God's Chinese Son by Jonathan Spence

leaps from his bed and runs around his room, shouting battle cries and moving his arms as if in combat; now he falls back again, silent and exhausted. Repeatedly, he sings the same two lines from a popular local song: "The victorious swain travels over rivers and seas /He saves his friends and kills his enemies." 47 Sometimes he addresses himself as Emperor of China, and is delighted when others do the same. He writes out in red ink the words of his new title, "Heavenly King, Lord of the Kingly Way, Quan," and posts it on his door. For his older sister, Hong Xinying, he writes the four characters of an alternate title he has adopted, "Son of Heaven in the Period of Great Peace." To other visitors he sings aloud what he has learned to be "the sounds of high heaven." He openly contradicts his own father, and denies that he is his father's son. He argues with his older brothers. Father, sister, brothers, visitors, all feel the bite of his tongue, and hear his assertions of his duty to judge the world, to separate out the demons from the virtuous. He remembers and writes down poems that he composed during those sky-war days and nights. One goes:
    My hand grasps the killing power in Heaven and earth;
    To behead the evil ones, spare the just, and ease the people's sorrow.
    My eyes roam north and west, beyond the rivers and mountains,
    My voice booms east and south, to the edge of the sun and moon. 48
    Another has these lines:
    With the three-foot blade in my hand I bring peace to the mountains and rivers,
    All peoples living as one, united in kindness.
    Seizing the evil demons I send them back to earth,
    And scoop up the last of the evildoers in a heavenly net. 49
    His own closest relatives and the people in Guanlubu village murmur that Hong Xiuquan may be mad. His brothers take turns to see that the door to his room is kept shut, and that he does not escape from the house. Such precautions are essential. Chinese law holds all family members responsi­ble for any acts of violence committed by an insane person. If a madman kills, all his family members will pay the penalty. 50
    Yet slowly Hong Xiuquan calms down. Family and friends grow used to his new name. His wife, Lai, bears him a baby girl. He returns to his Confucian texts, and begins to prepare yet again for the examinations. He resumes his teaching duties at a nearby village. The dream is beyond interpretation, and therefore by common consent it can have no meaning. 51

5  THE KEY
     
     
    It is in 1843, in the summer, that Hong Xiuquan realizes he has the key in his own hand; it has been there all the time for seven years. Enmeshed as he has been in the rhythms of state-sponsored ceremonial, examinations, and family, his dream has stayed fastened in his mind in all its detail, but still without clear explanation. A friend and distant relative named Li Jingfang, in whose family Hong has been teaching, drops by Hong's house, sees an odd-looking book, and asks for the loan of it, which Hong as casually grants. The book is Liang Afa's set of nine tracts, "Good Words for Exhorting the Age," brought home by Hong in 1836, and since then nei­ther read nor thrown away. Li Jingfang reads the tracts with rapt atten­tion. Returning to Hong's home, he urges that he read it too. Hong does. 1 Liang's tracts fit the lock of Hong's mind in many ways, for they focus on the source of evil, and the meaning of the good. 2 In their strange complexity, they talk to the world within his head and to the world of war that has been swirling around Canton from 1839 to 1842.
    It has been a strange and episodic war, fought over trade and money and prestige and opium, a war of threats and counterthreats, of bluster and evasion. The world of the foreign factories by the waterfront has been transformed and the British, driven from the city, have seized Hong Kong in recompense. At first in 1839 the Chinese seemed to have the upper hand. Exasperated by the ever-rising shipments of opium, grown in India