God's Chinese Son (31 page)

A decree to the distant English, who have long recognized the duty of worshipping Heaven (God), and who have recently come into the views of our royal master, especially enjoining upon them to set their minds at rest and harbour no unworthy suspicions.

The Heavenly Father, the Supreme Lord, the Great God, in the begin­ning created heaven and earth, land and sea, men and things, in six days; from that time to this the whole world has been one family, and all within the four seas brethren: how can there exist, then, any difference between man and man; or how any distinction between principal and secondary birth? But from the time that the human race has been influenced by the demoniacal agency which has entered into the heart of man, they have ceased to acknowledge the great benevolence of God the Heavenly Father in giving and sustaining life, and ceased to appreciate the infinite merit of the expiatory sacrifice made by Jesus, our Celestial Elder Brother, and have, with lumps of clay, wood, and stone, practised perversity in the world. Hence it is that the Tartar hordes and Elfin Huns so fraudulently robbed us of our Celestial territory (China). But, happily, Our Heavenly Father and Celestial Elder Brother have from an early date displayed their miraculous power amongst you English, and you have long acknowledged the duty of worshipping God the Heavenly Father and Jesus Our Celestial Brother, so that the truth has been preserved entire, and the Gospel maintained.. ..

Now that you distant English "have not deemed myriads of miles too far to come" and acknowledge our sovereignty; not only are the soldiers and officers of our Celestial dynasty delighted and gratified thereby, but even in high heaven itself Our Celestial Father and Elder Brother will also admire this manifestation of your fidelity and truth. We therefore issue this special decree, permitting you, the English Chief, to lead your brethren out or in, backwards or forwards, in full accordance with your own will or wish, whether to aid us in exterminating our impish foes, or to carry on your commercial operations as usual; and it is our earnest hope that you will, with us, earn the merit of diligently serving our royal master, and, with us, recompense the goodness of the Father of Spirits.

Wherefore we promulgate this new decree of (our Sovereign) Taiping for the information of you English, so that all the human race may learn to worship Our Heavenly Father and Celestial Elder Brother, and that all may know that, wherever our royal master is, there men unite in congratulating him on having obtained the decree to ruler
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In a curt reply to "the Insurgent Chiefs," Bonham rejects the document, "part of which," as he puts it, he is "unable to understand, and especially that portion which implies that the English are subordinate to your Sover­eign." Should either the Taiping or anyone else, he adds, "presume to injure, in any manner, the persons or property of British subjects, immedi­ate steps will be taken to resent the injury in the same manner as similar injuries were resented ten years ago, resulting in the capture of Chinkiang, Nanking, and the neighbouring cities." (The British had, in fact, not cap­tured Nanjing in 1842, merely threatened it with their artillery, but this is not the time for historical niceties.)
²⁴
Ordering the anchors of the
Hermes
raised, Bonham has Fishbourne set lull steam for Shanghai, which they reach in thirty-three hours. On the way to Nanjing the week before, when nervous Taiping garrisons, misled by the Qing propaganda, fired on the
Hermes,
Bonham practiced complete restraint and refused to run out his guns. On the homeward journey, when the same thing happens, he orders the
Hermes
to return the fire.
²¹

Bonham's mind is now made up. While the cultured missionary-inter­preter W. H. Medhurst reports to him, after perusing the twelve Taiping tracts acquired in Nanjing, that the Taiping appear to be "in some respects better" than the Europeans, Bonham brushes the suggestion aside. As he tells his superiors in Whitehall, the Taiping religion appears to him a "spurious revelation," with a true Old Testament base perhaps, but "superadded thereto a tissue of superstition and nonsense."
²⁶

The reports and tracts brought back to Shanghai by the
Hermes
fasci­nate the foreign community and cause new waves of speculation, defensive preparations, and bewilderment. One wealthy British wit—acting as if Hong Xiuquan has deposed the ruling dynasty—renames his racing pony
"Rebel Chief late Emperor,"
entering it for the May races, which it wins.
²⁷
The Qing officials are also perturbed by reports that Bonham has traveled to Nanjing to "dine with the Taipings," but are reassured by Bonham in a personal note that such was not the case.
²⁸
The French, who have their own sizable foreign area in Shanghai, are anxious to repeat the initiative of the British but find it hard to make the journey to Nanjing, since there is only one French steam-driven man-of-war in the region, the
Cassini.
The captain of this vessel, Franjois de Plas, is not only an experienced career officer but a recent convert to the Catholic faith, who successfully petitioned the French government to assign him a ship in which he might visit "every point of the globe in which pious missionaries have tried to spread God's word."
²
' In France in 1851 de Plas slowly assembled a group of officers and midshipmen who shared his sentiments and goals, and traveled in person to Rome, where the Pope blessed his project. For de Plas, the
Cassini,
with its two paddle wheels driven by 200-horsepower engines, six cannon, specially constructed chapel, and crew of 120, is a true vessel of God.
⁵⁰

De Plas is torn constantly by his own desire for action, the need to defend the Catholic community farther down the coast in Ningbo as well as those in Shanghai, visits for patrol purposes or refitting the ship to Macao and Hong Kong, and the contradictory instructions and requests of the French consul in Shanghai.
³¹
The confusion of the period is com­pounded when, in September 1853, Chinese secret-society members—not acting in any coordinated way with the Taiping armies—seize much of the Chinese city of Shanghai, causing the Qing officials either to flee or to take refuge with the foreigners in their special concession areas. Though the foreign community has prepared for such a contingency some time before with the training of militia and the construction of ditches and communicating roads, the disruption of trade leaves them in continuous anxiety.
³²
For the French residents, there are several complicating factors. Firstly, the French concession area is the actual neighbor of the Chinese city, where the secret societies now hold sway, and hence it is almost impossible to avoid daily tensions and clashes, or problems over sharing out the jurisdictions of roadblocks and bridge defense with the British. Secondly, the French have taken it upon themselves, ever since the treaty settlement of 1842, to be the guardians of the Catholic missionaries in China. Hence the grim news of the maltreatment and the killings of Cath­olic Chinese converts by the Taiping in Nanjing and other cities, gives de Plas an added urgency to go to Nanjing, and see if he can get some formal diplomatic agreements and promises of religious toleration more effective than those acquired by Bonham.
³³

Captain de Plas also has trouble on his hands as he tries to moor the
Cassini
in such a position off the Shanghai waterfront that its guns can cover both the newly built Catholic cathedral at one end of the stretch and the French consulate at the other, while attempting at the same time to avoid the erratic fire kept up in the waterway between the boats of the secret societies and the Qing waterborne forces.
³⁴
The immense ransoms demanded by secret-society members from the Chinese Catholic converts in Shanghai—as much as ten thousand taels from certain wealthy families of the faithful—further compound his problems of when or how to inter­vene to protect his charges. And, as a strictly private agenda of his own, de Plas lives in hopes that the recently widowed British consul, Rutherford Alcock, a man of "elevated soul and an upright heart," will soon be con­verted to Catholicism for he seems to de Plas to be "not far from abjuring his protestant faith."

It is only in November 1853, six months after the British return, that Captain de Plas receives permission to attempt the voyage to Nanjing, to make a reconnaissance and help the French diplomats meet with the Tai­ping leaders. To his alarm, instead of the consul or a junior diplomat coming with him, the French minister M. de Bourboulon decides to make the journey in person, and to bring his wife with him. His wife, an Englishwoman and a Protestant, takes pleasure in denying the divinity of Jesus and insisting that he is nothing more than a great philosopher. Thus what might have been a simple if risky venture becomes one fraught with diplomatic and personal niceties. The minister placates de Plas by telling him the goal of the journey is nothing less than "the extension of French protection over the Catholics" of Nanjing.
³⁶

Leaving Shanghai on November 30, the
Cassini
is after a few hours shrouded in fog at the mouth of the Yangzi, and forced to anchor. Even after the weather clears, it is a delicate journey because of the deep draft of the vessel, the officers' and crew's lack of familiarity with the shifting sandbars and unpredictable currents, and the great flotillas of small junks—one of two hundred sails, another of close to three hundred— which despite the presence of numerous Qing patrol boats still crowd the river as they carry supplies to the Taiping capital or the outlying cities the God-worshipers control on the Grand Canal and the river shores. Not until December 6 do the French reach Nanjing, and anchor in the river outside the walls.
³
' Soon the
Cassini
is filled with Taiping emissaries, dressed in red and yellow robes, their hair hanging long around their faces below their scarlet hoods or turbans, or sometimes stuffed into a cloth bag or pouch around their neck. To the French Jesuit priest Stanislas Clavelin, who is on the
Cassini
to serve as an additional interpreter, the Taiping seem "honest and polite." Told of the French desire to have an interview with Taiping leaders, they take a day to decide, but the affirmative response comes by nightfall.
³⁸

Next morning Taiping guides with horses are at the waterfront to meet them. De Bourboulon's legation secretary and Clavelin, with his Chinese catechist to help in translation, and two ship's officers, make up the party, which rides for close to an hour and a half to the sound of gongs and under fluttering Taiping banners, past the city's huge outer walls, till they enter through the main western gate, and ride several miles more through the wide main avenue. Among many burnt-out houses, the shops are closed and silent. Groups of women pass, some richly clad, on their way to their units of twenty-five in the women's camps, loaded with the rice they have collected from the public treasury near the river bank. To Clavelin they seem to show "a calm resignation, a little sad no doubt, but nevertheless much less so than [one] would have expected, considering the sacrifices of all kinds that they have had to make."
³⁹
A group of thirty young Chinese teenagers, finely dressed and mounted on well-formed ponies, caper around the Frenchmen, who are told these are the children of the Taiping leaders. Once a man presses close to Father Clavelin and opens his hand for a second, showing the priest a rosary clasped within, and making a rapid sign of the cross. It is the first evidence of the survival of Chinese Catholics in the city, among the God-worshipers.
⁴⁰

Other things about the Taiping order impress the French observers: the severed heads of opium smokers hanging in cages on the walls; the con­stant printing of the Pentateuch and Matthew's Gospel, and the holding of new examinations based on these and other religious texts; women petitioning for warmer clothing in the winter cold and being granted it from the common store, and the lanterns burning in the women's quar­ters through the nights. The impossibility of buying a set of Taiping clothes from anyone in Nanjing, since no one will trade such goods for cash, shows the Taiping control over economic life. The ten shots fired from cannon twice a day when the Heavenly King is at his prayers, and the apparent sincerity of other Taiping followers in their prayers and services, give an air of sanctity to the city.
⁴¹
When finally summoned to the audience hall to meet with Taiping officials, the French are startled by the contrast with the mixed desolation and bustle of the rundown streets:

With the aid of torches which lit up the room, we saw on each side a large number of onlookers; and at the end, in front of us, the two ministers who would receive us. Their splendid robes of blue satin, richly enhanced, on the chest mainly, by magnificent embroideries, their red boots, diadems wholly of carved gold on their heads, their grave and dignified bearing, and a large retinue forming a second rank behind them; all, in a word, contributed to giving to this interview a character of dignity and grandeur. . . ,
⁴²

The mood of the meeting is encouraging. The Taiping officials talk of their religious doctrines, their Heavenly King and his mission to stamp out idolatry, and call the Frenchmen "friends" and "brothers." Not only can de Bourboulon meet with their highest ministers, they promise, but if he has "serious interests to discuss" he can meet with the Heavenly King himself.
⁴³