God's Chinese Son (7 page)

But in summation, reflecting on the opportunities and challenges that tract distribution in such a land offers, Stevens acknowledges no limits to his rights or to his goals:

We have a more sure mandate to preach the gospel
in all the world,
than the monarch of China can plead for his title to the throne. By what right are the millions of China excluded from the knowledge of Christianity? They are most unjustly deprived of even an opportunity to make themselves happy for time and for eternity, by an authority which is usurped, but which they cannot resist; and there they have been from age to age idolaters, and are so still, cut off without their own consent from that which makes life a blessing. Against such spiritual tyranny over men's conscience, and rebellion against high Heaven, I protest; and if we take upon ourselves the consequences of governmental vengeance, who will say that we do wrong to any man?
²⁷

Hong Huoxiu, the future Heavenly King, comes to Canton for the Confucian state examinations in the early spring of 1836. It is a month since he passed the qualifying examina­tions in the small rural township of Hua county, near which he dwells. Now he must compete with the brightest scholars from the whole of Canton prefecture, which embraces fourteen counties. As always, there are thousands of candidates assembling in the huge examination compound in the eastern part of the old city, and rigorous quotas ensure that only a tiny fraction will pass. There is a portent this year: snow has fallen, the first snow in Canton in forty-six years according to older resi­dents, two full inches, which for a startling while bedecked the rooftops and foliage in shimmering white. Such portents can be read in many ways.
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In the years that he has been preparing for the examinations, Hong has lived surrounded by his family—his father, who has remarried after Hong's mother's death, though there are no children by this second union; two elder brothers and their wives; and one older sister. Hong also has his own new bride, named Lai, whom he married after the first young woman his parents arranged for him to marry died at an early age. Hong is the scholar of the family, and his relatives all wish him well, even though there is too little income from the family farming to keep him as a full-time student. Hong teaches in the village school—where as well as small sums in cash the payment is in food, lamp oil, salt, and tea—to earn the extra that he needs.
²

Local practice gives to those who succeed in the examinations at Canton an accolade that reminds one of those reserved for the gods at their solemn festivals. Although tiers of other examinations still lie ahead, the country people see passing the licentiate's exams in Canton as the mental and social triumph that it is, the due reward for years of sacrifice and patient study. All those who pass the final rounds for this degree, once the awards are posted, assemble dressed in red caps, blue outer garments, and black satin boots, and proceed together in sedan chairs to the Confucian temple of Canton, to pay their homage to the sage. Thence they process to the offices of the educational director to express their thanks and receive their investi­tures: two gold flowers for their red hats, a red wreath, and a cup of celebratory wine. Leaving the hall one by one, with their relatives and friends crowded around them, they are escorted home "with drums, music and streamers," to worship their ancestors and pay homage to their par­ents. The next day, with presents all prepared, they pay formal visits to their tutors, who made the successes possible.
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Any young man can nur­ture dreams like these.

The Hongs live in Hua county, thirty miles north of Canton by land, forty miles by river. Hua is a new county by the region's standards, created in 1685. Originally, this area was known as the Hua Mountains, a wild and rugged belt of forested highland that was subdivided between five separate counties. This made it a natural base for bandits and marauding gangs, for by moving only a few miles they could slip easily from jurisdic­tion to jurisdiction without ever leaving their mountain fastness, and the chances of five separate county magistrates coordinating an attack on ban­dits all at once were slim indeed.

The chaos of the period from the collapse of the Ming dynasty in the 1630s through the civil wars that marked the Manchu conquest of the south from 1645 to 1680 made this situation bleaker than ever, and the area became a no-man's land. Representatives of local scholarly families petitioned the government for redress and, after being once rebuffed, were finally rewarded by the creation of a newly named Hua county, a block of land about forty miles by thirty, carved out of the northern sections of the two large and populous counties between which Canton was subdi­vided. Hua received its own magistrate and staff, its county school, its clerks and tax inspectors, its grain storehouse and orphanage, a wall with four gates, and a force of four hundred men, half of them to guard the county seat and half scattered in garrisons among the surrounding villages. Thus reassigned were a total of 5,223 households, comprising 7,743 men and 6,775 women, working between them taxable farmland of around forty thousand acres.
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Hong's ancestors migrated here from the northeastern part of Guang­dong province in the 1680s, just as the new county was being formed. They settled and farmed in Guanlubu, to the west of the county town, on a stretch of well-watered level land, with mountains rising at their backs as they faced the sun. Guanlubu had been nothing but a couple of shops on the road when they first arrived, but by the time Hong Huoxiu was preparing for the exams a century and a half later, it was a good-sized village, dominated by people of the Hong lineage, with at least three streets of homes and a large pond in the front.
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The Hongs are Hakkas—"guest people"—as they are called in the local dialect of Canton, or "Nyin-hak," as they call themselves in their own dialect. To be a Hakka is to be not quite a local, and Hakka are granted two special slots in the local examinations, to help in their assimilation. The Cantonese whose ancestors settled in the area earlier emphasize their own priority by calling themselves the "original inhabitants."
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But to be a Hakka is not to be purely an outsider. It is not to be like the Miao tribes­men from Guangxi province to the west, who sometimes travel in their boats down the West River to Canton, to sell their oils and trade for city goods. These are truly strange-looking men, their religions all their own, their language unintelligible to Hakka and Cantonese alike, their hair not neatly shaved in front and braided at the back, in obedience to the style imposed on all Chinese by their Manchu conquerors in 1645, but piled in wild profusion upon their heads.
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Nor is it to be socially inferior, forbid­den to take the examinations and kept out of prosperous marriage ties. Such stigmas are reserved for the actors, or barbers, or the restless Tanka boat people, so named from the rounded twelve-foot boats like severed eggs in which they live, who pass their whole lives on the water and are forbidden—even if they had the means—to buy land and build a home on shore, or marry there. The greatest difference between Hakkas and other Chinese families in the region is that by Hakka custom their women do not bind their feet to make them small. Thus Hakka women can walk freely, and work in the fields with their men; they will also always marry Hakka men, since the other Chinese will find them unattractive.
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The Hakkas as a people place their origins in the central China plains to the south of the Yellow River, below the former capital of Kaifeng, and through their oral histories and their written genealogies trace their successive movements south across the centuries, in response to outside invasions, civil wars, and economic deprivation. The language they speak—"foreign" to many around Canton—is seen by themselves as in direct descent from the purest language of ancient Chinese civilization. Indeed, not long before Hong's birth Chinese scholars of linguistics have begun diligently tracing Hakka words and diction to illuminate their own historical past.
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Hong's lineage traces its roots back through scholars and ministers of the Song dynasty, in the twelfth century, to more shadowy figures in the Tang dynasty, and, even earlier, to the period of the later Han dynasty in the second century, when the Hong name can first be found. Across the centuries, too, they could point to members of the Hong line who passed the higher examinations, and in one case even the highest of all, which led to appointment first in the Hanlin Academy of Confucian scholars in Peking and later, after a successful bureaucratic career, to promotion to vice-president of the Board of War.
¹⁰
The branch of the family from which the Guanlubu Hongs trace descent had moved to northeast Guang­dong province near the Fujian border during the Song dynasty, and were based mainly in Meixian—the greatest center for Hakka people then and now—though other members of the lineage had scattered far and wide across the country.
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The move to the hitherto unknown region of Hua by Hong Huoxiu's great-great-great-grandfather was a bold one, for Hua was not the center of Hakka life and language that Meixian had been. And though the region of Hua was prosperous, with plentiful crops of rice and wheat, hemp and beans, cabbages and greens, peaches, peas, melons, oranges and dates, as well as liquor and honey and edible oils, fish and shrimp, chickens, ducks and dogs,
¹²
it is unlikely that the Hongs were able to get prime land to farm, even though they saw themselves as pioneers, and they had to move in isolated family groups rather than as a whole lineage. For the land was settled already by the original inhabitants, and as in many other parts of South China the Hakkas were different enough not to be fully welcome. But even when isolated, they kept their numbers up and their solidarity intact through their dialect and language ties; and a bride from outside the village, even if speaking other dialects, would be compelled to learn that of her husband's family, and their children of course would do the same.
¹³

From the seventeenth-century period of the family's move down to Hong Huoxiu's own time of schooling, none of the Hongs in Hua county are recorded as having passed the state examinations, even at the local level. And though Hong Huoxiu's father was described in the family genealogy as well respected, a leader and mediator of disputes in the vil­lage of Guanlubu, the house in which he raised his family was simplicity itself: it was on the western end of the third row of houses, set back from the pond, with a small courtyard dominated at the back by a largish family meeting room, quite open to the air, flanked by small rooms for the family members, the whole one story high, with floors of beaten sand and lime, walls of clay and lime, and a roof of laths laid with interlocking tiles.
¹⁴

It is the magistrate of Hua who leads his county residents to the rhythm of the rituals dictated by the state. The opening and closing of the year, the changing of the seasons, all have their solemn ceremonies in the county temple, as do the founding teacher—so they call Confucius—and the emperor, empress dowager, and heir-apparent, duly honored in far-away Peking. The emperor's "Sixteen Instructions" on virtuous behavior must be both venerated and read aloud, and for such events the successful degree candidates gather with the local officials to offer ritual sacrifices and hear the ritual music.
¹⁵
As written by the emperor, these sixteen max­ims—later amplified by the commentaries of other emperors and distin­guished scholars—summarize the behavior expected in each town and neighborhood. They extol respect and obedience to the state and one's senior relatives, harmony in each community, thrift and industry, scholar­ship and education, good manners, prompt payment of taxes, and mutual security. A few hold warnings—to reject strange and heterodox religions, to avoid all false accusations, and not to hide fugitives from justice.
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Three other gods receive the assembled dignitaries' worship in spring and autumn, and their prayers for Hua's protection: the god "of clouds and rain, wind and thunder"; the god of the district's mountains and rivers; and the city god of Hua. For each the offerings are calibrated, to show their ranking: four ritual vessels of wine and four bolts of white silk for the four forces of the weather; three vessels and two bolts for the gods of space; three vessels and one bolt for the god of the city, even though it is to him that the most urgent prayers for rain in time of dearth are first addressed, and it is he who controls the routes to the lands of the dead.'
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These are the gods and spirits that have force for all the community, so it is meet to sacrifice to them with bureaucratic style. As for the middle range of human families, the magistrate is content to let them worship their own past ancestors in their burial grounds, with their own assembled relatives. But below these departed shades, who have families to honor them, are those who have been lost to sight and history, and here the state asserts itself again. For these are "orphan ghosts" who have no one to pray for their spirits after death. Individuals of compassion often remember them collectively at the All Souls' festival, where they burn paper clothes for the spirits, and make them offerings of wine, fruit, and rice in the ceremony called "burning the street clothes." Still, their ability to harm the community remains disquieting, and therefore the magistrate holds ceremonies on their behalf at a specially erected altar in the north of the county town. The litany of the fates of these orphan ghosts, written by a local scholar long before, remains an echo of the present world in Hua: