The Smallest Possible Difference

[Geordie]

Good luck sorting out China!

I do hope I don't make people think there's an update, but I've been away for a while and just thought I'd pop into one of my favourite Timelines in my whole time on this board.

[wolf_brother]

Originally Posted by Geordie

Good luck sorting out China!

I do hope I don't make people think there's an update, but I've been away for a while and just thought I'd pop into one of my favourite Timelines in my whole time on this board.

Well, I promise it'll be one of my larger chapters, if not the largest. To put it in perspective, Chapter #1 of Book One was seven pages long - this update is currently sitting at nineteen pages, and I'm not even finished with it yet.

EDIT: Just posted it - twenty-nine pages long!

[wolf_brother]

[Spacing]

"China is like a sleeping giant. And when she awakes, she shall astonish the world."
- commonly attributed to Napoléon Bonaparte

Wadcliff, John. The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 10. Cambridge University Press.

... The treaty system interlude in modern China thus occurred during a century of 'dynastic interregnum' when the central power of the Qing declined, political disorder ensued, and a central power was by degrees re-established under a radically different system. This was combined with the political activation of the rural and urban masses and the widespread activation of modern technology and economic growth. In this broad perspective the century from the 1840s to the 1940s saw the height of Western imperialist penetration of China as well as the Chinese people's increasingly revolutionary response t it. Under the treaty system, China's sovereignty was increasingly impaired; with the rise of nationalism in the Taiping Revolution and the later Restoration period, followed by revolution again, it was reasserted. In this process of challenge and response, the treaty territories became the main foci, though at the start they were merely peripheral centers of coastal trade and foreign contact. The formative decades of the treaty system in the 1840s and 1850s must therefore be seen as the opening phase of the intricate and portentous web of influence by the Western powers on Chinese life...

...One principal task incumbent upon present-day students of mid-nineteenth century Chinese-Western relations is to keep realistically in view the 'West' with which China had to regard. The Western powers of the day were still primarily agricultural and from today's point of view undeveloped in terms of industry, transport, communications, literacy, medicine, public health, and the degree of democratic participation in public life. Britain, for example, had a population of twenty-two million by 1850. But its government and public sphere were dominated by less than 500 aristocratic families, who owned about half of the total acreage, while some 1,300 gentry and landed commoners owned much of the rest. Despite the Reform Bill of 1832, Britain at mid-century was still a country run by a wealthy nobility who had skillfully co-opted the new leaders of business, while rapid population growth steadily added to the impoverished mass of landless and vote-less laborers on the farms and in the new city slums...

... British military power in China was, from the first, Anglo-Indian. The war against the Afghans in 1839-42 overshadowed the war in China. Warfare against the Sikhs in 1845-8 continued to dominate British policy. Before coming to China in 1841 Sir Henry Pottinger had received a baronetcy for his work in Sind, which was annexed in 1843. In short, by the time the British used force in China their style and values had been shaped by successful experience in India. They came as a ruling elite, superior, self-confident, often arrogant, thoroughly convinced that the secret of power was prestige - the reputation of having power in reserve, and being ready to use it when necessary. They were also accustomed to developing their trade by dealing with local aristocrats and finding collaborators among them...

... One secret of the British success in China was the tacit community of interest between the British and Qing administrators (1). Each side represented a conquering power that had learned to rule its conquests by qualities of moral commitment and administrative skill. The superior moral prestige of the ruler of course lay at the heart of imperial Confucianism, the ideology of the Qing state. The treaty settlement of 1842 was thus a mondus vivendi worked out between representatives of two aristocratic empires...

Hanes III, Frank. The Opium Trade. Chicago: Source Books Ink., 2002.

... Tragically, the Treaty of Nanjing represented only a truce, not an end to hostilities between China and the West. Amid all the terms and conditions, no mention was made of opium. Officially the narcotic remained illegal to use and import. Unofficially, it continued to be big business for European and American merchants, and provided the tinder for the Taiping Revolution. During the years between the Opium War and the revolution, the opium octopus spread its tentacles from the coastal cities, where it had previously been contained, to the interior of China though the newly opened port of Shanghai and the Yangtze River, which proved to be a veritable railway for the drug's infiltration of the hinterland...

... While the Chinese were literally and physically addicted to the drug, the British government and various western merchants who engaged in trade with China were addicted to it financially. The grand visions of northern England's wide-fabricated cotton textiles penetrating China as thoroughly as opium continued to be a chimera. The Chinese, as they had done since the 16th century, continued to favor their homespun cloth from China's own impressive textile industry, and largely failed to purchase British or Western wares. On the other hand, Europe couldn't get enough of Chinese silk, and tea. Together with Britain benign addiction to the caffeine in tea (unlike opium dens, afternoon tea didn't degenerate in two weeks of intoxication and lost potential work suffered by opium smokers and the Chinese state), silk contributed in an outflow of silver from the West to East. In 1857 alone, at the height of the Taiping Revolution, the British paid the Chinese powers some £15 million for silk and tea. Even with the growing popularity of opium, the Chinese only spent some £7 million on the drug, while just £1.5 million was spent on cotton and £2 million for British manufactures, which left Britain owing China £4.5 million. And the Chinese would only accept payment in silver bullion...

... After the war the opium business came to be known as the Poison Trade, an accurate description of the drug's effects on its users. However an even more odious form of commerce was just beginning; the Pig Trade, the 'pigs' being coolie hired, or often kidnapped, for indentured service overseas. Despite the fact that the slave trade had been outlawed by Britain since 1807, and well into the late 19th century the British Navy continued to police the coasts of Africa for slavers, the treatment and transport of these forced laborers did not much differ from African slavery. The term 'shanghaied' comes the fact that many coolies were drugged and put on crowded, filthy ships with such high mortality rates that on average half the passengers died en route to their destinations. While turning a blind eye to the opium trade, representatives of the British government were horrified by the Pig Trade. John Bowring, Britain's top official in Guangzhou, wrote a graphic letter of complain in January 1852 to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Malmesbury, decrying the "iniquities scarcely exceeding those practiced on the African coast and in the middle passage have not been wanting... the jails of China have been emptied to supply 'labor' to British colonies and the Americas." Bowring, who had seen such an operation in action first hand, went on to describe "hundreds of coolies gathered together in the narrow, filthy barracoons, stripped naked and branded with the letter C (California), P (Peru), or S (Sandwich Islands) on their breasts, according to their destination." British opium merchants detested their confreres, because the distribution of the drug needed the goodwill of the Chinese to carry on their business, and the coolie trade represented a gnawing loss of face and an assault on Chinese pride (2). Ironically, back in Britain, the opium merchants and their faith-based opposition to the trade found a common enemy in the Pig Trade, leading the two powerful lobbies to briefly combine in Parliament to secure the passage of the Chinese Passenger Act in 1855, which, while not outlawing the trade in coolies, codified the conditions in which they were to be transported - codes that were, much like the various Imperial Edicts or Acts on the matter of opium, thoroughly ignored by Western merchants in Asia...

... Meanwhile, the tentacles of opium continued to spread throughout China, reading all the way to the top rungs of society. In 1850, the Daoguang Emperor died, and, in his will, begged forgiveness for agreeing to the shameful Treaty of Nanjing. His fourth son and successor, Aisin-Gioro I Ju, was nineteen when he ascended to the throne as the Xianfeng Emperor. Unlike his industrious father, Xianfeng cared little for government, and although married to a Manchu princess, became obsessed with one of his concubines, Cixi, to the point where he spent most of his time in bed with her, trading puffs on an opium pipe. After bearing his only son, Cixi was elevated to the rank of co-impress with the title of Empress of the Western Palace - Xianfeng's wife, Empress Ci'an, being Empress of the Eastern Palace. As the mother of the heir, Cixi soon wielded enormous influence in the Imperial Court. After Xianfeng's death she attempted a palace coup that resulted in...

... Meanwhile, other disasters, both man-made and natural, also afflicted the Manchu dynasty and the people of China. High government office, which previously had been only obtainable by passing rigorous examinations that guaranteed the competence of the ruling class, now became available to anyone who had £800. The mediocrities, although rich, who came to power as a result of this secular simony proved unequal to the responsibilities they had purchased, and the once industrious and highly educated Chinese bureaucracy began to rapidly decay. Adding to China's woes during the chaotic lull between the Opium War and Taiping Revolution, in 1856 the Yellow River overflowed and destroyed thousands of acres of rice paddies...

Yellow River

... The Yellow River, or Huang He, is the second-longest river in China after the Yangtze and the sixth-longest in the world at an estimated 5,464 kilometers. Originating in the Bayan Har Uul Mountains of eastern Dungistan, it flows through the North China Plain before empting into the Bohai Sea. Called the 'cradle of Chinese civilization', the Yellow River was the birthplace of ancient Chinese society and is one of the most prosperous regions in all of China. However, frequent devastating floods and course changes produced by the continual elevation of the river bed, sometimes far above the level of its surrounding fields have also earned it the unenviable names of 'China's Sorrow' and the 'Scourge of the Sons of Han.'

... Prior to the rise of modern dams in China, the Yellow River was extremely prone to flooding. In the 2,540 years prior to 1946, the Yellow River has been recorded to have flooded nearly 1,600 times, with twenty six noticeable shifts in its course, nine of the severe. These floods include some of the deadliest natural disasters ever recorded in human history. The most recent shift occurred from 1852 to 1857, at the height of the Taiping Revolution. In the early Qing Dynasty a fix amount of three million taels a year was appropriated for the river's conservation; by the early 19th century the figure had risen to nearly 4.5 million taels, or nearly 1/10th of the Qing government's total expenditure. However, because of the accumulation of silt and insufficient maintenance of the dikes, the river finally broke loose and began shifting course from empting into the Yellow Sea south of the Shandong Peninsula to its current end into the Bohai Gulf. During this period great damage was caused in terms of lose of productivity for the provinces affected by the shift; large areas of fertile farm land were lost, sometimes permanently, lines of military communication and transpiration were cut, and even the Grand Canal became unnavigable at several points as the shifting Yellow River forced the course of the smaller Huai River to change from emptying into the Yellow Sea into backing up the Grand Canal and emptying alongside the more southerly Yangtze River - a change that was not corrected until the 1887 Yellow River flood... (3)

The shifting course of the Yellow River in the 1850s
Left, the river prior to 1852; Right, the river after 1857

Zhengqing, Fei. China; Revolution & Restoration. 1992 ed.

... In nominal historiography an increase in population has usually been accompanied, indeed facilitated by, an increase in commerce and industry. One can hardly occur without the other. In the Western experience, modern capitalism provided the conditions that allowed industrialization to get started, which in turn led to growth in science, technology, industry, transport, communications, brought about social change, and the like so much that we in the contemporary world now ground all of the above under the broad term of 'development,' and indeed rank nations and whole continents by these various labels. In China however prior to the Self-Strengthening Reforms such development did not occur, at least not the scale in the West. In looking at China we must give up our common assumptions based on European experience and the ideologies derived from 19th century Western economic theorist such as Smith, Ricardo, Proudhon, Mill, Warren, or George...

... To begin with, the massive increase in population in Europe and later the Americas, Russia, and to a lesser extent Australia, has traditionally been attributed to industrialization also occurred in China during the same period, even though there was no comparable wide-fabrication system. An estimated population of 60 millions as of the mid-Han has been matched roughly by the same figure in the mid-Tang, suggesting even after a thousand years China only saw a modest population increase, if at all. Then the estimated total rose under the Song to well above 100 million, though this number shrank somewhat under Mongol rule and later under the early Ming. By the time of the Qing takeover in the 17th century the totals seems to have risen only slowly. The Manchus in 1651 recorded 10 million households, each of which was estimated at six persons. But we know that the official population estimates erred on the short side. This was because tax payments were due in par according to the estimated population totals for an administrative area, thus creating an incentive for short reporting both by the people and by the authorities responsible for tax payments. Popular cooperation was not to be expected. One may guess that the Chinese population by 1600 was close to 150 million. The Ming-Qing transition seems to have seen a relative decline. From 1741 however to the outbreak of the Taiping Revolution the annual figures rose steadily and spectacularly, beginning with 143 million and ending with 432 million. If we accept these totals, we are confronted with a situation in which the Chinese population doubles in the fifty years from 1790 to 1840. Even if, we greater caution, we assume lower totals in the eighteen century and the mid-nineteenth century, we still face a starling fact: something like a doubling of the Chinese people before Western contact, foreign trade, and industrialization could have taken much effect.

To explain this sudden increase we cannot point to factors constant in Chinese society but must find conditions, or a combination of factors, newly effect during this period. Among these is the almost complete internal peace maintained under Manchu rule during the eighteenth and early 19th century. There was also an increase in foreign trade through Guangzhou, and some improvements in transportation throughout the empire. Control of disease, such as the checking of smallpox by inoculation, also played an important role. But most critically of all was the food supply. Confronted with a multitude of unreliable figures by the Chinese state, historical economists have compared the population records with the aggregate data for cultivated land area and grain production in the past six centuries, revealing that the steady growth in population was made possible by, and indeed matched by, a steady increase of the grain supply, which grew some five or six times between 1400 and 1800, and then doubled between 1850 and 1950. This increase in reliable food supply was due perhaps half to the increase of cultivated area, particularly by migration and settlement in the central provinces, and half to greater productivity - the farmers' success in raising more crops per unit of land.

This technological advance took many forms; one was the continual introduction from the south of earlier-ripening strains of rise, which made possible double-cropping. New crops such as corn and sweet potatoes, as well as peanuts and tobacco were introduced from the Americas. Corn, for instance, can be grown on the dry and marginal hill land of North China, where it is used for food, fuel, and fodder, and provides something like one-seventh of the food energy available in the area. The sweet potato, growing in sand soil and providing more food per unit of land than almost any other crop, became the poor man's food in much of South China...

Zhengqing, Fei. Understanding China: A New History. 1984 ed.

... For the power-holding elites at least, China's great revolution bean in the 1830s. The Chinese place in the world rather suddenly began to turn inside out. The great security problem of the empire for over two thousand years had been on the Inner Asian frontier - what to do about the striking power of nomad cavalry erupting from the arid grasslands beyond the Great Wall. But in the 1830s the scene was reversed. For some two hundred and fifty years Europeans had been coming by sea for Chinese products, especially tea and silk. This European trade had been rather peaceful, with exports to Britain balanced in Beijing's eyes by the importation of specie, but now Indian opium rather quickly became the prime import. Worse than that, British officials turned up in Guangzhou for the first time demanding recognition as diplomats representing a sovereign power that claimed equality with the Son of Heaven. Worst of all, this incredible presumption was backed up by superior military might. Beijing's strategic posture had to be suddenly turned around to face this new threat on the other side of the empire. In developing a policy to deal with this new threat, China was at a disadvantage of having no body of precedent to fall back upon. Maritime problems had been at the level of frontier defenses by provincial authorities committed only to pirate suppression. Historically the only problem along the coast had been the occasional Japanese-Chinese pirate-raiders, however these raids had been a local police problem, not one of interstate relations. The Qing's only previous experience of diplomacy between two roughly equal powers had been with the Russians, once again on the Inner Asian frontier. However Russian relations for two hundred years had been contained within the tribute system; St. Petersburg figured within the Chinese grand foreign strategy - London did not...

... The Opium War, all Western academics previously agreed, was a classic iniquity. Indian opium sales in China were necessary to balance the triangular trade that moved Chinese goods to Britain and British goods to India. Further, by refusing to give up his ancestral claim to superiority, Daoguang backed himself into the corner of the unequal treaties. However, for the historian who has access to the Imperial Records, what Daoguang and his mandarins had mind, the picture is quite a bit different. The concessions following the war with Britain were remarkably similar to the concessions made just a decade previously to the emerging power of Kokand. However, while Qing statesmanship was consistent, there were two major differences. First, the Western states were expansive maritime powers from another world, reliant on the sea, addicted to both law and violence, and for them the Treaty of Nanjing was only the beginning. Second, the concessions that the Qing could use to stabilize Inner Asia would only damage the Manchu's prestige if used in China proper. The Qing had inherited the tradition of China's central superiority when they took power at Beijing. Anyone who claimed the imperial throne had to exact tributary obeisance from outsiders, and therefore the unequal treaties were a defeat that grew larger in the Chinese national psyche as time passed...

Bennett, A.J.P. China: Death Throes of Empire. New York: Perseus Books, 2009.

... The series of defeats suffered by the Qing in the 1839-1842 Opium War, though the worst in the dynasty's two centuries of rule, did not long go unchallenged. Exposed by the outsiders, in less than a decade the empire faced revolution from within on a scale not seen in China since the Yan Revolution of the 8th century. The two catastrophes were of course related. Had the Qing not just been humiliated, their forces trounced, and their economy fractured, the insurgencies might not have arisen, or been so successful. On the other hand, without foreign forbearance and eventual support, the Qing could scarcely have hoped to suppress them...

... Nearly all of China was affected by the 'organic disease' of revolution in the 1850s and 60s. 'White Lotus' armies fighting for a Ming restoration, there being no short supply of Ming pretenders, terrorized Guangdong in the mid-1850s; Muslim separatists took over Yunnan from 1855, while the Islamic Dungan Revolt saw the 'new frontier' (Xinjiang, modern Dungistan) break away in the 1860s; a host of heavily armed anti-Qing peasant bands known collectively as the Nian rampaged across Anhui and Jiangsu; Tiandihui fraternities flexed their muscles in the treaty ports, taking over Xiamen and then Shanghai (4). On cue, the Yellow River, capricious as ever, burst its dikes, causing devastating floods. Meanwhile other secret societies also mobilized among the rural masses; ethnic minorities rebelled in the hills and far-flung provinces; pirates infested the coast. And there were more. But all of these outbreaks were, for the most part, localized and little coordinated. They paled into insignificance beside the Taiping upheaval, 'one of the great pivotal moments in human history,' or, as contemporary writers in both The Times and the North American Review had it, 'the greatest revolution the world has yet seen.' Whether revolution, civil war, or merely a transitory phase, the Taipings spans the insurrectionists watershed between the dynastic challengers of the past and the ideological ones of the future. It was both a nativist throwback and a radical new departure, a people's revolution masterminded by ideological simpletons, an Asian peasants' revolt flavored by Christian messianism. In its all its fury it raged from Guangxi in the far south to within a few days' march of Beijing, affecting sixteen out of the eighteen provinces and turning the heart of the country along the Yangtze River into an extended battlefield. Its magnitude seemed at the time, and possibly remains, unprecedented. Sober analysts who have tried to quantify the death toll have ranged from twenty million, forty million, and a hundred million souls lost. Not all die in battle; famines, retributive feuds and casual massacres that dislocation engendered took a heavy toll; so did power struggles and purges within both the Taiping and Qing leadership. Thousands died simply from exposure. Suffice it to say that, if the figures are even remotely accurate, more of the human race perished in the Taiping convulsion than in the Tripartite War...

Zhengqing, Fei. China; Revolution & Restoration. 1992 ed.

... After 1850 the Qing regime was almost overwhelmed by widespread rebellions and revolution. The emperor's inability to subdue the British barbarians in 1842, even though the Opium War was fought at only half a dozen places on the coast, had shaken imperial prestige. In 1846-1848, moreover, flood and famine were widespread among China's expanded population. It is therefore not surprising that a great uprising finally commenced in 1850. The Taiping Revolution began in the southernmost provinces between the Guangzhou region and its hinterland. This area had been longest connected with the outside world via growing foreign trade, and had been one of the last conquered by the Manchus. Their military hold was in fact relatively weak in the very region that had been most disturbed by foreign contact. Local society was dominated by large land-owning clans, whose militia bands often carried on armed feuds bordering on out-right civil war between clan villages, or groups of villages. Such local conflicts were fostered by ethnic fragmentation, due to the fact that South China had received numerous infusions of migrants from the north, most prominently among them the Hakka people. Finally, as the population grew and conditions worsened, the foreign opium trade gave a key opportunity to the anti-Manchu secret societies, who offered mutual help and a social sub-system to the alienated and adventurous, especially on the poorly-controlled trade routes. In the traditional pattern the natural candidates to lead the revolution would have been the branches and offshoots of the Tiandihui societies, whose network was already widely dispersed among Chinese overseas and in foreign trade. The fact that the Taiping movement did not join with these established anti-Qing agencies springs from the personality of its founder, Hong Xiuquan...

Wadcliff, John. The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 10. Cambridge University Press.

... Hong Xiuquan was born some 30 kilometers outside of Guangzhou in a small, remote village, the son of a small peasant proprietor whose Hakka forebears had migrated to the region in the eighteenth century. Studious and ambitious, Hong was able to recite the Four Books from memory by age five (5). Hong attended the Guangzhou prefectural examinations for the first time in 1827 at the age of fourteen; but, like most of his fellow aspirants, failed to pass the examination, which was unsurprising considering the pass-rate for such examinations was roughly 1%. After which his family was unable to financially support his studies, and he became the village teacher in a one-room schoolhouse of recent construction. Taking first in the local, preliminary examinations at age twenty-two, he once again attempted to take the first-degree civil service examinations in 1836, and once again failed. While in Guangzhou for this second attempt he encountered Edwin Stevens, an American missionary, who handed him a set of nine slim volumes entitled The Benevolent Words to Advise the World (勸世良言), which he promptly set aside after skimming through. However it was to be a fateful meeting. The author of this tract was Liang Fa, a Cantonese of meager education but zealous temperament who had studied under the British Presbyterian missionary Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to China, in Guangzhou in 1815. Written in 1832, Liang's tract was, as far as we know, the only textual source for Hong Xiuquan's later religious conversion, and probably the only source on Christianity before 1847 when Hong obtained a full translation of the Bible. Its contents are therefore of particular important.

The arrangement of the work is quite unsystematic, with long quotes from Morrison's earlier translation of the Bible (n an opaquely literal style), interspersed with exegetical sermons by Ling in the vernacular. Biblical material is presented out of sequenced, with little heed to the chronological framework of the prophetic tradition or Gospel story. The epistles of the Disciples are the largest sources, with the Old Testament prophets, Genesis, and the Four Gospels in lesser proportions. The character of Jehovah is strongly born out, but that of Jesus is largely ignored. The work's stark fundamentalist message hammers home the omnipotence of God, the degradation of sin, and the implications of the choice between salvation and damnation. Underlying its evangelical surface, Liang's work embodies serious political implications. There is, first, the repeated suggestion that Chinese society as a whole stands on the brink of eternal damnation as a result of a long moral decline - an unmistakable suggestion, to a Chinese reader of the 1830s and 1840s, of the low point in a dynastic cycle. Second, and perhaps most compelling, the work conveys repeatedly an equivalence between the heavenly and earthly kingdoms. The Biblical 'Heavenly Kingdom,' for instance is glossed as referring to both the blessed after death and the congregation of the faithful on earth. Finally, throughout the work, the sequential confusion of the material suggests that the coming of the Messiah was not simply a single historical event, but rather an apocalyptic world crisis that might any number of times. The impact of this work was long delayed however. Hong evidently glanced through the work shortly after receiving it, then put it aside. A year later he suffered a third failure at the Guangzhou examinations which left him exhausted and deeply depressed. After being carried home by friends and family, Hong poured out his feelings of guilt and worthlessness to his parents. He then lay abed for days in a psychotic state, in which he received the first of his visions. In this first revelation, Hong ascended to Heaven, where he was reborn in a new body, thus purified. A venerable man with a golden beard handed him ensigns of royalty and a sword and adjured him to exterminate demons and to bring the world back to the true teaching. Filled with supreme righteousness and invincible power, Hong raged across the heavens, slaying evil spirits, accompanied by a man of middle age that referred to himself as his elder brother. When Hong finally awoke from these powerful dreams, he was unmistakably transformed. Friends and family stated that after this episode he became authoritative, solemn and taller in height.

The process by which this intense inner experience was rationalized into a coherent world-view was a very gradual one. For six years after his experience, Hong continued to function as he had before, though evidently freed from the crippling inner tensions that had troubled him in the past. Indeed, in 1843 he attempted to take the civil service examinations again; failing once more, he now turned against the system itself that had rejected him. To what extent Hong's shift towards his final historical destiny was affected by the recent Opium War is of course impossible to determine. It would remarkable however if the war had no effect upon him, for Guangdong was seething for contempt for the Qing. What is known however is that shortly after failing his examination for the forth, and last, time, Hong re-discovered Liang Fa's tract, which had been gathering dust in his bookshelf since before his episode. Hong now understood the book to be a call from God himself, and the bearded figure of his visions to have been Jehovah, while the elder brother he fought demons with was none other than Jesus - thus making he himself, Hong Xiuquan, the younger son of God, entrusted with the sacred mission of bringing the Middle Kingdom back to His worship...

King Huoxiu (6)

... Hong Xiuquan (洪秀全) style name Huoxiu (火秀), was a religious and political leader who lead the Taiping Revolution against the Qing Dynasty, establishing the Taiping Kingdom over much of southern China, with himself as the Heavenly King and self-proclaimed younger brother of Jesus Christ...

... It was not until seven years later that Hong took time to carefully examine the religious tracts he had received. In fact, Hong's writings of the 1840s clearly indicate that he saw his task as the conversion of the Chinese people, an event that would occur solely through a revolution of the spirit and without the agency of any earthly institution. Furthermore, at this stage Hong evidently considered that conversion could best be accomplished by reconciling Christianity with the Confucian tradition; much as early Catholic missionaries to China in the 15th and 16th centuries believed. Hong's tracts of the mid-1840s convey a Christianity that was little more than worship of Jehovah, abandonment of idolatry, and clean living - he condemned such evils as licentiousness, infidelity, murder and gambling - all familiar targets of Confucian moralism. Unlike his contemporaries, many of whom would go on to become leaders in their own right in the Taiping Revolution, Hong was the product of the standard Chinese bureaucratic training, and by this time had not yet entirely transcended his deeply-ingrained self-image as a bearer of the orthodox higher culture...

... Hong was not an ardent believer, and his faith soon lost him his position as school teacher. He now set forth on a missionary journey across southern China, accompanied by his cousins Hong Rengan and Feng Yunshan, who were both some of Hong Xiuquan's earliest converts. However along the journey the trio was divided, with Hong Rengan becoming separated early and forced to flee to Hong Kong, where he met the Swedish missionary Theodore Hamberg, who was to indirectly have an important influence on the Taipings...

Wadcliff, John. The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 10. Cambridge University Press.

... Feng Yunshan too was separated later, and eventually found himself among the Hakka communities of Guangxi, eventually converting the majority of the Hakka there by 1850. Feng's extraordinary talents as an organizer were well employed amid the bitter communal strife of the hilly Guangxi districts. Society there was highly militarized: partially because of the rapidly changing yet highly diverse ethnic makeup of the area; partly because of the failing of the local and provincial governments; and partially because of the ongoing rise in banditry and piracy in the interior and along the coast. Community militias had become a necessary and regular feature of village life. Feng organized his converts into a multi-village network of local congregations, thus creating the God-Worshipping Society. In some ways at this point the God-Worshippers resembled a secret society of the traditional sort, with its network of local lodges. Some of its organizational methods may indeed have been similar to those of the Tiandihui. But the God-Worshippers were hardly likely to have been incorporated into the Hongmen's society. Their imported creed, with its stark duality between the saved and the damned, mirrored their own alienated position in the polarized social environment of late 1840s southern China. And now the apocalyptic, political, implications of Liang Fa's tract came to the fore...

King Huoxiu

... Hong Xiuquan himself, now back in Guangdong, immersed himself in study and writing. In early 1847 he returned for the final time to Guangzhou to seek the tutelage of the American Baptist missionary Issachar Jacox Roberts, who would later become a close friend and adviser to Hong. However the two had a falling out over a miscommunication when Hong asked to be baptized and Roberts refused, leading Hong to return to his native land in the autumn of 1847...

Hong Xiuquan, Heavenly King of China, circa 1860

Robinson, J.C. A Short History of Civilization. 1966 ed.

... Unable to support themselves, poor Hakka and other mountain peoples had been emigrating back north and west for a century, renting uninhabited highland areas - terrain too steep and dry for rice - in neighboring provinces. They cut and burned the tree cover, planted cash crops, mainly indigo, and then after a few years the thin mountain soil would be exhausted and the Hakkas moved on. As coastal refugees poured into the mountains, the highland exodus accelerated. Landless and poor, the Hakka refugees were mocked as pengmin - shack people. Strictly speaking, shack people were not vagabonds; they rented lands in the heights that was owned but not used by farmers in the more fertile valleys. Shifting from one temporary home to the next , pengmin eventually occupied a crooked, 1,500-mile stretch of across southern China.

Neither rice, nor wheat, China's two important staples, would grow in the Hakka's marginal land. The soil was too thin, the slopes too step. Further, the sort of costly, laborious capital improvement project required of both crops in such an environment was unlikely to be undertaken by roving, temporary renters. Almost inevitably, they turned to American crops; maize, sweet potato, and tobacco. By the early 19th century many poor southern Chinese farmers' diets wouldn't have been out of place with their contemporaries in Europe or the Westernized Americas...

... Nobody knew how many shack people there were in the hills. Hoping, perhaps, that hiding their problem would solve it. the Qing bureaucrats left them out of census reports. But all evidence suggests the number was not small. Nearly a century before the violent Taiping Revolution, a new generation of rigid, by-the-books provincial officials in Jiangxi had finally undertaken to count the number of pengmin. In Ganxian county alone, they tallied some 59,000 settled inhabitants, mostly in the town of Ganzhou - and another 275,000 shack people in the surrounding hills. In country after country the story was reports were the same. Hidden from the government for centuries, more than a million people had been slowly but steadily moving their way across the country. And that, as the Qing court must have realized, was only one medium-sized province...

... Coupled with the outflow of pengmin was a second, parallel, perhaps even larger wave of migration in Southern China. In their quest for social stability the Ming court had prohibited people from leaving their home regions. However in the late 18th century the Qing reversed this policy, actively promoting a southern and westward movement. Much as the Westernized states of the New World, such as America, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, encouraged their citizens to migrate across the continent in the 19th century, the Manchus believed that filling up China's empty spaces was essential to national stability. 'Empty,' that is, from the Qing point of view - dozens of native, non-Han, peoples already lived there. Lured by tax subsidies and cheap land, migrants from the core provinces swarmed into the western and southern hills. Most of the newcomers were, like the shack people, poor, politically luckless, and scoured by urban elites...

Zhengqing, Fei. China; Revolution & Restoration. 1992 ed.

... The Society of God Worshipers (拜上帝会; Bai Shangdi Hui), as the sect first called itself, got started in the mountain regions of Guangxi west of Guangzhou, variously populated by Yao and Zhuang tribes and the Chinese Hakka that is, migrants from the Central Chinese provinces several centuries earlier before, who retained a more northerly dialect and other ethnic traits, such as opposition to foot-binding. As a minority in South China, the scattered Hakka communities were uncommonly sturdy and enterprising, as well as experienced in defending themselves against their frequently hostile neighbors. Indeed it should be of no surprise that the Hakka would rise so far under the Taiping dynasty...

... Taiping Christianity half-borrowed and half-recreated for Chinese purposes a full repertoire of prayers, hymns, and rituals, and preached the brotherhood of all mankind under the fatherhood of the one true and only God. Unlike the political passivity of Taoism and the other-worldliness of Buddhism, the Protestant version of the Old Testament available in the Yue Chinese dialect offered trumpet calls to a militant people on the march against their oppressors. The original corps of Hakka true believers were the bravest in battle and the most considerate toward the common people - and little wonder. Hong's teachings created a new Chinese sect organized for war, using tried and tested techniques that had evolved during 1,800 years of Christian history to inculcate an ardent faith in each individual and ensure his performance in its service, even to the death. Taiping Christianity was a unique East-West amalgam of ideas and practices geared to militant action, the like of which was not seen again in the Orient until the Coreen War nearly a century later...

Wadcliff, John. The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 10. Cambridge University Press.

... When Hong reached Guangxi he found a situation vastly changed from that of his youth. Feng's talents had spread the faith wide and far throughout the province, reaching across ethnic lines even into traditional Han society. However soon after Feng was arrested by a local militia, charged with sedation, and ultimately deported to Guangdong. Hong himself went to plead Feng's case before the provincial governor. Feng was released on bail, and the two remained in the region for seven months on pain of death until the summer of 1849. This was a fateful interlude for the Taipings. Deprived of their spiritual and temporal chiefs, who were even at this time merely primus inter pares, the God-Worshippers brought forward new leaders such as Yang Xiuqing, Xiao Chaogui, Wei Changhui, Shi Dakai, all of whom would go onto secure vital positions in the Taiping government. Yang and Xiao, the latter of whom was Hong's brother-in-law, in particular developed their own power after they both were discovered to have the heavenly gift of speaking with the voice of Jehovah and Jesus, respectively (7). There now ensued a period of rising militancy among the God-Worshippers. Idol-smashing, the destruction of several local temples, and their continuing proselytizing heightened tensions between the society and their non-Taiping neighbors. Under the famine conditions of 1849-1850, tensions finally exploded into open warfare between the God-Worshippers militias and those of the local and provincial governments. At this point it became clear to the new leadership that the God-Worshippers could not survive long in Guangxi. In July of 1850, under the summons of the new leadership, God-Worshipping communities from all over the south of China began to converge near the village of Jintian, at the base of mount Tzujing Shan, which by now has become one of the most sacred holy sites to Chinese Christians. The assembly at Jintian was not entirely peasant in composition; it also included several contingents of rural workers such as charcoal-burners and miners. As well a number of redoubtable Hongmen chiefs joined the early movement, bringing with them their own secret societies' lodges, the most famous of which was the pirate Lo Dagang. It was however inevitable that the powerful military camp at Jintian should come into direct conflict with the government...

Bennett, A.J.P. China: Death Throes of Empire. New York: Perseus Books, 2009.

... Hong's spiritual mission soon began to assume a more political, and militant, character. Arms and gunpowder were hoarded, signals practiced, troops drilled and plans laid. As well as proclaiming his visions and destroying more shrines, Hong and others in his hierarchy who possessed some level of education or merit began to integrate their revolutionary faith with knowledge of China's history. Their starting point, and inspiration for their organization, seems to have been the Rites of Zhou, a 'fundamentalist' tract completed during China's Warring States period that lays out the structure of a utopian society, and is one of the Thirteen Classics of Confucian thought. In those ancient times, at least according to the God-Worshippers, China had been the recipient of 'the original doctrine of the Heavenly Father.' It had then been shared with the wider world, and there it had survived and thrived; but in China, Heaven's first home, it had been turned on its head by a succession of 'devils' and barbarian invaders after the fall of the Han dynasty. The Manchu dynasty - 'imps' as the Taipings called them - were simply the latest manifestation of these demonic usurpers and, like the shrines and idols that had been the God-Worshippers targets, they must be destroyed. Only then could the taiping tiangou (太平天国) be re-established; a tagline by which the movement would describe itself which neatly combined the Christian tiangou, 'Kingdom of Heaven,' with the Taoist taiping, 'Great Peace.'

... Other contemporary movements, such as the Hongmen, also opposed the Manchu Qing as alien usurpers; they wanted to set the clock back to 1644 and restore the Ming. But the Taipings opposed the Qing as merely the last in a long line of alien dynasties; the clock should go back to 211 according to their line of reasoning. This coincided with important strands in recent Chinese thought. Ethno-centric and exclusive, these groupings did not as yet amount to a 'new organic tradition' of Han assertiveness. But as an experiment to this end, the contribution of the Taipings would be significant, albeit 'untasteful' to upper-class, educated, Chinese of the time. Whether by chance or grand design, the Taipings had tapped into some of the sources of later Chinese nationalism - resistance to foreign imperialism, including the Manchu dynasty; authenticity through alignment with an impeccably organized agrarian society; insistence on China's centrality in world events, even within Christianity's universal 'All-under-Heaven'; a yearning for social justice; and the espousal of a common Han Chinese identify based on placed, race, and culture, rather than dynastic mandates and historiographic sanction...

... After three years in Guangxi, the God-Worshippers had swollen to roughly twenty thousand disciples. Some had useful experience in military matters, having belong to other insurgent groups, or been engaged in piracy or banditry; a few had a genuine flair for tactics and organization. Discipline was strict, with opium, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and sex outlawed on both religious and practical grounds - the latter was especially important considering that quite a number of God-Worshippers, even in the growing army component, were women. Also importantly to the female contingent, foot binding was outlawed...

... Such practices could scarcely fail to attract attention, and in late 1849 the God-Worshippers narrowly repelled an assault by the local authorities. Soon after Hong officially declared himself the Heavenly King (天王; Tian Wang), and whole community moved out the area, heading north through the hills toward the Yangtze watershed...

Book of Taiping. Ed. Universalist General Convention. Kansas City: Universalist General Convention, 1985.

... In the thirtieth year of the demon Daoguang, in the 10th Month, all of the villages of the Heavenly Kingdom rose spontaneously at the same time. This was ordained by the will of Heaven, which is full of complex changes and cannot be completely understood. So the faith of the God-Worshippers was further increased...

... After the Tian Wang's [Ed. Heavenly King, Hong Xiuquan] arrival at Jintian the People moved to Wuxuan, and the God-Worshippers were assembled together. After the People assembled, they went forth and mobilized troops of God-Worshippers. Once assembly they turned back to Jintian, where they camped for several months. They were surrounded on four sides by Qing devils, but escaped by narrow mountain paths. They came out near Sihui, and were engaged by Qing troops, and the People destroyed them. Then they divided their forces and...

... The Tian Wang passed through Sihui, where he divided up his forces, some to go by water, and some by land, up to Yong'an. Where the road passes through there are high mountains on all sides, surrounding the plain for several hundred li. The Xil Wang [Ed. West King, Xiao Chaogui] led the troops going by land passed through, along with troops led by the Bei Wang [Ed. North King, Wei Changhui], and the two armies met and mixed, and the People were joyous, and they stayed for five days in the mountain passes of Ta-li, searching out grain, foodstuffs, and clothing in the villages, taking from whatever village they came to who was not of the People of the Taiping, and the grain which the people had moved into the depths of the mountains was also taken. While the Bei Wang thought this justice, the Xil Wang stayed in the village, and he told the people that they should not be afraid of the God-Worshippers and need not flee. They could eat together as one family. Thus the people of Ta-li become of the People and joined the Taiping. When the army marched, the houses of all those who had joined the God-Worshippers were set alight and burned, for they had found their true home...

... The People went from Ta-li straight up to Yong'an. After taking Yong'an the People stayed in the town for several months to rejoice in life and find peace once more. Then the armies of the Qing imps jumped up from the shadows of the night and surrounded the People on all sides so that they were cut off. Jehovah smiled down on his people though, and He would not allow them to be smote, and so the People captured then ten loads of powder and ammunition when they had not a scrap of paper. Thus the People broke out of the encirclement. After breaking through the encirclement the People moved to Xianhui, and were pursued by a great force of devils led by General Wu, the demon who guarded the entry to the Kingdom of Heaven, and more than two thousand soldiers of the Heavenly Dynasty, men and women, were killed. And Jehovah saw what a desperate position his people were in, and He blessed the People with the strength of ten thousand suns to blast His light into the shadows of the imp's black hearts, and lo, on the following day the People made a united effort and fought to the death with General Wu's troops, and killed five thousand of them. General Wu was wounded by the Tian Wang's great demon-slaying sword, and died.

After the victory the Dong Wang [Ed. East King, Yang Xiuqing] gave the order for the People not to go to Zhaoping, but to go by paths across the Yaoshan mountains, then go up to Guiyang, and lay siege to Guilin. After besieging it for more than a month the city was not taken, and the troops were withdrawn across the Li River, and then on to Changzhou. Along the way however, while passing near Quanzhou, a Qing imp shot at the Nan Wang [Ed. South King, Feng Yunshan], almost hitting him (8). With a great fury the People rose up and surrounded the city, breaching its walls after two days and slew all who were inside...

Bennett, A.J.P. China: Death Throes of Empire. New York: Perseus Books, 2009.

... What began as a migration turned into a crusade. Within two years what had been a remote and obscure problem had ballooned into the center stage of Chinese society, and soon began to affect even the Western powers which where beginning to intrude in Chinese affairs. Though this initial stage of the Taiping Revolution has been compared by Chinese Christians, both during the Taiping era and even in contemporary period, to the Exodus, in its military aspects it more clearly resembles the conquests of the Islamic Expansion. Like the Arabs, the Taipings had mixed results in their early stages. Despite fanatical onslaughts, they were forced to fall back before the well-defended cities of Guilin and Changsha; during the siege of the latter the 'Voice of Jesus' and West King, Xiao Chaogui, was captured and executed by Qing troops. The Taipings gathered defectors and adherents by the thousand, but the larger the heavenly host, the greater need for supplies, especially munitions. The capture of Wuhan proved to be a turning point; now with guns, money, supplies, food, and above all, boats, the Taiping armies took to the river. Downstream Anqing fell in early 1853, then - amid the slaughter of every Manchu they could lay their hands on - the high-walled metropolis of Nanjing. In March of that year the 'Heavenly King' entered Nanjing, now known as Tianjing (天京; Heavenly Capital), borne aloft in a golden palanquin and wearing the dragon robe of a Chinese emperor - as well as the tinsel crown of a Christian king... (9)

Wadcliff, John. The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 10. Cambridge University Press.

... Hong's position was now ambiguous. The Taipings early military organization was now given a more plausible political format. The major leaders, formally called 'marshals' were now to be 'kings,' with Hong himself as the Heavenly King. While his spiritual primacy over the others was recognized, yet he ordained that he be merely called 'sovereign' (君主; jun zhu), and that the appellation of divinity be reserved for Jehovah and Jesus. However, the new arrangement also recognized the dominant position of Yang Xiuqing, who robed his military and executive powers in priestly authority, entering trances to transmit divine commands. Yang was thus given the prestigious position of East King, and commander-in-chief of the army. It was also during this time that the Taiping flourished before the people of china a decisive summons to revolt. Besides formally inaugurating their own calendar, a traditional prerogative of legitimate regimes, they issued a series of broadsides announcing the advent of the new order and detailing their charges against the Manchus. The appeal was to national pride in the face of the assumption of power by China's 'traditional enemies,' the northern barbarians (狄; di) who had fastened upon China a cruel and corrupt government. Though the religious content was thus mixed with a strong dose of ethnic nationalism, there was no effort to hide it. Hong was portrayed as a dynasty-founder with a new, or rather revitalized, mandate - one direct from Heaven - with the Manchus as the embodiment of a king of supernatural evil that went beyond the simple vileness of a usurper. The essentials of Christianity were laid out in no uncertain terms. The Taipings sought broad support, but not at the expense of their divine mission. Though the documents and history show that they were willing to accept the services of men who only shared their nationalist aims, the Taipings openly revealed their ultimate intention to build their heavenly kingdom on earth...

Bennett, A.J.P. China: Death Throes of Empire. New York: Perseus Books, 2009.

... Instead of continuing their quicksilver advance to Beijing, the Taiping held back to institute their new Jerusalem and savor the fruits of victory. Momentum, and perhaps more importantly, panic on the part of the Qing establishment, were lost. When some months later the advance was at least resumed, the Taiping launched smaller, expeditionary armies, minus their Heavenly King, both north to Beijing and west up the Yangtze as Wuhan and a number of other critical cities had been retaken by the Qing in the interim. However the Qing were now prepared. Ships and boats of all sizes had been removed from the Yellow River to prevent an easy river crossing, while the Manchu's Eight Banner troops amassed to oppose the insurgents. The Taipings veered west, hooking up with the Nian rebels, who were soon subsumed into the Taiping movement (10). However by the time they approached Beijing winter was settling in across the North China plain, a novel experience for the tropical Guangxi Hakkas. However the Taipings quickly laid siege to Tianjin, and in 1854 reinforcements arrived, ending with the capture of the city in early 1855... (11)

Reza, Ahmad. Reform: A History. Istanbul: Central Press, 1999.

... The rise of the Hunan Army represented irregular forms of organization - by implication highly subversive of imperial authority - which were nevertheless so cloaked in Confucian orthodoxy that they were able to co-exist within the established order of the Qing dynasty. Organized partially along the lines of Qi Jiguang (1528-1588), whose writings had been widely published by the New Text writers of the early nineteenth century. Within this 'family army,' all ranks were fastened together by personal relationships. A battalion officer, for example, chose his company officers, and the company officers his platoon officers, who in turn personally recruited the ten men who were to serve under him. The battalion officer, to, was normally attached to a particular commander. Zeng Guofan (12) also stipulated that each time a new battalion officer was appointed, all the lowers officers and men of the battalion were to be chosen anew. The personal links thus formed supplied a cohesiveness which the Green Standard army lacked. Zeng tried to incorporate his new force into the old system, often sending letters of recommendation to Beijing pleading for his officers to be given honorary Green Standard ranks; however this system of familial connection was so alien to the bureaucratic principles of the Qing military system as to be considered a menace. Reports from Beijing regarding the military situation during the Revolutionary period and later often make the comparison of allying with Zeng against the Taiping as 'making a deal with the devil.' However Zeng was well aware of the conflict latent in his new enterprise, and took considerable pains to allay imperial suspicions. He was careful to sooth Manchu feelings by placing a local banner officer, Taqibu, in a major command position. As well Zeng continually stressed the raising of his volunteer army as being within the confines of his powers as commissioner. However the raising of a professional fighting force of course had little to do with the prescribed format for Zeng's position, and ultimately it was the Qing's dire straights, and perhaps just as importantly, Zeng's own positions as a high-ranking official and his connections in the capital that made his new organization acceptable to Beijing. Throughout the ensuing decades. Zeng was able to count on the support of high-ranking Manchu courtiers, such as Wenqing and Sushun, to counterbalance the hostility of regular Han metropolitan officials such as Qi Chiinzao, the Chief Grand Councilor, who considered such provincial military power even more dangerous than that of the Taiping (13)...

... It should be understood that the emergence of new, modern, military forces led by Han did not yet mean that the regular Manchu military system had been supplanted. Until the 1860s Zeng's Hunan Army existed alongside large contingents of Qing Eight Banner and Green Standard troops. Though most were underfed, underpaid, and ill-led, they were able to tie down significant portions of the Taipings military and continued to play a vital role in the Qing's campaign of reconquest. In early 1854 Zeng's army clashed with Taiping forces in the middle Yangtze valley. The Taipings had launched a massive westward expedition, which had succeeded in taping and holding most of the important cities upstream from Nanjing. The central provinces thus became a vast theater of military operations. The Taipings strategic design was to secure the river communications of Nanjing and occupy the rich agricultural regions surrounding. While Zeng's forces were able to turn back the Taipings at the Battle of Xiangtan, and his naval forces sailed forth to challenge Taiping control of the rivers and lakes of the Yangtze, by mid-1856 the Taipings' military fortunes were at their height, with Shi Dakai dealing Zeng a serious of defeats both on land and water, eventually after another few years forcing the Hunan Army to retreat north or risk being enveloped by Taiping forces... (14)

The Battle of Xiangtan

Bennett, A.J.P. China: Death Throes of Empire. New York: Perseus Books, 2009.

... The Western thrust fared even better. Anqing was secured and Wuchan retaken. With forces reckoned in the millions, plus control of the vital Yangtze corridor over a distance of some five hundred kilometers, the Taiping Kingdom now bestrode China. Suzhou, Shanghai, and the other teeming cities of the delta were threatened. Trade in the region was at a standstill; the wider world began to take notice. Missionaries, especially Americans, sensed a triumph beyond their wildest dreams, and urged support for the Taipings. The Rev. William Martin expected the Taipings to 'revolutionize the empire, rendering all its vast provinces open to the preachers of the Gospel.' The other Western powers, though initially skeptical, soon began to lose their cautious as the northern campaign continued to advance. Only the French held back; Catholic idols were as liable to be destroyed by the Taipings as Buddhist or Confucian ones. However all of the Western observers had reservations about the Taipings' worldly inexperience; especially when their publications began to be circulated throughout the Western world alongside first-hand reports. However, most foreigners who reached Nanjing could not fault the Taipings' discipline and dedication. They were impressed both by the idealism, and the puritanical abstinence, unknown among Western armies; by the important role assigned to women, including military deployment; by the pervading spirit of fraternity; and by the common ownership of resources. Indeed, both the early sociocratic and feminist movements drew greatly on the Taiping Revolution, both as an example to follow and one to critique in its many failures to live up to its own lofty ideals. On paper, and to an extent in practice, the taiping tiangou had more in common with the realities of the English Commonwealth than with the utopia both Cromwell and Hong had promised. But there was a naïvety and a presumption in China's Heavenly Kingdom as well. Even the Western missionaries were taken aback by the ignorance they encountered; they baulked at the sight of traditional animal sacrifices in Taiping churches and chapels, they were riled by patronizing comments about 'Our Lord' (meaning Hong) being 'Your Lord, too,' and most of all the Westerners were embarrassed by educated Taiping officials asking questions of God's personal details; 'How tall is God? And how broad? How large is his abdomen? Hoes he write verse? How rapidly?'

This questionnaire came in response to one of the more political nature submitted by a British mission in Nanjing in 1855. The attitude of the British was crucial, and though initially ambivalent, was already souring. The Taiping Kings - Hong's senior-most commanders had just been crowned as sub-kings following the victorious celebrations upon the capture of Tianjin - were as disrespectful of foreigner officials as any Qing functionary. They, and Hong himself, had by this point embraced a life of luxury, including concubines, opium, and more, that was at odds with their own movements morals. There were also deep divisions within the leadership. In 1856 a horrific bloodbath took the lives in a quick coup in which several of the kings were killed and Hong was regulated to a life of unimportance. The 'Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace' was looking more like a hellish despotism, and it was this, as well as a string of military setbacks in 1856 which saw the Taipings' campaign in the north halted by the Qing, in addition to increasing anti-British violence in the treaty cities, which turned London away from the idea of an alliance with the Taiping against the Qing...

... For the Manchus, too, the attitude of the British was crucial. The British had the largest fleet in the area, and the only one capable of re-opening the Yangtze. The young Xianfeng emperor, though deeply suspicious of Anglo-Taiping contracts and distrustful of foreigners in general, had already asked the British for assistance in attacking the Taipings. It had been declined on the grounds that the British were neutral; the other powers took a similar line, happily advertising their contacts with the Taipings if only to cow the Qing. In the case of the British, this was more like holding the Manchus to ransom; London had just tabled a demand for the revision of the 1842 treaty confident that the Taiping menace would find the court in Beijing at its most amenable. Once again, 'revision' of the treaty meant rewriting it. Backed by the other Western powers, as well as Russia, the British were now demanding even more treaty ports, commercial access to the interior of China along both the Yangtze and Yellow rivers; a permanent ambassador in Beijing; the legislation of the opium trade; the suppression of Chinese 'piracy'; and the lifting of internal transit dues. That was the first list; but as in the Opium War cause was soon found to extend it. After the Small Swords Society, an anti-Qing faction of Tiandihui nominally allied with the Taipings captured Shanghai...

Wadcliff, John. The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 10. Cambridge University Press.

... The Chinese who accompanied the spread of Western trade were not only an exotic element whose speech and customs were alien to the Yangtze delta. Many were also hustlers and racketeers in the growing underworld of foreign trade. Chinese who had gone overseas and acquired British nationality as residents of Hong Kong, Singapore, Penang, or other port cities were able to claim the British consul's extraterritorial protection. This created a whole class of merchants who were neither Western nor Chinese. But this use of British cover for illegality was only one symptom of a broader trend - the organization of dissidence in south China, first on the routes of trade, and later among the settled populace. As the growth of population and trade outdistanced the growth of government administration, secret societies met the increasing need for mutual help and protection both among traveling merchants, opium smugglers, boatmen, and bandits, and the settlements they both preyed and depended upon. South Chinese secret societies were generally affiliates of the Tiandihui, whose largely were largely autonomous. Though not under central control, and cooperative only when it suited their needs, the secret brotherhood had an esoteric language, passwords and signs by which members could identify each other, all of which was especially helpful to people moving about on dubious business. The loose Tiandihui network, having no central head, could not really rival the Qing government - but neither could the government wipe it out. Piracy began to flourish with the growth of trade in the coastal waters outside of either British or Chinese control. By 1850 the Xiamen consul estimated that at least 3,000 pirates, both Chinese and Westerners, were active on the coast. British gunboats regularly went out on expeditions, capturing some 139 vessels in four years, earning a bounty of nearly £14,000. Soon fishing fleets began to arm themselves against piracy, and quickly some armed vessels began to act ambivalently in either role...

... In the early 1850s Shanghai became a focal point where a new balance of forces in Sino-Western relations permitted the first stirrings of the new order to come. British contributions to the rise of Shanghai were made first of all by the Royal Navy which guaranteed the security of Chinese, as well as foreign, property and liberty. The British consuls gave legal, institutional form to the forces at work. But they were only primus inter pares. The Chinese contribution had several essential ingredients - Chinese merchants attracted the capital of landlord-gentry throughout the rich Yangtze, Chinese rebels who posed immediate questions of disorder and provoked foreign intervention, and finally, opportunistic, profit-minded Qing officials nominally representing a government too weak to control them. Arrangements between the early foreign consuls and their Chinese counterparts were rather informal. Unlike arrangements at other ports, Shanghai consuls did not secure concession areas formally leased by the Qing regime to their governments. Instead foreigners at Shanghai, while not permitted to buy land, could negotiate leases directly with Chinese landowners, report them through their consuls, and receive titles directly from Chinese officials in the area. The predominant British concession, in the spirit of free trade, welcomed all nationalities as well as their consuls in the original 138 acres of the British settlement, which thereby as it expanded became an international municipality under the jurisdiction of the entire treaty-power consular body. The resulting International Settlement, a unique institution, became in time a tribute to the new, Western influenced and yet still Chinese regime which would come to power; however it would go through nearly a century of gestation in the process of taking shape...

... Chinese residents in Shanghai by early 1853 only numbered some five hundred souls; however by March of that year the Taipings' capture of Nanjing let loose a flood of refugees. Thousands of homeless Chinese were soon camped along the International Settlement or in boats off the jetties; mat sheds, shops, and new streets of cheap housing proliferated to accommodate them. Among the refugees numbered not only commoners but also landlord and merchant families of wealth and power. During the following decades displaced gentry added to the Shanghai community and so accelerated the movement of lower Yangtze landlord families into foreign contact. This new influx of Chinese, far outnumbering the Western residents, quickly however pulled the city out of foreign jurisdiction, when, on 7 September 1853, the city was seized by Tiandihui rebels of the Small Swords Society (小刀会; Xiao Dao Hui) (15)...

Taiping & Small Swords troops outside of Shanghai
Note that some of the soldiers are female

... While the foreign consuls asserted their neutrality, they had to assume increasing responsibilities of local government, including the administration of justice in cases involving Chinese residents. They inflicted moderate fines or imprisonment for minor offenses, and while they handed more serious cases over to the Chinese authorities, they exerted their rule under what became known as 'Western law,' a hodge-podge of common and civil law. Meanwhile by late March 1854 the Qing finally landed a force to besiege the rebels in the city; however they were ill-equipped and soon turned to foraging, and after the local environment was scoured they turned to blackmail and banditry. The Qing authorities were unable to control them, and so on 4 April the British, American, and French merchants pulled together a mixed force of about four hundred sailors and volunteer merchant marines, together with double their number of Hongmen, advanced with four artillery pieces and several of their own ships and drove the Qing backed in the Battle of Shanghai. With this the Shanghailanders began to proceed with a policy of 'normalization' with the Taiping government and their Tiandihui representatives. Thus in July 1854 a committee of Western businessmen, ignoring protests of the consular officials, met and held the first meeting of the Shanghai Municipal Council, which quickly laid down the International Regulations, establishing the principles of self-government for the Settlement while working to integrate itself into the Taiping kingdom. 1854 would prove to be the last year that Shanghai would send taxes to Beijing. All this created a local Chinese readiness to acquiesce in the autonomy and assist in the defense of the foreign settlement. This mutuality of Sino-Western interests became the secret of Shanghai's successful independence. By 1855 the ingredients of a new order were present and taking shape in new institutions...

The flag of the Shanghai International Settlement

Tianjing Incident

... In the early days of the Taiping Revolution, the real power of the military was in the hands of the Military Advisors, who would go on to become the Kings of the Four Quarters, while the Heavenly King Huoxiu did not actually wield any power beyond his divine mandate. Following the capture of Nanjing and the establishment of the Heavenly Capital there, power increasingly was centered around the East King, Yang Xiuqing. Yang gained even more power following the death of the West King, Xiao Chaogui, in 1852, and in 1854 when the Tian Wang's cousin, Hong Rengan, journeyed from Hong Kong to Nanjing to re-join the Taipings and was elevated to the position of Hollow King (干王; Gan Wang), which further threw off the balance of power of the original leadership of the Taipings. Further, unlike his peers, Yang Xiuqing had the gift of occasionally being possessed by the Holy Spirit, who would give orders through Yang, much like King Huoxiu himself would see visions from God. This had allowed Yang to become even more influential within the Taiping court.

After the Taipings captured Nanjing and established their Heavenly Capital there, Yang's relationships with the other Kings gradually worsened. Wei Changhui was flogged on Yang's orders once for the offense of the North King's subordinate. Later, Wei's and Yang's relative entered into a property dispute, which ended with Wei's relative being executed by being quarters, further driving the two kings apart. As well Yang and Shi Dakai's relationship was destroyed after Shi's father-in-law insulted Yang, and was punished with a flogging once a day for one year, his nobility stripped, and his lands forfeited to the state. In the same incident Yang also had Qin Rigang, the tutor of both the future Brave and Loyal Princes (16), flogged as well...

... Even the Heavenly King was not spared from Yang's wrath. In early June 1856 the East King was taken once again by the voice of God, who ordered King Huoxiu flogged for disobeying Yang's orders regarding the war. Just weeks later, on 20 June 1856, the Battle of Nanjing ended in Taiping victory when the Qing's Jiangnan Army Group was routed outside of the Heavenly Capital by Qin Rigang, with Qing General Xiang Rong committing suicide shortly thereafter as the final traditional Qing army that would try to invade the Taiping Kingdom was scattered in retreat. Shortly afterwards, Yang was once again possessed by the spirit of God and...

Book of Taiping. Ed. Universalist General Convention. Kansas City: Universalist General Convention, 1985.

... Then the Dong Wang, commanded by the Voice of our Heavenly Father, summoned the Tian Wang to his residence. There, God, speaking through the Dong Wang's body, said onto the Tian Wang "You and the East King are both my sons. The East King has led the People and won a great battle against the demon imps, so why is he still hailed as jiuqiansui instead of wansui?"

And the Tian Wang replied "The East King has indeed make great contributions to defeating the devilish empire, so he shall be hailed as wansui."

And the Heavenly Father asked again, "Should the Dong Wang's sons be hailed as wansui?"

And the Tian Wang once again replied "The Dong Wang, his sons, and his descendants shall be hailed as wansui as well."

And God smiled through the Dong Wang's mouth, and was glad...

Wadcliff, John. The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 10. Cambridge University Press.

... The catastrophe that struck the Taipings in 1856 sprang neither from the deficiencies of their convictions nor from the strength of their opponents, but instead from the instability of the central leadership. This weakness, as we've covered earlier, was built into the Taiping system from its earliest days. The continued survival of the regime required that interpersonal rivalries among the leadership be balanced by a spirit of brotherhood for the common cause. But fraternal bonds soon fell victim to the ruthless ambition of Yang Xiuqing. By the time the Heavenly Capital had been established in 1853, his already great power had been further enhanced by the deaths of his rivals and the division of his opponents. Indeed, as Yang was the supreme military dictator of the Taiping's war effort, he alone was with Hong in Nanjing for much of the second phase of the Revolution, while the other kings led their armies in battle across the far reaches of southern and central China. Yang was thus able to browbeat Hong into conferring more and more power upon him, further cementing his central authority. In addition, Hong's progressive mental deterioration, perhaps under the increasing stress of his role as the Second Coming to over some thirty millions souls, had in any case led to his virtual withdrawal from any active participation in every-day executive decision-making. Yang quickly assumed new spiritual authority, asserting that he was not only possessed by the Voice of God, but also the incarnation of the Holy Ghost, exalted even above the second son of God. Most historians have depicted Yang as a faithless schemer, assuming that his own religious pretensions, in contrast to Hong's beliefs, were mere contrivances and far from sincere. Evil manipulator or not, it is clear however that without Yang's administrative brilliance and instinct for centralized power, even beyond that of Feng Yunshan, that the Taipings would never have achieved as much as they did in the first phase of the Revolution...

... In August of 1856, in a brazen power-grabbing move, Yang forced Hong to grant him to designation of 'Ten Thousand Years,' an imperial prerogative that hitherto even Hong himself had disdained (17). At the time, Wei Changhui demanded that Yang be punished and executed, but at this critical moment Hong refused to do so. Instead Hong ordered Wei and Shi Dakai, both of whom had just arrived to celebrate the defeat of General Qin, to leave the capital and reinforce the armies on the western frontier. However the following week Hong received urgent news one of Yang's staff, Chen Chengrong, who claimed that Yang was planning to execute Hong and claim the throne of the Heavenly Dynasty for himself. The Heavenly King then quickly issued secret summons to Wei and Shi, commanding that they return to Nanjing and kill Yang. Wei, then campaigning in Hubei, was nearest; with a body of some three thousand elite troops he hastened back to Nanjing. The son of landed gentry, Wei may have already resented his long victimization by Yang, who was by origin a poor laborer. On the night of 1 September he struck swiftly. Met outside the city gates by an equally numbered force led by Qin Rigang, the army was let into the city by Chen. Yang was killed, along with everyone else in his residence, including his fifty-four wives and concubines, and all of his children and other relatives. Unsatisfied, Wei then ordered a wholesale purge of all those who had supported Yang, or might have potentially supported him, or had slighted Wei, even if only perceived in Wei's mind. Some 27,000 souls died in the massacre, which raged in Nanjing for nearly a forenight, apparently went far beyond anything Hong had envisioned. When Shi Dakai and Feng Yunshan reached Nanjing on 26 September at the head of an army 20,000 strong, they too were appalled and urged Wei to stop. Wei, perhaps by now somewhat demented by the hideous scene, suspected both Shi and Feng of sympathies for the Eastern King's clique (18), and ordered them both arrested. Fighting broke out in the Heavenly city, with Shi issuing a call to the people of Nanjing to rise up against Wei and called on Hong to order the execution of Wei, while also issuing orders to his troops along the frontier, some 200,000 strong, to march on Nanjing immediately. Realizing that the people, nor the military, would not support him, Wei panicked and ordered an attack on the Heavenly King's residence. Whether Wei thought to execute Hong or to take him prisoner is unknown, as the coup was crushed by Hong's loyal staff, who rallied some two hundred of Hong's elite guards, as well as those who had formerly supported Yang who were still alive and within the city. Wei Changhui was killed on 1 November, trapped between Hong's residence and the encircling forces of Shi and Feng, and his severed head was paraded about the city for several days. Qin Rigang and Chen Chengrong were both subsequently executed as well. In this arena of carnage, greed, and paranoid, whatever remnants of its original vision the Taiping Revolution might have retained nearly perished. With the loss of centralized authority the Taipings fortunes floundered for some six months as the Qing took the opportunity to strike back, with the Hunan Army under Zeng Guofan re-taking Wuhan in late December 1856, and steadily rolling back the Taipings' gains in Hubei and Jiangxi throughout the spring of 1857...

... For all the chaos at its center, the Taiping Revolution however retained an irrepressible vitality among its rank and file. The revival of its military fortunes was accomplished largely by the rising new stars of the Taiping military; Li Xiucheng, Chen Yucheng, Lai Wenguang, and even Hong Rengan, the Heavenly King's long-lost cousin. Emerging as top field commanders in 1857, these brilliant tacticians gradually regained the offense and succeeded in throwing Qing forces north of the Yangtze once again, dealing the Hunan Army a stunning defeat at...

The Tianjing Incident

Xianfeng Emperor

... Succeeding to the Dragon Throne in 1850, at age nineteen, the relatively young emperor inherited a dynasty that faced not only foreign challenges, but internal conflict as well. The era name of Xianfeng (咸丰/咸豐), which means 'Universal Prosperity,' did not reflect the situation of the Manchu's empire. In 1850 the first of a series of popular rebellions began that would nearly destroy the dynasty. The Taiping Revolution, led by King Huoxiu, a leader of a syncretic Christian sect, broke out in Guangdong before rapidly spreading out across nearly all of southern China. The next year the Nian Rebellion started in North China, followed three years later by that of the Miao in Guizhou. In 1856 the Panthay Rebellion broke out in Yunnan, followed in the same year by the Nepalese-Tibetan War, and the First Dungani Revolution in 1862. Trapped between these powerful forces the Qing suffered repeated defeats. Luckily for the dynasty no foreign power became involved at the height of the Qing's misfortunes... (19)



(1) Although Pinyin, or an analogue, is never developed ITTL, for the twin sakes of ease of research and writing, and reader accessibility I will be presenting Chinese translations using the Pinyin system, unless directly quoting from a source.

(2) I'll let the reader determine for themselves whether the author is intending to be ironic here, or merely hypocritical in his description of the Pig Trade vis-à-vis that of the Poison.

(3) IOTL the Huai River's course was never corrected, or rather it was before changing once more. After the 1887 Yellow River flood forced it back to its previous path, the Huai was changed yet again in 1938 when the Chinese Nationalist Government purposefully destroyed the dams and dikes holding back the Yellow River in order to halt the rapid advanced of Japanese forces during the Second Sino-Japanese War, which once again forced the Huai River to change its course. In the aftermath the river began to pool into Hongze Lake before it would seasonally flood and run south instead of east, joining with the Yangtze instead of emptying directly into the Yellow Sea. Even to this day IOTL the PRC government has chosen not to attempt to redirect the Huai to its natural course, and instead only attempts to control the flooding by building several flood outlets for the river, especially via the North Jiangsu Irrigation Main Channel.

(4) Tiandihui is perhaps better known IOTL as the Heaven and Earth Society, or the Hongmen. Born as an alliance between anti-Qing, pro-Ming loyalist in the centuries after the Manchu Conquest of China, and religious dissidents that were targeted by the Qing state after the White Lotus Rebellion. During the late 19th century the Hongmen began to form secret societies among Chinese immigrant communities overseas, notably in the United States and Australia. Though wide-spread and vehement in their anti-Qing propaganda however, they did not take part in any of the rebellions against the Manchu dynasty during the 19th century, and after the Revolution of 1911 the group was largely without purpose, and split between Chinese expatriates mostly in the English speaking world, which largely either were assimilated into their host culture or became "Chinese Freemasons," and between those groups still in China, which, suddenly denied of their steady stream of income of donations from sympathetic locals in the provinces and various anti-Qing groups, largely turned into a criminal organization - the Triads.

(5) The Four Books and Five Classics refer to nine works which form the basis of authoritative Confucianist study. Where as only the Four Books were required by the Qing to pass the civil service exam, the Five Classics are considered to have been complied and edited by Confucius himself, and form a strong insight into Confucian thought.

(6) Going against traditional Chinese imperial customs, Hong Xiuquan never adopted an era name and continued to go by his birth name. However ITTL his courtesy name, or zi, of Huoxiu ('A Show of Fire') is adopted by his regime to set him apart from the earthly plane, and importantly this is the name he becomes most famous by in the West.

(7) As per IOTL. Make of it what you will.

(8) IOTL Feng was hit by the stray shot in early 1852, though he didn't subsume to his wounds for several months. ITTL however the shot isn't fatal due to slightly better penetration of Western thought into China, especially into the Taiping leadership, especially that of the improving medical knowledge coming out of Europe (See Book Two, Chapter #11 for more information). Importantly, though records are sketchy, it is believed that Feng only died after his doctors attempted to use traditional Chinese methods to ail him. ITTL however the Taipings are very big on 'Christian medicine,' including using chlorinated lime to wash their hands.

(9) This is a very rough outline of the OTL early years of the Taiping Revolution.

(10) IOTL the Nian, which is traditionally rendered in the Wade-Giles 'Nien' instead of the Pinyin 'Nian,' was largely destroyed by the Qing in 1862 after its most skilled commander and 'leader,' if there can be said to have been one leader to the Nian, Zhang Lexing, was killed in battle by the Qing. However just two years later Lai Wenguang, the younger brother of one of Hong Xiuquan's concubines, revitalized the movement and lead an army of Nian, 90,000 strong, to Beijing, nearly succeeding in capturing the capital and ending the war with a Taiping victory.

(11) IOTL the Taipings wintered outside of Tianjin, and though reinforcements arrived the following spring they were unable to capture the city or make any more head-way, and the entire northern campaign was abandoned in 1855. ITTL however the Taiping have some lucky breaks, better leaders, and were able to bring the Nian into their ranks, swelling their numbers substantially. This is especially important because the Nian were renowned for their cavalry, something the Taipings were notoriously lacking. The Qing simply can't hold Tianjin against such numbers.

(12) Born Zeng Zicheng, the son of a prosperous farmer, Zeng was notorious as a youth for being the town drunkard, and even using opium, which finally forced his father to send him to military school. From there he attended the prestigious Yuelu Academy, earning the highest provincial degree in the Qing civil service examinations at age twenty-seven. He was then appointed to the Hanlin Academy as a professor the Confucian Classics (it was there that he changed his name). Over the next fifteen years he rapidly moved up the ranks over the bureaucracy, holding over time the rank of Chief Literary Examiner in Sichuan, Senior Deputy Secretary of the Board of Rites, and then finally Military Examiner. Following the death of his mother in 1851 Zeng returned to his native Hunan, which was at the time over-run by the Taiping. Using his position of power he co-opted rule from the provincial governor and began raising a volunteer army and navy to combat the Taipings. IOTL he would go on to play an important role in the defeat of the Taiping Rebellion, finally capturing Nanjing and putting down the rebellion in 1864, after which he became a highly influential in the Qing court - so much so that in 1872 Empress Dowager Cixi had him assassinated.

(13) The Grand Council (军机处; Junjichu) was a Qing institution acted as something akin to the role of a privy council. Despite its important role in government, the Grand Council was nominally only an informal body in the inner court, whose members simply held other, high-ranking, posts in the Qing civil service. Therefore the Chief Grand Councilor wasn't an actual title of court, and usually was accorded to the most moderate member who split the balance between the Han and Manchu officials serving on the council when a Prince of the Blood was not present to do so.

(14) IOTL Zeng and his forces remained in the south of China fighting the Taiping until 1862, when the Qing finally moved in to crush the rebellion, taking Nanjing and ending it two years later. ITTL though Zeng's forces, though modernized and fiercely loyal, are overwhelmed by the larger and better (read: less factional) led Taiping armies, and the last major Qing army is ejected from China south of the Yangtze, with predictable ramifications.

(15) Whose name refers to the daggers favored by the society, which were practical both in the close quarters of cramped Shanghai, and for their ease of concealment. IOTL the Small Swords captured the old, walled city, of Shanghai; however they didn't even attempt to take the International Settlement. However while the French openly supported the Qing government, the British and Americans were nominally neutral, while de-facto most of them supported the Small Swords, and by association the Taipings. In late 1853 when the French troops were sent into the old city to support Qing imperial troops in recapturing it confused fighting broke out between the Qing and French on one side, and the Small Swords, British, and Americans on the other. However at the pivotal moment the Small Swords broke down into fratricidal fighting between members of the Fujian and Guangdong factions, and in the aftermath the Anglos decided it would be better to support the Qing. ITTL however with slightly different Taiping leadership, the Small Swords are a) more effectively brought into the Taiping movement, and b) seize the International Settlement.

(16) After the Tianjin Incident several notable Taiping commanders were elevated from mere generals to a second tier of nobility. Brave Prince and Loyal Prince refers to Chen Yucheng and Li Xiucheng, respectfully.

(17) The term wansui, meaning 'Ten Thousand Years' (万岁) is reserved for use in exalting the Emperor of China and praying for his long-lived rule, while the lesser hail of 'Nine Thousand Years' (九千歲; jiuqiansui) was used for powerful officials below that of a weak Emperor. Essentially Yang is attempting to usurp Hong's position as sovereign of the Taipings by using the voice of God to force Hong, his nominal superior, to grant onto Yang a position of supreme authority. Once again note that Hong himself has not used the traditional imperial nomenclature and had, until this point, rejected the slogan of wansui.

(18) IOTL Shi left his troops at the frontier, and journeyed to Nanjing with only a small entourage. Here though he meets up with Feng along the way, who, being more organizationally minded, has brought a respectable fighting force with him.

Also note that, since the fighting breaks out already within the city, ITTL the Porcelain Pagoda is still standing as IOTL Wei destroyed it to prevent Shi from using it as a platform for his cannon.

(19) The Arrow Incident never occurs ITTL because the Taiping, though nominally dedicated to suppressing the Opium Trade, were just as likely to indulge not only in the use of but also the sell of the drug as the Qing were. While the crew of the Arrow is arrested by Taiping authorities, there's no great outcry in Britain as a result, largely because the Taipings, working with their Tiandihui proxies, are slightly more gentle and diplomatic in their treatment of the Arrow, and more importantly because, the 'Taiping Lobby' in London largely made up of clergymen and reformers already looking to ban the trade and hesitantly supportive of the new regime, which note is considerably more moderate, at least to Western eyes, when compared to OTL, would fight against the opium merchants, tearing apart the temporary alliance which had railed against the Pig Trade. As well the British have considerably more important things on their plate in 1857 than one small ship full of Chinese merchants that gets arrested by Chinese Christians that just happened to have been registered in British Hong Kong. Note that with no Second Opium War, this means no Treaty of Tientsin, and the Xianfeng Emperor lives much longer he isn't forced to flee and make the hard trip from Beijing to Chengde.

[Unknown]

You're back, wolf_brother!!!

This is an interesting update.

[FDW]

Nice update, a successful Taiping rebellion is quite exotic touch to this TL.

[Haaki]

Originally Posted by FDW

Nice update, a successful Taiping rebellion is quite exotic touch to this TL.

Well, it seems to be implied that they won't be successful long-term.

Very nice update WB, this is probably the most in-depth AH of China I've seen thus far. It even managed to teach me a good bit about OTL China.

[wannis]

Does the "Book of Taiping" exist IOTL?

[wolf_brother]

Originally Posted by Unknown

You're back, wolf_brother!!!

This is an interesting update.

Originally Posted by FDW

Nice update, a successful Taiping rebellion is quite exotic touch to this TL.

Thank you both very much

Originally Posted by Haaki

Well, it seems to be implied that they won't be successful long-term.

Very nice update WB, this is probably the most in-depth AH of China I've seen thus far. It even managed to teach me a good bit about OTL China.

Thank you. As I've said before, I feel particularly accomplished when my writing inspires others to study real history.

Originally Posted by wannis

Does the "Book of Taiping" exist IOTL?

No. Unfortunately we have rather few surviving primary documents from the Taipings themselves IOTL. The Great Seal of the Taiping Kingdom, for instance, still hasn't been translated IOTL because it was arranged in such a way that reading it according to standard Mandarin, Hakka, or any other Chinese dialect renders incomprehensible gibberish for the most part. The Taiping apparently were in the process of creating their own language, or at least their own dialect, as we do know that the seal is written as a acrostic, but we simply have no Rosetta Stone to compare it to to help us decrypt it, so we have no idea which letter to start off with.

[wannis]

Originally Posted by wolf_brother

No. Unfortunately we have rather few surviving primary documents from the Taipings themselves IOTL. The Great Seal of the Taiping Kingdom, for instance, still hasn't been translated IOTL because it was arranged in such a way that reading it according to standard Mandarin, Hakka, or any other Chinese dialect renders incomprehensible gibberish for the most part. The Taiping apparently were in the process of creating their own language, or at least their own dialect, as we do know that the seal is written as a acrostic, but we simply have no Rosetta Stone to compare it to to help us decrypt it, so we have no idea which letter to start off with.

Heh. Make something like that up in a TL, and everybody would say "now he's going overboard"... real history can be so weird. In any case, congratulations on the "Book of Taiping" then - it has the real feel of a tract by some loony sect. I gather then that there are still adherents of that faith / ideology ITTL's 20th century? With a sizeable community in the USA?

[Nanwe]

Great post!! (and seriously long too), this is one of those things that make me realise that my knowledge of history is as a Spaniard, limited to Europe and a bit of Latin America.

Originally Posted by wannis

In any case, congratulations on the "Book of Taiping" then - it has the real feel of a tract by some loony sect. I gather then that there are still adherents of that faith / ideology ITTL's 20th century? With a sizeable community in the USA?

If the Taiping creed/religion/cult/sect survives, it might as well be the Chinese version of voodo or any other religious syncretism that mixes traditional religions with Christianity and become popular among the eastern immigrants to America (and not necessarily just Chinese?)

[wolf_brother]

Originally Posted by Nanwe

Great post!! (and seriously long too), this is one of those things that make me realise that my knowledge of history is as a Spaniard, limited to Europe and a bit of Latin America.

I warned you about its length

And luckily for you the next several updates will deal with Europe as I return to the heart of this TL.

Originally Posted by wannis

Heh. Make something like that up in a TL, and everybody would say "now he's going overboard"... real history can be so weird. In any case, congratulations on the "Book of Taiping" then - it has the real feel of a tract by some loony sect. I gather then that there are still adherents of that faith / ideology ITTL's 20th century? With a sizeable community in the USA?

Originally Posted by Nanwe

If the Taiping creed/religion/cult/sect survives, it might as well be the Chinese version of voodo or any other religious syncretism that mixes traditional religions with Christianity and become popular among the eastern immigrants to America (and not necessarily just Chinese?)

Unfortunately I believe the Taiping religion has since died off. If there was some sect or remote mountain village that continued to hold onto Hong's Christianity, it didn't survive the century and a half of upheaval since then. At least as far as I know there are no modern Taipings.

[wolf_brother]

Originally Posted by FDW

Nice update, a successful Taiping rebellion is quite exotic touch to this TL.

Actually, I want to touch on this real quick. At this point there's no guarantee that the Taiping will be successful, or even survive, ITTL. So far the main differences are the survival of Feng, and a slightly better Taiping military as a result which has driven the Hunan Army out north of the Yangtzi and taken Tianjin, and the Hongmen have captured/co-opted the International Settlement in Shanghai. The Taiping still have to deal with the flooding Yellow River, the famine, banditry, piracy, etc. The Poison and Pig Trades are still on-going. And the Tianjing Incident still occurred. They're doing slightly better than IOTL, though they're on the rocks at the moment, but that's only because IOTL they were doomed from the start. The only thing I've shown in this update is that they have at least a chance now.

[wannis]

Originally Posted by wolf_brother

Unfortunately I believe the Taiping religion has since died off. If there was some sect or remote mountain village that continued to hold onto Hong's Christianity, it didn't survive the century and a half of upheaval since then. At least as far as I know there are no modern Taipings.

Just to be clear - I meant it seems to survives in your TL, not in OTL. Or does it die out in your TL as well?

[wolf_brother]

Originally Posted by wannis

Just to be clear - I meant it seems to survives in your TL, not in OTL. Or does it die out in your TL as well?

Oh, well aren't I embarrassed

Yes, there is a sizable amount, both in China and in the expatriate community, of Taiping Christians well into the 20th century ITTL. Compare its size and influence to, oh, say, IOTL's Tenrikyō, Mormonism, Bahá'í, Rastafarianism, Cao Đài, or Wicca.

[wannis]

Originally Posted by wolf_brother

Yes, there is a sizable amount, both in China and in the expatriate community, of Taiping Christians well into the 20th century ITTL. Compare its size and influence to, oh, say, IOTL's Tenrikyō, Mormonism, Bahá'í, Rastafarianism, Cao Đài, or Wicca.

That's quite a range of comparison - you keep your options open!

[wolf_brother]

Originally Posted by wannis

That's quite a range of comparison - you keep your options open!

Ah, well, what I meant by that was that you'll be looking at a community in the low millions, mostly based in its country of origin but with a significant overseas element, and which exerts a substantial influence in the body politic and society of its mother country, and to a lesser extent, its over-seas communities.

[Jonathan Edelstein]

Shanghai as an independent mercantile city-state: interesting! It'll be different from Hong Kong, because it will be locally controlled by the Sino-European merchant aristocracy rather than being run from London - I'm not sure exactly how that will play out, but I look forward to seeing.

[Unknown]

Looking forward to the next update, wolf_brother.

Or, as Bart Scott once said: Can't wait!!!

[Nanwe]

wolf_brother, do you think that with the return to Europe and the arrival of the summer, you could return to weekly updates or updated every two weeks?

[wolf_brother]

Originally Posted by Jonathan Edelstein

Shanghai as an independent mercantile city-state: interesting! It'll be different from Hong Kong, because it will be locally controlled by the Sino-European merchant aristocracy rather than being run from London - I'm not sure exactly how that will play out, but I look forward to seeing.

Well, I'm not sure 'independent' would be the correct way to describe Shanghai at the moment. It is apart of the Taiping Kingdom, though with a great deal of autonomy, and the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing is still in force. Otherwise you are correct - a 'Sino-European merchant aristocracy' while effectively rule the city for some time, regardless of how things play out between the Qing and the Taiping, and in time Shanghai will come to be one of the key foci for the syncretism of East and West.

Originally Posted by Unknown

Looking forward to the next update, wolf_brother.

Or, as Bart Scott once said: Can't wait!!!

Thanks a lot!

Originally Posted by Nanwe

wolf_brother, do you think that with the return to Europe and the arrival of the summer, you could return to weekly updates or updated every two weeks?

Quicker than the past update took me? Yes.
But as quick as I was able to pump out updates during the first book? No.

In fact right now I'm not prepping my next few European chapters, but instead am writing out a few chapters that won't take place chronologically for quite some time as I have the sources I'm drawing upon in front of me at the moment on loan. I just finished writing an update detailing events in the US, Europe, and the Colorado potato beetle if that's any conciliation.