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NOTES AND QUERIES
A FURTHER NOTE ON FENG YUN-SHAN AND GÜTZLAFF
Since the publication of my Additional Notes on Carl T. Smith's Notes on Friends and Relatives of Taiping Leaders in the last issue of this Journal (Vol. 16, 1976: 132-134) I have acquired some fresh materials on Feng's relationship with Gützlaff (Additional Note (1)). The material is found in Prescott Clarke's paper The Coming of God to Kwangsi (Department of Far Eastern History, The Australian National University, No. 7, March, 1973) and Carl T. Smith's copy of "The full report of a Taiping deserter" from the Hong Kong Overland Register, 27th September 1853. A critical study of the contents therein enables me to arrive at a more definite conclusion on the subject under discussion.
Clarke's able and well-written paper deals with the life and works of Karl Gützlaff on the basis of exhaustive research in Europe and Hong Kong. He believes that Gützlaff's influence on the Taipings has either been "dismissed or forgotten" (p. 147). Its title suggests the close contact of Gützlaff's work with the promotion of Christianity in Kwangsi, but immediately calls for clarification. Should it imply that the worship of God was mainly, if not wholly, through the introduction of Gützlaff's work, it seems to me that the credit due him is overestimated.
Undoubtedly, a few points in the paper which are well-documented and verified can be accepted as Gützlaff's contribution to Taiping Christianity. For example, there were six stations established in Kwangsi in 1848-50, including Kwei-ping, each being run by a few members of the Chinese Union as a unit. Some members did join the Taipings after the uprising in 1851, but they could only hold unimportant positions in the lower echelon thus being unable to exert any significant influence on the movement. Indeed, they had to forsake what had been taught by Gützlaff and assimilate the Christian faith and obey the military rulings of the Taipings.
However, a decidedly significant and valuable contribution that Gützlaff made to the Taipings was the use of his version of the translated Bible and some tracts he had written. Through the new version of the Bible the Taipings adopted the term "Huang Shang Ti" (1) for God a term which Gützlaff had borrowed from the Chinese ancient classics. This process identified the Chinese God with the Christian God more closely than the term "Shang Ti".