God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan

God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan

 

This book by  attempts to reexamine the uprisings of China’s Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, a millenarian religious movement inspired by Christianity, and the intellectual development of its leader, Hong Xiuquan. In addition, the author also focuses on to seeking how it could be that this particular man had such an astounding impact on his country for so many years.

Accordingly, Taiping Rebellion was a millenarian war which was led by the visionary Hong Xiuquan with his goal of establishing the Kingdom of Heaven. It was then concluded to be the most devastating  war in the nineteenth century with the most number of death mostly of civilians due to famine and pestilence by the struggles of Taiping and Imperial Chinese forces.

            The story started in 1836 when Hong Xiuquan, a twenty-two year old school teacher, unsuccessfully passed a provincial civil service examination in Canton twice. The first time he fail did not mean so much since it was his first time. However, in his second failure he took it much harder and so he become gravely ill and that was when he got his first vision which has lasted several days and nights. In his visions he obtained a mission from God to destroy all demons from the surface of the earth and to save the mankind. Hong also believed that he was the Younger Brother of Jesus Christ. From then and onwards, he devoted himself towards interpreting his visions and carrying it into practice. Hong even changed his given names to Xiuquan, to emphasize the syllable quan, meaning fullness. The change also removed the syllable huo, meaning fire, which contradicted his surname, Hong, meaning deluge.

            Because practicing his visions proved to be difficult in his native country, he moved to Guangxi province to prophesize further under the local Hakka population. Two of his early followers has even developed their own channels of communication with Heaven, namely through possession by God and by Jesus Christ. The original society of “God-worshippers” was not a very alarming organization, either doctrinally or behaviorally. It had an original liturgy, including weekly “baptisms,” and scriptures consisting of Hong’s writings and excerpts from the Bible. It enjoined a rather Confucian morality with certain Christian additions.

Hong and his followers identified the demons as the local deities at first, however, later sometime in 1850 they had came to identify them as the Manchus of the ruling Qing dynasty. Hong Xiuquan went on to find the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace in order to destroy this demonic force. With his followers and their entire families, he started a long trek from their original base on Thistle Mountain to the old imperial city of Nanjing, located in the prosperous Lower Yangzi region. Here they established their Heavenly Capital in 1853.

However, the history of China in that era did not conduce to these peaceful pursuits. Law and order were breaking down in the already remote and loosely governed regions of Guangxi in which the group flourished. The Opium War between Great Britain and the Qing government began in 1839. When it ended in 1842, western access to Chinese ports was greatly expanded and the Chinese government was humiliated. The cities of the central Chinese coast were more affected by the war than was the more southerly Canton, whose magistrate contrived to maintain an uneasy truce with the British.

In 1856, a terrible power struggle came to a climax, in which Hong had one of his rivals killed, and thousands of his followers put to the sword. By the time of their final defeat in 1864, large parts of China had been thrown into chaos and tens of millions had died of war, hunger or disease.

Primarily,  story of God’s Chinese Son, narrates us the story about Heavenly Kingdom. It tells us a story about the perspective of  Hong Xiuquan and his two followers that claimed to have an immediate contact with God and Jesus Christ on their religious belief and practices.

Moreover, the author makes full use of missionary reports on Hong Xiuquan’s beliefs, as well as of Hong’s poetry and of his annotations and emendations to the Bible. This last type of source has been little used until now, maybe because we who have been born and raised in a Bible culture tend to do away with Hong’s very personal interpretations as erratic rambling, rather than seeing them as a relevant source of information on Hong’s mentality. By adducing rich contextual materials,  is able to give us a lively and well-informed inside account of Hong Xiuquan and his closest followers.

In addition, the author also has illustrated that it is only by further investigating the cultural and religious context of Hong Xiuquan, that we can to expand our understanding of the Heavenly Kingdom movement.

Moreover,  () has also focuses on the figure of the underworld king Yanluo and describes the underworld in some detail, since Yanluo featured prominently in Hong’s original vision as a major threat to mankind. However, the importance of the seal and the sword as demon-repelling objects, as well as the overall exorcist task that is assigned to Hong in his vision, () all point towards another interpretation. The seal and the sword are important exorcist objects of the Daoist priest. Exorcism normally plays no role in underworld iconography, except when Daoist priests visit the underworld “to destroy the fortress of hell” and enable deceased souls to gain safe passage through the underworld towards a better incarnation. In Hakka culture in Guangdong province where Hong originated, it was the custom for adults to be initiated in a Daoist exorcist tradition. This custom lasted into the twentieth century. Hong Xiuquan, not of elite background himself, could easily have taken part in this tradition directly or as a spectator. That he was well-acquainted with local religious lore as such is clear.

Further,  only mentions indigenous messianic traditions very briefly in his Foreword, () but otherwise devotes little attention to them. They may have been more important than he makes them out to be. In order to more clearly understand the specific brand of Heavenly Kingdom messianism in which demons are seen as the source of all evil, Qing demonological messianic traditions should have been examine more closely that could have provided a source for it. In fact, such traditions circulated widely in southern China. They specified a city specifically the Nanjing as a place of refuge compare the trek to Nanjing by the Heavenly Kingdom. The principal eschatological threats were defined in terms of demons including barbarians, one frequently mentioned saviour descended from the late Ming dynasty’s imperial house which had its first capital in Nanjing, and finally they believed in a mysterious general coming from the West which is also an element in Heavenly Kingdom expectations, discussed for the first time by  ().

Furthermore, there is a possibility that the messianic fervor of the Heavenly Kingdom made them interpret origin myths of southern Chinese kinship, social and ethnic groups in the reverse. However, in these myths, the origin of various groups is frequently explained in terms of descent from a previous dynasty either the imperial house or its loyal servants or as a long trek from some place in the north of China. Thus, the Hakkas to whom Hong himself belonged claim to have migrated from the north sometime during the Tang dynasty. A very widespread minority in Guangdong and Guangxi provinces were the Yao, who believed that they had come from a sacred place in the neighbourhood of Nanjing.

 

 

 

 

 

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