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Taiping Rebellion
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The Taiping Rebellion was a large-scale revolt against the authority and forces of the Qing Empire in China, conducted by an army and civil administration inspired by Hakka self-proclaimed mystics named Hong Xiuquan and Yang Xiuqing. Hong was an unorthodox Christian convert who declared himself the new Messiah and younger brother of Jesus Christ. Yang Xiuqing was a former salesman of firewood in Guangxi, who was frequently able to act as a mouthpiece of God to direct the people and gain himself a large amount of political power. Hong, Yang and their followers established the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (... and officially, Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace) and attained control of significant parts of southern China.
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The Taiping Rebellion was the first serious threat to the traditional Confucian system and its institutions in China. The monotheistic demands of Christianity conflicted with Confucian ideology. The Taiping sought to remove these traditions, replace them with Christian ideology, and transform society along Christian mores. Despite this inherent opposition to Confucianism and its political institutions, the Taiping leadership was unable to abandon completely their familiar Confucian traditions. In their notions of political and social institutions, they were often more Confucian than Christian.
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The Taiping Rebellion started in the mind of Hong Xiuquan (born Hong Huoxiu, 1814-64), a teacher and a farmer's son from Guangdong Province. After Hong failed his civil-service exams for the third time, he had a feverish dream of a bearded man and a younger man, whom he later decided were God the Father and Jesus. Hong ... kept seeing part of his own name, "Huo" in the Christian tract, which he interpreted as another divine calling. Convinced that he was God's son and Jesus' younger brother, and his mission from God was to "slash the demons" -- the twin demons of the Manchu government and the traditional Chinese folk religion -- Hong formulated his own ideology, a mix of Christian ideals and Confucian utopianism. He soon amassed a large anti-Manchu, anti-establishment following in the south and in 1851 led a group of 20,000 followers to establish the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, with Hong himself as king. Using their army and any number of ragtag peasant militias they could muster along the way, the Taipings swept up through south and central China and established themselves in Nanjing in 1853, renaming the city Tianjing (Heavenly Capital).
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The Taiping Rebellion played a significant role in ending China's isolationist outlook. The Nian Rebellion, Boxer Rebellion, and the Communist Revolution all stem from the emotions and ideas which emerged from the Taiping vision. The influx of strange, new things had started in China an unsettling movement, away from the old ways of the ancestors and into the Western sphere of influence. The attempts of the Taipings to end this unrest and to reinstate a golden era are similar in many points to the Communist attempts in the same direction. After the Taiping Rebellion, China would never again be a realm unto herself. With the failure of the Taiping movement, the age of the emperors was finished.
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The Taiping Rebellion (Taiping means great peace), the largest peasant rebellion in Qing history (1644-1911), was led by a foreign religion--Christianity. From Emperor Chien Lung's remarks about the world in the 1790s, to Hong Xiuquan, China had changed tremendously. Another peasant rebellion in the 19th century, called the Boxer Rebellion, directed mainly at foreigners in China, was built around heterodox beliefs such as supernatural forces that would render one invulnerable to guns and knives. The Taipings and Boxers helped foster broad trends away from mainstream Confucian learning. This was a great affront to those who argued that Confucian learning should be upheld as the essence (ti) of Chinese culture.
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By 1863 the Taiping Rebellion was falling apart. Holding the city of Nanking against imperial and foreign forces had become virtually impossible. Sometime in the June of 1862, the Hunan army was preparing to launch their final attack. Hung Jen-kan, the third and final leader of the Rebellion, had attempted during his rule to reevaluate the tenets and beliefs of the Taipings, as well as salvage the Taiping cause. This was not to be the case. Their dream of moving beyond Nanking seemed to be lost.
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Taiping Rebellion