CHIA CH'ING
Ch'ien Lung's son, who reigned as Chia Ch'ing (high felicity--not to
be confounded with Chia Ching of the Ming dynasty, 1522-1567), found
himself in difficulties from the very start. The year of his
accession was marked by a rising of the White Lily Society, one of
the dreaded secret associations with which China is, and always has
been, honeycombed. The exact origin of this particular society is not
known. A White Lily Society was formed in the second century A.D. by
a certain Taoist patriarch, and eighteen members were accustomed to
assemble at a temple in modern Kiangsi for purposes of meditation.
But this seems to have no connexion with the later sect, of which we
first hear in 1308, when its existence was prohibited, its shrines
destroyed, and its votaries forced to return to ordinary life.
Members of the fraternity were then believed to possess a knowledge
of the black art; and later on, in 1622, the society was confounded
by Chinese officials in Shantung with Christianity. In the present
instance, it is said that no fewer than thirty thousand adherents
were executed before the trouble was finally suppressed; from which
statement it is easy to gather that under whatever form the White
Lily Society may have been originally initiated, its activities were
now of a much more serious character, and were, in fact, plainly
directed against the power and authority of the Manchus.
Almost from this very date may be said to have begun that turn of the
tide which was to reach its flood a hundred years afterwards. The
Manchus came into power, as conquerors by force of arms, at a time
when the mandate of the previous dynasty had been frittered away in
corruption and misrule; and although to the Chinese eye they were
nothing more than "stinking Tartars," there were not wanting many
glad enough to see a change of rule at any price. Under the first
Emperor, Shun Chih, there was barely time to find out what the new
dynasty was going to do; then came the long and glorious reign of
K'ang Hsi, followed, after the thirteen harmless years of Yung Chêng,
by the equally long and equally glorious reign of Ch'ien Lung. The
Chinese people, who, strictly speaking, govern themselves in the most
democratic of all republics, have not the slightest objection to the
Imperial tradition, which has indeed been their continuous heritage
from remotest antiquity, provided that public liberties are duly
safeguarded, chiefly in the sense that there shall always be equal
opportunities for all. They are quick to discover the character of
their rulers, and discovery in an unfavourable direction leads to an
early alteration of popular thought and demeanour. At the beginning
of the seventeenth century, they had tired of eunuch oppression and
unjust taxation, and they naturally hailed the genuine attempt in
1662 to get rid of eunuchs altogether, coupled with the persistent
efforts of K'ang Hsi, and later of Ch'ien Lung, to lighten the
burdens of revenue which weighed down the energies of all. But
towards the end of his reign Ch'ien Lung had become a very old man;
and the gradual decay of his powers of personal supervision opened a
way for the old abuses to creep in, bringing in their train the usual
accompaniment of popular discontent.
The Emperor Chia Ch'ing, a worthless and dissolute ruler, never
commanded the confidence of his people as his great predecessors had
done, nor had he the same confidence in them. This want of mutual
trust was not confined to his Chinese subjects only. In 1799,
Ho-shên, a high Manchu official who had been raised by Ch'ien Lung
from an obscure position to be a Minister of State and Grand
Secretary, was suspected, probably without a shadow of evidence, of
harbouring designs upon the throne. He was seized and tried,
nominally for corruption and undue familiarity, and was condemned to
death, being allowed as an act of grace to commit suicide.
In 1803 the Emperor was attacked in the streets of Peking; and ten
years later there was a serious outbreak organized by a secret
society in Honan, known as the Society of Divine Justice, and
alternatively as the White Feather Society, from the badge worn by
those members who took part in the actual movement, which happened as
follows. An attack upon the palace during the Emperor's absence on a
visit to the Imperial tombs was arranged by the leaders, who
represented a considerable body of malcontents, roused by the wrongs
which their countrymen were suffering all over the empire at the
hands of their Manchu rulers. By promises of large rewards and
appointments to lucrative offices when the Manchus should be got rid
of, the collusion of a number of the eunuchs was secured; and on a
given day some four hundred rebels, disguised as villagers carrying
baskets of fruit in which arms were concealed, collected about the
gates of the palace. Some say that one of the leaders was betrayed,
others that the eunuchs made a mistake in the date; at any rate there
was a sudden rush on the part of the conspirators, the guards at the
gates were overpowered, every one who was not wearing a white feather
was cut down, and the palace seemed to be at the mercy of the rebels.
The latter, however, were met by a desperate resistance from the
young princes, who shot down several of them, and thus alarmed the
soldiers. Assistance was promptly at hand, and the rebels were all
killed or captured. Immediate measures were taken to suppress the
Society, of which it is said that over twenty thousand members were
executed, and as many more sent in exile to Ili.
Not one, however, of the numerous secret societies, which from time
to time have flourished in China, can compare for a moment either in
numbers or organization with the formidable association known as the
Heaven and Earth Society, and also as the Triad Society, or Hung
League, which dates from the reign of Yung Chêng, and from first to
last has had one definite aim,--the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty.
The term "Triad" signifies the harmonious union of heaven (_q.d._
God), earth, and man; and members of the fraternity communicate to
one another the fact of membership by pointing first up to the sky,
then down to the ground, and last to their own hearts. The Society
was called the Hung League, because all the members adopted Hung as a
surname, a word which suggests the idea of a cataclysm. By a series
of lucky chances the inner working of this Society became known about
fifty years ago, when a mass of manuscripts containing the history of
the Society, its ritual, oaths, and secret signs, together with an
elaborate set of drawings of flags and other regalia, fell into the
hands of the Dutch Government at Batavia. These documents, translated
by Dr G. Schlegel, disclose an extraordinary similarity in many
respects between the working of Chinese lodges and the working of
those which are more familiar to us as temples of the Ancient Order
of Free and Accepted Masons. Such points of contact, however, as may
be discoverable, are most probably mere coincidences; if not, and if,
as is generally understood, the ritual of the European craft was
concocted by Cagliostro, then it follows that he must have borrowed
from the Chinese, and not the Chinese from him. The use of the square
and compasses as symbols of moral rectitude, which forms such a
striking feature of European masonry, finds no place in the
ceremonial of the Triad Society, although recognized as such in
Chinese literature from the days of Confucius, and still so employed
in the every-day colloquial of China.
In 1816 Lord Amherst's embassy reached Peking. Its object was to
secure some sort of arrangement under which British merchants might
carry on trade after a more satisfactory manner than had been the
case hitherto. The old Co-hong, a system first established in 1720,
under which certain Chinese merchants at Canton became responsible to
the local authorities for the behaviour of the English merchants, and
to the latter for all debts due to them, had been so complicated by
various oppressive laws, that at one time the East India Company had
threatened to stop all business. Lord Amherst, however, accomplished
nothing in the direction of reform. From the date of his landing at
Tientsin, he was persistently told that unless he agreed to perform
the _kotow_, he could not possibly be admitted to an audience. It was
probably his equally persistent refusal to do so--a ceremonial which
had been excused by Ch'ien Lung in the case of Lord Macartney--that
caused the Ministers to change their tactics, and to declare, on Lord
Amherst's arrival at the Summer Palace, tired and wayworn, that the
Emperor wished to see him immediately. Not only had the presents, of
which he was the bearer, not arrived at the palace, but he and his
suite, among whom were Sir George Stanton, Dr Morrison, and Sir John
Davis, had not received the trunks containing their uniforms. It was
therefore impossible for the ambassador to present himself before the
Emperor, and he flatly refused to do so; whereupon he received orders
to proceed at once to the sea-coast, and take himself off to his own
country. A curious comment on this fiasco was made by Napoleon, who
thought that the English Government had acted wrongly in not having
ordered Lord Amherst to comply with the custom of the place he was
sent to; otherwise, he should not have been sent at all. "It is my
opinion that whatever is the custom of a nation, and is practised by
the first characters of that nation towards their chief, cannot
degrade strangers who perform the same."
In 1820 Chia Ch'ing died, after a reign of twenty-five years,
notable, if for nothing else, as marking the beginning of Manchu
decadence, evidence of which is to be found in the unusually restless
temper of the people, and even in such apparent trifles as the
abandonment of the annual hunting excursions, always before carried
out on an extensive scale, and presenting, as it were, a surviving
indication of former Manchu hardihood and personal courage. He was
succeeded by his second son, who was already forty years of age, and
whose hitherto secluded life had ill-prepared him for the difficult
problems he was shortly called upon to face.