118
CARL T. SMITH
Government, for they hoped that through those converts, whom they financed in their efforts to reach the areas controlled by the Taiping government, they might influence the movement. Since they believed that these converts who had been under their instruction were better grounded in the fundamentals of the Christian faith than the Taiping leaders at Nanking, the missionaries expected their converts to strengthen the Christian element in the movement and correct some of its reported misconceptions in doctrine and aberrations in practice. They also hoped that through the good offices of these converts, once they had established themselves at Nanking, the missionary would, in time, be able to join them.
The most prominent of these individuals was Hung Jen-kan, a distant cousin of the Taiping leader Hung Hsiu-ch'uan. He became the Kan Wang (Shield King) in the Taiping government at Nanking in 1859 and was executed in November, 1864, after the fall of Nanking.
He accompanied Hung Hsiu-ch'uan to Canton for Christian instruction under the Rev. Issachar Roberts in 1847. In an appendix to Dr. Margaret M. Coughlin's unpublished doctoral thesis, Strangers in the House: J. Lewis Shuck and Issachar Roberts, First American Baptist Missionaries to China (University of Virginia, 1972), there is a letter of Roberts to Shuck, dated 27 March, 1847, giving details of Hsiu-ch'uan's spiritual development. After a month's instruction, they were sent out on a preaching tour in the course of which they returned to their home district, Hua-hsien, Kwangtung. Jen-kan did not return to Canton with Hsiu-ch'uan for further studies but remained at home to study medicine.
While Hung had been preaching near his home in Kwangtung and studying with Roberts at Canton, Feng Yün-shan, a friend of his who had also been influenced by Christian ideas, had been gathering a group of followers in Kwangsi. They adopted the name of "The Society of God Worshippers" and were the nucleus from which developed the Taiping movement. The usual accounts of the movement attribute its origins to the activity of Hung Hsiu-ch'uan. This interpretation rests heavily on the account given in Hamberg's booklet The Visions of Hung Siu-Tschuen and Origin of the Kwang-si Insurrection, published in Hong Kong in 1854, and on various documents of the movement which were written after the death of Feng Yün-shan. There are several contemporary references which