Anti-Westernism might have been a satisfying indulgence for those who lived in the splendor of the palaces in and outside Peking, but it did nothing to alleviate the continuing misery of millions of Chinese peasants. To an increasing extent, the anger of these subjects became focused not on the white traders but on their own Manchu rulers. This was especially true in the impoverished southern provinces of the empire, where multiethnic populations struggled against not only the mounting demands of the imperial tax system but local organizations of bandits and river pirates. The economic crisis brought on by the Opium War had augmented the traditional Manchu inattentiveness to military needs, and in provinces such as Kwangtung and Kwangsi government armed forces did little or nothing to prevent lawlessness and the depredations of bandits. More and more Chinese peasants began to join secret societies—most notably a group called the Triads—whose main aim was the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty and the restoration of the Ming.
Out of this background emerged, in 1850, the Belisarius of whom Thomas Taylor Meadows had written. The origins of his rise were dramatically improbable, and the effects of it savagely destructive. Thirty-six-year-old Hung Hsiu-ch’üan was a relatively mild-tempered and introverted peasant from a small village thirty miles north of Canton. His principal claim to fame before 1850 was that he had failed the rigorous entrance exams of the Chinese civil service not once but four times. In imperial China, the civil service was the most honored path to notoriety, position, and success, and Hung had felt the effects of his failures deeply. After the third disappointment, in 1837, he had apologized to his parents for the shame he had brought on them, then collapsed into a grave physical illness. Marked by a high fever, hallucinations, and frightening seizures that became macabre entertainment for his fellow villagers, Hung’s malady may have been epilepsy. What is certain is that the extended dream that gripped his mind during its course became the bizarre source of a powerful movement.
In his delirious vision, Hung ascended to Heaven, where he was split open. His internal organs were replaced, and he was thus reborn. An aged man with a golden beard then appeared to him, arming Hung with a sword and instructing him to bring the world back to the one true faith. Hung, accompanied by another man some years older than himself, then went through the heavens laying waste to evil spirits. In waking fits, Hung leapt about the room in which he was confined shrieking, “Slay the demons! Slay the demons!” After Hung’s fever broke, he could recall his dreams clearly and felt that he had somehow been cleansed. His neighbors thought his brain had been damaged by the illness, but his behavior was benign, and for six years he lived peacefully in his village.
Then came another trip to Canton, another attempt at entering the civil service and another failure. But Hung’s reaction this time, while intense, was far different than it had been on the previous three occasions. The year was now 1843: China had been humiliated in the Opium War, and signs of Manchu corruption were everywhere. Indeed, Hung’s failure to gain admittance to the civil service may have been a result of his inability to pay his examiners a sufficient bribe. For all these reasons, Hung now held the imperial bureaucratic system responsible for his personal failure.
At this crucial juncture, Hung rediscovered a book that he had been given many years earlier in Canton. Written by a Chinese convert to Christianity and called Good Words to Exhort the Age, the text was a somewhat garbled rendering of Bible stories and Christian catechism, blended with a predictable dose of Chinese folk wisdom. At the time he received it, Hung had put the book aside without much thought. In 1843, however, he decided to read it, and as a result China would never be the same.
Suddenly and for the first time, Hung believed he fully understood the hallucinations that had gripped him during his illness. Driven past the point of madness by the intricacies and corruption of the Chinese bureaucracy, Hung became convinced that the old man in his dream was the Christian God; that the middle-aged man who had accompanied him on his demon-slaying journey was Jesus Christ; and that he himself was the second son of God, younger brother to Jesus, come to cleanse the world—with blood, if need be.
In 1847 Hung traveled once again to Canton, to the missionary school of the Reverend Issachar Jacox Roberts, where he studied the Bible for some months. Roberts was an American Baptist from the mountains of Tennessee who had come to China after being inspired by the work and words of Karl Gutzlaff, the Dutch missionary who hired out as a translator to opium dealers. Roberts remembered Hung as “a man of ordinary appearance, about five feet four or five inches high; well built, round faced, regular featured, rather handsome, about middle age, and gentlemanly in his manners.” Impressed by Hung’s dedication and intelligence, Roberts was also intrigued by the tale of Hung’s illness: “[H]e told some things in the account of his vision which I confess I was then at a loss, and still am, to know whence he got them without a more extensive knowledge of the Scriptures.” Hung, for his part, developed an enormous admiration for the Tennessee preacher. On Hung’s departure Roberts gave the young convert several more Christian tracts, which were to become important to Hung’s developing theology.
Returning home, Hung attracted a growing number of followers. But the group’s penchant for idolatry and their condemnation of ancestor veneration aroused enormous hostility in Kwangtung province, and Hung and his disciples were soon forced to flee into neighboring Kwangsi. Here Hung established a center for his cult at the base of a mountain called Tzu-ching San.
It was fertile country for sowing discontent. Into the anarchic mix of bandits, pirates, ineffectual law enforcement, and secret societies had lately been added a new element: Local gentry, in an effort to protect their property and fortunes, had raised private bands of militia. Generally, these militia were as destructive as the bandits they were assigned to control. More and more the air of violence and lawlessness drove peasants to look for radical solutions to their desperate predicament. Taking advantage of this desperation, Hung and his followers issued anti-Manchu broadsides that were as unforgiving as they were imaginative:
Whenever there is a flood or drought, the Manchus just sit and watch us starve, without the slightest compunction. This is because they want to make us Chinese fewer in number. They let loose avaricious and corrupt officials across the whole country, to exploit us to the marrow, so that men and women are weeping at the roadside. This is because they want to make us Chinese poor. If we investigate the origins of these Manchu Tartars, we find their ancestor was born from the copulation of a white fox and a red bitch, a union bound to produce a monster!
Thus incited, the ranks of Hung’s followers at Tzu-ching San steadily swelled: Within a year of his arrival in Kwangsi, he had many thousands. Exactly where social and political discontent left off and true religious adherence began for many of these faithful was and would remain impossible to determine. But the cult’s power grew regardless, and soon Hung tested that power on the battlefield.
Granting high rank to several adept military leaders who joined his movement, Hung put together a formidable army that began, in 1850, to move north toward the rich valley of the Yangtze River. Preaching stridently puritanical conduct to his followers—any sort of sexual activity during a military campaign was punishable by death—Hung led a campaign in which plunder and violence replaced other sins of the flesh. On June 11, 1851—Hung’s thirty-eighth birthday—the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace was proclaimed, with Hung as its T’ien Wang. Early in 1852 the Taipings, who now boasted an army of some 120,000, marched on and seized the important cities of Changsha and Wuchang. The movement had taken on national significance.
Just what the political and religious precepts underlying the Taiping cause were has been argued by scholars since the rebellion first broke out. Some Westerners in China at the time—most notably Thomas Taylor Meadows, Great Britain’s perceptive consular observer in Shanghai—quickly developed sympathy for the movement, seeing in it an attractive alternative to Manchu corruption and arrogance. But in fact,
the Taiping leadership never developed a sophisticated or even systematic political order, and their community was structured as one large military camp. Although women were allowed to serve the cause actively, they and their children were kept strictly segregated from Taiping men. Even wives were not allowed to live with husbands. This policy was nominally intended to prevent mischievous sexual behavior, but in reality, as even Meadows admitted, Taiping women and children were effectively held hostage to ensure the loyalty of their male relatives during campaigns.
Most Taiping legal codes were similarly duplicitous. While seeming to develop a form of proto-Communism by making land ownership and the Taiping treasury communal, Hung and his lieutenants in fact used this arrangement to build immense personal fortunes. And since the T’ai-ping t’ien-kuo was not an actual state but rather a giant, nomadic armed band, attempts at land reform never took hold. Taiping leaders were simply unable or unwilling to develop the sort of civil administration that would have made such reforms genuinely meaningful.
As for religion, the Taipings certainly caused an uproar and brought a good deal of Western attention to themselves through their iconoclasm. Ancestor tablets were destroyed in occupied cities and towns, Buddhist and Confucian temples were sacked, and idols of every variety were destroyed. “When you bow down to lumps of clay, to wood and stone,” Hung told the people, “I ask when did you lose your mind?” Yet whether Hung’s faith was actually Christian has always been open to serious doubt. For many years this doubt was based on Hung’s claim that he was Christ’s brother: It was assumed that through this claim Hung implied his own divinity. But in fact, Hung rejected the notion of Christ’s being divine. “God alone is most high,” Hung declared confidently, and although he did believe that both Christ and he were God’s sons, he denied that they could share in godhood. Even the original twelve disciples had, in Hung’s opinion, been mistaken in their assignment of divinity to Christ: “My Great Elder Brother,” Hung noted in the margin of his own New Testament, “clearly declares that there is only one supreme Lord; why then did his disciples afterwards mistakenly claim that Christ is God?” Hung’s religious doctrines were in a state of constant evolution throughout the life of the Taiping movement. Indeed, toward its end their evolution obsessed him almost exclusively. Small wonder, then, that they created such confusion among Westerners.
On balance it is impossible to say that the religious element of the Taiping movement, while certainly inflammatory, was actually helpful to Hung. By denouncing the ancient faiths of China, he alienated as many peasants as he won over. After all, to many Chinese there seemed little difference between Buddhist or Taoist idolatry and Christianity: “In every temple,” wrote one anti-Christian pamphleteer, “they [the Christians] are in the habit of worshipping a naked boy five or six inches long.… This ought … to be examined into.” As one modern Taiping expert has written of Hung and the Taiping elite: “Competent leaders, understanding the nature of the opportunity, would have put together a different and more adequate ideology.”
None of this, however, changed the fact that, in the Western communities of the five treaty ports, the notion of a Chinese Christian movement sweeping away the Manchu dynasty initially had much appeal. Some writers have suggested that Frederick Townsend Ward was among those Westerners who at first viewed the rebellion with sympathy, and, given what little hard facts were available on the Taipings in the treaty ports, as well as Ward’s admiration for revolutionary adventurers such as Garibaldi, this is not unlikely. But in 1852 the movement of Westerners in the Chinese interior was still strictly proscribed, and Ward would not at this point have had the chance to make any contact with the rebels or to learn more about their goals.
Nor did he manage to find any more lucrative or exciting employment in Shanghai than signing on with one of the ships that transported opium from India up the long Chinese coast. This was not, evidently, an occupation to Ward’s liking, and he soon put to sea again. Accepting the post of first officer aboard the Gold Hunter—a ship carrying a human cargo that has sometimes been referred to as “colonists” but more probably consisted of coolies—Ward set out for yet another part of the world where political instability had raised the possibility of violent employment: Mexico.
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Debarking at the port of Tehuantepec, Ward soon made the acquaintance of one of the most remarkable Americans of his era. William Walker, “the Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny,” was in 1852 just beginning his infamous career of filibustering, raising private mercenary armies and leading them into other countries to advance either his own schemes or those of wealthy sponsors. Almost a decade older than Ward, Walker was a native of Tennessee who, before 1852, had tried his hand at medicine, law, and journalism in various parts of the United States. His eclectic career had finally landed him in California. A deeply religious and humorless man, Walker was a confirmed advocate of slavery and a disciple of the expansionist solution to the South’s economic woes. The creation of new slave states out of western territories would, said men such as Walker, open fertile land to slave cultivation and revitalize Southern trade. But expansion was slowed by lengthy congressional debate between the pro-slavery and Free-Soil forces, and by 1852 the impatient Walker had dreamed up his own plan for increasing the economic and political power of the Southern bloc: He intended to raise a privately financed force of adventurers, enter the Mexican province of Sonora (on the southern border of what is now New Mexico and Arizona), declare it a “republic” with himself as its president, and later, if the timing was propitious, propose its annexation to the United States as a slave state.
Walker never revealed his true reasons for invading Mexico to anyone (according to the journalist Richard Harding Davis, Walker even “messed alone, and at all times kept to himself”), and most of the men he raised for his outlandish expedition were not political partisans but simple adventurers, bent on glory and loot. Certainly Ward, who traveled north from Tehuantepec to join Walker’s band, would have had nothing to do with any scheme that advanced the cause of slavery: His later statements of vehement opposition to the Confederacy confirm this. Unaware and uninformed, glad for the chance of action, Ward and the other Sonora filibusters set out in October 1853, meeting from the very beginning with misfortune.
This result was largely a product of Walker’s unfortunate personality. Among a company of extraordinary characters—Ward included—whose conversation was spiced, according to one account, with “extravagant humor and improbable blasphemy,” and whose chief pastimes were drinking and gambling, Walker was the sole man who, according to Davis, “did not boast nor drink nor gamble, who did not even swear, who never looked at a woman.” Many of Walker’s men deserted his cause even before he declared himself president of the “Republic of Lower California” on November 3, 1853. Although the exact date of Ward’s departure is unknown, his leaving is generally described as a result of personality conflicts with his chief. The causes of such conflict are not difficult to imagine. One deserter from Sonora described Walker as “excessively vain, weak-minded and ambitious. His vanity makes him tyrannical—his weakness renders him cruel, his unbounded and senseless ambition has led him to believe himself born to command. His great pride was in ‘standing upon his dignity;’—his men were constantly harassed with vexatious orders upon etiquette. There was not a sensible man in the entire command who did not utterly despise him.”
Nonetheless, there were important lessons in the Sonora experience for Ward: Having learned the value of discipline during his ocean voyages, he now learned its limits. Ward never brooked insubordination (on one occasion he threatened to blow up the ship he was serving on when the fearful crew refused to take in sail during a storm), but he also developed what has been called the “common touch” of command: the ability to empathize with his men, to take stock of their condition and mood and structure his plans accordingly. During his China adventure Ward was to stand in singular contrast to Walker by being not only well respected but well
liked by the soldiers who served under him. No description of Ward—even those of his enemies—ever accused him of vanity or cruelty; indeed, his integrity, fairness, and charm were generally conceded.
As for William Walker, after being arrested and tried in the United States for the Sonora fiasco, he went on to launch an even more ambitious expedition in 1856. Managing to secure the presidency of Nicaragua for himself, Walker was actually recognized by the American government. But his pride and arrogance separated him from his backers, and he fell ignominiously before a firing squad on a lonely stretch of Central American beach. Ward had not yet put his China plans into action when Walker was killed, and the lessons the younger man had learned in Sonora could only have been underlined by news of the execution. Ward later stated on at least one occasion that, as part of Walker’s force, he had been branded an outlaw in the United States. His frequent trips back to his native country make this seem unlikely, but his shame at having served under the “King of the Filibusters” was very real.
Ward remained in Mexico following his desertion from the Walker expedition, and during this time he met Charles Schmidt. Schmidt wrote that after the Sonora experience Ward, “having found favor with the new President General [Juan] Álvarez, came very near entering his service, as most liberal offers were made to him. He declined however on account of his not liking the people, their manners and customs, all being at variance with his preconceived ideas of the way in which their governmental affairs ought to be conducted.” With another American as a partner, Ward apparently tried his hand at business next, collecting scrap metal and shipping it to New York. But his commercial talents were no more impressive than ever, and the venture failed.