Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
internal upheaval was the Taiping Rebellion, a pseudo-Christian
uprising that very nearly toppled the Qing dynasty. It was suppressed
in 1864 only with the greatest of difficulty, and not before 40 million
people had died in what was, and still is, the most cataclysmic civil
war in world history. Overpopulation led to the disastrous calamity.
By the nineteenth century, China's population had grown to unman-
ageable proportions, and millions of people in the Chinese country-
side were facing malnutrition and even starvation. By the 1840s
millions of peasants unable to eke out an existence on their tiny plots
of land abandoned farming altogether and began to roam the country-
side as bandits.
The leading figure in the Taiping Rebellion was Hong Xiuquan, a
mentally unstable and intensely imaginative man who was convinced
that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. He was born to a poor
peasant family in southern China's Guangdong province, but it was
quickly apparent to Hong's family that he was a bright, precocious
boy. Accordingly, his extended family clan exempted him from all
manual labor and allowed him to study for the imperial service exami-
nations. Hong, however, failed the examinations repeatedly and even-
tually suffered a nervous breakdown. During his feverish delirium he
saw images of a venerable old man with a long white beard who gave
him a sword and told him to exterminate demons. Amiddle-aged man
also figured into the hallucinations.
Soon, after the fever broke and Hong returned to the rhythms of
everyday life, he picked up a Christian tract he had accepted a few
years earlier and was astonished to find in it the interpretive key to
his earlier dreams. He concluded that the Biblical “Kingdom of
Heaven” mentioned in the tract was none other than China, that the
demons were the Manchus, and that the elderly and middle-aged
men he saw were none other than God the Father and Jesus Christ,
respectively. All of this he interpreted as personal instructions to rise
up against the Qing regime and reclaim the Heavenly Kingdom of
China in the name of his vision of the Christian faith. In 1847 he sought
religious instruction from Issachar Roberts, an American Southern
Baptist preacher from Tennessee. Roberts, who found Hong venal
and unstable and in general unsuitable for Christian conversion, even-
tually refused him baptism and distanced himself from him.
This did not seem to matter to Hong, however. He began gathering
followers and converts to himself. He read in Acts 2 about the early
Christian community of believers and attempted to replicate this com-
munal sharing among his followers. Subsequent reading in the Old
Testament about the armies of Israel further enthralled him, and by the
