How the Taiping Rebellion Worked

In 1850, a disillusioned would-be bureaucrat named Hung Hsiu-ch'uan became the head of a rebellion against the Qing dynasty. Learn the story of this rebellion -- and how it influenced modern China -- in this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And for our
subject today, Katie and I both started our outlines with

(00:21):
some pretty amazing superlatives. I had that our subject, the
Taiping Rebellion, was the largest war of the nineteenth century,
and I had read that it was the most important
event in nineteenth century China. But the crazy thing is
that neither of us had ever really heard anything about this,
So it really is something we missed in history line.
We definitely missed it. We just found out about it

(00:43):
a few weeks ago when we did our podcast on
the Opium War, and uh, it's those are pretty amazing figures,
aren't they. Right? Twenty million dead in the Taiping Rebellion,
which we both thought must be a mistake when we
first read it too, and we looked, you know, Okay,
I gotta get another source for this. Twenty million is
way too many people, right, But it's what everybody has.

(01:07):
And this rebellion changed the Chang dynasty, which began in
sixteen forty four forever, and also the imperial system. So
it's a pretty big deal. Yeah. And fortunately for us
and for our story, something that ends up so broad
and so important starts with one man. And this man's
name is Hung shu Chuan. And let me go ahead

(01:29):
and say that I have no idea if I said
that correctly or not. But as most of you know,
I do a wrap up blog at the end of
the week every single Friday talking about the podcast that
published this week. So if you'd like to learn more
about it and see how these things are actually spelled,
please check out the blog. Hung was a poor farm
boy whose biggest hope was to pass the Civil service

(01:51):
examinations and get a good post somewhere in Canton. And
these were a huge deal. You first passed the qualifying
exams and your section, and then he passed that part, right,
he did. And then you went to Canton for the
state exam and thousands of people showed up, but only
a few would make it. And this, if you passed,
it would change your class and your entire future. It

(02:12):
basically everything is hanging off of this one exam for
poor young Hung, and he he fails it four times, yes,
again and again and again. So his dreams are thwarted forevermore.
But after one of his failures, he meets a Christian
missionary and starts reading religious texts. Yeah, he reads the
tract of an early Chinese Christian ling Afa, and when

(02:37):
he reads the track, he remembers a dream that he
had several years before, and everything sort of comes together
for Hung. He had dreamt that he was the son
of God, uh not Jesus, actually Jesus's younger brother, and
he's been ordered to establish the Kingdom of God on
earth right, and he has to get rid of the

(02:57):
demon Man choose and reform China. So it's not only
a religious goal, it's also somewhat of a political goal.
And when Hung discovers um the Christian tracts and Christianity,
he starts to feel that the confusion classics, which of
course he's been studying for twenty years trying to pass
the Civil Service exam, seem vain and uh not, they

(03:22):
seem what's wrong to be what's wrong with China, and
the Christian tracks seem like they give him something to do,
and that evil is around us and it can be
slayed and he can be the one to do it.
So his friend Fung Yun Sean here's his ideas, and
thinks they're pretty good and sets up a religious group
called the God Worshiper Society with a bunch of poor

(03:43):
peasants in the Guangxi Province. And around eighteen forty seven,
Hong Fung and the worshippers all come together and in
eighteen fifty Hung becomes the leader of the rebellion, and
by January one, eighteen fifty one, they've started a new
dynasty called the type Ing Tiango, which is the Heavenly
Kingdom of Great Peace, and Hong would be in charge

(04:06):
as the tien Wang or the Heavenly King of this
new dynasty for China, right, and their shining beginning is
when they capture Nanjing in March of eighteen fifty three,
which they renamed tian Jing, their heavenly capital. So this
is pretty crazy. This rebellion starts off as a bunch
of raggedy poor peasants and ends up being more than

(04:28):
a million disciplined religious fanatics. And their style is just
to pick people up as they go along, and uh,
you know, why are why are people so into it? What?
What do they have to offer? What are they all about? Well,
Their beliefs were a mix of Christianity and the and
the classical Chinese religion, and the Taipings were more of

(04:50):
the Old Testament type, the wrathful God, right, beware thy
wrathful God, and you know, someone who required obedience and
in general had a bit of a temper. If you're
up on your Old Testaments, they were. They were pretty puritanical. Actually, yeah.
They were anti prostitution, footbinding, slavery, opium, smoking, adultery, gambling, tobacco,

(05:12):
arranged marriage, idle worship, and alcohol. So they really weren't
getting around. But on the more progressive front, they deemed
men and women equal, and they wanted to simplify the
Chinese language, and they believed that all property would be
held in common, which that's a little foreboding for um,

(05:32):
what's to come later in China. It's an interesting predecessor here,
and that they believed in the equal distribution of land, right,
a primitive, primitive sort of communism. And they also, again
we're anti Manchu, wanted to get rid of the entire
imperial system and wanted a restoration to the old ways
in some respects. So we should probably talk a little

(05:53):
bit about the Man Choose. Yeah, the Man Choose. The
Manchu emperors had been in power for century uh with
the Qing dynasty, and the Chings had overturned the Mings,
who were sort of regarded as the classic Chinese dynasty. Um,
but the Man Choose lasted so long because they maintained
control over all aspects of the bureaucracy. They put Man

(06:17):
Choose in all the key positions. And we should say
to the Man Choose are minority in China, so a
lot of a lot of the Chinese are seeing them
as foreign emperors almost. Um. But I think the bureaucratic
aspect is interesting here, considering that Hung couldn't become a bureaucrat,

(06:39):
he couldn't pass his examination, and he ends up this
enemy of the Man Choose. But um, by the eighteen fifties,
the formally impressive military of the Man Choose and strong
emperors have weakened, and um they've lost the Opium War,
which um, you know, they're are held responsible for caving

(07:02):
into the West. But as we've learned in our earlier podcast,
there wasn't much that could be done about them. But
the Chinese were again very unhappy that the treaty of
Ninjing had been signed and felt that the Ching dynasty
had given in. So there's plenty of opportunity for secret
societies in the eighteen fifties, not just these guys when
the rebellion had swept some of them up with the

(07:24):
Tai Pings if they were even remotely anti Ching. The
Nian Rebellion was also going on from around eighteen fifty
one or eighteen fifty three to eighteen sixty eight, so
the Ching dynasty is fighting more than one rebellion at
the same time, and there are also famines, droughts, and
floods going on. The people are suffering and not very happy.
There's thought that perhaps the Ching dynasty wasn't doing as

(07:46):
much as they could to help the people. So of
course there's going to be some sort of reaction to
what's going on, and if things are bad, it must
be the fault of the current rulers, the barbarian foreigner
man choose. So now that we've got some con x
let's go back to the actual rebellion. The Taipangs tried
to capture Beijing but failed. They had lots of victories

(08:07):
in the Yangsee River valley, but that capture of Nanjang
was the only big city they ever managed to get,
and this is why some people think they ended up
not lasting. So there are some internal cracks as well.
Yung Sho Ching, the Taiping minister of State, has been
trying to take over some of Hung's power. It doesn't

(08:28):
go over well. And Young and his followers several thousand
are all killed by Hung, and he's not the only
one killed. Even the person who killed Yang is killed
by Hung. So we're already to make a struggle right well.
And Hung is becoming more imperial as his rain goes on,

(08:50):
less about his early ideals and more about being in charge,
you know, obviously if he's having all these people killed.
But he started up a huge bureaucracy of his own.
He has two thousand women serving as ministers, bureaucrats, maids,
and attendants. Um, he's his puritanical side has gotten even stronger.

(09:13):
And he's decreed that men and women, even those who
are married, couldn't have sexual relations until the heavenly Kingdom triumphed.
And if you know anything about human nature, so yeah,
it happens, and sometimes violators are beheaded. But at the
same time he's very hypocritical about this, and he even
keeps his own harem, so you can see how there

(09:35):
would be a lot of internal disputes and anger and
feuds and um. Things are starting to fall apart, and
he's starting to alienate people. One of his top general,
Shida Kai, gets nervous about all the killing and defects
and takes a lot of people with heads out of there. Right.
So the Chain dynasty is fighting back this entire time

(09:58):
against the Taipings, but their res verses are stretched then
because again they're fighting the Nean rebellion, and they're also
some Muslim rebellions going on in other parts of China,
so they've got a lot on their plate. And at
some point around this time, some accounts have hung stepping
back from leadership altogether. So here in the Harem time, right,

(10:19):
he's not doing the administrative stuff anymore. So you've lost that.
You know, that one prismatic leader right to your focus
actually had the vision from God which is inspiring everyone.
So he's just you know, gone and taking a seat.
Go step back a little bit. And in eighteen sixty
the Taipang's try to take Shanghai, but again that doesn't work.
This big city takeovers are just not happening of them. Interestingly,

(10:41):
they're thwarted by an American, Frederick Townsend Ward in his
army of foreign mercenaries, and the West is not pleased
that Award is getting involved in this. They want to
be neutral and just maintain their trading interests because that's
what the West is interested in, selling opium and keeping

(11:01):
these Chinese ports open um. So they're trying to stay neutral,
and the British actually arrest Ward for getting mixed up
in local politics, but he gets away and he ends
up setting up the Ever Victorious Army, which was Chinese
troops but Western officers and arms, so they were Western

(11:22):
trained but using Chinese people. And when he died, Charles George,
known as Chinese Gordon, took over. And a side note,
Gordon is really interesting. I might want to do it
totally separate podcast on him. He ends up being killed
in cartoon by modest governor of Sudan. It's all over
the world here, so if the Qing dynasty collapsed, foreign

(11:43):
trade might go with it. The British have just fought
the opium War and have secured those ports and everything,
and they don't want a regime change, so the West
becomes anti Taiping right because they're so anti foreign again
the man choes, they think, well, they'll probably be even
more anti foreigner with Americans and the British and the

(12:06):
Tayping are adamantly anti opium too, so it's really not
going to work out with that whole selling opium thing.
And there are some other outside forces that are coming
in here, because usually the gentry would get behind a
successful rebellion, but since the Taipings were so anti Confucianism,
a lot of them felt like they were being threatened

(12:28):
as well, that you know, the Chinese gentry classes and
the scholars and not the peasants. So they come together
under a man named Zungwofan, a Chinese official in the
Chang government, and he puts together a Hunan army courtesy
of their own local taxes and surrounds Nanjang. And by
this time Hung is sick and refuses to leave Nanjing

(12:49):
or to escape, and um he kills himself or perhaps
does of food poisoning in June of eighteen sixty four.
But before he dies he makes his teenage son, the
tian Wang or the Heavenly King, which again he has
a teenage son, But weren't people not supposed he was
supposed to be waiting for the heavenly kingdom there, I
don't think so. Nanjing falls from the Taiping in July

(13:12):
of eighteen sixty four, and one hundred thousand Taiping preferred
death to being captured. Yeah, they were offered amnesty if
they repented, but nobody did it. Basically a lot of
them would kill themselves by fire or just die at
the hands of the Imperial army rather than renounced their beliefs.

(13:34):
So in this way, Zong saved the imperial regime from
total collapse, although since his success gave more power to
the Han Chinese elite the gentry right, it weakened the
Ching dynasty after all, even more so the man choose win,
but they've given to so much to win that it's

(13:56):
sort of an empty victory for them, and the rebellion
didn't even really end. Then, skirmishes went on for years
and years. The Typing did not want to fall, and
the government was trying to squash them for quite a
while afterward. So they didn't want to fall, but they
basically do. So why does that happen? There's not really

(14:16):
much consensus on this, And it might have been because
they because of their religious beliefs and because they were
against Confucianism UM, and a lot of people considered that
religion integral to being Chinese. And then also on the
religion side of it, people might have objected to having

(14:37):
a theocracy. Some of it could have been because they
alienated so many people with those really radical social reforms.
And they also didn't really have a stable base. You know,
they only had that one big city that they had gotten,
but when they got there, they never consolidated power in
an effective way. Yeah, the rag tag way that they

(14:57):
formed isn't the most long lasting model now. And they
also had so much internal feuding. Hung changed so much,
there was corruption of his own beliefs. And then also
the West came in on the side of the West involvement. Yeah,
that certainly turns the cards where we put our our
money where we needed it. But of course, aspects of

(15:20):
the rebellion last for decades after, and a lot of
people do see a form of primitive communism in in
the whole Typing rebellion. UM. There are even some interesting
comparisons between Hung and Mao, both inspired by these UM
outside Western ideas Christianity or Um in Male's case, by

(15:44):
Marx and Um setting up utopian communities and remote areas
and governing very strictly. So it's it's interesting to think
about how something that neither of us had heard about
before this, and something that was such an important event
for the nineteenth century has interesting ramifications in the twentieth

(16:06):
century exactly Well. I think that about wraps it up
for today. But if you'd like to learn more about
how communism works, check out our article and also check
out the blog if you get a chance, on our
homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. For
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(16:28):
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