Jesus's Younger Brother: The Taiping War and the Men Who Saved the Qing

Act I: The Heavenly Kingdom (Review Question 4)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, "Taiping Rebellion," pp. 318–321. Reading-guide sentence (p. 318): "Like many of China's earlier insurrections, this one had its organizational base in an unorthodox religious sect."

A Hakka candidate and his vision

Hong Xiuquan (1814–1864) came from a Hakka farming family in Hua county, north of Guangzhou. The Hakka ("guest people") were Han Chinese who spoke their own dialect and had settled later than their Cantonese-speaking neighbors, often on poorer land; feuds between the two groups were common (slide D). Hong's family pinned its hopes on him. He sat the prefectural examination in Guangzhou in 1827, 1836, 1837 and 1843 and never passed. The odds were cruel: only about one candidate in a hundred passed at that level in a crowded province (slide C).¹

In 1836, in Guangzhou, Hong was handed a set of tracts, Good Words to Exhort the Age, by the Chinese Protestant convert Liang Fa. He glanced at them and set them aside. After his failure in 1837 he collapsed and lay ill for weeks, seeing visions: he was carried to heaven, given a new body, and met an old man with a golden beard who gave him a sword to slay demons, and a middle-aged man he called his elder brother (slide B). Six years later, after his fourth failure in 1843, his cousin Li Jingfang read the tracts. That reading was the catalyst that prompted Hong to reread carefully what he had only glanced at in 1836. The rereading produced a sudden interpretive connection: the old man was God the Father, the middle-aged man was Jesus, his elder brother, and he himself was God's second son, sent to rid China of demons (slide E).² In 1847 he spent about two months studying with the American Baptist missionary Issachar Roberts in Guangzhou, who declined to baptize him.

From preaching to an army

Hong and his early convert Feng Yunshan preached against idols, opium, alcohol and gambling. Feng built the God Worshippers' Society among Hakka charcoal burners, miners and farmers around Thistle Mountain (Zijingshan) in Guangxi (slide F). To the Qing state this was a heterodox sect, like the White Lotus groups of the 1790s (slide G). In 1848, while Hong was away, two local leaders began to speak in trance as divine voices: the charcoal burner Yang Xiuqing as God the Father and Xiao Chaogui as Jesus (slide H). Hong accepted their authority, a decision that would cost the movement dearly.

In 1850, as Hakka–Punti feuds and banditry spread, believers sold their property, pooled the proceeds in a common treasury and gathered at Jintian (slide I). Qing troops attacked and were beaten. In January 1851 Hong proclaimed the Taiping Tianguo, the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace (slide J). Men cut their queues and let their hair grow, so the Qing called them "long-haired rebels." The army moved north through Hunan, gaining recruits from miners, boatmen and secret-society members. Feng and Xiao were both killed in 1852. The Taipings took Wuchang in January 1853 and Nanjing on 19 March 1853, killing much of its Manchu garrison, and made it their Heavenly Capital (slide K).

In May 1853 a northern expedition under Lin Fengxiang and Li Kaifang marched toward Beijing. It reached the outskirts of Tianjin that autumn, then wintered in the cold of the North China plain without supplies. The Mongol prince Sengge Rinchen besieged its remnants; Lin was captured in March 1855 and Li in May 1855, and both were executed in Beijing (slide L).

The Taiping program

Ebrey's summary is careful: after taking Nanjing, "the Taipings announced plans for a utopian society based on the equalization of landholdings and the equality of men and women" (p. 318; slide M). The plan was the Land System of the Heavenly Dynasty (1853), which divided land by quality, pooled surpluses in common granaries and organized households into units of twenty-five families under a sergeant. It was never carried out across Taiping territory. In practice the Taipings collected taxes much as the Qing had, through existing landlords in many areas.

The program for women was more real but also stricter than it sounds. Footbinding was banned, women served in separate brigades and labor units, and in the early years in Nanjing husbands and wives were segregated by sex, even married couples (slide N). Ebrey states that "Women could take the civil service examinations" (p. 318). That rests on thin evidence, chiefly later stories about a woman named Fu Shanxiang; many historians doubt any women's examination was held. Hong's own palace kept dozens of consorts. Teach the Taiping record on women as a genuine break with Confucian norms, carried out by a regime that was also puritanical and autocratic.³

Missionaries were at first delighted by a Chinese movement that read the Bible, then repelled by a theology in which Hong was Christ's brother and Yang spoke as God. In Ebrey's words, they "quickly concluded that the Christian elements in Taiping doctrines were heretical" (pp. 318–319; slide O). Issachar Roberts went to Nanjing in 1860 at Hong's invitation and left early in 1862 denouncing his former student.

The leaders turn on each other

By 1856 Yang Xiuqing, the East King, ran the Taiping state, and he used his trances to discipline Hong himself. Ebrey's account of the crisis is: "After Yang claimed that God the Father insisted that Hong should be beaten for kicking one of Yang's concubines, Hong arranged to have Yang executed. The king entrusted with this task killed not only Yang and his family but also twenty thousand followers" (p. 319; slide S). Most historians date the beating episode to late 1853 and identify the immediate trigger in August 1856 as Yang's demand to be hailed "Ten Thousand Years," the title reserved for the sovereign. In September 1856 the North King, Wei Changhui, struck. Hong then had Wei executed, and the capable Wing King, Shi Dakai, left Nanjing with much of the army in 1857 and was eventually captured and executed in Sichuan in 1863. "In time," Ebrey writes, "the Taipings were weakened by internal dissension" (p. 319).

The movement revived under new leaders. Hong's cousin Hong Rengan, who had lived among missionaries in Hong Kong, reached Nanjing in 1859 and proposed railways, banks, newspapers and patents in his New Treatise on Aids to Administration. The generals Li Xiucheng (the Loyal King) and Chen Yucheng broke the Qing siege camps in 1860 and took Suzhou, the richest city of the lower Yangzi.⁴

The cost

Ebrey gives "some 20 to 30 million lives" for the Taiping war (p. 318), and calls the devastation caused by both sides "horrendous" (p. 321; slide T). Most deaths came from famine, disease and massacre rather than battle, and Qing forces killed as freely as the rebels. For comparison, the American Civil War, fought in the same years, killed about 620,000 to 750,000 people. Tobie Meyer-Fong's study of how survivors buried, counted and remembered the dead is the best guide to what such numbers meant on the ground.⁵

Act II: The Men Who Saved the Qing (Review Question 5)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 319–320. Reading-guide sentence (p. 320): "He recruited officers from among the Confucian-educated elite and had them recruit their own soldiers from among farmers in their region."

Zeng Guofan's Hunan Army

Zeng Guofan (1811–1872), a jinshi and a vice-minister in Beijing, was home in Hunan mourning his mother when the Taipings came through in 1852 (slide V). The court asked local gentry to raise militia. Zeng went further. He chose officers from among scholars he knew and trusted, and they recruited farmers from their own home districts, so that soldiers were bound to officers and officers to Zeng. He paid well, drilled hard and framed the war as a defense of Confucian civilization against a foreign creed. Ebrey's phrase for the result is "an essentially private army" (p. 320; slide W).⁶

Zeng also built a river navy of 240 war junks, because the Yangzi was the Taipings' highway (slide X). The war was slow. Zeng lost early battles and, after one defeat in 1854, tried to drown himself. He retook Wuchang in 1854, lost ground again, and only in September 1861 did his brother Zeng Guoquan take Anqing, the key to the middle Yangzi. Ebrey notes that Zeng "needed twelve years and 120,000 troops" to win (p. 320).

Money came from new sources. In 1853 the official Lei Yixian began taxing goods in transit near Yangzhou to pay his troops. This lijin (likin) tax spread across the empire and gave provincial commanders revenue the Board of Revenue in Beijing did not control.

Protégés and foreigners

Zeng's protégés extended the system (slide Y). Li Hongzhang raised the Huai Army from Anhui, and in 1862 Shanghai merchants paid for British steamers to carry it past Taiping territory to their city. Zuo Zongtang raised the Chu Army and retook Zhejiang. At Shanghai, Westerners now had a stake in Qing survival: the treaties of 1858–1860 (Lecture 3) depended on the dynasty. When the Taipings approached Shanghai in 1860 and again in 1862, in Ebrey's words "the Western residents organized counterattacks" (p. 319; slides O–P).

Shanghai's merchants, led by the banker Yang Fang, hired the American adventurer Frederick Townsend Ward in 1860 to raise a force of foreign mercenaries; he soon rebuilt it with Chinese soldiers under Western officers, armed and drilled in Western style. The court named it the Ever-Victorious Army in 1862. Ward was killed in September 1862 at Cixi, near Ningbo (slide Q). After a disastrous interlude under Henry Burgevine, the British officer Charles Gordon took command in 1863. When Suzhou surrendered in December 1863, Li Hongzhang had the surrendering Taiping leaders executed despite Gordon's guarantee of their safety, and Gordon was so furious that he briefly refused to serve (slide R). The Ever-Victorious Army was disbanded in May 1864. It mattered, but it never had more than a few thousand men. The Hunan and Huai armies won the war.⁷

The fall of Nanjing

Zeng Guoquan's army encircled Nanjing from 1862. Hong Xiuquan refused to abandon the city, telling his followers to eat "manna," and died on 1 June 1864, probably of illness. The city fell on 19 July 1864 and the victors massacred its defenders and looted it for days (slide Z). Ebrey's statement that "When Nanjing fell, none of the Taipings survived" (p. 321) is too strong. Li Xiucheng escaped with Hong's teenage son, was captured, wrote a long confession for Zeng Guofan and was executed in August. The young king reached Huzhou and joined Hong Rengan, who had been outside the capital when it fell; both were captured that autumn and executed in Nanchang in November 1864. Other Taiping armies fought on in the south until 1866.

Regionalism

Ebrey's long-term point (slide AA) is that military power shifted from the throne to regional leaders who controlled armies, revenue and patronage. The thesis goes back to Franz Michael and Stanley Spector, who traced a line from Zeng and Li to the warlords of the 1910s.⁸ Later scholars, notably Kwang-Ching Liu, qualified it: the court still appointed, transferred and dismissed governors-general; Zeng disbanded most of the Hunan Army after 1864; and loyal Han officials ran what Mary Wright called the Tongzhi Restoration.⁹ The safest formulation for students is that the Qing survived by depending on Han provincial leaders and their armies, and that this dependence grew until, after 1900, the center could no longer command them.

Pierian Spring: Fires Beyond the Taiping (Review Question 6)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, "Other Rebellions," p. 321. Reading-guide sentence: "With the transfer of armies to the interior to fight the Taipings and Nian rebels, uprisings also got out of hand in the northwest and southwest."

The Nian and the Yellow River

The Nian were mounted bands in the Huaibei region between the Huai and Yellow rivers, where poverty, salt smuggling and feuding had long bred armed groups (slide EE). Elizabeth Perry describes "predatory" and "protective" strategies of survival in this ecology: some villages raided, others fortified themselves, and the line between bandit and militia was thin.¹⁰ In 1855 the Yellow River broke its dikes at Tongwaxiang in Henan and shifted from its course south of the Shandong peninsula to one north of it, flooding a vast area and leaving the old channel dry (slide FF). Ebrey notes that many Nian raided seasonally, staying home to farm in summer and winter (p. 321). After 1864 former Taiping soldiers joined them (slide GG). The Nian killed the Mongol general Sengge Rinchen in Shandong in 1865. Zeng Guofan and then Li Hongzhang defeated them by blockading them behind rivers and fortifying villages; the last Nian armies were destroyed in 1868.

The southwest: Yunnan

In Yunnan, Han settlers and Hui (Chinese-speaking Muslims) fought over silver and copper mines (slide HH). In 1856 officials and Han militia massacred Muslims in and around Kunming. Du Wenxiu then made Dali the capital of a Muslim-led state that also included Han and other peoples; he took the title Sultan Suleiman (slide II). David Atwill stresses that this "Panthay" state was a multiethnic regional regime, not simply a Muslim holy war. The Qing retook Dali in early 1873, and Du took poison before he was executed.¹¹ Ebrey adds that the Qing won "only because it learned to play opposing factions of Muslims against each other" (p. 321).

The northwest: Shaanxi, Gansu and Xinjiang

In 1862 a Taiping force entered Shaanxi, and fighting between Han militia and Hui communities spread into a general war (slide JJ). Ebrey ties the northwest rising to Sufism, especially the New Teaching orders, and to long-standing Han–Muslim antagonism. She says that "By 1867 all of Gansu was in Muslim hands" (p. 321). That overstates: Lanzhou and other cities stayed in Qing hands, but much of the province was beyond Qing control. Zuo Zongtang arrived in 1868 and fought a war of sieges. At Jinjibao the Sufi leader Ma Hualong surrendered after a starvation siege and was executed in 1871 with many of his family. Suzhou (modern Jiuquan) fell in 1873. Zuo's campaigns were brutal, and he treated Sufi orders as heterodox sects (slide KK).¹²

Meanwhile, in Xinjiang, the Kokandi commander Yaqub Beg had built his own state from Kashgar after 1865, and Russia occupied the Ili valley in 1871. The court debated whether to spend on coastal defense, as Li Hongzhang argued, or on the inland frontier, as Zuo argued. Zuo won, marched west in 1876, and by early 1878 had retaken all of Xinjiang except Ili, which Russia returned under the Treaty of St. Petersburg (1881). Xinjiang became a province in 1884.¹³

The Black Flags

Ebrey writes that some Taiping armies relocated to Taiwan and Vietnam, and that in Vietnam they were known as the Black Flags (p. 321). The Black Flags were real and important, but their origin was different. Their leader, Liu Yongfu, came from the Guangxi insurgent bands of the 1850s and 1860s, associated with the Heaven and Earth Society and with Wu Yazhong's army. These bands were contemporaries of the Taiping, not Taiping units. Liu crossed into northern Vietnam around 1865, served the Vietnamese court, killed the French officer Francis Garnier near Hanoi in December 1873 and Henri Rivière in May 1883, and fought the French in the war of 1884–1885. There is no good evidence for Taiping armies relocating to Taiwan. The deck's slide MM now calls them rebels from Guangxi, separate from the Taiping; the difference from Ebrey is explained in the Corrections below.¹⁴

Corrections and Cautions

Notes

1. Jonathan D. Spence, God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996). On the examination odds, see Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). ↩

2. The standard narrative, based on Theodore Hamberg's The Visions of Hung-Siu-tshuen (1854), drawn from Hong Rengan, emphasizes that the conscious interpretive key locked in only in 1843. A subconscious or residual influence of the 1836 exposure on the content of the 1837 visions cannot be ruled out, however, because all detailed accounts of the visions are retrospective and filtered through later Christian interpretation. A claim that the tracts played no role whatsoever in 1837 is stronger than the evidence supports. See also Spence, God's Chinese Son. ↩

3. On the Land System and its limits, see Philip A. Kuhn, "The Taiping Rebellion," in John K. Fairbank, ed., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 264–317. Franz Michael with Chung-li Chang, The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents, 3 vols. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966–1971), translates the Land System and other Taiping texts. On women, see Spence, God's Chinese Son. ↩

4. Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2012), centers its narrative on Hong Rengan and on the British decision to intervene. ↩

5. Tobie Meyer-Fong, What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). Death-toll estimates vary widely because they rest on registered populations before and after the war; see also Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (1959). ↩

6. Philip A. Kuhn, Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796–1864 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), is the classic study of how gentry-led militia grew into Zeng's army. ↩

7. Richard J. Smith, Mercenaries and Mandarins: The Ever-Victorious Army in Nineteenth Century China (Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1978); Caleb Carr, The Devil Soldier: The Story of Frederick Townsend Ward (New York: Random House, 1992). ↩

8. Franz Michael, "Regionalism in Nineteenth-Century China," introduction to Stanley Spector, Li Hung-chang and the Huai Army: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Regionalism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964). ↩

9. Kwang-Ching Liu, "The Ch'ing Restoration," in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10, pp. 409–490; Mary C. Wright, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T'ung-chih Restoration, 1862–1874 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957). ↩

10. Elizabeth J. Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980). ↩

11. David G. Atwill, The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856–1873 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). ↩

12. Jonathan N. Lipman, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). ↩

13. Hodong Kim, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864–1877 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). ↩

14. Bradley Camp Davis, Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017). ↩

Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation

Jonathan D. Spence, God's Chinese Son (1996). The most readable account of Hong's life and visions, built from Taiping texts.

Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom (2012). The war's final years and the British decision to back the Qing, centered on Hong Rengan and Zeng Guofan.

Philip A. Kuhn, Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China (1970). How gentry militia became the armies that saved the dynasty; the foundation of the regionalism debate.

Philip A. Kuhn, "The Taiping Rebellion," Cambridge History of China, vol. 10 (1978). The best short scholarly overview.

Tobie Meyer-Fong, What Remains (2013). The war as experienced, mourned and remembered by survivors.

Elizabeth J. Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China (1980). The ecology of the Nian.

David G. Atwill, The Chinese Sultanate (2005); Jonathan N. Lipman, Familiar Strangers (1997); Hodong Kim, Holy War in China (2004). The three essential studies of the southwest, northwest and Xinjiang risings.

Bradley Camp Davis, Imperial Bandits (2017). The Black Flags and the borderland armies of Guangxi and Vietnam.