God's Chinese Son (28 page)

Within thirty days of leaving Wuchang, the Taiping vanguard covers the six hundred miles of river route and reaches the edges of Nanjing. The walls are vast, rising forty feet or more above the flat riverbanks and twisting through the hills that girdle the city to the east. They also extend for almost twenty-five miles in circumference, too huge to be defended in depth, as the British noted in their surveys made several years before, at the time of the Opium War. The northwest corner near the river seemed to them the most vulnerable part, while raiding parties sent up into the surrounding hills with cannon or artillery could hold the inner city at their mercy.
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The Taiping are no lesser strategists, and see the same possibilities for attack. They sap. They surround. They threaten. They infiltrate. They spur the hatred for the Manchu conquerors and urge the city's population not to do the demons' work. On March 19, 1853, they breach the walls on the north-western corner with a series of huge explosions and their first patrols enfilade the streets, though one tragically mistimed explosion kills hundreds of Taiping warriors as they charge through the open gap. Other forces scale the southern gate and walls and move through the prosperous residential quarters there, routing the remaining Chinese defenders. On March 20 the Manchu garrison troops hold fast in their inner citadel as the Taiping troops converge. The Taiping press around the inner citadel and launch a fresh assault. There are perhaps fifty thousand Manchus there, but few of them are trained or battle-ready veterans. As their walls are breached they turn on themselves and their families, setting fire to their homes and committing suicide even as the Taiping burst into their garrison quarters. The smoke rises, the carnage continues for days as the Taiping hunt and slay all surviving demons.

On March 29, all preparations completed, there is the sound of music. The people of the city prostrate themselves at the roadside as Hong Xiu­quan in yellow robe and yellow shoes is carried into the city by sixteen bearers in his elaborately ornamented golden palanquin. Above the palan­quin nod the effigies of five white cranes. In front march the long columns of his victorious troops. Behind him, astride on their horses, are thirty- two women, with yellow parasols.
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The Earthly Paradise is not just one place. It is the whole of China, wherever the Taiping Heavenly Army can reach the people and destroy the demons, so that all may live together in perpetual joy, until at last they are raised to Heaven to greet their Father.

Hong Xiuquan, the Heavenly King, and Yang, the East King, and other leaders have developed the military ideas of Feng Yunshan and combined them with their experiences at Thistle Mountain, Yongan, and Wuchang, to create their own ideal system. Just as in the Taiping armies there are four private soldiers under every corporal, and five of these little units under every sergeant, so now in the Earthly Paradise at large there shall be four families linked to every corporal's family, and twenty-five such family units under the guidance of every sergeant. Each one of these communities shall build a public granary, and also a chapel for public worship, in which the sergeant shall make his dwelling. Every Sabbath day, the corporal shall take his own family and the four others under his command to the chapel, to worship there, and men and women shall sit in separate rows as they listen to the sermons from the sergeants and sing praises to the Heavenly Lord. Every seventh Sabbath day, all senior officers, from the generals to the captains, shall visit one of the churches of the sergeants under their command, both to preach to them and to check that all in their congregations work hard and obey the Ten Commandments. Every single day the children will go to the chapel to hear their sergeants expound the Bible and the sacred Taiping texts.
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By day the people will work their land, but all must serve, when time allows, as potters, ironsmiths, carpenters, and masons, according to their skills. As to the land of China, all shall divide it up amongst themselves, with one full share for every man and woman aged sixteen and above, and half a share for every child below sixteen. All the land will be graded according to its productivity, and the shares handed out accordingly, with each person receiving land of varying richness, from best to worst. When the land is insufficient for the people's needs, the people will be moved to where the land is plentiful. Let every family in each unit rear five chickens and two sows, and see to their breeding. Let mulberry trees be planted in the shelter of every house, so all can work at raising silkworms and spin­ning silk. Of the products of this labor—food or cloth, livestock or money—let each corporal see to it that every family under him has food for its needs, but that all the rest be deposited in the public treasuries. And let the sergeants check the books and tally the accounts, presenting the records to their superiors, the colonels and captains. For "all people on this earth are as the family of the Lord their God on High, and when people of this earth keep nothing for their private use but give all things to God for all to use in common, then in the whole land every place shall have equal shares, and every one be clothed and fed. This was why the Lord God expressly sent the Taiping Heavenly Lord to come down and save the world."
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From the public treasuries, gifts shall be made to every family at times of birth, marriage and death, according to their need, but never in excess of one thousand copper cash, or one hundred
catties
of grain. No marriage should be treated differently because of the family's wealth, and these rules shall apply to all of China, so that each community has a surplus in case of war or famine. And at every ceremony, the sergeant shall lead his families in the worship of the One True God, making sure that no superstitious rites from days of old are followed.
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From every family unit with a living male head, one person shall be chosen to serve as a soldier in the army; but the widowers and widows, the orphans and the childless, the weak and the sick, need not serve, but will receive food for their needs from the public treasury.
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As births and new marriages or the Taiping's advances lead to new families joining the ranks, from every five such families a new corporal shall be created, and from every twenty-five a new sergeant, and so on up the ranks. Reports of merit even of the humblest soldier shall also be passed up the ranks from sergeant to lieutenant and so to the Heavenly King himself, so that promotions can be made and rewards given. All officers and officials, even the highest, shall be reviewed every three years, and promoted or demoted according to performance.
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Though all of this ideal system cannot be implemented at once, at least the listings and the rosters can be prepared and reviewed so that when the times allow, the Taiping leaders will be ready to act. From the earliest days of the Taiping's entry into their Heavenly Capital of Nanjing, cen­suses have been taken of the people, and the lists kept up to date and duly passed up through the ranks.
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From the details entered on a specific family record, such as that of the Liangs, one can see whence they have come, the extent of their loyalty, and who is left still to serve. Liang himself, now thirty-four, born and raised in Guiping, joined the Taiping forces at Jintian in August 1850; in September he was named a sergeant, in October raised to captain. After the capture of Yongan he was raised to colonel and then to general, in which rank he still serves. His father is deceased in Guiping, his mother is a general of the women's Fourth Rear Army. His wife holds a position in the office of court embroideries; his sister is an official messenger in the North King's court. His children still are under age. Of his three brothers, one has died in combat, two are currently not serving in the Taiping army.
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The military rosters, by contrast, do not list every family member, but give the age and provenance of each soldier, so their commanders can check their careers and capabilities at a glance. Thus Sergeant Ji, in the Thirteenth Army's forward battalion, now twenty-six, is also a Guiping man, who joined the Taiping at Jintian in September 1850, and rose to sergeant after the capture of Wuchang. His assistant sergeant Wang, only eighteen years old, was born in Wuchang and joined the Taiping when they took the city in January 1853, and named to assistant sergeant after the capture of Nanjing. Sergeant Ji's five corporals are aged nineteen, thirty-five, twenty-six, thirty, and twenty-three, and are all from the prov­inces of central China, not from Guangxi. The private soldiers in their squads range in age from seventeen to fifty-one. Six other men are listed as soldiers in the platoon, but classified as "off-the-registers" because of youth or age. One of these men is fifty-nine, the other five are youngsters, whose ages range from eleven years old to fifteen.
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Not everyone flocks eagerly to the Taiping ranks. Households are often delays. Some Nanjing residents hide out in their own or close friends' homes, on some occasions walling off back areas of their courtyards and trying to conceal their family members there. Some hide themselves in closets if the Taiping come, while others simply live in the wooded hills of deserted areas of the city, the huge extent of which makes such a fugitive existence possible even in the midst of the Taiping's own Heavenly Capital. ' One ingenious merchant estab­lishes special institutes to manufacture luxury embroideries and face pow­der for the women's quarters of the Taiping leaders, which assures the workers he employs of special perquisites and freedom to roam in search of rare materials, for the Taiping women dress boldly and garishly, and are heavily made-up, despite the puritanical pronouncements of their lead­ers. The same merchant, emboldened by his success, gets permission to assemble squads to gather firewood in the outer suburbs, and transport it to the capital in boats; many use this brief taste of freedom to vanish altogether into the countryside.
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reluctant to register their members, and prevaricate for weeks, sometimes until threatened with death.

In areas recently occupied by the Taiping, where the locals are not known at all to the occupiers, the local villagers and townspeople are left free to choose their own corporals, sergeants, and lieutenants, by whatever criteria they choose. They are even handed the blank forms in bulk, so they can circulate them in their neighborhoods, and omit none of the information on family members that the Taiping require of them. Once the rosters have been checked by Taiping officers, each household is issued an official doorplate with the relevant information written on it, to be publicly displayed as proof they have complied with the regulations of the Heavenly Kingdom."

The problems of dealing with the followers of non-Taiping religions are handled by the leaders in different ways. Taoists and Buddhists get short shrift: the numerous Taoist and Buddhist temples within Nanjing's walls, many of them treasures of architecture centuries old, are burned to the ground. The statues and images are smashed, the priests are stripped or killed. Those who survive must conform to the new Taiping religion, and Taiping soldiers preach the new religion with drawn swords in their hands, to underline the message.'
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But the Chinese Muslims in Nanjing are not attacked so savagely, and the mosques already established in the city are allowed to stand.
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One group of religious Chinese in Nanjing are in a position of particu­lar ambiguity, because of their apparent closeness to the Taiping troops' beliefs—these are the Catholic converts, who number about two hundred.

In the brief days of siege before the Taiping storm the city, these families store all their valuables for safekeeping in the mansion of the Ju family, for they are the wealthiest Catholics in the city. But one day after the Manchu citadel has fallen, the Ju family home is commandeered as the residence for a senior Taiping official, and all the property is confiscated for the common treasury. At least thirty of the Catholics are burned in their homes or cut down in the streets, during the first harsh days of chaos, before order is restored.
^H

The survivors gather in the Catholic church, where Taiping soldiers find them; when the Catholics refuse to recite the prayers according to the Taiping liturgy, they are given a three-day grace period, but warned that thereafter death will be the penalty for those who still resist. Good Friday is on the twenty-fifth of March in 1853, and as they begin their service of the adoration of the cross Taiping soldiers burst into the church, breaking the cross and overturning their altar. The seventy to eighty Catholic men, arms tied behind their backs, are given a rapid trial before a Taiping judge, and condemned to death unless they say the Taiping prayers. They refuse, expecting martyrdom. But for no clear reason a reprieve is given, and while their womenfolk and children gather in the church, the men, still bound, are locked in a nearby storehouse, where they spend their Easter Sunday. By the day after Easter, twenty-two of the Chinese Catho­lic men have recited the Taiping prayers, finding nothing in them that specifically contradicts their faith. The others, still obdurate, are sent off to serve at the front as soldiers—where ten desert—or as laborers.'
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In order to make all the necessary registration forms, and also to print enough Bibles and copies of the Taiping sacred texts for all the sergeants who need them for their reading and preaching, it is necessary to marshal the forces of the printing industry of Nanjing. The ranks of the local printers are swelled—after the Taiping capture of Yangzhou in April 1853—by numbers of Yangzhou craftsmen relocated to Nanjing, some of them masters at using metal movable type, fonts of which had been brought north by officials once stationed in Canton. The headquarters for these Taiping printing operations, suitably enough, are in the former Temple of the God of Literature, revered by Confucian scholars.
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The forms are easy to make, and require little skill, but the word of God is a different matter. It seems to be chance—or the fact that this is the particular edition that the Heavenly King has with him for several years for his own use and study—that leads the Taiping to rely on the version of the Bible translated by Karl Gutzlaff in Hong Kong, rather than any of the various other versions available, including later corrected versions by Gutzlaff himself.
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' The first book of the Bible that the Taiping publish is the
Book of Genesis,
chapters 1 through 28, from the creation of the world through Jacob's dream of the ladder, on which the angels ascended and descended to and from Heaven. Though Genesis has fifty chapters altogether, the Taiping leaders close this opening volume with the words of the True God to Jacob at the end of chapter 28, for these will have especial force to anyone among the Taiping faithful who can read or hear:

And
he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descend­ing on it. And, behold, the Lord stood above it, and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham, thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed; and thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.
And,
behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places to which thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.

And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not. (Genesis 28:12-16)

Even though the Chinese translation is not that fluid or perfect—and at times not even clear—the Taiping block carvers are instructed to print all twenty-eight chapters directly from Gutzlaff s text, just as they find them, not excluding the numbers of each verse that are inserted among the col­umns. There is only one exception, something the Taiping leaders find so shameful that they cannot put it in their people's hands. That is the last eight verses of Genesis
19,
where Lot, after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the death of his wife, retreats with his two surviving daughters to a cave above Zoar. Hong himself knows full well, from his Confucian texts, and his experiences at Thistle Mountain and Guanlubu, the paradoxes that can attend the filial child who seeks to perpetuate the family line. But this story is different from any in the Chinese tradition, as Lot's eldest daughter speaks to her sister:

And the first-born said unto the younger, Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father. And they made their father drink wine that night: and the first-born went in, and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose. And it came to pass on the next day, that the first-born said unto the younger, Behold I lay last night with my father: let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father. And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose. Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father. (Genesis 19:31-38)

Faced with the moral implications of such a passage that they have no means to explain away—especially given their own insistence on the force of the seventh commandment—the Taiping leaders cut the verses alto­gether, continuing the Bible story with Genesis 20. In practical terms, the cut is easy, for the offending verses fall at the end of a chapter, and there is no problem of continuity between Lot's flight from Zoar and the story of Abraham and Abimelech, which follows.
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With at least four hundred men in Nanjing employed in the job of transcribing the characters and carving the blocks, the Taiping work moves swiftly forward. The rest of Genesis is published, and Exodus too, by the summer of 1853. By winter, with the numbers working on the printing project grown to six hundred craftsmen, the Taiping complete Leviticus and Numbers from Gutzlaff s version, faithfully transcribing the long lists of odd-sounding names and the minutest dietary and sacrificial details, and making no further cuts, for there is less that they find shock­ing here. Amidst the maze of technical details, one can find important reinforcement for the Taiping's own precise regulations for the listing and organizing of the faithful, even though in the Bible the troops are older, and women are not included:

And the Lord spoke unto Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tabernacle of the congregation, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they were come out of the land of Egypt, saying, Take ye the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel, after their families, by the house of their fathers, with the number of their names, every male by their polls; from twenty years old and upward, all who are able to go forth to war in Israel: thou and Aaron shall number them by their armies. And with you there shall be a man of every tribe, every one head of the house of his fathers. (Numbers 1:1-4)

Also that winter the Taiping publish the first of the Gospels, that of Mat­thew, in its entirety.
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Nanjing is, for now, the Heavenly Capital, and to protect it the great
Taiping armies are divided into three: one to defend the city itself, one to sail and march back up the Yangzi River to recapture and consolidate control over the cities bypassed—or captured and abandoned—in the headlong rush downriver in the spring of 1853, and one to march overland to the north, cutting through the heartland of China and threatening Peking itself.
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In either December 1853 or January 1854 those with enough education to write a polished essay who have stayed on in Nanjing are invited by the Taiping leaders to submit essays on the three major strategic decisions that Hong Xiuquan has taken: the selection of Nanjing as the capital, the Taiping printing and publishing program, and the alter­ing of place-names in China.

In praising the choice of Nanjing as the Heavenly Capital, the various scholars assemble a range of reasons: the direct intervention and support of God and the Elder Brother Jesus are of course central factors. But also emphasized by many are more mundane topics: the city's high, thick walls, its full granaries, its favorable topography—"like a crouching tiger and a coiling dragon"—the "elegant, simple, and generous" customs of its inhabitants, and the prosperity of its markets and its agricultural hinter­lands. Others write of Nanjing's admirable river communications, the city's reputation as a "realm of happiness," its "concentration of material wealth" and location as a prime grain-producing area, the wideness of its streets, its historical resonance as a prosperous and fortunate city, and its natural role as the end of a geographical and temporal sequence that brought the Taiping armies from Thistle Mountain through Yongan to Wuchang.

Riskily but boldly, one of the scholars, a native from the Guiping area of Guangxi who once passed the licentiate's examination that Hong Xiuquan failed, brings up the problem of the right to rule. Across all time, he writes, since God first created Heaven and earth, there have been those who have turned against their rulers; thus "regicide and usurpation were frequent, and chaos and change continued until the present." But this process, far from being repeated by Hong, was by his goodness brought to a close. For "our Heavenly King personally received God's mandate and will eternally rule over the mountains and rivers. The righteous upris­ing in Jintian signaled the formation of a valiant and invincible army, and the establishment of the capital in Nanjing lays an everlastingly firm foundation. The capital is called the Heavenly Capital in accordance with Heaven's mandate, and our country is called the Heavenly Kingdom in consonance with God's will."
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In praising the printing in Nanjing of an official list of Taiping publica­tions, each marked with the royal seal of approbation on the title page, the scholars serving the Taiping again speak much of divine will and of Hong's majesty. "When Heaven produces an extraordinary man, it must have an extraordinary task for him to do. When Heaven has an extraordinary task, it must have an extraordinary treasure to facilitate its completion." But some talk with more precision of the need to purify the Chinese language after its corruption by the "demonic language and barbarian words of the Tartar dogs."
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Other scholars praise the use of such seals on the books as a proof of authenticity at this early period of the Heavenly Kingdom when "authenticity and falsehood of books are hard to distinguish." Particularly when such books are circulated among the armies in the field, "suspicion may be mixed with belief and the demons use all sorts of tricks." Further­more, since the restructuring of literature and of culture is one of the prime proofs that a true leader has once more emerged on earth, spreading such clearly authenticated books will show all people, great and small, near and far, that such a new leader is now come.
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' Yet other scholars link the word of God on earth as exemplified in three books especially, the Old Testa­ment, the New, and Hong's own proclamations. With these three circulat­ing in authenticated editions, "the road to Heaven is now in sight," and the day of their "secrecy" will be over; all other works such as those by Confu­cius and his follower Mencius, along with the "various philosophers and hundred schools," can be safely "burned and eliminated, and no one be per­mitted to buy, sell, possess, or read them."
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'
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