Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
early 1850s he had transformed his following from a few desperate
peasant fighters into a militant pseudo-Christian movement the mem-
bers of which cut their queues and proclaimed allegiance to the Ta i p i ng
Tianguo, or the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. His armies eventu-
ally proceeded northward through Hunan province, captured the city
of Changsha, and made their way to the Yangtze River with tens of
thousands of dedicated fighters. The “Taipings,” as they came to be
known, were victorious wherever they went. They built a large navy
and floated all the way down the Yangtze to Nanjing, which they cap-
tured in 1853, and named the capital of their new theocratic government
after mercilessly slaughtering every Manchu they found in the city.
Hong's seditious intentions were abundantly clear the moment he
named his movement a “kingdom” and had his followers cut off their
queues. He made good on these intentions by attacking Peking, but for
once he was defeated and beaten back. After 1855 he decided to
remain in Nanjing and consolidate his power there. Nanjing in the late
1850s and early 1860s contrasted quite favorably with the rest of
China; its streets were cleaner, its people happier, and its women much
freer. (Taiping women did not bind their feet and were given the
unprecedented freedom to walk around in public on city streets.)
Foreigners, initially fascinated with the Taipings, eventually backed
away from them and remained neutral as the Qing government
moved to crush the rebellion. Christian missionaries had concluded
by the early 1860s that Hong's garbled version of Christianity was
quite heterodox, and Western merchants and diplomats began to fear
that the favorable agreements they had reached with the Qing might
be subject to cancellation should the Taipings actually create a new
dynasty in China.
Western Christians were not the only ones who viewed the Taipings
as heterodox. To Chinese traditionalists, the ideology and religion of
the Taipings seemed the very antithesis of Confucian ethical teachings.
The Qing government, by this time quite Chinese in its world outlook,
resolved to crush the Taipings at all costs. In the 1850s the Qing
government entrusted the fight against the Taipings to one man: a high
government official named Zeng Guofan, a native of Hunan (a prov-
ince the Taipings had largely devastated). Regular Qing armies had
tried but failed to defeat the Taipings. Zeng was given free reign to
raise and train new armies and fight the Taipings as he saw fit. The
Qing dynasty more or less turned its destiny over to Zeng and trusted
him implicitly.
Zeng named his new army the Hunan Braves and in 1854 captured
the central Chinese city of Wuhan from the Taipings, but the Taipings
