Quotes:
*In my hand I wield the Universe and the power to attack and kill,
*I slay the evil, preserve the righteous, and relieve the people's suffering.
*My eyes see through beyond the west, the north, the rivers, and the mountains,
*My voice shakes the east, the south, the Sun, and the Moon.
*The glorious sword of authority was given by the Lord,
*Poems and books are evidences that praise Yahweh in front of Him.
*Taiping [Perfect Peace] unifies the World of Light,
*The domineering air will be joyous for myriads of thousand years.
Who is He?
The truth is that for every Chinese rebellion which succeeds, there are scores which fail - like the Taiping rebellion, led by a man influenced by Christian missionaries, who declared a heavenly kingdom on the Yangtze.
Originally, all Hong Xiuquan wanted was to be part of the establishment. A village schoolteacher, he immersed himself in Confucian scholarship for the civil service exam, but he just kept failing.
"He fell into what I suppose was some kind of depressive fit and he had a vision," says Jonathan Fenby, who has written a history of modern China.
"He imagined he'd gone up to the skies and there he had met a very tall man with a long beard and thick belt who had told him to come back to Earth and eradicate the demons on Earth."
Some time later he was given a Chinese translation of the New Testament by a Christian missionary.
"He decided on reading that, that the man he had seen up in the sky was the Christian God, that he, Hong, was the brother of Jesus, and that the devils he had to exterminate on Earth were the Qing dynasty, which was then ruling China and of course was not Chinese."
They had conquered China in the 17th Century, but their glory days were over and by the mid-19th Century they were losing to the British in the Opium Wars.
The Europeans brought Christianity which, for Hong, was a convenient alternative to the Confucian creed which had rejected him.
"Seeing that everyone in high heavens scolded him, Confucius escaped down to earth with the leader of the demons," goes an account of Hong's vision, set down in writing by a follower.
"The heavenly father then sent the angels to chase after Confucius, tie him up and bring him back to the heavenly father who was exceedingly angry and instructed the angels to whip him. There was plenty of whipping and Confucius asked for mercy repeatedly."
For the most part, China's emperors had not bothered much with religions. Buddhism had become very popular at a time of upheaval in the 6th Century, but it appealed mostly to people at the bottom of society.
Christianity was one of the novelties which had come in with the colonial powers. They used gunboats to open China to trade, and shattered the image of order and invincibility cultivated by the Qing emperors. Vernacular translations of the Bible helped loosen the grip of the Confucian elites.
The Europeans saw Hong's claim to be the brother of Christ as heresy, but he was not preaching for their benefit. He accompanied his spiritual message with a political one - a vision of equality and shared land ownership. This appealed to poor farmers, who were suffering from a sense of hopelessness, according to Guo Baogang of Dalton State college.
"Peasants have a very miserable life in the middle of the 19th Century," he says.
"There's a lot of famines and unemployment, most peasants have no land. So they're very vulnerable to the utopian thinkers prescribing a perfect society as a way to escape from the existing society."
By the end of the Taiping era at least 10 million had died, some say 20 million. Eyewitnesses described the Yangtze valley as littered with rotting corpses.
No-one knows exactly how Hong Xiuquan himself died. His decomposed body was discovered in his palace by a Qing general - an ignominious end for a challenger to empire and the opening of a terrible chapter in China's cycle of fragmentation.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19977188
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Xiuquan
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