From 1853 to 1864, the New Jerusalem was the capital of a real empire that some believed would take over all of China. It didn’t happen.
by Massimo Introvigne
Part 4 of 5. Read part 1, part 2, and part 3.
After they took Nanjing in 1853, the Taiping had a believable Heavenly Kingdom, with a major Chinese city as their capital. Hong Xiuquan (1814–1864), self-proclaimed younger son of God and brother of Jesus Christ (but with no claim, as we have seen in the previous articles, of being God himself) reigned supreme there in a former imperial palace, dressed like an emperor.
Initially, he continued in Nanjing the practice of keeping women and men of the Taiping living in separate quarters, including husbands and wives. They can meet, but without touching, and keeping a distance. Sexual intercourse, again even between spouses, was punished with the death penalty. The prostitutes and homosexuals of Nanjing, of whom there was no shortage, if caught, were also executed, and the same punishment was inflicted on the prostitutes’ clients. The separation went so far that shops were divided. There were shops for women and separate shops for men.
The rule of separation from the opposite sex did not apply to Hong himself who, by the count regarded by historians as most reliable, took eighty-eight wives, but in addition had easy access to virtually all of the some 2,000 women living in his royal palace. He prescribed that the women should carry him in a palanquin, feed, wash, and keep warm their Heavenly King, obey all his orders, and always smile.
Jealousy was one of the crimes leading the women to be publicly beheaded. For small faults there were lashes, and the women should keep smiling and praising Hong while the punishment was administered. Repeating the same fault, crying, or stopping smiling, led again to be beheaded. Other people who should be “instantly beheaded,” Hong prescribed, were those who would gossip about Hong’s private life, how many wives and concubines he had, and what he did with them.
Rather than denounced as a sexual predator, Hong has been hailed in both nationalist and Communist historiography as a proto-feminist, because he prohibited the common Chinese practice of binding the feet of the women to keep them small (something his ethnic group Hakka did not do), and allowed women to serve in his Kingdom’s bureaucracy and his army, including in the top positions. Some became generals, including Hong’s own sister.
The Taiping are also often considered proto-Communists by both Chinese and Western Marxists because they polled their properties together, and redistributed wealth and land in a more or less equalitarian manner. They quoted the Bible rather than a social imperative of equality, and historian Carl Kilcourse has warned that the real extent of redistribution in Nanjing should not be exaggerated. Apart from the lavish luxury of Hong and his court, Taiping ethics exhorted to respect the traditional social hierarchies, and did not proclaim that a peasant and a scholar should be treated as equal.
Since the Taiping’s raison-d’être was to restore pure monotheism, Taoist and Buddhist temples were burned to the ground. Significantly, the Taiping recognized the Muslims as fellow monotheists, and let their mosques in Nanjing alone. As for the Christians, including the Catholic community in Nanjing, they were told that they should subscribe to the Taiping non-Nicaean creed regarding Jesus as a creature and not as God (and Hong as Jesus’ brother), otherwise they will be beheaded. It seems, however, that those who refused, including almost all Catholics, were not executed, and instead accepted to include in their services versions of the Taiping prayers they found more or less compatible with their faith.
One reason the Taiping were comparatively tolerant with Christians is they did not want to antagonize the Western powers, who had appointed themselves as protectors of the Christian communities, and in fact hoped they would support their fight against the Qing. Documents show that this was seriously considered by the British, who disliked the Qing, but when they started corresponding with Hong and his courts they disliked the Taiping’s theological ramblings even more, and regarded them as evidence that they were not reliable. The fact that by mistake the Taiping opened fire on the ship of a British envoy did not help either.
Hong also believed he could conquer all of China without Western help. He sent armies to seize Beijing and Shanghai. They came very close to succeed, but ultimately failed due to a variety of factors, including weather (they were not equipped for an unusually rigid winter), the prowess of some Qing generals, and some help the Qing received from Western powers.
Sun Yat-Sen (1866–1925), the nationalist leader and first President of the Republic of China, and a great admirer of the Taiping, believed that the Heavenly Kingdom fell mostly because of internecine struggles. These are largely attributed to Yang Xiuqing (1823?–1856) who, as mentioned in the previous article, channeled God the Father. As Yan Xiuqing, he was a lesser “king” subordinated to the Heavenly King, Hong. But when he spoke for God the Father he was superior to Hong. In Nanjing, Yan Xiuqing became increasingly conscious of his power. He chastised Hong for his cruelty and for how he treated his women, and even ordered him whipped, although the penalty was graciously cancelled after Hong had accepted to submit to it.
Speaking as God the Father, Yang commanded Hong to reintroduce elements of the Chinese tradition in the Kingdom, not to further use the Old and New Testaments, who were full of errors (which persuaded Hong to prepare amended versions of them) and to finally allow husbands and wives to sleep together (which was done). He publicly humiliated two senior generals in the Taiping army, Wei Changhui (1823–1856) and Qin Rigang (1821–1856). They prevailed upon Hong to have Yan and his followers eliminated. On September 1, 1856, Wei and Chin with their armies surrounded Yan’s palace and killed him and his family, and in the following days slaughtered thousands of his followers. News of the carnage disgusted another senior Taiping general, Shi Dakai (1831–1863), who was far away from Nanjing at that time and believed this was the beginning of the end for the Heavenly Kingdom. He marched on the Heavenly capital and in turn arrested and killed Wei and Chin.
When the dust settled, Hong could believe that he might safely resume his old antics, with Yan out the way, although presented to the devotees by the Heavenly King as a saintly figure to be venerated. Hong was also encouraged by the arrival in Nanjing of his cousin and early associate Hong Rengan (1822–1864), whom he had not seen since 1849 and had spent time with Christian missionaries in Hong Kong, and of Issachar Jacox Roberts (1802–1871), the very American Baptist missionary who had introduced him to the Bible in 1847. Although Roberts eventually left Nanjing when he understood he would not convert Hong to his variety of Baptism, conversations with the missionary helped the Heavenly King in developing new theological theories, including that he, Hong, was also the return to earth of Melchizedek.
Hong also acquired a new competent general in the person of Li Xiucheng (1823–1864), who in 1860 almost took Shanghai, and was stopped only by a Western intervention that made it clear that at least Britain and France (and the United States, although unofficially, through “volunteers”) had decided, perhaps reluctantly, to save the Qing empire from the Taiping.
Foreign intervention was not the only reason the Heavenly Kingdom fell—at last, the Qing had found some competent generals themselves—but was an important factor. One after the other, the cities and regions controlled by the Taiping were recaptured by the Qing, with some Western help. Shi Dakai surrendered in Sichuan in mid-June 1863 and was executed in the cruelest way known to the Qing, through slow dismemberment. Thousands of his soldiers were also killed.
Fatally, in the Spring of 1864, the Qing troops arrived in Nanjing and laid siege to the city. They closed all supply lines, and the Taiping trapped inside started dying of hunger. Hong told them to eat the Biblical manna, which he interpreted as consisting of blessed weeds. He gave the good example himself, but he was no expert of herbs, and some of those he ate were poisonous. Although fool play was also suspected, most probably this was what led Hong to his death on June 1, 1864.
He was succeeded by his son, Hong Tianguifu (1849–1864), who was only 14. Li Xiucheng remained in charge of the defense. Although regarded to this day as a military genius, there was not much Li could do. On July 19, 1864, the Qing launched the final assault to Nanjing. The city fell, twenty thousand Taiping were slaughtered in one day, and the leaders, including Li Xiucheng, and Hong Rengan and the young king Hong Tianguifu who had tried to escape and hide, were all hunted, arrested, and executed.
With the death of Hong Tianguifu, who was also executed by slow dismemberment on November 18, 1864, when he was not yet 15, the story of the Heavenly Kingdom came to an end. But its consequences will last for long, as we will see in the following article.