In 1837 Hong Xiuquan was given a Christian text on his way to his 3rd attempt at the civil service examinations. This small and seemingly meaningless event would have major ramifications for the Qing dynasty and Southern China. After reading this text Hong had a dream where he talked to Jesus and God, with the outcome that Hong was in fact Jesus’ half brother, thus making him half god. But Hong did not act on his newfound knowledge until he failed his civil service exam for the 4th time. Concluding that a life of civil service would not be fruitful he turned his focus on becoming a prophet, since he was Jesus’ half brother he devoted his time to spreading the word of Christianity. By 1850 Hong had amassed a very large following, over 20,000 people to be more precise and his following would only grow as Hong declared himself the King of the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace or Taiping Tianguo and thus starting the Taiping Rebellion. In 1853 Hong and his followers stormed the city of Nanjing, seizing it and killing all of the Manchu people within emphasizing the Peace part of Hong’s title. Nanjing would serve as the capital for the Taiping until its capture.
This religious rebellion grew, ultimately controlling a large portion of southeast China. Their rebellion caused havoc and large swaths of death in the region, these gruesome conditions are conveyed in the first-hand accounts found within The World of A Tiny Insect: A Memoir of the Taiping Rebellion and Its Aftermath. A man recounts all the carnage he saw as a boy living through the reign of the Taiping in southeast China, most of his stories are of mass death, near-death experiences, or the deaths of loved ones. Constantly there are descriptions of squares filled with bodies so that one cannot touch the ground, rivers blocked by bodies floating in the water, or entire towns wiped out and strewn across the sides of roads. These massive death tolls described do come with some doubt as the scenes once observed as a boy could have been warped and changed over time by the trauma itself or the degradation of memories as the man recounts these scenes later in life. Additionally, the descriptions of the death toll could very well just be expressions in order to quantify the death, the descriptions given could be hyperbolic so it is best to have some skepticism on the carnage described.
But skepticism aside the estimated death toll brought upon by the rebellion is 20 million people, almost 5% of the population of China at the time. This death was brought on by the massive destabilization brought on by the Taiping. Taiping bandits roamed southeast China pillaging villages and killing people, these Taiping bandits gave rise to groups of local bandits who would be called “short hairs” while the Taiping were the “long hairs”. The short hairs and long hairs would clash but oftentimes those who suffered the most were the civilians, as regardless of whether they were short hairs or long hairs they were bandits and they pillaged, stole, and raped. Additionally, Qing troops sent by the government to quell the rebellion were in the area, but from the descriptions found within The World of A Tiny Insect: A Memoir of the Taiping Rebellion and Its Aftermath the Qing troops were very ineffectual, not stopping anything. In fact, they actually were complicit in deaths through the allowance of the short hairs to operate and may have even caused some deaths.
The Qing were completely ineffective in stomping out the Taiping but eventually did so in 1864 once Hong had died. But even then the Qing could not do so on their own, they required Western intervention in order to quell the rebellion. This rebellion did one thing to extremely cripple the Qing, this rebellion showed how truly weak they were. If the Qing were not capable of controlling their own people, allowing a group of them to control a large chunk of land within their own country, how would they be able to defend themselves from international powers? Then to confound this weakness the Qing needed the help of those they wanted to resist, the West, in order to control their own lands. These trends not only mimick the Ming and the Manchu but would continue up until 1911 when the Qing would eventually fall. The Taiping rebellion exposed the weaknesses within the Qing rebellion and the lack of nationalism which would continue to be a problem for the revolutionaries well into the 20th century. The Taiping rebellion preceded the rebellions of the early 20th century but showed that the Qing were vulnerable, weak, and reliant on the West, all things exposed by the revolutionaries to topple the Qing.
Bibliography:
Meyer-Fong, Tobie S. “4. Bones and Flesh.” In What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013.
Spence, Jonathan. God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan, pp. 203-204. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.
Spence, Jonathan D. “Chapter 8”. The Search for Modern China. Third ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013.
Sun Yatsen. “The Three People’s Principles” in Sources of Chinese Tradition: From 1600 through the Twentieth Century, Vol. 2, 202-205. Edited by Wm. Th. de Bary and R. Lufrano. Columbia Univ. Press, 2001.
Zhang, Daye. “Part 2.” In The World of a Tiny Insect: A Memoir of the Taiping Rebellion and Its Aftermath. Translated by Xiaofei Tian. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013.
