Taiping Heavenly Kingdom

A rebellion led by a man who believed he was the younger brother of Jesus, which killed more people than the First World War. Hong Xiuquan was a village schoolteacher who failed the imperial examinations four times, suffered a breakdown, and afterwards interpreted his visions through a Christian tract as revealing that God was his father and Christ his elder brother. The movement he founded in the 1840s in Guangxi grew among the marginalised Hakka minority and rose in 1851. It took Nanjing in 1853 and held it for eleven years as the capital of a Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace that controlled much of the Yangzi valley. Its programme was radical by any standard of the time: land held in common and redistributed, opium, alcohol, gambling and foot-binding banned, women in the army and sitting examinations, and the Confucian classics replaced by its own scriptures. It was also rigid and violent, and separated husbands from wives while its leaders kept harems. Western powers considered supporting it as fellow Christians and decided against it. The Qing state could not defeat it with its own forces and had to let provincial officials raise regional armies, which broke the imperial monopoly on military power permanently. Internal purges destroyed the leadership in 1856. Nanjing fell in 1864 and Hong died shortly before. Estimates of the dead range from 20 to 30 million. The kingdom lasted from 1851 to 1864 with Nanjing, renamed Tianjing, as its capital. It controlled much of the lower Yangzi valley. It is among the deadliest conflicts in recorded history. Its collapse left the Qing dynasty dependent on provincial armies.

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