Taiping Rebellion

The smaller rebellions of the mid-Qing were a foreshadowing of the massive explosion of religious violence that broke out in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first and greatest of these events occurred in the mountainous southern province of Guangxi.

The unique beliefs and meteoric rise of the Taipings raise the ques­tions of how deeply religion shaped the movement and how violent was their religion. The initial attraction of the movement was clearly shaped by the difficult conditions of life in mountainous Guangxi, a rough area of illegal mines, timber forests and ethnic division (Hong himself was a minority Hakka), where state influence and protection were only occasionally in evidence. Religious brotherhoods thrived in areas like this, and the appeal to the downtrodden remained a prominent attrac­tion as the movement advanced. Peasant grievances were immediately reflected in the utopian promises that the Taipings made: redistribution of land, food to all who labour, the expulsion of the foreign Qing dynasty and restoration of the just and natural order. Such promises were stock features of peasant rebellions as early the second century CE, when an identically named millennial kingdom was established in the south-west.^[65] At the same time, Hong's unique religious ideas per­vaded the movement's numerous public statements. While still on Zijing Mountain, the movement banned a series of vices including opium, concubinage and prostitution, as well as women's footbinding, a Han Chinese custom that was not shared by the Hakka. More important, the place of Hong as the Heavenly Sovereign and of the movement as the legitimate government of China was always portrayed in terms of dispelling evil, punishing demons and serving the will of the Heavenly Father.

Our Chinese empire has now received the great favor of the Great God who has ordered our Sovereign, the Heavenly King, to rule; how can the occupa­tion and prolonged misrule of the Manchu barbarians be permitted to continue? You gentlemen have for generations resided in China; who among you is not a Child of God? If you can uphold Heaven in destroying the demons... you shall be a hero without compare in the mortal world, and in the heaven you shall receive glory without bounds. If instead you cling to your delusions, protect the false and reject the true, in life you will be a barbarian and in death a barbarian demon. Between obedience and disobedience there is a great principle.^[66]

The Taiping advance was not just a military assault, it was also a chastisement of the institutions of the Qing. Once in power, the Taiping state maintained its face of uncompromising puritanism, but also became rent by internal division and a constant need for resources. As a result, the ‘Great Peace' was anything but peaceful. The Taiping capital was beset by struggles between the subordinate commanders known as the ‘Five Kings', and devolved into an ‘arena of carnage, greed and paranoia'. Suspicious of a plot by the ‘Eastern King' Yang Xiuqing, Hong ordered an attack on Yang and his entourage, initiating two weeks of slaughter in which 20,000 were killed. Foreign observers were initially intrigued by reports of a Christian rebellion, but such interest was short-lived. Beyond the problem of Hong's own beliefs, it became clear that the Taiping state was bad for business. Unwilling to accept the Taiping ban on the opium trade, British and French representatives in Shanghai quickly turned against the movement, even going as far as to provide the support of mercenary troops.

The death total of the rebellion is extremely difficult to calculate. The conservative estimate of 20 million people killed would make it by far the deadliest event of the nineteenth century, vastly more so than either the Napoleonic Wars or the American Civil War. But the real number may

Figure 2.1 Qing troops storming the Taiping capital of Nanjing. The lower left-hand comer shows the tactic of driving cattle set on fire to burst the city gates.

have been much higher. The siege and capture of fortified cities was often followed by an orgy of recriminatory slaughter of the civilian population, and some important cities such as Anqing changed hands multiple times. Beyond the violence of the rebellion and its suppression, the destruction of supply routes, market towns and rice fields decimated an already precarious coun­tryside, sending waves of refugees (and with them an outbreak of cholera) into safe havens such as Shanghai. The combined effect of these disasters completely depopulated vast swaths of one of China's most productive agricultural regions. In 1855, Guangde County in southern Anhui had a population of nearly 310,000. Ten years later, just over 5,000 remained, and within a generation newly arrived migrants would come to make up five out of six of the county's residents. Even with repopulation policies in place, the region was slow to recover. The 1953 population of four central provinces (Zhejiang, Anhui, Jiangsu and Jiangxi) was still nearly 20 million lower than it had been a century earlier.^[68]