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Translator’s Introduction
- University of Washington Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
3 Translator’s Introduction The nineteenth century was a bad century for the Manchus, who established the Qing dynasty in 1644 and ruled over China until 1912. Internal and external problems beset the once powerful, prosperous empire. Among other things, the Qing government had to handle the Opium Wars with the Great Britain, the armed uprisings of the Hui Muslims and other ethnic peoples, and natural disasters, famines, bureaucratic corruption, and economic stagnation. But the most horrific tragedy that befell the country in the nineteenth century was the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), led by a failed civil service examination candidate who claimed to be the son of God and the younger brother of Jesus Christ.1 Along with the contemporaneous Nian Uprising that broke out in north China, the Taiping Rebellion caused an immense loss of life, devastated large parts of the wealthy and cultured southern provinces, and dealt a near-fatal blow to the already weakened Qing regime. More than twenty million people, mostly civilians, died during the fourteen years of one of the largest civil wars in human history. This book, The World of a Tiny Insect (henceforth The World), is an autobiographical work that, at its core, contains a lengthy recollection of the author’s traumatic childhood experience in one of the southern provinces most ravaged during the Taiping Rebellion. 1 There are many historical narratives of the Taiping Rebellion in the English language . Interested readers may refer to Jonathan D. Spence’s God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), or to a more recent publication on the subject, Stephen R. Platt’s Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012). 4 Translator’s Introduction As might be expected, there are many accounts of the Taiping Rebellion by people who lived through it; what sets The World apart from most of them is the fact that it recounts the turbulent period as experienced by the author as a very young child. When his hometown was captured by the Taiping army in the autumn of 1861, the author of The World was seven years old. In the next two years, he and his mother were constantly on the run, hiding from the “Longhairs” (i.e., Taiping soldiers, so called because they refused to wear the braid ordained by the Manchus), the “Shorthairs” (i.e., local bandits), and the imperial troops. During this time, he witnessed gruesome deeds of violence and cruelty as well as macabre scenes of death, including the suicide of a family member right before his eyes; he himself almost died a number of times, from terrifying encounters with the Longhairs, the Shorthairs, and even other civilians who also just wanted to survive, as well as from struggles with starvation and illness. Compared with people who experienced the rebellion as grown-ups, our author had an unusual perspective. Sometimes, as a curious little boy who still only half-understood what he saw, he actively sought out opportunities to observe sights shunned by adults; and perhaps because he was a small child, he remained more or less invisible to those who were engaged in acts of violence, and managed to stay out of harm’s way. But the psychological damage caused by those nightmarish experiences was more difficult to avoid and proved long-lasting. The images and memories remained with him, haunting him so much that he felt compelled to tell his tale thirty years later. And a remarkable tale it was: shocking and horrifying in its grisly detail, poignant in its compassion and grief over the senseless killings and deaths. The author of The World is a man named Zhang Daye, Zhang being his family name. He hailed from Shaoxing, a city with a long and illustrious cultural past, in the fertile, scenic, and sophisticated southeastern province of Zhejiang. Nothing is known about him outside The World, which both reveals much about him and discloses little. We know, for example, the date of his birth, which was January 29, 1854; and we know his nickname and baby name; and yet we do not know his “style name” or “courtesy name,” by which a premodern Chinese man was known among his peers, and which furnished an important piece of information regarding his identity. We know that his father served in some middle-level official post in Jiangsu Province; at one point, the...