Sabot Cat
Banned
The Dakai Dynasty: Rise of the Heavenly Kingdom
Preface: Stagnation and Struggle in the Qing Dynasty's China
“More than fifty years have passed since the founding of the Qing dynasty, and the empire grows poorer each day. Farmers are destitute, artisans are destitute, merchants are destitute, and officials too are destitute. Grain is cheap, yet it is hard to eat one’s fill. Cloth is cheap, yet it is hard to cover one’s skin. Boatloads of goods travel from one marketplace to another, but the cargoes must be sold at a loss. Officials upon leaving their posts discover they have no wherewithal to support their households. Indeed the four occupations are all impoverished!”
-Tang Chen (1790s)
China was a premier force on the world stage before the ascendancy of the Qing Dynasty. Unlike the nation-states in sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas, China had all of the foundational features of an advanced culture, with its abundance of protein rich farmable plants and docile livestock, producing the food surplus necessary for a division of labor and specialization of professions. This in turn led to all of the civilized ailments and aids, including writing and superior weapons of war. For two millennia, these factors in aggregate helped China to be wealthier than any of the nations of the world (including the various kingdoms of Europe), abundant in a collective proclivity for inventions and innovations among them printing, the compass, and gunpowder.
The Ming Dynasty's China was also one of the first countries in the world where it was proven that the threshold from feudalism to capitalism did not have to be passed with bloodshed. The reigning rulers gave a light tax burden and regarded the market with a quiet non-interventionism, facilitating the replacement of serfdom with commercial farming and wage labor. This laissez-faire approach to economics also carried to the cultural sphere, as Confucianism was re-interpreted by heterodox thinkers like Wang Yangming and Li Zhi, while Christians were allowed to profess their faith in peace. The aristocracy coexisted peacefully with the merchants, enjoying mutually waxing splendor.
It thus should have been on the fast track for an industrial revolution, especially when one considers that China has the third largest coal reserves readily available in the Shanxi Province. If there is anything that can be surmised from the European imperialist humiliation, it's that the decline of Chinese hegemony was not the product of scarce resources, but the result of a maladaptive culture. Or to be more direct, a maladaptive ruling clique: the Ming Dynasty were overthrown at great cost by the Qing Dynasty, and the latter's troops indiscriminately massacred people, such as in the infamous mass murder at the city of Yanghzhou, or in the provinces of Jiangnan and Sichuan, and after settling into their positions of power, the Qing soon cast their bureaucratic shadow over the masses.
They were crusaders against cultural progress, murdering any scholars and burning any texts that dared to advance a new or inconvenient idea. They were a blight upon the economy, enforcing a strict quota on the number of operating merchants, encouraging subsistence agriculture, preventing new mines from being opened, making commerce noncompetitive through thirteen government guilds, and appropriating 10,666 square kilometers of arable land wherein serfdom once again became the order of the day. Perhaps most crucially, they dammed up the river of wealth that was international trade, until it was but a tiny stream in Canton.
In consideration of all of this, it's surprising (and unfortunate) that their dynasty clung to life for as long it did. The Anglo-Chinese War served as the first stab to its pulpy, decaying wooden base. This conflict was a less of “war” between two equals and more of a conquest, with only 69 British casualties for 20,000 Chinese casualties over the course of three years and five months. The casus belli was the opium trade, or the lack thereof. The war and everything to come from it would not have occurred without the lack of economic openness, and through trying to reduce opposition, they invigorated it, an ironic plight shared by those who nailed Jesus to the cross and slayed the first Christian martyrs. Perhaps the Qing were at least partly justified in restricting the flow of foreign ideas into the country, because as soon as the treaty ports were opened and a new wind blew upon the faces of the Chinese masses struggling in a stagnant squalor, revolution was upon the land.
Chapter 1: A Kingdom Rises and an Empire Falls
“In my hand I wield the Universe and the power to attack and kill,
I slay the evil, preserve the righteous, and relieve the people's suffering.
My eyes see through beyond the west, the north, the rivers, and the mountains,
My voice shakes the east, the south, the Sun, and the Moon.
The glorious sword of authority was given by the Lord,
Poems and books are evidences that praise Yahweh in front of Him
Taiping unifies the World of Light,
The domineering air will be joyous for myriads of thousand years.”
-St. Hong Xiuquan, Poem on Executing the Evil and Preserving the Righteous (1837)
The most important of the emergent anti-Qing vanguard would be the Baishangdi Hui (God Worshiping Society), a Christian sect founded in 1843 by Hong Xiuquan, Feng Yunshan and Hong Rengan. Their movement attracted thousands of followers from the oppressed masses, as they preached equality and salvation in God the Heavenly Father. A word war spanning generations, with millions of arbor casualties, has been waged over the founders' exact theology. What many religious historians seem to miss here is that this era was the equivalent to the doctrinally free-wheeling days of early Christianity. An attempt to find an orthodoxy here will be, and has been, frustrated time and time again because there is no orthodoxy to find. The only thing that can be discerned is an overriding mandate to purge China of all of its “demons”, such as Confucian idols and temples, but more importantly the ruling Qing Dynasty.
The first bloodshed was not a clash between the nascent revolutionaries and the Qing Dynasty, but with the roving brigands that the Baishangdi Hui often countered at every turn. In revenge, a band of them ambushed and killed a prominent Taiping leader named Yang Xiuqing, on the night of June 14th 1849. He would be the zealous revolutionaries' first martyr, before they would be dealt another harsh blow in December 1850, when the Qing army commander at Xunzhou (Li Dianyuan) surrounded a residence of Hong Xiuquan in Huazhoushanren Village. There the rebel leaders were trapped, captured, and executed by beheading.
In the face of this catastrophe, Shi Dakai took on the mantle of leadership, and rallied the troops against the Qing in the memory of their martyred leaders. Shi Dakai was once just a young orphan, born in March 1831 in Guigang, Guangxi. Nonetheless, he persevered in his studies, and at the age of sixteen, he became a part of the Baishangdi Hui. Through his superlative genius in the battlefield and reputation for competency, as well as fairness in managing the Holy Treasury in its infancy, he was promoted to commander just three years into his service.
On January 1851, in Guangxi, Shi Dakai founded Taiping Tianguo (the Heavenly Kingdom of Taiping) and was promptly crowned as its king. The name of the realm wasn't just a reflect of its founders' and followers' Christian faith, but to further discredit the ruling Qing Dynasty. King Shi Dakai claimed that the current dynasty did not have the Mandate of Heaven because they did not have salvation in Jesus Christ, and that they could not rule over “all under heaven” if they acted in defiance towards the Lord above. Revisionists have claimed that this was more important arcana for philosophers than the common folk of the time, but it remained a fact that King Shi Dakai commanded tens of thousands of people in his army that were reportedly energized by his persona and rhetoric. However, his strength was not just in charisma or numbers: in May of that year he had led a victory against a Qing army 50,000 strong with just 300 soldiers at the Renyi river gate. He campaigned along the Yangtze river, absorbing more cities like Hunan and Wuhan while never losing a battle. In March 1853, his army captured Nanjing and christened it with the new name of Tianjing (Heavenly Capital).
He fortified the city of Tianjing and recreated the Holy Treasure as an emerging national currency, while continuing his much praised administration. He was especially popular with the peasants, as he had a modest dwelling and shared his poetry with them, and in turn they wrote folk songs in honor of him and his victories. He encouraged agriculture and commerce, lightening taxes and promoting people for their talent while imploring the citizens to report wrongdoing, in order to build a more efficient bureaucracy. He preached equality of the classes and sexes, with no private property ownership and female soldiers serving with male soldiers. He promoted monogamy, as he had an exclusive love of his wife Huang, while prohibiting polygamy and concubinage. Civil service exams, which were to be open to women, became rooted in Biblical rather than Confucian sources, while gambling, opium, tobacco, alcohol and prostitution were all outlawed.
By May 1853, the Taiping Kingdom had piqued the interest of Westerners, and henceforth the Dakai court hosted Sir George Bonham, Governor of Hong Kong and superintendent of the United Kingdom's trade in China. King Dakai was interested in opening up trade with the British Empire to stimulate commerce and strengthen evangelizing efforts. Unfortunately, the opium trade issue caused a clash between the two, with Shi Dakai sternly rejecting its legalization. Later on, the French attempted a similar mission, but they managed to also offend the court by referring to the Qing Emperor Xianfeng as “emperor”, a title reserved only for God in the Heavenly Kingdom. U.S. Commissioner Robert McLane carefully studied these cases, and hoped that he would have more luck through being introduced by Issachar Jacox Roberts, a Southern Baptist missionary that had been a friend of the court since its earliest days. Commissioner McLane secured a secret and exclusive trade agreement with Taiping, allowing the United States to outmaneuver France and the United Kingdom in the event that the Qing Dynasty would be overthrown.
King Shi Dakai had hoped to gain powerful allies in the Christian nations of the Western world before directly attacking Beijing, and with disappointment at the two foreign policy failures as well as the failure to secure an actual military alliance with the United States, he dispatched troops to try to recruit the disaffected Nian rebel bands. The Nian were skilled horsemen and salt smugglers that lacked a common ideology outside of anti-Qing sentiment among the peasants, but they shared a nostalgia for the Ming Dynasty. This was reflected by their incorporation of the Ming's signature color red in their banner and in the dye for their beards. Their leader was Zhang Lexing, although the word 'leader' might be too strong here, as there were sixteen distinct Nian groups each with their own “lodge master” who only consented to the loosest of centralization. The Nian thus aided the Heavenly Army in their campaigns in Huabei, where they captured numerous cities. By winter of 1854 they had taken Tianjin, a strategic location near to Beijing.
This was a flashpoint of revolutionary wave in China. In March 1855, a clash between Qing officials and Muslim miners in Yunnan sparked a general uprising of the Hui led by Du Wenxiu, who captured the provincial capital of Dali and declared himself the Sultan of Pingnan Guo (Pacified Southern State). The Miao peasants of the Guizhou, overburdened by taxes and seeing weakness in the Qing, rose up and took over in the name of Shi Dakai and the Taiping Kingdom by June 1855. The members of the Tiandihui in Guangdong province, led by Ling Shih-pa of the Baishangdi Hui, also cast off their oppressors and united with other rebelling Southern provinces. The Qing overstretched their military and supply lines in attempting to quell the revolts, while the Nian's incursions into Shaanxi inspired Muslims there to rise up in rebellion. With all of the Qing empire collapsing, King Shi Dakai was so confident that he dispatched an amban (equivalent to a protectorate's Resident) for Tibet, where he was received amicably. The king than rallied his forces and lead them triumphantly to Beijing in November 1855, achieving an overwhelming victory.
The Xianfeng Emperor was caught attempting to flee the city for his summer palace at Chengde by the revolutionaries, who resolved to take him and his brother Prince Gong. Afterward, it is said that Shi Dakai offered forgiveness to the captive royals, but they refused to admit the error of their ways. Whatever the case may be, they were executed with no surviving heirs willing or able to significantly challenge the new status quo at the moment. Their palaces were subsequently plundered by the invading armies.
It's hard to conceive of scenarios where the Qing Dynasty could not have fallen in the face of such strong, unified opposition to their rule, and it's amazing that they lasted for as long as they did. Nonetheless, the 'unified' quality of the opposition would be rapidly proven untrue.
[Author's Note: Pinyin and even Wade-Giles was butterflied of course, but I'm using unhistorical orthography because I'd rather not inflict Legge romanization upon you all. I'm also not a personal supporter of the Qing conquest theory, but it has more backers in this timeline. Updates will be weekly. ]
Last edited: