China's Last Empire (History of Imperial China) by Rowe William T

Author:Rowe, William T. [Rowe, William T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2010-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

The White Lotus Rebellion, 1796–1805

At the other end of the spectrum from bachelor fraternities like the early Triads were the various sectarian groups usually subsumed under the label White Lotus. These were all more or less millenarian or apocalyptic groups that combined elements of folk Buddhism, Manicheism, and devotion to the monotheistic Eternal Mother. Whereas fraternal associations, even those that eventually adopted elements of White Lotus belief, were exclusively male, sects were open to women and very frequently incorporated entire village communities into its structure. Like fraternal associations, many White Lotus groups were orientated toward martial arts, but instead of using swords and other sophisticated weaponry, sectarians—whose local leaders were as likely to be boxing teachers as priests—prided themselves on their skill in manual combat and their invulnerability to weaponry, which they attributed to their devotionalism and regimens of personal hygiene, including vegetarianism and sexual abstinence.

White Lotus sects were essentially diffuse and local, with little in the way of a centralized religious hierarchy or systematic theology. A sprawling cadre of priests traversed provinces throughout the countryside to proselytize and tend to various local congregations. They preached from a proliferation of sacred texts, some of which circulated fairly widely while others were produced by the individual leader himself. At times, White Lotus sects shared temple precincts with fully orthodox Buddhist or Daoist cults. Although the wider population often viewed them with suspicion or contempt, they tended to be openly evangelical. They went underground only in response to official campaigns of repression, which came and went according to the whims of incumbent officials and the court’s oscillating fears of social instability. And although their millenarian beliefs had a definite anti-establishment bent, their proclivity to uprising varied greatly according to the individual teacher and the degree of imminence assigned to the coming apocalypse. 12

Out of this northern sectarian tradition emerged the devastating White Lotus rebellion at the turn of the nineteenth century. As was the case in the Wang Lun rebellion of 1774, official pressure more than any other factor drove the sectarians into rebellion. The mounting wave of bureaucratic investigations, spurred by the Qianlong court, growing out of the emperor’s new awareness of just how threatening sectarian activity could be, seems to have played a direct role in fomenting this uprising two decades later. Another factor was rural immiseration in the Han highlands, the result of decades of ecological deterioration. Yet a third determinant was fiscal exploitation by clients of the Heshen faction at court, which had not been a concern two decades earlier when Wang Lun rebelled.

Even so, specific features internal to the local tradition of the Han River highlands made these sectarians, more than their co-believers elsewhere, inclined to active rebellion. There were two distinctive patterns of White Lotus organization in northern and northwestern provinces during the late eighteenth century. The plains were dominated by the Primal Chaos tradition, whose stable priesthood, with its scriptural canon, tended to keep a low profile to protect well-established congregations from prying official eyes.

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