The Military Chronicle of the Beautiful Marshal

This last week in Andalusada has been spent mostly in my most favorite of all places: Taiping China. This week in the rest of my life, however, has been spent mostly offline, with my nose increasingly in books. This post was inspired by a passage from one of those books:

Whether described by Teresa of the Castle or Teresa of the antimacassars, the slow, painful, clearly marked journey is the same.... But in this anthology none of these maps or manuals or "ways" will be found to be described. For the mystic who happesn to be a Protestant, although he is not more isolated than the Catholic... the fellow climbers are not roped. For the Catholic there are "recognitions" everywhere. But for Jakob Boehme the sixteenth-century shoemaker, or John Wesley the founder of Methodism, or George Fox the Quaker, or Emanuel Swedenborg, there was no benefit of clergy, no scaffolding to hang onto, few guidebooks, and little in history to help.

-Anne Fremantle, The Protestant Mystics, p. viii

Even though Protestantism plays out differently (Güntheritism does have some mystical background, for starters), I'm guessing that this is still true - and nowhere is it more true than in Taiping China, which develops Christianity in radically non-Western ways.

Since I've already introduced one book, and have nothing better to write about just now, I may as well introduce another. One with a name so awful that I'm only going to use it three times in this entire post.

Instead of the Military Chronicle of the Beautiful Marshal

One of my house rules about writing Chinese history (about which I have a lot to do, because there's stuff that's going on between the Song tyranny and the Heavenly Kingdom) is that foreign translations err on the side of awfulness. Take, for instance, the string of characters here rendered as The Military Chronicle of the Beautiful Marshal, and let's count the ways it's bad:

• 司馬麗 "the Beautiful Marshal" is actually a proper name, Sima Li. There's a case to be made for translating it that way, but it's still like rendering  孫子 "Grandchild Child" rather than "Sun Tzu."
• Why is it rendered the Military Chronicle of the Beautiful Marshal, rather than the Beautiful Marshal's Military Chronicle? Because Orientalism, that's why. The former title is wordier and Chinese "is" (or, because it often isn't, "ought to") more purple than Christian languages.

So that's my quota of using the long title. Hereafter, I'm going to render it as Sima Li's War Diary.

Structure of Sima Li's War Diary

The War Diary's closest equivalent IRL would be "The Pilgrim's Progress meets Kill Bill." Take a lot of Quentin Tarantino's favorite things - spaghetti wuxia, martial arts, pop culture references, and a strong female lead. (And feet) - and throw their purée into a religious allegory, and you'd come pretty close.

• Sima Li [tentatively; her name changes during the story, but I'm not sure what from] is a 13-year-old girl, the everyman protagonist of the story. Her story is, for the most part, a trek from her doomed home in the mountains (allegorically, but the geography maps to somewhere in the south, maybe Sichuan or Yunnan) to Tianjing, the Heavenly City.
• 14 illustrative plates: While they weren't included in the first printing, there are 14 engraved illustrations that are inseparably linked to the work as a whole.
• Foot fetishism: You know how Christian has his "heavy burden"? Sima Li has feet, Golden Lotus feet, and the author focuses on them a lot. (Her feet are a metaphor for her soul; it's the only subtle metaphor in the book, made less so because everybody knows it.)
  
  The illustrative plates take it even further. Plate II (showing and discussing Sima Li slowly setting forth) is drawn from a very low angle, split evenly between Sima Li's lotus shoes in the foreground and her doomed village behind her, and captioned to emphasize her swaying walk; in historic context it's almost pornographic. It makes the contrast with Plate VII (Sima struggling to recover from one or another swamp of allegory) all the stronger: she's unshod and missing a few toes (a detail the text doesn't mention), a testament to the damaging power of sin.
• Atop Salvation Mountain, Sima Li is hit by lightning. Badly shaken, her companions [who?] lay hands on her, whereby her broken feet are miraculously healed. (Presumably the lightning burns are healed too, but the War Diary doesn't talk about it.)

The biggest difference isn't in tone, or structure, or cultural content: it's that Sima Li's War Diary is nonfiction.

Sima Li's War Diary and historiography

Sima Li may not have written the War Diary, but she certainly existed. She did run away from home at the age of 13, lily feet and all. (The lightning atop Salvation Mountain is fictional, but the faith healing may not be. Faith healing of lotus feet was widely reported in many Taiping territories.) The War Diary's battles correspond to real ones. The longer chapters, in particular, corroborate and confirm details cited by other sources, including sources a Chinese author wouldn't be familiar with (like London Times foreign correspondants.) One chapter is detailed enough that historians use other sources to corroborate it.

So the question is: was the War Diary a metaphor, or was it actually how the author experienced the Taiping wars?

This post is a work in progress. It will be expanded upon.