The Last Heavenly King

By Vincent van Mechelen

'The Last Heavenly King' is the first part of Triptych of Times, a trilogy spanning a period of more than 260 years, in which members of the Persoon-Hong family migrate from China to the Guianas, from the Guianas to the Netherlands and from the North Atlantic region to Namibia. The second part is Waiting Can Wait, a (near-)contemporary novella which is both playfully tragicomic and philosophically serious, and the third part Legends of the Future, a novella of ideas 'written by Sondaha Persoon'. Parts Two and Three are not (yet) available as ebooks.

'The Last Heavenly King' is a historical novella whose real writer may be Vincent van Mechelen, but whose fictional writer is Hong Kuiyuan, an equally real person who was born near Guangzhou (Canton) in 1848. Hong Kuiyuan tells his personal story of the collapse, in 1864, of the Taiping ('Great Peace') Heavenly Kingdom, founded by his uncle Hong Xiuquan, the first Heavenly King. The Chinese and foreign enemies of the Heavenly Kingdom used to refer to it as 'the Taiping Rebellion', and this unparalleled episode in human history is still generally known by that name today.

The story starts with the fall of Nanjing, which was called "Tianjing" or "Heavenly Capital" by the God-worshipers. When the last town, Huzhou, is lost to the imperial Qing too, the survivors flee in the direction of their Hakka homeland, but in the end they fare no better then the ones they left behind. Kuiyuan's father, the Shield King, and his fourteen-year-old cousin, the Young Monarch, are also captured and executed. The sixteen-year-old Kuiyuan himself escapes but is later captured and abused by pirates. When he finally arrives in Hong Kong, his hopes are shattered again.

Yet, while the first Heavenly King’s attempt to found his own Christian theocracy on Earth led to the deaths of more than 20 million people, Kuiyuan manages to survive and to start a less divine and less royal, but much more peaceful life in one of the Guianas. (The basics are fact.) In Part Two of Triptych of Times, Hong Kuiyuan will live on as the great-great-grandfather of the new protagonist 'Nancy' Hong Waiting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vincent van Mechelen
• Release date: Aug 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9789081773515

Vincent van Mechelen

Machiel Vincent van Mechelen is a native of the Netherlands who also lived and worked in Canada as a landed immigrant. While still being taught Dutch, French, English and German, 'Machiel' –as Vincent was called then– received a science-oriented secondary education. The formative influence of the exact sciences continued at the academic level, but the arts, pure or applied, life and social sciences and ethics later played a significant role as well or started to receive a greater emphasis. Eventually, Vincent graduated from three different universities, in landscape architecture, in philosophy and in English language and literature (in this order, with diverse jobs in two continents, a one-year trip around the world and a period of studying informatics in between).In the course of about thirty years, Vincent van Mechelen wrote philosophical, (neutral-inclusive) ideological, literary and linguistic books and papers, short stories, a play and poems, among which songs, all labors of love, one of them a Vocabulary of Alliteration. Most of the author's work is in This Language (what many may consider 'American English'), a part in Deze Taal ('Dutch') and some of it in Zhezhong Yuyan ('Putonghua Chinese'). Since the advent of the Internet Vincent's main mediums of publication have been MVVM-site (mvvm.net), a private site, and TRINPsite (trinp.net), a site owned by a nonreligious denominational foundation. A few books have now been self-published in print and as ebooks.The first ebook which appeared at Smashwords was The Last Heavenly King, part of Triptych of Times, a trilogy consisting of The Last Heavenly King, Waiting Can Wait and Legends of the Future, all three novellas in themselves. As the beginning describes the final days of the 'Taiping Rebellion' (only 84 years before Machiel first saw the light), it should be of interest that the author visited China (including Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan) several times and still studies Chinese – at an intermediate level, that is.The Metric Calendar, a Metric Diary is Vincent van Mechelen's second ebook. It is published at the same time as Metric Diary, a printed diary using the Quaternary Metric World Calendar. The ebook contains the Metric Diary (in color) on screen, but unlike the Diary on paper (in greyscale), it explains first the basics of a systematic calendar such as the Metric Calendar. This explanation is a good illustration of a way of thinking which is not bound by the magic of baseless, if not supernaturalist and/or exclusivist, tradition; not bound by arbitrariness or irrelevance, however 'normal' a majority in a particular place at a particular time may deem a belief or practice to be. (Incidentally, and yet not too coincidentally, the Metric Calendar also plays a role in Triptych of Times.)On MVVM-site at http://mvvm.net you will find additional public data about Vincent van Mechelen and other works by the same author under the same civil name. For more about Triptych of Times with the Last Heavenly King see tot.mvvm.net. For more about the Metric Calendar and a Metric diary see metric.mvvm.net. These subdomains provide direct links to the most recent information.Address correspondence to [e-mail]. (If discontinued consult MVVM-site.)

Book preview

Part One of Triptych of Times

THE LAST HEAVENLY KING

a historical novella

by Vincent van Mechelen

Published by MVVM at Smashwords 66 aSWW

Copyright M. Vincent van Mechelen 2011 ChrE

All rights with respect to text, poem and pictures reserved

Version 71.32.3

EPub ISBN 978-90-817735-1-5

Smashwords Edition License Statement

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, then please visit Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

Part One of Triptych of Times

THE LAST HEAVENLY KING

Table of Contents

Acknowledgement

The Fall of the Cities

The Capture of My Kin

Descending to the Sea

Shipped Off

Afterword

About the author and other info

Three photographs

Acknowledgement

For the historical data of the horrendous Taiping Heavenly attempt at founding a Christianist theocracy in China i am indebted most to Jonathan D. Spence, author of GOD'S CHINESE SON, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (1996, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, London). This whole book was a great source of inspiration and especially its last chapter an important source of information for me while writing The Last Heavenly King. Basically the story in my work of fiction starts where Spence's story stops in a remarkable and thorough work of nonfiction.

M. Vincent van Mechelen, 66.MSE

The Fall of the Cities

I did not cry when I saw the approaching horror reflected in the pregnant Zhenzheng’s eyes, after the demon devils had set fire to the explosives under the Eastern wall of Tianjing. I did not cry when our Heavenly Troops could not stop the bloodthirsty dogs any more from squeezing through the openings in the wall, after which they started to slaughter, rape and loot everybody and everything within their reach. I did not cry when we had to leave Tianguifu’s little brothers, cousins of mine, behind in the streets, where they would meet the terrible fate of tens of thousands of other God-worshippers. I was sixteen years old then, and a man. But I cried, when temporarily safe from immediate danger, I saw from the roof of a temple how the idolatrous heathens in the service of Tongzhi, the fake Manchu ‘emperor’, took down our royal standard from the Palace of the Heavenly King, where my uncle, and my father too, had reigned, and ruled, since I was five years old. It felt as if the true Emperor Himself had forsaken, first His second son, and now all of us.

What happened in 1864, on that sixth day of Month Seven on our calendar, did not come by surprise. Thousands of our people had died of starvation, because there had been hardly any food in the whole city for weeks. The Chinese soldiers who fought for the Manchus had taken every strategic hill around Tianjing. They had built more than a hundred forts, about a quarter to half a mile apart, each with a garrison of their Tartar dogs or ‘Qing troops’ – as they preferred to call themselves. At the palace my uncle had entreated his Heavenly Father and Heavenly Elderly Brother to send a celestial army for the defence of the capital. However, that army had never come and never came, in spite of all our praying and piety.

We had been struck by even more disaster when the old Tian Wang, the first Heavenly King, fell ill and died. Strictly speaking he was my father’s cousin, but I regarded Hong Xiuquan as my uncle. I really was close to him for only a few years, as I used to live in Hong Kong before joining my father, Hong Rengan, in Tianjing. At the time I was twelve years old and Tianguifu, who was my uncle’s eldest son, only ten. Non-Chinese people may not realise that ‘Tianguifu’ was, and still is, an exceptional given name, because it consists of three, instead of the usual two, words and characters. But a close relative like me was allowed to call him Tiangui for short. Tiangui and I became boon companions in the early years of my stay in Tianjing, something that did not change when he succeeded his father as the new Tian Wang. (Not a few of our adversaries insinuated that ‘Tian Wang’ stood for ‘King of Heaven’, but for us it meant no more than ‘Heavenly King’, on Earth that is.)

Even though all the ministers of the Heavenly Kingdom had paid homage to the fourteen-year-old Tianguifu as the Young Monarch, military affairs remained in the hands of General Li, the Loyal King, and also court matters, for meanwhile my father, the Shield King, was in Huzhou (something like one hundred and sixty miles away). Probably in an attempt to further secure the dynasty Tiangui had been given four wives, or rather girls, by his father, but still, he did not have a child of his own. My cousin just did not seem to be able to choose between his wives and then chose one of his father’s poems or a book instead. Both in private matters and in political affairs his days had been a far cry from the times of his father. While Tianguifu’s brave soldiers were without grain and effective leadership, Tongzhi’s dogs were digging holes in the ground, after which his foxes would fill them with explosives. They made Tianguifu’s reign last only a mere six weeks in the capital.

It was in the middle of the day when that section of the city wall was blown up. I was staying with the Young Monarch at the palace. I saw the bewilderment on his face when the blast occurred, and the fear and distress on the faces of his wives, among whom Zhenzheng, who had been my personal favourite for almost a year. They knew and we knew what it meant to fall in the hands of the Qing, in the capital or wherever else in China they would get hold of us. Especially if you were a member of the Royal Family, it would not merely mean death –an ascent to Heaven