THE TAIPING REBELLION

DATE OF HAPPENING: 1850-1871

The Taiping Rebellion was a nation-wide rebellion agains the ruling Qing Dynasty (house of Aisin Gioro) led by a man named Hong Xiuquan. It was one of China's most bloodiest civil wars in its history, and greatly weakened the already disadvantaged Qing Dynasty.

It all started when Hong Xiuquan, born in 1814, and an ethnic Hakka Chinese, failed the civil service exams in Kwangtsou (Guangzhou). He returned to Kwangtsou to take an exam a second time, and while he was in the city Hong heard of a preacher named Edwin Stevens, a Protestant preacher from the United States who travelled to China to spread Christianity. Hong received a set of pamphlets from the preachers. Hong did not really think about them at the time, but those pamphlets would soon do big things to him. Hong would fail the civil service exams four total times, and with each time he failed, he became more mentally sunken. He would also end up having visions of an old man and a middle aged man instructed Hong to slay all the demons in China. Again, Hong didn't think much of it.

Years later, after Hong failed the civil service exam for a fourth time, a cousin of Hong discovered a pamphlet on Hong's bookshelf. The pamphlet was named "Quanshi Liangyan" a Christian pamphlet written by a Chinese convert. So, Hong decided to read the pamphlet. From the pamphlet, Hong deduced that the old man in his dreams was God and the middle-aged man Jesus, and the demons were the Qing leaders. Hong experienced a deep awakening: he was God's second son.

The Qing Dynasty, despite being a respected country internationally, was more gilded than gold. The British exposed this in the 1840s with the Opium Wars. The Aisin Gioro house, the Qing rulers, were also of Manchu origin, and the majority Han Chinese hated being ruled by a minority. China also had a population boom, but no expanded infrastructure, which made the rulers be disliked even more. When Hong proclaimed himself as Jesus's brother, Qing China was already in a massive decline: inferior corruption, humiliation by the British, and now other great European powers are seeing China as an opportunity. Most of the Chinese also hated the Qing, because the Qing at this point were not doing enough to help the populace. The Hakka Chinese, which Hong was a part of, was especially disadvantaged. At first, people did not believe Hong. I mean come on, he's just some guy proclaiming himself as Jesus's younger brother! Millions of Chinese, though were exposed to the good news. At first Hong was ridiculed, but he started to amass followers among the disenfranchised Hakka Chinese. They become known as the Baishangdi Hui (God Worshippers' Society) and would be the core of Hong's future army.

Hong would then continue the studies of the Christian faith. But, he soon diverged paths with mainstream Christianity when he disagreed with the concepts of forgiveness, and he focused on his own divinity. Hong and his crew would travel village to village, witnessing the miserable lives of the downtrodden Chinese peasants. Hong, believing it was a class issue, began preaching about abolishing private property and ending social classes. A proto-communism with a touch of cult fanaticism, if you will. Not only that, he started portraying the ruling Manchus as demons, from his visions, and prophesizing an ultimate battle of good vs evil in the Middle Kingdom. The Qing authorities took notice of this, and began harassing the Baishangdi Hui. But, the Qing went a little too close to the hornet's nest, and a rebellion started. In 1850, Qing troops attacked a Baishangdi Hui militia. The militia took up arms and fought back. This would escalate in January of 1851 when Qing troops attacked Hong's followers in the city of Jintian, starting the Jintian rebellion. This city would eventually be the first to fall to the Baishangdi Hui, and Hong Xiuquan proclaimed the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. After Jintian was captured, many Chinese began to see Hong as legitimate, and joined his army. Soon, Hong led an army of one million. People from all sorts of classes joined the Taiping Rebellion. Peasants, disenfranchised merchants, intellectuals, and other ethnic minorities (including more Hakkas). Even women joined the army. By 1852, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was blitzkrieg-ing China, taking cities quite quickly. Qing armies scattered, and as Hong took more cities, he became more brutal. It became a "Join or Die" situation, but rather than a warning that you would die to the enemy if you didn't join their ranks, you would die to the Taiping armies themselves if you didn't join their ranks. This resulted in massacres, and captured Qing soldiers were executed. Remember when Hong rejected the Christian value of forgiveness? This is partly a result of that. Manchus were killed even more brutally, being burned alive. In March of 1853, Nanking fell to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Hong entered the city on a yellow silk chair, and declared Nanking the new capital of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and himself the rightful ruler of China. By then, most of Southern China fell to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and now Hong Xiuquan took one of China's major cities! This was a new chapter for the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and the potential end of the Qing.

When Nanking was taken, Europeans decided to travel to Nanking to observe. They were shocked by how fundamentalist the kingdom was, and it was extremist by even Puritan standards. Imagine a christian version of the Islamic State in China. That was the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. There punishments for smoking, drinking, or dancing. Sexual intercourse resulted in the death penalty. That is, except for Hong Xiuquan himself, who had a harem which attended to all of his sexual needs. The Taiping were also divided onto "Kings", who could all supposedly talk to God. They would all do strange ceremonies. Hong Xiuquan's righthand men, namely Yang Xiuqing, was slowly transforming the rebellion into a working country, and became expanding railways. He also found a postal service, began to collect taxes, and reorganized the militias into a proper army. The social reforms included equalizing men and women, and banning private property. Karl Marx, one of the founders of Communism, at first supported the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, but then became repulsed by how violent the rebellion was on the hands of the Taiping.

In 1855, Yang started to challenge Hong's authority. He claimed that God spoke to him instead of Hong. Hong, in return, order another right hand man, Wei Changhui, to kill Yang. Yang and his followers were all exterminated, numbering 27,000 deaths. After that, Hong had Wei killed lest he objected to Hong. People were no longer promoted based on merit, but loyalty to Hong. Hong was building his own cult personality.

Meanwhile, the Qing was also busy fighting France, who were very opportunistic of China's civil war. Fortunately for the Qing, Pro-Qing militias started to spring up. They still disliked the Qing, but they hated the Taiping even more. Normally, the Qing would shut them down. But considering the Qing was fighting two wars at once, they instead decided to forge an alliance with these warlords. When the Taiping tried and failed to take Shanghai, the British and the USA were convinced enough to aid the Qing. They trained Qing soldiers and arming them. These westernized forces, along with the warlord's forces, proved a turning point against the Taiping (as if the Taiping internal civil purges weren't bad enough for them already). The Qing adopted the same strategies as the Taiping, which was to pretty much slaughter anyone who didn't profess loyalty to them. The Qing burnt whole villages down, as they played by the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom's rules. The Qing and Taiping destroyed so much crops, that a famine occured, and new peasant revolts started. Hundreds of cities disappeared from maps. The outcome of the war was uncertain at this point, as Taiping forces were nearing Beijing. But, they were forced back to Nanking.

By then, the Taiping were beginning to lose. Anqing fell back to the Qing in 1861 (This resulted in mass cannibalism, to the point which human flesh was sold in markets). In 1863, Qing forces encircled Nanking. Supply lines were cut off, and there was no escape. The Qing, with the help of the Europeans and Americans, reversed the tide of the war and now isolated Nanking from the rest of Taiping-controlled territory. Hong meanwhile, was committing so much debauchery that he was completely unaware of his burning kingdom. In 1862, other Taiping management urged Hong to evacuate the city. Hong, being so deluded, was all like "No, I have God by my side!" So they stayed, as the Qing continued to cut off supply lines, and as starvation began to overtake the city. By 1864, almost everyone except for Hong himself knew the kingdom was in grave danger. Eventually, Hong agreed to do something. So he order his followers to go and gather "manna", just as Moses had done in the desert. Except while Moses's manna was from God, the "manna" for Hong was a bunch of inedible herbs and berries. They gave the berries and herbs to Hong, and when Hong ate it, he ascended to heaven. Nah just kidding, he died from food poisoning, and probably went to hell instead for sparking a war which caused tens of millions of deaths. Hong's teenage son, Hong Tianguifu (which I will call Hong 2.0) was put on the throne. But by then, the Qing was about to take Nanking, and in July 19, the city fell to the Qing. The resulting takeover was one of the worst massacres in Chinese history, with over 100,000 Chinese dying in three days ALONE. The Qing were as brutal, if not more brutal than the Taiping, as they slaughtered prisoners and Taiping followers. The Qing exhumed Hong Xiuquan's corpse from its resting place, cremated it, and fired it off in a cannon to deny him a resting place. Continuous Taiping armies were defeated, with the last in 1871.

All in all, 20-30 million people total died in this civil war, either the second or the third bloodiest war in history (After World War II and contesting with the Ming-Qing transition). Of course, revolutions in China did not stop as 75 years later, Mao Tse-Tung took over China and also killed millions during the Great Leap Forward. Hong Xiuquan, proclaiming to be Jesus's brother and claiming to save China from the Qing demons, instead caused one of China's most brutal and bloody civil wars. So, moral of the story: If you're a ruling government, don't treat your people so badly that they will start supporting a delusional and possibly schizophrenic cult leader. It will not end well.
Dorgon, out!