstream, prosperous commerce, and good passage for the larger vessels. The constant loading and unloading of the vessels makes it a natural focus for bandits' attention, and the scores of little islands and inlets along the main stream's course provide natural hideaways and shelters for water-borne plunderers. Shrewdly aware of the amounts of money to be made from drugs and ransoms and the protection rackets, Guangxi men and women provide food and shelter to the river bandits. By the middle 1840s some of these "Rice Hosts," as they call themselves, have formed joint stock companies to invest in the rackets, drawing back a percentage of the profits in return.
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Many of the river bandits, too, were members of secret societies or brotherhoods during their seafaring days, and they bring their old allegiances with them to their new river domains. Strongest of the groups— really a loose confederation—are the so-called Triads, or Heaven-and- Earth Society. The initial formation of this brotherhood dated to the 1760s, when a group of restless, disaffected men—among them itinerant monks, teachers of Chinese boxing techniques, gamblers, candy makers, traveling doctors—who grew up in the south-eastern provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, bonded together. They signed a blood covenant, adopted one of their number as their "teacher," arranged themselves in a numero-logical hierarchy of "brothers," and drank together a mixture of wine and the ash from burning incense to "unify their hearts." Their plans were fluid, but included the recruitment of new members by the founding group, and the robbery of wealthy homes, storehouses, and county treasuries so as to amass the funds to "commence their great undertaking."
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The spread of the Heaven-and-Earth Society was hard for the Qing state to stop with force because it was not simply either a rebellious or a religious grouping. It was, much more, a broad-based "brotherhood" that promised local people protection and support in harsh and troubled times. As one arrested member explained to the authorities:
The name Tiandihui [Heaven-and-Earth Society] comes from the fact that Heaven and Earth are the source of being for mankind. The only meaning is respect for Heaven and Earth. Originally, the reason for people's willingness to enter the society was that if you had a wedding or funeral, you could get financial help from the other society members; if you came to blows with someone, there were people who would help you. If you encountered robbers, as soon as they heard the secret code of their own society, they would then bother you no further; if you were to transmit the sect to other people, you would also receive their payments of "gratitude." Therefore, those who want to enter the society are many in number.
Such mutual aid and "protective" activities slid easily into "protection rackets," as the testimony of a local man named Xu in Guangdong province clearly showed. His business was peddling brewer's yeast, which he bought from a store owner called Lai in Fujian, and carried back for resale in his hometown. Robbed one day by five men of all the silver he possessed, Xu hurried in desperation to Lai's shop. Lai's response was direct: "If you join the Tiandihui you can avoid being robbed on the road in the future, and I can also get back the silver that was robbed from you." Xu agreed to be initiated into the Heaven-and-Earth Society, his money was soon returned, and most importantly he was told what to do when he traveled the region in the future. If approached by robbers again, he should at once hold up his thumb—code signal for the word for "heaven." The robbers would respond by raising their little finger, to signify "earth," and he would pass on his way, unmolested.
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Such quietly effective and inconspicuous identification signs were common throughout southeast China, though other variants were also used. Society brothers in teahouses would hold three fingers together when drinking tea or smoking their tobacco pipes. Or they would leave the second button of their outer garments unfastened, or coil their queues of hair up on their heads with the end sticking up through the center of the coil.
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They also used a choice of standard identifying phrases, unobtrusive to the uninitiated but immediately recognizable to brotherhood members: "We never met before, but from today we are mutually acquainted." If asked, by robbers or strangers, where they were going, they were to say, "I've come from the east and am going to the west," but if asked whence they came, then they were to say, "I have passed under the bridge," in reference to their passage under the line of knives or swords held over their bodies as they passed through their initiations.
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Shared by members in all the southern provinces was a rhyming jingle they were also told at their initiations, so that they would never forget it: "Kaikou buliben / chushou bulisan"—"When speaking, never leave out the basic word; when extending your hand, never forget the three fingers together."
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The "basic word" they had never to forget was "Hong," meaning vast or flood. This was the same character used as the family name of Hong Xiuquan, and though Hong's family had used the name long before there was a Heaven-and-Earth Society, for the tens of thousands of initiated brotherhood members the character had a special aura as an invocation. This aura grew in power as the brotherhood expanded in extent and influence between the 1760s and the 1840s, and created and refined its own foundation myths; that same character "Hong" had in fact been one of the many names or pseudonyms of the brotherhood's founder in the 1760s. It was also the first character of the imperial reign name of the founder of the Ming dynasty in 1368, Hong-wu, a symbol of great force and power that the brothers invoked as they spread their goal of "restoring the Ming by overthrowing the Qing" and created a fictional and patriotic lineage for their own organization that ran back into the seventeenth- century period of the Qing conquest of the Ming. Besides that, the character appeared in earlier Chinese Buddhist and messianic texts foretelling apocalyptic disasters, where it was often linked to a counter-vision of an age of "great equity" or "great peace"—Taiping.
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But never forgetting the "basic word" was not to mean that one should utter it out loud: rather the brotherhood members broke the character "Hong" into component parts, each of which could be represented by a Chinese number. Thus since "Hong" had three dots on the left-hand side, a two-dot form similar to the Chinese number "8" at its base, the form for "one" at its center, and a shorthand form of "20" at the top, brotherhood members would use the phrase "3-8-21" when speaking or introducing each other, or could combine the three dots and the two dots into the word "five" and identify themselves by saying "five and twenty-one."
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By the time that Hong Xiuquan and Feng Yunshan are preaching in Guangxi, the Heaven-and-Earth Society has spread there both among the Hakkas and the original inhabitants. Just as the society brothers once did in the Canton delta region, they swell their numbers in Guangxi by forcing local farmers—with threats, or murders of those who show reluctance—to join them, and few dare refuse.
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Through their own contacts in Hong Kong and elsewhere, they too have access to Western weapons, which they ship inland by boat. It was a head of the local Heaven-and- Earth Society in Hong Kong, for instance, who bought the rifle off the deserter from the Ceylon Rifles, and other brothers used a house owned by a society member next to the schoolhouse outside the east gate of Canton city as the base for their communications with dealers in Hong Kong.
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On both the main rivers of Guangxi, and the smaller tributaries, they often set up "toll stations" to take their dues from those moving river goods and passengers. Others shift their major gambling operations, once flourishing in the area around Canton, to the towns around Guiping, openly flaunting their control.
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Perhaps it is the brazenness of this conduct that prompts Hong Xiuquan to list gambling as the sixth of his commandments, and to link it to both wine and opium, and Feng to find a ready audience when he repeats the same message.
For those Chinese who bitterly resent the river bandits' power and choose not to join them, one alternative is to form their own militia groups, as local communities have for centuries past, not only in such famous gatherings as the righteous hosts of gentry and farmers assembled against the British troops on the hills above Canton at Sanyuanli, but in countless other regions and communities as well. By 1846 such militias are growing numerous, controlled by Chinese landlords, recruited at the village level from local residents paid in grain, often with village tax money, some of which was also paid by Hakkas.
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The migration of Hakka people to the Guiping region from the area north and east of Canton city has been a steady one for fifty years or more, long antedating the problems with the displaced pirates. But the movement continues as the social order cracks apart, so that in some areas, especially in the hills, the Hakkas now outnumber the original inhabitants. Since these Hakkas are often members of the Heaven-and-Earth Society, feuds become a feature of eastern Guangxi life in the 1840s, as the various groups clash over areas of residence and land use rights. "Revenge against those who speak the Hakka tongue" becomes a popular slogan among the local Chinese families.
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Hakka farmers—both men and women—in their hillside plots take weapons to their work, and rally in groups a hundred strong with hoes or spears if the alarm is given. The local tribal leaders, dispossessed by both groups, and themselves often corrupt or heavily in debt, watch from the sidelines but take no action.
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For beleaguered Hakkas in this tense environment, Hong's message of salvation has a special resonance, and Feng Yunshan's Society of God- Worshipers draws eager converts not only for its religious message but because its numbers and organization give promise of solidarity against threatening forces all around.
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As a poverty-stricken God-worshiper describes this chaotic process of divided and uncertain loyalties: "Bandit raids continued year after year, with unending robbing of pawnshops and attacks on towns. The country people were used to seeing [armed] bands and ceased to be afraid; so when they saw the troops of the God-worshippers arrive . . . they did not flee elsewhere. Because of this, they were oppressed by the militia and therefore joined us in bewilderment."
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If the Hakkas of the Guiping region begin to flock in growing numbers to P'eng's God-Worshipers, it may also be because the ground for Christian faith there has been prepared by Karl Gutzlaff, the German missionary who cruised the Chinese coast in 1836, handing out his tracts with Edwin Stevens. Since that time, Gutzlaff has not only been developing a new technique for spreading his Redeemer's words; he has also been serving as the interpreter and Chinese-language secretary to the newly appointed British superintendent of trade, and so is in an excellent position to know the state of anti-pirate campaigns and the social conditions of the Chinese countryside.''
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Gutzlaff, unlike the more cautious missionaries in China, continues to think that one should do everything possible to understand the Chinese, in order to convert them: to "learn from their own mouth their prejudices, witness their vices, and hear their defence, in order to meet them effectually. ... In
style
we ought to conform entirely to the
Chinese taste
.'"" Gutzlaff also believes that "the converts ought themselves to contribute towards the advancement of the blessed work, and the congregations formed become missionary societies to all around them," so he creates in 1844 an organization of Chinese to work with him to achieve their common Christian goals, the "Chinese Union." Claiming 37 members in that first year of operation, by late 1845 he reports the membership has jumped to 210. The following year, as numbers continue to rise, subsidiary posts of the union are formed in Guangxi province, among them one in Guiping county itself, whither Chinese preachers from the union travel in some numbers to spread the word, and report that "lots of people" in Guangxi are becoming "worshippers of Yesu" (that is, of Jesus), among them even converted pirates.
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Gutzlaff himself, as a member of the "Moravian Brethren" of Christians, has a profoundly open view of missionary endeavor. He believes that the Chinese Union, even if composed of largely untrained Chinese converts, can still spread the ideas of a shared spiritual brotherhood and the values of communal life, and that the central goal of conversion to Christ far outweighs any scruples about the specificities of particular denominations or churches, or whether the Chinese Christians still practice ancestor worship or make offerings to God the Father.
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Already in the 1830s, before the Opium War began, Gutzlaff had been publishing pamphlets in Chinese on religious, educational, and scientific subjects, and circulating them both in Canton city and along the coasts as he explored them on his illegal journeys. In the 1840s, as the Chinese Union grows and spreads, he immeasurably increases this production, and uses the considerable cash contributions that flow in to him from European supporters of his missionary endeavors to pay his union members to spread the tracts to inland China, especially Guangxi. These tracts are far smaller and hence easier to carry and distribute than the bulkier version of Liang Afa, even though Liang's nine-chapter text was not always circulated as one volume, but sometimes as four or five bound clusters of two or three chapters, or even as nine separate stitched volumes of single chapters, which would have made them lighter but even harder to follow.
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