The literary material I chose is “Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom.” This is a book about the history of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Compared with the typical history books focusing on documents and analyzing events, this book creatively focuses on an important person in that age, Hong, Rengan. Therefore, this book is more like Hong’s biography in more than five years of history. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom war was one of the critical events in China in the 19th century. This unprecedented civil war almost completely destroyed China’s richest areas. Some historians believe that the number of people killed in this war may even exceed that in the Second World War. Unlike traditional China’s civil war, the religion believed by the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was called God Worshipping, which was derived from Christianity. Therefore, this civil war can be understood as a religious war.
But interestingly, western countries at that time, including Britain and France, did not support their “fellow religious brothers” in this war but supported the Qing government representing traditional China. Naturally, this is related to the serious distortion of some Christian customs by God Worshipping; for example, the people of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom think their king is the brother of Jesus. But in the later stage, Hong, one of the book’s protagonists, once expressed his willingness to correct some mistakes to the missionaries. So I think the main reason why Britain and France attacked the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was to protect their interests in China. They don’t care about the life and death of the Chinese people.
One of the most attractive plots in this book is the dialogue between Hong and missionaries. At that time, Hong was mainly responsible for the internal affair of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. He was also one of the most intelligent people in the ruling class. The dialogue between Hong and the missionaries reflects the connection and opposition between the real Western Christian culture and the derived culture. Both the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and the missionaries have made it their duty to save China’s heretics. But one of them advocates violence to seize Chinese power, while the other opposes violence. Although the talks ended unhappily, both sides learned a lot from them. For example, Hong later promulgated a law similar to the Homestead Act to distributing land to the people. Another attraction of this book is that its author quotes a lot of materials from the western world, which makes this book very novel for me, a Chinese reader.
In conclusion, this book delineates the communication and conflict between oriental and Western cultures. When the East gradually became synonymous with backwardness, although Eastern civilizations tried to obtain western support by learning some Western cultures, they were still the sick man of East Asia in the eyes of real Western civilizations. This systematic discrimination has lasted for nearly a century and is still reflected in some cases today.
