The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom

What is known of the early life of Hong Xiuquan comes chiefly from the Basel missionary Theodore Hamberg, who had it in 1852 from Hong’s relative Hong Rengan; his booklet is read here as the British naval officer Lindesay Brine quoted and summarised it in 1862 (Brine, Taeping Rebellion p. 63). By that account Hong was born in 1813 in a village some thirty miles from Canton, became the village schoolmaster and failed the examinations at Canton (Brine, Taeping Rebellion pp. 64–67, following Hamberg). In 1837, ill after another failure, he had visions that lasted about forty days. An old man in a black robe told him that the people he had made were worshipping demons, and gave him a sword to exterminate the demons and a seal; a man of middle age, whom he called his Elder Brother, went with him to fight them (Brine, Taeping Rebellion pp. 67–70, quoting Hamberg). Six years later he read a set of Christian tracts by the Chinese convert Liang Afa that he had been given at Canton, and took them as the key to the visions: the old man was God the Heavenly Father and the Elder Brother was Jesus (Brine, Taeping Rebellion pp. 64–67, following Hamberg) (Brine, Taeping Rebellion pp. 72–73, quoting Hamberg). He and a relative baptised themselves and threw out their idols (Brine, Taeping Rebellion pp. 72–73, quoting Hamberg).

In 1847, Brine says, Hong went to Canton to the American missionary Issachar Roberts. Roberts wrote in 1852 of a pupil who, he thought, had been Hong: the man had studied the Scriptures with him for two months or more, had given him a written account of his vision and had asked for baptism, but left for Guangxi “before we were fully satisfied of his fitness” (Brine, Taeping Rebellion pp. 76–79, with Roberts’s letter of 1852).

The texts that the movement printed in 1852 and 1853 give ten “celestial commands”, beginning with the worship of the great God and the rejection of “corrupt spirits” and keeping the seventh day for praise (Taiping tracts (trans. Medhurst), Decalogue (Brine, pp. 367–368)). Their Trimetrical Classic says that God sent his Son, who in 1837 was received up into heaven, was given a seal and a sword, and was told to drive out the fiends together with “the elder brother”, Jesus (Taiping tracts (trans. Medhurst), Trimetrical Classic (Brine, p. 374)). Hong was proclaimed emperor of a new dynasty of Taiping, “Great Peace”, in 1851 (Brine, Taeping Rebellion p. 124). On 19 March 1853 his army took Nanjing (Brine, Taeping Rebellion p. 157), which his proclamations called the heavenly capital (Brine, Taeping Rebellion p. 166).

Hong Rengan, baptised and for some years a catechist of the London Missionary Society at Hong Kong, reached Nanjing in 1859 and was made Kan-wang, the Shield King (Brine, Taeping Rebellion pp. 239–242). Roberts settled there in October 1860 (Brine, Taeping Rebellion p. 295) and left on 20 January 1862. He wrote that he now believed Hong “a crazy man, entirely unfit to rule without any organised government”, and that Hong’s religion made him “equal with Jesus Christ, who with God the Father, himself, and his own son, constitutes one Lord over all” (Brine, Taeping Rebellion pp. 296–298, Roberts’s letter of January 1862).

The Taiping general Li Xiucheng, writing as a prisoner, says that Hong poisoned himself as the Qing armies closed in and that his young son succeeded him (Li Xiucheng, Deposition p. 70). The Qing commander Zeng Guofan reported that on 19 July 1864 a mine brought down part of the wall and his troops entered the city (Li Xiucheng, Deposition appendix, memorial no. 1 (pp. 74–75)).