“From having been the religious teacher of Hung-siu-tsuen in 1847, and hoping that good—religious, commercial, and political—would result to the nation from his elevation, I have hitherto been a friend to his revolutionary movement, sustaining it by word and deed, as far as a missionary consistently could without vitiating his higher character as an ambassador of Christ. But after living among them fifteen months, and closely observing their proceedings—political, commercial, and religious—I have turned over entirely a new leaf, and am now as much opposed to them—for good reasons, I think—as I ever was in favour of them. Not that I have aught personally against Hung-siu-tsuen; he has been exceedingly kind to me. But I believe him to be a crazy man, entirely unfit to rule without any organised government; nor is he, with his coolie kings, capable of organising a government, of equal benefit to the people, of even the old Imperial Government. He is violent in his temper, and lets his wrath fall heavily upon his people, making a man or woman ‘an offender for a word,’ and ordering such instantly to be murdered without ‘judge or jury.’ He is opposed to commerce, having had more than a dozen of his own people murdered since I have been here, for no other crime than trading in the city, and has promptly repelled every foreign effort to establish lawful commerce here among them, whether inside of the city or out. His religious toleration and multiplicity of chapels turn out to be a farce—of no avail in the spread of Christianity—worse than useless. It only amounts to a machinery for the promotion and spread of his own political religion, making himself equal with Jesus Christ, who, with God the Father, himself, and his own son, constitute one Lord over all!! Nor is any missionary who will not believe in his divine appointment to this high equality, and promulgate his political religion accordingly, safe among these rebels, in life, servants, or property. He told me soon after I arrived, that if I did not believe in him I would perish, like the Jews did for not believing in the Saviour. But little did I then think that I should ever come so near it, by the sword of one of his own miscreants, in his own capital, as I did the other day.
“Kan-wang, moved by his coolie elder brother (literally a coolie at Hong-Kong) and the devil, without the fear of God before his eyes, did, on Monday the 13th instant, come into the house in which I was living, then and there most wilfully, maliciously, and with malice aforethought, murder one of my servants with a large sword in his own hand in my presence, without a moment’s warning or any just cause. And after having slain my poor harmless, helpless boy, he jumped on his head most fiend-like, and stamped it with his foot; notwithstanding I besought him most entreatingly from the commencement of his murderous attack to spare my poor boy’s life.
“And not only so, but he insulted me myself in every possible way he could think of, to provoke me to do or say something which would give him an apology, as I then thought and think yet, to kill me, as well as my dear boy, whom I loved like a son. He stormed at me, seized the bench on which I sat with the violence of a madman, threw the dregs of a cup of tea in my face, seized hold of me personally and shook me violently, struck me on my right cheek with his open hand; then, according to the instruction of my King for whom I am ambassador, I turned the other, and he struck me quite a sounder blow on my left cheek with his right hand, making my ear ring again; and then, perceiving that he could not provoke me to offend him in word or deed, he seemed to get more outrageous, and stormed at me like a dog, to be gone out of his presence. ‘If they do these things in the green tree, what will they do in the dry?’—to a favourite of Tien-wang’s—who can trust himself among them, either as a missionary or a merchant? I then despaired of missionary success among them, or any good coming out of the movement—religious, commercial, or political—and determined to leave them, which I did on Monday, January 20, 1862.”
We may add, that subsequent to the departure of Mr Roberts, the Taeping leaders signified that they had no farther need of missionaries at Nankin.
Let us now trace the career of the head of Taepingism, Hung-siu-tsuen, from the ‘Pekin Gazette’ and other documents.
In the year 1837, a man twenty-three years of age, whose family resided near Canton, went up for his literary examination—a competitive examination for office under his Government. He was plucked—it was not the first time. Perfectly satisfied with his own merits, he had assumed the title Siu-tsuen, or “Elegantly perfect,” in addition to the family name of Hung. As Siu-tsuen we shall speak of him. Between 1837 and 1843, Siu-tsuen was again repeatedly unsuccessful at the examinations; disappointment brought on brain fever, and for some years he was a dangerous lunatic. Recovering from this attack, he accidentally obtained possession of a number of tracts on Christianity by a native convert called Leang-Afah. They were in style and translation enough to puzzle a stronger brain than Siu-tsuen’s. Naturally excitable, he was now seized with a religious mania, and fancied he had personal interviews with the Trinity. He had witnessed the proceedings of Western nations against the Government of his country; and our combination of civilisation, religion, and war no doubt struck him as the right means for gratifying his spleen and his ambition. From a crack-brained enthusiast, Siu-tsuen sobered down into a conspirator against his sovereign and the order of the State. From 1843 to 1846, he was, we are told, busy inoculating a small circle of his immediate friends with his views. His disciples believed that he was in direct communication with the Deity, and he appears at first to have merely contented himself with the character of a second Moses. He formed a society which he called the “Congregation of the Worshippers of God” (or “Shangti”). Hung-jin, or Kan-wang, and another relative of Siu-tsuen’s, named Fung, likewise joined it. As the society increased, Siu-tsuen bound the members by oaths “to live or die with him, and to exert all their efforts to assist him;” and in return he promised to ascertain from heaven for the members “wherein lay their respective interests and profits,”[[2]] an essentially Chinese way of looking at Christianity. They soon worshipped Siu-tsuen as an incarnation of Shangti, or God. Both he and his relative Fung had ecstatic fits. The latter performed miracles; and like other arch-impostors, they passed unconsciously from deluding others into deceiving themselves. The disordered condition of Southern China favoured the propagation of any doctrines, however wild and bizarre; and the mountains and secluded valleys of Kwang-si afforded the necessary hiding-places for a sect whose first article of faith was disobedience to the Emperor. In either 1846 or 1847 Mr Roberts, residing in Canton, was so interested in the doings of Siu-tsuen that he invited him to stay at his house, and promised a kind welcome on the part of his brethren. Siu-tsuen, accompanied by his relative Hung-jin, accordingly went to Mr Roberts, and stayed two entire months studying Protestantism. Their conduct was exemplary, but Mr Roberts did not feel justified in baptising the worthies before they left, which is just as well, for, in “the 3d month of 1848,” Siu-tsuen announced to his flock that “our Heavenly Father had come down into the world,” and on “the 9th month he was followed by the Saviour, who wrought innumerable miracles!”
About this time the plot of sending Hung-jin to the Europeans, and intrusting him with the office of misleading us as to the real character of the intended insurrection, must have been decided upon, for we now find him in communication with Mr Hamberg. What occurred between 1850 and 1853, when Hung-jin rejoined his relative at Nankin, we will condense in a few words. Siu-tsuen and Fung, aided by another disappointed candidate for office named Tai-tsuen, or Tien-teh, raised the standard of revolution, and declared openly their intention of subverting the present dynasty. Siu-tsuen styled himself the King of Perfect Peace, or “Tae-ping-wang,” and nominated the other two as subordinate kings. They sacked several cities in Kwang-si, but finding the province getting too hot to hold them, they decamped with the loss of Tien-teh, their best leader, and crossed into Honan province, so as to strike the great water-communication which circulates through Central China. The Taeping leader, then captured, made a full confession, which, tested by the experience of to-day, is a most truthful account; and though vaunting the courage of his brother rebels, he distinctly says that, after all, Siu-tsuen was a mere profligate and winebibber, rejoicing in no less than thirty-six mistresses.
In June 1852, we find that the Taepings, ten thousand strong, had reached a large river flowing through Honan into the Yang-tsze. The water-communication once reached, they had but to embark, and the current would waft them to Nankin, and as far north as Tien-tsin.
By Christmas 1852 they had reached the commercial heart of the Empire in the great emporiums which lie about the confluence of the rivers Han and Yang-tsze. Two centuries of peaceful industry, of buying and selling, giving and taking in marriage, without one thought of a sudden and bloody awakening from a dream of luxury, were here ready for the strong-handed. The writer met a man who witnessed the destruction of the three great cities of Wuchang, Hankow, and Han-yang, the slaughter of the ill-starred inhabitants, and the conflagration of the vast fleets of junks and trading-boats there assembled. For eight days and nights the place was, he said, wrapt in flames—a perfect hell upon earth. The horrors of this scene were sufficient to frighten all the inhabitants of the lower valley of the Yang-tsze into subjection, but it did not save them from pillage and rapine. The officials were everywhere slaughtered when they dared to remain at their posts, and the Manchou garrisons, with their children and women, perished to a soul. Wherever the current of the river would float these Taepings, they conquered, unopposed. Nankin in its turn fell into their hands with frightful slaughter, and Chin-Keang, at the entrance of the Grand Canal, shared the same fate. Still aided by the water-communication, they aimed a blow at Pekin, and actually advanced to the head of the canal. Directly, however, the water-communication failed them, their progress was arrested, and they sustained a defeat that deterred them from a second attempt on the capital. There can be no greater fallacy than the notion that the stability of the dynasty has been really jeopardised, or that the raid of the Taepings towards Pekin was the result of organisation or military skill, instead of being entirely due, as we have said, to the immense water facilities at their command, from the very mountains of Kwang-si to the Tung-ting Lake, and from the lake to the Yang-tsze, and from it to Tien-tsin by the Grand Canal.
Siu-tsuen, alias Tien-wang, or King of Heaven, now sat (in 1853) in Nankin, and Taepingism was thoroughly established as an evil which it would require years to extirpate; and what was worse, damage had been done to the extension of Protestant Christianity in the minds of the better classes in China, from the artful manner in which Siu-tsuen had succeeded in dragging us in as his allies against the Government and peaceable classes of China.