Jerusalem at Nanking

THE REBEL EMPEROR (352 pp.)--Flavia Anderson--Doubledoy ($4.95).

Hung Hsiu-ch'uan was a kind of Chinese John Brown, a religious zealot who saw his rebellion succeed--for a time. A poor provincial schoolteacher, he rose to lead the Taiping Rebellion, which ravaged China between 1851 and 1864, and cost the lives of an estimated 20 million people. Since Hung was a professing if distinctly unorthodox Christian, who ruled some 30 million subjects at the peak of his power, he has left behind him one of the most tantalizing ifs in history: If he had toppled the Manchu Dynasty and mounted the Dragon Throne, would China be Christian today?

Around this intrinsically fascinating story, Author Flavia Anderson has wrapped the bulky burlap of 50-odd volumes of research. Cliche-laden and crammed with minor figures, the book has a narrative pace roughly that of a Yangtze barge hauled upstream. But it is a historical trip worth taking for readers who can match Author Anderson's labor of love with a love of labor.

Divine Trance. Born near Canton, Hung Hsiu-ch'uan ("The Accomplished and Perfected'') at first longed to be a civil servant. Disheartened at flunking exams, and already possessed of fragments of Christianity, he fell ill and went into a 40-day trance. During the trance, he saw visions, and later declared that he had talked with God and been ordained to rule China. Hung threw the graven tablet commemorating Confucius out of his classroom. The act brought immediate dismissal as a teacher. After Hung converted his best friend, the pair began proselytizing in Kwangsi province.

Most of the converts were Hakkas, members of an outsider ethnic group to which Hung himself belonged. Social scientists might call them havenots; Toynbee would call them an internal proletariat. What with famine poverty, and the corruption of the Manchus, the Hakkas were ripe for revolt.

In 1851 an army of 40,000 "God-worshipers," as they called themselves, began a march on Peking from about 300 miles west of Canton. They wore their hair long, shunning the shaved head and braided pigtail as marks of Manchu enslavement, and took spirited noms de guerre--"Enemy-Breaking," "Rush on Foe," "Report Success." "God is the father of the generals of this army," Hung told his men. The God-worshipers swarmed down the Yangtze River valley and into Nanking, covering 1,400 miles in 27 months.

Calvin plus Savonarola. There Hung set up regal headquarters and proclaimed: "The New Jerusalem ft the present Nanking." The advance guard of his army rolled to within 100 miles of Peking but never captured the Manchu capital. For the next eleven years Hung's Nanking was ruled with the puritanical fanaticism of Calvin's Geneva and Savonarola's Florence. The decapitated heads of the Decalogue-breakers hung above the city's gates. Adulterers were wrapped in oil-soaked cloth, and set aflame. Hung himself maintained a harem that grew to 88 wives and concubines, but defended it as a dynastic necessity.

Whatever its excesses, the Taiping Rebellion was nominally Christian and reformist. One of its ironies was that no Christian power offered assistance. As Author Anderson describes it, the great powers preferred the status quo. Britain was deep in trade, including the opium traffic that Hung ranked as an evil second only to adultery. The Protestant missions were isolated from Hung's people, while the Roman Catholics skirted the Taipings for fear of reprisals. Besides, it was impossible to tell exactly how Christian Hung was. He had syncretized Buddhist elements, including the 33 heavens and the 18 hells, into his version of Christianity, together with grandiose assumptions of personal divinity.

Alone with Pilgrim's Progress. Toward the end, Hung was a kind of Emperor Jones, locked in his beleaguered palace reading Pilgrim's Progress for comfort. He went mad, and told his starving followers to eat grass cooked in leaves. Just before a foreign-led legion called the Ever Victorious Army, commanded by Britain's Charles ("Chinese") Gordon (of subsequent Sudan fame and immolation), ended his reign on July 19, 1864, Hung committed suicide by drinking gold leaf mixed in wine. His agonized last words: "It is not the Heavenly Father who has failed me, but it is I who have failed the Heavenly Father."

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