Perhaps history always reveals as much about how we conceive of ourselves in the present as it does about what occurred in the past. Two exhibits on the Taiping Rebellion that I visited recently in Suzhou and Nanjing bear out the point.
As I doubt that one in a thousand Americans has ever heard of the Taiping Rebellion, a short overview will be necessary. We Americans tend toward historical myopia. When we speak of our own civil war, we call it The Civil War, neglecting the fact that in overlapping years civil war was decimating China, a civil war so costly in human life that it makes our own look like a bloodless skirmish by comparison. With a death toll of between twenty and thirty million from 1850-1864, the Taiping Rebellion has no peer in history. So what did the short and bloody Kingdom of Heavenly Peace mean to the Chinese then, and what sense do they make of it now?
The Taiping Rebellion germinated in 1837 with a dream. Hong Xiuquan, a Confucian scholar whose roots were in the Hakka minority rather than in the majority Han, had failed the civil-service examinations for the third time. A combination of illness and stress produced a delirium in which Hong envisioned himself a part of previously unseen family, the son of a bearded patriarch and the brother of an elder divine son.
In small numbers, Christian missionaries by this time had already begun without much success to seek converts in China. Christian tracts had been translated into Chinese, and in these tracts Hong found the means to make sense of his own dreams and deliria. The father and son that he had met in his dreams were none other than Jehovah and Jesus, and he himself was the younger brother called by God to establish a heavenly kingdom on earth. It was a fervor wed to violence from its inception when Hong shouted out in his delirium his dictum to “kill the demons.” In time, those demons would take on very earthly shape in the figures of the Qing emperor and the ruling elite, and the path to the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace would be cut with the sword.
At his zenith in the mid-1850s, Hong had established a capital at Nanjing and controlled a region of seventeen provinces in central and southern China. Not all Taiping soldiers, however, were true believers in Hong’s odd religious vision—a hybrid of Chinese hierarchy, Christian scripture, and fevered imagination. Instead, what drew many into the cause was shared hatred of the Qing, a dynasty already bloated by decadence and loathed by many Han Chinese for its foreign Manchu origins. That Hong, too, was not a Han hardly mattered; the usurper in power generally makes a better target for scorn than does the one of the rise.
What is most striking about the exhibits at the Suzhou Museum and the Taiping Museum in Nanjing are the omissions. Both exhibits present the rebellion as a kind proto-Marxist peasant revolution. No mention at all is made of the religious vision that motivated the rebellion and sustained it through the end. If ever a regime could be described as a theocracy, it would be Hong’s Heavenly Kingdom, yet one would never know this based on the museum displays. This is the most glaring omission, but by no means the only one. The exhibits note neither the routine brutality of the Taiping nor the hypocrisy of its leaders. Despite its rhetoric of egalitarianism, some were certainly more equal than others in Hong’s Heavenly Kingdom. Expropriated property was to be communally shared, yet Hong and his high lieutenants lived in luxury. The heavenly king ordered sexual segregation, preventing even wives and husbands from sharing a bed, all the while establishing his own imperial harem. Common people who violated the policy were bound to wind up with their heads severed from their bodies. Opium addicts, homosexuals, Buddhists, Taoists, Qing sympathizers, and perceived Qing sympathizers all exposed their necks to the same blade.
The distorted presentation of the history of the Taiping is not surprising, for the original distorter was Hong himself. As his kingdom began to crumble in the early 1860s, Hong cloistered himself in his Nanjing palace and rewrote the Bible. Any passages in the Chinese translations that did not fit his vision he revised or cut, claiming that the original source had been in error. He also made sure to add numerous references to himself, giving the unsuspecting reader the sense that Hong embodied the fulfillment of a prophecy, even if that prophecy originated only in his own mind.
The curators of the museum exhibits have done something quite similar, though toward political rather than religious ends. They have given us a Hong of the mind, a hero of the people whose attractive frame can only be seen when the field is swept clean of most of the facts. In the long-standing thinking of the Party, the feudal Qing were bad, and, in opposing them, the Taiping must surely have been proletarian and good. Much must be forgotten to tell the story this way, but that is the story the exhibits present. There is no space in such a tale for Hong in his decline, when the heavenly king’s work with his distorting pen closely resembles Hitler moving about non-existent armies on maps in the Fuhrer Bunker as Berlin fell. Many rogues of history have been undone by hubris. Can there be any greater act of pride than to proclaim oneself sired by God and to found a state based on that premise? Or to assume the arbitrary power of truth and wield it in defiance of reason?
As I doubt that one in a thousand Americans has ever heard of the Taiping Rebellion, a short overview will be necessary. We Americans tend toward historical myopia. When we speak of our own civil war, we call it The Civil War, neglecting the fact that in overlapping years civil war was decimating China, a civil war so costly in human life that it makes our own look like a bloodless skirmish by comparison. With a death toll of between twenty and thirty million from 1850-1864, the Taiping Rebellion has no peer in history. So what did the short and bloody Kingdom of Heavenly Peace mean to the Chinese then, and what sense do they make of it now?
The Taiping Rebellion germinated in 1837 with a dream. Hong Xiuquan, a Confucian scholar whose roots were in the Hakka minority rather than in the majority Han, had failed the civil-service examinations for the third time. A combination of illness and stress produced a delirium in which Hong envisioned himself a part of previously unseen family, the son of a bearded patriarch and the brother of an elder divine son.
In small numbers, Christian missionaries by this time had already begun without much success to seek converts in China. Christian tracts had been translated into Chinese, and in these tracts Hong found the means to make sense of his own dreams and deliria. The father and son that he had met in his dreams were none other than Jehovah and Jesus, and he himself was the younger brother called by God to establish a heavenly kingdom on earth. It was a fervor wed to violence from its inception when Hong shouted out in his delirium his dictum to “kill the demons.” In time, those demons would take on very earthly shape in the figures of the Qing emperor and the ruling elite, and the path to the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace would be cut with the sword.
At his zenith in the mid-1850s, Hong had established a capital at Nanjing and controlled a region of seventeen provinces in central and southern China. Not all Taiping soldiers, however, were true believers in Hong’s odd religious vision—a hybrid of Chinese hierarchy, Christian scripture, and fevered imagination. Instead, what drew many into the cause was shared hatred of the Qing, a dynasty already bloated by decadence and loathed by many Han Chinese for its foreign Manchu origins. That Hong, too, was not a Han hardly mattered; the usurper in power generally makes a better target for scorn than does the one of the rise.
What is most striking about the exhibits at the Suzhou Museum and the Taiping Museum in Nanjing are the omissions. Both exhibits present the rebellion as a kind proto-Marxist peasant revolution. No mention at all is made of the religious vision that motivated the rebellion and sustained it through the end. If ever a regime could be described as a theocracy, it would be Hong’s Heavenly Kingdom, yet one would never know this based on the museum displays. This is the most glaring omission, but by no means the only one. The exhibits note neither the routine brutality of the Taiping nor the hypocrisy of its leaders. Despite its rhetoric of egalitarianism, some were certainly more equal than others in Hong’s Heavenly Kingdom. Expropriated property was to be communally shared, yet Hong and his high lieutenants lived in luxury. The heavenly king ordered sexual segregation, preventing even wives and husbands from sharing a bed, all the while establishing his own imperial harem. Common people who violated the policy were bound to wind up with their heads severed from their bodies. Opium addicts, homosexuals, Buddhists, Taoists, Qing sympathizers, and perceived Qing sympathizers all exposed their necks to the same blade.
The distorted presentation of the history of the Taiping is not surprising, for the original distorter was Hong himself. As his kingdom began to crumble in the early 1860s, Hong cloistered himself in his Nanjing palace and rewrote the Bible. Any passages in the Chinese translations that did not fit his vision he revised or cut, claiming that the original source had been in error. He also made sure to add numerous references to himself, giving the unsuspecting reader the sense that Hong embodied the fulfillment of a prophecy, even if that prophecy originated only in his own mind.
The curators of the museum exhibits have done something quite similar, though toward political rather than religious ends. They have given us a Hong of the mind, a hero of the people whose attractive frame can only be seen when the field is swept clean of most of the facts. In the long-standing thinking of the Party, the feudal Qing were bad, and, in opposing them, the Taiping must surely have been proletarian and good. Much must be forgotten to tell the story this way, but that is the story the exhibits present. There is no space in such a tale for Hong in his decline, when the heavenly king’s work with his distorting pen closely resembles Hitler moving about non-existent armies on maps in the Fuhrer Bunker as Berlin fell. Many rogues of history have been undone by hubris. Can there be any greater act of pride than to proclaim oneself sired by God and to found a state based on that premise? Or to assume the arbitrary power of truth and wield it in defiance of reason?
