The Abiding Strangeness of the Past
And the Startling Strangeness of the Taiping Uprising
In Why Study the Past? Rowan Williams comments on writing history as a balancing act of “concern with difference and concern with continuity.” As he puts it: “the risk of not acknowledging the strangeness of the past is as great as treating it as purely and simply a foreign country.”1
In attempting to write about “The China We Never Knew,” both the “foreign country” and “strangeness of the past” are always before me, and in complicated ways. There is strangeness on at least two levels: China of the late-nineteenth century and the Western missionaries I’m attempting to understand—who themselves were grappling with the strangeness of China (and the Chinese with the strangeness of Westerners!). It would be a mistake to think we understand the missionaries; it’s just the foreign country and culture of China and the Chinese we need to work to understand. There is a subtle temptation to allow the continuities (with today) to mask that strangeness of the past, or to allow only bits of strangeness to intrude. No, the whole thing is inhabited by “strangeness.”
In my grappling with this story of China and nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries, there is nothing stranger, nothing more arresting than the Taiping uprising and its origin in Protestant Christian missions. The shock waves of this great civil war—roughly parallel in time with the U.S. Civil War—are still being measured. Though, for reasons we will explore, its significance for Christian missions often seems underplayed. At times one senses that it is being edited out as too strange.2
On a wider scope, just this month a new book has been released: Huan Jin’s The Collapse of Heaven: The Taiping Civil War and Chinese Literature and Culture, 1850-1880 (Harvard University Press). I am eager to read it and hope to comment on it here. I am sure it will add historical texture to my own understanding (though the price of the book is an immediate obstacle!).
In the previous post I described the scene in 1860 Suzhou, and I’ve debated whether this is the right moment to (once again, as I did with Gutzlaff) diverge from the narrative track of following Jimmy and Sophie Graham’s entrance into China in 1889. But I think the Taiping episode is too important to leave for a later time. So buckle in for the ride back into world of mid-nineteenth century missionaries in China, and one very unexpected result of their work.
Prior to 1860, Westerners had been confined within China to five treaty ports and their close environs. News of an insurrection in interior regions had been trickling into Canton and Hong Kong as early as 1850. There had been some indications of its religious motivations, perhaps Christian in nature.
But by the spring of 1853, those rumors had sharpened into startling news. The ancient Ming Dynasty’s capital of Nanjing had been overthrown, its Manchu population slaughtered, and the city occupied by a powerful movement rolling out of southern China. Further explanations were urgently sought. For this was clearly more than the social banditry and disorder that had been reported thus far.
In Hong Kong, news of events in Nanjing jogged the memory of Theodore Hamberg. A missionary of the Basel Evangelical Society and a young colleague of Karl Gutzlaff and his Chinese Union, Hamberg realized that he had some important light to shed on the developments. In 1852, in Hong Kong, Hamberg had met Hong Rengan (who we met in Suzhou, in our previous posting). Hong Rengan was by all appearances a Christian, with a well founded knowledge of the faith.
And Hong Rengan had a story to tell. Hamberg had listened with interest, and then asked him to write it down. This he did, in a brief account, and Hamberg filed it away. Then, in the fall of 1853, Hong Rengan sought out the missionary once again. And now the penny dropped. Hamberg understood the significance of the story Hong Rengan had earlier related. Here was a close cousin of Hong Xiuquan, the “rebel” leader, and had firsthand knowledge of the Taiping uprising. Through extended conversation, the story of Hong Xiuquan and his remarkable movement in the inner reaches of Guangdong and Guangxi Provinces was filled out.
In 1854 Hamberg wrote up an account of what he had learned. It was published in Hong Kong in 1854 as The Visions of Hung-Siu-Tshuen and the Origin of the Kwang-si Insurrection.3 Hamberg was to die of dysentery in May 1854, before his account was widely distributed. But he had set a benchmark for understanding the leader and the origin of the Taiping movement.
By all accounts, Hong Rengan was a remarkable person. Before arriving in Hong Kong in 1852, he had spent some time in Shanghai, where he had studied Western astronomy. That Hong Rengan had been attracted to the study of astronomy should pique our curiosity, for the imperial rites and ideology of the “Celestial Empire” was not incidentally related to the ordered movements of the heavenly bodies. And the early Jesuit missionaries in Peking had capitalized on this. But however suggestive it might be, nothing concrete is known of Hong Rengan’s personal interest in astronomy and how it might have related to his Christian faith.
It is very likely that Hong Rengan had been instructed by the versatile missionary Alexander Wylie (1815-1887). Wylie had come to China in 1846 with the London Missionary Society, and James Legge had put Wylie in charge of the London Missionary Society press in Shanghai. Wylie was an impressive intellect, with deep interests in mathematics and astronomy. And he had gained a mastery of Mandarin. His study of Chinese history and culture led him to publish Jottings on the Science of the Chinese (1853), and he translated Western works on mathematics, astronomy, and technology into Mandarin. This mix of missionary evangelistic commitment and scientific and technological interests often shows up in varying degrees among nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries. And Chinese intellectual interest in Western science and technology would accelerate through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In Hong Kong, Hong Rengan also came to know some of the leading Protestant missionaries of that period. In addition to Theodore Hamberg, there was William Milne, William Burns, Benjamin Hobson, Elijah Coleman Bridgman, and Issachar Roberts. The latter, a quirky figure, would play an initeresting role in the Taiping story. But chief among Hong Rengan’s missionary associations in Hong Kong was the Scottish missionary James Legge (1815-1897). Of whom we shall say more.
To be continued….
Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past? The Quest for the Historical Church (Eerdmans, 2005), 10-11.
See Williams, Why Study the Past?, 24. However, as we shall see, there are important exceptions. See Thomas H. Reilly, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014); Carl S. Kilcourse, Taiping Theology: The Localization of Christianity in China, 1843-64 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Published in London in 1855 as The Chinese Rebel Chief, Hung-Siu-Tsuen; and the Origin of the Insurrection in China.