Hong’s Heavenly Kingdom of Taiping was the driving ideology of the Taiping Rebellion. The rebellion has been central to historical study for its scale, brutality, and the mass socio-political upheaval it triggered.1 The ideological vision at its core has been interrogated by historians to determine the nature of intellectual engagement between East and West and map the nature of influence and exchange.2 Understanding Hong’s articulation of the Heavenly Kingdom of Taiping as a teleological narrative of Chinese history is useful to highlighting both the Christian and the Confucian elements of his vision as well as their interaction. The teleological nature of Hong’s narrative was central to establishing a claim to authority – allowing him to draw cultural authority from classical elements of Chinese culture and moral authority from a Christian ethic.
Hong’s articulation of China’s past and future was dependent on Christian narrative elements.3 This narrative temporality was framed within a Christian framework through ideas of salvation and notions of the demonic. He characterised China’s ancient past as Christian in nature – offset by the invasion of demonic forces.2 These demonic forces were associated with a range of influences like the Qing dynasty and Buddhism.4 In response, he presented his Heavenly Kingdom as the means to salvation, the means to set China back onto the course of Christianity.5
Central to his engagement with China’s ancient past was the figure of Shangdi.6 Arguing that the worship of Shangdi was a universal phenomenon in ancient China, he constructed a monolithic depiction of religion and worship.2 Hong’s invocation of Shangdi came from an attempt to construct dialogue with Chinese antiquity. Hong’s first exposure to Christianity was through Liang’s Good Words.7 Pairing the figure of Shangdi with an interpretation of the Christian nature of China’s past was not Hong’s own invention, but one borrowed from Liang.8 However, Hong’s writing drew this connection into a temporal narrative of sin and salvation. Hong’s understanding of Christianity was thus inherently shaped by the cultural contexts embedded in Liang’s interpretations.
The Christian narrative he created was further shaped by cultural context through his medium of articulation. Despite his denouncement of Chinese classical texts, Hong’s narratives drew from this tradition. For example, the three character classic was central to the Taiping instruction of children.6 Hong’s narrative was also constructed within the Chinese language, thus inheriting Chinese cultural contexts. Hong was constructing a novel claim to divine authority. This was a linguistic project and his dependency on terms like tai-ping and tian-zi constructed spiritual and political authority through Confucian ideas embedded in the Chinese language.9 He constructed his authority through notions of familial ties identifying himself as the second son of the Heavenly Father, and as Christ’s younger brother.2 His expressions of Christian obligation were thus tied to the Confucian notion of five relationships.10 He articulated obligation to the Heavenly Father through a language of familial ties and filial loyalty.11 Thus, to convert his Christian visions into transmissible pieces of divine revelation, he was dependent on Chinese narrative forms. So despite Hong’s association with one and rejection of the other, his construction of authority through narrative was thus dependent on both Christian and Confucian elements.
The temporal nature of Hong’s discourse was more than just a narrative device borrowed from the Bible. It was a link between the Christian ethic and cultural authority. This link was central to allow Hong to present not only a vision for religious upheaval but a civilisational ideal that spanned reform across the social and the political realms as well. By historicising the Heavenly Kingdom, he constructed his vision as shaped and driven by the motions of history transcending the earthly not only in the religious sense but in the temporal sense – articulating a mission that was endowed with purpose that transcended the present – a mission that was in service of the past as well as the future.
- Richard Lufrano, The Heavenly Kingdom of the Taipings (New York, 2001), p. 246. [↩]
- Ibid. [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩]
- Carl S. Kilcourse, Taiping Theology: The Localization of Christianity in China, 1843–64 (New York, 2016), p. 50. [↩]
- Ibid., p.55. [↩]
- Ibid., p.64. [↩]
- Ibid., p.50. [↩] [↩]
- Ibid., p.65. [↩]
- Ibid., p.52. [↩]
- Ibid., p.49. [↩]
- Ibid., p.109. [↩]
- Ibid., p.125. [↩]