The Water Kingdom by Philip Ball

Author:Philip Ball
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

Flood brothers

The dissolution of Yellow River management in the latter half of the nineteenth century has been read as a metaphor for the fate of the Qing empire itself. After the glories of the Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors of the eighteenth century – the three ‘great Qings’ – there was nothing but slow decline, of which the debacle of the Opium Wars was just the opening act. This is a fair characterization in broad terms, but it’s hard to say if the image points to any cause-and-effect relationship. Did a fading dynasty lose the power and authority, indeed the mandate, needed to manage the rivers? Or did the unruly waters themselves fatally weaken the emperors? Probably a bit of both: it’s too simple to suggest that the Qing rulers lost control of the rivers through apathy and weakness, but once they did, their position became ever more precarious.

The Xianfeng Emperor inherited a profoundly unappealing throne in 1850. Not only were the hydraulic works in total disarray and the state beholden to foreign colonial powers, but the Taiping Rebellion was just erupting. It was to become the worst civil war in history, claiming an estimated 20–30 million lives – more than the First World War. The Taipings were considered by the Qing rulers to pose a far greater threat than the British, who were determined only to subdue them and not to supplant them. ‘The British are merely a threat to our limbs’,15 said the Xianfeng Emperor’s brother, but ‘the rebels menace our heart’.

Famine caused by neglect of the irrigation systems seems to have played a part in sowing the discord on which the Taipings drew. But there were other dominoes ready to fall. British opium wreaked havoc with traditional social structures, and the Chinese defeat had flooded the marketplace with imported commodities, causing local industries to decline and shed labourers. All these problems were, rightly or wrongly, laid at the door of the Manchurian rulers.

Whatever the composition of the mixture, no one could have predicted the nature of its turbulence. Arguments in southern China for deposing the Qing overlords weren’t hard to find, but the one offered by the Taiping leader Hong Xiuquan scarcely seemed the most persuasive. Hong insisted that a foreign god – the deity of the Christian missionaries – had revealed that he, Hong, was the brother of Jesus and had told him to eliminate the Manchurian demons. The Taiping uprising was essentially a millenarian movement of the kind that had convulsed Western Europe in the Reformation: utopian, populist, mystical and deeply religious. Hong promised a Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace where all would be equal and private property was forbidden.

Hong encountered Christianity via missionary teachings while visiting Guangzhou in 1836 to sit (and fail) the civil service examinations. The message of Christ was still a novelty in China at that time, a 1724 ban on missionaries by the Yongzheng Emperor having only recently been lifted. And what could be more propitious than that Hong’s family

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