Read Online God's Chinese Son by Jonathan Spence - Free Book Online

a monk from Sichuan province and he stood three days before the altar in the governor's yamen, three days under the burning sun, an upright staff pushed into the ground by his side, with no sign of weakness, no sign of perspiration on his face, with candles burning stead­ily on the altar, next to a bowl of pure clear water. Again the people mocked, until suddenly the rains came, and they were silenced. Only to mock again when the governor, to thank the gods, ordered ten married women to sacrifice a sow at the south gate of the city, and burn off its tail. 20 Less than a month later, as epidemics followed the drought and the sudden rains, the people brought the image of the famous second-century god Yingtuo out from his shrine inside the Great South Gate of Canton city, and paraded it through the street, escorted by drummers and by crowds of young girls chosen especially for their looks. 21
    Predators often prowl at such scenes of petitioning or rejoicing, encour­aged by the expensive preparations and the flocks of people, and attempts to keep decorum sometimes fail in curious ways. At the autumn festival of All Souls, allegedly the most solemn ceremony of the ritual year, held in 1836 at a village in the western suburbs outside Canton, the bamboo structures, the booths, the glittering displays in the temple ground were so astonishing, funded by subscriptions from local merchants and worthies totaling seven thousand ounces or so of silver, that the magistrate ordered two parallel roads built out to the temple grounds, one to be used only by men and one by women. But this prompted two young men to dress as women, so they could join the women on their walk, and rob them there at leisure. At last their looks betrayed them, and they were arrested and "made a show to the assembled multitude." 2 "
    Hong Huoxiu is twenty-two years old in 1836. As he mingles with the crowds of fellow students on the road outside the lieutenant governor's official residence near the examination halls, two men catch his attention. One of them is a Cantonese, and acts as interpreter for the second, a foreign-looking man who does not speak good Chinese. This second man is strangely dressed: as Hong later remembers him, he has a "coat with wide sleeves" in what appears to be the style of the former Ming dynasty, and his hair is "tied in a knot upon his head." Through his interpreter, this second man tells the bystanders "the fulfillment of their wishes," even if they have not yet questioned him. To Hong he says, "You will attain the highest rank, but do not be grieved, for grief will make you sick."" 3
    The next day Hong sees the same two men again, standing on Longcang Jie, the "Street where the dragon hides," or "Street of potential wisdom," some way south of where they were the day before, but still near the exami­nation halls. This time no words are uttered, but one of the men reaches out to Hong with a book in his hand. Hong takes the book. It is Liang Afa's collection of religious tracts, "Good Words for Exhorting the Age." 24
    Hong's description of the foreign man is vague, and the words he ascribes to him elusive. But everything about this stranger points to Edwin Stevens, returned a few months before from the longest of his coastal trips. In the early spring of 1836 Stevens has taken on a new calling in addition to his formal title of chaplain for the Seaman's Friend Society—that of "missionary to the Chinese"—and a friend lists "distributing Bibles and tracts" as now foremost among Stevens' interests. 25 And yet despite his several years in China, Stevens still needs an interpreter, for he finds the language vexingly hard. There are two views on learning Chinese, he has written recently, "One, that the attainment of the language was next to impossible; and the other more modern, that its acquisition is as facile as the Latin or Greek. While we subscribe to neither of these extremes, we confess ourselves inclined more towards the former than