Tiny Insect

God doesn’t speak to just anyone. Communicating with the divine is mediated by clerics, sacred texts, by long and complicated rituals. Many traditions, such as Christianity, put a special emphasis on the written word, recordings of revelations from prophets, aeons, or the divine itself.

So what happens when God talks to someone who isn’t “supposed” to hear him? What distinguishes new divine revelation from blasphemy? How can you be sure it’s God speaking and not a devil or demon? Not a charlatan faking a religious experience for their own ends?

The emergence of new divine revelation that challenges or reinterprets the existing theology has happened in many traditions. In this episode we’re going to begin the story of how the God Worshipers – and then the Taiping – handled it when God began speaking regularly at Thistle Mountain.

(Painting of the missionary Robert Morrison, who was successful and popular enough to have his portrait painted. The same can not be said for Issachar Roberts).

On the surface, Hong Xiuquan’s life in 1845 and 1846 was unremarkable. He was in his early thirties, married with young children. His job as a school teacher had been secured through a mix of qualifications & family connections.

And then 1847 happened. By the beginning of 1848 Hong was a wanted man, actively leading a growing & radical religious community and writing about his intentions to assume imperial power over the largest empire on earth. So what the hell happened in 1847? That’s the question this episode attempts to answer.

While Feng Yunshan was building up the God Worshipers in Guangxi Province in 1845 and 1846, Hong Xiuquan living was back in his hometown of Guanlubu, Guangdong province working as a school teacher. He also spent his time elaborating on the nature of God, his relationship to humankind, and how the Chinese people had been deceived by demons and spirits. These writings were later collected into the “Taiping Testament”. In this episode we’re going to explore the Testament and see how it laid the foundation for what will become the Taiping political project, which resulted in a full insurrection against the ruling Qing dynasty a few years later.

Feng Yunshan preached and spread Shangdi’s good word. For nearly 3 years, he worked tirelessly to grow the movement that worshiped God and recognized Hong Xiuquan as Jesus’ younger brother. In this episode we’re going to learn what worshipping Shangdi meant, how it related to other practices in the area, and see increasingly violent iconoclasm that will help lead to full scale insurrection and the establishment of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

In this episode, we look at the region where the Society of God Worshipers took root and grew, and what life was like there in the second half of the 1840’s. Pirates, bandits, secret societies, and everyday people trying to scratch out a living in a Qing “backwater”. This “internal frontier” was the place where Hong’s Christian beliefs took root & grew into the nucleus of what would become the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

Hong Xiuquan finally lost his faith in ever becoming a Confucian scholar in the aftermath of the Opium War. After reading a set of Christian pamphlets composed by the Chinese writer Liang Fa, he discovered the meaning of his heavenly vision and his life’s new mission: To save his brothers and sisters from the demonic influences of the old gods & spirits.

The story of the Opium War is usually told as part of a wider narrative of European colonial expansion, and the beginning of a “century of humiliation” from the perspective of the modern Chinese state. Last episode, we covered the main narrative of the war, a kind of “Great Man” history last episode. But it’s easy to forget that the fighting and loss of the Opium War had far-reaching consequences for tens of millions of everyday people living in the Qing Empire.

Hong Xiuquan was one of those ordinary people affected by the war, but drew very different conclusions from the hostilities than many of his neighbors. Hong saw in the British a people who followed a powerful God, one that two millennia of imperial ideology had replaced with false idols and demon worship. Worship of Confucius & Buddhist Bodhisattva, the practice of dark Daoist magic – these had led the people of China away from the all-powerful Father of Heaven who the authors of the Classics had called Shangdi. In Shangdi and his Heavenly Kingdom Hong found truth and order in the chaos and turmoil that surrounded him in the aftermath of the Opium War.

The idea of the Opium War carries a great deal of meaning in modern memory. For many flavors of Chinese nationalist, it is the beginning of their century of humiliation at the hands of exploitive foreigners. For the British, it is another milestone on the road to the heights of Empire. But that is how it all looks in retrospect. For those who directed the armies of the war, and those who fought in it, the engagement was a confusing mess, where neither side seemed to have much understanding of what the other side wanted or why it was fighting the way it did.

In this episode, we’ll go through the main war, the classic leaders & battles, to understand as best we can what those who directed the war’s engagements thought they were doing and why.

In 1839, Lin Zexu makes history’s largest drug bust when he secured more than 1,600 tons of opium from European traders in Guangzhou. At first it was a triumph against the plague of imported opium. But unfortunately for Lin & the Qing Empire, that opium was technically owned by Queen Victoria and the British government. In response to the seizure, the Opium War was on.

Qing dynasty “foreign policy” operated quite differently than it is commonly understood today, or as it was understood by contemporary states in Europe and West Asia. Going all the way back to the Han, Chinese dynasties tried to fit what we think of as foreign policy into the principles of Confucian hierarchy and submission. When British traders began arriving in large numbers in 18th century, the Qing tried to accommodate them in a way the British would tolerate as a price of doing business. In the wake of Napoleon’s defeat and a rising “free trade” ideology in the 1830’s, the balance of power and mutual toleration started to shift decisively.