The History of China - #325 - Taiping 2: The God Worshippers

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

Amidst the ashes of the Opium War, a new flame is beginning to kindle – not in the halls of power, but in the distant, forgotten hills and mountains. While the would-be prophet Hong Xiuquan returns home, his closest friend vanishes into the wilds of Guangxi – a world of ethnic tensions, criminal brotherhoods, pirates-turned-river-bandits… and a government far too distant and preoccupied to care. What Feng Yunshan finds there, and what he builds among its dispossessed and desperate Hakka denizens, will become the backbone of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: the God Worshipping Society. Time Period Covered:1844–1847 Major Historical Figures:Feng Yunshan, organizer, founder of the God-Worshipping Society [1815–1852]Hong Xiuquan, Second Son of God [1814–1864]Hong Ren'gan, cousin, convert [1822–1864]Issachar J. Roberts, American Baptist missionary [1802–1871]Karl Gutzlaff, German missionary, founder of the Chinese Union [1803–1851] Major Sources Cited:Kuhn, Philip A. "Ch. 6, The Taiping Rebellion" in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 10.Platt, Stephen R. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom.Scott, James C. The Art of Not Being Governed.Spence, Jonathan D. God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The strange, the bizarre, the unexpected. Cat and Jethro, box of oddities. Listen on Spotify. or wherever you get your podcasts. The Box of Oddities. Hello and welcome to the history of China. Episode 325, The God Worshippers. The mountains are a refuge not just from the state,

but from the state's categories. James C. Scott, the art of not being governed, 2009. Religious suffering is, at one in the same time, The expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world. Karl Marx, critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the Right, 1843. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness's sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you, and shall say all men, of evil against you falsely for my sake. The Book of Matthew 510 God has sent me, the sovereign, to descend unto the world. Hong Shoe Chen, Temple Wall poem 1847. The Union Jack merrily flew over Hong Kong. With its great, if widely underreported, victory in the Opium War, mighty Britannia's reach now stretched across the South China Sea.

With major combat operations over, the Royal Navy turned to managing its newest prize of war, and what a mess it was that they had won. The time for tolerating such a state of costly anarchy was at an end. Piratical confedrations, you see, still ruled the waters, cutthroat, semi-legal, half-criminal economies that had bled the Pearl River trade routes for generations. Chasing them had never worked. So the British decided to change the problem itself. Rather than pursue ships endlessly across the bay,

they opted instead to strike at these systems that fed them. Paid informers flooded the docks. Every hull was registered and tracked. The sea lanes within three nautical miles of Hong Kong became a controlled kill zone for anyone still daring to fly the black flag. Anyone caught there would be fed directly into the maw of the British justice system and it's still very bloody code.

Not that being caught further out to sea was much of an improvement. The official Qing response to piracy, after all, was historically simple. A quick show trial, followed by a walk to the execution grounds, then whoosh, thud, another head for the waterfront cages. Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate's death for thee. And it worked, or at least appeared to. For merchants in the harbors, the effect was, immediate relief. The great pirate confederations, those floating murder cities that had once

strangled the coasts, began to collapse under pressure from both sides. The sea lanes were cleared out. The old order on the water broke down. But power itself flows a lot like water. Damned from its preferred path, it doesn't simply stop. It diverts and backflows into new, often unanticipated outlets. Far off in his exile, Linza Shoe might have allowed himself a grim nod had he known. He had, after all, seen this coming. The British could command the sea and seal up the coast, but they had no appetite for the tangled, brackish interior of the continent. They could gunboat their way up to the river mouths,

but they still couldn't, or rather knew better than to try, chasing the shattered pirates as they retreated ever deeper into the waterlogged labyrinth that was Lower Guangxi Province. The inevitable result was displacement. Thus, the pirates left the salt largely behind. They took their swivel guns, hardened crews, and violent dispositions, and pushed inward by their hundreds and thousands. Denied access to the sea,

the surviving networks found that they could survive among the endless lattices of rivers, shallows, and mountain waterways, all feeding eventually into the pearl system. The Shun, the Yu, the Qin, and dozens of unnamed tributaries threading deep into the interior. Guangxi in the mid-1840s was not so much a province as it was a slow-motion catastrophe in progress. It had always been on the rougher end of the spectrum, remote, mountainous, ethnically complex, the kind of place that the central government administered more in theory than an actual practice. But by the time that the pirates arrived, the situation had already curdled into something qualitatively worse.

The province was fractured along just about every fault line there was simultaneously, and the tectonic pressures had been building up for a long time. The people themselves, or more accurately, peoples, were already entangled enough not to try to sort out all by themselves. Guangxi was not one community, but many, stacked uneasily atoply. top each other. The original inhabitants, the Punti, or People of the Land, had been there the longest and held the best farmland throughout the valleys. The Hakas, meanwhile, were relative newcomers, migrants from the east who'd been trickling into the region for more than half a century at this point, settling on whatever marginal hillside plots that the Punti hadn't already claimed. They were linguistically and culturally distinct, and had by the 1840s, migrants.

in sufficient numbers to now rival or even outnumber the Punti in some of those hill districts, for which they were, of course, bitterly resented. Revenge against those who speak the Hakka tongue was a slogan that required little elaboration in eastern Guangxi. By the 1840s, the feuding between Haka and Punti had metastasized from neighborly friction all the way past Hatfield-McCoy rivalry straighted into something approaching endemic low-level warfare. Haka farmers took their hos to work with them each day, but also their spears. At the sound of a raised alarm, a hundred men could rapidly transform into a defensive spear line. The local tribal leaders, dispossessed by both groups, heavily in debt and corrupt in the

particular way that men rendered powerless tend to become corrupt, watched from the sidelines and did nothing. Into this already volatile situation, the landlords and gentry had inserted the their own solution, militia. By 1846, local defense associations, known as Tuan, were proliferating across the countryside, nominally controlled by the Chinese landlord class, recruited from village residents and paid in grain. In theory, these were orderly, locally legitimate institutions. In practice, Philip Kuhn drily notes, on the local level, the criminal lodges, or Fong, and the ostensibly respectable Tuan defense associations had become, in his

His words, quote, analogous forms of organization, not always clearly distinguishable, end quote. The Qing authorities, confronted with this blurring of the line between protection and predation, responded with what had by now become their signature move across Guangxi, a blanket prohibition against fighting of all kinds for any reason, issued, of course, from an appropriately safe distance, and as such promptly ignored by everyone. And then there were the triads. The Heaven and Earth Society, or Tian Di Hui, had been spreading throughout the southeast for decades. By now in Guangxi, it had embedded itself into the fabric of local life with the quiet persistence of water-finding cracks in stone.

The appeal of association with such an organization was not, to be clear, typically all that ideological in nature. Rather, it was simply a question of day-to-day practicality. As one arrested member explained to the authorities, if you had a wedding or a funeral, society members would help with the costs. If you came to blows with someone, there were people who you could count on to back you up. If you encountered robbers on the road and knew the right signals, perhaps a thumb raised to heaven or a little finger for earth, three fingers held together over your teacup,

you were allowed to pass on your way unmolested. For such a people, with no real corporate lineage structure, no powerful family connections, and no reliable access to the state for protection, for people like the Hakas, in other words, the triads were not a criminal organization, it was the closest thing to a social safety net that existed for them. The trouble was that mutual aid societies and protection rackets are separated by a membrane so thin as to be nearly theoretical. On the main rivers in their tributaries, triad lodges set up toll stations, actual physical checkpoints, where dues were extracted from anyone seeking to move goods or passengers through their stretch of water.

Gambling operations that had once flourished around Canton relocated to towns around Gwe Ping, where the triads flaunted their control in the open, apparently secure in the knowledge that the relevant authorities could do nothing about it. And now, the displaced pirates, many of them triad members themselves. from their seafaring days, brought their old allegiances and their very specific skills to the river world of Guangxi, fusing with the already established local networks and mutating into something new and considerably more dangerous than either had been separately. Probably the easiest way to understand what Guangxi's economy had become by the 40s isn't through statistics or policy documents. It's through the people themselves. Take, for instance, Big Head Yang, born of a Chinese father and a Western mother somewhere in the orbit of Macau, a mixed-blood pirate whose

forces had moved inland and were now terrorizing the region around Guayping. A man who was himself social merger made flesh. A full member of no single world, yet operating across all of them. Or let's look at Akeu, a Cantonese woman who ran a successful, legitimate trade in sugar, cooking oil, and cotton, all while simultaneously selling opium and gunpowder to the pirate gangs, commodities that she obtained from her lover, Captain J.B. Endicott, the owner of the American opium receiving ship, the Rupert. In the 1840s, she was raising their children in a rented house in Macau, buying six-pounder guns from British mariners on credit at $130 a pair, and acquiring sea-spoiled opium at a discount from shipwrecked vessels. Among her personal effects,

a telescope made by Cox of London, a silver watch. two sets of calibrated money-weighing scales and a single-barreled English fowling piece. When a British patrol threatened her with arrest, she jumped from the vessel into awaiting Sampan and slipped away into the harbor to safety. When a Chinese Confederate double-crossed her by seizing two of her ships, she blackmailed him with threats from her quote-unquote foreign friends until he was terrorized into making it right. Neither Big Head Yang nor Akeu were considered marginal figures operating on the fringes of the legitimate economy. They were the very representations of that mainstream economy. The distinction between legal and illegal, merchant and

smuggler, savvy businessman and cutthroat pirate hadn't really so much broken down in Guangxi as it had never really been allowed to grow in the first place. By mid-decade, local men and women, the so-called rice hosts or Mifanzu, had formed what amounted to joint stock companies to invest in protection rackets, drawing for themselves a percentage of the profits. The river junctions were where the money pooled, Guiping Township especially, sitting at the confluence of the Yu and Chen rivers, where they fed into the larger Shun, with its rocks and rapids upstream and its prosperous downstream commerce, its scores of islands and inlets providing natural cover for waterborne

plunderers. Everything had to move through Guay Ping, but nothing did without someone first getting their cut. The official Qing response to all of this was pretty much nothing at all. Reports of banditry, when not ignored outright by regional bureaucrats, might merit some form of investigation, eventually, after a safe interval, meaning long after the bandits had finished their despoilments and left Scott Free. Magistrates stayed safely within the walled confines of their Yaman compounds.

Tax collection had broken down. Most people found it far easier, more regular, and considerably safer beside, to pay the triads their protection fees rather than wait for government tax collectors. Whatever semblance of imperial order had ever existed across the region had a long since rotted away. What remained was, as Kuhn puts it, quote, a world where the strong preyed unchecked upon the weak, end quote. So this was Guangxi in 1844, ethnically fractured. militarized village by village, shot through at every level by criminal networks so thoroughly intermeshed with the local economy, that any distinction between the two was pretty much only on paper, and effectively written off by any form of meaningful government oversight.

And now, just to be the cherry on top, the pirates pouring in from the coast, one more source of pressure in a vessel with no release valve left to pull. And this is what Feng Yun Shan was. into, not accidentally, not lost or confused, on a mission. He was going deeper into the mountains, looking for the people nobody else was looking for, and he was going to find them, no matter what it took. When Hong Xiu-Cen had left Guangxi in the autumn of 1844, confused about where Feng even was, short of money and obligations calling from home, Fung didn't follow him.

He was, it turned out, in Guayping Township, the entire time that Hong was there asking after him, staying with another branch of the Zhang family. He simply didn't come forward. Whether he couldn't or chose not to, we don't really know. What we do know is that a month or so after Hong's departure, Thung and his host made a decision. They would not go back east, nor down the river to Canton, nor home to Guan Lu Bu. Instead, they would head north. First to the village of Gulin, in the lower foothills where the Zhangs had property. Then, in early 1845, northwest, along the valleys of the rivers flowing down from Zijing Shan,

literally purple thornbush mountain, but rendered into English more simply as Thistle Mountain, deeper into the hills to a secluded village where the Jongs also had some land. The following year, deeper still, into the heart of Thistle Mountain itself, where he moved in with a local family named Zeng, who had taken his message to heart with what Spence calls, quote, exemplary fervor, end quote. There he would remain into 1847. For three years, Feng Yun Shan sent no word home, not to his family in Guan Lu Bu, nor to Hong Xiu Quan himself. Spence can only offer that Fung, quote, made no attempt, perhaps had no opportunity, end quote, to communicate. Whether that silence was chosen or simply inevitable, the mountains of Guangxi kept their own counsel.

But his silence didn't signal in action. Thung put those three years to good use. Why Thistle Mountain? The answer has as much to do with geology as theology. It was, like much of Guangxi to borrow a term from the late anthropologist James C. Scott, a quote-unquote, shatter zone. In short, the kind of term. rain that most empires wind up just giving up on and riding off entirely in all but name. Vertical, rugged labyrinths of narrow valleys and forested slopes so difficult to penetrate that imperial tax collectors and soldiers had long since stopped even bothering to try. In moving ever deeper into those mountains, Fung was moving in effect ever farther from the state.

From the centers of Confucian influence and education, the cosmopolitan river markets, the rich Valley Farmland and the powerfully connected landlord families. Away, in other words, from every institution and power structure that had ever told men like him and men far poorer than him, where they stood and what they deserved. What was way out there was something else entirely. The people that Fung found in the Shadow of Thistle Mountain were not the type most commonly found in history books. Carpenters, rice flour grinding. fortune tellers, sellers of medicine, salt, opium, bean curds, boatmen, fuel gatherers, charcoal burners, herdsmen, peddlers. Men and women, one and all, who scraped by each day as best

they could, and for whom the future wasn't something to look forward to, but something yet to be inflicted upon them. And, of course, miners, working the mountain's silver loads and coal seems, men clinging so barely to the edges of survival that during the droughts of those years, some had been reduced to eating their own coal just to blunt the sharpest stabs of hunger. One early godworshipper described his upbringing in the region with the kind of flat affect of a man who'd never really known any different. He said, quote, My family was destitute and had not enough to eat. We lived by tilling the land, cultivating mountain slopes, and hiring out as laborers.

keeping to our station and accepting our poverty. At the age of 8, 9, and 10, I studied with my uncle, but my family was poor, and I could not study longer. It was difficult to make ends meet each day. To get enough a month was even more difficult, end quote. It was the same story on every such set of lips, the epitaph of an entire culture. These people were exactly who Feng Yin Shan had been looking for.

And though they didn't realize it yet, the people of Thistle Mountain had likewise been waiting for someone like Fung. What they had in common was nothing. Not an absence of commonality, but nothing itself as the thing they shared. No powerful lineage behind them. No corporate clan structure to mobilize for the defense. No ancestral halls funded by generations of accumulated land and wealth. No connections to. the magistrate who might take their side in a dispute. And crucially, they were majority

Haka, or in Mandarin Kha Jia, literally guest people. Not just newcomers, but marked as perpetual outsiders, their foreignness encoded into their very name. The Punti had their lineages, the triads had their brotherhood, the gentry, their militias, the pirates, their guns. But as for the Hakka, poor in the Thistle Mountain Hills, they had each other, but not much else. What Feng Yun Shan arrived to offer them then was a framework that turned that isolation inside out. Thus, his so-called Ba Xiang Di Hui, his god-worshipping society, was on one level, obviously and overtly a religious congregation. But as Kuhn notes, it functioned more like something that the Haka people had been structurally missing for a long time. A means of networking local congregations and villages that could provide exactly the kind of regional solidarity, mutual recognition, and collective identity that the corporate lineage system provided for those wealthy enough to have one.

You are not a poor minor with no family connections in a county that didn't want you. you were actually a child of God, a member of a chosen people, answerable to a heavenly father who had personally dispatched his second son to set the world right on your behalf. And should you run into trouble, be it from militiamen, gangsters, pirates, or imperial agents, you now had 300 or more brothers and sisters that you could count on to stand with you when the chips were down. The god-worshapers' stark duality between the saved and the damned mirrored almost exactly what these people already knew in their bones, what it felt like to be the righteous ones abandoned by a corrupt world.

The theology fit the sociology like a key and a lock. Liang Afa's gospel tracts, filtered now both through Hong's visions and now preached by Fung's tireless sermonizing, gave that feeling a name, a copy. cosmology, and critically, a sword. Thung preached repentance, baptism, the Ten Commandments, and the one true God. He described Hong's dream in ever-growing detail, the golden-bearded father, the elder brother, the demon-slaying sword, to communities who had every reason to believe that the world, as currently constituted, was run by the demons.

He baptized his converts the way that Hong had talked. him, piecing together ritual from scattered references. And as he made each convert, he organized them into networks, congregations, into something that was beginning, far off in the mountains where nobody important was watching, to look very much like a movement. But what he was explicitly not preaching was anything like a revolution. Absolutely not. Fung wasn't preaching, anything so dangerous, so subversive, so thoroughly illegal as revolution. Not out loud anyway. Not yet. By the time Hong Xiu Chen walked back into Guangxi in the autumn of 1847, Thun's organizing had produced branch congregations of the god-worshipping society across a dozen

or so districts. Each one, a unit of territory large enough to require its own magistrate, replete with official Yaman compound and apparatus of imperial administration. Feng Yun Shan, the school teacher, had in three years on foot and with no institutional backing or even cash, managed to build a network that outran the reach of the state across terrain that the state itself had long since given up on even trying to govern. And though he definitely wouldn't yet say it, he had built an engine of revolution. Now he just needed someone to light it. While all this was going on up in the mountains of Guangxi, meanwhile, Hong Xiu-Cen was back in Guan Lu Bu,

doing what it was that Hong Xiu-Cen did, teaching his school, riding religious tracks, preaching in his off-hours, and waiting, though he probably wouldn't have called it that, for something to happen. What finally did happen in early 1847,

was the arrival of a letter. Word had reached Canton that there was a man in Hua County who had read Liang Afa's tracks and believed them, who preached, who had converts, who had baptized himself and his friends in a stream with a ritual pieced together from scattered references in a cheap pamphlet. This word reached the Chinese Union, a network of Chinese Christian evangelists that had been assembled by Karl Goetzlough, and through them all the way to a man. named Isakar J. Roberts. Roberts had come a very long way from his own hometown down in Shelbyville, Tennessee, in every sense of the phrase. A self-educated Baptist, he had arrived in China in 1837

at the invitation of Gutslav himself, and had been the first Western missionary to return to Canton after the Opium War, setting up a small chapel with a bell tower in the suburbs, dressing in local garb, going so far as to learn the Hakka-dial. elect, gathering a small congregation about him. His affiliations with mission societies back home were Spence notes, quote, often temporary and stormy, end quote. He was a maverick, a zealot, a man of strong and loudly held opinions. The sort of man, in short, who's very easy to underestimate, because beneath the bluster was something genuinely ardent, a vision of baptism not as mere ritual formality, but as the beating heart of Christian devotion and a personal relationship with Christ.

In his own most lyrical writings, Roberts described the joy of taking candidates into the water at nighttime, when the moon was full, immersing them completely, quote, in the spacious deep in imitation of the death and burial of his Lord, before raising them again in imitation of the resurrection of Jesus, end quote. For a Baptist of Robert's conviction, Baptism was the public declaration of a private miracle, the outward sign that an inward transformation had already occurred. You didn't receive baptism in order to be praised. One's soul could not be redeemed after all by works or rituals. Rather, one undertook the baptism to demonstrate to God and to one's congregation alike. That salvation had already been achieved

within. No mere administrative hurdle. This meant that before Roberts could assent to baptizing anyone, he needed to be personally satisfied that the miracle had genuinely taken place inside them. No mere ritual. The entire point. And upon hearing of this man, this Hong Xiu-Cuan, who had entirely of his own volition been baptizing his followers in water from a basin since 1843, Roberts thought that he had found exactly the kind of zealously redeemed soul that he was looking for. Roberts' senior assistant wrote formally to Hong in early 1847, urging him to come to Canton. Hong accepted, this time able to persuade his cousin Hong Ren Gan to accompany him, and the pair were received cordially by Roberts.

Under the American's supervision, the two cousins read the Bible, Goodslav's translation, a version somewhat clearer than the old Morrison Milne text that Liang Afa had used, though with its own idiosyncrasies, gaps, and ambiguities, through which a sufficiently determined reader might find, well, almost any interpretation that he wished. Hong Ran Gan, his obligations and his family pulling him back east, didn't stay long. But Hong Xiu-Chen did. And when he satisfied himself with the reading, he did what Liang Afa himself. had done 30 years before with the missionary Milne, he asked Roberts to prepare him formally

for the rights of baptism. Roberts agreed. He sent two of his Chinese converts to Guan Lu Bu to investigate Hong's reputation at home. The report came back clean. Hong wrote out his statement of faith as Baptist practice required. Roberts found it satisfactory. A formal baptism seemed, for the very first time in Hong's life, genuinely within reach. The exact sequence of events remains murky. Spence is pretty careful about this, actually. But the most plausible sounding account involves a trap. Several of Roberts' other Chinese converts,

fearing that Hong might be hired by Roberts and thus displaced one of them from their position, fed Hong a piece of advice. Ask Roberts for financial reassurance about the future. future. This was a calculated move. Roberts was famously intolerant of anyone he suspected of seeking baptism as a route to missionary employment rather than genuine faith. The man who asked about his stipend before his soul had, in Robert's eyes, already demonstrated that the miracle had not taken place. Guilelessly, Hong did exactly what his fellow converts suggested. Roberts' respects' response was immediate. His only recorded comment on the matter was that Hong had chosen to leave

before Roberts was, quote, fully satisfied of his fitness, end quote. Within Baptist circles, that anxiety had a name of its own. Rice Christians. Converts who sought baptism not out of genuine faith, but for the material benefits that missionary patronage could provide. It was Roberts specifically and deeply American terror of being grifted in the name of God. The trap had been perfectly calibrated to exploit that weakness. He thought that he was protecting the fitness of his church, while he was in fact amputating its most powerful branch. If we consider for a moment what this actually meant for Hong Xiu-Chen,

he'd not come to Canton to be saved. He'd already been saved. and in rather more dramatic fashion than most, his vision where God the Father had personally renamed him. He hadn't come to Roberts seeking transformation. That had already happened. He'd come seeking recognition, a formal acknowledgement from the institutional Christian world

that what had happened to him in 1837 was real and valid. He had done everything that had been asked of him, him, and he'd been turned away, again. First in the examination hall, and now it was the baptismal front. Hong Xiu-Chen walked out of Isikar Roberts Chapel on July 12, 1847, without his baptism. Somewhere far off to the northwest, in the mountains of Guangxi, an engine had been built and was ready for someone to start it up. Roberts, watching his visitor walk out into the Canton heat, presumably thought that he'd simply turned away yet another man looking for a handout. He had, in fact, just turned away the future heavenly king of the kingdom of great peace.

Hong did not go home. Instead, almost penniless, just a few borrowed copper coins to his name, and with his possessions on his back and his demon-killing sword in a specially made scabbard marked with the single character of his dream name, Tren, Shokhuan turned his steps west. He would not go back home to his family or job, to the life that was still there for him. Instead, he headed towards Guangxi and Feng. He didn't even have the boat fare.

He had to walk it. He got as far as the river town of Meizashun, more than halfway to the Guangxi border, when ten men dressed as an anti-smuggling patrol, stepped into his path. When Hong had relaxed his guard, they produced guns and knives, and relieved him of everything, his borrowed money, his bundle of possessions, and his sword. But because they were not totally heartless, they did leave him with a single change of clothes. It's worth pausing on the sword. Again, this was no ordinary blade.

It was the physical embodiment of his divine commission. Having it taken away from him by a gang of river bandits, impersonating government of officials was the kind of cosmic insult that a Lester man might have read as a sign to give up his crazy idea and go home. Hong, however, read it as something else altogether. He petitioned the nearest Qing prefect for aid. The prefect was quick to point out, though, that Meise Shun was not technically within his jurisdiction, and he therefore bore no responsibility for Hong's losses. But sympathy moved him nonetheless, and he pressed into Hong's hands a strong string of copper coins worth close to a half ounce of silver. Not much, but it was enough for a

single meal a day and boat fare for a few stages west. It was at that point that a stranger spoke with him. We have this moment because Hong later told it to his cousin, Hongran Gan, who then told it to a Swedish missionary, Theodore Hamburg, who wrote it down. Clearly, this exchange affected Hong enough that he not only remembered it years later, but specifically wanted it told and written down. A bystander, noticing Hong's dejected countenance, offered him an old saying, quote, A broken cord, of course, is vended with a line,

and when the boat comes to the bank, the way opens again. End quote. It's a kind of saying that has the quality of folk wisdom that sounds immediately comprehensible, and yet turns slightly strange when you really start to examine it. I mean, a broken cord is mended with a line, Yeah, obviously, but what cord? What line? And when the boat comes to the bank the way opens, is that a promise or merely an observation about how rivers work? You think you understand it,

and then you realize you're not quite as sure what's just been handed to you. In any case, Hong obviously pocketed the words and kept them with him for later. He kept walking. By limiting himself to a single meal a day, Hong could stretch his half ounce of silver enough to afford some boat fare, at least for a few stages up river. Once on the river west toward Guangxi, he found himself, comfortably, among scholars. They pitied his situation, but admired his learning, and listened to his teachings about the one true God. Sometimes they even fed him. The occasional tea, a bit of cash, sometimes a word to the boat's captain to comp as fair. Within a month, he had reached Sigou Village and the

Huang family, the distant relatives of those who had sheltered him and Feng on their first journey west back in 1844. They were able to tell him that Feng had visited the year before and left word of his new location, even further north, a place called Thistle Mountain. Hong duly turned northward, accompanied now by the young son of the Huangs. The road was long, but it hardly mattered, because something had shifted. Spence is careful to note it. Hong, far from being dejected or exhausted by the robbery, the rejection, the weeks of walking and scraping for boat fare, was on the evidence more certain of himself than he'd ever been before. His hardships hadn't broken him, but confirmed him. At some point on the road,

he stopped at a roadside temple, took out his brush, and wrote a poem on the wall. This was not an unusual act for a traveling scholar. What was unusual about it was his use of a single character, in fact, the first word of the first line. He didn't use Wu, the ordinary word for I that Hong usually used. Instead, it was Zhen. I, the ruler. I, the sovereign.

The imperial first person. A pronoun so restricted in Qing China and every dynasty before it, that its use by anyone other than the emperor himself was not merely presumptuous. It was a capital crime. Yet in this wall-side poem, Hong used it not once, but three times. The poem read, I, the sovereign in the high heavens, am the heavenly king.

You, here on earth, are devil demons. Deceiving the hearts of God's sons and daughters, you shamelessly dare to let men worship you. God has sent me, the sovereign, to descend unto the world. What will the wiles of devil demons avail you now? I, the sovereign, as commander of the heavenly hosts, will show no mercy. You and the other devil demons must quickly flee. The examination system had told him that he was a nobody. Isikar Roberts had told him he was unfit.

The bandits at Maid Zishun had taken his sword. And somewhere between the robbery and that temple wall, clarity had arrived. He didn't need the sword. The sword was steel. And what is steel compared to the hand that wields it? What he carried now was something the bowels. Bandis couldn't take from him, and Roberts couldn't withhold from him. The word, the Holy Spirit, and the authority that came from it. Written in the Imperial First Person three times on a wall

in broad daylight, in a province administered by the dynasty that he was about to destroy. He kept walking. On August 27, 1847, Hong Shio Chen walked into the region of the thistle mountain. Fung Yunshan, who'd not known that he was coming and had received no word, was little less than astonished. The assembled god worshippers, many of whom had never laid eyes on the man that they'd been told was the second son of God, were waiting. Spence puts it, quote, His God had brought him home, and quote. And all around Feng, in those mountain villages surrounding Zijing Shan, the people who had nothing, Yet, who had, in three years of Feng Yun Shan's tireless teaching and organizing, been given something.

A name for what they already knew in their bones. A cosmology that explained the world as they actually experienced it. The beginnings of, in time, an army. But for that first month of their reunion, the two men did not organize, recruit, or plan. Instead, they wrote, living with the Zung family, those committed God-worshippers who had sheltered Fung for over a year, they now worked together. Hong elaborated the details and divine significance of his 1837 dream.

He polished up his religious tracts, now able for the first time to cross-reference them against a complete Bible, the one thing that Roberts, whatever else he'd withheld, had given him access to. Thung contributed what three years in the mountains had taught him about what these people needed to hear and how to tell it to them. The adult son of the Zung household distributed their writings throughout the region. Fresh converts began to trickle in. Two men sitting in a tiny village in the mountains, writing with brush and ink about their deeply held beliefs. Peaceful, tranquil, truly picturesque. certainly not an image of apocalyptic revolution not yet but looks can be deceiving all that and much more next time thanks for listening