Hong Xiuquan
Hong Xiuquan failed the imperial examinations four times, concluded that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, and started a war that killed perhaps twenty million people. Born in 1814 to a Hakka farming family near Canton, he was the clever son the family invested in, and the examination was the only route out. The pass rate at the county level was around one per cent. After his third failure in 1837 he collapsed and was delirious for days, and described visions of a golden-bearded old man who gave him a sword and a middle-aged man who instructed him. Years later he reread a Christian pamphlet he had been handed in the street and interpreted the visions through it: the old man was God, the other was Jesus, and Hong was God's second son, sent to drive the demons from China. The demons were identified as the Manchu rulers of the Qing and the traditional idols, which his converts began smashing. The God-Worshipping Society grew among the poor, the Hakka minority and the miners of Guangxi, and became the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in 1851 — a state with its own calendar, a ban on opium, foot-binding, alcohol and prostitution, the separation of the sexes, and the common ownership of land. It took Nanjing in 1853 and held it for eleven years. Hong withdrew into his palace and his theology while his kings fought each other, tens of thousands dying in one purge. He died in June 1864, of illness or poison, weeks before Nanjing fell. The Taiping war is the deadliest civil war in recorded history.
- Lived: 1814 CE – 1864 CE
- Nationality: Chinese
- Roles: religious_leader, revolutionary, political_leader
