Hong Xiuquan

A village schoolteacher from southern China who repeatedly failed the imperial civil service examinations, Hong Xiuquan came to believe that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, sent to rid China of demons. The movement he inspired grew into the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–1864, a civil war against the Qing dynasty that killed at least 20 to 30 million people. From 1853 until his death he reigned as the "Heavenly King" in Nanjing.

Hong was born into a Hakka farming family in Hua county, near Guangzhou; most scholars accept 1 January 1814 as his birth date, though several others are recorded. His family paid for his schooling in the hope that he would pass the state examinations, the route into officialdom. He failed the provincial examination in Guangzhou several times. On a visit there in 1836 he was handed a set of Christian tracts written by the Chinese preacher Liang Fa but paid them little attention. After a third failure in 1837 he suffered a breakdown and, during a long delirium, dreamed of ascending to Heaven, where a bearded father figure gave him a sword to fight the demons that men were worshipping.

In 1843, after his fourth and final failure, Hong read the tracts properly and decided that they explained his dreams: the father was God, whom he identified with the ancient Chinese deity Shangdi, and the elder brother was Jesus. He began smashing Confucian and Buddhist images and preaching. With his relative Feng Yunshan he travelled to Guangxi in 1844, and in 1847 he studied in Guangzhou with the American Baptist missionary Issachar Roberts, who declined to baptise him. Meanwhile Feng had built up the God Worshipping Society among poor Hakka communities in the hills of Guangxi. Two other leaders, Yang Xiuqing and Xiao Chaogui, claimed to fall into trances in which God and Jesus spoke through them, and Hong accepted their claims.

By 1850 the society had more than 10,000 members and was clashing with local authorities and rival groups. When government troops attacked them at Jintian in January 1851, the God Worshippers won, and Hong proclaimed the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. Breaking out of encirclement, the Taiping armies marched north into Hunan and on to the Yangtze valley, and in March 1853 they captured Nanjing, which Hong renamed Tianjing, the Heavenly Capital.

From his palace Hong ruled mainly through proclamations. The Taiping state banned opium, separated men and women, introduced a new calendar and some communal ownership of land, and preached greater equality for women, although the leaders kept concubines. Hong also produced his own revised version of the Bible. Yang Xiuqing, the "Eastern King", directed many of the military campaigns and still claimed to speak with the voice of God. In 1856 Hong, suspicious of Yang's ambitions, joined others in having him and his family killed; the purge, known as the Tianjing incident, spiralled into further killings among the Taiping leadership and badly weakened the movement.

After a failed attempt on Shanghai in 1860, Qing forces, helped by Western-led units, slowly pressed in on Nanjing. With the city besieged and short of food in 1864, Hong told his followers to eat "manna" and himself ate wild plants from the palace grounds. He fell ill in April and died on 1 June 1864; illness is the likeliest cause, though suicide by poison has also been suggested. His teenage son succeeded him, but Nanjing fell the following month. Qing troops dug up and burned his body, and his ashes were fired from a cannon.

Most of the war's victims died from famine and disease. Opinions of Hong vary widely: the revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, who came from the same region, reportedly identified with him from childhood, and Chinese communists praised the rebellion as a forerunner of their own peasant revolution.

Our 1815 map shows the Qing empire a generation before the rising, and the 1878 map shows it after the Taiping kingdom had been destroyed; none of our map years falls during the rebellion itself.