A failed exam, the self-proclaimed brother of Jesus Christ, a fourteen-year-long war that led to the deaths of tens of millions. While most people in the West might have never heard about it, the Taiping Rebellion was one of the bloodiest wars ever, and a pivotal event in the history of China. Between 1850 and 1864, the Qing Empire fought a devastating civil war against the rebel armies of the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, commonly known as Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, while also having to deal with various other rebellions around China and foreign interference.
During these troubled times, the Taiping Rebellion alone caused an estimated twenty to thirty million deaths, but it has been suggested that the death toll might be up to fifty million or even more, which makes it the second-bloodiest war in history, surpassed only by World War II. The driving force behind such destruction was a religious movement called God Worshipping Society, and its leader, a man who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ, Hong Xiuquan.
Hong Xiuquan
Hong Xiuquan was born as Hong Huoxiu in 1814, in a town near Guangzhou (then known as Canton), in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. He was the youngest son of a Hakka family, a Han subgroup and ethnic minority of Southern China, and from an early age he was an exemplary student. With the financial aid of his entire village, Hong received a formal education in order to undertake the imperial examinations that allowed admission in civil service. This was often the only way to escape a life of poverty and the test was brutally competitive, with a pass rate of less than one percent.
He failed his first attempt in 1827 and worked as a farmer and a teacher, but tried again a few years later, in 1836. During his stay in Guangzhou for this second exam, Hong met Edwin Stevens, an American Protestant missionary, who gave him a publication written by Chinese Protestant minister Liang Fa entitled “Good Words to Admonish the Age”. Hong didn’t think much of the book and failed the exam again.
A year later, Hong once again tried the imperial exams, failing for a third time. This disappointment caused Hong to have a nervous collapse which lasted for forty days, during which he had various visions. In these visions, he saw his “celestial father”, a long-bearded old man who gave him the mission of freeing the world from demons, with the help of his celestial older brother and a heavenly army. This figure also suggested that he should change his name to “Hong Xiuquan”, a moniker he later adopted.
After recovering from his breakdown, Hong was allegedly stronger and healthier than ever, and worked as a teacher for years before attempting, and failing for a fourth time, the imperial examinations in 1843. Only then, Hong read the book written by Liang Fa that he received years earlier, and identified the celestial figure from his visions with God, and his heavenly older brother with Jesus Christ. He also believed that the Bible was written specifically for him, and that the great evil he had to eradicate was the Qing dynasty, a Manchu clan that ruled the Chinese Empire and was seen as foreign by the majority Han population.
Hong started preaching about his visions and new beliefs, gathering a small following, and destroying Buddhist and Confucian statues and books in his village and surrounding ones, but was despised by most citizens to the point he had to leave his native county. Hong and some of his followers traveled west to the Guangxi Province where, in 1844, relative of Hong and early convert Feng Yunshan founded a religious movement called “God Worshipping Society”. After a few months, Hong returned to his home village, while Feng remained in Guangxi, where he kept spreading the new faith and gathering devotees.
Alleged illustration of Hong Xiuquan published in 1854. The identity of the person depicted in this print is actually disputed, it could be another Taiping leader.
From cult to army
When Hong returned to Guangxi in 1847, he found out that over 2,000 people had joined the cult and became the official head of the movement. In just the span of a few years, the seemingly absurd ideas of Hong Xiuquan had evolved into a true religion, a syncretism of Protestant Christianity and the ancient Chinese folk religion. His wrath against the “demons” of the Qing dynasty resonated with the commoners who were affected by constant famines, natural disasters, and poverty, especially among Hakkas. The Chinese Empire was also suffering from foreign interventions, and the humiliating defeat at the hands of the British in the First Opium War (1839-1842) left the Qing weakened and affected by an increasing rate of opium addiction.
Hong capitalized on the hatred against the Qing by including social policies into his ideology. He wanted to ban opium, prostitution, and gambling, he was in favor of gender equality, but against physical contacts between men and women, even if married, and called for a redistribution of land and common ownership of goods. Around this time, Hong also worked on his own Chinese translation of the Bible, altering some passages to fit his teachings, and putting much more emphasis on the Old Testament and the wrath of God rather than the forgiveness that is more common in the New Testament. Two new leaders of the religion also emerged, Yang Xiuqing and Xiao Chaogui. These two claimed that God and Jesus Christ, respectively, could speak through them, and their ability was confirmed by Hong himself.
Meanwhile, the growing cult faced an increasing opposition from local authorities and multiple conflicts against bandits and non-Hakka villagers. In 1850, when the movement counted between 10,000 and 30,000 members, Feng Yunshan called for a revolt against the local government and, together with Hong, organized their men into an army. At the time, the Qing army was in Guangxi to suppress a rebellion by another religious sect, the Tiandihui (Heaven and Earth Society), and tried to also wipe out the God Worshipping Society, but the cult survived the initial skermishes in late 1850. On January 11, 1851, Hong Xiuquan proclaimed the foundation of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, with himself as Heavenly King, and led an uprising in Jintian, ultimately routing the imperial army with the help of the Tiandihui rebels after weeks of fighting. These clashes since late 1850 marked the start of the Taiping Rebellion.
The height of the Taipings
Starting in September 1851, the Taiping army marched north, capturing various towns and moving toward the Hunan Province. Meanwhile, they were absorbing into their ranks more and more people, mostly affected by the economic struggles of the empire, or whoever shared their hatred towards the reigning Qing dynasty. The army was reorganized with five “Kings” serving as commanders under Hong Xiuquan: South King Feng Yunshan, East King Yang Xiuqing, West King Xiao Chaogui, North King Wei Changhui and Flank King Shi Dakai. The first three have been already introduced, while the last two were members of the God Worshipping Society since its early days in Guangxi.
However, two of the kings died in battle soon afterwards. Feng was wounded while marching in Guangxi near the town of Quanzhou and, as a retaliation, the Taipings destroyed the city and slaughtered most of its population, but the South King eventually perished in June 1852. Xiao was killed three months later while leading his army during the siege of Changsha, the capital of Hunan, and the Taipings abandoned the offensive soon afterwards.
Despite these setbacks and some heavy losses, the army kept marching north slaughtering their opponents, ultimately reaching Wuchang, part of modern day Wuhan, in the Hebei Province. The city was captured in January 1853 and the Taipings, now numbering in the hundreds of thousands, headed east. They first captured Anqing and then moved towards Nanjing, the historic capital of China and one of the most important cities in the empire. An army of well over 500,000 men attacked the city, which fell in March 1853. The Taiping army proceeded to murder tens of thousands of Manchus that lived in Nanjing.
Hong Xiuquan elected Nanjing as the capital of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, renaming the city Tianjing (Heavenly Capital), and settled down there. He commissioned the building of a new luxurious “Palace of the Heavenly King” and lived a lavish life, ruling through written decrees. With now a large territory under his rule, Hong started implementing his reforms. He banned alcohol, opium, tobacco, gambling, foot binding, polygamy, prostitution, and slavery, often ordering the death penalty as a punishment. Private property and social classes were abolished and all land was redistributed. Men and women were declared equal, while establishing a strict separation between the sexes. He also mandated the study of the Bible, issued coins and banknotes, and introduced a new calendar.
Shortly after the capture of Nanjing, the Taiping army lauched two offensives aimed at taking total control of China. The Northern Expedition crossed the Yellow River and pointed toward the Qing capital Beijing, receiving the help of the Nian rebels who were fighting the government in the area. The Nian rebels wanted to “kill the rich and aid the poor”, but were mostly disorganized and without clear goals, and became loosely allied with the Taipings.
Despite heavy losses, the offensive reached the Beijing area and the Qing started evacuating the city, but instead of attacking the capital, the rebel army marched toward Tianjin. However, the Taipings were struggling in the harsh winter of Northern China and, by February 1854, they had to retreat. This setback, and the delay in attacking Beijing, gave the Qing time to regroup, and the Taiping offensive was ultimately defeated in May 1855.
The Western Expedition had more success, capturing a number of cities, but failed to completely conquer Western China, and the Taiping armies returned to Nanjing in 1856. That year, the rebels successfully defended Nanjing against a Qing siege of the city.
Map of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom inside the Qing Empire. In light orange the areas occupied at some point during the war. The darker shades, surrounded by a dotted line, denote the territories where the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was firmly established. In dark orange the territories of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom toward the end of the war (M.Bitton, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0).
Internal struggles
Meanwhile, after the deaths of Feng Yunshan and Xiao Chaogui, East King Yang Xiuqing gained more power and sometimes challenged the rule of Hong Xiuquan. Yang’s claim, confirmed by Hong, that God could speak through him, gave the East King so much influence that he became the de facto leader of the Heavenly Kingdom. After the victory in the siege of Nanjing, Yang sent the three main generals of the army, Wei Changhui, Shi Dakai and Qin Rigang, to different provinces and while “speaking as God” claimed to be at the same level as Hong. The Heavenly King saw this as an attempt at taking his throne and recalled the three generals. Wei and Qin soon arrived and, after consulting with Hong, they decided not to wait for Shi. On September 2, 1856 their armies attacked Yang’s palace, murdering the East King, his family, and thousands of his followers.
A month later, Shi arrived in the Taiping capital and was disgusted by the massacre, blaming it on Wei. Shi was forced to leave and his family was killed by Wei’s troops. Meanwhile, Wei plotted to imprison Hong and take power, but the Heavenly King ordered his execution, and also had Qin killed shortly afterwards. These bloody events became known as the Tianjing Incident. After fighting the Qing and amassing a large military force, Shi returned to Nanjing that November, as requested by Hong, and was put in command of the entire army. Thanks to his victories, modest personality and more moderate ideas, Shi was very popular among the public and Hong soon grew suspicious of him. The Heavenly King eventually handed more power to his two brothers and completely retreated to his palace. In order to avoid another internal conflict, Shi voluntarily left the capital with thousands of his supporters in 1857.
While the Taipings were dealing with their internal struggles, the Qing dynasty was busy fighting more insurgences all over China, such as the Nian in the north, the Tiandihui-inspired Small Swords Society in the south-east, the Red Turban Rebellion in Guangdong, the revolt of the Miao people in the south-west, and the Panthay Rebellion of the Muslim Hui in Yunnan. All these revolts started in the 1850s and took advantage of the Taiping offensive that was already giving so much trouble to the Qing. Meanwhile, the Western powers were worried that the fall of the Qing would mean the end of their trade privileges in China, and reluctantly supported the ruling dynasty, while also trying to renegotiate the treaties signed just a few years earlier. Between 1856 and 1860, the Qing faced Great Britain and France in the Second Opium War, with the Europeans ultimately winning.
The westerners were also initially curious about this Christian-inspired cult that was taking over China, and the Heavenly Kingdom sought to gain an alliance with Western countries on the base of their common religious roots and opposition to the Qing. However, the violent ways of the Taipings and their peculiar beliefs disgusted European and American diplomats. Even Karl Marx, with whom Hong shared his ideas of classless society, was so outraged by the violence that he expressed his disapproval of the rebellion in a 1862 article.
The decline of the Heavenly Kingdom
The Taiping army kept fighting the Qing across China and, in the Heavenly Kingdom, Hong Xiuquan’s cousin Hong Rengan became a central figure and proposed a series of reforms aimed at centralizing and modernizing the administration. He promoted the construction of railways and the establishment of a postal service, but these were never implemented. Hong Rengan also wanted to expand the kingdom and launched a campaign to capture the eastern coast of China. The Taiping army conquered a number of cities, including Ningbo, one of the ports open to foreign trade, in December 1861. After six months of occupation, British and French forces retook the city for the Qing Empire, in order to defend their economic interests.
Foreign intervention was instrumental again in the following clashes. The British had already helped the Qing army in the siege of Anqing, which left the city so starved that the population resorted to cannibalism, and the Taipings ended up losing their stronghold in Central China. When the Taiping army attacked Shanghai in 1861, after already failing to take the city the previous year, the combined British, French, and Qing army ultimately defeated the rebels after more than a year of fierce fighting. During this time, a small force called “Ever Victorious Army” stood out among the Qing ranks. It was made up of Chinese soldiers and European mercenaries, with Western commanders, equipment, and training, and fought Taiping and Nian rebels in the decisive battles of the war.
Illustration of the Battle of Anqing, in which the Qing forces sieged the Taiping-occupied city between 1860 and 1861. The siege ended with a Qing victory.
In the final years of the Taiping Rebellion, the fighting between the Qing forces and the rebels was ferocious. Entire towns were burned, countless people were massacred without mercy, crops were destroyed, and severe famines and plagues hit the war-torn regions. In June 1863, Shi Dakai was surrounded by Qing forces in Sichuan. The general negotiated to turn himself in if the lives of his men were spared, and was then executed. On the eastern front, the Qing army advanced with the help of British and French troops, reaching Nanjing in early 1864. The Taiping generals wanted to retreat and regroup, but Hong Xiuquan refused, affirming that God would defend their capital. Nevertheless, over 200,000 Taiping rebels left the city and surrendered to the Qing.
Under siege, Nanjing run out of food supplies and Hong told his followers to eat the manna that God provided them. However, the people of Nanjing could only find grass and inedible berries, and the Heavenly King himself resorted to eating weeds he took from the gardens in his palace. Maybe because of the weeds he ate, or maybe committing suicide by poison, Hong Xiuquan died on June 1, 1864. His teenage son Hong Tianguifu succeded him as Heavenly King but, at fourteen years old, the Taiping commanders thought of him as too inexperienced to lead the rebellion. Less than two months after Hong Xiuquan’s death, the Qing army entered Nanjing, looting, burning, and destroying it, ruthlessly killing thousands. The body of the former Heavenly King was exhumed, beheaded, cremated, and his ashes were shot out of a cannon to deny him a final resting place.
Hong Tianguifu managed to escape from the city with Hong Rengan and some of his generals, but they were all captured in the following months. The young Heavenly King was executed in November 1864, a few days before his fifteenth birthday. The Taiping Rebellion was defeated, but pockets of resistance kept fighting the Qing in the mountains of Southern China, with the last rebel armies vanquished only in 1871. The other revolts that ravaged the Qing Empire were also wiped out around the same time.
Aftermath and legacy
The Taiping Rebellion brought an immense amount of destruction throughout China. The estimated casualties of the war range between twenty and thirty million people, with some suggesting over fifty million deaths. Both sides tried for years to damage their opponents by destroying fields and agricultural lands, causing famines and plagues that killed millions. No prisoners were taken, the Taipings mass murdered the Manchus who lived in the areas they controlled, while the Qing did the same to ethnic Hakkas even after the war, with hundreds of towns and villages completely wiped out.
The Hakkas were blamed for the war and also for the Red Turban Rebellion in Southern China, and a long conflict with another ethnic group, the Punti, led to the deaths of up to one million people. The Taipings destroyed countless Buddhist and Confucian temples, burning books and dismantling statues, especially in and around Nanjing, causing an immense loss of cultural and artistic works. One of the structures destroyed during the Taiping occupation of Nanjing was the Ming-era Porcelain Tower, a large pagoda considered at the time one of the wonders of the world. The rebellion also brought a permanent stain on the image of Christianity in China.
The Qing Empire survived this close call and suppressed many more rebellions, but suffered from the unequal treaties imposed by Western powers and Japan. The rulers tried to save their empire with a series of reforms, including the abolishment of the imperial examinations in 1905. Another series of uprisings led to the end of the Qing dynasty and imperial China, and to the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912, founded by Sun Yat-sen and later ruled by his Nationalist Party (Kuomintang). However, the instability lasted for many more decades, leading to the civil war that ultimately saw the Communists triumph in Mainland China in 1949, while the Nationalists fled to the island of Taiwan.
The Taiping ideals inspired both the Communists and the Nationalists, who viewed the rebels as heroes who fought the corrupt Qing dynasty. Mao Zedong praised the rebellion as a peasant, proto-communist, uprising, while Sun Yat-sen was himself a Hakka and admired Hong Xiuquan since childhood. Since 1959, a reconstruction of Hong Xiuquan’s residence in his home town near Guangzhou serves as a small memorial and museum of the Heavenly King and the Taiping Rebellion.
Throne of Hong Xiuquan inside his former palace in Nanjing, which was later used as Presidential Palace by the Republic of China and now hosts the China Modern History Museum (KongFu Wang, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0).
