• 1119: How “holy” is the holy land?, submitted on 2023-02-20 06:23:41+08:00.
• 1120: What romanization scheme was in use for the Chinese in the State of Manchukuo?, submitted on 2023-02-20 16:31:23+08:00.
• 1121: What what were the operational and tactical factors which led to the failure of the Russian airborne forces to establish a an air bridge during the Battle of Hostomel Airport?, submitted on 2023-02-20 22:07:20+08:00.
• 1122: End of shift of a tower crane operator., submitted on 2023-02-20 22:42:06+08:00.
• 1123: I’m a Hellenistic tourist in 250 BC, on a mission to see all 7 Wonders of the World. After I finish, I’m hungry for more in farther away lands. Were I to travel outside the bounds of Alexander the Great’s conquest, what place would be a candidate for an 8th Wonder during this time?, submitted on 2023-02-21 08:19:26+08:00.
• 1124: What was the early memory of the Taiping Rebellion in the Late Qing like?, submitted on 2023-02-23 11:25:30+08:00.
• Sources and Further Reading

1119: How “holy” is the holy land?, submitted on 2023-02-20 06:23:41+08:00.

—– 1119.1 —–2023-02-20 08:44:37+08:00:

This submission has been removed because it violates the rule on poll-type questions. These questions do not lend themselves to answers with a firm foundation in sources and research, and the resulting threads usually turn into monsters with enormous speculation and little focused discussion. Questions about the “most”, the “worst”, “unknown”, or other value judgments usually lead to vague, subjective, and speculative answers. For further information, please consult this Roundtable discussion.

For questions of this type, we ask that you redirect them to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory.

1120: What romanization scheme was in use for the Chinese in the State of Manchukuo?, submitted on 2023-02-20 16:31:23+08:00.

—– 1120.1 —–2023-02-20 17:12:17+08:00:

Please repost this question to the weekly “Short Answers” thread stickied to the top of the subreddit, which will be the best place to get an answer to this question; for that reason, we have removed your post here. Standalone questions are intended to be seeking detailed, comprehensive answers, and we ask that questions looking for a name, a number, a date or time, a location, the origin of a word, the first/last instance of a specific phenomenon, or a simple list of examples or facts be contained to that thread as they are more likely to receive an answer there. For more information on this rule, please see this Rules Roundtable.

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1121: What what were the operational and tactical factors which led to the failure of the Russian airborne forces to establish a an air bridge during the Battle of Hostomel Airport?, submitted on 2023-02-20 22:07:20+08:00.

—– 1121.1 —–2023-02-21 08:36:55+08:00:

b. Landing somewhere safe and moving onto the objective.

I suppose that’s less SEAD and more CEAD – Circumvention of Enemy Air Defence.

1122: End of shift of a tower crane operator., submitted on 2023-02-20 22:42:06+08:00.

—– 1122.1 —–2023-02-21 01:59:20+08:00:

Doesn’t look like bamboo to me – it’s clearly metal tubing with metal brackets.

1123: I’m a Hellenistic tourist in 250 BC, on a mission to see all 7 Wonders of the World. After I finish, I’m hungry for more in farther away lands. Were I to travel outside the bounds of Alexander the Great’s conquest, what place would be a candidate for an 8th Wonder during this time?, submitted on 2023-02-21 08:19:26+08:00.

—– 1123.1 —–2023-02-21 20:42:43+08:00:

This submission has been removed because it violates the rule on poll-type questions. These questions do not lend themselves to answers with a firm foundation in sources and research, and the resulting threads usually turn into monsters with enormous speculation and little focused discussion. Questions about the “most”, the “worst”, “unknown”, or other value judgments usually lead to vague, subjective, and speculative answers. For further information, please consult this Roundtable discussion.

For questions of this type, we ask that you redirect them to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory.

1124: What was the early memory of the Taiping Rebellion in the Late Qing like?, submitted on 2023-02-23 11:25:30+08:00.

—– 1124.1 —–2023-02-23 21:05:57+08:00:

I am going to have to confess from the get-go that my answer will be one that is incomplete, and necessarily so because of the nature of the source material. Simply put, publicly expressing any sort of wistful nostalgia for the Heavenly Kingdom, in any part of China, was unlikely to be beneficial to one’s health given the Qing’s rather understandable jumpiness around rebel remnants. The apparent resultant lack of any significant pro-Taiping sentiment thus needs to be weighed in relation to the sensibility of holding such sentiments: were people not expressing it because they wouldn’t, i.e. the Taiping were seen as having been a pretty bad thing overall; or were they not expressing it because they couldn’t, i.e. you didn’t want to be branded as treasonous? There is also a certain consideration that needs to be taken of regional variation: there is a tendency in the historiography on late imperial China to effectively treat the Lower Yangtze region, or even the Jiangnan more narrowly, as representative of the whole of China. There have of course been attempts to rectify this, but studies of cultural memory around the Taiping have still largely focussed on cultural production in the Jiangnan, which, to be fair, was the most persistently devastated region, as opposed to the Kingdom’s region of origin in the deep south. Those are the disclaimers to get out of the way.

For most Jiangnan literati elites, there was no love lost for the Taiping, who, in their various memoirs and jottings, represented a force of indiscriminate destruction and primal chaos. There was, in short, no particular reason for them to see the Taiping as particularly virtuous, or their return as desirable. Many of these memoirs were written by people who had suffered losses in the family because of, or merely coincidentally during the uprising, and those losses became indelibly associated with the broader period. The memoirist Xu Feng’en recounted that he had been unable to bury his mother properly after she died of illness in 1853 and so placed her coffin in a temporary burial chamber; the Taiping broke into it in 1863 and attempted to break down the coffin for firewood, but were stopped just short when news arrived that Qing forces had broken into the town, and they retreated. Zhang Guanglie, a child at the time of the war, went on to write the Record of 1861, a collection of texts all revolving around the death of his mother at Taiping hands in 1861. He, too, had no reason for particular affection towards the Taiping cause.

Even some who had at one stage supported the Taiping found little cause for praise of them afterward, though here is where we must account for certain political circumstances. Wang Tao absconded from Shanghai to Hong Kong in October 1862, having written a letter advising the Taiping to make common cause with the Western powers against the Manchus and thus ending up on the wrong side of the law within Qing territory. Yet his retrospective writings on the Taiping are decidedly uncharitable, or at least, he has nothing overtly positive to say. Yung Wing, who briefly served in an advisory capacity at the Taiping capital in 1859, similarly had little regard for them in retrospect. These two cases are interesting, however, because their authors had, by that stage, quite overtly switched political allegiances. Yung Wing became an informal member of the Qing general Zeng Guofan’s staff in 1863; Wang Tao later gained the patronage of Li Hongzhang, who successfully petitioned for his pardon in 1884. These two men may not necessarily have been pro-Qing as such; if anything, what this may reflect is a switch from one ethnocentric agenda to another, supporting the Han subversion of Manchu power from within the Qing state, rather than violent revolution from without. Nevertheless, their status also likely made any kind of complimentary discussion of the Taiping distinctly taboo, and it would be premature to declare that they had absolutely, unequivocally dropped any kind of privately-held association or sympathies.

The Qing state had taken a keen interest in public commemoration, but there was always somewhat of a tension between the state-directed commemorative agenda, which emphasised the eventual but costly Qing triumph over the rebellion, and the more directly personal and local reckoning with loss that individuals and communities engaged in. Some, for instance, found more solace in private gardens than in state-established ‘loyalty shrines’. Indeed, one provincial governor in 1874 complained that the Manifest Loyalty Shrine at Jinyazhuang was being misused in all sorts of ways: as a venue for birthday parties, operatic performances, and gambling; as a quarantine centre, a morgue, a rubbish dump, even a fishing spot. But to assert that the Qing state did not still affect commemorative practices would be mistaken: in Yangzhou, for instance, the Liangjiang Bureau to Gather and Investigate the Loyal and Righteous at least nominally set the agenda for how commemorations were to be decided upon and enacted in public, even if there remained considerable latitude for private commemorative acts in parallel.

Theatre, while aimed at a popular audience, still involved elite patronage, and so it, too, does not reveal a latent pro-Taiping sentiment in post-Taiping China. What we can see, however, is a certain degree of either censorship or self-censorship emerging in the postwar years in terms of how the Taiping were potrayed. The dramatist Yu Zhi, for instance, was just one of many playwrights who wrote plays that ultimately condemned the Taiping and yearned for – or, in the postwar period, celebrated – the return of social and moral order, though as Rania Huntington notes, Yu Zhi in particular was stylistically distinct from most of his contemporaries in taking a moralistic rather than sentimental approach. The result of this, though, is that the Taiping in Yu Zhi’s plays are not necessarily active agents of evil. Instead, some of Yu Zhi’s Taiping plays portray them in fact as ‘both the instrument of moral justice and the subjects of karmic judgment, in turn’, to quote Huntington. In his wartime oeuvre, the Taiping were ultimately evil, but Yu Zhi sympathised with those who saw them as righteous and were drawn to their cause; his aim was to return them to the correct path represented by Confucian orthodoxy. However, in his postwar Taiping play, the Yinyang yu, the focus is very much on the total condemnation of the rebel cause, and the depiction of followers not as somewhat unwitting dupes, but as either already depraved, or drawn into the movement by drugs and dark magics.

But all of these are functionally elite statements. The extent to which there was a more pro-Taiping grassroots school of thought remains, for the moment, largely unknown to us. What we do know is that there must have been a counter-narrative, at the very least in Guangdong. Sun Yat-Sen is the case in point here: he openly admired the Taiping’s ideals, even if he did have criticisms of some of their political and strategic failures. Such open admiration, albeit largely expressed after his departure from China, would only have been possible if there was indeed an underground, pro-Taiping narrative, at least among Sun’s Hakka community in Guangdong. Moreover, Sun’s memoirs are often contradictory, but one version would have it that his father had in fact been a Taiping convert, and that Sun was therefore born into a family of underground Taiping adherents. Huge if true, but if he indeed lied about this, that he would make such a lie in such a way indicates just how strongly he himself had imbibed a pro-Taiping stance. In that regard, appeals to the memory of the Taiping by the Cantonese plotters of 1903 were likely to have been markedly less absurd than the elite-centric narrative would make it appear.

Unfortunately, the study of latent Taiping sympathies remains underdeveloped, and it is also not helped by the fact that post-revolutionary cultural output invariably parroted the pro-Taiping line of the KMT and latterly the CCP, just as pre-revolutionary literature had often toed the anti-Taiping line of the Qing. Where these post-revolution, pro-Taiping plays fit on a scale between concessions to state narrative and reflections of genuine popular sentiment is potentially an insoluble question. What is clear is that the connections between the Taiping and Christianity were not necessarily widely known, even to most Chinese Christians, before the 1920s, when Republican scholars travelled to overseas archives to recompile the Taiping textual record from writings that had been rescued by foreign visitors to the Heavenly Kingdom. Sun’s own association of the Taiping with Christianity before the 1920s may have been a particularly individual one, influenced specifically by his alleged family background (or rather, one of his alleged family backgrounds). Pro-Taiping sentiments would therefore have likely been associated with anti-Manchuism, or latterly with social revolution, rather than with Christianity, and that would also likely explain some of the reasoning behind the 1903 attempt.

—– 1124.2 —–2023-02-23 21:09:32+08:00:

Sources and Further Reading

• L. Eve Armentrout, ‘The Canton Rising of 1902-1903: Reformers, Revolutionaries, and the Second Taiping’, Modern Asian Studies 10:1 (1976)

• Tobie Meyer-Fong, What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in Nineteenth-Century China (2013)

• Tobie Meyer-Fong, ‘Gathering in a Ruined City: Metaphor, Practice and Recovery in Post- Taiping Yangzhou’, in Lucie Olivová and Vibeke Børdahl, Lifestyle and Entertainment in Yangzhou (2009)

• Rania Huntington, ‘Singing Punishment and Redemption in the Taiping Civil War: Yu Zhi’s Plays’, Frontiers of History in China 13:2 (2018)

• Rania Huntington, ‘Chaos, Memory, and Genre: Anecdotal Recollections of the Taiping Rebellion’, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 27 (2005)

• Ayumu Doi. ‘“Rediscovery” of Liang A-Fa: From a Perspective of the 1911 Revolution and Reinterpreting the Taiping Rebellion’, Journal of Contemporary East Asia Studies 3:1 (2014)

• Audrey Wells, The Political Thought of Sun Yat-sen: Development and Impact (2001)

—– 1124.3 —–2023-02-25 06:48:43+08:00:

A good question, one to which I have yet to find an answer. Possibly the answer lies in some Chinese-language scholarship I have yet to consult; possibly the sources exist but haven’t been approached yet; possibly the sources do not even exist. Ask again in a few years if/when I’ve been able to work on it a bit, and I may have an answer for you.