Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/87

Rh The dating according to the insurgent calendar, together with all the imperialist sources and Hung Jin's earlier account in Hamberg, agree that the formal establishment of the government, the ordering of the state, the adoption of the army regulations, and various other matters were accomplished during the occupation of Yungan from 1851 to the spring of 1852. These slight discrepancies need not concern us greatly, because the Chinese practice is to date a new reign from the beginning of the year following its actual opening.

More serious is the statement of the Chungwang in his Autobiography, confirmed by all the imperialist sources, that at the end of November, 1852, just before the siege of Changsha was raised, Hung assumed his imperial seal. This might argue that Hung had not had a proper seal at Yungan and now rectified the omission, an absurdity to anyone who recalls the Chinese flair for seals, and the great care the Taipings showed to grade all their officers and indicate the grades not only by the flag, hut by the size of their seals. That the T'ienwang should have been without one for nearly two years is unthinkable. A second explanation that he was heretofore only a wang or king, and now became an emperor fails because technically he never did become an emperor, through a religious objection to the use of the character "Ti," which meant God. Yet this ceremony did practically have that effect, because our sources assert that he was there hailed as a "wan sui" (ten thousand years), a term appropriate only to the emperor.

If he became an emperor at Changsha and yet con-