God's Chinese Son (51 page)

Guangxi and Guangdong, to give them permission to return home and "engage in some trade." "If you are willing to spare them," Li points out to his interrogators, "everyone will hear of it, and everyone will be willing to submit."
²⁷

Li Xiucheng also has advice for his captors: buy the best cannon from the foreigners, and the most efficient type of gun carriages—for one is useless without the other—and then find the finest Chinese craftsmen and have them make exact replicas, while teaching others how to do the same.

Thus "one craftsman can teach ten, ten can teach a hundred and everyone
in our country will know…To fight with the foreign devils the first
thing is to buy cannon and get prepared early. It is certain that there will be a war with them."
²⁸
As to the Taiping's role in the future, it is over: "Our Heavenly Kingdom is finished ... and this is because the former Heavenly King's span was ended. The fate of the people was hard, such a hard fate!" How then could he himself, Li asks rhetorically, have helped his Heavenly King so long, and so tenaciously? His confession breaks off in the middle of his answer: "It is really because I did not understand. If I had understood . . ."
²⁹

Li Xiucheng, upon his capture, thinks the Young Monarch must be already dead. But in fact Tiangui Fu is safe, and still accompanied by around a hundred followers. Circling around the west shore of Lake Tai, they reach Huzhou, where the Shield King, Hong Rengan, commands a large but isolated Taiping garrison.
³⁰
Huzhou is almost ringed by hostile troops, those of the Qing army commanded by Li Hongzhang, and a strong force known as the Ever-Triumphant Army, a mixed band of Chi­nese and Filipino mercenaries, commanded by French officers. This force has been so named in deliberate emulation of and rivalry to the Ever- Victorious Army, commanded in the region of Shanghai first by the American mercenary Frederick Ward, and after his death in combat in 1862 by the British officer Charles Gordon. Side by side with the French and Qing combatants, some former Taiping generals are also fighting. They are defectors, having chosen to support at last the dynasty they so long opposed, and thus gain official titles, a chance to keep their accumu­lated loot, play at cards, and smoke their opium in peace. To the surprise of the French officers, the most able of these defected Taiping generals still holds it to be an "incontestable truth" that Hong Xiuquan was "raised to heaven for forty days and that he had received there the instructions necessary to begin his mission."
³¹

The atmosphere in Huzhou is harsh and uneasy. The handful of for­eign mercenaries still there fighting—with various degrees of willing­ness—for the Taiping see scores of executions every day, often for the most trivial causes, while Chinese suspected of treason are tied to piles of brushwood and set afire. The roads leading to the city have been strewn with the bodies of dismembered dead, to warn the Qing, the French, and the Taiping renegades of their fate if they are caught. Two of the French commanders have already died, though not at Taiping hands—one blown to pieces by a faulty cannon seized from a captured Taiping town, and another shot in the back of the head by his own troops, whether on pur­pose or by accident none can say. Other French officers, calling their assembled troops to charge the Taiping entrenchments, and rushing out ahead with sabers drawn to set a fine example, realize too late that none of their men have followed them, and are seized and cut to pieces by the Taiping troops.
³²

One of the mercenaries inside Huzhou is an Englishman called Patrick Nellis, who commands a small band of Westerners—Irish and English, Greek and Austrian, French and German. After listening with half an ear to an hour-long sermon by the Shield King, Hong Rengan, of which he hardly understands a word, Nellis is startled after the service to be addressed by Hong Rengan himself. Hong, speaking "in English, very slow," asks Nellis his nationality. When Nellis replies that he is English, Hong Rengan, reflecting the years of disappointment since he left Hong Kong, says that "he had never met a good foreigner." Yet Hong neverthe­less tells Nellis that he will soon be leaving Huzhou for the south, and asks him to come along, since Nellis is skilled at both artillery and rifle fire. In the event, they do not travel together, nor does Nellis ever see the Young Monarch, Tiangui Fu. No one dares talk of the kingdom's new ruler, nor of what has just happened in the Heavenly Capital: as Nellis explains, "The Rebels said nothing about Nanking; and in fact all conver­sation of that sort was most dangerous, for the small boys in the service of the Wangs [Taiping kings] were nothing but spies, and any talk of the sort was certain death."
³³

Apart from such mercenaries as Nellis, the British are less involved in the war than once they were. Though for a time they abandoned their neutrality and unabashedly fought beside the Qing, in the spring of 1864 their government decides that British officers should not, after all, fight in the lines on behalf of China, and the Ever-Victorious Army, which had effectively come under their command, is ordered disbanded.
³⁴
Relieved of their most urgent duties, the British troops, as they await the news of the final destruction of the Taiping forces, while away their time with games. They sprint, they jump, they put the thirty-two pound shot, they leap the hurdles, they throw the cricket ball for distance, they hop with sacks around their legs, they run three-legged races, and try to cross the city moat on tightropes. Most popular of all, to the spectators, is the wheel­barrow race, run blindfold over a seventy-five-yard course. The collisions, spills, and falls are always fun to watch, but the onlookers' joy is greatest when one man with his barrow turns clear around and races off alone across the field.
³⁵

The French forces, however, are still actively in the fray, and eager to best their foreign rivals. They fight their way forward in the blinding heat, as the siege is tightened around the fugitive kings in the city of Huzhou. Even the veterans of China service have known no heat like this in their past experience, and deaths by sunstroke fell some, while others succumb to the cholera that spreads among all armies from the piles of unburied corpses along the lanes of towns and on the country roads.
³⁶
The French officers swiftly learn that the cholera victims treated in the West­ern way, with brandy and camphor, often die; whereas when they use Chinese doctors, who treat the sufferers with acupuncture needles inserted into nose and lips, stomach and forehead, under the fingernails and in the leg joints, the illness is overcome.
³⁷

To keep their spirits up, the Frenchmen sing their songs from home, and drink champagne, which they chill in shaded pits filled with cold water brought from nearby wells and mountain springs.
³
^ One dons his bathing clothes and swims in the warm canal, spanning the stream with a rough plank bridge when a Chinese woman refugee, abandoned on the farther bank, shows willingness to join him. Noting this shared moment, the French commander, on his next trip to a recently recaptured village, brings a whole group of women back to serve his troops.
⁵⁹
Some of the officers arrange to have a billiard table brought up to the front lines, and place it under the shaded awnings that shelter their redoubts, so they can play together while waiting for the battle."
¹⁰
And those who wish to escape more deeply make their way at dusk to drink their absinthe in the spot they have named—using the slang picked up from the Arabs by the troops in North African campaigns—their "fountain of Maboul," their fountain of craziness, their fountain of forgetting.
⁴¹

The Qing, the French, and the Taiping renegades, with their modern arms and growing numbers, are too much for the Taiping defenders of Huzhou, and at the end of August 1864 Hong Rengan and the Young Monarch flee the city. They move ever farther down toward the south, drawn, it seems, back to the regions of Guangdong where their movement started. They survive another month on the run until October, when a sudden Qing raid on their camp forces them to separate. Hong Rengan is captured first, on October 9.
⁴²
In his interrogation by the local Qing offi­cials, Hong Rengan reiterates his belief in the extraordinary powers of the Heavenly King. Hong Xiuquan "was nine years older than I," he tells them, "and gifted with extraordinary powers of intelligence. A glance at anything was all that was required to impress the subject on his mem­ory."
⁴³
The rising at Thistle Mountain, says Hong Rengan, gives "undoubted evidence of the display of divine power throughout those years," and despite the ultimate collapse of the Taiping movement, "among those who have enjoyed the smiles of fortune for the longest time the Heavenly King stands pre-eminently forward," for he survived every one of the colleagues with whom he started out from Thistle Mountain. Hong Rengan is executed in the Jiangxi capital of Nanchang on Novem­ber 23.
⁴⁴

When the Qing troops raid the camp and capture Hong Rengan, the Young Monarch, Tiangui Fu, manages to slip away with about ten follow­ers. Crossing a small bridge, they climb a nearby hill and hide in a pit. The Young Monarch's entourage is discovered by Qing soldiers and taken away, but somehow Tiangui Fu evades the searchers. For four days he hides out in the hills, frightened and alone, finally so paralyzed by hunger that he longs for death. Suddenly, either in vision or in reality, "a great tall man, his whole body white as snow," gives him a piece of flat bread to eat, and vanishes. Restored to strength, Tiangui Fu shaves off his long Taiping tresses, and finds work for a few days with a local farmer, pre­tending that his name is Zhang and that he is from Hubei. When the harvest is all gathered in, he travels onward, until he is robbed of his remaining clothes by one man, and forced to carry loads of bamboo for another.
⁴⁵

Tiangui Fu is arrested at last by Qing patrols on October 25, 1864. He throws himself on the mercy of the state, and makes a brief confession. What he remembers of his father is briefly said: "The old Heavenly King told me to study religious books, and would not allow me to study ancient books, which he said were all demonic. I managed, however, to read secretly thirty or more volumes, and still retain some recollection of their subjects and contents."
⁴
'' Of the entire long war, and all its hopes, he tells his captors merely, "The conquest of the empire was the ambition of the old Heavenly King, and I had no part in it." His own greatest ambition, he tells his interrogators, if they release him, is to study quietly at the Confucian classics and try to gain the lowest degree, that of licentiate.
⁴
' It would have taken judges with a true sardonic wit to reprieve the Young Monarch, and set him on the road to pass the examinations that his father always failed. There are none bold enough to take the chance, and on November 18, 1864, the Young Monarch is executed, a week before his fifteenth birthday.
⁴⁸

So by the year's end of 1864, not only the Heavenly King is gone, but all the inner core of kings he built around himself have left this life: the Kings of the North and East, the South and West, the Wing King, Shield King, Loyal King, and Hong's own son, the Young Monarch, Tiangui
Fu. But if God, the Heavenly Father, is saddened at Hong's passing, He gives no sign. Hong's Elder Brother, Jesus, too, is mute. And even his Heavenly Mother, who cried out with such anguish at his birth, and fought to keep her infant from the seven-headed dragon's jaws, stays silent in her realm.

In the boom towns they are creating, where the masts and smokestacks of the merchant ships now cluster thickly at the water's edge, the Western­ers proceed in whatever ways they choose. Some walk on tightropes. Some tie themselves to partners and lurch, three-legged, down the track. Some grip the handles of their barrows and—eyelashes pressed against the cloth of unfamiliar blindfolds—race through the cheering throngs in search of a finish line that they cannot see. And out beyond the walls, shielded by awnings from the sweltering sun, stand other men who chalk their cues and calculate the angles, waiting for the enemy to make his move. While their companions, wearied by the omnipresent smell of death, leave the encampment and walk to the beckoning fountain of Maboul. There, clasp­ing the well-cooled glasses in their hands, they watch the glimmering of the Heavenly Army's nighttime fires; and with ears lulled by the sounds of signal gongs and drums, they glide their way toward oblivion.