Hong Xiuquan

The missionary Theodore Hamberg, who had his account from Hong Rengan, says that Hong was born in 1813 in a village about thirty miles from Canton, taught in the village school and failed the examinations at Canton (Brine, Taeping Rebellion pp. 64–67). In 1837, during an illness, he had visions in which an old man gave him a sword against the demons and a man of middle age, whom he called his elder brother, helped him to fight them (Brine, Taeping Rebellion pp. 67–70, quoting Hamberg). In 1843 he read Christian tracts that he had been given years before and understood the two figures as God the Father and Jesus (Brine, Taeping Rebellion pp. 72–73, quoting Hamberg). The Taiping Trimetrical Classic tells the same story in the movement’s own words: God sent his Son, who in 1837 was received into heaven (Taiping tracts (trans. Medhurst), Trimetrical Classic (Brine, p. 374)).

He was proclaimed emperor of a new dynasty of Taiping in 1851 (Brine, Taeping Rebellion p. 124), and after his army took Nanjing in March 1853 he lived shut up in his palace there (Brine, Taeping Rebellion pp. 157 and 166). The missionary Issachar Roberts, who had taught him and later lived fifteen months at his court, wrote in 1862 that Hong made himself “equal with Jesus Christ” (Brine, Taeping Rebellion pp. 296–297, Roberts’s letter of January 1862). His general Li Xiucheng states that he poisoned himself shortly before the city fell in 1864 (Li Xiucheng, Deposition p. 70). See the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.