OBLIGATORY ADMINISTRATIVE STUFF: I love to write about millenarian peasant rebellions in China. I’ve dealt with the Taiping Rebellion and a Manichaean offshoot of the Red Turban Rebellion previously (and I’ll return to the latter timeline soon, as I’ve just thought of a really interesting long-term consequence that I can explore), but in this timeline, I’d like to play around with the Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813. There’s comparatively little scholarship dealing with the Eight Trigrams movement, and at first glance they would seem to be a poor candidate for a counterfactual timeline. In real life the uprising was quite unsuccessful; it lasted only three months, the rebels never broke out beyond the provinces of Zhili, Hebei, and Shandong where they were initially active, and excepting a few early victories they lost almost every military engagement they were involved in. That said, there’s a trump card that we can play to give the rebels more success. Even in real life, a group of roughly one hundred rebels was able, with some eunuch support, to infiltrate the Forbidden City, and despite several organizational failures were able to cause widespread chaos before being put down by the palace defenders. Greater rebel success here will throw everything up into the air, and it’s noteworthy that even at this comparatively early date the Qing Dynasty was showing signs of decline. The past few years had seen numerous natural disasters on the north China plain, from famine to flood to drought. Additionally, China’s enormous population growth since roughly 1700 had created a situation where there wasn’t really enough food to go around. In the previous fifteen years, there had been two large-scale uprisings, the White Lotus Rebellion (1796-1804) and the Miao Rebellion (1796-1805), both of which required large numbers of troops to put down and strained the imperial treasury. So we’ll roll the dice, cause some chaos, and see what happens. In this initial post, I’ll first discuss the origins, beliefs, and organization of the Eight Trigrams movement to establish some context, and then get into the first days of the rebellion and a couple of initial PODs. I hope you enjoy it.
Part #1: 革
“Revolution. It is believed in only after it has been accomplished. There will be great progress and success. Advantage will come from perseverance. Remorse will disappear.”
- For hundreds of years, millenarian Buddhist sects had flourished on the north China plain. Often lumped together by contemporary historians under the name of “White Lotus Buddhism,” these sects often venerated a deity known as the Eternal (literally Never-born) Mother (無生老母, wusheng laomu). They proposed that the end of the world was nigh, and that a new age, or kalpa (劫, jie), would soon begin, at which time the elect would be saved and the unenlightened would perish. Meditation (often while chanting mantras, most notably the eight-character mantra 真空家鄉無生父母, or “Eternal Parent at Home in True Emptiness”), healing, boxing (and other fighting techniques), and vegetarianism (some sects also practiced abstinence from alcohol and opium) were all practiced to various degrees by these millenarian sects, which were transmitted through lineage ties and teacher-to-pupil relationships. The sects survived in secrecy; officially, they were and always had been branded as “heterodoxy” by the imperial government. While there was no organizing or governing body that held all of these sects together - such a step would have been too dangerous, given official prohibitions on their existence - were a charismatic individual to unite multiple sects under one banner, they would have considerable revolutionary potential. Such was the case in the Wang Lun uprising of 1774 and the White Lotus Rebellion of 1796. It was also true in the case of the Eight Trigrams.
Before encountering millenarian Buddhism, Lin Qing’s life had been nothing to write home about. At various times he had been an apothecary, a minor clerk, a construction worker, a quail salesman, and a gamble; he had traveled as far as Suzhou and Manchuria, but had no place to call home. Sometime in 1806, Lin joined a millenarian Buddhist sect, the Ronghua Assembly, based in Zhili Province not far from Beijing. Lin’s charisma, persuasiveness, and energy quickly vaulted him up through the ranks of the small sect, and by 1808 he was its acknowledged leader. It was a year or two after assuming leadership of this small village sect that Lin, in essence, began to think big. He started making trips, traveling through Zhili, the neighboring province of Hebei, and even going as far as Shandong, seeking to make contact with other sects. It is perhaps a testament to Lin’s abilities that he was able to achieve as much success as he did. Between the years of 1809 and 1812, he convinced scores of sects to recognize the profundity of his doctrine and to submit to his authority as the ultimate leader of an umbrella group of millenarian sects. It was also during this period when he came into contact with the men who would become the other two heads of the Eight Trigrams triumvirate, Li Wencheng and Feng Keshan. The combined sects, which counted thousands of adherents between them, became known as the Eight Trigrams (八掛, ba gua, after the ancient cosmological diagrams) largely for organizational purposes. After several propitious omens, including the sighting of a massive comet in 1811 and continued famine the following year, Lin decided that the time had come for rebellion, and the date was fixed: the fifteenth day of the ninth month of 1813. (1)
The plan hatched by the Eight Trigrams leaders was far-reaching and wildly ambitious. On the fifteenth day of the ninth lunar month, sect leaders across Zhili, Hebei, and Shandong would rise up and seize cities across these three provinces. Those to the south of the capital would then rush north to aid Lin Qing in the most audacious part of the plan: his attempt to seize the Forbidden City and take control of the capital while the Jiaqing Emperor was on his annual hunting trip in Manchuria. When the emperor returned, Lin’s group, augmented by reinforcements from sects to the south, would sally forth from the city and capture or kill the emperor. The sheer grandiosity of the plan made it incredibly difficult to put into practice; it required a degree of coordination and mobilization among geographically dispersed sects that was almost guaranteed to catch the attention of local officials. In many cases, local magistrates were lax or dilatory in responding to the threat. Yet some acted promptly, including Magistrate Jiang Kejie of Hua, who arrested a group of Eight Trigrams leaders, including the rebellion’s second-in-command, Li Wencheng. Li’s arrest threw the carefully planned timetable out the window, as his acolytes responded to their leader’s incarceration. Forced into action, the Eight Trigrams sects began to rise up ahead of schedule; Li was freed from prison and his forces took control of the city of Hua in northeast Hebei, while in Shandong rebellions broke out across the western half of the province. Oblivious to all of this, Lin Qing continued his preparations for the attack on the Forbidden City. He was unaware that the situation had changed in more ways than one.
During his annual hunting trip in Manchuria, in late August, the Jiaqing Emperor caught a cold. After a week, his condition had worsened; suffering from shortness of breath and a racking cough, he decided to cut the trip short and return to Beijing ahead of schedule to be examined by the imperial doctors. He returned to the Forbidden City with his retinue on the thirteenth day of the ninth lunar month - two days before Lin Qing’s assault was scheduled to begin (2). Again oblivious to the events unfolding around him, Lin and his men, numbering between three and four hundred, entered Beijing on the fourteenth (3) and spent the night at several inns, assembling again on the morning of the fifteenth and splitting into two groups, one assigned to attack the east gate and the other the west gate of the palace complex. At noon, it began.
*******
It was a beautiful day, bright and sunny and hot and dry, with a stiff breeze blowing down from the north, and Tian Qilu was going to die. He should have stayed at home. They all should have stayed at home.
“This place is a fucking maze,” he panted, as they turned another in a series of never-ending corridor. “Where is the Venerable Master?”
Fu Cai shrugged. “That way, I think,” he said pointing vaguely to the west. He then turned and nodded in the opposite direction. “Or maybe he’s over there?”
They’d gotten separated, the five of them, Tian and Fu and Xu and An and Li; they had gone the wrong way, or perhaps they had gone the right way and everyone else had gone the wrong way. The Manchus were behind them, or in front of them, or maybe to the left. Either way, there were a lot of them.
“Where’s that damn eunuch?” said Tian. “He was supposed to lead the way.”
“Run off, I expect,” said Xu, puffing under the weight of the jewels he had plundered from a bureaucrat, or a prince, or a somebody whom they’d stabbed. “He’s got no balls.”
“I think that’s a prerequisite for the job,” said Fu, as the five men paused. Around them were the shouts of men yelling for help, the screams of the dying, the clash of swords. A muffled crack sounded in the distance. Tian Qilu looked up at the roof of the building in whose shadow they were huddled, at the sinuous and twisting dragon that was perched at the top of the sloping roof. It looked like it was laughing.
His reverie was interrupted as a group of palace defenders turned the corner and found themselves face to face with the lost rebels.
“Charge!” shouted the tall man in front, brandishing a truly enormous sword.
“Charge!” responded Xu, waving his bloodstained dagger in the air.
“Run!” yelled Tian, turning and sprinting back the way they had come.
Xu excepted, the five men decided that discretion was the better part of valor. As they rounded yet another narrow corner and found themselves in a dead end, Fu stopped abruptly.
“What’s that smell?” he said, twitching his nose.
“Who the fuck cares?” said Tian. “Let’s find the others.”
An, the silent man of the group, pointed to the west. “Smoke,” he said. “It’s smoke. The palace is burning.” (4)
Just then another group of Manchus, long spears in hand, appeared at the entrance to the cul-de-sac. They could all smell the smoke now. There was nowhere to run. As the Manchu defenders lowered their spears and charged, Tian Qilu gripped his sword tightly and moaned.
“We should have stayed home,” he whispered.
And all the while, the Forbidden City burned.
NOTES
(1) If I’m going too fast, and there’s more information about the beliefs and organization of the Eight Trigrams that should be included, just let me know. I’m trying to get to the actual timeline as quickly as possible.
(2) First and minor POD, with the result being that the Forbidden City is more heavily defended when Lin’s assault takes place.
(3) Second and also minor POD. In real life Lin himself wasn’t in Beijing; more than half of the rebels never even made it into the Forbidden City due to lack of coordination and loss of nerve. His presence keeps everyone in the fold and the attacks are more coordinated.
(4) Third and not-so-minor POD. Although ATL historians are divided on the cause of the Great Fire in the Forbidden City, legend holds that Prince Mianning, second son of the Emperor and heir to the throne, ignored rules against discharging a firearm in the Forbidden City (as he did OTL) and started firing his musket, which misfired spectacularly, with tragic yet alt-historically entertaining consequences.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
-New feature! I’d like to get some good discussion going in the thread, so I’m proposing a few questions for people to talk about. I’ve got my own ideas, but am interested in hearing what other people think. Obviously, you need not limit responses to these queries; ask or opine on anything!
(1) Are there any short-term reactions to the revolution by foreign powers (read: Britain)? Obviously, this is a rather fraught time in Europe, so does the turmoil in China go unnoticed for a couple of years?
(2) What are the initial effects on the opium trade? The chaos will spread to the south soon enough - is the trade disrupted, or do more people smoke their lives away in despair? Also: there will be lots of pirates in the south. Speaking theoretically, could a group of Chinese pirate vessels seize a British merchant ship?
*Next up: aftermath of the Forbidden City fire, initial progress of the rebellion, chaos begins to spread. Thanks for reading.
Part #1: 革
“Revolution. It is believed in only after it has been accomplished. There will be great progress and success. Advantage will come from perseverance. Remorse will disappear.”
- For hundreds of years, millenarian Buddhist sects had flourished on the north China plain. Often lumped together by contemporary historians under the name of “White Lotus Buddhism,” these sects often venerated a deity known as the Eternal (literally Never-born) Mother (無生老母, wusheng laomu). They proposed that the end of the world was nigh, and that a new age, or kalpa (劫, jie), would soon begin, at which time the elect would be saved and the unenlightened would perish. Meditation (often while chanting mantras, most notably the eight-character mantra 真空家鄉無生父母, or “Eternal Parent at Home in True Emptiness”), healing, boxing (and other fighting techniques), and vegetarianism (some sects also practiced abstinence from alcohol and opium) were all practiced to various degrees by these millenarian sects, which were transmitted through lineage ties and teacher-to-pupil relationships. The sects survived in secrecy; officially, they were and always had been branded as “heterodoxy” by the imperial government. While there was no organizing or governing body that held all of these sects together - such a step would have been too dangerous, given official prohibitions on their existence - were a charismatic individual to unite multiple sects under one banner, they would have considerable revolutionary potential. Such was the case in the Wang Lun uprising of 1774 and the White Lotus Rebellion of 1796. It was also true in the case of the Eight Trigrams.
Before encountering millenarian Buddhism, Lin Qing’s life had been nothing to write home about. At various times he had been an apothecary, a minor clerk, a construction worker, a quail salesman, and a gamble; he had traveled as far as Suzhou and Manchuria, but had no place to call home. Sometime in 1806, Lin joined a millenarian Buddhist sect, the Ronghua Assembly, based in Zhili Province not far from Beijing. Lin’s charisma, persuasiveness, and energy quickly vaulted him up through the ranks of the small sect, and by 1808 he was its acknowledged leader. It was a year or two after assuming leadership of this small village sect that Lin, in essence, began to think big. He started making trips, traveling through Zhili, the neighboring province of Hebei, and even going as far as Shandong, seeking to make contact with other sects. It is perhaps a testament to Lin’s abilities that he was able to achieve as much success as he did. Between the years of 1809 and 1812, he convinced scores of sects to recognize the profundity of his doctrine and to submit to his authority as the ultimate leader of an umbrella group of millenarian sects. It was also during this period when he came into contact with the men who would become the other two heads of the Eight Trigrams triumvirate, Li Wencheng and Feng Keshan. The combined sects, which counted thousands of adherents between them, became known as the Eight Trigrams (八掛, ba gua, after the ancient cosmological diagrams) largely for organizational purposes. After several propitious omens, including the sighting of a massive comet in 1811 and continued famine the following year, Lin decided that the time had come for rebellion, and the date was fixed: the fifteenth day of the ninth month of 1813. (1)
The plan hatched by the Eight Trigrams leaders was far-reaching and wildly ambitious. On the fifteenth day of the ninth lunar month, sect leaders across Zhili, Hebei, and Shandong would rise up and seize cities across these three provinces. Those to the south of the capital would then rush north to aid Lin Qing in the most audacious part of the plan: his attempt to seize the Forbidden City and take control of the capital while the Jiaqing Emperor was on his annual hunting trip in Manchuria. When the emperor returned, Lin’s group, augmented by reinforcements from sects to the south, would sally forth from the city and capture or kill the emperor. The sheer grandiosity of the plan made it incredibly difficult to put into practice; it required a degree of coordination and mobilization among geographically dispersed sects that was almost guaranteed to catch the attention of local officials. In many cases, local magistrates were lax or dilatory in responding to the threat. Yet some acted promptly, including Magistrate Jiang Kejie of Hua, who arrested a group of Eight Trigrams leaders, including the rebellion’s second-in-command, Li Wencheng. Li’s arrest threw the carefully planned timetable out the window, as his acolytes responded to their leader’s incarceration. Forced into action, the Eight Trigrams sects began to rise up ahead of schedule; Li was freed from prison and his forces took control of the city of Hua in northeast Hebei, while in Shandong rebellions broke out across the western half of the province. Oblivious to all of this, Lin Qing continued his preparations for the attack on the Forbidden City. He was unaware that the situation had changed in more ways than one.
During his annual hunting trip in Manchuria, in late August, the Jiaqing Emperor caught a cold. After a week, his condition had worsened; suffering from shortness of breath and a racking cough, he decided to cut the trip short and return to Beijing ahead of schedule to be examined by the imperial doctors. He returned to the Forbidden City with his retinue on the thirteenth day of the ninth lunar month - two days before Lin Qing’s assault was scheduled to begin (2). Again oblivious to the events unfolding around him, Lin and his men, numbering between three and four hundred, entered Beijing on the fourteenth (3) and spent the night at several inns, assembling again on the morning of the fifteenth and splitting into two groups, one assigned to attack the east gate and the other the west gate of the palace complex. At noon, it began.
*******
It was a beautiful day, bright and sunny and hot and dry, with a stiff breeze blowing down from the north, and Tian Qilu was going to die. He should have stayed at home. They all should have stayed at home.
“This place is a fucking maze,” he panted, as they turned another in a series of never-ending corridor. “Where is the Venerable Master?”
Fu Cai shrugged. “That way, I think,” he said pointing vaguely to the west. He then turned and nodded in the opposite direction. “Or maybe he’s over there?”
They’d gotten separated, the five of them, Tian and Fu and Xu and An and Li; they had gone the wrong way, or perhaps they had gone the right way and everyone else had gone the wrong way. The Manchus were behind them, or in front of them, or maybe to the left. Either way, there were a lot of them.
“Where’s that damn eunuch?” said Tian. “He was supposed to lead the way.”
“Run off, I expect,” said Xu, puffing under the weight of the jewels he had plundered from a bureaucrat, or a prince, or a somebody whom they’d stabbed. “He’s got no balls.”
“I think that’s a prerequisite for the job,” said Fu, as the five men paused. Around them were the shouts of men yelling for help, the screams of the dying, the clash of swords. A muffled crack sounded in the distance. Tian Qilu looked up at the roof of the building in whose shadow they were huddled, at the sinuous and twisting dragon that was perched at the top of the sloping roof. It looked like it was laughing.
His reverie was interrupted as a group of palace defenders turned the corner and found themselves face to face with the lost rebels.
“Charge!” shouted the tall man in front, brandishing a truly enormous sword.
“Charge!” responded Xu, waving his bloodstained dagger in the air.
“Run!” yelled Tian, turning and sprinting back the way they had come.
Xu excepted, the five men decided that discretion was the better part of valor. As they rounded yet another narrow corner and found themselves in a dead end, Fu stopped abruptly.
“What’s that smell?” he said, twitching his nose.
“Who the fuck cares?” said Tian. “Let’s find the others.”
An, the silent man of the group, pointed to the west. “Smoke,” he said. “It’s smoke. The palace is burning.” (4)
Just then another group of Manchus, long spears in hand, appeared at the entrance to the cul-de-sac. They could all smell the smoke now. There was nowhere to run. As the Manchu defenders lowered their spears and charged, Tian Qilu gripped his sword tightly and moaned.
“We should have stayed home,” he whispered.
And all the while, the Forbidden City burned.
NOTES
(1) If I’m going too fast, and there’s more information about the beliefs and organization of the Eight Trigrams that should be included, just let me know. I’m trying to get to the actual timeline as quickly as possible.
(2) First and minor POD, with the result being that the Forbidden City is more heavily defended when Lin’s assault takes place.
(3) Second and also minor POD. In real life Lin himself wasn’t in Beijing; more than half of the rebels never even made it into the Forbidden City due to lack of coordination and loss of nerve. His presence keeps everyone in the fold and the attacks are more coordinated.
(4) Third and not-so-minor POD. Although ATL historians are divided on the cause of the Great Fire in the Forbidden City, legend holds that Prince Mianning, second son of the Emperor and heir to the throne, ignored rules against discharging a firearm in the Forbidden City (as he did OTL) and started firing his musket, which misfired spectacularly, with tragic yet alt-historically entertaining consequences.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
-New feature! I’d like to get some good discussion going in the thread, so I’m proposing a few questions for people to talk about. I’ve got my own ideas, but am interested in hearing what other people think. Obviously, you need not limit responses to these queries; ask or opine on anything!
(1) Are there any short-term reactions to the revolution by foreign powers (read: Britain)? Obviously, this is a rather fraught time in Europe, so does the turmoil in China go unnoticed for a couple of years?
(2) What are the initial effects on the opium trade? The chaos will spread to the south soon enough - is the trade disrupted, or do more people smoke their lives away in despair? Also: there will be lots of pirates in the south. Speaking theoretically, could a group of Chinese pirate vessels seize a British merchant ship?
*Next up: aftermath of the Forbidden City fire, initial progress of the rebellion, chaos begins to spread. Thanks for reading.