PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
Hong Kong in 1852 was a diseased and watery place, a rocky island off the southern shore of the Qing Empire where the inhabitants lived in dread of what one described as “the miasma set free from the ground which was everywhere being turned up.” A small British settlement sat between the mountains and the bay, but the emerald and sapphire glory of the scene belied the darkness below the surface. Leaving the concentration of godowns, military barracks, and trading firms along the colony’s nostalgically named central streets (The Queen’s Road, Wellington Street, Hollywood Road), one could find the grandest vistas in the gravel paths that led up the coast into the hills, but the European settlement soon gave way to scattered Chinese houses among fields growing rice and sweet potatoes unchanged in the decade since the British took the island as their prize in the Opium War. Some of the wealthier merchants had built opulent mansions in those hills, with terraced gardens commanding a view of the harbor and town. But as though their builders had strayed too far from the protection of the settlement, the inhabitants of those houses sickened and died. Marked as “homes of fever or death,” the ghostly manors sat silent and abandoned, their empty gaze passing judgment on the settlers below.1
One of those settlers was Theodore Hamberg, a young Swedish missionary with a thin chinstrap beard that set off his delicate, nearly effeminate features. He was blessed with a lovely voice, and in his youth in Stockholm he had sung together with Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale.” But while Lind went on to conquer the opera halls of Europe and America, bringing suitors such as Frédéric Chopin and Hans Christian Andersen to their knees along the way, Hamberg’s life took an entirely different path. His strong tenor found its destined outlet in preaching, and in 1847 he left his native Sweden to sail to the opposite end of the world, to this malarial colony of Hong Kong, with the sole purpose of bringing the Chinese to their knees after a different fashion.
Theodore Hamberg might well have lived his life in obscurity, for his proudest accomplishments meant little to anyone beyond a small circle of Protestant missionaries. He was one of the first Europeans in his generation to brave the Chinese countryside, leaving the relative safety of Hong Kong to preach in a village outside the Chinese trading port of Canton a hundred miles up the Pearl River (though for health reasons he finally returned to the colony). He was also the first to learn to speak the dialect of the Hakka, or “guest people”—a gypsy minority thickly populous in south China. All of that might have meant little to anyone in the world outside except that one day in the late spring of 1852, one of his converts from the countryside brought a guest to meet him, a short, round-faced Hakka named Hong Rengan who had a remarkable story to tell.
The strangest thing about this Hakka, Hamberg recalled from their first meeting, was how much he already seemed to know about God and Jesus despite the fact that he hailed from well beyond the narrow reach of the Hong Kong missionaries. Hamberg listened with curiosity as Hong Rengan gave a baffling account of the events leading to his arrival in Hong Kong. He spoke of visions and battles, armies and congregations of believers, a heavenly prophet from among the Hakkas. He had, or at least so he claimed, been hunted by the agents of the Qing dynasty and had lived in disguise under an assumed name. He had been kidnapped, had escaped, and had lived for four days in the forest, six days in a cave. None of it made much sense, though, and Hamberg confessed, “I could form no clear conception of the whole matter.”2 Not knowing what to make of the story, he asked Hong Rengan to write it down, which he did, and then—though Hamberg had expected him to stay for baptism—he left without explanation. Hamberg put the sheets of paper with Hong Rengan’s story into his desk and turned his mind to other matters. He would think little of them again for nearly a year, until the spring of 1853 when the news came that Nanjing had fallen in a torrent of blood, and Hamberg realized that the strange events sketched out in Hong Rengan’s tale meant more than he had ever imagined.
News of the mounting upheaval in China reached Hamberg and the other settlers in Hong Kong and up the coast in Shanghai only in scattered and vague accounts. From Chinese government reports there seemed no pattern to the rising disorder of the early 1850s, no principle or cohesion. Local uprisings and small-scale banditry in China’s countryside were a perennial thorn in the side of the imperial authorities, hardly anything new or noteworthy, though they certainly did seem to have increased in the years following theOpium War. Chinese travelers and clandestine Catholic missionaries deep in the interior forwarded rumors of some larger movement led by a man known as “Tian De,” or “Heavenly Virtue,” but just as many accounts reported that the man was dead, killed by imperial forces, or that he had never existed in the first place. In the absence of any clear news, the foreigners in their coastal ports paid little attention, concerned only that bandits might disrupt the production of tea and silk.
But the fall of the southern capital of Nanjing in 1853 brought a massive civil war right to the doorstep of the foreign settlement in Shanghai, which was just two hundred miles downriver where the Yangtze met the sea. Half a million rebels calling themselves theTaiping Tianguo (“Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace”) flooded down from central China on a grand flotilla of commandeered ships to Nanjing, leaving a swath of emptied cities and shattered imperial defenses behind them, and the debate was settled; this was no mere bandit uprising. Fear gripped the city of Shanghai. There was no direct communication with Nanjing, no concrete information (the American steamer Susquehanna tried to sail upriver to Nanjing to investigate but ran aground). Rumors spread that the insurgents would next march on Shanghai to attack the foreigners, and the city’s Chinese population boarded up their houses, packed up their furniture, and took to riverboats or fled into the countryside for safety. The foreign settlers called up their unready defenses, rallying a haphazard volunteer defense corps to man the city walls and bringing up the few ships in ready reach—two British steamers and a brig-of-war, and one steamer each for the French and Americans.3
But there it ended, at least for the time being. The Taiping did not march on Shanghai, and the city’s vigilance eased off. Instead, the rebels set their targets northward toward Beijing, the capital of the Manchu rulers, and dug in for a long and bloody campaign with Nanjing as their base of operations. Their “Heavenly Capital,” as Nanjing was now renamed, lay tantalizingly just out of reach of Shanghai. One British ship did manage to visit in late April 1853 but brought back conflicting impressions of what was happening there, the clearest opinion being that of the British plenipotentiary, who declared the Taiping to have an ideology of “superstition and nonsense.”4 The visitors learned nothing about the rebels’ origins.5
Despite the scarcity of clear information, raw accounts of the civil war in China radiated outward from Shanghai and Hong Kong to capture the imagination of the Western world. Europe had been through its own upheavals just five years earlier with therevolutions of 1848, and the events in China seemed a remarkable parallel: the downtrodden people of China, oppressed by their Manchu overlords, had, it seemed, risen up to demand satisfaction. The Economist called it “a social change or convulsion such as have of late afflicted Europe” and mused that “it is singular to find similar commotions at the same time in Asia and Europe.”6 Here was evidence that the empire at the other end of the world was now connected to the economic and political systems of the West.
Karl Marx, in 1853 a London correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune struggling to give shape to his ideas on capitalism, likewise considered the rebellion in China to be a sign of China’s integration into the global economy, describing it as the end result of Britain’s forcing China open to foreign trade in the recent Opium War. In Marx’s terminology, what was happening in China was not merely a rebellion or a hodgepodge of uprisings but “one formidable revolution,” one that demonstrated the interconnectedness of the industrial world. Indeed, it was in China, he argued, that one could see the future of the West: “the next uprising of the people of Europe, and their next movement for republican freedom and economy of Government,” he wrote, “may depend more probably on what is now passing in the Celestial Empire—the very opposite of Europe—than on any other political cause that now exists.”7
As he explained it, the disorder in China had its roots in the opium trade; a decade earlier, Britain had cracked China’s markets open with its warships, and in doing so it had undermined the “superstitious faith” of the Chinese in their ruling dynasty. Exposure to the world meant the destruction of the old order, he believed, for “dissolution must follow as surely as that of any mummy carefully preserved in a hermetically sealed coffin, whenever it is brought into contact with the open air.” But the effects of the Qing dynasty’s dissolution would not be limited to China itself. The whole of the Taiping Revolution was, in his mind, Britain’s fault, and now the effects of her actions overseas were going to be felt back home: “the question,” he wrote, “is how that revolution will in time react on England, and through England on Europe.”8
Marx predicted that the loss of China’s markets to the Taiping Revolution would undermine British exports of cotton and wool. Merchants in a chaotic China would accept only bullion in exchange for their goods, sapping Britain’s stores of precious metals. Worse, the revolution would cut off England’s source of tea imports, and the price of tea (to which most of the British were addicted) would spike in England at the same time that a poor harvest in Western Europe looked likely to send food prices through the roof, reducing still further the demand for manufactured goods and undermining the whole manufacturing industry on which Britain’s economy depended. “It may be safely augured,” Marx concluded, “that the Chinese revolution will throw the spark into the overloaded mine of the present industrial system and cause the explosion of the long-prepared general crisis, which, spreading abroad, will be closely followed by political revolutions on the Continent.”
If Marx was keen to convince the readers of the New-York Daily Tribune that the Chinese civil war was one of class struggle and economic revolution analogous to the movements in Europe, the editors of the Daily Picayune in the southern slave port of New Orleans saw it in rather different terms, after their own particular vision of the world. It was, as they saw it, a racial war, and China was a slave state in upheaval. The Taiping had emerged, the editors explained, from the southern provinces of Guangxi and Guangdong, whose inhabitants were “principally of the primitive Chinese race.” The northern Manchus, in contrast, were “the ruling race in China” who had taken the throne two hundred years earlier, since which time “China has been accordingly ruled as a conquered country by its masters.” The two races never mixed, they explained, and in accordance with their southern vision of a harmonious slave-based society, the Picayune offered that in China “The quiet, patient, laboring millions have submitted to their masters mostly with exemplary gentleness.” The sole threat to the stability of this Manchu-Chinese country of peacefully coexisting masters and slaves was these “primitive” people of south China who refused to submit to the yoke. The Taiping Rebellion, then, was a dark analogy to an uprising of African slaves in the United States.9
The London Times, for its part, was the most prescient of observers, honing in immediately on the question of whether Britain should send its navy into the Chinese conflict and, if so, on which side. In an editorial on May 17, 1853, just after the news of Nanjing’s fall reached London, The Times noted that the Taiping seemed unstoppable and that “according to all computable chances, they will succeed thus far in subverting the Government of China.” The Times also ran a report from a Shanghai paper asking whether “a change of masters” was something desired by the Chinese nation at large, offering that the Taiping—though hardly beloved in northern China—represented a force of change that was indeed welcome to the Chinese, and “throughout the country the feeling seems to be growing deeper that the exactions and oppressions of the mandarins are no longer to be borne.”10 By the end of the summer, The Times declared flatly that the rebellion in China was “in all respects the greatest revolution the world has yet seen.”11
But the rebels themselves were a cipher. The reader of The Times would easily conclude that the Taiping enjoyed the support, grudging at least, of the Chinese people and were poised to overthrow the Manchus and usher in a new era of government. But the editors also sounded a note of caution about Britain’s ignorance. “We are without any substantial information as to the origin or objects of the rebellion,” they wrote. “We know that the existing Government of China is likely to be subverted in a civil war, but nothing more.” Britain, they worried, simply didn’t know enough about the nature or ideology of the rebels to decide whether it should support or encourage them: “We cannot tell in the case before us on which side our interest or our duties may lie—whether the insurrection is justifiable or unjustifiable, promising or unpromising; whether the feelings of the people are involved in it or not, or whether its success would bring a change for the better or worse, or any change at all, in our own relations with the Chinese.” As it turned out, however, answers to the most pressing of these questions—of the origins of the rebellion, of who the Taiping really were and what they believed in—were to be found in Hong Kong, scribbled on a few stray sheets of paper stuffed into a drawer inTheodore Hamberg’s desk.
The following autumn Hong Rengan sought out Hamberg again, now in his village station outside Canton, and this time the missionary knew him for who he was: the cousin and lifelong companion of the Heavenly King of the Taiping, severed from the movement and blown to Hong Kong by the vagaries of chance. He was the only person in contact with a foreigner who had firsthand knowledge of the forces that had risen up in the interior of China—forces that now, as the world finally took notice and watched from afar, threatened to destroy the ruling dynasty from within. Hamberg and Hong Rengan formed a close friendship, the thirty-four-year-old missionary and the thirty-one-year-old refugee, and Hamberg finally got to baptize his friend in September 1853 before taking him back to Hong Kong.12 Hamberg instructed Hong Rengan carefully in Lutheran doctrine, preparing him to serve as an assistant to the foreign preachers and eventually to take their brand of Christianity to the Taiping in Nanjing (though Hong Rengan later claimed that it was he who had spent those months teaching the foreigners, not the other way around).13 As they worked together, Hamberg, with his halting command of Hakka dialect, managed to tease out the details hinted at in Hong Rengan’s written account and to pull together the full story of who this man was and where he had come from.14
As Hong Rengan told the story, it was his cousin Hong Xiuquan, nine years older, who had always been the brilliant one. They lived in neighboring villages about thirty miles from the provincial capital of Canton, close enough to see the White Cloud Mountains northeast of the city on a clear day. The villagers were mostly relatives from their clan, which had once been a grand one—back in the days of the Song dynasty many of them had served as high officials and imperial advisers, but that was a very long time ago and now they were poor farmers. They did, however, have a small schoolhouse where Hong Xiuquan began studying the Confucian classics at the age of seven. He distinguished himself immediately and in a few years had memorized the Four Books, the Five Classics, and the other texts required for the civil service examinations. By his early teens, he had also read widely in Chinese history and literature and was so bright, his family believed, that he could understand the ancient texts at first reading without assistance. They dreamed that he would restore their long-lost family glory, and several of his teachers worked without pay in hopes that their reward would come when he passed the exams and became an official. As his need for more specialized training took him to schools farther from the village, his family pooled their resources to support him, though by age sixteen he was already supporting himself as a schoolteacher, with a small salary paid primarily in rice, lard, salt, and lamp oil.
Passing the Confucian civil service examinations was the key to gaining an official appointment in the Qing dynasty government, and that was the goal to which both cousins aspired. But the examinations were fabulously difficult, and failure at the provincial level usually meant years of waiting for the next chance to compete. The actual process of taking the provincial exam consisted of three days in a dank, musty cubicle in Canton, proving one’s mastery of the Confucian classics. And though Hong Rengan himself never had much success, when Hong Xiuquan traveled to Canton to compete for the first time in 1827, he placed high in the rankings on the first day. As the examination wore on through its full span, however, his name slipped in the rankings, and by the end of the third and final day he had fallen out of the circle of winners. It was nine more years before he finally qualified to take the exam again, in 1836, and on that occasion he failed for a second time. Hong Rengan also never managed to pass, but it was Hong Xiuquan who had their entire extended family’s hopes riding on him. So that may be why he was the one who finally suffered a breakdown.
Hong Xiuquan had his first visions in 1837, just after failing the examination for a third time. Weakened by the ordeal, he had to be carried home afterward. When he got there, he collapsed into bed and called his family, who crowded around him. He apologized to them that his life was over and he had let them down; then he closed his eyes and lost all strength. They thought he was dead. But eventually he woke up and began telling them about strange things he had seen while he was asleep. In his dream, a dragon, a tiger, and a cock had entered the room, followed by musicians with a sedan chair. They carried him away to a “beautiful and luminous place” full of men and women who rejoiced when they saw him and an old woman who washed him to remove the defilements from his body. A group of old men also appeared, and he recognized some of them as the sages of ancient China. They slit open his body with a knife, removed his organs, and replaced them with new ones, red in color. Then they closed him up, though later he could never find any trace of the incision. He was escorted into a grand hall, where in the highest position sat an old man in a black robe with a flowing beard of gold. The old man wept that the people of the world did not venerate him. “They take of my gifts,” he told HongXiuquan, “and therewith worship demons; they purposely rebel against me, and arouse my anger. Do not thou imitate them.” He then gave Hong Xiuquan a sword for killing demons (but admonished him not to use it on his brothers and sisters), as well as a seal and a piece of yellow fruit, which he ate. It was sweet. The old man in black led him to look down at the people on the earth, where everywhere he could see defilement and perversion. Then he woke up.
Hong Xiuquan’s visions continued off and on for forty days, and Hong Rengan stayed by his cousin’s side listening in his waking moments to hear stories of what he had seen. There were other recurrent characters, one a middle-aged man he called “elder brother” who traveled with him to the “uttermost regions” of the world to slay demons with his sword. In another dream-vision, the old man in black was berating Confucius for failing to teach proper doctrine to the Chinese people, and Confucius humbly confessed his guilt and shame while Hong Xiuquan looked on. His brothers kept the doors to the house locked during those weeks, and they would sometimes catch Hong Xiuquan leaping about his room, shouting “Kill the demons!” and slashing wildly at the air. His insanity drew the curiosity and amusement of neighbors, who came to look at him as he slept, to see the famous madman close up. At one point he woke up claiming to be the emperor of China. His family was shamed and worried. As Hong Rengan explained to Theodore Hamberg, “His friends and relatives only replied, that the whole was strange indeed, without thinking at the time that there was any reality in the matter.” What Hong Rengan did not believe at the time—but did believe by the time he recounted his story to Hamberg—was that his cousin’s visions were, in fact, divine revelations.
Hong Xiuquan finally recovered, and Hong Rengan saw that he was literally a different person after his ordeal—taller, stronger, and vastly more intelligent. He was now more handsome, with fair skin and high nose. His gaze had become “piercing and difficult to endure.” His voice boomed, and when he laughed, “the whole house resounded.” Healthier and sharper of mind than ever before, he returned to his teaching and his preparation for the civil service exams. But he was no more successful than before. In 1843 he sat for the examination in Canton for the fourth time, and failed yet again. That was the year another cousin found a forgotten book in Hong’s cabinet. It was a Christian tract in Chinese, which a missionary had pressed into his hands some years before in Canton but which he had never read. The cousin looked it over and thought it interesting, so Hong Xiuquan took the time to read it carefully. And thus came his epiphany. That book, he told Hong Rengan, unlocked the secret of his dream-visions from six years before. After reading the basic tenets of Christianity, he suddenly understood it all: the old man in black with the golden beard who had commanded him was God, and the elder brother who had helped him slay demons was Jesus Christ. The demons were the idols worshipped by the Chinese in their Confucian and Buddhist temples, and his brothers and sisters were the Chinese people. Hong Xiuquan baptized himself, then threw away the Confucian tablets in his schoolroom.
Hong Rengan was Hong Xiuquan’s first convert, along with a neighbor named Feng Yunshan. They baptized themselves in a river and took down the “idols” in their classrooms—the tablets and likenesses of Confucius that were icons of the state religion ofConfucianism, which lay at the heart of the examination system. The three began studying together, gathering translated Christian texts where they could find them. Hong Xiuquan preached to them and soon to others drawn in by his message, using the Gospel tracts and his visions as complements—each, he claimed, proving the truth of the other. The Bible, he believed, had been written explicitly for himself.
The three believers—Hong Xiuquan, Hong Rengan, and Feng Yunshan—now began to convert their parents, their brothers and sisters, their wives and their children to the God for whom Hong Xiuquan was prophet. It didn’t always go easily; Hong Rengan’s older brother beat him with a stick for taking down the Confucian tablets, which caused his students to abandon the school and left him with no income. Hong Rengan, indignant, replied, “Am I not the teacher? How is Confucius able to teach, after being dead so long? Why do you force me to worship him?” Hong Xiuquan and Feng Yunshan left in 1844 to spread their word to other villages and far-flung family members throughout the province, and though Hong Rengan desperately wanted to join them, his relatives forced him to stay as a schoolteacher because he was only twenty-two years old. He had to put the Confucian tablets back up to get his students to return. But even staying put, he managed to baptize at least fifty or sixty converts, which was a good deal more than Hamberg would ever manage in his own career.
As Feng Yunshan preached from village to village in the mountainous regions of the neighboring province of Guangxi, the movement grew and spread. Autonomous congregations sprang up, numbering in the hundreds of followers who referred to themselves as part of a “Society of God Worshippers.” They took Hong Xiuquan—whom many had never met—as their spiritual leader. When Hong Xiuquan came back home in 1845, Hong Rengan noted a shift in his ideology; he was no longer solely concerned withConfucianism, with replacing it with the worship of God. There was a new tone to his preaching that disparaged the ethnically Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty as the wrongful usurpers of China. “God has divided the kingdoms of the world, and made the Ocean to be a boundary for them, just as a father divides his estates among his sons,” Hong Xiuquan explained to his cousin. “Why should these Manchus forcibly enter China and rob their brothers of their estate?” His religious movement was becoming a political one.
By 1847, there were about two thousand followers of the Society, primarily from the Hakka population. Emboldened by their faith and their numbers, they began smashing Buddhist idols and temples, raising the suspicions of the authorities. By 1849, the independent congregations were having fits, speaking in tongues. They looked to Hong Xiuquan to tell them which of their channeled words came from God and which came from the Devil. A pestilence ravaged the province in 1850, and when word spread that sick people could be healed by praying to Hong Xiuquan’s God, the numbers exploded. Multitudes joined the Society, and after the disease had passed they gave credit for their survival to Hong Xiuquan’s religion.
But none of that was enough to call an army into being. What tipped the scales was an outburst of violence between Hakka and “native” settlers in Guangxi province. The Hakkas, as latecomers, had to scrabble for land and water rights, and the more long-standing local families scorned them as interlopers. A small-scale war broke out between a handful of Hakka and native villages in the autumn of 1850; the natives burned down the homes of the Hakkas, and the Hakkas turned to the Society of God Worshippers for protection and support. Local authorities, already suspicious of the religious sect, now began to view it as a harbor for troublemakers. But according to Hong Rengan, Hong Xiuquan had foreseen all this and waited patiently to make his move.
As the Hakka-native violence spread, Qing officials—who blamed the trouble on the Hakkas—sent a body of soldiers to round up Hong Xiuquan and Feng Yunshan. Getting wind of the plan, a nearby congregation of God Worshippers armed themselves with swords and spears and marched overland to save their leader. They easily routed the outnumbered imperial soldiers, and Hong Xiuquan sent out word calling for all of the God Worshippers from across the districts to gather in one place for the first time and prepare for the next stage of their movement. Many had already sold their houses and land in preparation. Over the following days they assembled and found that they now numbered in the tens of thousands. With little effort they took possession of a small town, their first military victory. Imperial soldiers laid siege, firing on the God Worshippers from outside, but they managed to slip out in the middle of the night and in the morning the imperials fell on a nearly empty town. Troops dispatched to pursue them were cut down in the woods, and the imperial soldiers wreaked their frustrated revenge on the unfortunate townspeople who had stayed behind.
On January 11, 1851, Hong Xiuquan declared the founding of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, with himself as the new emperor, or Heavenly King, of China. Feng Yunshan and three other lieutenants were appointed kings of the four directions. Through 1851 and 1852, the Taiping army fought its way north, absorbing the poor and disenfranchised, the criminals, all those who feared or hated the reigning Qing dynasty authorities, all who would convert to their brand of Christianity and commit themselves to the destruction ofConfucianism and, above all, the Manchu overlords. By the time they reached the Yangtze River cutting through central China in January 1853, there were half a million of them, though Feng Yunshan and untold numbers of others had died along the way. But Hong Rengan knew of this only through hearsay. He had been too late to the first assembly point and arrived at the town after the God Worshippers had already slipped out in the night. Trying to follow them, he had found only imperial patrols hunting for stragglers. And thus had begun his flight and his disguises, pursued by Qing agents who burned his home village to the ground, his kidnapping at the hands of a man who wanted the bounty on his head, his escape, and finally his asylum in Hong Kong with the Swedish missionary Hamberg.
The one thing Theodore Hamberg would do in his life to capture the attention of the world beyond his small circle of missionaries was to translate Hong Rengan’s account into English and publish it. He did so because it had convinced him of what was, to him, the most marvelous, the most improbable and amazing fact of the rebellion: namely, that the rebels who had risen up from the heart of China to overthrow the Manchus were Christians. His book came out first in Hong Kong and Shanghai as The Visions of Hung-Siu-Tshuen, then in London as The Chinese Rebel Chief. It was nothing less than propaganda, seeking to convince the readers of the English-speaking world that the Taiping rebels worshipped the same God they did. It was, furthermore, an attempt to draw foreign support toward the rebels by awakening, in Hamberg’s words, “a more lively and permanent sympathy … on behalf of the millions of China”—by which he did not, of course, mean the people of China who remained loyal to the Manchus. Finally, Hamberg published the book to raise money for the cause, of which he had, through his friendship with Hong Rengan, become a clear partisan. “It may add to the satisfaction of the readers,” he wrote at the end of the volume, “to know, that while they are promoting the sale of the book, they are also relieving the distress of many who form the subjects of its pages.”15
In May 1854, as he finished work on the book, Hamberg gave Hong Rengan and two friends money to travel to Shanghai in the hope that they could make their way up the Yangtze River across the Qing cordons to rejoin the Taiping movement in Nanjing. He loaded Hong Rengan down with gifts. There was a range of Chinese books: authorized Bible translations compiled by the foreign missionaries, along with translated works of history and several maps showing the world, China, and the Holy Land. Hamberg also gave him the standard tokens of the European trying to impress a Chinese audience—a telescope, a thermometer, a compass (though the Chinese had invented that one). He hoped that Hong Rengan would be the European missionaries’ conduit to the Taiping.16And that would just be the start; Hamberg’s real hope was that once they got to Nanjing he himself could follow them and join the movement as a religious teacher. Hong Rengan had mentioned on occasion how much he would like to have Hamberg with him in the Heavenly Capital, but Hamberg didn’t want to be presumptuous and insisted that he wouldn’t try to join the Taiping unless they gave him a formal invitation.17
The journey, however, was a failure. Hong Rengan had a falling-out with his missionary hosts in Shanghai (they found an opium pipe in his room, though he claimed that a visiting friend had left it there), and at any rate they didn’t have the means to help him get to Nanjing. The Chinese portion of the city was in rebellion, controlled by a secret society sympathetic to the Taiping that didn’t believe he was related to the Heavenly King and refused to help him. Hong spent a few months in Shanghai casting about and studying astronomy and mathematics at a missionary school before giving up on rejoining the Taiping. He took a steamer back to Hong Kong, sailing through the waters off the Chinese coast at a breathtaking speed, and wrote a poem comparing the choppy sea to a battleground, the sound of the ship cutting through the waves to “a host of ten thousand men in battle,” suggesting a longing for the war in which he couldn’t take part.18 His Swedish friend wasn’t there to greet him when he got back to Hong Kong, however; a few days after Hong Rengan’s departure for Shanghai, the “miasma” of the colony caught up with Theodore Hamberg, and he died of dysentery at the age of thirty-five.19
Hong Rengan’s return to Hong Kong in 1855 promised to be a permanent one, and he found long-term employment as a catechist and assistant to the preachers of the London Missionary Society. He was well trusted, a baptized Christian known for his friendship with the late Theodore Hamberg, and his amiable personality won him the favor of the broader missionary community. His supervisor and closest collaborator for the following years was the stodgy muttonchopped Scottish missionary James Legge, who was embarking on a project to make English translations of the whole of the Confucian canon (the same texts on which the infernal civil service exams were based). Legge and Hong worked closely together and often preached in tandem—first Legge in his newly acquired Cantonese, then Hong Rengan in Hakka dialect. In contrast to his past practice, Hong Rengan’s sermons in Hong Kong reflected James Legge’s doctrine, not his cousin’s.
Legge, who did not lightly praise anyone who was Chinese, held an unbounded affection for Hong Rengan and described him as “the most genial and versatile Chinese I have ever known.”20 Legge’s daughter seconded this, testifying that her curmudgeonly father felt for Hong Rengan a “special affection and a warmth of admiration such as he gave to hardly any other Chinaman.”21 Indeed, there was something in Hong Rengan’s personality—a quality of humility, of intelligence—that caught the attention of many of the missionaries he worked with. Another described him as “a man of exceptional ability and fine character,” who possessed a “clear and intelligent acquaintance with Christian truth.”22 One of Legge’s counterparts in the London Missionary Society quipped that whenever you saw a Chinese person having frequent conversations with Hong Rengan, “you may be sure there is something good going on in him.”23 And it wasn’t just the foreigners who admired him; a Chinese doctor educated in Edinburgh likewise described him as “a man of great intelligence and considerable fluency of speech.”24 In light of later events, however, others would look back years later and wonder whether it had all been a ruse, whether Hong Rengan’s “amiable disposition and Christian sweetness” that so endeared him to the foreigners had been nothing more than the clothing of a sheep, hiding a wolf within.25
The population of Hong Kong began to shift in those years after the fall of Nanjing. The Manchu government set into motion a broad campaign to hunt down and execute all of the followers of the Taiping they could capture, sending refugees fleeing to the safety and stability of the British colony. Qing officers couldn’t touch the Taiping-controlled regions around Nanjing, but in other parts of China still nominally under the control of the central government, the purge of sympathizers was merciless. The government’s targets included not just the partisans themselves but also the relatives—however innocent—of every known member of the Taiping movement out to the furthest branches of their family tree. The Qing governor-general in Canton, just a hundred miles up the Pearl River from Hong Kong, led an especially brutal regional effort to crush the sympathizers. In response to a secret society uprising that he determined (most likely erroneously) was in support of the insurgents in Nanjing, his agents cast a dragnet across the province in 1854 that ensnared an estimated 75,000 accused Taiping supporters. And for those who weren’t immediately captured, the government set up suicide stations: pavilions with tools for killing oneself (daggers, ropes), emblazoned with placards calling for supporters of the insurrection to choose a quick self-imposed death over the eventual capture and dismemberment that would bring greater shame to their families.26
Through 1854 and into 1855, the governor-general in Canton oversaw what the British consul described as “a series of executions, among the most horrible for extent and manner, of which the world has any authentic records.”27 According to one British eyewitness, tens of thousands of accused Taiping supporters were slaughtered in the Canton execution ground, a narrow alleyway crammed with pottery (it being a marketplace in less troubled times) that stank with congealed blood. “Thousands were put to the sword, hundreds cast into the river, tied together in batches of a dozen,” he testified, and he watched in horror as the accused were butchered—one executioner to grip the topknot of the bound, kneeling prisoner, and another to chop off his head with the sword. Despite the cramped quarters, the teams worked with revolting efficiency, and this witness counted sixty-three men decapitated in the space of four minutes before he had to stop watching. “I have seen the horrid sight,” he wrote, “and the limbless, headless corpse, merely a mass of flayed flesh among headless trunks, that lay in scores covering the whole execution-ground.” There were chests for sending the severed heads of the prisoners up to the governor-general as proof of effective punishment, but so many were executedthat their heads wouldn’t fit, and the executioners eventually packed only the ears (the right ears, specifically), which alone filled the boxes to overflowing.28
Another witness to the violence was a Chinese man named Yung Wing, who had just returned from the United States after graduating from Yale University in 1854. Thoroughly Americanized, he hoped to work for the Qing government and promote education reform on an American model. He traveled first to Canton to refresh his nearly forgotten Chinese but found a scene in the execution grounds that made him rethink his support for a government that could condone such barbaric acts. As he described it: “But oh what a sight! The ground was perfectly drenched with human blood. On both sides of the driveway were to be seen headless human trunks piled up in heaps waiting to be taken away for burial.” So many were killed that “no provision had been made to find a place large enough to bury all the bodies. There they were left exposed to a burning sun. The temperature stood from morning to night in midsummer steadily at 90 Fahrenheit and sometimes higher. The atmosphere within a radius of two thousand yards of the execution ground was heavily charged with the poisonous and pestilential vapor that was reeking from the ground already over saturated with blood and from the heaps of corpses which had been left behind for at least two days.”29
The executions in Canton were a major turning point in the fortunes of Hong Kong. Refugees flooded into the colony, not just the fugitives threatened by the governor-general’s men but also wealthy merchants from south China seeking a more stable base from which to run their businesses. Hong Kong boomed as the new arrivals built houses, drove up the rents on existing structures, founded new trading companies, and generally infused a vibrant new life into the city.30 The missionaries rejoiced; it may have been difficult for foreign preachers to travel to Canton, but in time, it seemed, all of Canton might eventually come to them. The brutal and bloody crackdown in Canton also cast the Qing government in a cold new light, and even those outside who questioned the motives of the Taiping couldn’t defend the barbarism and horror of the existing regime’s reaction to it.
Legge knew well that his thirty-three-year-old assistant, Hong Rengan, was the cousin of the Taiping Heavenly King, but he wasn’t nearly as enamored of the rebels as Hamberg had been. He maintained that the Taiping weren’t true Christians, insofar as their doctrines stemmed from their so-called Heavenly King rather than any accepted denomination. There was also the thorny issue of Hong Xiuquan’s believing himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ. For all his affection for Hong Rengan, Legge was largely unconcerned about the doings of Hong’s extended family and advised him constantly to put thoughts of Nanjing behind him, to devote his life instead to preaching and studying in Hong Kong—for if events in the wider sphere continued as they were going, he believed, surely all of China would be thrown open to the missionaries in time.
Hong Rengan, for his part, seemed to take Legge’s advice to heart, and the years marched past. He took on a range of duties—visiting prisoners in the jail and preaching in the hospital, as well as traveling with Legge. There was an Anglo-Chinese College founded by missionaries, where Hong Rengan taught Chinese history and literature to Chinese Christian students, and he also helped Legge with his Confucian translations, leading Legge through the interpretations of the classics he had mastered for his now-abandoned dream of becoming a civil servant in the Qing Empire.31 As the civil war in north China ground to a stalemate and the south of the country convulsed with reprisals, Hong Rengan worked safely, quietly, and efficiently as Legge’s assistant in Hong Kong, far out of reach both of his brethren in the Taiping and of the Qing authorities, who would execute him on the spot if they could catch him.
Even more significantly for later events, Hong Rengan also gained an enormous amount of knowledge about life outside China during those years in Hong Kong. Not, perhaps, as much as Yung Wing, with his Yale education and years of residence in the United States, but certainly worlds more than any other supporter of the Taiping movement. Though still technically in China, Hong Kong was a node linked to the wider world of the British Empire. In the schools run by the missionaries and in the books they translated to promote the strengths and discoveries of their own civilization, he learned about European and American ideas of political economy, science, medicine, government administration, and even military science.32 He saw the workings of the British colony—the ways in which life was ordered, the place of trade in its economy, the place of the church in its moral life. These were glimpses of a society far removed from the one he had known, and they left impressions he would long carry with him. Above all, though, it was an idyllic life in those years, and he and Legge interspersed their studies and preaching with hikes in the hills above the city. Through four years of warfare on the mainland, they enjoyed a life dominated by books, sermons, and picnics.33
But Hong Rengan’s popularity cut both ways. For he was popular—indeed, enormously popular—not just with the missionaries but also with the crowds of Chinese that gathered around him whenever he ventured out, the crowds of refugees driven to Hong Kong by the specter of the execution grounds in Canton. James Legge knew full well that those who pressed against Hong Rengan as he stepped off at the dock weren’t asking him about religion, at least not in Legge’s sense. They were asking about his cousin and the rebellion, and whether he would lead them to Nanjing and the Heavenly Kingdom. Other missionaries whispered that if Hong Rengan could just get to Nanjing, he could be the one to correct their doctrines after everything he had learned in Hong Kong. He could, single-handedly, be the man to bring true Christianity to China at last. And it was those missionaries who, behind Legge’s back, had their way in the end.
Hong Rengan disappeared while Legge was away for home leave in the late spring of 1858. Other missionaries gave him money for the trip and promised a stipend for the family members he left behind, but with regard to Legge—who steadfastly told him to stay away from the Taiping—it was a secret. He left one record of his state of mind when he gave up the safety of Hong Kong. It was an optimistic poem of departure, the voice of a solitary traveler finally awakened, preparing to rejoin his family and his congregation:
The southern flight of wild geese awakens me from my bed, and
I arise to confront the wind-blown sails and the shining banks of the river.
There are no musicians to honor my departure, so
I’ll write my own lines to fly on a banner from the mast.
My thoughts are as deep as the spring grass, waving green;
Though mountains divide them, the geese throng with excitement.
Roll up your sleeves and steer your boat, pay no mind to me.
From this point onward, the hero’s powers will know no boundary.34
This time he didn’t take a load of Bibles or a telescope, nor did he have the convenience of a steamship. He didn’t take the crowds who had thronged him in Hong Kong or even the few family members who had managed to join him there. He left his older brother behind as head servant in Legge’s household, where he would be safe. Then he set off alone, in disguise, to attempt the journey overland across seven hundred miles of war-torn Chinese countryside to Nanjing.