THE TAIPING REBELLION (1851-64):

A CASE STUDY IN INTERRELIGIOUS ENCOUNTER

a paper presented

at the

International Conference on Religion and Globalization

held at

Payap University Chiang Mai, Thailand July 27 - August 2, 2003

by

P. Richard Bohr Professor of History Director of Asian Studies College of Saint Benedict & Saint John's University Minnesota, USA

China's Global Crisis and a Messianic Dream. As the most heterodox of 2

China's many sectarian uprisings, the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864) was the gravest challenge to imperial Confucianism until the twentieth century. The Taipings were driven by a syncretistic religion formulated by Hong Xiuquan, a failed examination candidate from South China's marginalized Hakka minority, who sought to transform

China into a Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace and Equality. Intersecting with the twin crises of domestic decline and foreign encroachment, Hong's monotheistic faith rationalized a millenarian blueprint, messianic leadership, motivational ritual, puritanical morality, apocalyptic timetable, and theocratic organization by means of which the

Taipings nearly toppled China's old order.1

Disasters have long stirred Chinese millenarians, including Eternal Mother "folk religious sects" (jiao) and secret society sworn-brotherhood associations (hui).2

Charismatic leaders often resorted to ideas and rituals banned by the imperial government (always eager to control religion) to articulate the frustrations of alienated peoples and expose them to apocalyptic promises of supernatural liberation from an orthodox order now deemed evil. And they often recruited diverse followers into congregations which anticipated the new millennium. When the state attacked these groups for challenging Confucian socio-ethics, support of kinship institutions, and loyalty to the throne,3 they often raised the banner of revolt.4

The Taipings tapped this rich heterodox tradition. At the same time, they were the first Chinese rebels to be inspired by Protestant Christianity, then being introduced into China. Christianity provided Hong with ideas potentially far more explosive than the Daoist utopianism, Maitreyan messianism, and Manichean dualism that motivated other Chinese sectarians. Ultimately, Hong's interpretation of the Bible became the 3 standard by which he reinterpreted and selectively incorporated China's traditions, both orthodox and heterodox. The resultant fusion, in which the biblical energized the indigenous elements, became a potent mix of ideology, motivation, and organization.5

Chinese sectarianism often began with compassionate creator-deities like the

Eternal Mother, who, by dispatching such messianic agents as the Maitreya Buddha of the Future,6 inspired several White Lotus uprisings in late imperial China. Yet polytheistic Eternal Mother faith focused primarily on the reunion of the elect with her following the destruction of the earthly order and the creation of a vaguely-sketched millennial epoch at the kalpa's end.

Taiping religion, by contrast, emerged from the monotheistic Heavenly Father, the loving, universal God who had burst forth from the West's evangelical churches during the Great Awakening to globally proclaim that all the world's people were worthy of His love and rescue from moral and physical degradation and that their conversion would trigger the advent of the worldwide Kingdom of God.

The Heavenly Father was introduced to Hong by Liang Fa, China's first pastor, baptized and ordained by Protestantism's earliest missionaries to the Chinese: the

English Presbyterian Robert Morrison and the Scottish Congregationalist William Milne.

Because of the 1724 imperial ban against Christianity, Morrison and Milne relied on the printed Chinese word for covert dissemination in China. While carving the woodblocks for their Bible translation in the safe-haven of Canton's foreign trade enclave, Liang, having concluded that neither Confucian ethics nor Buddhist self-cultivation possessed the transcendent morality needed for character change, embraced Christianity.7

From Messianic Vision to Dynastic Insurrection. The missionaries' God as 4

creator, law-giver, and redeemer dominates Liang's Good Words to Admonish the Age, his 1832 introduction to Christianity. This notion profoundly affected Hong, who, in

1836, covertly received a copy of Liang's tract at the Canton examination site, near his

Hakka village, from an American missionary. Following Hong's third unsuccessful examination try a year later, a black-robed, blond-bearded Heavenly Father appeared to him in a dream, complaining that Confucianism, reinforced by Buddhism and

Daoism, had induced the Chinese people to rebel against God's beneficent rule of ancient China and become mired in polytheism and moral decadence under apostate emperors. He identified Hong as Christ's younger brother and commissioned him as

"Heavenly King" to return China to monotheism and morality.8

In 1843, after his bitter fourth and final examination failure, Hong destroyed his

family's door, ox, pig, and dragon gods and the Confucian tablet in the village

schoolroom where he taught; offered food and prayers before the words "Heavenly

Father"; "baptized" himself and two cousins, and made a three-foot "demon slaying"

sword with which to "capture all the [idol-worshipping] demons" and unite the world into

a universal "harmonious union" under the Heavenly Father's restored temporal rule.9

This global millennium would begin in the impoverished hinterland region of

Xunzhou, in southeastern Guangxi province (250 miles west of the Canton Delta),

where China's forced integration into the global economy following the First Opium War

(1839-42) aggravated dynastic decline.10 The recent tripling of China's population had

outstripped land and food, inflated commodity prices, intensified unemployment, and

concentrated land-holding among the original settlers, called Punti. Escalating robbery,

opium smuggling, and gambling among increasing numbers of desperate tenants 5

forced to pay higher rents and taxes -- unchecked by the enfeebled Manchu

government -- devastated agricultural production and intensified lawlessness.

This situation was particularly acute for Hong's Hakka relatives. As linguistically

and culturally distinct newcomers pushed southward by barbarian invaders from their

north China homeland in recent centuries, the Hakka (literally "guest people") had

become tenant farmers widely dispersed on the barren hillside fields of their Punti

landlords. By the time Hong began to preach among this Hakka minority throughout

Xunzhou in 1844, the Punti as well as aboriginal neighbors were feuding with them over

land, forcing the Hakka to arm for self-defense.

The kind of anarchy in Xunzhou had long given rise to millennial visions. The

Daoist classics, for instance, depict the emergence from chaos of a paradise of

simplicity, justice, communal ownership, and peace in which a virtuous government

responds to people's needs.11 The Triads, too, developed a misty utopian dream of

plenty and safety within the Triad lodges, or "seats of great peace" (taiping zuo). But

Hong went beyond these alternatives by blaming Xunzhou's social, economic, and

ethnic polarization on Confucius' hierarchical "partial love," which, he said, caused

people to "love those of their own village, hamlet, or clan, and dislike those of other

villages, other hamlets, and other clans."12 In fact, Hong claimed, this tragedy was the

direct antithesis of the universal love praised by the philosopher Mozi (fl. 479-438 BCE)

and negated the goal of "great peace and equality" (or taiping) depicted in the pre-

Confucian Book of Rites, a favorite examination text. Hong then linked the goal of taiping with the instrumentality of the biblical Kingdom of Heaven (Tianguo), described

in Good Words, to envision a restored millennium called Taiping Tianguo and ruled 6

directly by the Heavenly Father, under Hong's vice-regency.13

Chinese millenarian movements were typically led by messianic heroes whose

authority, like Hong's, derived from visions, heavenly transports, and divine mandates.14

Claiming that individual conversion would activate moral revival in Xunzhou, Hong

preached the rejection of China's "false spirits" and "perverse things" for the worship of

the "true God," belief in Jesus, and adherence to the Ten Commandments.15 Those

who clung to "worldly customs" and "believed in devils," he warned, would be devoured

by wolves and tigers and descend into the "eighteenth level of hell."16

Sectarian messiahs like Hong also anticipated the new dispensation by

employing scriptural revelation, prophetic preaching, and faith healing to convince their

followers that the symptoms of cosmic crisis (sparked by Western imperialism) and

dynastic decay portended an imminent, cataclysmic end to the prevailing age.17 They also acted out its transformed values and communal life, beginning with the rituals of rebirth and purification.18

The sect members' familial unity under lay leadership, gender equality, and

property-sharing, celebrated in the White Lotus "precious scrolls" and in the Triads'

sworn kinship groups, certainly challenged Confucian precepts.19 But Hong confronted

Confucianism head on. After three months of catechism in Canton with Issachar Jacox

Roberts, a Baptist from Tennessee -- subsequent to the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, which

permitted evangelism in China's newly-opened treaty ports -- Hong organized the God

Worshippers Society, a multi-village, Xunzhou-wide network of congregations, initiated

according to the baptismal rite of adult bodily immersion he had learned from Roberts.

The God Worshippers sang Baptist hymns and Roberts' own doxology in praise of 7

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to the accompaniment of gongs and fire-crackers, and

Hong enforced compliance with the Ten Commandments -- which expressly forbade opium smoking, gambling, and robbery -- through summary beheading. One congregant observed: "After I worshipped God I never dared to transgress in the slightest, but was a sincere believer, always fearing harm from serpents and tigers."20

While Hong supplied the needy from his Sacred Treasury, a Hakka-inspired community chest, shamanism merged with the Trinity to accelerate the millennial timetable and transform the God Worshippers into political insurrection. Yang Xiuqing, an illiterate boss of Xunzhou's charcoal workers, used local faith healing and spirit possession techniques to take upon himself -- in the name of the Trinity -- the illnesses which resulted from the region's drought-induced malnutrition and typhus and to speak for the Trinity.21 The resultant trances, prognostications, dream interpretation, speaking in tongues, faith healing, and other ecstatic behavior among Hong's congregations created a highly-charged apocalyptic atmosphere in which the Heavenly Father himself took charge of the God Worshippers' deliverance.22

The divine descents through Yang instilled a martial zeal in the struggle against the local elite who, offended by the God Worshippers iconoclastic destruction of the religious sites which also facilitated market activities, lineage and village alliances, and social services, began sending their militia against them in January 1850. The following spring, the Qing government itself, alarmed by the God Worshippers' loyalty to a transcendent God claiming superiority over the Confucian Son of Heaven, assumed they were a traditional rebel threat to the throne and attacked them.

Religion in the Heavenly Kingdom's Rise and Fall. Hong's congregational 8

structure facilitated the mobilization of thousands of God Worshippers over a wide area.

In proclamations, Hong called on all Chinese -- Hakka, Punti, and aboriginal groups

alike -- to unify as a "Chosen People" whom the Heavenly Father would deliver from

dynastic oppression in a latter-day Exodus.23 In camp, the Taipings concluded their grace with the phrase "Kill the [Manchu] demons!"24 On the march, they razed temples,

monasteries, and libraries and killed Buddhist and Taoist clergy as well as Manchus

and unrepentant Chinese civil servants. Before battle, the Taipings exulted: "Our

Heavenly Father helps us, and no one can fight with him."25

Battlefield valor was inspired by the filial bond to the morally-demanding

Heavenly Father, now increasingly depicted as warrior-god and judge descending daily

through the shamans. The promise of heaven for bravery in battle and the threat of

execution for violating the Ten Commandments fostered disciplined troops (including

100,000 intrepid Hakka women fighters under the command of Hong's sister), who

easily overwhelmed the disorganized Qing forces in the rebellion's early years.

Some Daoist-inspired insurrections resulted in the short-lived theocracies of the

Five Pecks of Rice sectarians, the Ba ethnic community in southwest China, and the

Yellow Turbans.26 Later, White Lotus rebels appealed to Maitreyan messianism in their

quest to overthrow the Mongol emperors. Yet these rebels soon discovered that

Buddhist eschatology offered neither a realistic alternative to the existing order nor a

concrete plan for reorganizing secular power.27 Hong's Heavenly Kingdom, on the

other hand, offered a more concrete scheme for reconstructing state and society.

Following his declaration of the inauguration of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom

on January 11, 1851 (his thirty-sixth birthday), Hong decreed that the Heavenly 9

Kingdom would be governed by a theocratic hierarchy, merging religious, military, and civilian authority into a single administrative pyramid through Hong and his "brother" kings to extend God's sovereignty directly to individual Taiping believer.

In March 1853, one million Taipings captured Nanjing, China's "second city" astride Shanghai near the mouth of the Yangzi River. Hong renamed it "New

Jerusalem" and now proclaimed himself to be the reincarnated biblical priest-king

Melchizedek, messianic founder of the first Jerusalem who prefigured both King David in the Old Testament and Jesus in the New.

In "New Jerusalem," Confucianism was supplanted by a radical new ideology based on 1) the Taiping Bible (consisting of the first six Old Testament books, the entire

New Testament, and a third, "True Testament" chronicling the divine descents in

Xunzhou); 2) Hong's theological writings; and 3) Taiping evangelical pamphlets. This canon became the basis of the Taipings' universal education and civil service examination.28 Throughout Nanjing, property was turned over to the communal Sacred

Treasury; trade and commerce became a state monopoly; the written language was simplified; ancestral rites were banned; and women's equality was promoted by prohibiting footbinding, arranged marriage, polygamy, wife purchase, widow suicide, and prostitution and by decreeing women's equal access to schools, government exams, bureaucratic appointment, and military service.29

The "best room" in every building was transformed into a "Heavenly Father hall," where, in front of incense-filled altars of three bowls each of tea, meat, rice, and vegetables, worshippers recited Hong's commentary on the Ten Commandments, the

Lord's Prayer, Bible passages, and prayers and hymns; heard sermons praising the 10

Heavenly Father's omnipotence, Hong's messiahship, and the importance of loyalty to state over filial piety to family; and took part in Protestant-style baptisms, weddings, and funerals.30 War and work were banned on the Sabbath.

Hong saw the state as the instrument of God's universal love. He decreed that the countryside outside Nanjing be organized into "congregations" of 25 families -- the lowest administrative level proposed in China until that time -- where a "sergeant" would insure that men and women received equal amounts of similarly-productive land

(thereby extending to Chinese women, for the first time, equal access to landholding31), that rents were abolished and taxes reduced, and that surplus produce was stored in public granaries. The sergeant was also to administer justice, teach both boys and girls, and conduct worship services in the local church.

Amid victory and defeat, the Taipings supported the longest rebel utopia in

Chinese history, encompassing 30 million people in six provinces of the lower Yangzi valley. But for all its strengths, the Taipings' theocratic paradigm could not endure. As prophet, priest, and king, Hong brought the Heavenly Father to China in visions, ritual, and Bible study. But Yang Xiuqing, the shaman, issued the divine commandments more compellingly, directly through his "golden mouth." In the fall of 1856, a jealous

Hong ordered Yang's assassination, after which moral zeal and martial discipline waned as the Heavenly Father's voice no longer rang out through the Heavenly Kingdom, and centralized military coordination, the mainstay of theocratic control, began to unravel as far-flung Taiping generals focused on their own regional fiefdoms at the expense of a coordinated military strategy and implementation of the Land System.

Yang had endeavored to make the Taipings more traditionally sectarian. But 11

Hong Ren'gan, the Heavenly King's cousin and early convert, sought to make them more Christian. Baptized and confirmed in the Lutheran catechism, and having served as an evangelist in Hong Kong, Ren'gan succeeded Yang as head of the Taiping government and military in 1859. Convinced that only Christian nations could compete in the nineteenth-century globalizing world, Ren'gan recommended that Taiping China integrate with the West by creating Christian-inspired schools, hospitals, and social welfare agencies funded by wealth generated by Sino-Western partnerships in transportation, commerce, finance, technology, mining, industry, and international trade. The Taiping state, he proposed, should be based on the rule of law safeguarded by an independent Western-style court system, a limited bill of rights, and a universally- educated citizenry informed by an open press and with access to Taiping leaders.32

The Heavenly King ignored his cousin's proposals, which many scholars speculate could have saved the Taipings and turned China into a Meiji Japan.

Although Qing forces were battling the Taiping and other rebels in every part of the country, the loyalist noose tightened around Nanjing. Soon after the Heavenly King died on June 1, 1864, his millennial campaign was eradicated by "regional" armies and their landlord patrons loyal to Confucianism and the Manchu throne.

Conclusion: The Taipings in Global Perspective. At a terrible cost of between 30 and 40 million lives in 16 of China's 18 provinces, no civil war in world history rivals the devastation of the Taipings' chiliastic campaign. And few episodes so powerfully dramatize the consequences of global interreligious encounter. Hong's monotheism went beyond even the most heterodox sectarians to inspire a millennial framework that attracted the dispossessed, justified the egalitarianism that motivated 12 them, created the puritanism that disciplined them, and shaped the theocracy that propelled them. One astonished missionary noted at the time: "There may be defective teaching among [the Taipings] . . . but it . . . is confessedly a moral revolution . . . [and] is the wonder of the age."33 And the Qing general who torched "New Jerusalem" in

1864 observed that "Not one of the hundred thousand rebels in Nanjing surrendered

. . . . Never before in history has there been so formidable a rebel force."34

Taiping religion was a potent insurrectionary force. The merging of Hong's authority as religious founder and messiah with the shaman's folk religious charisma leads one scholar to conclude that "much of . . . [the Taipings'] religious behavior could be understood in terms of ordinary Chinese folk religion . . . [for] without some means of making . . . [Taiping] religion comprehensible to a peasantry utterly unfamiliar with

Christian eschatology, the rebellion could never have gotten off the ground . . ."35

Yet Taiping religion not only kept Hong from aligning with other rebels but also alienated the very Christian "brothers" and "sisters" in the West whom he regarded as integral to his global millennium. Hong's monotheism led him to deny the divinity of himself and Jesus: "if Christ were divine," he insisted, "there would be two Gods."36 Not only did Hong proclaim himself God's second son but made himself, rather than the risen Christ, the center of the imminent Heavenly Kingdom.

Christians in the West and indeed in China deplored Hong's unitarianism and his rewriting portions of the Bible (editing out Noah's intoxication, for example) to accord with Taiping orthodoxy. After resigning as the Taipings' "Director of Foreign Affairs" in

1862, Issachar Roberts himself condemned Taiping faith, insisting that it "should be exterminated by the foreigners . . . in the interest of commerce and the Gospel. . . .”37 It 13 was indeed those very commercial interests which prompted the pro-Manchu intervention of Christian mercenaries from Europe and America, which feared that a

Taiping victory would impose Hong's concept of global equality and thereby negate the

West's commercial privileges in the post-Opium War treaty system with the Qing.

No trace of Taiping religion survived the Heavenly Kingdom's collapse. Yet the

Taipings remain the unique instance in which the Bible and Chinese religion were fused to create a powerful insurrectionary surge that claimed to have brought the Kingdom of

Heaven to earth. After the Taipings' fall, the orthodox Protestantism championed by

Liang Fa remained a missionary preoccupation for another 85 years.38 And the Social

Gospel instincts anticipated by Hong Ren'gan's modernization proposals had a major impact on China's subsequent national development.39

Hong responded to the discovery of a larger world beyond China in terms of redemptive history. He hoped to achieve China's salvation by making it the site of the latest revelation of the transcendent God who was high above the immanent Confucian emperor and whom the foreigners continued to worship long after the Chinese had abandoned Him.40 To this end, Hong implied that, as Middle Kingdom, China was no longer unique. And he was convinced that the Chinese imperial institution must be destroyed by divine means, of which he was the designated instrument. Although the

Taipings' religiously-inspired Heavenly Kingdom was suppressed and China remained under foreign domination until 1949, their efforts to change China went far beyond traditional sectarian insurrection and anticipated China's modern-day revolutions, which, while inspired by similar millenarian ideals, relied on strictly secular means.41 14

NOTES

1 Recent English-language scholarship on the Taiping ideology includes Eugene Powers Boardman, Christian Influence Upon the Ideology of the Taiping Rebellion, 1851-1864 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952), P. Richard Bohr, "The Heavenly Kingdom in China: Religion and the Taiping Revolution, 1837-1853," Fides et Historia, 17.2 (Spring-Summer 1985), 38-52, Jen Yu-wen, The Taiping Revolutionary Movement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), Jonathan D. Spence, God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), Philip A. Kuhn, "The Taiping Rebellion," in John K. Fairbank, ed., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10: Late Ch'ing, Part I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 264-316, Vincent C. Y. Shih, The Taiping Ideology (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967), and Rudolph G. Wagner, Reenacting the Heavenly Vision: The Role of Religion in the Taiping Rebellion (Berkeley: University of California, Institute of East Asian Studies, 1982). For a PRC perspective, see Xia Chuntao, Taiping Tianguo xongjiao [Religion of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom] (Nanjing: Nanjing University Press, 1992). For further titles, see G. W. Tiedemann, comp., Bibliography of Western Language Materials Concerning the Taiping Tianguo, forthcoming and Jiang Pingcheng, Yenjiu Taiping Tianguo shi jushu zongmu [A comprehensive bibliography of studies on the history of the Taiping Rebellion] (Beijing: Shumu wenxian, 1983). 2 Daniel H. Bays, "Popular Religious Movements in China and the United States in the Nineteenth Century," Fides et Historia, 15.1 (Fall-Winter, 1982), 24-38 and Guillame Dunstheimer, "Some Religious Aspects of Secret Societies," in Jean Chesneaux, ed., Popular Movements and Secret Societies in China, 1840-1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), 23-47. 3 K. C. Liu, "Introduction: Orthodoxy in Chinese Society," in idem, ed., Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1-24. 4 For an overview of Chinese sectarianism, see J. J. M. DeGroot, Sectarianism and Religious Persecution in China, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Johannes Müller, 1903), Daniel L. Overmyer, Folk Buddhist Religion: Dissenting Sects in Late Traditional China (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1976), idem, "Alternatives: Popular Religious Sects in Chinese Society," Modern History, 7.2 (1981), 153-90, Richard H. C. Shek, Religion and Society in Late Ming: Sectarianism and Popular Thought in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century China (University of California, Berkeley Ph.D. dissertation, 1980), Stevan Harrell and Elizabeth J. Perry, "Syncretic Sects in Chinese Society: An Introduction," Modern China, 8.3 (July 1982), 283-303, Robert Weller, "Ideology, Organization and Rebellion in Chinese Sectarian Religion," in Janos M. Bak and Gerhard Benecke, eds., Religion and Rural Revolt (Dover, N.H.: Manchester University Press, 1984), 390-406, and T. H. Barrett, "Chinese Sectarian Religion," Modern Asian Studies, 12 (1978), 333-52. 5 For the nature and role of evangelical Protestantism, see Murray Rubenstein, The Origins of the Anglo- American Missionary Enterprise in China, 1807-1840 (Lanham, Md. and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1996), P. Richard Bohr, "The Legacy of William Milne," International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 25.5 (October 2001), 173-178, and idem., "Jesus, Christianity, and Rebellion in China: The Evangelical Roots of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom," in Roman Malek, SVD, ed., The Chinese Face of Jesus Christ, 5 vols. (Sankt Augustin: Monumenta Serica Monograph Series, L, vol. 2, forthcoming in 2003). 6 For Eternal Mother belief, see Erik Zürcher, "Eschatology and Messianism in Early Chinese Buddhism," in W. L. Idema, ed., Leyden Studies in Sinology (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982), Daniel L. Overmyer, "Folk- Buddhist Religion: Creation and Eschatology in Medieval China," History of Religions, 12 (1972), 42-70, Chan Hok-lam, "The White Lotus-Maitreya Doctrine in Popular Uprisings in Ming and Ch'ing China," Sinologica, 10.4 (1969), 212-13, Susan Naquin, Shantung Rebellion: The Wang Lun Uprising of 1774 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), idem, Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976) and B. J. ter Haar, The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992). 7 George Hunter McNeur, China's First Preacher: Liang A-fa (Shanghai: Kwang Hsüeh Publishing House, [1934?]), 23, 25. For my theological analysis of Good Words, see P. Richard Bohr, "Liang Fa's Quest for Moral Power," in Suzanne Wilson Barnett and John King Fairbank, eds., Christianity in China: Early 15

Protestant Missionary Writings (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 35-46. For an analysis of the book's political implications, see Philip A. Kuhn, "Origins of the Taiping Vision: Cross- Cultural Dimensions of a Chinese Rebellion," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 29.3 (July 1977), 350-66. 8 Quoted in Jen Yu-wen, Taiping Tianguo dianzhi tongkao, 3 vols. [Studies on the Institutions of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom], 3 vols. (Hong Kong: Mengjin shuwu, 1958) 3:1727. 9 Quoted in Hamberg, Visions, 25. 10 For a historical analysis of conditions in China during this period, see Kwang-Ching Liu, "Nineteenth- Century China: The Disintegration of the Old Order and the Impact of the West," in Ping-ti Ho and Tang Tsou, eds., China in Crisis, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 1:93-178, Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839-1861 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), and Susan Mann Jones and Philip A. Kuhn, "Dynastic Decline and the Roots of Rebellion," in Fairbank, ed., Cambridge History of China, 10.1, 108-32. 11 Max Kaltenmark, "The Ideology of the T'ai-p'ing ching," in Holmes Welch and Anna K. Seidel, eds., Facets of Taoism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 19-52, Anna K. Seidel, "The Image of the perfect Ruler in Early Taoist Messianism: Lao-Tzu and Li-Hung," History of Religions, 9 (1969-1970), 216-47, and Rolf Stein, "Remarques dur les mouvements Taoisme politico-religieux au 11e siècle après J.C.," Toung Pao, 40 (1963), 1-78. 12 Quoted in Jen, Tongkao, 3:1725. 13 In 1846, Hong expressed his confidence that the millennial role reversal would soon be realized: Presently we shall see the world united as one family, enjoying great peace and equality [taiping]. How can it be that this perverse and unfeeling world cannot in a day be transformed into an honest and upright world? How can this encroaching, fighting and killing age cannot in a day be changed into a world where the strong no more oppress the weak, the many overwhelm the few, the wise delude the simple, or the bold annoy the fearful? (Quoted in ibid.) 14 Frederic Wakeman, Jr., "Rebellion and Revolution: The Study of Popular Movements in Chinese History," Journal of Asian Studies, 36.2 (February 1977), 205-12. 15 Quoted in Hamberg, Visions, 43. 16 Quoted in Jen, Tongkao, 3:1732. 17 C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 218. 18 C. A. Curwen, "Taiping Relations with Secret Societies and with Other Rebels," in Chesneaux, Popular Movements, 65-84 and Elizabeth J. Perry, "Taipings and Triads: The Role of Religion in Interrebel Relations," in Bak and Benecke, eds., Religion and Rural Revolt, 342-53. 19 Daniel L. Overmyer, "Values in Chinese Sectarian Literature: Ming and Ch'ing Pao-chüan," in Johnson, Nathan, and Rawski, eds., Popular Culture, 219-254 and idem., Precious Volumes: An Introduction to Chinese Sectarian Scriptures from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1999). 20 Quoted in Hamberg, Visions, p. 37. 21 See ibid., 56-85. For further material on the Guangxi descents, see Wang Qingcheng, Tianfu Tianxiong shengji [The sacred declarations of the Heavenly Father and Heavenly Elder Brother] (Liaoning: n.p., 1986). 22 For an assessment of the apocalyptic motif in the Taipings' rise, see Michael Barkun, Disaster and the Millennium (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974). Regarding the Taiping Rebellion as an example of "cataclysmic millennium" typology, see Scott Lowe, "The Taiping Revolution and Mao's Great Leap Forward," in Catherine Wessinger, Millennialism, Persecution, and Violence (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 220-240. 23 See Panxing zhaoshu [Proclamations by imperial sanction], in Xiang, et. al., Taiping Tianguo,1:157-67. 24 Quoted in Jen, Tongkao, 3:1862. 25 Quoted in Joseph Callery and Melchior Yvan, History of the Insurrection in China, third ed., John Oxenford, trans. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1853), p. 268. 16

26 Terry F. Kleeman, Great Perfection: Religion and Ethnicity in a Chinese Millennial Kingdom (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1998) and Richard B. Mather, "K'ou Ch'ien-chih and the Taoist Theocracy at the Northern Wei Court, 425-451," in Welch and Seidel, eds., Facets of Taoism, 103-22. 27 Cf. John W. Dardess, "The Transformations of Messianic Revolt and the Founding of the Ming Dynasty," Journal of Asian Studies, 24.3 (May 1970), 539-58. 28 Rudolph G. Wagner, "Operating in the Chinese Public Sphere: Theology and Technique of Taiping Propaganda," in Chun-chieh Huang and Erik Zürcher, eds., Norms and the State in China (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), 104-138. 29 For an overview of Taiping reforms in Nanjing, see Erik Zürcher, "Purity in the Taiping Rebellion," in Walter E. A. van Beek, ed., The Quest for Purity (Berlin, New York, and Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter, 1988), 203-215, John Lovelle Withers, II, The Heavenly Capital: Nanjing Under the Taiping, 1853-1864 (Yale University Ph.D. dissertation, 1983), and Lindley, Ti-Ping Tien-Kwoh, 2:691. 30 Quoted in Augustus F. Lindley, Ti-Ping Tien-Kwoh: The History of the Ti-Ping Revolution, 2 vols. (London: Day and Son, 1866), 1:361. 31 Muramatsu, "Rebel Ideologies," 257-58. Robert A. Scalapino and George T. Yu believe that the "combination of puritanism and egalitarianism with respect to male-female relations was quite possibly the most novel element in the Taipings movement." Modern China and Its Revolutionary Process (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 19. 32 For an introduction to Hong Ren'gan's reform ideas, see Teng Ssu-yü, "Hung Jen-kan, Prime Minister of the Taiping Kingdom and His Modernization Plans," United College Journal, 8 (1970-71), 87-96. See also Carl T. Smith, Chinese Christians: Élites, Middlemen, and the Church in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1985), chap. 4. 33 W. H. Medhurst, "Letter to the Editor," North-China Herald, November 26, 1853, p. 66. 34 Quoted in Winters, 231. 35 Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 325. 36 Quoted in Michael, Taiping Rebellion, 2:229. 37 Issachar Jacox Roberts, "Letter to the Editor," North-China Herald, November 17, 1860, 182. For an analysis of contemporary missionary perspectives on Taiping religion, see J. S. Gregory, "British Missionary Reaction to the Taiping Movement in China," Journal of Religious History, 2 (1963), 204-28, John B. Littell, "Missionaries and Politics in China -- The Taiping Rebellion," Social Science Quarterly, 43 (1928), 566-99, and Rudolph G. Wagner, "Understanding Taiping Christian China: Analogy, Interest and Policy," in Klaus Koschorke, ed., Christen und Gerwürze: Konfrontation und Interaktion kolonialer und indigener Christentumsvarianten (Gottengen: n.p., 1998), 132-57. For a recent theological assessment of Taiping borrowing from Christianity see C. S. Song, The Compassionate God (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1982), chap. 10. 38 Adrian A. Bennett and Kwang-Ching Liu, "Christianity in the Chinese Idiom: Young J. Allen and the Early Chiao-hui hsin-pao, 1868-1870," in John K. Fairbank, ed., The Missionary Enterprise in China and America (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 159-96. 39 For a discussion of Christianity's impact on Chinese reform, see Paul A. Cohen, "Littoral and Hinterland in Nineteenth Century China: The 'Christian' Reformers," in Fairbank, Missionary Enterprise, 197-225. For a perspective on Social Gospel developments in China, see Paul Richard Bohr, Famine in China and the Missionary: Timothy Richard as Relief Administrator and Advocate of National Reform, 1876-1884 (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1972), chap. 6, and idem., "The Legacy of Timothy Richard," International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 24.2 April 2000):75-80. 40 Joseph R. Levenson, "Confucian and Taiping 'Heaven': Political Implications of Clashing Religious Concepts," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 4.4 (July 1962), 436-53. 41 Lucian Bianco, for example, has written: "The Taipings were in a sense the precursors of the communists (Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915-1949, Muriel Bell, tr. [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971], 5)."