Charismatic religion meets turbulent politics: the Taiping movement and resonant charisma

The Taiping Movement was a Christian-based political, social, and religious revolution that shook the Chinese Empire from 1844-1864. Founded by charismatic self-proclaimed prophet Hong Xiuquan, the Movement aimed to establish a Heavenly Kingdom on Earth based on Hong's charismatic vision. In this Heavenly Kingdom, all citizens would worship the Christian God, whom Hong identified as Shangdi. All people would be equally children of a Heavenly Father and would live in a social and political structure that flowed from this religious system. The millions who joined the Taiping Movement would participate in a new charismatic religious system, driven by the experience of Hong's visions and a commitment to destroy demons and tear down the blasphemous imperial system. The charismatic religious and political message of the Taipings was the chief element responsible for attracting followers, but it did not do so in all places equally. When Hong first preached in relatively wealthy and stable Guangdong Province, he made few converts. It was only after he moved his message to the volatile rural frontier of Guangxi that his ideas were able successfully form a movement. Western Christian missionaries were similarly driven by charisma, but they found little success in winning converts. Charisma alone, then, cannot account for the success of the Taiping Movement. Rather, its success in Guangxi lay in resonant charisma - that is, a charisma which resonated with political and social conditions of the frontier province.

CHARISMATIC RELIGION MEETS TURBULENT POLITICS: THE TAIPING MOVEMENT AND RESONANT CHARISMA by Austin McDowell A Senior Honors Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The University of Utah In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Honors Degree in Bachelor of Arts In Religious Studies Approved: ______________________________ Colleen McDannell, PhD Thesis Faculty Supervisor _____________________________ Margaret Toscano, PhD Chair, Department of World Languages aaaaaa and Cultures _______________________________ Nathan Devir, PhD Honors Faculty Advisor _____________________________ Sylvia D. Torti, PhD Dean, Honors College April 2020 Copyright © 2020 All Rights Reserved ii ABSTRACT The Taiping Movement was a Christian-based political, social, and religious revolution that shook the Chinese Empire from 1844-1864. Founded by charismatic selfproclaimed prophet Hong Xiuquan, the Movement aimed to establish a Heavenly Kingdom on Earth based on Hong’s charismatic vision. In this Heavenly Kingdom, all citizens would worship the Christian God, whom Hong identified as Shangdi. All people would be equally children of a Heavenly Father and would live in a social and political structure that flowed from this religious system. The millions who joined the Taiping Movement would participate in a new charismatic religious system, driven by the experience of Hong’s visions and a commitment to destroy demons and tear down the blasphemous imperial system. The charismatic religious and political message of the Taipings was the chief element responsible for attracting followers, but it did not do so in all places equally. When Hong first preached in relatively wealthy and stable Guangdong Province, he made few converts. It was only after he moved his message to the volatile rural frontier of Guangxi that his ideas were able successfully form a movement. Western Christian missionaries were similarly driven by charisma, but they found little success in winning converts. Charisma alone, then, cannot account for the success of the Taiping Movement. Rather, its success in Guangxi lay in resonant charisma – that is, a charisma which resonated with political and social conditions of the frontier province. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ii INTRODUCTION 1 TAIPING HISTORY AND THE BAI SHANGDI HUI 8 NINETEENTH CENTURY CHINA, CHRISTIANITY, AND THE ROOTS OF THE TAIPING MOVEMENT 20 EXPLANATIONS OF THE TAIPING MOVEMENT’S SUCCESS 33 POLITICAL EXPLANATIONS 41 RELIGIOUS EXPLANATIONS 47 RESONANT CHARISMA AS AN EXPLANATION 63 CONCLUSION 72 REFERENCES 80 1 INTRODUCTION The Taiping Movement was a massive political, social, and religious upheaval in nineteenth-century China. It began in 1844 as a small, rural, mostly inocuous cult of “God-Worshippers” who based their beliefs on the visions of self-proclaimed prophet Hong Xiuquan. By 1851 its adherents were actively rebelling against the Qing dynasty, proclaiming the dawn of their “Heavenly Kingdom” and launching a “Guangxi Insurrection.” By the time the Taiping Movement was quashed by the Chinese Empire in 1864, it had gone from insurrection to rebellion to catastrophic civil war, spawned a fullfledged government, and nearly toppled the Chinese Empire. At its peak, the Taiping Movement operated as a utopian state, the Taiping Tianguo, led by Hong himself as its Tianwang, or Heavenly King, and ruled strictly under the principles of the Movement. This kingdom controlled most of South China, including the entire Yangtze River Valley and the historic capital city of Nanjing. To Western observers, it appeared to be a new and competing Chinese state likely to overthrow the Empire in Beijing, just as the Qing dynasty had overthrown the Ming in the seventeenth century or the Ming the Yuan in the fourteenth. The Taiping movement, however, was unlike these past revolutions in one key respect – it self-identified as a Christian movement, with an overt goal of establishing a Christian state, not a traditionally Chinese one. In this sense, the success of the early Taiping Movement raises a puzzling historical question – what was it about this particular Christian movement that drew in so many followers and allowed it to rise as explosively as it did, especially in a nation and among a people that had historically shown little interest in Western religion? What was the unique appeal of the Taiping Movement that missionary Christianity lacked? 2 Since at least the seventh century, when Nestorian missionaries made contact with the court of the Tang dynasty, Christian ideas had been present in China. Catholic missionaries had been active in China since Jesuit Matteo Ricci reached Macau in 1582. Protestant missionaries, many of them operating under the auspices of the London Missionary Society, had been trying to make Chinese converts since Robert Morrison arrived in 1807.1 Missionary efforts had only become more extensive as European powers grew their influence in Chinese port cities in the nineteenth century. By the midnineteenth century, Christian literature was readily available and widely circulated in China, particularly around treaty ports.2 Christianity was well-known by the Chinese people, if not well-liked. Despite decades of efforts, early Protestant missionaries made few converts. The London Missionary Society, for instance, only baptized ten Chinese in their first 25 years in China. By 1840, their converts still amounted to less than a hundred.3 Roman Catholic missionaries, with their centuries of presence in China, were more successful and struck deeper into the interior of China but had still only made a handful of thousands of converts out of a nation of hundreds of millions. The Taiping Movement, on the other hand, attracted millions of followers. What was it about the Taiping Movement’s brand of Christianity that attracted nineteenth-century Chinese citizens in a way that Western Christianity did not? 1 Robert H Lin, “The Taiping Revolution: A Comparative Historical and Sociological Study of a Movement—From the Perspective of Intercivilizational Encounters and Missions” (PhD diss., New School for Social Research, 1977), 49. 2Sukjoo Kim, “Liang Fa’s Quanshi Liangyan and its Impact on the Taiping Movement” (PhD diss., Baylor University, 2011), 69. 3 Lin, “Taiping Revolution,” 55. 3 Previous scholarship on the Taiping Movement points two possible explanations, one based on politics and the other on religion. The first proposes that the Taiping Movement was driven by a revolutionary political ideology conditioned by social and political conditions in nineteenth-century Guangxi rather than by a religious ideology. Under this angle of analysis, the Taiping Movement succeeded where missionary Christianity failed because the two were qualitatively different phenomena. Western Christianity was concerned with winning converts to a religious ideology. After converts had personally accepted that ideology, they were admitted into religious social systems (congregations), but those social systems existed chiefly as support for the personal, inward manifestation of the religious system. The Taiping Movement, on the other hand, proposed a revolutionary new social and political system, and secondarily refined a religious ideology that supported it. To scholars arguing this perspective,4 the Taiping Movement was a political movement rather than a religious one, and so it had a political revolutionary appeal that missionary Christianity lacked. The second explanation proposes that the Taiping Movement was primarily a religious movement which attracted followers with its religious ideology. Under this angle of analysis, the Taiping religious system developed from Hong’s vision interpreted through Christian texts and was not overtly political. This system did birth later political and social ideologies, but these were not at the core of the movement. Rather, the political aspects of the Taiping Movement arose as a natural outgrowth of Taiping 4 See, for instance, Michael (1971); Reilly (2004); and Levenson (1962). 4 Christianity.5 According to this explanation, the early success of the Taiping Movement must be attributed to the religious system at its core rather than to the political or social ideologies that grew out from it. Scholars who argue that the Taiping Movement’s appeal was chiefly religious rather than political face the additional question of which specific aspects of Taiping Christianity most contributed to attracting followers. Rudolf Wagner (1981) points to Taiping religion’s similarity to Chinese folk religion, specifically the worship of the deity Shangdi and beliefs concerning visions.6 Eugene Boardman (1951) notes that Christian terms and stories used by the Taipings were translated in a way that already suggested political and social rebellion, and that the Taiping religious system drew followers in by appealing to these connotations.7 Most recently, Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye (2019) suggests that the main appeal of Taiping Religion was in its charismatic quality. She compares the Taipings to other charismatic religious movements of the nineteenth century and notes that, like them, the Taiping Movement attracted followers by the charismatic experience of its leader, transmitted by charismatic preachers and experienced by the whole group of followers as a collective charisma.8 This paper builds off Inouye’s analysis of the Taiping Movement and agrees with her that it was first and foremost a charismatic religious movement. As an organization, 5 For examples of religious explanations of the movement, see Boardman (1951); Wagner (1982); and Kim (2011). 6 Rudolf Wagner, Reenacting the Heavenly Vision: The Role of Religion in the Taiping Rebellion (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1982), 26, 33. 7 Eugene Boardman, “Christian Influence Upon the Ideology of the Taiping Rebellion,” Far Eastern Quarterly 10, no. 2 (1951): 118. 8 Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, China and the True Jesus: Charisma and Organization in a Chinese Christian Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 20. 5 the Movement was built around divine revelation received through Hong’s (and later other leaders’) supernatural experiences, further legitimized by the members’ own charismatic experiences. Its members assumed a new collective identity when they joined the Taiping religion. They committed themselves to a radical new social order based on this supernatural revelation where all members were equally children of a Heavenly Father, and Hong was God’s son appointed to lead them on earth. Existing social relationships based on Confucian principles were forgotten. Hong’s vision was promoted powerfully by leaders of the Movement and treated absolute truth. Every member of the Taiping Movement knew this vision and others that formed the basis of their ideology and committed themselves totally to following them. These visions, spread by written texts and word of mouth, became the fuel for a collective charismatic energy. This charismatic religious energy, in turn, was the driving force behind the Taipings’ collective development of their social and political institutions. As strong as it may have been, however, charisma alone cannot account for the Taiping Movement’s success. Charismatic preachers, ideologies, and organizations were common in nineteenth-century China, but none of them achieved the same success as the Taiping Movement. Inouye points out that the London Missionary Society was, like the Taiping Movement, built on and motivated by a powerful, shared moral ideology and the charismatic commitment missionaries had to it.9 It made only a handful of converts in China in the first half of the nineteenth century. Likewise, Inouye argues, the Qing Empire was built on a charismatic religious ideology where citizens saw the emperor as 9 Inouye, True Jesus, 35. 6 Heaven’s representative on earth and the political organization of the empire as a direct manifestation of Heaven’s will.10 This charismatic ideology was precisely that which the Taipings rebelled against and drew followers away from. Though Wagner does not explicitly use the term charisma in his description, he describes missionaries such as Karl Gutzlaff and I.J. Roberts as eccentric personalities practicing an energetic, revivalist Protestantism, suggesting they too were using personal charisma to promote charismatic ideologies.11 Their only notable success was what they achieved through their influence on Hong Xiuquan and the Taiping Movement. What, then, can account for the Taiping Movement succeeding while contemporary charismatic movements failed? To account for this discrepancy, I propose that the success of the Taiping Rebellion in Guangxi lay not in charisma alone, but in resonant charisma – a term I have created to specifically describe charisma which, whether by design, revelation, or chance, resonated strongly with the cultural, social, and political context in which the Movement occurred and as a result was able to grow into the massive event it became. It was not just charismatic, but charismatic in a way that hit all the right notes to resonate with rural South Chinese peasants: the Movement appealed to cultural and religious tradition, while also challenging an increasingly unpopular regime. It appealed to Christian religious ideas but expounded on them in a way that made sense in a Chinese context. It had a powerful, charismatic, and at times dictatorial leadership, but that leadership promised a solution so social and economic woes of the time. Charisma alone was not what allowed 10 Ibid., 27. 11 Wagner, Reenacting, 12. 7 the Taiping Movement to draw millions of Chinese to a foreign religion; it was the way that charismatic element resonated that drove the Movement. The first section of this paper is a summary of Hong’s vision and his subsequent formation of the Bai Shangdi Hui (literally, Worship God Society), the religious organization that would grow into the core of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. This history goes over key events and introduces concepts important to understanding the charismatic character of the Taiping Movement. The second section is a description of conditions in mid nineteenth-century China, including a discussion of Western missionaries’ work in the Empire. This section provides what information necessary to understand why the Taiping Movement resonated in its context, and why missionary Christianity did not. The third section presents previous scholars’ explanations of the Taiping Movement’s success, and notes where these explanations are useful and where they fall short. This section contains two subsections; the first presents a summary of sources that treat the Taiping Movement and its success as essentially a political phenomenon, and the second provides a similar summary of sources that treat them as essentially religious or philosophical. Though it is by no means a comprehensive list of sources on the Taiping Rebellion, this overview of existing scholarship serves to illuminate the two major schools of thought on the most appropriate analysis of the success of the Taiping Movement. The fourth section of this paper is my own analysis, which explains the concept of resonant charisma and argues that it provides a satisfying explanation for the success of the Taiping Movement by building on previous scholarship and synthesizing under one term both the religious and political explanations for the movement. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the possible significance of 8 my concept of resonant charisma for future scholarship, both on the Taiping Movement and on other similar charismatic historical movements, both those that succeeded and those that burned out quickly or reached limited success. 9 HONG’S VISION AND THE BAI SHANGDI HUI In the summer of 1837, in the South Chinese village of Guanlupu, Hong Huoxiu, the young man who would become the charismatic prophet of the Taiping Movement, lay unresponsive in bed in his family home. He had just returned from Canton after his third failed attempt at the Imperial Civil Service exam, and his failure had driven him into delirium. Sometimes he would rise and madly swing an imagined sword, shouting incoherently about slaying demons, and other times he would lie on his bed, clearly ill. This dramatic reaction to his failure was not entirely unwarranted – the Civil Service Examination was essentially the only means of social advancement available to lowerclass Chinese. Hong, like all candidates for the exam, had spent the better part of his life preparing for it, committing to heart the Confucian and Taoist texts that formed the foundation of Chinese society and state. Passing the exam meant moving into the social class of those who work with their minds which, in Confucian tradition, was definitionally the class that ruled over those who work with their hands.12 Failing it meant that Hong would remain an outcast in the Confucian social system – something that certain scholars, including Franz Michael, suggest may have played a role in motivating Hong’s later efforts to destroy that system.13 12 Joseph R. Levenson, “Confucian and Taiping Heaven: The Political Implications of Clashing Religious Concepts,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 4, no. 4 (July 1962): 436; Anders Hansson, Chinese Outcasts: Discrimination and Emancipation in Late Imperial China (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), 20. 13 Franz Michael, The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971), 1:22-23. 10 According to the Taiping Movement’s officially sanctioned history, this delirium lasted for forty days before Hong awoke.14 During his sickness, Hong experienced the visions that would become the basis of his prophetic self-identity and the religious element of the Taiping Movement. Hong said that in his visions he was taken to Heaven.15 It was a place of indescribable beauty, full of joyful people and adorned not unlike the Imperial Palace in the capital. When Hong first arrived, some women cleansed his body, inside and out. They removed his internal organs, representative of all the doctrines Hong had known before, and replaced them with new ones, pure and clean, representative of the new doctrine he was about to receive. Once Hong had been purified, he was taken into a grand hall where an old man with a long golden beard sat upon a grand throne. He wore a high-brimmed hat and imperial black dragon robes and was easily recognizable as a figure of great authority. Hong, with the company of Heaven, bowed before this grand figure. The bearded man, facing Hong, handed Hong a gold seal and a sword. He told Hong that people on earth were worshipping demons, and it saddened him greatly to see it. He told Hong that people had strayed from his instructions and were blaspheming against his name and against his commandments. Even Hong’s own name, he said, blasphemed his name in its use of the character Huo. The old man gave Hong a new name – Hong Xiuquan – and 14 Franz Michael, The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971), 2:62. 15 Most sources on the Taiping Rebellion contain an account of Hong’s vision. The accounts vary mostly in the specific details they include and whether they present the vision as a single event or as a series of visions. The account I present here synthesizes the details of Hong’s vision as presented in Hamberg (1854) and Wagner (1982), both of whom describe multiple visions. Michael (1966) presents an abbreviated description of the entire event as one vision in Volume I of History and Documents; in Volume II, document 17 he includes the Taipings’ own published account of Hong’s visions. 11 simple (if opaque) instructions on what he was to do when he returned to earth: fight demons and lead people back to the right way. During Hong’s visions of Heaven, he saw himself following that command on a grand scale, leading heavenly armies against hordes of demons. These demons took on many forms but generally resembled those of traditional Chinese mythology. At the head of the demons’ armies was a figure Hong recognized as Yanlo, Chinese Buddhism’s Lord of Hell. Whatever their powers, these demons could not stand up to Hong and his armies. The old man told him the seal he had been given was the same one used at the beginning of creation, and all demons fled from it. Hong drove armies of demons back to Hell during his visions, exterminating with his sword those that refused to flee on account of the seal. Fighting by Hong’s side was a man on the cusp of middle age, identified as the bearded man’s son. He called Hong Di – younger brother – and, when he was not on the battlefield, helped his father instruct Hong in correct doctrine. Hong, the old bearded man, and the one who called Hong di were joined in Heaven and sometimes on the battlefield by women, whom Hong identified as the wives and daughters of the men. Together, they resembled an idealized Confucian family structure, living together and cooperating in their common goals, but maintaining appropriate social relationships among the members. This Heavenly Vision would later form the basis of the Taiping Movement, the God-Worshippers Society, and Hong’s Heavenly Kingdom. But Hong did not immediately understand it in this grand sense. He began going by his new name and adopted a quieter and more thoughtful demeanor, but otherwise his external life was 12 mostly unchanged by the vision.16 Hong did, however, grasp that his vision had some significance. Theodore Hamberg (1864) and Franz Michael (1966) point to Hong’s poems composed between 1837 and 1843, which contain statements that he has some great appointment from Heaven as a King but do not articulate clearly what that appointed position entails or who has given it.17 Theodore Hamberg similarly recorded in 1854 that Hong had told his family that “the venerable old man above has commanded that all men shall turn to me, and all treasures shall flow to me” but does not indicate that Hong had any specific idea of who the old man was or how this command was to be realized.18 Most histories of the Taiping Movement leave Hong’s vision here. They make the claim that Hong did not consider the vision carefully or arrive at any specific interpretation until 1843 after he closely read a Christian missionary tract.19 In his 1982 book Reenacting the Heavenly Vision: The Role of Religion in the Taiping Rebellion, Rudolf Wagner offers a different perspective, pointing to Chinese religious culture’s established procedures for validating and interpreting visions. Hong, Wagner argues, did not dismiss his experience but rather treated it as a possible vision, pending verification under these criteria.20 If and when the vision was verified, Hong could go about the work 16 Theodore Hamberg, The Visions of Hung-Siu-Tshuen and the Origins of the Kwang-Si Insurrection Hong Kong: China Mail Office, 1854), 14. 17 Michael, History and Documents 2:18-20. See also the poems Hong reportedly spoke during his vision (though they were likely composed much later) on pages 10-14; Hamberg, Visions, 12-13. 18 Hamberg, Visions, 11. 19 See, for instance, Michael (1971) v.1 pp.25, which identifies 1843 as the point where Hong’s illness “based on his delusions, could…be ascribed to a religious experience”; Kim (2011) pp.91 who skips from the 1837 vision to its 1843 interpretation with no mention of any interpretation in the interceding years ; Hamberg (1854), who similarly skips from the 1837 vision to its 1843 interpretation. 20 Wagner, Reenacting, 23. 13 of identifying who was in the vision and what it meant. In his 2004 book The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire Thomas Reilly similarly points out that long before Hong’s vision took on a Christian identification, it was significant in its Chinese context. Hong’s vision demanded the destruction of imperially sanctioned idols, which had clear religious as well as political connotations.21 In 1843, Hong’s visiting cousin suggested that a Christian missionary tract he had been given years earlier might help him understand his dreams. It was not uncommon in Hong’s time for evangelists and missionaries to target the educated class of would-be Imperial bureaucrats, and the tract Hong’s cousin suggested he re-read was likely one of hundreds of copies given to candidates for the civil service examinations.22 The particular tract Hong read was “Good Words to Admonish the Age” by Liang Afa, China’s first native evangelist. As a composition of an enthusiastic Chinese convert, “Good Words” was not so much a concise summary of Christian doctrine as it was a loosely connected series of favorite Bible passages, verbose sermons, and musings on Christianity. Upon reading Liang Afa’s tract, Hong came to a new understanding of his 1837 vision. The old man with the golden beard was actually God the Heavenly Father, creator of the universe and deity to whom all people owe obedience. The younger man was Jesus Christ, the literal son of that God. This meant that Hong, whom the younger man had called di, was himself the son of God and the younger brother of Jesus Christ. The old man had told Hong about two pure books, perfect and uncorrupt in his vision and one 21Thomas Reilly, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 62. 22 Kim, “Liang Fa’s Quanshi Liangyan,” 69. 14 false book which contained many errors. The pure books were the Old and New Testaments. The false one represented the Confucian classics. The old man had given Hong a commission to fight the demons people worshipped instead of praising the true God. These demons were the deities of Chinese folk religion, up to and including the highest deity that the Emperor worshipped on behalf of the nation. This understanding of the vision, drawn through comparison with Afa’s tract, would become the basis of the beliefs of the God-Worshippers Society, a small, rural religious sect that would grow into the Taiping Movement. Once Hong had arrived at his interpretation of his vision, he began promoting its message to his family and home region. At this stage, his message was primarily iconoclastic. He implored people to worship God on whom all things depended, and to oppose demons that opposed that God (mostly religious idols).23 Everywhere Hong preached he denounced local religious figures, destroyed temples, and cast down idols. He made a few converts, mostly from his own extended family, but his iconoclastic message, even with its charismatic quality, failed to resonate with the local population in Guangdong province.24 Hong and his cousin Feng Yunshan traveled to neighboring Guangxi to spread their message there, and they found a great deal more success. Guangxi was at the far Southern edge of the Chinese Empire; it had been among the last areas to fall under the authority of the capital, its population was composed largely of ethnic minorities, and its physical geography was mountainous and not well-suited to agricultural practices common in the rest of China. The people of Guangxi lived at the 23 Michael, History and Documents 1:26; Reilly, Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, 95. 24 Michael. History and Documents, 1:28. 15 margins of Chinese society, many of them working in charcoal production, mining and other labor-intensive and socially unappreciated jobs, and a considerable number of the local residents were considered “mean people” – a social class encompassing boatmen and other lowest-ranking professions whose members were not full citizens and were ineligible for civil service under Imperial Law.25 The authority of Beijing was not felt so strongly in Guangxi as it was in the rest of China, as bandits roamed the countryside and the few Imperial bureaucrats in the province represented their own interests more than the Empire’s. Social organization among the poor, mountain-dwelling people of Guangxi, especially the Hakka minority to whom Hong preached, came chiefly through family groups and Secret Societies rather than an effective government.26 The social, economic, and political conditions of this region, a world away from the comparatively wealthy Guangdong lowlands and port cities, made for a population much more willing to listen to Hong’s message and embrace his new ideology. In other words, Hong’s charismatic message resonated there. Hong and Feng centered their preaching in Guangxi around Thistle Mountain, a highland region containing a few small villages. The local population was ethnically mixed, with a considerable population of Hakka (a local minority group of Han Chinese who had migrated to the region from central China within the past few centuries). Many of those Hakka were classified as “shed people”, the Imperial government’s name for a social class considered respectable citizens and could take civil service exams, but 25 Hansson, Chinese Outcasts, 1. 26 Ssu-Yu Teng, New Light on the History of the Taiping Rebellion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), 50; Hansson, Chinese Outcasts, 53. 16 worked as low-ranking manual laborers and lived in separate communities on the margins of society.27 Conflict was common between Hakka shed people and the ancestral inhabitants of the area, and Guangxi Hakkas as a result mostly lived in tight, selfsufficient communities away from the local population and disconnected from central authority. As such, they were far more receptive to Hong’s novel charismatic message than social groups more integrated in Chinese society. Since the Guangxi Hakka were already disconnected from Imperial Confucian culture, they had no strong motivation to hold on to it or reject a system antithetical to it. Living at the social and economic margins of society, they welcomed an opportunity to join a tight-knit group offering mutual economic and social support, even if that came with a foreign religious ideology. The close social networks and familial relationships the Hakka maintained meant that when a few people from a village converted, the rest of the village often converted with them. By the end of 1844, Hong and Feng had established functional congregations in a number of villages around Thistle Mountain and had amassed at least a few hundred followers for their new religion. They decided to call this religious organization the Bai Shangdi Hui – Literally The “Worship God Society.” Hong and Feng’s use of the term Shangdi in their organization’s name, as Reilly (2004) notes, is significant in itself and marked what almost certainly appeared to Chinese observers as the first political action of the Taiping Movement.28 Shangdi was not the only term for “God” Hong could have opted for. He could have chosen the more politically neutral Shen or followed Roman Catholic missionaries in adopting TianZhu 27 Hansson, Chinese Outcasts, 52 28 Reilly, Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, 80, 99. 17 (Heavenly Lord). In an Imperial Chinese context, using Shangdi to refer to the Christian God implied superiority to and insubordination toward the Emperor. Shangdi had referred for millennia to the highest God in the Chinese pantheon, and still did in the religious systems of many Chinese citizens.29 In the Qin dynasty, however, the Emperor had adopted the term as his own title, and since then, any use of Di or Shangdi conveyed immediate associations with the Imperial office. Using the term in a biblical religious schema led to formulations such as “there is no God but Shangdi” and “Do not blaspheme the name of Shangdi.” Hong, along with his followers, saw the Emperor’s title as a violation of these commandments and so sought to tear him down along with all the idols and false Gods of China.30 Because it represents the beginning of both collective organization and political aspirations this 1844 formation of the God (Shangdi)Worshippers Society was the beginning of the Taiping Movement.31 At the end of the year, Hong left Guangxi and returned to his job teaching in his hometown, quietly writing about his religious convictions but not actively gathering new followers. Feng stayed behind and continued to expand the Taiping Movement in Hong’s absence. By 1847, Protestant missionaries in the region, likely members of the Chinese Union, had heard of Hong and his visions. They invited him to travel to Canton and study under Baptist missionary Issachar J. Roberts. He accepted the invitation. The few months 29 Wagner, Reenacting, 31. 30 Reilly, Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, 88. 31 Most scholars on the Taiping Movement identify the January 1851 proclamation of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom as its start date. These sources treat the activity of Hong and the God Worshippers Society from 1843-1851 separately as preliminaries of the Movement. While 1851 is the correct start date for the Taiping Kingdom, I see no reason to consider it the start of the Taiping Movement. Although the God-Worshippers did not use the term Taiping in their name, their organization belonged to the same religious and ideological movement that the Kingdom did, so I treat their formal organization in 1844 as the beginning of the organized Taiping Movement. 18 Hong spent in Canton most likely were the first time Hong had read a complete Bible.32 Even more than Liang Afa’s tract had, the Bible – specifically Gutzlaff and Medhurst’s Shangdi translation – validated Hong’s visions and confirmed his mission. Hong, acting as God’s son, following the example of the Kingdom of Israel and fulfilling the teachings of Jesus, was to establish God’s Heavenly Kingdom on earth and rule as its Heavenly King (not Emperor, since that title belonged to God alone). In the summer of 1847, Hong returned to Thistle Mountain to find that Feng had grown the God-Worshippers Society to a membership of thousands. With Hong its prophet personally present and Hong’s newly edited version of the Gutzlaff-Medhurst Bible as an additional scripture, the movement accelerated its growth. More Hakka joined the movement, both from religious conviction and from social-political expediency, and others in Guangxi began to follow them. New charismatic leaders including Yang Xiuqing and Xiao Zhaogui emerged, channeling the voice of God through their own visions to corroborate Hong’s mission and further draw people into the Movement. By 1850, the Taiping Movement had tens of thousands of followers, living in a religiously dictated social structure that drew more converts in by the day. The rapid growth of the Taiping movement and rumors that its leader hoped to seize the emperor’s throne for himself alarmed the Empire, and Imperial troops began threatening the Taipings at Thistle Mountain. On January 11, 1851, amid increasing conflict with Qing forces, Hong declared himself the Tianwang, or Heavenly King, of a new Heavenly Kingdom, effectively declaring war on the Qing Empire.33 32 Boardman, “Christian Influence,” 119. 33 Michael, History and Documents, 1:42. 19 In subsequent years, the Taiping Movement continued to grow, but took on an increasingly military and political character. Members of the Taiping Movement continued to practice their religion, for instance, by praying to Shangdi and observing a sabbath, but its social organization became more like an army and less like a utopian commune. Overthrowing the Manchu Qing dynasty and establishing their own, new kingdom became the overt goal of the Taiping Movement. In 1853 the Taiping army seized China’s historic capital city of Nanjing, renamed it Tianjing, and established it as the capital of their Heavenly Kingdom. There the Taiping Movement became a functional state, with a bureaucracy not unlike that of the Qing Empire fueled by the collective charisma of the movement’s adherents. The law of the Christian God, as interpreted by Hong, was the law of the Kingdom. The Taiping government redistributed conquered land so that all citizens would be equally able to grow food to sustain themselves. Women were treated as men’s equals and were allowed in the Taiping civil service, providing they passed the new Biblical knowledge examinations all prospective bureaucrats took. Assistant kings were appointed to rule over conquered territory. As Taiping political leaders set up a bureaucratic base of operations at Tianjing, the armies of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom continued to seize territory in the name of Shangdi and their Heavenly King. At the peak of their kingdom, the Taipings controlled the entire Yangtze River Valley, and their armies had marched into all but one province of China. They had threatened both Beijing and Shanghai, and it seemed that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom could topple the Chinese Empire. Between 1851 and 1864 the Heavenly Kingdom drew in as many as thirty million people. The Taiping Movement’s success, however, was not to last forever. After the Heavenly Kingdom was established, 20 Hong, whose personal charisma had started the entire Movement, retreated into his palace and backed away from personal leadership.34 In his place, Yang Xiuqing and other leaders vied for power, but none seemed able to channel the Movement’s charismatic ideology the way Hong had. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom became less charismatic and more bureaucratic. By the time Hong died in 1864 the Taiping Movement’s charismatic religious ideology had largely been institutionalized and replaced with the politics of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. With Hong’s death, the Taipings’ original charismatic message was abandoned and the Heavenly Kingdom was without a charismatic motivating ideology or personality. By the end of 1864, the Qing Empire reclaimed Tianjing and the Taiping Movement was wiped out. It is clear that the Taiping Movement’s success, as long as it lasted, was driven by charismatic ideology. It cannot be ignored, however, that after it assumed a military character in 1851 the Movement’s ideology became something qualitatively different from what it was when it was synonymous with the God-Worshippers Society. The main factors drawing people to the Movement, though still connected to the movement’s charisma, changed after the Taipings adopted an overt military character. The same charismatic religious core of the Taiping Movement remained, and continued to attract some followers. The military campaign against the political status quo, however, took precedence as the Movement turned into a Revolution. For this reason, I limit my subsequent analysis of the success of the Taiping Movement to those factors operating in its ideology and organization before the end of 1851. 34 Michael, History and Documents 1:53. 21 NINETEENTH-CENTURY CHINA, CHRISTIANITY, AND THE ROOTS OF THE TAIPING MOVEMENT The nineteenth century in China was, to put it mildly, a turbulent era. The Qing dynasty was seeing its political and economic authority eroded as Western powers moved in to trade along the coasts and as frequent rebellions cropped up in outlying regions of the empire. China’s population was growing at a record pace and agricultural production had not increased sufficiently to feed it.35 This, combined with years of poor crops, led to widespread famine among the lower classes. Revenue from the empire’s trading economy contracted dramatically as Western merchants and statesmen legally and illegally seized greater control over trade in Chinese port cities. To make up the loss in import taxes, the imperial government had increased taxes on its already burdened citizens. Trade in opium from British India left millions of Chinese citizens addicted to the drug and drained the Chinese economy of silver.36 The Empire’s prohibition on opium import had little effect at stopping either addiction or the flow of the drug. In an effort to stop the flow of opium and reassert its authority China fought a disastrous war with Great Britain from 18391842. China lost this Opium War, enabling Western powers to make greater inroads to China in its aftermath. Following the treaty of Nanjing, which ended the First Opium War, Chinese ports were increasingly opened to free trade. Hong Kong was ceded to Great Britain, and 35 Walter H. Mallory, China: Land of Famine (New York: American Geographical Society, 1928), 13; Michael, History and Documents 1:14 36 Michael, History and Documents 1:16. 22 foreign zones were established in treaty ports where foreigners could live, work, and do business outside the authority of the Chinese Empire. As the nineteenth century went on, more treaties were signed and by the end of the century China had lost control of trade in virtually all its ports. For some Chinese businessmen, commerce with Western merchants in these ports was a lucrative business. For most Chinese, however, the incursion of Western powers brought only opium addiction, economic hardship, and political destabilization. After the First Opium War, anti-Western sentiments became widespread as Chinese citizens felt the ill effects of Western incursion. Since the Qing Dynasty had failed to stop this economic invasion, anti-Qing ideas welled up along with them. The combination of both created a situation where some Chinese citizens began to call for a new dynasty to address China’s social and economic problems. Particularly in remote areas such as Guangxi, these political dissenters often organized themselves into “secret societies.” Members were bound together by an oath of allegiance to the group and a commitment to its anti-Qing ideology. Occasionally, these secret societies would rise up in open rebellion against the government; such insurrections were, at the best of times, not infrequent.37 These rebellions were crushed by the Imperial government but were never treated as unjustifiable or foreign to Chinese political and religious ideology. Rather than opposing the Confucian religious principles that justified the emperor’s reign, as the Taiping Movement would, their rebellious ideology was based on them. 37 Thomas Taylor Meadows, The Chinese and their Rebellions: Viewed in Connection with their National Philosophy, Ethics, Legislation, and Administration (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1856), 117. 23 In imperial Chinese religion, the Emperor’s reign was understood as being validated by the “Mandate of Heaven (TianMing).” Like European concepts of divine right to rule, this TianMing maintained that the Emperor was not just an earthly political figure, but that his reign was established and sustained by Heaven. On behalf of the people, the Emperor was tasked with worshipping the highest God at a grand altar in the capital city. Heaven expected him to govern the Empire in accordance with Confucian principles38. Unlike the European concept of kingly authority, the Emperor’s Mandate of Heaven was not absolute or unconditional. It was granted at the beginning of a dynasty, but that dynasty could lose the Mandate at any time if the emperor failed to govern properly. While a dynasty had the Mandate of Heaven, it would be allowed to rise. When the Mandate was lost, the dynasty would decline. In Chinese popular religion, famine, war, disaster, and civil unrest were understood as signs of this loss of the Mandate.39 All of these were common in nineteenth-century China, so secret societies calling for an end to the Qing dynasty and a restoration of the Ming arose and became increasingly powerful as their ideology was vindicated by current events. While secret societies spread their anti-imperial message among disaffected Chinese citizens in interior China, Western missionaries were preaching in and around port cities. Roman Catholic missionaries had had a presence in China since 1582, when Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci began traveling from Macau on tours of South Chinese ports. Protestant mission work in China, however, had begun much later. In 1807 Robert Morrison of the London Missionary Society began evangelizing to the mainland from a 38 Levenson, “Confucian and Taiping Heaven,” 441. 39 Michael, History and Documents 1:16; Meadows, The Chinese and their Rebellions, 18. 24 base at Macau. By 1850 Protestant missionaries were active in all the treaty ports of China. As Great Britain expanded its political and economic influence in China during the first half of the nineteenth century, Anglophone Protestants followed in its wake and set out to save the millions of benighted souls of China. Partly due to heavy government restrictions on their movement and activities, and partly due to strong and growing anti-Western sentiment, Protestant missionaries had limited success in China. Between 1807 and 1840, the London Missionary Society made only a handful of converts in the Chinese Empire. Among those converts was Liang Afa, a Guangdong native who became a Protestant evangelist after his conversion. As a Chinese citizen, Liang was allowed much greater freedom to travel, write, and publish than what Morrison and other Western missionaries were allowed. He used this relative freedom to become China’s first native evangelist, preaching where his Western teachers could not and spreading texts they legally could not, including to candidates at the imperial civil service examinations.40 He became a prolific writer, publisher, and distributor of Chinese language Christian tracts, the most influential of which was Good Words to Admonish the Age.41 This was the tract that would eventually find its way into the hands of Hong Xiuquan, who would use its message to interpret his vision and craft the theology of the God-Worshippers Society. Good Words was a lengthy work, divided into nine volumes, which presented Christianity as Liang understood it in a form and language accessible to average Chinese readers. Liang seems to have imitated the conventions of Chinese morality books, and in 40 Kim, “Liang Fa’s Quanshi Liangyan,” 65. 41 Ibid., 118. 25 doing so framed his set of Christian beliefs and moral principles as something that could fill a similar role to the principles in those morality books.42 This is not to say that Liang presented Christianity as simply a modified Confucian ethical system; Good Words stressed that what moral principles it contained flowed from God rather than from some natural order, and that moral uprightness came from the saving action of God and Christian duty.43 Liang’s tract was not Confucian literature, but it did fully articulate Christianity as Western missionaries knew it either. Good Words, as Reilly (2004), Michael (1971), and Kim (2011) note, was not a structured catechism or a republication of the entire Bible. Rather, it was a collection of Liang’s rambling sermons and Bible excerpts with Liang’s commentary.44 The Bible excerpts were not arranged in any significant order and were not presented with any historical or textual context. In the mold of the evangelical missionaries who had trained him, Liang focused on the power, sovereignty, and commands of God. The tract dwelled at length on the Flood, the Exodus, and the receiving of the Law, and it included parts of the Sermon on the Mount and certain teachings of Jesus. The Ten Commandments were another common topic in the tract, but not all of them appeared in their entirety and not all of them were given equal weight.45 Liang discussed at length the idea of sin and needing Jesus as a savior, but was not able to sufficiently describe what that meant to Chinese audiences. Reilly (2004) notes that Liang’s notions of salvation are entirely 42 Zexi Sun, “Translating the Christian Moral Message: Reading Liang Fa’s Good Words to Admonish the Age in the Tradition of Morality Books,” Studies in World Christianity 24, no. 2 (2018): 98. 43 Ibid. 44 Reilly, Heavenly Kingdom, 68; Michael, History and Documents, 1:25; Kim, “Liang Fa’s Quanshi Liangyan,” 65. 45 Kim, “Liang Fa’s Quanshi Liangyan,” 65. 26 personal rather than collective.46 Jesus was portrayed as an important teacher about a spiritual Kingdom of Heaven. Liang did not mention any political or social implications of his teachings. Good Words was the first and, according to some scholars, the only Christian text Hong Xiuquan ever read in detail, and the religious formulations it contained would form at least a part of the basis of Taiping Christianity.47 After the Opium War ended in 1842, Western missionaries were granted more freedom to move and preach their message in China. Under the terms of the treaty that ended the war, Western settlements in designated treaty ports fell outside the legal jurisdiction of the Chinese Empire. These Western-governed bases of operation made ideal locations for establishing congregations and basing missionaries, and so Western missionaries increased their efforts to make converts in China. Eliza Gillett Bridgman’s 1853 book Daughters of China provides a window into what these missionary activities looked like, and how Western Protestant missionaries saw themselves and their goals. The book gives an account of Bridgman’s mission work in China with her husband from 1844-1852, mostly operating out of Canton. Bridgman makes clear throughout her book that she sees herself as engaged in a spiritual venture for the good of Christ, not a political or temporal mission to effect change on earth. She is generally respectful of Chinese cultural traditions (save religious 46 Reilly, Heavenly Kingdom, 64. 47 Taiping historians are divided on how much of Taiping religious ideology was based on Good Words. Kim (2011) compares the tract’s contents with Taiping religion point by point and concludes that Liang’s tract was the basis for most of the Taiping religion. Michael (1971) proposes that Good Words was the only Christian literature Hong read before 1844, and so must have been the basis of Taiping religion. Boardman (1951), contrastingly, argues that the Taipings’ pre-1847 use of Shangdi and other terms from the Gutzlaff-Medhurst Bible (rather than Shen and other terms in Liang’s tract) proves that Taiping religion was based much more on it than on Good Words. 27 ones, which she unsurprisingly treats as things to be corrected) but does not hide her disgust at living conditions in China. She frequently remarks about the lack of ventilation in Chinese homes, the dirt and debris cluttering Chinese streets, and alludes to a need to modernize and ‘clean up’ China, a quasi-imperial goal that seems connected (if covertly) to her religious mission. The Chinese people Bridgman interacts with are mostly members of the urban merchant class. She describes traveling to friends and potential converts’ homes by sedan chair, indicating that she and her husband had assumed a place in the mid to upper class, to the relative neglect of the lower classes (those who carried their sedan chairs, for instance.) She writes about friendly relationships with merchants with whom her husband has relations, and teaching girls how to sew and perform other similar tasks expected of a civilized woman in the nineteenth century. Hong Xiuquan, contrastingly, promoted his message among the disaffected lower classes of rural Guangxi. When Bridgman traveled away from the urban business center of Canton, however, she was much less welcome. She describes some trips where the villagers’ response was negative but relatively mild. In these cases, she needed to close the curtains on her sedan chair to avoid villagers gawking at the white woman passing by. In another story, she describes fearing for her life when villagers pelted the boat she was aboard with stones and cursed her as a foreign devil.48 Once she reached her destinations on these trips, where a previously-established contact was waiting to meet her, she was relatively safe and unbothered. During transit, however, she was often met with the 48 Eliza Bridgman, Daughters of China; or, Sketches of Domestic Life in the Celestial Empire (New York: Robert Carter & Bros., 1853), 64. 28 unpleasant reactions of villagers who were less than welcoming of imperialist foreigners preaching foreign doctrines. Taiping Christianity, contrastingly, would be widely embraced in the same area just a few years later. When at their base in Canton, Bridgman and her husband’s chief work was running a school attended mostly by the children of urban merchants. Bridgman describes teaching young girls how to sew and housekeep, as well as to read. She instructed the children in in Christian doctrine and told Bible stories. Bridgman’s husband spent most of his time working on a complete Mandarin Chinese Bible translation. He collaborated with other missionaries scattered among the treaty ports of Southern China. Bridgman alludes to, but does not dwell on a major hurdle facing her husband and his fellow translators in their Bible work – the translation of the name of God into Chinese. A singular, all-powerful, all-knowing God of the universe was a relatively novel concept in Chinese religious culture. For the most part, Chinese popular religion was polytheistic, acknowledging the existence of many spirits and demons. Each one had its own limited jurisdiction and powers.49 Individual villages or families only honored one or two of these, but the existence of many more was recognized. Some of these spirits were understood as more powerful than others but none of them was supreme or singular in the same way as the Christian God. The problem for translators was what term could be properly used for the English term God. In 1715 Roman Catholic missionaries, following a directive from the Vatican, had adopted TianZhu – Heavenly Lord – as their translation of God. Protestants were divided between two possible translations. The first term, Shen, 49 Wagner, Reenacting, 36. 29 could be used to generically refer to a God, but it was also the word for minor spirits and some demons. Further, some existing translations had used the word to translate Angel or Spirit. Proponents of Shen argued that it was similar to the Greek theon, which the authors of the New Testament had used to render the Hebrew Elohim.50 The other possible name for God, Shangdi, referred to a deity thought of in preConfucian China as creator of the world and the highest deity in the pantheon. Shangdi was still known and worshipped in nineteenth-century China, but had taken on a different role and status more like other deities. Advocates for using the term Shangdi compared the deity’s identity as the highest god and creator in pre-Confucian China to the identity of the Christian God. Critics of the term raised the point that it was irresponsible to conflate the Christian God with any pagan deity, however high a position that deity may occupy. Critics of the term Shangdi also raised an important political point. Since the Qing Dynasty, the Emperor of China had associated himself with the title Shangdi and its associated power. Using the term to refer to the Christian God, therefore, could prove politically dangerous. Christian missionaries operated carefully and knew they were in China only because the government allowed them. Challenging the Emperor’s authority with their translation of the Bible would likely sour relations and lead to the expulsion of foreign Christians from China entirely.51 The Taiping Movement did not share these concerns, and would later wholeheartedly adopt Shangdi as the name of God, embracing its anti-imperial implications. 50 Reilly, Heavenly Kingdom, 82. 51 Ibid., 86. 30 In addition to this first wave of relatively reserved Protestant missionaries, independent charismatic missionaries came to China in increasing numbers after 1842. They were driven by a powerful zeal to convert souls before Christ’s imminent return,52 and they looked for the action of God in charismatic experiences as evidence of a conversion. These missionaries included I.J. Roberts, a revivalist Baptist preacher from Tennessee and Karl Gutzlaff, a German missionary who collaborated with fellow missionary Medhurst to produce a Shangdi translation of the Bible. Both men brought with them to China the charismatic, revivalist brand of Christianity rapidly rising in the United States and Europe.53 Despite their charisma, they found limited success preaching in and around China’s port cities. Their theological convictions and charismatic practices, however, percolated into the beliefs and practices of Hong Xiuquan’s God-Worshippers Society and became much more successful when they were attached to the Taiping Movement. In the case of Issachar Roberts, this transfer of ideas occurred through personal contact with Hong, who had come to study with Roberts in Canton in 1847. He was the only Protestant Missionary with whom Hong had such direct contact, but scholars on the Taiping Movement disagree on the extent of his influence on the Taiping leader. Teng (1963) points out that while Hong briefly studied under Roberts, Roberts’ descriptions of their time together and his later reactions to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom suggest that the religion of Hong and the God-Worshippers had little in common with Roberts’ 52 Wagner, Reenacting, 13. 53 Ibid. 31 evangelistic Protestantism.54 Roberts, for instance, understood Jesus as the supreme head of a spiritual Kingdom of God, while Hong consistently focused on establishing a Heavenly Kingdom on earth, with himself as its divinely appointed head. Roberts believed in the divinity and supremacy of Christ; Hong acknowledged them, but also claimed the Son of God title for himself, something Roberts found theologically unacceptable. By the end of the Taiping Movement, Roberts had expressed a hope that God could work through it but had determined that Hong was a madman and “worse than useless” to spreading Christianity.55 Gutzlaff’s influence on Hong was more indirect and came chiefly through his Bible translation. Gutzlaff had prepared this complete translation in collaboration with fellow missionary Walter Medhurst and a handful of other colleagues. Gutzlaff was principally responsible for translating the Old Testament from Hebrew. Unlike Liang Afa, who had generally (though not exclusively) used Shen to refer to God, Gutzlaff used Shangdi with an unapologetic awareness of the potentially revolutionary political and philosophical associations of the term, especially in the context of the Old Testament. As a foreigner, Gutzlaff was unable to personally distribute his translation of the Bible outside the treaty ports, so in 1844 he established the Chinese Union – an organization composed of Chinese converts trained as evangelists – and sent its members into the Chinese interior.56 Some scholars suggest, based on theological similarities and Hong’s use of the term Shangdi in his organization’s name that Hong had contact with members 54 Yuan-Chung Teng, “Reverend Issachar Jacox Roberts and the Taiping Rebellion,” Journal of East Asian Studies 23, no. (1963): 67. 55 Ibid., 66. 56 Jessie Lutz, “The Legacy of Karl Friedrich August Gutzlaff,” International Bulletin of Mission Research 126 (July 2000): 126. 32 of the Chinese Union, and by extension to Gutzlaff’s translation of the Bible prior to the formation of the God-Worshippers Society.57 Others, including Franz Michael, note that some members of the Chinese Union joined the early Taiping Movement, but Hong himself likely never read the Gutzlaff-Medhurst Bible until he came to Canton to study under Reverend Roberts. Whatever the specific method, however, the revivalist evangelical ideas of Gutzlaff, Roberts, and their evangelistic Protestant colleagues clearly filtered, in some capacity, into the religious system of the Taiping Movement. It was these ideas, combined with the Christianity of Liang Afa’s Good Words and seen through the lens of Hong’s personal visions and cultural framework, that informed the religious system underlying the Taiping Movement. Taiping religion focused much of its attention on the power and absolute sovereignty of God. Drawing from Liang’s tract, it stressed the Ten Commandments as God’s absolute law and often mentioned the flood of Noah as an example of what happens when people stray away from worshipping God. Taking cues from Gutzlaff’s Old Testament, Taiping religion understood Shangdi, the same God who had led the people of Israel, as their God and the ultimate leader of their Movement.58 Like revivalist Protestantism, Taiping religion incorporated charismatic religious experiences, including enthusiastic hymns and prayers, visions and glossolalia, rebuke of the devil, and group conversion experiences.59 Despite all it took from missionary Christianity, however, Taiping religion was ultimately dismissed by Western observers as non-Christian, largely 57 See for instance Reilly (2004) and Wagner (1982). 58 Boardman, “Christian Influence,” 121. 59 Michael, History and Documents 1:26. 33 because it held that Hong was the second son of God and that his revelations were just as much the word and the will of God as the Bible. By the end of the Taiping Movement in 1864, Western Christians were actively working with British forces and the Qing Empire to crush it, hoping they would be able to spread what they considered true Christianity once the Taiping heretics were dispelled.60 60 Inouye, True Jesus, 19. 34 EXPLANATIONS OF THE TAIPING MOVEMENT’S SUCCESS Word of the Taiping Movement appears to have first reached Western ears in 1849, when British consul at Canton John Bowring read, translated, and forwarded to London a memorial from the governor of the Liangguang61 Provinces to the Emperor reporting ‘troubles in the region.’62 Reports of rebels and bandits in Guangxi trickled into the treaty ports of Guangdong for the next few years. As the Taiping Movement grew into a Revolution and expanded its Heavenly Kingdom, this trickle of information became a steady flow, and Western observers became increasingly interested in the rebels and their motivations. Diplomats made official reports to European governments, missionaries gave commentary on the Movement, Western authors published books on the Rebellion’s leader, and the Taiping Rebellion became a topic of great interest in Western circles. These contemporary documents present the earliest outsider speculations as to what caused the Rebellion and what had made it so successful in attracting followers. These early accounts recognized that the movement’s success, if it was as the reports from Guangxi suggested, was anomalous. One observer noted that they had “made many inquiries as to the probable origin of the sedition and where the chief strength of the insurgents lies” but had not received satisfying answers. This observer noted that the rebels were sometimes compared to the Secret Societies prevalent in the region, but noted these suppositions were “hardly sufficient to account for the support the 61 Literally, the “Two Guang”, this was the name of the administrative division of the Chinese Empire which included the provinces of Guangdong (Canton) and Guangxi. 62 Prescott Clarke and JS Gregory, Western Reports on the Taiping: A Selection of Documents (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1982), 3. 35 outlaws have received from the inhabitants of the province.”63 Some observers guessed that the population joined the rebellion to participate in banditry64 (something decidedly not true of the Taiping Rebels – their movement would become well known for its discipline and prohibition on soldiers looting for personal gain.)65 Others proposed the Movement, like past insurrections in China, was fueled by a zeal for the restoration of the Ming or a response to the economic conditions of the area.66 As more information became available to observers, the religious origins of the movement became increasingly apparent and of interest. The Overland Friend of China wrote in 1851 acknowledging rumors that the ‘New Emperor’ was Roman Catholic or possibly ‘A Shang-Te Man’ (a Protestant convert), but dismissed these as ‘improbable,’ surmising that the Christian designation for the movement’s leader was mostly likely fabricated to stir anti-foreign sentiment against it.67 By summer of 1852, the Movement was regularly being referred to as the ‘Shang-Te (God) Society’, a clear indication that its religious character was beginning to be accepted by Western observers.68 It seems, however, that observers of this period mostly attributed the movement’s success to its military and revolutionary aspects, not to its religious element. An 1853 letter from missionary I.J. Roberts (who had briefly taught Hong Xiuquan in 1846) shows a keen awareness of the religious aspect of the Movement by this point in time. Baptist Roberts, along with other missionaries including French Catholic Dr. L.G. Delaplace saw divine 63 Clarke and Gregory, Western Reports, 9. 64 Ibid., 6. 65 Michael, History and Documents, 46-48. 66 Clarke and Gregory, Western Reports, 13. 67Ibid., 8. 68 Ibid., 17 36 providence as responsible for the Rebellion’s success and hoped that through it China could be won over for God.69 Franciscan missionary Joseph Rizzolati was less sure of the rebels’ true ideology or reason for success but nonetheless anticipated that their new Empire, whatever its reason for establishment, would be fertile ground for the message of Christ.70 The Taipings themselves similarly attributed their Movement’s explosive growth to divine favor. Taiping religion focused heavily on the idea of doing what was right before God – for the Taipings, this meant worshipping only God, casting down idols and demons in God’s name, and living according to the commandments of God and God’s appointed Heavenly King.71 Taiping documents continuously assert that the Christian God Shangdi is the only God, and that only following him leads to success. The Chinese Empire, in Taiping thought, was crumbling because it had fallen away from the commandments of the true God to worship demons. By the same token, the Taipings were successful because they obeyed those commandments and entrusted their fate to God. The Taipings saw their religious and military success as divinely ordained, and a direct result of their adherence to Shangdi’s will.72 It should be noted that such explanations for the Taiping Movement’s success were not entirely out of step with traditional Chinese thought. The Chinese Empire staked its claim to power on the Mandate of Heaven – that is, the Emperor and his house were understood as ruling only because Heaven allowed them to. Heaven would only sustain 69 Clarke and Gregory, Western Reports, 20, 25. 70 Ibid., 32. 71 Ibid., 5. 72 Michael, History and Documents 1:50. 37 that privilege if the Emperor governed as he was expected to. When the emperor failed in his duty, the Mandate of Heaven was lost, chaos ensued, and a new dynasty would rise up to assume power.73 To many Chinese minds, the nineteenth century was precisely such a time of chaos. The Emperor had failed to protect his citizens from the foreign invaders and had been unable or unwilling to respond to famine or stop bandits. In a Chinese philosophical framework, as any educated Chinese person or informed Western observer knew, all these were signs that the Qing Empire had lost the Mandate of Heaven and was doomed to fail.74 The Taiping Movement, it seemed, had arisen to seize that mandate. Secular Western observers of the Taiping Movement were less inclined to attribute its success to divine intervention. Instead they proposed historical, political, or social explanations of the movement’s success. In his 1856 book The Chinese and their Rebellions, Thomas Taylor Meadows provides an early example of the type of explanation that would become typical of Western observers from the secular sphere. The Movement – or, in Meadows terms, Revolution – was at its beginning and at its core a religious movement. The success of the Movement, however, lay in the way it presented its message and the way that message fit into existing Chinese ideological frameworks. Meadows gives a brief account of Hong and Feng’s early preaching activities, and he compares these to the missionary work of Paul and the apostles of Jesus recorded in the Book of Acts. Both, he points out, were driven essentially by the powerful convictions of their leaders, who claimed authority based on visions of divine origin. Both leaders propagated their new religion in a powerful Empire with deeply entrenched religious 73 Meadows, The Chinese and their Rebellions, 18. 74 Kuhn, “Origins of the Taiping Vision,” 354. 38 convictions, and both found success because of the powerful way they presented their ideas.75 In a later part of his book, Meadows frames the Taiping Movement within Chinese ideology surrounding popular rebellion. Rebellion, he claims, was never a specifically negative phenomenon in Chinese ideology. Rather, it was understood as the natural means for citizens living under an absolute government to place a check on their leaders. When the emperor and his agents failed to govern justly, the people could claim what Meadows calls “The Right to Rebel” – that is, rise up to forcibly remove corrupt officials and, if need be, replace the entire Imperial government.76 Such rebellions, he argues, were not seen as revolutionary or radical acts, but rather a natural part of the imperial Chinese political system. They did not aim to overthrow the imperial institution, but rather to replace particular corrupt members of it.77 Meadows attributed the Taiping Movement’s success to its connection with this tradition of rebellion. The Taiping Movement arose in a time and place where citizens felt little confidence in their government or its officials. Calls for rebellion were already strong in nineteenth century China, and once they had transitioned from a religious organization to a more overtly political movement, the Taipings increasingly attracted would-be rebels to their ranks.78 Granted, the Taiping Movement had more a revolutionary than a rebellious character – it intended to tear down the Imperial 75 Meadows, The Chinese and their Rebellions, 82. 76 Ibid., 27. 77 Ibid. 78 Michael, History and Documents. 40. 39 institution and replace it with a new one based on the Taiping religious system – but its anti-imperial character, paired with its success, attracted rebels and revolutionaries alike. Interpretations of the Taiping Movement as a religious movement turned political revolution remained the most common explanation for its rapid rise through the remainder of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century. This rapid rise, however, was not seen as a success so much as an unqualified disaster. HB Morse, in his 1908 book The Trade and Administration of the Chinese Empire, frequently references the ill effects of the Taiping Rebellion on the economy, government, infrastructure, and social stability of the Empire. In his economics-minded account, the Taipings are characterized as “great vandals” who destroyed formerly prosperous trade cities, damaged portions of the Grand Canal, caused a mass flight of Chinese citizens into the treaty ports, and precipitated only social and economic disaster.79 Essentially no studies of the Movement came out of this period. Up to its fall in 1911, the Qing Empire actively destroyed Taiping documents and suppressed the embarrassing memory of the Taiping Rebellion. The few sources from this period that do mention the Taipings unsurprisingly paint them as vandals, rebels, and bandits hardly worth remembering. During the reign of the Republic of China (1911-1949), Chinese historians, political scientists, and other scholars directed renewed attention toward the Taiping Movement. In his 1962 book Historiography of the Taiping Rebellion, Ssu-Yu Teng lists leading Taiping scholars from this period and their principal works.80 Teng, however, 79 H.B. Morse, The Trade and Administration of the Chinese Empire (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908). 80 Ssu-Yu Teng, Historiography of the Taiping Rebellion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 59. 40 does not dwell on the specific content of these authors’ works, and English translations are not readily available. This leaves Teng’s Historiography as nearly the only source of scholarship on the Taiping Movement accessible to English speaking researchers, and his well-researched statements on the causes of the Movement’s success as the closest we can come to a representation of scholars’ explanations of the Movement from the Republic period. The first chapter of Teng’s Historiography points to Liang Afa’s Good Words to Admonish the Age as the fundamental source of the Taiping Rebellion’s ideology. This identification seems simple enough – based on accounts from Hong Xiuquan’s contemporaries and the Taiping Movement’s official histories, it was the first Christian literature Hong ever read and was critically important in his coming to understand his vision. Liang’s tract, however, does not sufficiently explain what the Taiping movement grew into as it turned from religious cult to political revolution. Part of that transformation flowed naturally from Hong’s vision and its Empire-threatening implications. The rest developed as a result of social, economic, and political conditions in nineteenth century Guangxi. In the years leading up to and immediately following the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949, Chinese scholars pointed to the Taiping Movement as an early attempt at a modern popular revolution in China, driven by the common people’s resistance to conditions under the social and political systems of the Qing Dynasty. In the context of a newly Communist and rapidly modernizing China, The Taiping Movement was read as the historical precursor of the Chinese Revolutions of 1911 and 1949 and an 41 early step toward modernization.81 The scholars Teng cites mostly studied the Taiping Movement at Chinese universities, under the close supervision of the Chinese state. All of them praised the Taipings as a people’s revolutionary movement and most of them were aligned with China’s political left. One, Fan Wenlan, Teng identifies as “the dean of Communist historians in China” and an alternate member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.82 To these historians, the success of the Taiping Movement was essentially political, flowing primarily from its appeal as a common people’s revolution against an oppressive ruling class. In its presentation of scholarship on the Taipings, Teng’s historiography foregrounds what has always been a central question about the Taiping Movement – was it, at its core, a religious revolution, or was it a social-political one? Was the movement’s origin in religious fervor, as Teng suggests with his lengthy discussion of Quanshi Liangyan, or was it in the revolt of the people against the ruling class and their socioeconomic conditions, as historians aligned with the Communist Revolution would suggest? Which explanation better accounts for its remarkable success in attracting followers? In the decades since 1949, this has become a central question about the Taiping Movement. Practically every scholar who has studied the Taiping advocates for one solution or the other, whether overtly as part of their argument or covertly as background for their analysis. All of them, of course, recognize that both religion and politics played a significant role in the Taiping Movement, but each of them must recognize one or the other as the essential basis of the Taiping Movement. 81 Teng, New Light, i. 82 Teng, Historiography, 71. 42 POLITICAL EXPLANATIONS OF THE MOVEMENT While Teng’s 1962 Historiography suggests he understands the Taipings as chiefly a religious Movement, his 1950 New Light on the History of the Taiping Rebellion attributes the Movement primarily to political and social revolutionary principles. In this earlier work, Teng bluntly asserts that “The Taiping movement was an agrarian, racial, and political revolution.”83 As a base for his claim, he cites recent scholarship which “unanimously hails” the Taiping Rebellion as a forerunner of China’s republican and Communist revolutions, and identifies it as an anti-feudal and antiimperial revolution by oppressed people.84 It seems that in 1950 there was no doubt in Teng’s mind or that of any of the authorities he cites that the Taiping Movement was at its heart a politically driven peasant revolution, with the religious element serving a marginal role, if any at all, in its growth. In New Light, Teng argues for two principal causes of the Taiping Rebellion. The first is political corruption, which he claims should be understood as the cause of all revolutions and civil wars in China.85 Corruption, he notes, breeds economic woes, military losses, and cultural stagnation. All these conditions were clearly present in nineteenth-century China, and they were the same conditions educated Chinese understood as signs the reigning dynasty was approaching its end. Additionally, Teng identifies the Manchu Qing dynasty’s well-documented oppression of the Han Chinese 83 Teng, New Light, 35. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., 37. 43 majority and overtaxation of Chinese citizens as precisely the sort of corrupt political behavior that led to anti-Manchu sentiment and large-scale rebellions such as the Taiping Movement.86 The second cause of the rebellion, Teng contends, was economic depression. Per his analysis, the people rose up in revolution because of ongoing annexation of land and concentration of wealth, rapid population growth with a limited food supply, the rapid outflow of silver for opium, and widespread famine.87 The Taiping Movement, then, became an agrarian revolution in response to economic turmoil and inequitable land distribution, a political revolution in its response to widespread political corruption, and a racial revolution in its powerful anti-Manchu ideology.88 Teng does note that the religious inspiration of Hong’s nativized Christianity was an important cause of the rebellion, but he quickly qualifies that statement by noting that this “outburst of a religious fanaticism” was not the primary cause or the chief goal of the Movement. To make this point even clearer, he quotes Yung Wing: “neither Christianity nor religious persecution was the immediate and logical cause of the rebellion.”89 In his 1962 article “Confucian and Taiping Heaven: The Political Implications of Clashing Religious Concepts,” Joseph Levenson similarly argues that the Taiping Movement was essentially a political and social revolution couched in religious terms. Unlike Teng (1950), Levenson extensively discusses the religion and philosophy of the Taipings and notes their significance to the movement. His essential argument, however, is the same as Teng’s – the Taiping Movement was first and foremost a political and 86 Teng, New Light, 38. 87 Ibid., 41. 88 Ibid., 44 89 Ibid., 49. 44 social revolution to overturn the government and institutions of Qing China. In Levenson’s analysis, the religious and philosophical beliefs of the Taiping Movement were designed in direct opposition to those of the Qing Dynasty, and therefore acted in service of the movement’s revolutionary political and social goals. Levenson bases his argument on the assertion that the Chinese Empire based its entire structure on Confucian religious principles and leaned on the Confucian religious system to cement its legitimacy. The Emperor ruled by the Mandate of Heaven, and his citizens and officials obeyed because the Confucian natural order required it. Those who worked with their hands served those who worked with their minds, who served the Emperor, who sacrificed to Heaven on the people’s behalf. Children were obedient to parents, and citizens served their officials.90 Levenson maintains that the Taiping Movement was political at its core but argues that by staging this political revolution the Taipings were intrinsically rebelling against this Confucian religious and philosophical system. Taiping religious ideology, Levenson claims, existed only as the revolutionaries’ response to and replacement for the Empire’s own Confucian claims to legitimacy. Taiping religion, he writes, “had no social existence in China except ideological concomitant of violence,”91 specifically the violence characteristic of a popular revolution. It was created with the sole purpose of opposing the religious basis of the imperial institution and legitimizing the political goals of the Taipings. In his 1971 book The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents Franz Michael likewise argues that the Taiping Movement was a political revolution and suggests the 90 Levenson, “Confucian and Taiping Heaven.” 91 Ibid., 439. 45 only real role of religion in the movement was to justify the political aspirations of the movement’s leaders and ensure absolute obedience from their followers. Michael suggests on multiple occasions that the visions of Taiping leaders may have been fabricated to send a message in service of the Taipings’ political goals.92 He calls the Taiping religious system insanity and illogical, and suggests that Hong Xiuquan, far from being a prophet convinced he was fulfilling a mission from Heaven, was a madman who became increasingly trapped in his delusions as the Movement grew.93 Further, Michael points to Yang Xiuqing, one of the highest leaders of the Taiping Movement, and explicitly claims that he faked trances and fabricated messages from God to increase his own political power.94 In Michael’s analysis, the religion of the God Worshippers Society was at best an exceptionally persuasive madman’s delusion. More likely, he suggests, it was an ad-hoc system built to motivate and control followers and serve leaders’ revolutionary political interests. In either case, the Taiping Movement’s religious element existed primarily in service of the Movement’s political aims. Michael goes so far as to claim that not only was the Movement’s religious aspect molded for this purpose, but that it was molded by cunning leaders with no personal belief in the religion.95 Hong and his first handful of followers likely did honestly believe the earliest religious tenets of the God-Worshippers. But after Yang, Xiao, and others like them had taken control of the movement at Thistle Mountain, the religion morphed into a tool crafted to draw people to their cause, ensure 92 Michael, History and Documents 1:36. 93 Ibid., 33. 94 Ibid., 36. 95 Ibid. 46 those people’s absolute allegiance to it, and further their personal revolutionary political aims. In the Taiping Rebellion section of his 1974 (tr.1977) History of China from the Opium Wars to the 1911 Revolution, Jean Chesneaux describes the Taiping Movement as an entirely political revolution. He noted the Taipings’ assertions that all men were equally children of God and said that they flowed from a “Chinese peasant tradition of primitive collectivism”, a claim at odds with religious explanations for the success of the Taiping Movement.96 He described the Taiping revolutionaries as a sort of pre-proletariat who gathered together rebellious and disconcerted citizens of Chinese society. The Taiping Movement was, by his description, a social crusade for poor peasants’ equality, a campaign against the Manchu, and an attempt at modernization in response to pressure from the West.97 Its religion was nothing notable, just a mixture of popular religious beliefs with elements from Confucian tradition. Hong himself was not a charismatic prophet convinced of his mission from god – rather, he was an embittered and neurotic man, disaffected by the Imperial establishment after his failure in the civil service exams and determined to tear the entire Imperial system down. Robert Lin’s 1977 dissertation examines the Taiping Movement from the perspective of the contact between Western and Chinese civilization. In his analysis, the Taiping Movement was essentially political and economic, fueled by the charismatic preaching of its message by Hong, Feng, Yang, Xiao, and other leaders. The religious 96 Jean Chesneaux, Marianne Bastid, and Marie-Claire Bergere, China from the Opium Wars to the 1911 Revolution, trans. Anne Destenay (New York: Pantheon Books), 96. 97 Ibid., 93 47 aspect of the Movement was important, but its significance lay almost entirely in the way it addressed the conditions of the time. The Taiping religion promised immediate, collective, total, this-worldly salvation through the destruction of the existing social order.98 Further, it made foot binding, opium smoking, alcohol, and other marks of the elite class its enemies, indicating that the movement was at least partly a manifestation of class conflict between the scholarly imperial elite and the common people in nineteenth century China.99 In other words, the Taiping religion was essentially political in what it preached and how it preached it. The most developed part of the Taiping religion was that part which attacked the Confucian ethic on which the Imperial institution was based – the part with the heaviest political implications. The Taiping Kingdom’s collective land distribution system was a direct response to the oppressive economics of nineteenth century China. The Taipings’ inclusion of those historically excluded from Chinese society was a politically revolutionary move, not a religious one. The religion of the Taipings served their political interests – the goal of the Taiping religion was to maintain discipline and homogeneity among the followers of the political movement, and the result was a religious sect that was neither Confucian nor Christian, but was an amalgamation of both in the service of political aims.100 Though Lin does not frame his conclusions in these terms, his discussion points to both the political and religious aspects of the Taiping Movement being intensely charismatic in their presentation, organization, and leadership. 98 Lin, “Taiping Revolution,” 7. 99 Ibid., 6. 100 Ibid., 48. 48 RELIGIOUS EXPLANATIONS OF THE MOVEMENT While the scholarship listed above framed the Taiping Movement in essentially social and political terms, other scholars writing on the Taipings have considered the movement with respect primarily to its religious element, and have attributed the success of the movement to its religious core. Apart from those composed by Christian missionaries contemporary with the Taiping Movement and those of the Taipings themselves, few sources from before 1949 consider the Taiping Movement this way. The sources from this period listed in Teng (1962), for instance, all address the Taiping Movement in political, social, or economic terms.101 They treat Taiping religious ideology as a secondary aspect of what was essentially a political movement and a forerunner of the 1911 and 1949 revolutions. To these scholars, Taiping religion was a means of social control and a legitimizing ideology for the Taiping Government, not the driving force underlying the Movement. The religious aspect of the Taiping Movement received little serious attention, let alone credit for the Movement’s success, until after the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949. Among the first publications to attribute the success of the Taiping Movement essentially to its religious element was Eugene Boardman’s 1951 article “Christian Influence Upon the Ideology of the Taiping Rebellion.” Boardman’s article focuses much of its attention on the origins of Taiping Christianity with the specific goal of finding in it the origins of The Taiping Movement’s more radical, revolutionary aspects. Boardman starts with an exploration of how the tenets of Taiping religion were influenced by 101 Teng, Historiography, 59-81. 49 Christianity, and through what channels that influence most likely came about. Unlike Teng (1950) and older sources, which identify Liang Afa’s Good Words as the chief source of the Taipings’ Christian ideology, Boardman points to the revolutionary terminology and this-worldly focus of the movement and proposes that these aspects of Taiping religion are better accounted for if Hong and the Taipings adapted their Christianity from Gutzlaff and Medhurst’s complete translation of the Bible.102 This translated Bible, Boardman contends, establishes a much stronger basis and inspiration for political and social revolution than Good Words. With it as the religious basis of the Movement, it is feasible to analyze the Taipings as a religious movement first and a political one second. Boardman points first to the terminology used by the Taipings in their official documents and compares it to that found in the Gutzlaff-Medhurst Bible. Critically, both Gutzlaff and the Taipings consistently use Shangdi as the name of God, while Liang’s tract preferred other terms.103 To readers in nineteenth century China, the use of Shangdi gave Gutzlaff’s Bible strong anti-imperial connotations a priori. It was this religious language that would come to fuel the Taipings’ political ambitions, not vice versa. Boardman further notes that the Taiping Movement made extensive use of the Bible, publishing and distributing it widely, but did not use the whole Bible equally. Taiping publications for the most part contained only the Pentateuch and the Gospels, copied nearly verbatim from the Gutzlaff-Medhurst translation, with a few later modifications to fit with Taiping theology and avoid taboo characters.104 While Good 102 Boardman, “Christian Influence,” 120. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid., 121. 50 Words contained a mostly spiritual vision of Christianity (not unlike that of nineteenth century Protestant missionaries) mingled with Confucian elements, the Gutzlaff Pentateuch presented Shangdi of the Old Testament as actively intervening in the world on behalf of a chosen kingdom. Taiping theology, Boardman claims, reflects this nationalist, militant, temporally active Shangdi God much more than it reflects the more spiritual, transcendent Shen God of Liang’s tract. The Shangdi of the Taipings was not the peaceful, spiritual, saving God of Liang’s tract, but rather a powerful and jealous deity who commands absolute obedience and the establishment of an earthy Kingdom. The Taipings stressed the Ten Commandments, the Exodus, the Flood, and Creation to the virtual exclusion of the sermon on the mount, the golden rule, and others of what Boardman calls “the gentler features of the Christian faith.”105 The Taipings were committed from the beginning of their movement to destroying idolatry, keeping the Ten Commandments, and establishing a divinely-ordained social structure among themselves where all were equally children of Shangdi in a divinely appointed Heavenly Kingdom. It is clear from Boardman’s description of Taiping ideology that he understands their religious precepts as informing their political goals, not the other way around. Further, he specifically attributes the Taipings’ military success to the social cohesion these religious principles enforced106. Boardman does, however, acknowledge that the Christianity of the Taipings was particularized to fit its political circumstances. The Taiping Movement did not adopt all of Christianity, despite the existence of translated Bibles and Christian missionaries in 105 Ibid., 122. 106 Ibid., 123. 51 South China which would have made it possible. Boardman quotes Hong Xiuquan’s cousin’s explanation for the Taipings not adopting the whole Christian system: “Siutshuen [Xiuquan] often used to praise the doctrines of Christianity, but, added he, ‘Too much patience and humility do not suit our present times, for therewith it would be impossible to manage this perverted generation. ’”107 This quote suggests an awareness of the kind of religious system necessary in nineteenth-century China, but does not imply that the Taiping religious system was intentionally designed to serve political ends. Boardman’s description merely qualifies those religious teachings as somewhat informed by their social and political context. Philip Kuhn’s 1977 article “Origins of the Taiping Vision: Cross Cultural Dimensions of a Chinese Rebellion” advocates a similar explanation of the Taiping Movement. In his analysis, Taiping ideology was first and foremost a religious system based on the visions of Hong Xiuquan. It acquired its political flavor only after that system had been implemented and re-interpreted in the social context of Guangxi province. Kuhn asserts Hong was “a religious fanatic” deeply convinced that he was able to complete his divine mission without any aid or interference from human institutions and who was “without any firm concept of the political implications of his religious revelation.”108 For Hong and his early followers, the Taiping Movement was entirely religious. His chief goal was to lead the people to the worship of Shangdi, not to challenge the Empire. 107 Ibid., 123. 108 Kuhn, “Origins of the Taiping Vision,” 358. 52 This religious message focused on iconoclasm and devotion to God won few converts in Hong’s native Guangdong. The beginnings of the Taipings’ Christianinspired egalitarian social program were likely a part of his preaching as well, though in comparatively wealthy and culturally monolithic Guangdong province such a message was neither attractive to local people nor practical to implement. Hong’s message only took on a social and political character when it was preached to the poor Hakka of rural Guangxi.109 Kuhn does, however, acknowledge that Hong’s message of a society in decline and in need of reform to the correct way would carry at least some political overtones in a Chinese cultural context. An educated Chinese listener, he notes, could not help but compare such a message to the Chinese concept of dynastic cycles, and it would not be entirely illogical to conclude that Hong intended to assume the role of new upright emperor for himself.110 Kuhn argues that in comparatively wealthy and stable Guangdong province such a message could not succeed. Hong’s home province was entrenched in the Confucian ideological system, and imperial authorities had a much greater presence there than in most of South China. Guangdong was the center of China’s trade with the west, and it was deeply economically and socially connected to the rest of the Qing Empire. The minority Hakka population to which Hong primarily preached had an established place in Guangdong society and lived in stable, agricultural, comparatively wealthy villages. Guangxi province, by comparison, was poor, remote, and had a much weaker imperial presence, which created a context much more receptive to a revolutionary political 109 Kuhn, “Origins of the Taiping Vision,”363. 110 Ibid., 354. 53 message. Similarly, Guangxi was not nearly as entrenched in imperial Confucian ideology as Guangdong. A new religion promising an egalitarian social program, collective protection, and a kingdom of Heavenly Peace was a welcome idea to poor, disenfranchised people living in a nearly lawless frontier province.111 In Kuhn’s analysis, these social and political ideas flowed naturally from the Taipings’ religious program but could only do so in the social and political context of rural Guangxi. The core of the Taiping Movement and the ultimate root of its success, then, was its religious ideology. The political aspects of the movement flowed secondarily from this religious message and its context. Rudolf Wagner’s 1982 book Reenacting the Heavenly Vision provides another analysis of the Taiping Movement as a religious phenomenon, with a strong emphasis on Hong’s vision and how its interpretation shaped Taiping religious doctrine. Wagner argues the political implications of the vision were an inevitable result of its religious interpretation, and that religious interpretation was itself an inevitable result of Chinese folk religious practices for verifying, interpreting, and acting on religious visions.112 Reenacting the Heavenly Vision gives the impression that the entire Taiping Movement, both its initial religious and later political aspects, were the inevitable result of the verification and interpretation of Hong’s vision. Hong has little agency in Wagner’s account; similarly, his followers are not attracted to the Taiping Movement by religious charisma or political self-interest, but rather by the gravity of Hong’s vision and its verification within their existing religious system. 111 Kuhn, “Origins of the Taiping Vision,” 363. 112 Wagner, Reenacting, 26. 54 Wagner describes the Taiping Movement as an explicitly Christian one modeled on the Protestant pietism of nineteenth century missionaries to China,113 and frames Hong’s vision in terms of the question of how it led to such a Christian movement emerging and becoming so popular. For purposes of his analysis, Wagner, unlike previous scholars, focuses on the Taipings as they saw themselves. Rather than searching for external religious or political explanations for the Taiping Movement, Wagner approaches it from within, directing his attention at the visions of Hong Xiuquan, Taiping writings, and Taiping religious practices in their cultural context. Since the Taiping Movement saw itself as primarily, if not exclusively a religious revolution, so too does Wagner’s analysis. As part of his analysis, Wagner describes popular Chinese religious beliefs surrounding supernatural visions and their methods of interpretation. Within this context, he proposes, Hong’s visions were not seen as something unique or unprecedented; rather, they fell into an accepted mode of religious revelation in Chinese religious culture.114 The central question for Hong and his contemporaries, then, was not whether Hong had had supernatural visions, but whether those visions could be verified as real, meaningful ones prompted by a deity rather than false visions put into his mind by a demon, or nothing at all. Under the accepted parameters for verifying a vision, Hong and other witnesses needed to see something from the vision manifest in the temporal world. The ultimate verification of Hong’s vision, Wagner writes, came when he found and read Quanshi Liangyan and found that it not only helped explain the meaning of 113 Wagner, Reenacting, 11. 114 Ibid., 22. 55 characters and images in his vision but also fulfilled a prediction in his vision that he would find a book that would help him understand at a later time.115 Hong’s reading of Gutzlaff’s Old and New Testaments further confirmed his vision, since the old man with the golden beard had told him he would find two books, one about when he had descended to earth to do great signs and the other about when his son came down to save people from their sin. With the vision verified as real, Hong’s task was then to identify the figures in the vision and interpret it; once he did this, he could put the vision into practice and do the will of whatever deity it came from. Based on a combination of the properties of the old man in the vision and his reading of the Gutzlaff translation of the Bible, Hong concluded that the old man was Shangdi, the God of the Christians and, critically, of Chinese antiquity.116 Hong, along with his educated peers, was keenly aware that Shangdi had been widely worshipped up to the Zhou dynasty as the highest deity of the Chinese pantheon and the creator of the world. Worship of two different forms of Shangdi (neither of whose iconography exactly matched the figure Hong had seen)117 continued in some parts of China but was not widespread. The term Shangdi had since the Qin Dynasty been more associated with the Chinese Emperor’s title than with a deity of worship,118 but the idea of Shangdi as the supreme God still existed in Chinese religious culture. In Wagner’s analysis, the critical moment in the history of the Taiping Movement was when Hong, using established cultural protocols for the interpretation of visions, 115 Ibid., 28. 116 Ibid., 33. 117 Ibid., 34-5. 118 Reilly, Heavenly Kingdom, 87. 56 identified the deity who had spoken to him as Shangdi. Visions and the divine commands were understood, he maintains, as being limited in scope to the domain of the particular deity who had send the vision. A village’s patron deity could send visions pertaining to that village, and a family’s could send visions with instructions applicable to that family, but no deity’s power extended beyond its domain. By identifying Shangdi, the creator of the universe, as the sender of his vision, Hong identified the scope of his vision as universal.119 The formation of the Taiping Movement followed inevitably from the interpretation of this vision and the preaching of its message, and its revolutionary implications came directly from the command of the highest God. Shangdi had told Hong he would slay demons and rule a Heavenly Kingdom, and Hong was powerless in his religious context to refuse. Thus, the Taiping Movement was essentially a religious movement, as it staked its entire legitimacy on the interpretation of Hong’s vision as the will of Shangdi, and its success was rooted in this religious quality. The political action of the movement flowed from this religious basis, both in the identification of the Manchus as the demons Hong had been commanded to fight and the understanding of the Emperor as having falsely stolen the title of Shangdi from the highest God. Thomas Reilly’s 2004 book The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire centers its argument around the Taipings’ choice to use the term Shangdi in the name of their religious organization and in their official religious publications. Reilly argues that this was an essentially religious choice, motivated by a desire to restore what the Taipings understood as pre-imperial Chinese religion.120 The 119 Wagner, Reenacting, 36. 120 Reilly, Heavenly Kingdom, 5. 57 Taipings were, however, well aware that the term Shangdi came with clear political implications. Shangdi was the title claimed by the Emperor, and had been for nearly three thousand years. The Taipings’ explicit assertion that the Emperor had blasphemed by claiming that title was not only a religious conviction, but also an overt political attack on the imperial institution.121 Similarly, the Taipings’ invocation of Heaven in their religion violated the imperial religious system, where only the emperor could worship heaven on behalf of the people. When Hong claimed the title of Son of Heaven for himself, he did so on religious principle. He knew, however, that the title was reserved for the Emperor, and that assuming that title was an act of revolution.122 When the Taiping Movement decried Confucian principles, it was doing so both from religious conviction and opposition to the Imperial social order – to claim equal status as children of the same Father God was intrinsically to oppose a strictly stratified Confucian social order. The Taipings were at their core a religious movement, but everything about their religion was designed explicitly with a revolutionary flavor – the terms used, the way they were employed, and the organization of the God-Worshippers all presented a direct threat to the Imperial system. The Taipings were fully aware of these implications of their religious ideology, and they informed the Taiping religious and political systems. Recent research on the Taiping Movement, including a religious analysis by Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, a legal one by Glenn Trager and a sociological by Edward Tiryakian, has focused on the concept of charisma as a major driver of the Movement’s 121 Ibid., 94. 122 Ibid., 102. 58 success. Charisma, in its general definition, is a broad concept that describes the energetic, magnetic, or forceful appeal of certain people, ideas, or groups. Sociologist Max Weber developed the term’s modern definition and wrote on charisma as a source of authority for leaders, both political and religious. In religion, charisma is sometimes defined more narrowly as the property of manifesting characteristics that are truly extraordinary or divine, and doing so in a way that attracts followers and meets their expectations of leaders and philosophies worth following.123 Personal charisma belongs to individuals and justifies their claims of authority to lead movements. Organizational charisma is a collective outgrowth of this personal charisma that belongs to the organizations and ideologies of the followers of a charismatic leader. Under certain circumstances, organizational charisma may outlive an individual charismatic leader and continue to sustain a movement. Both general charisma and the more particular religious type can exist as individual and organizational phenomena. In his 2010 article “Loosing the Dragon: Charismatic Legal Action and the Construction of the Taiping Legal Order” Glenn Trager treats the Taiping Movement as charismatic but does so through the lens of a legal scholar analyzing the construction of Taiping legal systems. In Trager’s analysis, the entire Taiping Movement was a massive action of collective charisma. Beyond the charismatic leadership of Hong, Feng, and others, the Taipings were engaged in a sort of experiment in collective charismatic nation-building. Followers of the movement contributed the same collective charisma to the development of Taiping social and legal institutions that they put into their religious 123 Inouye, True Jesus, 3. 59 devotion.124 These institutions were not imposed from above by a powerful charismatic authority; rather, the Taiping Movement constructed its legal order through the collective charismatic legal action of its members. The common Taiping belief system served as the common grounding for the Taipings’ charismatic action, and this charismatic legal action in turn reflected the universal moral principles of brotherhood inherent in the charismatic religious base of the movement.125 Though Trager is writing from a perspective of law, it’s clear that this analysis of Taiping institutions as a charismatic construction falls into the set of analysis that describe the Taiping Movement as a religious movement first, with a political element flowing from that religious system. The goals of overturning the Qing state and building their own were not the main aim of the Taipings; rather, they were the natural result of their commitment to the charismatic religious ideology of the movement. It follows that the success of the Taipings lay in their charismatic religious and ideological system rather than their politics. Edward Tiryakian’s 2011 article “The Missing Religious Factor in Imagined Communities” similarly uses the Taiping Movement as an example of a movement driven by collective charisma. He describes how the Movement’s adherents enthusiastically embraced the ideology of the movement, which fueled its explosive growth. He argues that the Taiping Movement had at its core Hong’s religious vision, and the Movement that grew out from it did so through the powerful action of collective religious charisma.126 The Taiping Movement was not a political revolution orchestrated by a few 124 Glenn Trager, “Loosing the Dragon: Charismatic Legal Action and the Construction of the Taiping Legal Order,” Law and Social Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2010): 350. 125 Ibid., 348. 126 Edward Tiryakian, “The Missing Religious Factor in Imagined Communities,” American Behavioral Scientist 55, no. 10 (2011): 1409. 60 powerful leaders for their own political ends, but rather a social movement actively constructed and propagated by its followers. The Taiping Movement made a community of believers not just in their common beliefs, and certainly not in their political goals, but in their shared charismatic crafting of a Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to which they were all committed. Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye presents a similar charismatic explanation of the Taiping Movement in her 2019 book China and the True Jesus. She identifies the collective religious ideology of the Movement as being driven and reinforced by the charisma of both the leaders and collective members of the movement. In Inouye’s analysis, the critical element of the Taiping Movement and the one that led it to its surprising success was this charisma, and the way it interacted with the organization of the Movement.127 Hong served as a charismatic prophet, leading the movement with his vision from Heaven. Adherents of the Taiping Movement were drawn to it and continued to follow it because they experienced this charisma and were able to attach to it their own vision of a place in the Heavenly Kingdom. The political aims of the Taiping Movement were secondary to and flowed from this religious and social charismatic project. While Inouye focuses primarily on the collective charisma of the Taiping Movement, Taiping history makes it clear that the individual charisma of Hong Xiuquan and other Taiping leaders also played an important role in the growth and success of the Movement. Hong’s vision, the basis of Taiping religious ideology, was a textbook example of a charismatic religious experience. The commitment he demonstrated to his 127 Inouye, True Jesus, 20. 61 religious message of following Shangdi during his years as a traveling preacher contributed to Hong’s personal charisma, which was reflected in the Taipings’ highly formalized accounts of troubles Hong met during his travels. Bandits stole all Hong’s possessions, but he continued confidently on his journey. Because he would not steal and trusted Shangdi to provide, he went without food for days, intriguing fellow travelers.128 He and his occasional traveling companions were constantly in the dangerous position of traveling frontier country, but in the Taipings’ own words “they depended on the protection of the Heavenly Father, The Supreme Lord and Great God.”129 The placement of these accounts in the Taiping Heavenly Chronicle alongside an abbreviated biblical narrative and an account of Hong’s vision shows that the Taipings thought of Hong’s travels as a manifestation of the charismatic action of God. The powerful, unambiguous language Hong used in accounts of his vision and poems about his new religious convictions further speak to his charismatic convictions and the way he preached them. In an 1837 poem, for instance, Hong confidently claimed divinely ordained cosmic power while simultaneously promising divine reward for those who followed his message and punishment for those who would not hear it. He wrote that “My hand has the power, both in Heaven and on earth, to punish and kill, To behead the depraved, retain the upright, and to give relief to the people…my voice shakes the reaches of East and South, to the regions of the sun and moon.”130 In a later poem, he similarly claims great power and promises reward from God to followers: “Holding the 128 Michael, History and Documents, 2:71. 129 Ibid., 66. 130 Ibid., 19. 62 three foot sword in hand, I consolidate the mountains and rivers…The East, West, North, and South venerate the Sovereign supreme; Sun, Moon, Stars, and constellations join in the song of triumph…With great peace and unity, what happiness there shall be.”131 This type of confident assertion of divine sanction is they type of energetic behavior that lends attractive charisma to leaders of successful movements. Hong’s dramatic public attacks on Chinese religious sites and relics further demonstrated his personal charisma, both in the colloquial sense and the more specific religious experience sense, and absolute commitment to his new religious system. The Taiping Heavenly Chronicle describes one incident where Hong, along with his early followers destroyed a religious figure named Kan-Yao. First, Hong beat and denounced the idol as he aggressively asserted that he was “true ordained son of Heaven” He listed off the supposed demon’s sins, then, in a collective charismatic demonstration, the four men who were with him dug out the demon’s eyes, ripped its black dragon robe, ripped off its beard, break its arms, and turn the remains of the idol upside down.132 Histories of the Taiping Movement describe Hong rapidly winning new followers in Guangxi as he spoke his message and destroyed idols, even in the earliest years of the Taiping Movement133. Such accounts suggest Hong’s behavior and the conviction with which he preached his message lent him the strong personal magnetism characteristic of charismatic leaders of charismatic movements. 131 Ibid., 20. 132 Ibid., 74. 133 See, for instance, Michael, History and Documents, 1:29-30; Inouye, True Jesus, 23; and Reilly, Heavenly Kingdom, 66-67. 63 In addition to Hong, other early leaders of the Taiping Movement, including Feng Yunshan, Yang Xiuqing, and Xiao Zhaogui brought their own personal charisma to the movement. Feng, who worked with Hong to establish the God-Worshippers Society in Guangxi, was an effective early preacher of the Taiping message. When Hong returned to Guangdong Province late in 1844, Feng stayed behind to spread Hong’s message. When Hong returned, he was greeted by thousands of God-Worshippers who considered him their prophet and his vision their revelation134. Feng was so successful in drawing new followers to the Taiping Movement that early Western reports, based on interactions with members of the Taiping Movement, often misidentified him as the Movement’s founder and prophet135. Specific information about how Feng promoted the Taiping message is not available. However, since Feng attracted thousands of followers in Hong’s absence, was conflated with Hong, and promoted a message based on Hong’s charismatic experience it makes sense to guess that he was charismatic in the same way Hong was. Yang and Xiao, like Feng, used their personalities to promote Hong’s charismatic message and win converts to the Taiping Movement. They also went a step further by bringing their own charismatic religious experiences into Taiping doctrine. After they had joined the Taiping Movement, both men regularly experienced trances in which they spoke what the Taipings considered supernatural divine revelation. Yang claimed to channel God the Father’s voice in his trances; Xiao claimed Jesus the elder son of God’s in his.136 What both men spoke during their trances was accepted by the Taipings and 134 Michael, History and Documents, 1:31. 135 See, for instance, Clarke and Gregory, Western Reports, 11. 136 Michael, History and Documents, 36. 64 recorded in official documents as the word of God and the Heavenly Elder Brother.137 Hong himself accepted these revelations and would later give both Yang and Xiao positions as assistant kings in his Heavenly Kingdom. With Hong’s endorsement clear, members of the Taiping Movement accepted these charismatic experiences as part of the Taiping religious system. Adding these new charismatic experiences to the system further fueled the collective charisma of the movement as its members connected with them just as they had with Hong’s original vision. In addition to spreading accounts of their personal charismatic experiences, Hong, Feng, Yang, and Xiao encouraged and contributed charismatic and supernatural experiences of their followers. As part of their preaching in Guangxi, the Taiping leaders reportedly healed illness,138 channeled the voice of God, and performed other miracles in the name of Shangdi.139 Yang in particular predicted the future with an accuracy that their followers saw as supernatural action (though this may have been more a result of a developing intelligence network).140 The Taipings invoked the power of Shangdi to set one of their members free from jail, and it was done141. As the Taiping Movement grew into an open rebellion, every successful military and political move was understood as a supernatural action.142 These charismatic events further legitimized the Taiping 137 Specifically, in The Book of the Declarations of the Divine Will Made During the Heavenly Father’s Descent to Earth” and “Book of Heavenly Decrees and Proclamations,” found in Michael, History and Documents, 2:86-110. 138 Inouye, True Jesus, 23. 139 Michael, History and Documents, 1:37. 140 Ibid., 53. 141 Ibid., 35. 142 Lin, “Taiping Revolution,” 93. 65 Movement in the eyes of its followers, and increasingly stoked the collective charisma of the movement. All of this, however, leaves a significant question unanswered: if it was the charisma of the Taiping Movement that gave it its appeal, why did it only start to gain a significant following after Hong and Feng moved their preaching to Guangxi? Their message was consistent throughout the Taiping Movement, and there is no reason to believe Hong was preaching something different in Guangxi from what he was preaching in Guangdong. Why was the charismatic quality of the movement unsuccessful in Guangdong? Further, if it was the charismatic quality of the Taiping Movement that brought it its success, why did similarly charismatic western missionaries have so little success in the same region? As a solution, I propose that it was not charisma alone, but a more particularized resonant charisma that led the Taiping Movement to success. 66 RESONANT CHARISMA AS AN EXPLANATION FOR THE TAIPING MOVEMENT The issue of whether the Taiping Movement success flowed from social and political aspects or from religious ones presents a standing question to scholars of the Taiping Movement. Scholars from all fields recognize that the Taiping Movement was both a religious and a political phenomenon, but the particular explanation of its success adopted by each depends in part on their disciplinary and ideological perspective. Communist Chinese academics in the mid-twentieth century attributed the Taiping Movement’s success to its egalitarian revolutionary social, political, and economic ideals.143 Christian missionaries a hundred years earlier attributed its success to divine intervention. Specialists in the history of intercultural contact such as Lin (1977) and Levenson (1962) approach the Taiping Movement as a cultural and political response to the conditions that contact created. Sociologists point to the charismatic religion-based ideology of the Taipings as key to its success, while legal scholars point to the collective legal organization that charismatic ideology fostered. Scholars of religious history unsurprisingly tend to point to the Taiping religious system as the fundamental source of the movement’s popular success. While it is difficult to determine with certainty whether the Taiping Movement’s success was essentially religious or essentially political, I follow Boardman (1951), Wagner (1982), and Inouye (2019) in proposing religion played the greater role. The political aspects of the Movement, I contend, are best understood as flowing from the 143 Teng, Historiography. 67 Taiping religious system rather than vice versa. The Taipings were, first and foremost, a charismatic religious sect built on a foundation of supernatural religious visions of a harmonious Heavenly Kingdom of Shangdi worshippers. It was the collective commitment to realizing this vision that drove the rapid growth of the Taiping Movement, and it was the collective religious charisma of its followers that fueled the movement as it grew into something increasingly political. Charisma, as Inouye (2019) points out, is the key element that characterized Taiping religion and propelled it, like other charismatic religious movements of the same period, to its sudden success.144 This is not to say that the social and political aspects of the Taiping Movement can be dismissed entirely. The social programs, land reforms, and calls for revolution found in Taiping documents clearly correlate with the social and political needs of Guangxi and rural China in the nineteenth century. Opium smoking, alcohol use, foot binding, and other social vices prohibited by the Taipings were markers of an upper-class leisure lifestyle resented by the common people.145 Land reform and social inequality were serious issues, and the Taipings were not the first rebels to demand a change to a more equitable system.146 The Manchu Qing Dynasty was deeply unpopular among majority Han Chinese, and the Confucian-mandated class inequality propping it up was a target of criticism by rebel groups and others even before the Taiping Movement. Nonetheless, it would be a mischaracterization of the Taiping Movement to say it was a political movement along the lines of the Triad rebellions. The Taipings were, critically, a 144 Inouye, True Jesus, 20-21. 145 Lin, “Taiping Revolution,” 6. 146 Meadows, The Chinese and their Rebellions, 68 religious movement; unlike these past rebellions, their self-avowed motivating philosophy was a religious commitment to live according to the commands of Shangdi and to establish his Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. Scholars such as Franz Michael (1971) explain away this religious aspect as a tool crafted to serve the political ends of the Movement’s leaders, but this explanation leaves little room to acknowledge the religious commitment of the Movement’s early leaders and members. From a purely secular, political point of view, it seems entirely possible that the Taiping Movement’s religion was an instrument in the hands of revolutionaries. This analysis, however, dismisses the clearly strong belief followers of the movement had in their system. Nothing about Hong’s writings suggests he understood his visions as anything but revelation and command from God. Nothing about the organization of the God-Worshippers Society before 1850 suggests that it was a revolutionary movement; rather, it seems that the Taiping Movement’s religious system was authentically and powerfully believed, and that followers who joined the movement in Guangxi did so for reason of religious belief more than political goals. The Taiping Movement, then, was a religious sect which included social and political overtones responding to the conditions of nineteenth-century Guangxi. These social and political aspects would eventually breed a full revolutionary ideology alongside the Taiping religious system. This revolutionary ideology was not foundational to the early Taiping Movement nor was it the source of their early success, but it cannot be dismissed as inconsequential to the early Taiping Movement. Social and political conditions in Guangxi province unquestionably contributed to the people’s acceptance of the Taiping Movement’s ideology. The Taiping Movement was at its core a charismatic 69 religious phenomenon, but it is clear from the movement’s failure to win converts in Guangdong contrasted with its meteoric rise in Guangxi that conditions in the environment where the Taiping religion was preached had an effect on its acceptance. The challenge is integrating both the social-political conditions of Guangxi province and the charismatic religious character of the Taiping Movement into a single theoretical explanation for its early and surprising success. As a solution, I propose that the Taiping Movement’s success lay in what I call resonant charisma. Charisma is the strong, persuasive personal magnetism of a person or group, and in religious definitions generally involves what are seen as supernatural events prompted by the action of the divine and confirmed by divine revelation.147 Charisma is manifested in individuals and gives those individuals an air of persuasive divine authority. It can similarly become a property of larger movements when the whole membership of the movement shares a single-minded commitment to it, and in living this commitment proves divine sanction of the movement, which can then quickly grow as more and more people, persuaded by the testimonies of members of the movement, join. The Taiping Movement, as Inouye (2019) points out, can be straightforwardly characterized as charismatic because both its leader Hong Xiuquan and its members claimed divine sanction based on their revelation and possessed the kind of collective magnetic energy that propels a charismatic movement to success.148 Charisma alone, however, is insufficient to explain the success of the Taiping Movement. 147 Inouye, True Jesus, 3. 148 Inouye, True Jesus, 21. 70 The Taiping Movement was charismatic from its earliest stage. The roots of the movement lay in the divine vision of Hong Xiuquan, which sources note at least mildly affected his behavior even when it was not fully understood.149 Wagner (1982) describes a period where this vision had not yet been interpreted or verified, but once it had been it clearly qualifies as a charismatic experience. 150 Reilly (2004) and others claim that the vision’s significance was likely immediately understood, and thus immediately carried a strong anti-imperial message.151 Nonetheless, these scholars would likely agree that once Hong had accepted his vision as a legitimate religious experience, it had a distinctly charismatic character. Before he had a single follower, Hong’s vision had the quality of a charismatic experience. It is clear, further, that Hong channeled this charismatic religious experience into a personality that radiated charismatic authority. Hong preached with the expectation that people would hear his account of his charismatic experience and accept it, thus taking part in his charismatic experience secondhand. The message Hong preached, then, was charismatic from the beginning. Despite this charisma, his revelation was not accepted when he first began preaching it in Guangdong. We know from Taiping official documents as well as secondhand histories of the movement that Hong began preaching to his home province as soon as he had interpreted his vision.152 We know that Hong was already strongly iconoclastic, but his destruction of idols in Guangdong was not seen so much as a manifestation of God’s action as a countercultural nuisance. We know that Hong talked 149 Michael, History and Documents, 1:23; Hamberg, Visions, 14. 150 Wagner, Reenacting, 24. 151 Reilly, Heavenly Kingdom, 79. 152 Michael, History and Documents, 1:26, 2:66. 71 openly about his vision and tried to make converts in Guangdong but was ultimately unsuccessful.153 When he and Feng Yun-Shan traveled to Guangxi Province, contrastingly, their message was quickly received as divine revelation and they were soon baptizing entire villages to their new religion.154 It is clear from accounts of Hong’s preaching that his message did not substantially change when he traveled to Guangxi, nor did the main points of his vision, nor did his charismatic conviction that he was doing the will of God. Yet something about Guangxi province made it receptive to Hong’s charismatic revelation in a way that Guangdong Province was not. In other words, Hong’s charisma was highly resonant in Guangxi, while in Guangdong it had not been and had been largely dismissed as delusion. It may be tempting to suppose that this increased resonance of Hong’s Movement in Guangxi was due to the movement taking on an increasingly political character, but this is not the case. As has been mentioned, even in Guangxi the GodWorshippers Society was in its early years strictly a religious movement. It did not manifest any overt political intentions until after it had already established itself as a popular and successful religious organization.155 On the other hand, it is impossible to ignore the social and political conditions of Guangxi Province around 1840 and say they had no impact on the development or the success of the Taiping Movement. The concept of resonant charisma incorporates the impact of these social and political conditions, 153 Hamberg, Visions, 13. 154 Michael, History and Documents, 1:29. 155Kuhn, “Origins of the Taiping Vision,” 358. 72 while still maintaining that the early Taiping Movement was at its core a charismatic religious movement, not a political revolution aiming to change those conditions. In relatively wealthy Guangdong province, Hong and his message had been as charismatic as they ever would be, but its radical egalitarianism and strong antiConfucian bent hardly resonated with the local population. Further, for as much as Hong might connect his teachings to the ancient Chinese deity Shangdi, citizens of Guangdong province would certainly recognize that he was preaching a form of Christianity, a foreign religion associated with Western merchants, diplomats, and soldiers that were increasingly present but hardly welcome. Guangxi, on the other hand, was much poorer and existed at the margins of the Chinese empire.156 Confucian ideology was far less embedded, and the peasant class of rural Guangxi was far more likely to question the sociopolitical status quo than citizens of Guangdong were. Hong’s commitment to establishing a Kingdom of Great Peace appealed to a province continually in conflict; his commitment to land reform and social equality appealed to peasants barely surviving on what land they could manage to cultivate. The social support network the Taiping Movement sustained was precisely the sort of social support that was lacking for the peasant class in Guangxi, and the general dissatisfaction and unrest in the province made its people receptive to new ideologies such as that of the Taipings. All these social, economic, and political factors combined to make Guangxi into an environment where Hong’s vision had not just charisma, but resonant charisma. 156 Morse, Chinese Empire, 262-3. 73 It is worth noting that Hong’s was not the only charismatic vision being preached in South China in the nineteenth century, and Hong was not the only charismatic man preaching one. Protestant missionaries operating in nineteenth-century China, including Issachar Roberts, Karl Gutzlaff, and other independent missionaries to China preached a charismatic, revivalist Christianity.157 They were no strangers to the concept of charisma, and their tradition actively channeled charisma as a form of divine revelation. Further, these men were described as powerful preachers and organizers with a strong charismatic magnetism in their personalities not unlike that of Hong. Nonetheless, these Protestant missionaries made only a handful of Chinese converts and did not amass nearly the following that Hong and the Taiping Movement would. Inouye (2019) describes the London Missionary Society, which was active in China during the same period as being itself a charismatic organization staffed by charismatic missionaries with a clear and powerful commitment to spreading the Gospel to China.158 These missionaries and their organization were charismatic in much the same way as the Taipings, yet they also failed to resonate the way Hong’s message did. Inouye also describes the Qing Empire, the very institution the Taiping Movement would come to stage revolution against, as being itself a charismatic institution.159 In the case of the Qing Imperial apparatus, its charisma was not only failing to amass new loyal followers as Hong’s did, but was actively losing the loyalty of citizens on the periphery of the Empire. This, it stands to reason, was a result of the same 157 Wagner, Reenacting, 13. 158 Inouye, True Jesus, 20, 35. 159 Ibid., 20, 27. 74 property of resonance that made the Taiping Movement so successful. Whereas the Taiping Movement brought a new religious and ideological system to Guangxi that resonated with the conditions of the province, the Qing Empire attempted to preserve one that had lost its resonance. In a place like Guangdong, where Imperial and Confucian institutions had been accepted for centuries and social conditions were stable, the Qing Empire’s charismatic ideology still resonated with the population. In Guangxi, social conditions were such that for all its charisma, the Qing Empire’s ideology did not resonate. As a result, it failed to keep loyal followers. Meanwhile, the Taiping Movement drew in followers precisely because its charismatic message resonated with the social conditions of the province. In summary, charisma-focused religious analyses provide a promising explanation for the success of the Taiping Movement, but any that neglect the social and political aspects of nineteenth century Guangxi that allowed that charisma to resonate leave out a critically important factor in the success of the movement. Likewise, analyses that focus on social and political factors in the success of the Taiping Movement to the exclusion of the charismatic religious and ideological basis that undergirded it misidentify the substance of the Taiping Movement and paint it as if it were a secular revolution, which is decidedly not the case. The concept of resonant charisma strikes a balance between the two, attributing the success of the Taiping Movement ultimately to its charismatic religious and ideological substance, but noting from the beginning that the success of this charismatic program was contingent on its resonating with the social and political conditions of Guangxi Province. Resonant charisma accounts for both the success of the Taiping Movement in Guangxi and the failure of the Qing Empire to 75 maintain its influence there. It provides an explanation for why Hong’s charismatic religious message was so successful and well-received while the equally charismatic preaching of Protestant missionaries was not. It accounts for the meteoric rise of the GodWorshippers Society and the rapid widespread acceptance of Hong’s religious and philosophical system in Guangxi, while also explaining why that same message preached by the same charismatic figure failed in Guangdong. Resonant charisma, further, serves to conceptually bridge the divide in Taiping research between those who view the Movement as essentially religious and those who view it as essentially social political by incorporating both as critical elements in a single concept that accounts for the success of the Taiping Movement. 76 CONCLUSION Hong Xiuquan was a charismatic leader, driven by a religious vision to establish first a society of God-worshipping Chinese, then a Heavenly Kingdom that would bring the will of God to earth and rule in accordance with his vision. Hong was surprisingly successful in his endeavor, especially considering he was preaching a brand of Christianity in China, something which Westerners had attempted but never had much success at. His religious organization combined his vision as he interpreted it, elements of classical Chinese religion, and a powerful opposition to Confucianism and established Chinese religious culture,160 and when preached to the disaffected people of Guangxi resonated such that it grew into a successful religious, and later political movement. Scholars are divided on what about the movement led to this success, with some preferring political explanations and some preferring religious ones. Neither, however, provides a satisfactory explanation of the movement’s success on its own. The two perspectives can be synthesized through the concept of resonant charisma, which incorporates under one concept both the charismatic elements of the Taiping Religious system and the sociopolitical conditions that allowed it to resonate with Chinese peasants in nineteenth century Guangxi province and grow into the successful movement that it did. The Taiping Movement was still, at its core, a religious movement driven by a charismatic religious ideology, but this religious ideology was only able to succeed through its resonance with political and social conditions of nineteenth century Guangxi 160 Reilly, Heavenly Kingdom. 77 Province. Protestant missionaries’ charismatic religious systems, by contrast, failed to resonate and so did not succeed in winning many converts. Similarly, the Qing Empire’s charismatic institutional ideology had lost what resonance it had had in the province, and so was becoming increasingly unpopular as the local population put their energy and ideology behind alternative systems such as the Triads and Taipings.161 The Taiping Movement failed to resonate with conditions where it began in Guangdong, but achieved rapid success in Guangxi, where its charismatic religious ideology resonated with the conditions of the population. Both the religious and the political elements of the Taiping Movement were critical to its success, but the social and political ones were not formative of the early Taiping Movement, and it would be inaccurate to suggest, as Michael (1971)’s history of the Movement does, that the Taipings were political revolutionaries without strong religious conviction. Resonant charisma provides a solution that maintains the essentially religious basis of the Movement while still satisfactorily accounting for the role of social and political factors in its success. Though I use it to account specifically for the success of the early Taiping Movement, resonant charisma as a concept could be applied in analyses of nearly any. charismatic movement, religious, social, or political. Application of the concept can explain why some charismatic movements, like the Taiping, succeed and amass millions of followers while others, like the Triad Societies or the revivalist Christianity preached by Protestant missionaries in nineteenth-century China, fail to catch on or burn out. A leader whose charismatic message is resonant in the context where it is preached has a 161 Michael, History and Documents, 1:13. 78 very good chance of recruiting followers and building a movement; the more resonant the movement, the more quickly it can grow. A charismatic would-be leader whose message is not resonant where they preach it, on the other hand, is much more likely to be dismissed as an enthusiastic madman, much as Hong was in Guangdong Province. Whether a charismatic leader preaches a religious, political, or social message, they will only have limited success if that message fails to resonate in the context where they preach it. The concept of resonant charisma, further, constitutes a direct connection between the personal charisma of a movement’s leader and the collective charisma of its followers, two elements of the concept of charisma that are often treated separately. A charismatic movement begins with the charismatic message of its leader, perhaps working with a few early followers. If that message resonates in the context where it is preached, it attracts more followers who adopt the charismatic ideology and reinforce it with their own collective charismatic action. It is this collective charismatic action that Trager (2011) references in his article on the charismatic construction of Taiping legal institutions, and it is this collective charisma that propels the movement forward even if its leader fades into the background as Hong did. The Taiping Movement would not have grown into the revolution it did if its charismatic message had not resonated with, and subsequently been adopted and further propagated by followers of the movement. In the field of research on the Taiping Movement, the concept of resonant charisma provides a way to explicitly connect the religious and ideological basis of the Movement with its social and political context. Unlike Michael (1971) and others’ socialpolitical explanations of the Taiping Movements’ success, the concept of resonant 79 charisma allows for the recognition of the Taiping Movement as what its followers and early leaders understood it as, that is as a religious movement. It provides a framework for discussion of the social and political circumstances of the Movement without leaning on them as an ultimate explanation and assuming the religious system was developed in response to these circumstances. It allows researchers to acknowledge that the religion of the Taiping Movement may have changed over time or been shaped by political circumstances, but maintains that, however it may have developed, the Taiping Religious system was sincerely believed by its followers and understood as a religious, not a specifically political project. This religious system succeeded because it resonated in its political context; we need not consider the system, as Michael does, as a means to a political end. In the study of other historical charismatic religious-social-political movements and teachings, resonant charisma provides a framework to analyze their relative popular success or failure. Charismatic preachers and ideologues who found success can be set up against their social and political contexts to find what about their charismatic message resonated such that people followed the movement and built a collective charismatic ideology from the leader’s vision. Those who met limited success can be studied in terms of whom they were successful with; a charismatic leader whose charisma resonates with a small subset of the population will draw in that subset and may build a successful movement, but the extent of the movement will be limited by the extent of the resonance of their charismatic message. Charismatic political movements’ success or failure can be analyzed in these terms, as can the rise or collapse of religious movements and charismatic ideologies. A movement whose leader’s charisma resonates powerfully with 80 the people to whom it is preached will grow as the Taiping Movement did; a movement whose charisma resonates exceptionally powerfully and translates to a powerful collective charisma will often outlive the charismatic leader and become a collective project. Charismatic ideological movements’ failures after a period of success, like the Qing Empire’s can be explained as their failure to resonate under changing conditions. The Taiping Movement was, without question, a charismatic one. But the success of Hong in attracting followers and the success of those followers in establishing a coherent movement was not due to charisma alone, but rather to the way that charisma resonated in the context in which it was preached. In the case of the Taiping Movement, this resonance was based on the way Taiping religious ideology fit with and responded to social, political, and economic conditions in nineteenth- century Guangxi. Past accounts of the Taiping Movement have largely focused on either its charismatic religious character or its social and political responses to conditions in rural Southern China; resonant charisma accounts for both, and does so under a single term that omits neither the religious basis of the movement nor the conditions in which it arose. Critically, an analysis based in resonant charisma treats the Taiping movement as its followers saw it – a religious movement that happened to resonate with social and political conditions of the time. And by treating the Taiping Movement as what it was, this angle of study promises to honestly approach the movement, taking advantage of modern theories of charisma and conditions for revolution without artificially imposing those same understandings on its followers. 81 REFERENCES Boardman, Eugene P. “Christian Influence Upon the Ideology of the Taiping Rebellion.” Far Eastern Quarterly 10, no. 2 (1951): 115-124. Bridgman, Eliza J. Gillett. Daughters of China; or, Sketches of Domestic Life in the Celestial Empire. New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853. Chesneaux, Jean, Marianne Bastid, and Bergère Marie-Claire. China from the Opium Wars to the 1911 Revolution. Translated by Anne Destenay. Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1977. Clark, Prescott and JS Gregory. 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