Mysterious Communication: The Secret Language of the Gowned Brotherhood in Nineteenth-Century Sichuan

Abstract

To study lower-class and marginalized people, we always have to face the issue of how to find their voices. The study of Chinese secret societies has depended heavily on archival sources, especially reports by local officials—from governors to magistrates—and on prisoners’ confessions under torture. In such sources the voices of secret society members are inevitably distorted. In this article, I propose to explore the words found in secret society sources, especially The Bottom of the Ocean (Haidi)—the canon of the Gowned Brotherhood, a text filled with examples of the Brothers’ secret language (their argot and signs). By looking at their specialized language, I will look for echoes of their political thought, identity, and behaviors, particularly in the late nineteenth century, when the organization both faced government pressure and attacks and also experienced unprecedented expansion. The Bottom of the Ocean was a history of the Brotherhood written in their own words, and perhaps even their own voices. It thus, to a certain extent, can be understood as a “hidden transcript,” a term used by James Scott, to refer to a text showing a kind of “subordinate group politics,” or “the small voice of history,” a term used by Ranajit Guha, as he committed himself to writing the history of the subaltern. By interpreting the “hidden transcript” or the “small voice,” we can find “the