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

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

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