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The Origins of the Tiandihui

The Chinese Triads in Legend and History

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Beginnings: The Eighteenth Century

The Tiandihui, as we know it today, was founded at the Guanyinting (Goddess of Mercy pavilion), Gaoxi township, in Zhangpu county, Zhangzhou prefecture, Fujian province, sometime in 1761 or 1762. It was a most ordinary product of a most extraordinary environment, merely one of several similar societies to emerge in the Minnan-Yuedong heart of the Nanyang trade zone.

The area where it sprang up, also referred to by some Western scholars as the Southeast Coast macroregion, encompassed portions of southern Fujian and eastern Guangdong (plus Taiwan). Comprising approximately 47,224 square miles, even the mainland parts were set off from the rest of China by high mountain regions and internally divided by their own peaks and streams. Separate river systems washed the narrow plains of the region's major prefectures, while rugged terrain divided the settlements into highlands and lowlands, Hakka and Hokkien.

The Physical and Economic Environment of Zhangzhou Prefecture

Zhangzhou, the southernmost of Fujian's four coastal prefectures, lies in the heart of the province's largest plain, created by the Qiulong (Nine Dragons) River and its tributaries. Aptly described by the Qing scholar Gu Yanwu as an area "leaning on the mountains and resting in the sea, right between Fukien and Kuangtung," it was composed in the period of our concern of the seven counties (xian) of Longqi, Zhangpu, Haicheng, Nanjing, Changtai, Pinghe, and Zhaoan. Its capital, Zhangzhoufu, sat upstream some 24 miles west of Xiamen (Amoy).

To some, the prefecture appeared as a paradise on earth, a "charming, thriving and well-populated country, rich in corn, rice and sugar cane." Others were less enchanted, pronouncing its air "damp and vaporous," and its soil "full of snakes and worms."

But it was not agriculture that drove the Zhangzhou economy. Its maritime location had given rise to a highly commercialized, outwardlooking, trade that had made the area an "exception" to the rest of the province and most of China as early as the Ming dynasty (1368 — 1644), As Evelyn Rawski notes in her study of coastal Fujian, the peasants of the interior had begun to specialize in cash crops and to be heavily dependent on market conditions at an early date. Throughout the Ming, foreign silver flowed into Zhangzhou, and its economy boomed, supported by such important manufactures as silk and cotton textiles, iron cooking pots, fans, and salt.

The downside of this commercial prosperity, however, was an inflationary cycle that pushed land prices in Zhangzhou to levels not found elsewhere in Fujian, and that even in the Ming probably made it difficult for peasants to purchase good paddy. The result was an out-migration by the dispossessed that, as early as 1600, caused one-half of the Fujianese to earn their livings away from home.

Conditions seem to have worsened during the Qing, when the "momentum of agricultural commercialization between 1600 and 1800 stopped short of transforming Fukien's [Fujian's] traditional agrarian economy into a commercial economy based on cash crops." Despite rising rice output, made possible by improved seeds, double-cropping, and terracing, and the opening of marginal lands with the introduction of such crops as peanuts and sweet potatoes, the final result was even greater population growth, declining man-land ratios, over-intensive farming, and the complex systems of multiple ownership and tenancy so eloquently described elsewhere.

To give some indication of the magnitude of the problem, in 1751 Fujian province had an estimated 7,736,155 inhabitants, about 1,500,000 of whom lived in the two largest prefectures, Zhangzhou and Quanzhou. The succeeding years saw a population explosion that pushed the late-eighteenth- or early-nineteenth-century figure beyond even the 1953 census's estimate of 13.1 million. In terms of land tenure, this meant that whereas in 1571, the average landholding in Zhangzhou was estimated at 5.0 ITLμITL per person (6.6 mu = 1 acre), by 1812 the figure had shrunk to 0.93, well below the 4.0 mu needed for bare subsistence.

One of the regions hardest hit by this cycle of fast population growth, land scarcity, and high rice prices was Zhangpu county, the home of the Tiandihui. Even more than the rest of Fujian, Zhangpu, hemmed in by mountains and sea, was a region for which the phrase "the land is barren and the people are poor" (diji minpin) seemed an apt description: its hillsides were hard and infertile, and its fields, mostly located near the sea, were about 50 percent sand and brine. Despite the unprecedented prosperity of the Ming, in which the number of Zhangpu markets increased ninefold, from just one in 1491 to ten by 1628, the harsh natural environment made for a population that engaged in constant battles with the sea. By 1425, inhabitants from Longqi and Zhangpu counties had already built 186 dikes to reclaim land from the sea. Their difficulties were exacerbated during the Qing by rising absentee landlordism, which gave rise to the complex tenancy system known as the "one plot of land, two or three owners" (yitian liangsanzhu) and to large numbers of landless farmers. In addition, the region boasted a large number of salt fields and salt producers who, with no dependable means of livelihood, were at the mercy of rapacious officials and merchants.

Some of those who did not have access to land sought employment as hired laborers in their native villages. Others, with some degree of literacy, got by telling fortunes, reading horoscopes, or predicting the future from sticks shaken out of a can. Still others who knew the martial arts sold their skills on the streets or took on students. Many of those without such recourses found their niches as priests, beggars, pirates, or thieves.

But more often than not, circumstances forced the dispossessed to follow in the footsteps of their forebears and earn their living abroad. Some took up peddling, setting up small stalls in nearby country towns or migrating back and forth between villages with carrying poles balanced on their shoulders. Others were pushed out of their familiar confines while still remaining relatively close to home, engaging in the long-distance trade between Guangzhou and Xiamen, not far from Zhangzhou. But many had to go much farther afield, to Guangxi, Sichuan, the Nanyang, and especially Taiwan. That island, as many scholars have pointed out, provided a safety valve for the overflow of mainlanders during much of the early and mid-Qing. When Kangxi came to the throne (1662), Taiwan's population had not yet reached 100,000; by the end of his reign (1722), migrants from Guangdong and Fujian had swelled the figure to more than 200,000. And this was only the beginning of the growth. Over the next hundred years, Taiwan continued to fill up rapidly, to the point where its population soared to perhaps as much as 2,000,000 in the Jiaqing period. In addition, the rapid pace of Taiwan's economic development after its conquest by the Qing in 1683 was due primarily to immigrants from Quanzhou and Zhangzhou, who made the island an integral part of the Nanyang trading network.

Individual sojourners, regardless of whether they were itinerant peddlers or small-scale participants in the long-distance commerce of the day, shared in common an insecure livelihood. Cut off from local support systems, they were socially isolated with little recourse but to make do among themselves. Coastal Fujian, like coastal Guangdong, was an area with a long tradition of the "down-and-out" making fast money at the expense of others wherever they could; many of the hard-pressed joined with those habitually at the financial margins, resorting to part-time petty piracy and crime to make ends meet. J. J. M. de Groot, during his peregrinations through coastal Fujian in the 1880's, observed that everytime the livelihood of the people of Zhangzhou was threatened, fishermen and farmers alike would move with their families into boats, where they bided their time eking out livings as fishermen or pirates until they could return to their homes. That this was but the most recent manifestation of a centuries-old cycle was borne out by a local saying to the effect that whenever people in Zhangzhou or Quanzhou got hungry, pirates emerged.

The Social and Political Environment of Zhangzhou

Oriented toward the sea and cut off from its neighbors, Fujian was always a difficult province to govern, and the Zhangzhou region in particular was often characterized as being "Hua wai," outside of civilization. Continuous turmoil, recurrent cycles of rebellion, and closure to the outside characterized its political scene.

One telling example was the wokou episode of the mid-sixteenth century, in which bands of Sino-Japanese smuggler-pirates repeatedly raided the coast from the Yangtze delta to Vietnam. For Fujian, the worst period came between 1555 and 1564, when wokou raids laid waste coastal ports while brigands pillaged the mountainous interior. The residents in their plight thereupon turned to lineages for self-preservation, starting them down the evolutionary road, as Harry Lamley has noted, to becoming the strong corporate entities that ultimately came to dominate much of southeastern China.

Zhangzhou was also a major arena in the Manchu struggle for South China and the coast. Of the many regional contests during the Ming — Qing transition, probably none had more dramatic repercussions than that centering on the Zheng family in Fujian. The details of Zheng Zhilong's rise to power as a maritime adventurer with an enormous fleet of his own, his subsequent surrender to both the Ming and the Qing government, and the anti-Qing resistance carried out by his son Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga), who ended up on Taiwan, have been told elsewhere and need not detain us here except insofar as they relate to the sufferings of Zhangzhou. In the words of a contemporary:

Chih-lung was a man from Ch'üan-chou. He invaded Chang-chou but spared Ch'üan-chou. Therefore the Chang-chou people insisted on pursuing him, while the Ch'üan-chou people insisted on placating him. Both prefectural governments held to their own opinion without reaching a common decision, and the piracy became even more furious.

Between 1620 and 1683, one of most hotly contested pieces of territory in this struggle was Xiamen (Amoy), which changed hands several times and served as a major base of Zheng operations. Given Xiamen's location at the mouth of Zhangzhou's river basin, the turmoil there easily spilled over into the prefecture itself. In 1628, for example, Zheng Zhilong, frustrated in his attempts to gain pardon from authorities in Amoy, seized twenty merchant junks and plundered numerous settlements on the Zhangzhou shore of the Amoy estuary while taking care all the while not to damage the property of people from Quanzhou.

As if the depredations of the Zheng family were not enough, more suffering came to Zhangzhou as a result of the coastal evacuation (haijin) policy implemented by the Qing government between 1660 and 1683. In an attempt to starve out the Zhengs, Qing officials ordered the entire coastal population to move thirty, fifty, or sometimes even several hundred li to the interior (one li = 0.5 cm). The region near Amoy was the first to be evacuated; the policy was then extended to the remainder of the coast the next year, 1661. By 1665, most of the southern coast had been forcibly depopulated. The result was incalculable damage to local residents. In the words of a contemporary:

Villages, farms, fields, and houses, all is burnt and left behind. ... The people, being without any means of livelihood, wander about and their dead are counted by the millions. Everything within two or three hundred li from the coast is left waste, creating a veritable noman's land.

Local leaders took advantage of all this turmoil to establish their own networks, territories, and spheres of influence. Xiedou, collective violence triggered by local feuding, was the result. The feuds, which came in time to characterize so much of southeastern China, occurred first among the lineages of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou and were a direct result of the twenty-year coastal evacuation policy. As the littoral was resettled, disputes among the inhabitants broke out over property boundaries and tideland rights, and later, during the Yongzheng reign (1725 — 35), turned into well-organized fights.

Xiedou outbreaks were first noted in Tongan county during the 1720's, with the report that, after having been preyed on by larger rivals, several small lineages banded together to form a "pseudo-lineage" for their mutual protection. Thereafter, "violence carried out between balanced groups in the absence of effective state control" produced cycles of bloody give-and-take among lineages that sometimes continued for generations and often involved ritual practices. Owing to the coastal inhabitants' need to defend themselves from pirates, weapons abounded, and armed struggle became pervasive — especially in the Quanzhou region, where the big lineages continually provoked the small ones.

Describing this process, the scholar Zhuang Jifa has written that, after mixing blood and wine and swearing their fidelity under Heaven and Earth, men of different surnames banded together and adopted "shi," the first character of the Chinese term for Buddha, or some other character as a common surname. This enabled them to form a major "lineage group" while at the same time sweeping away the kind of conflicts usually implied by different surnames.

Nearly everyone who has written about the Minnan-Yuedong region has mentioned feuds as one of the major problems of governance and commented on the proclivity of people from Zhangzhou and Quanzhou to become involved. As early as 1728, Gao Qizhuo, the governor-general of Fujian, complained, "The vilest custom in Fujian is that of large surname groups gathering together to xiedou," the worst examples being the two prefectures of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou, where "the great lineages [dazu] prey on one another constantly."

The situation was no better a century later, according to Xie Jinluan, a prominent literatus of the early nineteenth century:

In ... Tongan [county], Quanzhou [prefecture], and Zhangpu [county], Zhangzhou [prefecture], the lines of enmity have been drawn for many years. Grudges over murdered fathers and elder brothers are everywhere. ... There is not one feud-free county in Quanzhou or Zhangzhou, nor is there one feud-free year.

Xie Jinluan's contemporary Yao Ying observed that in Pinghe county (Zhangzhou) alone there were no fewer than 1,000 cases on record, most of which involved homicide committed during robbery, feuds, and abductions. He also pointed out that in Zhangzhou it was the custom to make clear distinctions between the large and small, and strong and weak lineages, in a region where the small and weak had been serving the large and strong for a long time. In short, the blood feuds of Zhangzhou were carried out by common-surname alliances scattered through several rural districts, which during times of crisis could be mobilized into large "assembled lineages" (huizu).

The xiedou activities of the early eighteenth century featured pitched battles in which combatants faced each other with iron-tipped carrying poles, "the most common lethal weapon then employed." But by the end of the century, modern firearms had come into wide use, escalating the scale of combat appreciably. The composition of the combatants had changed as well, with non-kin mercenaries or drifters increasingly hired to participate in lineage feuds. Many who participated in the feuding mechanism were men who had been pushed aside by the demographic and ecological changes. Some such as Zhang Biao and Xie Zhi, whose stories are told below, eventually joined the Tiandihui.

Xiedou techniques and patterns of organization spread outward from Zhangzhou as people were forced to migrate across the border to places like Chaozhou and Huizhou prefectures in Guangdong or to move from the Hokkien lowlands to the Hakka highlands of the Tingzhou (Fujian) and Jiaying (Guangdong) hinterlands. Nowhere did the practice catch on more strongly, however, than in Taiwan, with the important difference that, unlike the surname or lineage feuds of the continent, the feuds there were carried on by residents of a county or prefecture against "outsiders." The most famous of these "native place" or "subethnic" feuds pitted people from Zhangzhou against people from Quanzhou, and people from Fujian against people from Guangdong (or people from both Guangdong and Quanzhou against people from Zhangzhou). These patterns, which developed at the time of the Zhu Yigui rebellion (1721), often amounted to feuds between the Hokkien and the Hakka.

Local religious societies (shenminghui), organized for the support of local deities or ancestor worship, often financed these feuds and allowed their temples to be used as the headquarters for feud operations. According to Lamley, some of these societies, although ostensibly founded for the support of certain local deities, really provided a network of non-kin connections to frontier communities lacking extensive agnatic ties.

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Excerpted from The Origins of the Tiandihui by Dian H. Murray. Copyright © 1994 the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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