God's Chinese Son Read Free Page A

terrible period. When it was over, the faithful would draw together into their own ideal community, in which they would live at last in peace and harmony. 8
    From that time forward, both in China and in Europe, the millenarian and apocalyptic strains of belief stayed vigorously alive. And in both China and Europe, the proponents of these beliefs came to link them to radical political and egalitarian programs that brought numerous new followers from among the poor, and also led them at intervals into violent conflicts with the state. In China, across the whole span of time from the tenth to the nineteenth century, the state often blamed such uprisings on the fol­lowers of the "White Lotus Teachings," but in fact there was no one central teaching, rather a host of conflicting and competing centers of revelation and resistance. 9
    In Europe, too, the many strands of millenarian belief that had so chal­lenged the Catholic church continued—with renewed intensity—after the Protestant Reformation. Transposed to the soil of colonial North America, the Puritan visionaries found what at first seemed the perfect setting for their various New Jerusalems and "praying towns." And though that vision faded in the face of eighteenth-century realities, even those who now attacked excessive liberty and equality still created their timetables for the end of the world and kept the worlds of Daniel and Revelation alive through their "federalist millennialism." 10 Especially through Amer­ican Baptist missionaries, these impulses were carried back to China in the early nineteenth century, where they reinforced the message being brought by evangelical Protestant missionaries from the British Isles and central Europe. By the early 1830s these new forces were institutionally established in South China, ready to compete with indigenous Chinese elements for the loyalties of the youthful Hong Xiuquan. It is the outcome of that conjunction that is the subject of our story.
    I feel fortunate that I was introduced to the many levels of Taiping history by Jen Yu-wen, one of the greatest scholars of that strange upheaval, whom my teacher Mary Wright invited to Yale in the late 1960s, so that he could complete an English-language digest of his imposing three-volume work on the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom." But though I was fascinated by the Taiping, nothing then, or in the two decades follow­ing, led me to think that I would ever write on the Taiping myself. Not only Jen Yu-wen but literally hundreds of historians and editors in the People's Republic of China were at work on the Taiping, since the Com­munist authorities chose to view the Taipings as proto-socialists from whose experiences much could be learned concerning revolution, not least the fact that without the vanguard leadership provided by a disciplined Marxist-Leninist party, such peasant uprisings could never succeed. In addition, virtually all the known surviving Taiping documents had been translated into English in accessible editions, and it seemed to me that everything that could be known about the Taiping had been fully aired.
    In the late-1980s, however, I became aware of two Taiping texts— printed in Nanjing in three volumes during the early 1860s—that had been found in the British Library in London. These texts recorded a pro­tracted series of heavenly visions said to have been relayed through Jesus and his Father to their faithful Taiping followers on earth. Through the courtesy of the British Library, I was able to consult the new texts in the original and to make my own copy; and on a later visit to Peking I met their discoverer, Wang Qingcheng, and had a full discussion of their sig­nificance. 12 I came to realize that the discovery of these texts made it possible after all to take a fresh look at the Taiping.
    One could of course argue that heavenly visions of the kind recorded in these newly found texts are not historical sources in any precise sense of the term. And yet the