When I tell people about my research on late Qing baojuan, I talk about how ordinary lives can animate history. Non-official histories and religious texts can give us a poignant sense of daily concerns and their solutions. My work gives voice again to long-silent popular perspectives on the late Qing, some anonymous, some by named authors, which include attempts to process crises – both great and small.
Sometimes I spend my days contemplating minutia. The painstaking concern that The Precious Volume of Honoring Grains, for example, takes in recommending that devotees pick up every single grain of rice that falls to the ground and separate out unhusked grains from the rice prior to cooking to prevent them from falling undigested into the outhouse and incurring heavenly wrath, is incredibly specific. On days when I write about such texts, my thesaurus gets a work-out as I look for synonyms for outhouse (privy, latrine), feces (dung, excrement, bodily waste), and contamination (defilement, pollution, impurity). Those are weird days.
And then there are days like today, as I work on the introduction to this chapter on baojuan newly composed during and shortly after the Taiping War (1851-1864), that I find myself looking for a different set of synonyms.
Bloody (brutal, gory, vicious), weary (fatigued, exhausted, drained), hopeless (despairing, dejected, demoralized).
And translating passages like this, written by Yu Zhi (余治 1809-1874) in 1854, “Alas! What times are these, what circumstances are these? These times and these circumstances are yet murky and unawakened. The land shakes, people are trampled like mud and ashes, with bodies piled like mountains, blood pouring out to become a river. Hearing it hurts the heart, speaking of it stings the nose. What times are these, what circumstances are these?” And, from the same man writing again in 1864, “Now after this, I will not dare say that the happiness of heaven’s heart is guaranteed. Now after this, I will not dare say that the protection of the gods is guaranteed.”
Numbers like 100,000 dead in the 1864 fall of Nanjing, or 20-30 million dead in the war itself (the variation itself there saves or kills 10 million people, an unimaginable number already) are too big to wrap one’s mind around.
And then you have Yu Zhi’s refrain, “What times are these, what circumstances are these?”
He’s right, hearing it hurts the heart. Writing it does too.
I’m not writing about the dead though, but how the living themselves tried to cope, particularly a group of evangelical philanthropic moralists associated with Yu Zhi who published and distributed a spectacular array of exhortative moral texts in the 1850s-1870s.
Sometimes, they memorialized and mourned the magnitude of human suffering brought on by the conflict. And sometimes they just focused on the little things. Picking up every grain of rice in the hopes that merits would once again outweigh demerits and heaven would cease its punishment, for example.
“I know this, that the inability of the calamity to end is not the fault of heaven’s heart being unable to change its mind and is not that others’ hearts will not change. In truth, it comes from my heart being unable to change. For this reason, if I wish to change others’ hearts, I must first start with mine.” (Yu Zhi again, writing in 1864)
In researching and writing about these texts, the great and the small, I want to bring a little humanity back into the enormity of the war and the post-war recovery.
“What times are these, what circumstances are these?”