God's Chinese Son (42 page)

Elgin notes privately that those of his party who do go ashore in Nan­jing find the city a scene of desolation, through which one can ride as through a "great park." Most of the guards at the gates seem to be unarmed, women roam freely within the streets, and though no shops are open supplies seem plentiful. The senior Taiping officer they meet, a Guangxi man named Li, promises the British that if they will stay the night ashore they "can then visit the court of the Heavenly Kingdom." But no one in the British party follows up on the invitation, and the moment passes. Lord Elgin himself does not go ashore, and gives no answer to the Heavenly King.
²⁰

It is in April 1859, during the time of drift and indecision in Taiping government and war following Elgin's visit and departure, that Hong Rengan reaches Nanjing, and greets his cousin the Heavenly King, whom he has not seen since 1849. The Heavenly King is amazed and overjoyed, for Rengan too is family, in both a literal and an emotional sense. He grew up next to Hong's ancestral village and knows his relatives. He was among his cous­in's earliest converts, and one of Feng Yunshan's closest friends. He knows Hong Kong. He knows the foreigners and their ways. He knows the Bible intimately, but believes in the revelations of the Heavenly King, and in his cousin's kinship with God and Jesus. And so within days of Hong Rengan's arrival, Hong Xiuquan names his cousin to high rank in the Taiping nobility, makes him a commanding general of the Taiping armies with the honorary title of "Supreme Marshal," appoints him "Leader of the Ministers," "Chief Examiner," "Minister of Appointments," and "Head of Foreign Affairs." And in mid-May 1859, the Heavenly King makes the final leap of faith: he enfeoffs Hong Rengan as king, the "Shield King," to take the place of the other founding leaders who have died.
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Hong Rengan has had a strange and often dangerous life since last the cousins met. While Hong Xiuquan built up his following in Thistle Mountain, Rengan continued to take the lower state examinations—five times in all—but always failed. When in 1850 Qing troops raided Hua county to arrest the followers or relatives of Hong Xiuquan, Rengan set off to Guangxi, but he could not get through the Qing lines, and the war was so mobile that he never was able to join his cousin. Leaving Guangxi, but unable to return home, Rengan drifted to Hong Kong, where he began to work for foreign missionaries.
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Hearing of the Taiping capture of Nanjing, and their establishment there of the the Heavenly Capital, Rengan traveled—like Roberts—north to Shanghai, but also like Roberts was unable to get through the Qing forces to reach the Taiping base, and the Triad Society occupiers of Shang­hai would not help him. So after a brief period during which he "studied astronomy and astronomical calculations in a foreign school"—perhaps with Alexander Wylie, a talented mathematician and astronomer who had been in China since 1847—in the winter of 1854 he decided to return again to Hong Kong and seek longer-term employment with the missionary soci­ety there. The trip back, on a steamer that made the entire journey in four days, was a revelation to Hong Rengan, and plunged him into verse:

The ship flies like an arrow through the raging billows; Swept along in the wind's force, my determination grows all the stronger. The sea becomes the field of battle, the waves are the military formations; Their crests toss against the stars and the moon, like billowing banners and flags.
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In Hong Kong, Rengan continued for four years to study astronomy and work with the missionaries, and he slowly began to mingle on terms of trust and friendship with many of the talented group of Westerners who crowded the little colony at this time: among those from Britain whom Rengan came to know were James Legge, the first translator of the Confucian classics; William Milne, son of Liang Afa's first teacher and reviser of Morrison and Gutzlaffs Bible translation projects; William Burns, who had just completed his translation of John Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress;
and Benjamin Hobson, preacher and physician, author of books in Chinese on surgery, midwifery, and children's diseases. He also re- met Issachar Roberts and several other American Protestant missionaries, among them E. C. Bridgman, who translated for minister McLane on the
Susquehanna
s Nanjing voyage. Among new acquaintances were a number of German and Scandinavian missionaries from the Basel Missionary Soci­ety, including the Swedish-born Theodore Hamberg, a fine orator and preacher, expert in Hakka dialect, and early co-founder of the Chinese Union with Gutzlaff, with whom Rengan shared a brief written record of the Taiping movement's founding, and to whom Rengan dictated a much longer account of the movement's growth and glory. He also talked often with Yung Wing, the first Chinese to have traveled to the United States and received an American college degree, who was trying to work out how to combine his knowledge of the West and China in either the world of administration or business.
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Of all Hong Rengan's friends in Hong Kong during this period, the most important was undoubtedly the Scotsman James Legge. Legge, the youngest of the seven children of an Aberdeen tradesman, initially taught mathematics, until he was ordained as a Congregationalist minister and traveled to Hong Kong in 1843, where he headed the Protestant Theologi­cal Seminary, which had been founded to "train a native ministry for China." By the time Rengan returned to Hong Kong in 1854, Legge was already well on the way to amassing what has been called one of the most "extensive and important collections of sinological literature in all of the western nations in the nineteenth century."
⁵
Rengan worked with Legge both as a Christian catechist—to help in the conversion of other Chinese— and as a scholarly assistant. Hong Rengan was lucky in this friendship, for Legge was a man who trusted the Chinese and saw much good in them, and was constantly using his ministry to learn as much as possible: in Legge's words, "Several hours of every day were spent in visiting them from house to house, and shop to shop, conversing with them on all sub­jects, and trying to get them to converse with me on one subject."
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Years later, after Hong Rengan's death, Legge remembered him as "the most genial and versatile Chinese I have ever known, and of whom I can never think but with esteem and regret." And Legge wrote further that Hong Rengan "was the only Chinaman with whom I ever walked with my arm round his neck and his arm round mine." Sometimes they preached together at the same church service, and when Rengan spoke of trying to join his cousin in the Taiping capital, Legge urged him to "remain quietly in Hong Kong as a preacher."
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Perhaps it was with Hong Rengan that Legge was strolling in the sum­mer of 1857, as Lord Elgin arrived, and Hong Rengan with whom he shared his thoughts on the future:

On the 2nd July of that year I was walking out on Caine's Road in the
afternoon with a friend, when we saw a steamer coming through Sulphur
Channel. At first we thought it must be the mail, but it proved to be the
Shannon,
with Lord Elgin on board. As she steamed into the harbour, and she and the Admiral saluted each other, and the thunder of their guns rever­berated along the sides of the mountain, which were then all fringed with mist, I said to my companion, "There is the knell of the past of China. It can do nothing against these leviathans."
⁸

James Legge, because of his formidable knowledge of Chinese language and his theological erudition, had been entrusted by the Protestant mis­sionaries, along with the celebrated translator Walter Medhurst, "to delib­erate on the rendering of the names of the Deity into Chinese." This led to a further bond with Hong Rengan, for throughout his long and produc­tive life Legge always championed the use of "Shangdi"—High Lord of All—for the translation of the name of God, a choice that fitted perfectly with the belief of the Taiping, who had consistently used the same term, from the time they named their first assemblies the "Bai Shangdi Hui," God-worshiping Society.
⁹
As part of his methodology in proving his theo­logical positions, Legge drew heavily on the way that Paul in the Epistle to the Hebrews had elaborated on the story of the priest-king Mel- chizedek. Such an early Christian methodology seemed to Legge a perfect example of the way later commentators on the Bible message could "con­firm the good and supplement the deficient." By this logic, Confucianism was not seen as fully antithetical to Christianity, since the term
shangdi
can be found in various early Chinese texts. Thus in Legge's mind, "pro­gressive revelation in the Biblical text affirms the possibility that God could leave a witness elsewhere in the world, even if this witness was quickly distorted by other corrupting influences."
¹⁰

Along with a small number of other missionaries such as Karl Gutzlaff, Legge also had a special interpretation of the prophetic passage in Isaiah, chapter 49, verses 11 and 12:

And I will make all my mountains a way, and my highways shall be exalted. Behold, these shall come from far: and lo, these from the north and from the west; and these from the land of Sinim.

To these missionaries, "Sinim" referred to China, and implied that for over two millennia God had anticipated including the Chinese people in His kingdom. Legge preached on this very theme in the later 1850s.
¹¹

The Hong Kong in which Hong Rengan resided during the 1850s— especially the waterfront area of Victoria—was becoming a boom town, despite the pessimism over its prospects that had accompanied its founding in 1841, and the terrible death toll taken of the earliest Western settlers and troops from fever. Legge attributed much of this new prosperity to the dislocations caused by the Taiping and the secret societies around Canton, placing "the turning point in the progress of Hong Kong" to 1852 and 1853. In those years, wealthy Chinese families fled to Hong Kong to escape the fighting and disorder on the mainland; houses were in demand and rents rose; the streets that had been comparatively deserted assumed a crowded appearance; new commercial Chinese firms were founded; the native trade received an impetus. The British Royal Engineers installed well-planned roads, drains, and harbor facilities, and the colonists planted groves of shrubs and bamboo to improve the air; these changes, along with the streetlamps and their staff of lamplighters, the handsome post office where the mail was brought by clipper from Bombay, the new churches and substantial houses, gave some imposing aspects to the new settlement, though visitors grumbled that both rents and the prices in the only good hotel were excessively high.
¹²

The little colony itself exhibited the worst and the best of the West and China, and a certain blending of the two cultures. For Chinese as for Westerners there was gambling, work in the illegal opium trade, the coolie trade with its racketeering and kidnapping, savage fights between rival gangs, daring robberies by those who used the colony's new drains as secret channels past the guards above the ground, and a social "order" in which for a time there were more brothels than respectable households. The prevalence of crime and violence meant that "the gallows found con­stant employment" for Western and Chinese alike, since British criminals guilty of capital crimes were hanged in public along with their Chinese counterparts.
¹³
But there were also the first successful entrepreneurial Chi­nese businessmen rising to prominence in trade, property, and in shipping, Chinese studying British law, and young Chinese girls being trained to a high level of English-language competence in special schools. Even if some of these girls, when grown to womanhood, formed irregular liaisons with the Western traders there, for others there was the model of Daniel Cald­well—once the fearsome head of the Hong Kong detectives in charge of suppressing piracy, now promoted to registrar general of the colony— who had publicly taken as his wife a Chinese Christian convert. As a bemused James Legge expressed it, "I sometimes fancy Britannia standing on the Peak, and looking down with an emotion of pride on the great Babylon which her sons have built."
¹⁴

In January 1857 Hong Rengan had a chance to witness one of the more complex cases in the young colony's history—the attempted mass poison­ing of the Western residents, which was traced swiftly to the bakery of a Chinese resident of Hong Kong named A-lum. James Legge himself ate the poisoned bread twice—"early in the morning and again at breakfast time"—but survived because the second meal of poisoned bread made him vomit violently. Yet even in the midst of the terror, hysteria, and cries for vengeance, Hong Rengan would have seen that A-lum was not lynched, as many at first had believed he would or should be. Instead A-lum was brought to trial before a British court and acquitted, since he was able to prove that the poison had in fact been placed in the dough by two of his bakery employees, perhaps at the instigation of Chinese in Canton who hated the British for their attempt to enforce their rights of residence in the city. During the trial, and for a short time afterward when he was held in protective custody, A-lum kept order in the jail and supervised the management of the Sunday Christian services there, preparing the prayer books in advance and maintaining "perfect order among all who attended."
¹⁵

Hong Rengan, with money given to him by members of the missionary community, left Hong Kong in the summer of 1858 to travel to Nanjing. The timing of his journey was probably determined by the death of his mother that same summer, which released him from the pressing obliga­tions of filial piety. But since he was, in the deepest sense, moving into the unknown, he left his wife and young son, and one of his brothers, in the care of the Legge family until he should send for them.
¹⁶

Having left his family in safety, Hong risked taking the traditional route that centuries of Chinese had followed, moving north from Canton city up the East River to the Jiangxi border, and then down the Gan River into central China. Here in the autumn of 1858 he linked up with a subordinate general of the Qing commander Zeng Guofan, campaigning in the region. But when the Taiping troops routed the Qing, Hong was unable to move across the lines to join them, and instead lost all his baggage and was forced to flee northwest, to the Huangmei area of Hubei. Ever resourceful, he gained temporary respite and needed funds by serving as medical adviser—perhaps using skills taught to him by Benjamin Hobson—-to a Qing magistrate whose son was ill. When he heard the news of Elgin's fleet moving down the Yangzi River after its visit to Wuchang, Hong was able to place aboard a British ship a message to his Hong Kong friends, telling them how he was faring. In early 1859, using his recent wages to buy a stock of goods, he passed back through Qing lines posing as a merchant, and reached the Heavenly Capital in late April 1859.
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