Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/387

 CHAPTER XVII

BY WAY OF SUMMARY

the middle of the nineteenth century the Taiping rebellion arrested the attention of the world. It all but ruined the central provinces of China. That so great a catastrophe should have sprung from the brain of a man who, in his palace at Nanking, revealed such meager ability, who was so notoriously dominated by the king of the East and his own feeble relatives, is almost unthinkable. After consideration of all the factors and examination of the sources at hand, I have adopted the theory that the real author of the movement was the man whom the imperialist sources claim to have been the teacher of Hung Siu-ch'üan and Fêng Yun-shan, the man Chu Kiu-t'ao, and that it was he who in the early days of the movement came to be known as the T'ienteh-wang, and at the beginning was supposed to be the chosen emperor to restore the Ming Dynasty. The recently published Taiping T'ien-kuo Yeh Shi also asserts that Fêng Yun-shan and Hung Siu-ch'üan followed this Chu, and states that after his death Hung succeeded to the headship of the movement. I believe that this death did not take place until the Taiping host broke out of Yungan and the T'ienteh-wang was captured by the imperialists. He assumed the name Hung Ta-ch'üan, which he himself admitted to be a false one. His confession fits so well into the scheme and so completely supplies the effective