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people had resisted the British, while the Manchus had fled (which is about the exact opposite of what foreign sources tell us happened). As they went from one loss to another during the war, the Manchus became the scapegoats for the decline of the empire they had put together, while many Chinese suddenly discovered that they disagreed with most things the Qing had ever attempted to do.
    After the 1842 defeat, Chinese cities had to deal with an increasing foreign presence. Some members of the elite who came into contact with Westerners believed that their sheer presence was shameful and humiliating. Lin Changyi, a Fuzhou scholar and official—and a clansman of Commissioner Lin of Opium War fame—found himself living across from the British representatives in his home town in the late 1840s. He wrote in his diary:
    There is a pavilion to the northeast of my study. It faces the Jicui Temple on the Back Rock Hill which is now the hiding place of a flock of hungry eagles. They have built their nests and reside in them since. Whenever I rest my eyes upon the spot, the sight of it disgusts and embitters me. My first impulse is to snatch my strongbow, and shoot a deadly arrow at them. But, alas. My dart will not be fatal, and I relinquish my purpose in despair. To console myself I have sketched a painting to which I have given the name Shoot the Eagles and Chase the Wolves . Hence I named my study the Pavilion of Eagle Shooting. 11
    The display of British power along the Chinese coast gave rise not only to a will to resist. It also created a sudden blossoming of interestin the West. Drawing on firsthand information from participants on both sides in the war, a number of Chinese publications from the 1840s dealt with Europe more deeply than ever before. In 1844, Wei Yuan, who had worked closely with Commissioner Lin Zexu in Guangzhou, published some of Lin’s materials on the foreigners in the book Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms. (Lin himself had little use for them in the Xinjiang exile into which the Qing sent him after 1842 as punishment for his supposed failures in getting the war started.) Wei also became one of the first Chinese to urge the empire to equip itself with modern Western military technology to defend its coast. In the 1850s, the first translations of scientific texts began to appear, mostly in Shanghai and Hong Kong, often published by missionaries and their collaborators.
    While the impact of missionaries on China’s relations with and knowledge of the West had always been great, the number of Christian converts had been small. As the Qing perceived a rising threat from foreigners in the early 1800s, it attempted to crack down on missionary activities. But their efforts were largely in vain. The Protestant religious awakenings in Britain and the United States in the 1820s and 1830s, combined with the increase in trade, meant that many Christian missionaries were able to operate on the edges of the empire. The first complete Bible in Chinese was published in British India in 1822, and other versions appeared over the next thirty years. While the number of converts remained tiny, even after missionary activities expanded in the wake of the Opium War, it was large enough to irritate Chinese officials. With some reason one mandarin remarked that “most of these ignorant and deluded people attend these chapels out of necessity. They were driven to it by poverty and the need to relieve their distress.” 12
    T HE REAL THREAT TO THE ESTABLISHED ORDER , however, was not to come from missionary chapels, but from new and militant forms of religion born within China itself. Among the jetsam of thegreat turning of the tide in South China was a young man called Hong Xiuquan. Hong was born in 1814 in a village north of Guangzhou, nowadays close to the perimeter of the city’s gleaming new international airport. But even in the early 1800s, Hong’s birthplace was in touch with the outer world: It was emigrant