Tiny Insect Mark Chapman

Taiping church service, around 1860.







While Feng Yunshan was building up the God Worshipers in Guangxi Province in 1845 and 1846, Hong Xiuquan living was back in his hometown of Guanlubu, Guangdong province working as a school teacher. He also spent his time elaborating on the nature of God, his relationship to humankind, and how the Chinese people had been deceived by demons and spirits. These writings were later collected into the "Taiping Testament". In this episode we're going to explore the Testament and see how it laid the foundation for what will become the Taiping political project, which resulted in a full insurrection against the ruling Qing dynasty a few years later.

This is a statue of a deity in Fujian province, with offerings placed in front of it.







Feng Yunshan preached and spread Shangdi's good word. For nearly 3 years, he worked tirelessly to grow the movement that worshiped God and recognized Hong Xiuquan as Jesus' younger brother. In this episode we're going to learn what worshipping Shangdi meant, how it related to other practices in the area, and see increasingly violent iconoclasm that will help lead to full scale insurrection and the establishment of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

Not exactly Thistle mountain, but an example of what the area north/north-west of Guiping, Guangxi looks like.







In this episode, we look at the region where the Society of God Worshipers took root and grew, and what life was like there in the second half of the 1840’s. Pirates, bandits, secret societies, and everyday people trying to scratch out a living in a Qing "backwater". This "internal frontier" was the place where Hong's Christian beliefs took root & grew into the nucleus of what would become the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

Posthumous portrait of Liang Fa, author of "Good Words for Exhorting the Age"







Hong Xiuquan finally lost his faith in ever becoming a Confucian scholar in the aftermath of the Opium War. After reading a set of Christian pamphlets composed by the Chinese writer Liang Fa, he discovered the meaning of his heavenly vision and his life's new mission: To save his brothers and sisters from the demonic influences of the old gods & spirits.

The story of the Opium War is usually told as part of a wider narrative of European colonial expansion, and the beginning of a “century of humiliation” from the perspective of the modern Chinese state. Last episode, we covered the main narrative of the war, a kind of “Great Man” history last episode. But it’s easy to forget that the fighting and loss of the Opium War had far-reaching consequences for tens of millions of everyday people living in the Qing Empire.







Hong Xiuquan was one of those ordinary people affected by the war, but drew very different conclusions from the hostilities than many of his neighbors. Hong saw in the British a people who followed a powerful God, one that two millennia of imperial ideology had replaced with false idols and demon worship. Worship of Confucius & Buddhist Bodhisattva, the practice of dark Daoist magic - these had led the people of China away from the all-powerful Father of Heaven who the authors of the Classics had called Shangdi. In Shangdi and his Heavenly Kingdom Hong found truth and order in the chaos and turmoil that surrounded him in the aftermath of the Opium War.

The idea of the Opium War carries a great deal of meaning in modern memory. For many flavors of Chinese nationalist, it is the beginning of their century of humiliation at the hands of exploitive foreigners. For the British, it is another milestone on the road to the heights of Empire. But that is how it all looks in retrospect. For those who directed the armies of the war, and those who fought in it, the engagement was a confusing mess, where neither side seemed to have much understanding of what the other side wanted or why it was fighting the way it did.







In this episode, we'll go through the main war, the classic leaders & battles, to understand as best we can what those who directed the war's engagements thought they were doing and why.