This book is not the product of academic research but rather the rediscovery of an old memoir by a witness to China's horrific bloodshed during the second half of the nineteenth century, marked by the Taipings and Nians in China's most affluent region, the Yangtze Delta, commonly known as Jiangnan (currently southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang). The original title of the memoir is Weichong Shijie, and a copy is available at the National Central Library in Taipei.
The academic element of this book is its English translation from the Classical Chinese original by Xiaofei Tian, including many poems and annotations of a long chain of historical events in that region and the numerous relationships that the author had. Being a professional translator myself, I fully appreciate the efforts of the translator. Although I do not have Zhang Daye's original, judging by the annotations of historical events, I see the achievement of the translator in term of “faithfulness” (xin) and “accuracy” (da), vital for a good translation.
As regards the memoir, it is not the only work on the Taiping-Nian attacks on the Lower Yangtze during the 1850s and 60s. There is the multi-volumed Taiping History Museum (ed.), Taiping Tianguo Shiliao Congbian Jianji (Essential Collection of Historical Materials of Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace) (Beijing: Zhonghua Books, 1962) in which eye-witness reports and memoirs both adopted the moral judgement that the rebellion in question was in fact bandits rioting, and that ordinary citizens of China were the main victims of looting, raping, killing and slavery on an industrial scale.
It is worth noting that it was Western observers of the time, who did not seem to know much about Qing China, who dubbed the riot a “revolution” – e.g. W. Hewett and Company (ed.), The Religious Precepts of the Tae-Ping Dynasty, with a Brief Account of the Chinese Revolution (London: John Such, 1853); E.G. Fishbourne, Impressions of China, and the Present Revolution: Its Progress and Prospects (London: Thames Ditton, 1855); A.F. Lindley, Ti-Ping Tien-Kwoh: The History of the Ti-ping Revolution (London: Day and Son, 1866); C.C. Spielmann, Die Taiping-Revolution in China, 1850–1864 (Halle: A.S., 1900). This view then became orthodoxy. In the hands of Marxists and Maoists, the terms “revolution” and “rebellion” are the only ones permitted to define the riot.
Zhang's memoir shows us once again that what happened in the delta had little that was revolutionary about it. To call a spade a spade, Zhang's witness account of an innocent boy makes this line of interpretation of the later Qing history far more credible than any of the ideologically charged assertions commonly circulating. First, the rioters were unpopular: very few locals joined them. Second, the main target of the Taipings and Nians was not the Qing state and its officials: rather, the rioters were after people's possessions. Third, the senseless destruction of innocent lives and property, especially arson, for which the Taipings were notorious, shows that there was no attempt to rebuild a new state for new governance by the rioters. Fourth, it was the Qing state and Qing officials (such as Zeng Guofan and his Hunan Army) that managed to pick up all the pieces left by the rioters and resume law and order in society. In other words, neither the Taipings nor the Nians represented any workable institutions which tried to organize Chinese society. As such, their defeat was inevitable. It is thus counterfactual to speculate what kind of social order the bandits would have established if they had prevailed. It is time put the record straight.
What strikes me most as an economic historian is how people at the grassroots level behaved when law and order were systematically violated and deliberately broken down by intruders (the Taipings came from the Pearl River region and the Nians from the Yellow River region). It becomes clear that the rioters’ attacks united ordinary people in towns and villages. The strengths possessed by people in the delta were not eye-for-eye violence but loyalty, responsibility, resourcefulness, and community spirit, even sometimes in the cruellest way (e.g. a medical doctor killed his own crying baby in order not to attract the attention of the Taiping looters to their hideout). Sharing was common, be it food, shelter, transport or cash. In particular, Confucian loyalty and responsibility saved the author's young life repeatedly by servants who would have been expected to join the riot from the dogmatic Marxian point of view. Here, the reader senses where the real value of the Chinese civilization lay: although the author viewed himself as an unworthy little insect (weichong), he was safe because of the help he received from other people. In the end it was those ferocious bandits that lost their heads.
The last point I wish to make is that the author came from a well-to-do family from the gentry (based on the facts that he was educated from a very young age, his family had several homes, and his father and grandfather had concubines) but he became interested in joining the bureaucracy only when his livelihood was in difficulty. This challenges the cliché that every man dreamed of being an official in China (this may be true today). Instead, the author's lifetime pursuits were travelling and composing poems, a Confucian middle-class lifestyle that he was brought up in, which seems to have been far more attractive than running an office. Indeed, as far as we can tell, in the Late Qing (c. 1850) the gentry-to-officials ratio was 57:1, and the population-to-officials ratio was 15,136:1! So, the author represented the mainstream of his stratum of the time. If so, all the alleged root causes of China's backwardness associated with Confucianism have become very questionable.
As an important primary source, I highly recommend the English version of this memoir to students of the modern history of China.
