The Taeping Rebellion in China
An account of the Taiping movement written in 1862 by a British naval officer. It is used here for the documents it prints at length: Theodore Hamberg’s narrative of Hong Xiuquan’s visions, two letters of the missionary Issachar Roberts, and reports on Hong Rengan.
Brine wrote while the Taiping still held Nanjing. His fourth and fifth chapters are built on long quotations from the booklet of the Basel missionary Theodore Hamberg, whose narrative, Brine explains, is the translation of a paper given to Hamberg by Hong Xiuquan’s relative Hong Rengan (whom he calls Hung-jin), together with the substance of conversations with him in 1852. Brine marks Hamberg’s words with quotation marks and adds his own comments between them. Hamberg’s account therefore reaches the reader at two removes: Hong Rengan told it some fifteen years after the visions, Hamberg wrote it down, and Brine excerpts it. The wiki cites it as Hamberg quoted by Brine.
The book also prints a letter of 1852 in which the American missionary Issachar Roberts recalls his pupil of 1847, the letter in which Roberts explains why he left Nanjing in January 1862, and an account of Hong Rengan’s years at Hong Kong drawn from missionary reports. Brine’s own judgements, for instance that the visions were the product of a diseased mind and that Roberts acted unwisely, are his and are not cited as fact. The appendix with the Taiping texts is described under Taiping Precepts and Odes.
Cited in
- 1851 to 1864, firm date