By the 19th century, the society operated a wide range of criminal enterprises in several continents. But esoteric rituals were never forgotten.
by Massimo Introvigne
Article 3 of 6. Read article 1 and article 2.
In the previous article of this series, I mentioned the “discovery” by the Qing authorities of the most famous secret society, the Tiandihui, in late 18th-century Taiwan.
Gradually, the Qing imperial officers found a story of the origins of the Tiandihui that finally persuaded them that it was indeed a political plot. This story dates back to the end of the “native Chinese” Ming dynasty (1644) and its replacement by the “foreign” (Manchu) Qing dynasty. An imperial concubine named Li was said to have had a son she had given birth to in a temple in Gaoqi, Fujian, the supposed place of origin of the Tiandihui. Li means “Peach,” a sacred fruit in many Chinese traditions. Her son was named Xiao Zhu. The name means “Young Lord,” but Zhu was also the surname of the Ming emperors.
The five founders of the Tiandihui were said to have been at the same time monks from the Shaolin monastery and the sons of the “Young Lord” Zhu. The Shaolin monks had helped the Qing, or so the story went, but had later been betrayed by them. The five ancestors of Tiandihui had to flee Shaolin.
In the early 19th century, the imperial police discovered rituals in which Ming symbols often appeared, with the motto “fan Qing fu Ming” (“overthrow the Qing, restore the Ming”), and the password “muli doushi zhi tianxia.” The latter can be interpreted in a variety of ways but may well mean “the Zhu [i.e., the Ming] will rule over everything under Heaven.”
The authorities then sought to identify specific places and physical persons confirming this subversive story. They might not have realized that in the original Tiandihui myth these references were primarily symbolic.
The Tiandihui ritual became known in the 19th century, mainly thanks to English and Dutch police officers in Singapore and Indonesia, but is probably of older origins. Its essential elements are the reminder of the original myth, the blood oath, the initiation with the communication of passwords and signs, the reminder of the punishments that await traitors, and references to a “place of shelter,” the “City of Willows,” of which the initiate was shown a map.
In several versions of the ceremony, the initiate was also given a “certificate,” which had a magical role as it was supposed to protect its possessor. This certificate was important because it was connected with two elements that would play an increasingly significant role in the Tiandihui: protection and dubious economic activities. The person who supposedly introduced the society to Taiwan, Yan Yan, was said to have already promised the first members that it would be enough to show the certificate to the bandits who were so widespread in the island to escape from them. The Tiandihui was also accused of selling certificates to illiterate peasants for exorbitant figures.
It was only a short step from there to full-blown criminal activities. A process of deviance amplification may partly explain these developments. It was because the imperial authority was cracking down even on more or less harmless branches of the Tiandihui that they went underground, and increasingly engaged in criminal activities.
In Singapore, the English authorities governed the Chinese community for a long time through secret societies. It was only when they found that their power had become excessive (as “an empire within an empire”) that they banned the societies, in theory in 1869 with the Dangerous Societies Suppression Ordinance, which remained largely on paper, and in practice from 1890. Before these statutes, the British had tolerated the private management of prostitution and gambling, and even racketeering activities, by the Tiandihui for several decades. Long before the Qing crackdown, the Tiandihui was also engaged in criminal activities in Taiwan and Mainland China.
From the end of the 19th century onwards, Tiandihui’s activities had been declared illegal almost everywhere in the world. Nevertheless, they continued to grow wherever there was a Chinese emigration, particularly one coming from Southeast China, including in the United States.
The Tiandihui came to be known as “the Triads,” a name whose origin is controversial, but which probably refers to the union of Earth, Heaven, and Humanity. Together with other Chinese “secret societies,” they dealt mainly with prostitution, racketeering, gambling, and illegal drugs. Rituals remained important, however, especially in Southeast Asia, at least until the 1950s. Traces of the rituals can be found even today, when secret societies are showing up as a criminal problem in new areas of Chinese immigration, including in Italy, where the courts have applied laws designed against the mafia to the “Triads.”
One problem remains. Why did many thousands of Chinese risk the fierce repression of the authorities to be initiated into the Tiandihui, when, after all, they could have become members of other fraternal (and even criminal) societies that at first sight guaranteed similar advantages, without automatically exposing themselves to the capital punishment reserved for members of “secret societies” considered anti-Qing? And can this question explain how and why the Tiandihui became, from its origins, a major international criminal society? But what exactly was the Tiandihui “in the beginning”?
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
