num_pages: 432
description: Whether read for its powerful account of the largest uprising in human history, or for its foreshadowing of the terrible convulsions suffered by twentieth-century China, or for the narrative power of a great historian at his best, God's Chinese Son must be read. At the center of this history of China's Taiping rebellion (1845-64) stands Hong Xiuquan, a failed student of Confucian doctrine who ascends to heaven in a dream and meets his heavenly family: God, Mary, and his older brother, Jesus. He returns to earth charged to eradicate the "demon-devils," the alien Manchu rulers of China. His success carries him and his followers to the heavenly capital at Nanjing, where they rule a large part of south China for more than a decade. Their decline and fall, wrought by internal division and the unrelenting military pressures of the Manchus and the Western powers, carry them to a hell on earth. Twenty million Chinese are left dead.
language: English
title: God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan
titlecomplete: God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan
characters: Feng Yunshan, Shi Dakai, Li Xiucheng, Wei Changhui, Hong Xiuquan, Xiao Chaogui, Hong Rengan, Yang Xiuqing
genres: China, Christianity, Historical, History, Religion, Asia, War, Biography, 19th Century, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 1126
publisher: W. W. Norton & Company