page_title: Taiping Rebellion
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Taiping Rebellion / History / Origins
context_page_description: The Taiping Rebellion, which is also known as the Taiping Civil War or the Taiping Revolution, was a massive rebellion or civil war that was waged in China from 1850 to 1864 between the established Qing dynasty and the theocratic Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.
  Commanded by Hong Xiuquan, the self-proclaimed brother of Jesus Christ, the goals of the Taipings were religious, nationalist, and political in nature; they sought the conversion of the Chinese people to the Taiping's syncretic version of Christianity, the overthrow of the ruling Manchus, and a wholesale transformation and reformation of the state. Rather than simply supplanting the ruling class, the Taipings sought to upend the moral and social order of China. To that end, they established the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom as an oppositional state based in Tianjing and gained control of a significant part of southern China, eventually expanding to command a population base of nearly 30 million people.
  For more than a decade, the Taiping occupied and fought across much of the mid and lower Yangtze valley.
context_section_description: Qing-dynasty China during the early to mid-19th century suffered a series of natural disasters, economic problems and defeats by Western powers, in particular the humiliating defeat in 1842 by the British Empire in the First Opium War. Farmers were heavily overtaxed, rents were rising, and peasants were deserting their lands in droves.  These problems were further exacerbated by a trade imbalance caused by the large-scale illicit import of opium.  Banditry was becoming more common, as were secret societies and self-defense units, all of which led to an increase in small-scale warfare.
  Meanwhile, the population of China had increased rapidly, nearly doubling between 1766 and 1833, while the amount of cultivated land was stable. The government, commanded by ethnic Manchus, had become increasingly corrupt. Anti-Manchu sentiments were strongest in southern China among the Hakka community, a Han Chinese subgroup.  Meanwhile, Christianity was beginning to make inroads in China.
  In 1837 Hong Xiuquan, a Hakka from a poor village in Guangdong, once again failed the imperial examination, frustrating his ambition to become a scholar-official in the civil service. He returned home, fell sick and was bedridden for several days, during which he experienced mystical visions. In 1843, after carefully reading a pamphlet he had received years before from a Protestant Christian missionary, Hong declared that he now understood that his vision meant that he was the younger brother of Jesus and that he had been sent to rid China of the "devils", including the corrupt Qing government and Confucian teachings.  In 1847 Hong went to Guangzhou, where he studied the Bible with Issachar Jacox Roberts, an American Baptist missionary. Roberts refused to baptize him and later stated that Hong's followers were "bent on making their burlesque religious pretensions serve their political purpose."
  Soon after Hong began preaching across Guangxi in 1844, his follower Feng Yunshan founded the God Worshipping Society, a movement which followed Hong's fusion of Christianity, Daoism, Confucianism and indigenous millenarianism, which Hong presented as a restoration of the ancient Chinese faith in Shangdi.  The Taiping faith, says one historian, "developed into a dynamic new Chinese religion ... Taiping Christianity".  The movement at first grew by suppressing groups of bandits and pirates in southern China in the late 1840s, then suppression by Qing authorities led it to evolve into guerrilla warfare and subsequently a widespread civil war.  Eventually, two other God Worshippers claimed to possess the ability to speak as members of the "Celestial Family", The Father in the case of Yang Xiuqing and Jesus Christ in the case of Xiao Chaogui.
caption: A drawing of Hong Xiuquan, dating from about 1860.
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