The Complete Adventures of Hazard & Partridge Read Free Page B

Wade-Giles system of Romanization, with which Pearsall would have been familiar with), a failed civil services examinee who claimed, via dreams and visions he received while ill, that he was the second son of the Christian God, younger brother of Jesus of Nazareth, whose mission it was to both finish Jesus’ work in bringing God’s kingdom to Earth, and also to slay the foreign demons, the Manchus, who had overrun God’s predestined, Earthly capitol. Hong acquired a small group of devotees, which eventually grew into a large following, and eventually a military force, which began a war against the Qing dynasty, taking the ancient capital of Nanjing as the center of a new quasi-Christian kingdom in China, with Hong as its king; before its downfall, the Taipings (whose name translates into “Heavenly Kingdom”) had taken over an enormous portion of Chinese territory. With the Qing dynasty inept and incapable of defeating the Taipings, the Manchus relied on two sources of help—aid from the Western Powers, who saw it in their best interests to prop up the weak Qing, as opposed to dealing with the highly-nationalistic Taipings; and private armies, raised by elite Chinese loyal to the Qing cause. One of these loyalists was a wealthy farmer and Confucian scholar named Zeng Guofan, who raised an army in the province of Hunan, and was pivotal in the destruction of the Taiping state.
    It was during the last years of the rebellion that Zeng’s army was first infiltrated by members of the nascent Ko Lao Hui, and the army’s travels allowed for the society to spread; when Zeng disbanded his army following the Taipings’ defeat, former soldiers (possibly at least 30% of whom were full-members of the Ko Lao Hui) went to find work in areas throughout China, increasing further the society’s influence. As the society’s strength grew, it moved beyond the gambling houses that had made it wealthy and began moving in circles inhabited by revolutionaries, which led to the group gradually assuming an anti-foreign, anti-Manchu position. In 1891, the Ko Lao Hui were involved in a wave of attacks upon foreign missions, consulates, orphanages and churches; also in 1891, C.W. Mason, an official at a British customs house in the Ko Lao Hui’s homeland of Hunan, was caught and sentenced to nine years in prison for smuggling from Hong Kong a significant cache of weapons for use in a planned revolt against the Qing, spearheaded by the Ko Lao Hui. Several more attacks on foreign establishments, with the apparent goal of both weakening the Qing as well as their relationship with the powers of Europe and America, continued in successive years, culminating in a revolt in December of 1906, in which members of the Ko Lao Hui destroyed several foreign churches and consular buildings—an uprising that took armies from four surrounding provinces to quell.
    Given the fact that Pearsall was in China as a U.S. Marine the year before the Wuchang Uprising of 1911, which ultimately led to the abdication of the Emperor and the establishment of the Republic, as well as (possibly) several years before he enlisted in the U.S. Army, it is extremely likely that he had heard of the Ko Lao Hui, as it was something of a poorly-kept secret they were involved in various anti-Manchu activities. Furthermore, owing to their reputation as being anti-foreign (which, of course, included anti-American), Pearsall no doubt heard accounts of the group’s attacks on American interests, possibly from witnesses or survivors, and decided to use this group as the template for his evil society. The Boxer Uprising, even decades after its conclusion, was still a fresh memory in the collective mind of the West, and any related groups, the Ko Lao Hui included, would have featured prominently in discussions of anti-Western movements of the recent past.
    Even the diabolical Koshinga, leader of the Ko Lao Hui and hell-bent on overrunning the Western world, has a basis—in name at