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Like many other criminal syndicates, the Triads started out as a underground movement, set to overthrow the oppressors of their homeland. For the Mafia, the enemies were the French invaders, while for the Traids, they were the Manchurian rulers. Manchuria, then a country not yet part of China, had invaded and taken the capital, Beijing in 1674, overthrowing the Ming emperor and instating their own rulership. That was the start of the Ch'ing dynasty. The Chinese resented the Manchurians whose standard of living was a lot higher than that of most Chinese. When this resentment turned into rebellion in the Fukien province, the second Manchurian emperor Kiang Hsi, recruited an order of buddhist fighting monks from the Siu Lam Monestary (also known as the Shaolin) to break the rebellion.
In gratitude he offered the monestary some imperial power, which they used to help the Fukien people. Soon, the emperor began to distrust the monks so he ordered his army to to convince the monks to give up their "rebellious ways." When the monks refused their monestary was burned down to the ground. 108 monks died in the fire, while 5 survived. Those five went on to establish five monestaries, and five secret societs dedicated to overthrow the Ch'ing dynasty. The monks went on to have a number of adventures, part mythical, part truthful, but they are forever remembered as the "Five Ancestors" of the modern day Traids.
The symbol to represent the five societies was a triangle encasing the Chinese character Hung, which is the family name of the former Ming emperor. The three sides of the triangle stands for the unity between the heaven, the earth and man, embodied in the character Hung in the middle. The sacred trinity. The Hung family colour was red, a colour commonly associated with luck and prosperity. This is why the Triads are often refered to as the Hung Mun - Mun being the chinese word for red - the "Heaven and Earth Society," or the "Hung Society."
Because of their rebellious and treasonous nature, the many different underground groups, operating with a common goal, but virtually autonomous from one another, without a central authority, began developing secret languages, and ways of communication, as well as elaborate initiation rites, to impress upon new members the need for absolute loyalty and secrecy.
The five societies played roles in several rebellions against the Manchurian rulers:
In 1796 the White Lotus Society rebellion broke out among impoverished settlers in the mountainous region that separates Szechuan province from Hubei and Shansi provinces. It apparently began as a tax protest led by the White Lotus Society, a secret society that advocated restoration of the native Chinese Ming dynasty, and promised personal salvation to its followers. The rebellion was finally crushed in 1804.
Between 1847 and 1850 there was Cudgels uprising in Kwangsi province, followed by the Hung Hsiu Chuan rebellion - also called the Taiping Rebellion - based out of the same province between 1851 and 1865. The rebellion was by far the bloodiest war of the nineteenth century. The revolt was a radical political and religious uprising, that ravaged 17 Chinese provinces and cost 20 million lives. The rebels rose against the tyranny of the Manchus, advocating a program partly based on Christian doctrines. Among their aims were public ownership of land and the establishment of a self-reliant economy. Their slogans - to share property in common - attracted many famine-stricken peasants, and the Taiping ranks swelled to more than one million soldiers.
Under the leadership of Hung Hsiu Chuan, a religious zealot, who thought he was the brother of Christ and the son of God, they captured Nanking and made it their capital. Hung founded the "Great Peaceful Heavenly Dynasty" in 1851. After a few years the leaders began to quarrel among themselves, the reforms were not completed and their opponents, supported by the Western powers, defeated the Taiping in 1864.
The Manchu government was so weakened by the rebellion that it never again was able to effectively rule China and in 1896 the Boxer Rebellion, starting in Beijing, involving the White Lotus Society, the Red Swords and the Red Fists, together with branches of the Hsing Chung Triad assisting Sun Yat Sen - the founder of Republican China - and other revolutionaries carried out armed insurrection against the Ch'ing dynasty in the decade before the republican revolution of 1911. Meanwhile, the Western powers and Japan virtually raped China, enforcing opium drug sales by war, stealing gold and heritage antiques, and demanding huge recompensation for any affront.
The Manchus were overthrown in 1911, but there were no Mings left to restore. The Triad societies no longer had a dedicated cause, and many of them broke up and disbanded, but others realigned their goals and started excercising more and more of their considerable power in other arenas. Some of the associations and societies turned into trading corporations while others turned into early forms of labour unions. Some groups offered their considerable martial potential to the new rulers, and still others turned to organised crime, using their underground connections and power to entrench themselves in every day living; a group whom you could join and rely upon for assistance and protection. At first these groups were strictly for the people, by the people. But the more powerful they became, the more removed they became from the people they set out to foster and protect, until one day, people didn't join the societies out of respect, but out of fear.
And so the Triads were born.
With the isolationist sentiment growing stronger as a result of foreign influence in the Ch'ing rule, most Triads decided to move their base of operations to the free Hong Kong exclave right before the communists took over and kicked Chang Kai Chek, a former Triad member, and his Nationalist Party across the harbour and into Taiwan. The Triads had movability in Hong Kong, easy access to the mainland as well as other countries, and they started to spread their influences across most of South-East Asia, and beyond.
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