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Ko Lao Hui - Society of the Elder Brethren

The Ko Lao Hui, the Society of the Elder Brethren, drew its strength from, and made its appeal to, the peasant, to the artisan, and to the common soldier. Its members were mostly illiterate, even its leaders had little education. Its historical appeal, its propaganda, its unifying force, were all on different lines from those of the Ke Ming Tang. Only in objective did they meet, and in that objective only on the one point, that of the "Hsing Han mie Ch'i " or "Fu Han mie Man," the restoration of the Han (Chinese), and the destruction of the Bannermen, or Manchu.

For many years a secret society known as the Ko Lao Hui had been known to exist, and, althongh little appeared to be known of its. organization and aim, it was undoubtedly inimical to the foreign reigning Manchu dynasty. In consequence of the members using their secret power for evil purposes, the government interdicted it under heavy penalties.

The Ko Lao Hui, working from its experience of human affairs and human nature, made no bones about declaring that while brotherhood is possible, equality is not. Twins are the exception, the elder and correlative younger brother the rule. Liberty is to be attained by the proper adjustment of responsibility and privilege within this relationship; abstract liberty of the individual would seem to the Ko Lao Hui as useless as it is unattainable. Liberty to carry out his filial, fraternal, and marital obligations loyally, to play his part faithfully in the commune, this he desires. But a liberty "to live his own life," would be to him no attraction, the man who desired it something less than sane.

This society quite early in its existence was divided into an eastern and a western branch. Thus in works of reference the home of the society is sometimes given as the Central provinces. But the real stronghold has been in the west; Szuchuen, Kansu, and Shensi. The western branch flourished. Soon it was necessary for a member of the eastern branch to address one of the western as "grandfather," or at least as "uncle," to mark the superiority. Scattered as it is throughout. the country, it is, however, only formidable in the north-west and west.

Members are enrolled in one of the eight guilds. The guild of filial piety, fraternal subordination, sincerity, faithfulness, ceremonial observance, rectitude, frugality, and sense-of-shame; virtues so glibly run over by the Chinese tongue, which occur sine termino in the classics. The members of the Hsiao, or filial piety, guild are all, ipso facto, Ta Ko (elder brethren). Of the other guilds, those of "sincerity" and "rectitude" are the most popular.

The society has its own regalia, symbols, secret signs. All the machinery of this Chinese freemasonry is highly developed; ceremonies of initiation, of further initiation into higher grades, ornaments of ritual, signs for mutual recognition, and so on. The intellectuals of the Ke Ming Tang found it easier to dismiss all this with a sneer, as being but mummery, before they were rudely awakened to a realization of the immense membership, the effective organization, the staunch loyalty the society contained. For the illiterate, slow-moving, heavy-burdened peasantry of the north-west, the Ke Ming Tang was too cold, too abstract, too intellectual. But the colour, the warmth, the sense of the dramatic which it failed to give, had been for centuries supplied by the Ko Lao Hui, and the former party found that the nearest approach to an informed political enthusiasm in the province, which might with care be used as a friendly ally, which might be easily converted into an antagonism, but which in no case could be ignored, was this same Ko Lao Hui.

The Ko Lao Hui claims to be centuries old; its present incarnation, however, began with the fall of the last Chinese dynasty, the Ming. "When the Ming ended and the Ta Ch'ing began" (Ming wu, Ch'ing chu) is often given as the date of the society's birth. Its old home was in Szuchuen, whence via Hanchungfu it came across the Ts'ing Ling mountains into Shensi and Kansu. The society has been active all through the Manchu dynasty which it indifferently terms Man (Manchu) or Yang (foreign).

In 1886, three tickets of membership in this society were found on a maU arrested in Shanghai, for attempting to extort money from shopkeepers, Mr. Playfair, the English Consul in Shanghai, who sat as an Assessor at the trial, obtained one of the tickets; and gave a facsimile of the face of it, with a translation of the characters our it, in the China Review for September-October of that year. The ticket, like those of the Triad Society, was of cloth; but in other respects there does not seem to be any rescmblancc between the tickets of the two societies.

In 1891 this society became notorious in consequence of the part its members were supposed to have taken in the outhreaks, especially those against foreign; missionaries, in the Yang-tsze vaHey. Some alarm was created, too, by the strange conduct of Mr. Mason, an employee in the Chinese Customs' service at Chinkiang, who was detected in an attempt to smuggle a large quantity of arms and ammunition, and some dynamite that he purchased in Hongkong, into Chinkiang. He also engaged half a dozen foreigners, to act as leaders of the Chinese iil his insane insurrectionary scheme. When the discovery was mode, he was at once suspected by some, especially the Chinese officials, of being a member of the dreaded Ko Lao Society and of plauning to overthrow the dynasty; and he appears by his subsequent behaviour to have desired to be looked on in that light. But, if he really held the wild notions imputed to him, he appears to have acted in the best way possible to frustrate any revolutionary movements of himself or his associates.

For his pari in the brilliantly conceived scheme he was tried in Shanghai, and sentenced to nine months' imprisonment and banishment from there and the other foreign settlements in China. The worst of the affair was that his servants, and other Chinese connected in their labours with him, were suspected of being members of the organization and tortured again and again in the most barbarous mauner to try and compel them to divulge the names of their supposed confederates. While under torture, these men made statements incriminating a wealthy Chinese gentleman named Li Hung, also known as Li Hsien-man, which subsequent information and event tended to confirm.

At this period the Head Centerof the society was one Kuang Shih-uiing, but Li Hung was, in consequence of his opulence, scarcely less powerful than his chief. Moreover he had a real wrong to avenge. His father, Li Ch'ang-shou, was at one time a prince under the Taiping emperor, but before the final overthrow of him who had exalted him, he deserted and turned his arms against his former comrades. For the good work he did in the Tsing canse he was rewarded and the name of the Perfectly Faithful was conferred on him. Hut he must still have been looked on as dangerous in some way, for some reason or other, he was executed, in Anhui. It was to obtain revenge for his father's ignominious death that Li Hung joined the society ; and, if the information obtained by the Chinese officials was correct, it was he who supplied Mason with funds to purchase arms. He was said to have conveyed sixty thousand taels of silver from his home in Anhui to Chinkiang for that purpose, and to have delivered half of the amount to Mason.

Li Hung was captured by the anthorities in 1892, and in 1893, while still detained in prison he committed suicide, and his wife, concubine, and a slave girl followed his example and put an end to their lives at the same time. Subsequently Ku'ang Shih-ming, who had also been captured, was executed and his head and the head of Li Hung were exhibited to the public gase. A few days later an Rider of the society, an ex-Captain in the army, named Wan Sung-ting, and five or six others counected with the society, and with tbe Mason fiasco, were executed.

Soon after the Mason affair, there was a strong ill feeling shown towards foreigners in the Yang-tse Valley, which led up to murders and other outrages being perpetrated upon them. Those responsible for these outrages and destruction of foreign property, which were connived at, if not prompted by Chinese officials and scholars, have found it very convenient to attribute all the mischief done, by incited mobs to the Ko Lao Society hogey, which, they say, seeks to involve China in a war with foreigners, in order thai it may work out its own rebellious schemes.

In 1892, four Ko Lao Society members were captured in the Liling Hsien, on the borders of Kiangsi and Hunan provinces. Two were put to death and the others imprisoned to await trial. On this, about a thousand members of the society rose, liberated their companinns and bore them away. They were chased by the local militia and several encounters with loss of life, in some of which the rebels were victorious, took piace. The members finding themselves in actual rebellion and not having any notion of republicanism, set up a king and princes and made a stand in ihe mountains, from which they made occasional incursions into neighboring towns.

By the year 1900 AD it had become an instrument for the ambition and an opening for the predatory instincts of the turbulent classes. In the north of Shensi it was indistinguishable from bandit hordes. In the early days of the Revolution all excesses, all outrage, were accounted for by the fact that the Ko Lao Hui were in the ascendant. The terms " Ko Lao Hui " and "t'u fei " (local villains) were regarded as interchangeable. But such a view will not cover all the facts; the course of the Chinese Revolution in the north-west remains confused on such a reading.

In any previous outbreak against foreigners the Ko Lao Hui has been willing to do its share. Whatever might have been the case with a few leaders, to the majority of the members there would have been little difficulty in 1911 in classing foreigners with Manchus, as an evil to be swept from the land. The revolution of thought, which had occurred in the coast provinces in this respect, had left the north-west almost untouched. The embarrassment of the Manchu Government gave impetus to the society in Sianfu. So strong was its membership, so good its organization, so leagued up with the banditti of the hills, that shopkeepers were reluctantly forced to join it as an insurance against looting should an outbreak occur.