The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom

In imperial China, the civil service examinations were the great ladder of advancement. Hundreds of thousands of men studied the Confucian classics for years in the hope of passing, and only a tiny fraction succeeded. Hong Xiuquan, born in 1814 into a Hakka farming family near Guangzhou, was one of the many who failed, again and again. After his third failure in 1837 he fell seriously ill. In a fever he experienced visions: he was carried to heaven, cleansed, and met a venerable old man with a golden beard who gave him a sword to destroy demons, and a middle-aged man he called his elder brother.

For several years the visions remained unexplained. Then in 1843 Hong read a set of Christian pamphlets he had picked up years earlier in Guangzhou: Good Words to Admonish the Age, written by Liang Fa, one of the first Chinese Protestant converts. Hong concluded that the old man was God the Father, his elder brother was Jesus, and he himself was God’s second son, sent to rid China of demons. With his cousin and his friend Feng Yunshan he began to preach, smashing Confucian tablets and local idols.

Hong’s relationship with Chinese tradition was complicated. In later Taiping accounts of his heavenly journey, Confucius himself appears in heaven and is rebuked and punished for leading the Chinese astray with false teachings, before being allowed to remain there in a lesser place. Yet Hong never stopped thinking in Chinese terms. He drew on the classics’ memory of an ancient golden age, when, he argued, the Chinese had worshipped the one true God under the name Shangdi, before idolatry corrupted them. In his eyes the Christian message was not foreign but a restoration of China’s own lost faith. This blend of biblical monotheism, Confucian moral language and dreams of a just social order gave the movement its unusual power.

Feng carried the message into the hills of Guangxi, where poverty, banditry and tensions between Hakka settlers and local people were rife. There he built up the God Worshipping Society among miners, charcoal burners and poor farmers. In 1847 Hong spent some months with the American Baptist missionary Issachar Jacox Roberts in Guangzhou, studying the Bible, though Roberts did not baptise him. Meanwhile in Guangxi, members such as Yang Xiuqing began to fall into trances and speak as God the Father or Jesus, giving the movement new leaders with authority of their own.

By 1850 the God Worshippers were clashing with local militias and Qing troops. In January 1851, at the village of Jintian, they proclaimed the Taiping Tianguo, the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, with Hong as Heavenly King. Taiping armies moved north through Hunan, gathering recruits, and in March 1853 they captured Nanjing, the old southern capital, which they renamed Tianjing, the Heavenly Capital. Many of the Manchu inhabitants of the city were killed.

The kingdom mixed Christian and Chinese elements. Its people kept the Sabbath, recited the Ten Commandments and printed their own edition of the Bible, which Hong revised. They banned opium, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, foot binding and the buying of concubines, and at first men and women lived in separate camps, even married couples. A plan called the Heavenly Land System promised that land would be shared equally by families, an ideal with roots in Chinese classics as much as in the Bible, though it was never fully put into practice. The kingdom held its own examinations, based on Taiping scriptures rather than Confucian texts, and organised its government through an elaborate hierarchy of kings.

The leadership soon turned on itself. In 1856 Yang Xiuqing, the East King, who claimed to speak for God the Father, demanded greater titles. Hong allowed other commanders to kill him, and the purge that followed left thousands dead in Nanjing. Hong withdrew increasingly into his palace and his revelations. In 1859 his cousin Hong Rengan, who had worked with missionaries in Hong Kong, arrived and proposed modernising reforms, including railways and banks, but the kingdom was too divided to adopt them.

The Qing court, weakened by the Opium Wars, could not defeat the Taiping with its regular forces. Officials such as Zeng Guofan raised regional armies, above all the Hunan Army, which fought a long and brutal campaign up and down the Yangzi. Western powers were at first neutral and curious, and some missionaries visited Nanjing. After 1860, when the Taiping threatened Shanghai and its foreign trade, Western governments supported the Qing, and Western-officered units such as the Ever Victorious Army, led first by the American Frederick Townsend Ward and later by the British officer Charles Gordon, fought alongside Qing forces.

Hong Xiuquan died in Nanjing in June 1864, probably of illness. In July the Hunan Army breached the walls and massacred much of the remaining population. Taiping remnants fought on for some time elsewhere. Nobody counted the dead. Historians commonly give 20–30 million deaths from battle, massacre, famine and disease, some estimates run higher still, and whole regions of the lower Yangzi were depopulated for decades.

The Taiping left a contested legacy. For the Qing and for many Christian missionaries, they were dangerous heretics. Sun Yat-sen, who grew up in the same region a generation later, admired Hong as an early revolutionary against the Manchus, and in the twentieth century Chinese communist historians praised the Taiping as a peasant uprising. Today historians look more at the religious heart of the movement, the role of Hong’s visions, and the terrible human cost of the war. Scholars such as Jonathan Spence and Rudolf Wagner have argued that Hong’s faith must be taken seriously on its own terms, rather than dismissed as a cover for politics or social grievance. In Nanjing, a museum of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom tells the story in the gardens of a former princely residence.