The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire

3. The Taiping Challenge to Empire

3 The Taiping Challenge to Empire F oreign Protestant missionaries and native Chinese evangelists carried the seed of their Chinese-language religious literature into the fertile sectarian soils of inland Guangdong and Guangxi, sowing its message among the poor and the dispossessed.That seed took root in the heart of Hong Xiuquan.The futureTaiping king translated this translated Christian message more authentically into the idiom of traditional Chinese history and culture. The end product of this process of translation and indigenization was the religion of the Taiping, a religion inspired by Protestant Christianity yet so shaped by Chinese traditions that the Taiping leaders successfully represented it as a restoration of the religion of the Chinese classical era. The main sources of this translated message were Liang Afa’s tract Good Words to Admonish the Age and Rev. Charles (Karl) Gützlaª ’s version of the Bible. The Gützlaª Bible played a much more influential role in this indigenization process than did Liang Afa’s tract.Liang’s tract,which usually receives more emphasis than it deserves, did sow the religious seeds of Hong’s original vision, but it was Hong’s reading of the Bible that shaped the form and direction taken by the developing Taiping movement. From his reading of the Bible, Hong was exposed to a view of the relationship between religion and culture that diªered from that in Liang Afa’s tract. Good Words to Admonish the Age was very much a Protestant work, made up mostly of biblical passages that emphasized an individualistic and culturally disembodied salvation. While certainly a foreign work of literature , the Gützlaª Bible, by contrast, presented salvation in its historical 78 development and as an integrated religious, cultural, social, and political whole. In the Old Testament particularly, the Taiping could read of a deity who punished nations that did evil and who rewarded those that did good, all the while being concerned about cultural matters such as music, food, and marriage customs,all matters taking place within the history of a specific people. This connection between religion and its cultural expression was reestablished by the Bible itself in its entirety of Old and New Testaments. The Bible restored the connection between cult and culture that Liang’s tract had torn asunder. Seeing religion in its historical and cultural context had as much to do with the transformation of Hong’s emerging faith as did any of its specific doctrines or concepts.This is not to diminish the contribution of these concepts .On the contrary,three of these concepts,especially one that was unique to the Gützlaª translation, contributed dramatically to the transformation of the emerging faith.Christian ideas were translated into the Chinese language by missionaries who were not oblivious to the implications of these translations. Hong and the Taiping received these ideas and shaped them according to the Taiping’s own religious vision and to Chinese cultural traditions , thereby completing the process of the translation and indigenization of Christianity.This process culminated in Hong’s presentation of his religion as a revival of the religion of the classical era and in his denunciation of the emperor and the imperial system as a blasphemy of the same classical religion.This presentation in large part accounted for theTaiping’s enthusiastic popular appeal and constituted the basis for the rebellion. The revolutionary nature of some of the terms employed by Gützlaª and other translators would not be apparent to casual Western readers of the Bible.But in an imperial Chinese cultural context,in which the emperor accorded to his person and his throne a sacred status and in which he served as a religious, political, and cultural symbol, the terms exploded with a revolutionary impact.The three most explosive terms and ideas that most distinctively define Taiping religious identity and most perspicuously open a window into the Taiping soul were: the name of God, which will receive most of our attention because of its particular connection to the charge of blasphemy; the title of Christ; and the theological construct of the kingdom of Heaven. The Taiping Challenge to Empire 79 the missionaries translate the name of god By far the most incendiary term in the translation process was one unique to the Bible version of Gützlaª and Dr.Walter H.Medhurst of the London Missionary Society. This version used Shangdi (Sovereign on High) for the name of God. Indeed, this term and the contexts...