Directly the ‘Pekin Gazette’ officially recognised the rebellion, the European residents, instead of sympathising with the Government and the well-disposed Chinese, at once testified their interest in the movement, and openly avowed a hope that by the swords of these rebels China would be reformed and converted. Each one had his reason for adopting what at first sight seemed so unfair a course. The European official was sick of mandarin arrogance; the missionary was wearied with the slowness of his progress in dealing with the stolid self-sufficiency of the Chinese character, and in trying to establish breaches in the obstinacy of his belief in Confucius and Mencius; the trader longed for extended commerce or larger profits; and our smugglers were at war, as well as the Kwang-si rebels or Canton pirates, with all law and order.
The Taepings were speciously represented as men battling for religious and political freedom; and a Swedish missionary, Mr Hamberg, claimed for our reputed converts the credit of having organised and guided the rebellion. Himself deceived by the cunning of the Asiatic, he put forth a strange fable, called the ‘Revelations of Hung-siu-tsien,’ and was thus mainly instrumental in enlisting on behalf of an organised system of land-piracy the religious sympathy of this country. Hordes of armed robbers, ravaging the interior of a distant country, because they said they believed in Heaven, were forthwith pronounced Christians, engaged in war upon heathenism. And, forgetting the first principle of our faith, that it is not to be propagated by the sword, we shut our ears and hearts against the wail of perishing multitudes, and dreamed that the light of the Gospel had dawned on Cathay. Years have elapsed since our credulity was thus imposed on, and from the experience gathered we are now able, we think, to tear the veil from the monstrous imposition.
The rebellion in Kwang-si first obtained political importance when it secured the adhesion of a few literary expectants for office, who had been rejected at the competitive examinations in Canton. By those examinations, every man in China may hope to reach the highest posts in the empire. The necessities of the Court of Pekin during the reign of the last three inefficient monarchs had compelled it to dispose of certain appointments by purchase. Every disappointed candidate at the provincial examinations traced his failure to this abuse, and a formidable body of ambitious, half-educated enemies to the State was thus formed. This was exactly the class needed by the hard-fighting brigands of Kwang-si and pirates of Kwang-tung to bind them together under a common banner, and they were not long in finding their way to a theatre where they might play at being kings, ministers, and generals to their hearts’ content.
For one of these disappointed candidates for office, named Hung-siu-tsien, and for a society of reputed converts at Hong-Kong, known as the Christian Union, Mr Hamberg claims the credit of the Taeping movement. They are perfectly welcome to the honour; but we, in the first place, impeach the testimony of the Chinaman who persuaded Mr Hamberg that the leader of the Taepings was a Christian convert; and, in the next place, we declare that the members of the “Christian Union” were as arrant knaves as ever imposed upon the good-nature of a confiding clergyman.
The Christian Union at Hong-Kong was instituted for the purpose of training Chinese in Protestant Christianity, and sending them as missionaries into the interior of the country. Mr Gutzlaff had the charge of this Union, and seems to have been utterly deceived by them; for we are assured by one who was immediately brought up amongst them as an Englishman studying the Chinese language, that they were dissolute characters, pretending to be converts for the sake of a livelihood. There was no duplicity they did not practise, and no lie they did not invent. Our informant one day entered the study of one of these missionaries, as he was poring over a long and well-written Chinese letter. His face was lit up with joy and interest, and he exclaimed, “Ah, when you are able to compose like that!” The young English student took up the letter, and found it to be from a convert named Wang-pin, giving an account of a mission upon which he had been despatched into the interior. It described his adventures and difficulties, his hopes and anxieties; how some officials had maltreated him; how he had escaped: it recounted labours amongst his brethren, and, lastly, the conversion of two women and a youth, and the joy with which he had welcomed by baptism such and such persons into the fold. The imposition was perfect; but, unfortunately, the writer had allowed himself to be seen very recently in Hong-Kong. Search was made for him. Aided by a policeman, the task of discovering Wang-pin was not difficult. He was dragged out of a brothel, where, no doubt, he had penned his interesting report.
Such profligacy was the rule rather than the exception amongst the Christian Union. At a recent meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, Mr Lay related another instance of moral turpitude. It appears that the Union was supposed to consist of men from various provinces of China, and a number of Bibles adapted for circulation in their respective districts were regularly issued to these natives, when they were despatched upon their tours of duty. As there was reason to suppose that these Bibles were often returned to the office, and had to be paid for as new ones supplied from the Chinese publisher at Hong-Kong, a number of them were secretly marked with the names of the converts who were supposed to distribute them gratis in remote parts of the empire. Before many days, every one of these marked Bibles returned to the hands of Mr Hamberg, and it was then discovered that they had been sold to the Chinese publisher, who had again presented them as new Bibles. Of course this system of pillage was put a stop to, but we leave the reader to guess how many more frauds were daily perpetrated by such a set of scamps upon innocent-minded missionaries. We might fill a volume with further details of the tricks of the Christian Union, but we forbear.
Amongst these reputed converts to Christianity was one who can at any rate claim the credit of having so thoroughly deceived us, that even so recent a writer as Commander Lindesay Brine, of the Royal Navy, did not succeed in discovering the wolf under the skin of the oily Hung-jin. Mr Hamberg first met Hung-jin (or, as he now styles himself, Kan-wang) in 1852, at a time when the minds of our residents in China were much excited. Mr Hamberg was full of curiosity, Hung-jin all ready to gratify it. Hung-jin quite delighted the missionary “with the interest he displayed in Christianity, and his acquaintance with its precepts.” The rogue, be it known, had actually studied Christianity for two entire months, some years previously, under Mr Roberts, an American missionary in Canton. As a near connection of two out of three of the most prominent leaders in Kwang-si, Hung-jin could give information about them; and, still more to delight Mr Hamberg, he invented a fable he knew would be very palatable to the outer barbarian, and promote the fortune of himself and family. Hung-jin, having converted us to Taepingism, was much treasured by our religious societies in China, and every care and expense were lavished upon him to render him a fit instrument for keeping up the connection between us and the leaders of the Taeping movement. He and his brother, we know, were in the employ of two missionaries in Hong-Kong about the year 1853. Hung-jin was above the average of his countrymen in ability; and, under the care of the Rev. Mr Chalmers for three years, made considerable progress in secular studies. In 1854 he was baptised, and repeated unsuccessful attempts were then and subsequently made to send him back to his friends in Kwang-si and Central China. Our missionaries were almost hysterical over their treasure; they declared he had quite established himself in the confidence and esteem of the Shanghai missions; that he exhibited “much talent, evinced much sweetness of disposition, and, above all, had given undoubted proofs of the sincerity of his attachment to the Christian faith.” Early in 1859 he contrived at last to rejoin his relative in Nankin: a relative whom he had left years before as a mere conspirator in Kwang-si, he now found self-installed as an incarnation of the Deity in a yamun of Nankin. The discontented and unsuccessful candidate for literary honours of Canton was now the King of Heaven, the Tien-wang of Nankin. Hung-jin was welcomed as he deserved, for he had well served the King of Heaven by throwing dust in the eyes of the much-feared foreigner; and Hung-jin, the Christian impostor, stepped into royal robes as the “Kan-wang,” “Shield King,” or, in other words, the prop and stay of Taepingism; and, having shown such ability in bamboozling the foreigner, his especial province appears to have been to feed us with hopes of a general conversion and extension of trade, but to take care that we did not test their sincerity. Feeling that it was not yet time to throw off the cloak of piety which had hitherto served him so well, Commander Brine tells us that the Kan-wang wrote to the Rev. Mr Edkins, deploring his unfitness for the high post to which his distinguished relative had appointed him; expressing his own anxiety “to promote the diffusion of true religion;” adding, that he was more than ever impressed with the superhuman wisdom of the Tien-wang, or King of Heaven! Just after he had thus given utterance to these expressions of diffidence and zeal, our late pupil, now an assistant-king in Nankin, started on an expedition into Ngan-hwuy province, to spread the knowledge of Perfect Peace. A traveller who happened to be on the river Yang-tsze at that time, tells us that it was easy to trace the path of the mission by “the smoking and flaming villages.” Every impostor must, however, eventually be exposed, and so it was with the Kan-wang; for the missionaries, taking him and his relative at their word, thrust themselves into Nankin. Mr Roberts, the quondam instructor in divinity of the Taeping rulers, had preceded the Kan-wang, and the latter found Mr Roberts clad in regal robes, and holding some sort of office. About this time also (1860), the Rev. Mr Holmes visited Nankin; he came away shocked at what he had seen and heard. We shall avail ourselves presently of his testimony as to the character of the Taeping rebellion; but for the present we shall confine ourselves to the career of Hung-jin, or Kan-wang. In the ‘North China Herald’ of October 19, 1861, under the signature “Rusticus Expectans,” we next hear of the scamp. The anonymous writer turns out, by the evidence of Captain T. W. Blakiston, to be Mr Forrest, an interpreter in the British consular establishment.[[1]] Mr Forrest draws a vivid picture of the homes of the different Taeping-wangs. He tells us of his Excellency Le, who was building a gorgeous yamun, “upon which upwards of a thousand workmen were engaged—some building, some carving stone and wood, and not a few standing with a bundle of rattans in their hands ready to inflict blows on any one shirking his work. A great portion of the building is already completed, and the whole will be a good specimen of a Chinese yamun of the old style, with its network of beams at the gables, its large wooden columns, and fantastic carvings. Asking what the workmen were paid, Le laughingly replied,—‘You English pay for work; we Taepings know better. Is not ours a truly great Empire?’”
In front of the Kan-wang’s palace were two orchestras, painted over with dragons, diablerie, Chinese characters, and the beatitudes from St Matthew! The Kan-wang is, it seems, a hearty fat individual, forty years of age, and very intelligent. He can shake hands like an Englishman, and say, “How do you do?” Mr Chalmers’s care in his education was evinced by his knowledge of geography especially, and the number of books of reference by which he was surrounded.
“His sanctum is quite a museum in its way; a fine cheerful room facing a garden of flowers, with a large bed of Soochow manufacture for its principal article of furniture. The bed is covered with jade ornaments, and hung with rich yellow curtains. Tables line the sides of this chamber, and they are loaded with the strangest conglomeration of articles: a telescope on a moving pedestal, a gun-box, three Colt’s revolvers useless from rust, a box of percussion-caps, ditto of vestas, Windsor soap, a Woolwich manual of fortification, and a Holy Bible; any amount of Chinese books, five clocks, broken barometers, ink-stones, and dirty rags, fans mounted in silver, jade-stone drinking-cups, gold and silver platters, chopsticks, English port-wine bottles, and Coward’s mixed pickles. About the apartment were suspended an English naval sword, some dragoon-caps, a couple of Japanese knives, two French plates, an engraving of the Holy Well in Flintshire, and lying on the bed was a mass of silver ingots tied up in a cloth.”
Amidst this collection of loot, the Kan-wang could give a neat dinner and plenty of wine, for which he had an especial dispensation. Our informant then adds that Kan-wang is “a good fellow, and merely accommodates his Christianity to his tastes and habits”—an opinion in which we agree, only substituting the words arch-knave for good fellow. Hear, for instance, what Mr Roberts says of him, in January 1862:—