The White Lotus Rebellion

I. Religion and Rebellion in China

The White Lotus rebellion of 1796 to 1804 was the largest rising against the Qing dynasty in the eighteenth century. It broke out in the mountainous borderlands where the provinces of Hubei, Sichuan and Shaanxi meet, along the upper valley of the Han river, and it took the Qing government nearly nine years and enormous expense to suppress. The rebels were inspired by the teachings of the White Lotus tradition, a loose family of popular religious sects that expected the end of the present age and the coming of the Buddha Maitreya.

The rebellion marked the beginning of a century of religious and ethnic risings that shook the Qing empire, including the Taiping Rebellion described in The Taiping Rebellion and its Bible, the Muslim revolts in Yunnan and the northwest, described in The Panthay Rebellion and The Dungan Revolt, and the Boxer rising of 1900, described in The Boxer Rebellion. The Qing government responded to these movements with laws against heterodox teachings that were applied to the Christian communities of China as well as to the sects.

This page examines the beliefs of the White Lotus sects, the course of the rebellion, the Qing response and the place of the Christians in the Qing understanding of heterodoxy. It also considers the parallels between the apocalyptic expectations of the White Lotus and those found in the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures.

II. The White Lotus Tradition

The name White Lotus, Bailian, was first used by a Buddhist movement founded in the twelfth century by the monk Mao Ziyuan, who established a community devoted to the Pure Land teaching, the worship of the Buddha Amitabha and the hope of rebirth in his Western Paradise. The community admitted lay men and women, who lived together and kept a vegetarian diet. The Buddhist establishment and the government regarded the movement with suspicion, and it was banned at various times under the Song and Yuan dynasties.

Over the following centuries the name came to be applied by officials to a wide variety of popular religious groups, many of which had no direct connection with Mao Ziyuan's community. Modern historians, such as Barend ter Haar, have argued that the White Lotus was not a single continuous sect but a label used by the state to describe groups it regarded as heterodox and dangerous. The groups themselves often used other names, such as the Teaching of the Eternal Mother, the Way of Former Heaven or the Hunyuan teaching.

In the fourteenth century, movements associated with the White Lotus and the cult of Maitreya played a central part in the rebellions that overthrew the Mongol Yuan dynasty. In 1351 Han Shantong, who claimed that Maitreya was about to descend into the world, led a rising of the Red Turbans, Hongjin, in the Huai river valley. His son Han Lin'er was proclaimed the Young Prince of Radiance. One of the Red Turban commanders, Zhu Yuanzhang, founded the Ming dynasty in 1368, and the name of the dynasty, Ming, meaning bright, has been connected by some historians with the expectation of the King of Radiance, Mingwang.

Once in power, the Ming emperors banned the White Lotus and other sects. The Ming legal code of 1397 prescribed the death penalty for those who led sects that used the names of Maitreya, the White Lotus or the Bright Religion, and the Qing code inherited these provisions.

III. The Eternal Venerable Mother

From the sixteenth century the White Lotus sects developed a distinctive body of scriptures, called precious scrolls, baojuan, written in a mixture of prose and verse and recited at their gatherings. The precious scrolls taught that the world had been created by a supreme deity, the Eternal Venerable Mother, Wusheng Laomu, who had sent her children, the original sons and daughters, into the world. In the world they had forgotten their origin and had become attached to the dust of the senses.

The Eternal Mother longed for the return of her children to their true home, the native land of true emptiness, and she sent a series of Buddhas to save them. The history of the world was divided into three ages or kalpas, each ruled by a Buddha: the past age by the Lamp-Lighting Buddha, Dipamkara, the present age by Shakyamuni, and the coming age by Maitreya. At the end of the present age there would be a great catastrophe, in which the unbelievers would perish, and the elect who had received the teaching would be gathered to the Eternal Mother and enter a world of peace.

The sects transmitted their teaching through masters and disciples, and members were initiated by the recitation of an eight-character mantra: Zhenkong jiaxiang, Wusheng fumu, Native land of true emptiness, Eternal Parents. They met at night to recite scriptures, practise breathing exercises and martial arts, and treat illness. Most of the sects were peaceful, but in times of crisis the expectation of the end of the age could inspire rebellion.

IV. Comparisons with Biblical Apocalyptic

Western scholars and missionaries who studied the White Lotus sects in the nineteenth century compared their teachings with the apocalyptic traditions of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. The Dutch sinologist J. J. M. de Groot, in his Sectarianism and Religious Persecution in China of 1903–1904, translated many of the Qing documents on the sects and drew attention to the parallels and differences between their beliefs and those of the Christians.

The division of history into ages ending in catastrophe and renewal recalls the visions of Daniel, in which a succession of kingdoms is ended by a kingdom set up by God that will never be destroyed, in Daniel 2:44, and the promise of new heavens and a new earth in Isaiah 65:17 and Revelation 21:1-4. The gathering of the elect at the end of the age recalls the words of Jesus about the gathering of the chosen ones from the four winds, in Matthew 24:31.

Yet the differences are also significant. In the Biblical tradition, the end of the age is brought about by God, and the faithful are told to wait for it rather than to bring it about by force, as in the counsel to keep on the watch in Matthew 24:42-44 and the statement of Jesus that his kingdom is no part of this world, in John 18:36. In the White Lotus tradition, the coming of Maitreya could be understood as a call to action, and the leaders of the sects sometimes proclaimed themselves Maitreya or his representatives. The same tension between waiting and acting appears in the history of Christian millenarian movements in Europe.

V. The Sects and the Qing State

The Qing dynasty, which conquered China in 1644, regarded the sects as a threat to public order. The Qing code punished the leaders of heterodox sects with strangulation and their followers with beating and exile, and the officials were instructed to investigate and suppress the sects. In 1724 the Yongzheng emperor issued the Amplified Instructions on the Sacred Edict, a commentary on the sixteen maxims of his father, the Kangxi emperor, which was read aloud to the people in every district twice a month.

The seventh maxim of the Sacred Edict called on the people to reject heterodox teachings in order to exalt orthodox learning. The Yongzheng commentary named the White Lotus and other sects as examples of heterodoxy, and it also named the Lord of Heaven teaching, Tianzhu jiao, the Chinese name for Catholicism. The commentary thus placed the missionaries' religion alongside the sects in a text that every subject of the empire was expected to hear, and its classification shaped the attitude of officials towards Christianity for more than a century. It declared that Catholicism was tolerated at court only because its missionaries were skilled in mathematics and astronomy, and that the people should not follow it. Christianity was thus classed with the sects in the official ideology of the Qing state.

The same year, 1724, the Yongzheng emperor banned Christianity throughout the empire, except for the missionaries who served at the court in Beijing as astronomers, painters and engineers. The missionaries in the provinces were expelled to Macao, and the churches were converted into public buildings. The ban followed the Chinese Rites Controversy, in which the papacy had forbidden Chinese Christians to take part in the rites in honour of Confucius and their ancestors, a decision that the Kangxi emperor had regarded as an insult.

VI. The Rising of Wang Lun

In 1774 a rising led by Wang Lun, a martial arts teacher and herbal healer in Shandong province, showed the potential of the sects for rebellion. Wang Lun was the leader of a sect called the Clear Water teaching, Qingshui jiao, a branch of the White Lotus tradition, whose members practised meditation, breathing exercises and boxing. In the autumn of 1774 he led his followers in an attack on the county town of Shouzhang and then captured the city of Linqing on the Grand Canal.

The rebels believed that they were protected by magic from the weapons of the government troops, and that the end of the present age was at hand. After a siege of about a month, the government forces captured Linqing, and Wang Lun died in a burning building. The rising lasted only a few weeks, but it alarmed the Qianlong emperor, who ordered a thorough investigation of the sects. The history of the rising was studied by Susan Naquin in Shantung Rebellion of 1981.

VII. The Highlands of the Han River

The White Lotus rebellion of 1796 broke out in a region that had been transformed by migration in the eighteenth century. The mountainous borderlands of Hubei, Sichuan and Shaanxi, along the upper valley of the Han river and the Daba and Qinling mountains, had been sparsely populated at the beginning of the century. In the course of the century hundreds of thousands of migrants from the crowded lowlands moved into the region, clearing the forests and planting maize and sweet potatoes, crops introduced from the Americas that could be grown on steep slopes.

The migrants lived in scattered settlements, beyond the effective control of the government, and they worked in the forests, the mines, the salt wells and the iron works of the region. The soil of the cleared slopes was soon eroded, and the harvests declined. The region was also troubled by bandits and by conflicts between migrants and older settlers. Contemporary officials described the migrants as shed people, pengmin, who lived in shacks and moved from place to place.

The White Lotus teaching spread among these communities in the 1770s and 1780s. The teachers who travelled through the mountains offered healing, protection and the hope of salvation at the end of the age, and they collected contributions from their followers. Some of them taught that a descendant of the Ming emperors would appear to restore the dynasty, and that Maitreya was about to descend. The Qing authorities discovered the network in the 1790s and began to arrest its leaders.

VIII. The Arrests of the 1790s

In 1793 and 1794 the Qing authorities in Hubei, Sichuan and Shaanxi uncovered a network of White Lotus teachers led by Liu Song and his disciple Liu Zhixie. Liu Song, who had been exiled to Gansu after an earlier arrest in 1775, had continued to direct his followers from exile, and his disciples had proclaimed that a man named Wang Fasheng was a descendant of the Ming and that Maitreya would soon appear. The government ordered the arrest of the leaders and their followers, and the local officials used the investigation to extort money from the population, arresting and torturing many people who had no connection with the sects.

The extortion and brutality of the officials and their runners drove many people to join the sects in self-defence. Contemporary officials and later historians agreed that the misconduct of the local government was a major cause of the rebellion. The rebels themselves declared that the officials had forced the people to rebel, guanbi minfan, a phrase that recurs in the history of Chinese popular risings. Liu Song was executed in 1794, but Liu Zhixie escaped and continued to organise his followers.

IX. The Outbreak of 1796

The rebellion began in February 1796 in the prefectures of Jingzhou and Xiangyang in western Hubei, where sect leaders called on their followers to rise. The rebels wore white headbands and carried white banners, and they proclaimed that the end of the age had come. They attacked county towns, killed officials and gentry, and spread rapidly into the mountains of Sichuan and Shaanxi. Within a few months several groups of rebels, each led by its own leaders, were active across a wide area of the three provinces.

One of the most famous leaders of the rebellion was Wang Conger, a woman from Xiangyang, the widow of the sect leader Qi Lin, who had been executed in 1796. She commanded a large force of rebels in Hubei and Shaanxi, and she was said to be skilled in martial arts. In 1798 she was trapped by government forces and threw herself from a cliff to avoid capture, and she was remembered in later popular tradition as a heroine of the rising. Other leaders included Xu Tiande and Wang Sanhuai in Sichuan and Leng Tianlu in Hubei.

The rebels did not form a unified movement or a state. They moved through the mountains in mobile bands, raiding towns and villages and avoiding pitched battles with the government armies. They recruited new followers among the migrants and the poor, and they forced many people to join them. The rebels also killed many civilians, and the mountain population suffered from both sides.

X. The Rebels' Proclamations

Few documents written by the rebels of 1796 survive, and most of what is known about their beliefs comes from the confessions extracted from captured leaders by the Qing officials. These confessions describe the teaching of the coming kalpa, the descent of Maitreya and the appearance of a descendant of the Ming, and they record slogans that promised the rebels protection and reward. Some rebels were told that those who died in battle would be reborn in the native land of true emptiness, and that the new age would bring an end to suffering and taxation.

The confessions must be read with caution, since they were produced under interrogation and often torture, and the officials shaped them to fit their own understanding of heterodoxy. Historians such as Dai Yingcong have emphasised that many of the rebels were not sect members at all, but people driven to rebellion by the extortion of the officials and the hardships of the war, or forced to join the rebel bands. The religious language of the rebellion served to unite people with many different grievances.

XI. Qianlong, Jiaqing and Heshen

The rebellion broke out at a time of transition in the Qing government. The Qianlong emperor, who had reigned since 1735, abdicated in February 1796, at the end of the sixtieth year of his reign, so as not to exceed the reign of his grandfather Kangxi. His son, the Jiaqing emperor, succeeded him, but Qianlong retained real power as the Retired Emperor until his death in February 1799.

During the last decades of Qianlong's reign the government had been dominated by his favourite, the Manchu official Heshen, who controlled appointments and accumulated an enormous fortune through corruption. Heshen and his associates profited from the war against the White Lotus, and the commanders in the field sent false reports of victories while embezzling the funds for the campaign. The campaign dragged on for years without result.

When Qianlong died in 1799, Jiaqing immediately had Heshen arrested and ordered him to commit suicide. The confiscated wealth of Heshen was said to be equal to several years of the revenue of the state. Jiaqing then reorganised the command of the campaign against the White Lotus, punished the corrupt commanders and appointed new ones, including the Manchu general Eldemboo and the Chinese officials who organised the local militias. The fall of Heshen marked a turning point in the war.

XII. Stockades and Militias

The new commanders adopted a strategy of strengthening the walls and clearing the countryside, jianbi qingye, which had been proposed by the official Gong Jinghan and others. The population of the affected regions was concentrated in fortified villages and stockades, called zhai or bao, built on hills and surrounded by walls, where the people stored their grain and took refuge when the rebels approached. The rebels were thus deprived of food and recruits.

The stockades were defended by local militias, tuanlian, organised by the local gentry and financed by local contributions. The militias were more effective than the regular troops, since their members knew the terrain and were defending their own homes. The government also recruited the rebels' own followers, offering pardons to those who surrendered and recruiting them as soldiers. These soldiers, called xiangyong, village braves, became an important part of the government forces.

The strategy succeeded. From 1800 the rebel bands were gradually reduced, and their leaders were captured or killed. The last large bands were destroyed in 1804, though small groups continued to resist in the mountains for some years. The rebellion had lasted nine years and had cost the government, according to an often-cited estimate, about two hundred million taels of silver, equal to about four or five years of the empire's revenue. The officially recorded direct military expenditure for 1796 to 1804 was about ninety-two million taels, and later reimbursements and unreported provincial spending make the true total uncertain. The war had exhausted the treasury that Qianlong had filled.

The use of local militias in the suppression of the White Lotus anticipated the methods by which the Qing would later suppress the Taiping, described in The Taiping Rebellion and its Bible. The historian Philip Kuhn, in Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China, traced the development of the militias from the White Lotus war to the Xiang Army of Zeng Guofan, and argued that they marked the beginning of the militarisation of Chinese rural society in the nineteenth century.

XIII. The Cost of the War

The number of people who died in the White Lotus rebellion is uncertain. The official records report that tens of thousands of rebels were killed in battle and executed, and many more civilians died from violence, famine and disease. Some estimates place the total number of deaths in the hundreds of thousands. The mountain regions were devastated, and many of the migrant settlements were abandoned.

The rebellion revealed the weakness of the Qing armies, the Manchu banners and the Green Standard troops, which had grown corrupt and ineffective during the long peace of the eighteenth century. It also revealed the extent of corruption in the government under Heshen and the fragility of the social order in the regions of recent migration. Historians have often regarded the rebellion as the beginning of the decline of the Qing dynasty.

XIV. Women in the Sects

Women played a prominent role in the White Lotus sects, in contrast to their limited role in the official religious and political life of the Qing empire. The Eternal Mother, the supreme deity of the sects, was a female figure, and the precious scrolls described her as a mother weeping for her lost children. Women could become teachers and leaders in the sects, and they took part in the night meetings at which men and women recited the scriptures together, a practice that the officials regarded as a sign of immorality.

Women also took part in the risings. Besides Wang Conger, the sources mention other women leaders among the rebels of 1796, and women fought in the rebel bands. The prominence of women in the sects was one of the reasons for the hostility of the officials, who regarded the mixing of men and women as a violation of the Confucian order. The same accusation was made against the Christians, whose communities in Sichuan included consecrated virgins who lived in their families and taught the faith, and against the Taiping, whose women's armies astonished observers.

XV. The Highlands after the War

After the suppression of the rebellion, the Qing government sought to restore order in the highlands of the Han river. It resettled the population, registered the migrants, reduced taxes and built new administrative centres, and it maintained the militias and stockades that had been built during the war. Many of the former rebels and the village braves who had fought against them were enrolled in the regular army or settled on the land.

The government also continued its campaign against the sects. The officials were instructed to search for sect scriptures and images and to arrest the teachers. The Sacred Edict was read aloud in the villages, and the gentry were encouraged to establish schools and community compacts to teach Confucian morality. Yet the sects survived in secret and reappeared in later decades, and the highlands remained a region of poverty and unrest. The environmental damage caused by the clearing of the slopes continued, and the region suffered from floods and erosion throughout the nineteenth century.

The war also left a legacy of militarisation. The local gentry who had organised the militias retained their power, and the practice of building stockades and organising militias spread to other regions in the following decades. These local forces were to play a decisive part in the wars of the mid-nineteenth century, when the Qing government again relied on the gentry to defend the empire against rebellion.

XVI. The Eight Trigrams Rising of 1813

The suppression of the White Lotus rebellion did not end the activity of the sects. In 1813 the Eight Trigrams sect, Bagua jiao, a branch of the White Lotus tradition in the provinces of Zhili, Shandong and Henan, organised a rising under its leaders Lin Qing and Li Wencheng. The sect taught that the Eternal Mother would send Maitreya to save her children at the end of the age, and its leaders calculated that the rising should take place on the fifteenth day of the ninth month of 1813.

On that day a group of about two hundred sect members, with the help of eunuchs in the imperial palace who had joined the sect, entered the Forbidden City in Beijing and attacked the inner palace. They were repulsed by the palace guards and by the imperial prince Minning, later the Daoguang emperor, who shot several of them with a musket. Lin Qing was captured and executed. In Henan, Li Wencheng's followers captured the town of Huaxian and held it for three months before it was taken by government troops.

The attack on the Forbidden City shocked the Jiaqing emperor, who issued an edict blaming himself for the failures of his government. The rising was studied in detail by Susan Naquin in Millenarian Rebellion in China of 1976, which used the confessions of the captured rebels to reconstruct the beliefs and organisation of the sect.

XVII. Christians under the Laws against Sects

The Qing authorities applied the laws against heterodox sects to the Christian communities of the empire. After the ban of 1724, Christianity survived in the provinces in small communities, served by Chinese priests and by missionaries who entered the country in secret. The largest communities were in Sichuan, where the priests of the Paris Foreign Missions Society maintained a mission, in Fujian, Jiangxi, Hubei and the region around Beijing.

The officials who investigated the White Lotus sects often discovered Christian communities and treated them in the same way. In 1784–1785, after the arrest of Italian Franciscans travelling to Shaanxi, the Qianlong emperor ordered a nationwide campaign against the Christians, and many missionaries and Chinese Christians were arrested. In 1805, after a map of the coast prepared by the Augustinian missionary Adeodato di Sant'Agostino was discovered, the Jiaqing emperor ordered another campaign, and in 1811 he issued a law that prescribed death for those who propagated Christianity and exile for those who refused to renounce it.

The officials who interrogated Christians asked the same questions they asked of the sect members: whether they met at night, whether men and women gathered together, whether they recited scriptures and collected money, and whether they had any connection with rebels. The Christians, like the sectarians, possessed books, images and prayers that the officials regarded as signs of heterodoxy. They were required to renounce their faith by stepping on a cross, a practice that recalled the fumi-e of Japan described in The Shimabara Rebellion.

The Christians of Sichuan suffered especially during and after the White Lotus rebellion, since the officials suspected that they were connected with the rebels. Some Christian communities were accused of being White Lotus sects, and some priests were arrested. The French priest Gabriel Taurin Dufresse, vicar apostolic of Sichuan, was arrested in 1815 and executed at Chengdu, and many Chinese Christians were exiled to the frontier. The Lazarist priest Jean-Gabriel Perboyre was strangled at Wuchang in 1840 under the laws against heterodox teaching.

XVIII. Christians Distinguish Themselves from the Sects

The Chinese Christians and their missionaries sought to distinguish their faith from the teachings of the sects. They emphasised that Christianity taught obedience to rulers, citing the counsel of Paul to be in subjection to the superior authorities, in Romans 13:1, and the command of Jesus to pay back Caesar's things to Caesar, in Matthew 22:21. They pointed out that the Christians did not seek to overthrow the government or proclaim a new dynasty.

The Christian apologists also emphasised the differences between Christian and sectarian teachings about the end of the world. While the sects expected a catastrophe in the near future and calculated its date, the Christians taught that no one knows the day and hour, as in Matthew 24:36. Yet the officials were often not convinced, and the Christian expectation of the return of Christ and the judgement of the world seemed to them similar to the sectarian expectation of the coming of Maitreya.

The comparison between Christianity and the White Lotus sects continued into the nineteenth century. When the Taiping Rebellion broke out, many officials regarded it as a new form of White Lotus sectarianism, and Zeng Guofan's proclamation against the Taiping placed their religion in the same category as the heterodox teachings condemned by the Sacred Edict. In 1900 the Boxers, whose movement grew out of the same tradition of sectarian boxing and spirit possession, attacked the Christians as followers of a foreign heterodoxy.

XIX. The Treaties and Toleration

The legal position of the Christians changed after the First Opium War. The Treaty of Whampoa of 1844 between France and China permitted the French to build churches in the treaty ports, and in 1844 and 1846 the Daoguang emperor issued edicts permitting the practice of Christianity and restoring some confiscated churches. The Treaty of Tianjin of 1858 and the Convention of Beijing of 1860 gave missionaries the right to travel and preach in the interior and to buy property.

The toleration of Christianity was thus imposed on the Qing government by the foreign powers, and the Christians came to be associated with foreign power in the minds of many Chinese. The laws against heterodox sects remained in force, and the White Lotus and other sects continued to be suppressed. The different treatment of Christianity and the native sects was resented by many officials and gentry, and contributed to the conflicts between missionaries and local communities in the later nineteenth century.

XX. The White Lotus in Historical Memory

The White Lotus rebellion has been interpreted in different ways by historians. Qing officials regarded it as the work of heterodox teachers who deceived the ignorant. In the twentieth century, Chinese Marxist historians interpreted it as a peasant uprising against feudal oppression, in which religion served as a means of organisation. Western historians, such as Susan Naquin, Daniel Overmyer and Barend ter Haar, have studied the religious beliefs of the sects and their role in the rebellions, and have questioned whether the sects were inherently rebellious.

The precious scrolls of the sects, many of which survive in libraries in China and Japan, have been studied as a body of religious literature that reveals the beliefs of ordinary people in late imperial China. Their teachings about the Eternal Mother and the end of the age show the persistence of apocalyptic hope in Chinese popular religion, and they invite comparison with the apocalyptic literature of Judaism and Christianity, such as the books of Daniel and Revelation, and with the Jewish communities of China described in The Jews of Kaifeng, whose own scriptures were preserved through the same centuries.

XXI. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.