General Tso and His Muskteers(ii): Taiping Rebellion

Among Tso Tsung-t’ang’s dearest friends was not only Zeng Guofan, the founder of the Xiang Army, but also Li Hung-chang, who joined them in initiating the Western Affairs Movement¹. Unlike the other two, Li wasn’t from Hunan—he came from Hefei, Anhui Province, which at the time belonged to Luzhou Prefecture. He was born on February 15, 1823, making him an Aquarius. According to ChatGPT, Aquarians are known for independent thought, reason, and vision. They tend to prize intellect, seek progress, and come off as a bit aloof—yet firm in their convictions, drawn to novelty, and inclined toward pragmatic reform. Both my parents are Aquarians. Based on what I know of them, that may be true—but it’s only one side of the story. ChatGPT conveniently left out how strange Aquarians can be.

Unlike his two friends, Li passed the provincial exam at 19, and at 24 became a jinshi², earning entry to the Hanlin Academy³ as a junior compiler. He began his career in the literary tradition, studying under Zeng Guofan. In some ways, the situation hasn’t changed: those who fail the exam often end up teaching those who pass. The imperial exams were just one path—no need to take them as destiny. That holds true even now. Zeng later appointed him to command in the Xiang Army, and soon after, Li raised his own funds and established the Huai Army⁴ in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, which he led in suppressing the Taiping Rebellion⁵, the Nian Rebellion⁶, and uprisings in the northwest. His Huai Army would become one of the late Qing’s most formidable regional forces.

The Taiping Rebellion was a peasant uprising of unprecedented scale, and one of the bloodiest civil wars in Chinese—or world—history. It was led by a man named Hong Xiuquan⁷, who launched his rebellion in Guangxi and seized Nanjing, renaming it Tianjing⁸, or “Heavenly Capital.” For over a decade, the Taiping regime resisted the Qing court, only to be eventually crushed by Tso Tsung-t’ang and his comrades. The rebellion erupted from deep social tensions, worsened by the Qing’s loss of legitimacy following the First Opium War⁹.

In the mid-Qing period, land was increasingly concentrated in the hands of landlords and local elites. Smallholders were driven to ruin, forced to become tenant farmers or hired laborers, or else drifted as landless migrants. Tenant farmers, lacking land of their own, cultivated plots leased from landlords. A large share—often half or more—of their harvest was paid as rent, usually in rice or wheat, rarely in coin. Typical arrangements gave landlords sixty percent, tenants forty. Though not slaves, tenant farmers lived with little dignity or protection. With most of their crop claimed by others, they had scant means to save or rise. Many families remained trapped in this status across generations.

Hired laborers were in even direr straits: unable to lease land, they worked for wages in others’ fields. Their incomes were low, their lives precarious, and their social status near the bottom. Ruined peasants, having nowhere else to turn, formed secret societies and brotherhoods—fertile ground for rebellion.

Though the Qing state promised reforms like “consolidating land and head taxes,”¹⁰ local officials piled on levies of their own—temporary surtaxes, “clean governance stipends,” endless pretexts to extract silver. Officials reported fake personnel to skim off salaries, withheld soldiers’ pay, and set up illegal tolls. Those unable to pay were jailed or had their homes seized. Resentment ran deep. When the Taiping rebels rose, their slogan was “Enforce Heaven’s will, deliver the people from fire and water.” Many commoners preferred their uncertain promises to the certainty of Qing oppression. Hong Xiuquan came from Guangxi, where Hakka migrants¹¹ and native locals had long clashed in violent rivalry. Many early Taiping followers were Hakka, a fact that shaped the rebellion’s early energy and cohesion.

What’s especially curious is that Hong didn’t just launch a rebellion—he founded a new religion: the God Worshipping Society¹², inspired by Christianity. Hong was from a poor family and had failed the imperial exams multiple times. In 1837, at age 23, after another failed attempt, he suffered a mental collapse and fell into a prolonged delirium.

In that dream, he claimed to have ascended to heaven, where he received divine revelation. He was led by angels to a golden palace, majestic and radiant, guarded by legions of heavenly soldiers. There he met the “Heavenly Father” and the “Heavenly Elder Brother.” The former, an old man with white hair, called himself Shangdi¹³—God. The latter, a young man, was named Jesus, and said he was Hong’s elder brother. The Heavenly Father bestowed on him a golden sword and seal, commanding him to “rid the world of demons”—meaning Buddhist and Daoist idols, ancestral tablets, and the Qing emperor himself. He also reproached Hong for not having followed the true way sooner, and sent him back to Earth to spread the faith. When Hong awoke, he felt chosen: a divine emissary charged with saving China and restoring paradise to the world.

It wasn’t until 1843, after reading Good Words to Admonish the Age by Chinese Christian preacher Liang Fa¹⁴, that Hong began to identify his “Heavenly Father” and “Heavenly Brother” with the Christian God and Jesus. From there, he constructed a hybrid belief system: he was Jesus’ younger brother, Shangdi was the true God, all other deities were demons. What he had experienced was not a dream, but a revelation. He began proselytizing in Guangdong and Guangxi, building a following among the landless, the dispossessed, and the Hakka poor.

The movement denounced idol worship and old superstitions—no incense, no ancestor rites, no feng shui. They smashed temples, burned shrines, destroyed spirit tablets. Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism were denounced as the “Three Demons.” The Qing emperor was “the Great Demon.” The call was for total eradication of the old ways. In terms of morality, the Society promoted frugality and discipline: no gambling, no alcohol, no opium. Though men and women were segregated, gender equality was emphasized. Concubinage was condemned. Literacy was encouraged, family virtue praised, mutual aid idealized.

But the God Worshipping Society was never just a religion—it was a militarized, theocratic movement. Hong declared himself the Heavenly King¹⁵, with five subordinate kings—East, West, South, North, and Wing—each holding both political and spiritual authority. Believers had to join the army or administration, follow divine edicts, study doctrine, and participate in mass rituals. Teachings were delivered through “Heavenly Edicts,” “Royal Proclamations,” and “Ritual Codes,” combining Confucian formalism with Christian vocabulary and revolutionary intent. What emerged was not a church, but a full-fledged religious-political-military state.

Notes:

¹ The Western Affairs Movement (also known as the Self-Strengthening Movement, c. 1861–1895) was a state-led effort to modernize China by adopting Western technology while preserving Confucian values.

² Jinshi (進士): The highest academic degree in the imperial examination system, conferring eligibility for elite state posts.

³ The Hanlin Academy (翰林院) was an elite scholarly institution of imperial China, serving as a think tank and talent pool for high government offices.

⁴ The Huai Army (淮军) was a regional military force founded by Li Hung-chang, distinct from the Xiang Army and funded through local resources.

⁵ The Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864) was a massive civil war against the Qing dynasty led by Hong Xiuquan, resulting in over 20 million deaths.

⁶ The Nian Rebellion (1851–1868) was another large-scale uprising in northern China, often occurring alongside the Taiping Rebellion.

⁷ Hong Xiuquan (洪秀全) was the leader of the Taiping Rebellion and founder of the God Worshipping Society.

⁸ Tianjing (天京) was the Taiping capital, formerly Nanjing.

⁹ The First Opium War (1839–1842) resulted in Qing defeat and the cession of Hong Kong to Britain, eroding the dynasty’s authority.

¹⁰ “Tanding rumu” (摊丁入亩) and “diding guibing” (地丁归并) were Qing tax consolidation policies, widely abused in practice.

¹¹ The Hakka are a Han Chinese subgroup with a distinct dialect and migration history, often marginalized in southern China.

¹² The God Worshipping Society (拜上帝会) was a Christian-inspired religious movement founded by Hong Xiuquan.

¹³ Shangdi (上帝) is a traditional Chinese term for a supreme deity, adopted by Chinese Christians as a translation for “God.”

¹⁴ Liang Fa (梁发) was one of the first Chinese Protestant evangelists; his tract Good Words to Admonish the Ageinfluenced Hong Xiuquan.

¹⁵ The Heavenly King (天王) was the title assumed by Hong Xiuquan as both political and spiritual ruler of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

Recommended Readings:

1. For an overview of the Western Affairs Movement, see Mary C. Wright, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T’ung-Chih Restoration, 1862–1874 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957).

2. Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 155–60.

3. Wolfgang Franke, The Reform and Abolition of the Traditional Chinese Examination System (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 112.

4. David Pong, “The Huai Army and Its Principal Commanders,” Modern Asian Studies 30, no. 4 (1996): 993–1028.

5. Jonathan D. Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 3–25.

6. Mark Levene, The Crisis of Genocide, Volume 1: The European Rimlands 1912–1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 29–30. (For comparative civil war casualties.)

7. Thomas H. Reilly, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 45–67.

8. Spence, God’s Chinese Son, 142.

9. Julia Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (London: Picador, 2011), 183–200.

10. Madeleine Zelin, The Magistrate’s Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth-Century Ch’ing China(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 210–15.

11. Melissa J. Brown, Is Taiwan Chinese? The Impact of Culture, Power, and Migration on Changing Identities(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 42.

12. Reilly, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, 87–102.

13. Daniel H. Bays, A New History of Christianity in China (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 36.

14. Liang Fa, Good Words to Admonish the Age, trans. Carl T. Smith (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2003 [originally published 1832]).

15. Spence, God’s Chinese Son, 287–305.