Introduction

This post originally was to be an answer to this question posed by /u/Chronos96, which asked:

I'm currently reading Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom by Stephen R. Platt and The Search for Modern China by Jonathan Spence. One thing I notice is both of the texts read as if Hong's visions were "real" in the literal sense. Were there any documents that he recorded of his visions or were they mainly just conversations between him and his cousin?

However, as you can see I kind of went down a huge rabbit hole of Taiping source material, so it has taken me drastically longer than expected. But now, 144 hours and three international flights later, it is done, and I am ready to share it with the community.

The 1837 visions were unquestionably a key component of the formative period of the Taiping movement, but you’re not wrong to point out that there is quite a bit of space for reasonable doubt about the specific details thanks to issues of our source material. But to begin with, it can be pretty definitively stated more or less straight away that Hong Xiuquan had a series of visions and a prolonged state of delirium in 1837. Even though our most reliable testimony comes from Hong Rengan, who as you are aware was a relation of Hong Xiuquan and senior Taiping minister, as an extended family member who grew up in a neighbouring village, if he was not himself a firsthand witness he would certainly have heard second-hand from Hong’s immediate family.

However, the specific content of the visions can be dug into further, which is helped – but also somewhat hindered – by the fact that we have two major sources narrating the visions in depth, but both postdate them by quite a significant margin. In order of publication date, the first of these is The visions of Hung-Siu-tshuen, and origin of the Kwang-si insurrection, published in Hong Kong in 1854, written by a Swedish Lutheran missionary named Theodore Hamberg on the basis of interviews conducted with Hong Rengan, who had migrated to the colony in 1852. The second is the Taiping Heavenly Chronicle, published in Nanjing in 1862 but purportedly written (or to use its own words, ‘revealed’) in 1848, with no specific authors named.

While it is tempting to say that by virtue of being the more contemporary source, the Hamberg account is the more reliable of the two, it is nonetheless far from problem-free. Hong Rengan would have had opportunity for direct contact with Hong Xiuquan until mid-1849, when Xiuquan left his home village for the last time, and so had ample time to absorb possible revisions to the vision narrative that occurred after Hong’s reading of the Good Words for Exhorting the Age. Additionally, by virtue of being intended for a mainstream Protestant audience in the West, it is entirely plausible that there are elements of the original visions which were excised in order to be more understandable and/or less offensive.

On the flip side, while the Taiping Heavenly Chronicle purports to have been written in 1848, the probability that it contains revisions that reflect a post-1848 agenda, or indeed that it may have been fabricated in other ways, must be taken into account. At the very least, parts of the text were updated to include the titles of particular figures, as Feng Yunshan is referred to as the South King, which he would not have been known as before the capture of Yongan in 1851. As only one manuscript copy exists of this document, which is the 1862 printing, we cannot know with much certainty what else was revised – indeed we could, if we wanted to, doubt that there was ever an older text at all. Jen Yu-Wen asserted that Hong Rengan wrote the original Taiping Heavenly Chronicle in 1848 and used it as the basis for his testimony to Theodore Hamberg, which is certainly possible and might explain why there would be a printing of it after Hong Rengan arrived at Nanjing, but there are problems with this explanation which we can consider the implications of later. My own reading of the Chronicle suggests that if it there ever was a precursor which served as the basis for the Hamberg account, the Chronicle contradicts Hamberg on enough points to suggest that it is markedly different from this now-lost mutual predecessor. Much of it is evidently tinged by an agenda shaped by the years of war after 1851, and it has much stronger Biblical overtones than Hamberg’s account.

On top of these two sources, however, there is a copious amount of other material which can be drawn on, including a short version of the vision narrative given in a document from 1860, exchanges between a British diplomatic mission and the Taiping East King Yang Xiuqing in 1854 which can give us a little window into Taiping theology, Hong’s early poetry, which might help us weed out later embellishments by elucidating his personal theology at the time of the visions, and a simultaneously rather important and rather unsatisfying account of Hong Xiuquan’s background written by Hong Rengan before he gave his testimony to Hamberg. When the source landscape is taken as a whole, we not only get much more in terms of what the original dream narrative must have been like, we also see a great illustration of how Taiping ideology and worldviews changed over time, as well as how the vision narrative was used for much more pragmatic purposes.

Week 79

 

On April 15^th 1919, three weeks after the foundation of the Fasci di Combattimento, the first in a series of episodes of violence more or less directly tied to the fascist organizations – during the early stages, these initiatives were often directed and carried through by elements of the arditi, futurist and nationalist groups, rather than directly by the Fasci di Combattimento themselves – took place in Milan, with the assault and destruction of the main location of the Socialist newspaper, the Avanti!. The circumstances of the event itself and the degree of planning and organization involved, as well as the responsibility of it aren't easy to determine and were object of obvious controversy already in the immediate aftermath, with the official inquiries committed for the most part to clear the authorities and police forces of any responsibility.

As for their part, the fasci, in their initial weeks, and in fact in their initial months of life, with their membership barely toughing one thousand nationwide (far from the 15,000 boasted by Mussolini in his interview for the Giornale on April 18^th 1919), the strength to organize, execute and direct similar initiatives by themselves – and furthermore any attempt to establish an exact distinction between the fasci and the composite undergrowth they were part of is made more difficult by the fact that most of the times double or even triple memberships were allowed, so that, for instance the ardito Ferruccio Vecchi and the futurist Marinetti, closely involved with the events (the first one at least by his own admission), were also among the founders of the Milanese Fascio.

The month of March in Milan, and already before the foundation of the Fascio , had seen an increase of the tension between socialists (and by extension the other forces accused of “betraying” the Italian victory, but mostly for sake of simplicity, the “Bolsheviks”) and the various forces of national interventionism, spurned by both the increasingly tense state of international affairs (with the difficult settlement of the Dalmatia and Fiume issue) and by the depressing financial state (the fixed exchange ratios with the Allies had ended on March 15^th 1919), which threatened to translate into a marked inflationary process. In light of which both the aspirations of the workers to maintain the comparative improvement of their wages during the war and the hopes of the veterans for a return to a suitable position appeared destined to come into conflict – as was the other main source of social discomfort: the progressive erosion of the social and financial status of fixed income recipients (state employees, homeowners, small land owners).

The Milanese Camera del Lavoro (that is, the association of the local unions) had proclaimed a general strike for the 15^th – the result of the incidents of April 13^th when, during a series of public speeches (the end of the war had also meant a substantial release of the restrictions on the rights of association, speech and press), one of the intervening personalities (the anarchist Ezio Schiaroli – allegedly a last minute replacement for the reformer leader Filippo Turati) had apparently (according to the relation for the Interior of prefect Giovanni Gasti) incited the workers to seize power. The police had then forced the interruption of the rally, which had originated a series of violent episodes, resulting in one dead and eight wounded.

The general strike was to be paired with another socialist manifestation, which the various “order” groups had initially decided to protest, holding their own rally in opposition to the socialist one. In an obvious effort to prevent incidents, the authorities had managed to persuade – or so the prefect believed - the “order” forces to abstain from their initiative. Nonetheless, after a public speech involving Vecchi and Mussolini among the others, during the course of the day groups of nationalists, arditi and officer cadets (following the description given by R. De Felice) had begun forming within the city center, not far away from the Avanti! building, at the end of what is now known as the fashion district. Meanwhile, groups of socialists were also returning to the Avanti! where both the police and the army had been tasked with preventing the two groups from coming into contact.

The first “engagement” between the opposite groups took place not far from the building, with the arditi elements forcing the socialist to disperse and then marching towards the Avanti! - there, the police had formed a corral around the building, when a gunshot allegedly coming from the building killed a soldier of the corral.

The killing of Speroni – continues the official report (with questionable punctuation) – while it surely contributed to aggravate even further the spirits, already excited, of the crowd, caused a moment of disarray among the soldiers forming the corral, some moved to assist the fallen ones and a small opening was made to transport the victim. One of the protesting officers [of the crowd, not of the corral] held up in the air the helmet of the soldier who had been shot, inciting with fiery words the officers, who after overcoming under those particular psychological circumstances with sudden and simultaneous impulse the weak resistance offered at the point by the soldier's corral moved forward to the Avanti! building from the windows of which further gunshots were coming, shooting in turn with their revolvers. After immediately climbing the grates on the ground floor's windows, which served [to reach] those of the first floor, while those inside went running – through the windows on the back and the roofs – the crowd broke into the locals and into the newspaper's printing rooms devastating everything and especially the subscribers archive and what formed the organic foundation of the newspaper, throwing into the Naviglio [the nearby channel] furniture and whatever fell into their hands. Equal if not worse damage was made to the printing rooms; sabotaging the linotypes in their essential parts, melting or throwing into the Naviglio the types. Last, the building was set on fire by means of the propaganda leaflets and of the gasoline for the machines. The socialists maintain that the damaging was made with technical knowledge and lucid selection. The events occurred hastily and rapidly and every effort to prevent the devastation put in place by functionaries and agents were paralyzed by the rush of the nationalists piling up against the Avanti! main gate to protect the destroyers led by captain Vecchi of the arditi who later boasted about it in public as of a praiseworthy distinction.

The triumphant crowd left the buildings carrying the Avanti! signboard as their spoil, to be then delivered to the monument of Victor Emmanuel II – the other half instead continued their celebration at their, soon to become known as, “lair”: the building of the Popolo d'Italia.

Their choice – Mussolini had also allegedly been violently attacked in the April 13^th speech which had created the circumstances for the whole affair – appeared to provide confirmation to the idea that Mussolini had directly instigated the action against the Avanti!. Regardless – there are good reasons to doubt the idea of a “punitive expedition” ordered by Mussolini – it's certain that Mussolini's contentious past with the socialist organizations, his constant (and reciprocated) polemics with the socialist press and with the official Socialist Party, his central position within the national interventionist field (with the Popolo d'Italia rising above the score of interventionist and radical periodicals as the main voice of national interventionism), all contributed to a degree of personalization of the conflict between socialist and anti-socialist forces around his public figure.

As for himself, Mussolini rejected the allegations with a distinctive choice of words – that would return in another, even more dramatic, circumstance. On April 18^th in an interview given to the nationalist Giornale d'Italia, paired with an editorial for his own Popolo d'Italia, he explained:

Everything happening at the Avanti! was spontaneous, absolutely spontaneous. A movement of crowds, a movement of combatants, of people, fed up with leninist blackmailing. The atmosphere had become unbearable. Milan wants to work. It wants to live. The formidable recovery of economical activity was overshadowed by this feeling of uncertainty and of interlude which is especially noticeable among those portions of the bourgeoisie spending their afternoons at the cafe rather than in the workshop. This state of things had to end. It had to burst. And blow, and blow, it did. The first episode of civil war took place […]

We of the fasci didn't prepare the assault against the socialist newspaper, but we accept the full moral responsibility of the episode […] The offense against the great newspaper can inspire once more the full solidarity of the socialists, but their political unity is over. In between Turati and Serrati there's an abyss and there are certain ultra-extremists who regard Serrati as a reactionary [codino, in the original – from the habit of the reactionaries of early XIX Century to wear a wig with a queue]. Their run for the reddest is fatal.