God's Chinese Son (40 page)

In Hong's palaces, everything must be clean, to avoid the dangers of fire or disease. Leprosy is a terror that has struck the palaces before, leav­ing "faces swollen, black and filthy, bodies putrid." No piles of rubbish may be left around, all spittoons must be emptied carefully and neatly at every change of shift, and all flying insects must be kept away from Hong's own person, especially in the evening. One attendant fans them away from Hong's head, and one from his feet. The fan must not be nearer than five inches to his body, and never may it touch him.
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The bathhouse must be another world of cleanliness and order: no women may go there when not on duty, and those who use it must be recorded on a roster of attendance and afforded perfect privacy.
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When Hong himself is at his ablutions, the women always prepare four sets of clean and scented towels, some of yellow and some of white silk, and when the weather calls for it the towels are heated. His handkerchiefs, sweat towels, and cloths for face and beard are always clean and regularly changed.'
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One group of attendants is assigned to the care of his upper body, one for his lower. His beard is trimmed, his hair is combed and neatly coiled, his nose is wiped, his feet and lower parts kept clean, and the area "near his navel" cleansed with special care.
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The two attendants assigned each morning to his dressing, may stand directly in front of him, and face him, but like every other woman in the court they may not raise their eyes higher than his shoulders, and never meet his gaze directly.
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Making sure not to touch his bared neck, they robe him in his gown, they see to the even hanging of his sleeves to right and left, and smooth the decorative collar round his shoulders. His hat is placed upon his head always by being held at the back, and completely straight.
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All the women in the palace, on rising, rinse their mouths so that their breath is fresh, and carefully clean the area round their eyes.
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Their hands too are always clean. Never may they pluck their brows or hair, never wear outlandish clothes and never bind their feet, but always keep their hair smoothly combed, their topknots neatly coiffed, their dresses bright and clean and trimmed with flowers.
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As Hong tells them, being pretty is not the point, for when did Jesus or the Heavenly Father mind an ugly woman? It is being well groomed that is essential to one's looks
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When Hong walks forth in his palace gardens, by day or night, his women check that his clothes are warm enough, and may even hold his arm to steady him. If he wishes to ride through the gardens, to see the flowers or hear the birds, they pull the traces of his ornamental carriage with their own hands, watching at ail times for bumps, walking slowly, keeping their distance, and remembering that if they swing the front of the carriage to the left then the rear of the carriage will veer out to the right.
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Hong maintains a complete ban on all Confucian books, both for his palace women and for his own children. Unmoved by God's message relayed to him by Yang Xiuqing before his death, Hong sees such "ancient" books as "all demonic."
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But every day, amidst or after their other duties, the women must read the Bible and Hong's poems in con­junction and in sequence: one day a chapter from the Old Testament, followed by some poems, next day a chapter from the New Testament. When reading the Bible, they must pay particular attention to the personal names, which are marked in their editions with a vertical line, and the geographical names, which are marked with two lines, reading them aloud to each other to make sure their pronunciation is correct. Every Sabbath, in addition, they read the Ten Commandments. Those failing to do their reading will be reported to Hong, and severely punished.
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In addition, at every morning assembly, the women will chant some of Hong's poems aloud, and commit them to memory. They need never hide their admiration for Hong's poetry, so long as they are sincere.
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The nights in Nanjing can be long and cold, and the Heavenly King's health and happiness is everyone's concern. Carefully they see to the rugs and quilts and braziers that will keep him warm, prepare his heated gin­seng and shaved deer horn to give him strength, massage his head and feet, ankles, arms, and knees to ease the tiredness of his body.
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On the most private matters of all, Hong gives no precise instructions to his women, but he who calls himself both "fire" and "sun" throughout the cycle of the poems, in echo of the fiery name that once he shared with God, and in honor of his designation as the sun in apposition to his women moons, gives special praise and promise to those who "ease" the flame:

She who can truly ease the flame repels the demon's snares,

She who can truly ease the flame is my true wife.

She who can truly ease the flame shows the greatest mercy,

She who can truly ease the flame understands the Way.
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''

Such easers of the flame are the "most treasured" of the palace women, the true
niangniang,
or "queens," and the ones who can expect the "highest rewards."
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Everywhere in this palace universe Hong's rule holds sway, for he can "never be wrong" as far as his attendants are concerned, any more than God can be wrong to His daughters-in-law, or Jesus to his sister-in-law.

In the awesome presence of these three, the demon devil Yan Luo and his minions "bow their heads like turtles and burrow into the earth."
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Hong claims that there is now "no secret beating in dark corners" in his palaces, but that does not mean that there is neither fear nor violence among the members of his sprawling entourage, and the women are expressly told not to blame Hong if he shows a violent temper.
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His anger can be pro­voked by anything from a misplaced swing of a fan to the late arrival of his hot towels.
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Anyone making a mistake twice is considered a "habitual offender," and though beating is the commonest punishment—those enduring the blows are expected to look cheerful and even to praise their Heavenly King as the blows fall—those who refuse to acknowledge their guilt may find that the punishment for their stubbornness is death, the woman being first ritually bathed and then carried to the back garden of the palace compound for execution with the "great sword."
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"If you do not care for your Sovereign," as Hong says bluntly, "there are others who will."
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Hong not only has to see to the relationships between the dead, the living, and God the Father, between his earthly relatives and each other, and between his palace women and himself—he also has to heed the relationship between himself as God's younger son and the Bible text that has dominated so much of his life. Even as his women chant their chapter of the Bible each day, Hong has to work with all his heart and mind to reconcile the previously accepted word with the echo of the dead East King's charge—based itself on Captain Mellersh's rejections of the Tai­ping claims to their personal relationships with God and Jesus—that both the Old and the New Testaments were full of errors and need revising.

Where to start? Hong decides to start at the beginning, in Genesis, and to focus on two basic categories of "errors" that he can both identify and try to set aright. One category concerns God's journeys down to earth; the other involves the interconnections of family members with each other in ways that are not suitable for the Taiping faithful, and surely must be due to the devil's work.
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As he has been telling his palace women, so brash are the devil demons that they even dare, at times, masquerade as God the Father or as Elder Brother, Jesus, and can thus deceive Hong himself, let alone his more gullible subjects.
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To alter the Bible's accounts of God's visits down to earth, and thus to reinforce the claims of Taiping revelation—whether Hong's or Yang's or Xiao's, for all are intertwined and none can stand without the others—is in part a matter of grammar and of emphasis. Thus in Genesis 1:26, where the old Bible says, "And God said, let
us
make man," Hong's altered version reads, "And God said I will make man."
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In Genesis 12, verse 13, whereas in the old Bible Abraham asks Sara, his wife, to protect him from Pharaoh, in Hong's revision Abraham asks "the God of my ancestors" to do the protecting. In Genesis 19, verse 1, when the old Bible reads, "And there came two angels to Sodom at even," Hong's change is even more direct. He writes, "The Lord True God came down to Sodom," and God as visitor and actor in his own earthly presence replaces the angels throughout the story, in verses 13, 15, and 16.
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At other times the words for "older brothers" or for "younger brother" are inserted into the text, even though not in the old Bible, to heighten the sense of family inti­macy.
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Or, even more boldly, Jesus, identified as "God's
eldest
son" (to leave room for Hong as the younger son), is introduced suddenly into the Old Testament story, as a forceful man of action. One example of such an insertion by Hong occurs in the mysterious verses 24 and 25 of Exodus chapter 4, when Moses is returning to Egypt and his wife, Zipporah, bloodily circumcises their son Gershom. In Hong's version Jesus is in attendance at this event.
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Certain aspects of the story of Noah and his three sons are also dis­turbing to Hong Xiuquan. For here it is the father's drunkenness that is most at issue in Hong's mind, and makes him seek revision. In the early version of the flood, which Hong read in 1843 in the religious tracts of Liang Afa, the story ended with the ark still floating upon the waves, and the reader was never told if its passengers ever came safely back to land. The version of Genesis that now confronts Hong's urgently exegetical eye tells of their landing and of God's covenant, and continues the story this way:

(v. 20) And Noah began to be a farmer; and he planted a vineyard.

(v. 21) And he drank of the wine, and became drunk; and he was uncovered

within his tent.

(v. 22) And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren outside.

(v. 23) And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness,

(v. 24) And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.

(v. 25) And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. (Genesis 9:20-25)

Hong's solution is to leave uncut the fact that Noah became a husbandman and planted a vineyard, for the Chinese version sounds innocent enough about these bucolic labors. But the two references to drunkenness and to nakedness in verse 21 have to go. "Exhausted," Hong writes in substitution, "Noah while in a deep sleep tumbled from his bed onto the ground." Only in verse 22 is it explained that by this unfortunate fall he exposed his naked body
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For the Taiping, banned from alcohol as from opium, the fact that a man beloved of God would drink himself to oblivion, and in this state show his private parts to his three sons, is safely smoothed away. A quick erasure of "Noah awoke from his wine" in verse 24 and substitution of "Noah awoke from his sleep" and the revision is complete.
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In purging the story of Noah, as he has already done for that of Lot, Hong Xiuquan is removing the taint of immorality and impropriety from the earliest denizens of the Bible. But with Lot's uncle Abraham, as with Abraham's son Isaac, Isaac's son Jacob, and Jacob's son Judah, Hong is entering specific family territory. For as it is written in the very first verses of Matthew's Gospel, Jesus himself is in the direct line of descent from these four, a line of descent that passes down from them through Jesse, David, and Solomon, to Joseph, the husband of Mary, mother of Jesus. As Jesus' younger brother, and the father of the Young Monarch Tiangui, Hong has clear need to make his Old Testament ancestors moral exem­plars. Abraham and Isaac do not present major problems to Hong Xiu­quan, but in each case he is worried by the way that they lie to Abimelech, king of Gerar, by claiming that their beautiful wives—Sarah and Rebekah—are in fact their sisters. Both Abraham and Isaac fear that Abime­lech will kill them if he wants to make their wives his own. But by lying, they not only place their wives in sexual jeopardy; they bring the wrath of God on Abimelech's head. By rather elaborate sleight of hand, Hong recasts these stories so the patriarchs appear blameless and the burden of deceit falls either on the wives themselves or on other intermediaries.
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More difficult, for Hong, is knowing what to do about Jacob, whom God the Father himself rewarded with the name of Israel. The old Bible clearly delineates how Jacob first obtains his brother Esau's birthright by use of ruthlessness, and then with his mother's help deceives his dying father, Isaac, and receives the blessing that his father wished to give to Esau. In this case Hong gives up the text as too immoral to be fixed by minor changes, and rewrites all of Genesis 25:31-34, and most of chapter 27.