How to start a rebellion : The Chinese way (Part-I)
Rebellions form the basis of almost every chapter in history. Typically, it unfolds with an unjust king or ruler mistreating their subjects, while their queens resort to making puns out of their subjects' grave problems, like the infamous "if they can't have bread, let them eat cake." And these grievances often lead to rebellions, which if successful, may transform into a revolution, as seen in the case of the French.
(this image will help you imagine)
Rebels and Chinese Rebellions
However, the Chinese way of rebellion is a rather unorthodox one, because in most of the cases, particularly in Europe, Commoners or the rebels were not very sure of what will happen to them if they overthrow their king except that they perhaps be living a less uncomfortable life, and this uncertainty itself proved to be the reason for adopting the safest form of Government i.e the Republician form (Again the french case) where power is divided and they themselves could decide what their condition would be after a rebellion against the monarchy and even if they again pick monarchy, it would certainly be a person of nobel birth who could just be a marionette without any real power in his hand.
But this was not the case in China, where they believed in the "Mandate Of Heaven", according to which there always remains a dynastic cycle which will govern the land below the Heaven( ya ,The Chinese were extremely self centred and believed that only China lies below the Heaven and they consider everyone else beyond China as barbarians and savages) and one of the most important duty of the emperor was to protect the Chinese people from the outsiders (hysterically some of these emperors themselves were outsiders). however, when the emperor becomes unworthy or corrupt, the heaven withdraws its blessing and natural disasters like famine, unstabilty in society and other calamities would prevail in the kingdom, another interesting aspect of this mandate is that it doesn't forbid any ordinary person from becoming the emperor as long as he is capable of effectively managing the kingdom. Inshort the Chinese were quite sure that after a rebellion they would inevitably be governed by a just king upon which the heaven bestows its blessing and they would be free from disasters like Famine, malady and social instability, atleast for a couple of centuries if everything goes right. Hence rebellions were like rituals for the chinese people that they have to perform after every hundred or two hundred years in order to restore the prosperity of their kingdom.
Thus, it would not be an overstatement to say that China has been a cornucopia of rebellions, from Red eyebrows rebellion in c.27 AD to yellow turban rebellion in c.214 AD to White lotus rebellion in c.1804 AD ( seems like ancient Chinese rebels had some obsession with colours) and the list can on and on but the most harrowing putsch in the history of humankind which ultimately resulted in more casualties than WW I and was unsurprisingly started as a religious movement was the Taiping revolt of 1850s.
The Taiping Background
Imagine that you are an average mid 19th century Chinese peasant living in a small Chinese village with nigh destitution, grappling extremely scare resources and along with a society full of opium addicts. Farmers, traders, bureaucrats, government officials, and even priests are now only at the mercy of opium. Social instability is growing, corruption has prevailed the great Qing empire and worst of all, foreign influence and power has grown so much that the Manchu dynasty of China is nothing more than a mere puppet of the outlanders. Your village has been suffering from a famine and you are sitting under a tree shade almost surprised and wondering why the mandate of heaven has not striken yet.
It was a period of great turmoil for China as it had recently lost the first opium war (c.1839-41 AD) and was forced to rectify the treaty of Nanjing in c.1842 AD. The treaty had been designed in such a way that it created a huge imbalance in trade between China and Britain and there was literally no restrictions on the import of Opium , China was forced to hand over the island of Hong Kong to British, along with that the treaty also politically benefitted the British greatly, granting them immense political powers like diplomatic immunity, extraterritoriality, etc.
So, keeping in mind all these conditions of 19th century China, undoubtedly it was nearly impossible to find any person in the countryside who would not despise the emperor or the Chinese government as a whole. And the Taiping Rebellion feeded on this same despise but with a twist of religion.
Like any other religious, social, political, or frankly Machiavellian movement, the Taiping movement also had several protagonists but as the famous urban poet Kendrick Lamar has said " the one in front of the gun lives forever". The first one to stand in front of the arrows of the Qing empire and dared to propagate the foreign religion of Christianity was a man called Hong Xiuquan.
Hong...was a bright individual and like many of us today he also had an ambitious dream to enter the Civil services by cracking the imperial Civil service exam (ya, they are having Civil service exams even in 19th century) and again like many of us today he couldn't clear the exam and resorted to become a tutor in his village near Guanzhou(canton). But when he failed his 2nd attempt, he had an encounter with a protestant missionary named Steven Edwards in Guanzhou who was a professor of theology in the University of Yale and had decided to preach and Spread Christianity instead of teaching, he handed Hong a pamphlate with " Good words to admonish the age" written on it , (one more thing, it was verboten to propagate any other religion inside the boarders of the Qing empire, but as mentioned before it was all because of the increase in foreign powers that Stevens was able to preach there). Hong didn't initially payed any attention to it and walked his way to home.
Hong returned again after a couple of years, when he had collected enough money to pay for the examination fee, he gave the exam, and let's just say the result of his 3rd attempt was same as the last two, but perhaps this time Hong had expected a pragmatic result and thus his body could not sustain the shock of not passing the exam and he fell seriously ill, his condition was so severe that his parents thought he was going to die.
It was during this time he saw a dream, in which he had a detailed vision of heaven and claimed to see a father like figure with golden beard, wearing black robe (supposedly God) who gave him a sword and told him to free his land from the demons(supposedly Qing emperor and foreigners) , he also saw a mother like figure who told him that he had to fight along side with his brother to pulverize the demons who are causing vexation to his mother and father, apart from that he also claimed to see Confucius being punished by God for misleading the innocent people into some pagan nonsense. Inshort, it is suffice to say that he was told about the evils of the world in his dream and was also given instructions to battle with them ( and was also given a torture show of Confucius)
This dream of his changed everything, he become healthy, his mental state changed ,his facial expression changed, he started to smiled more it was like he was a completely different person, he then again resumed his full time job of tutoring for another three-four years , bouncing from village to village until he had enough money to pay for the examination fee again, he started to prepare for his fourth attempt, only to face disappointment again. He was nigh directionless and broke when one of his relatives reminded him to take another look at the Christian phamplate given to him by Edward Stevens, he found the pamphlate and suddenly everything clicked.
With the perspective of a Christian he began to induce what he saw in his dream several years ago and concluded that the man he saw was The God mentioned in Christian Bible and he himself was his younger son and the brother of Jesus Christ, and he had to fight the evil sprits that had prevailed in his land .The moment this thought crossed his mind, he renounced the Confucius religion, which was the prevalent religion of the Chinese people, hammered and destroyed any Buddhist or Confucius statue or symbol he came across(typical) and even managed to convince some of his relatives that he actually was a son of God. He had suddenly gone from a respectable tutor to an obnoxious religious fanatic.
And as you can imagine he was banned from the village due to his behaviour but it didn't bother him much as he had now taken preaching as his new full time job.
To be continued...
**I have decided to Split this story into two parts, so that I can effectively articulate what had happened after Hong started to preach his own version of Christianity, and believe me the story only gets interesting after this.**
Very interestingly narrated...keep it up
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