Hong Xiuquan: The Failed Exam Behind China's Taiping Rebellion

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In 1837 a poor Hakka villager from Guangdong province named Hong Huoxiu failed the Qing imperial civil service exam for the third time and collapsed into days of delirium. He dreamed of a golden-bearded father in a black dragon robe, an elder brother, and Confucius being beaten for leading China astray. Six years later, after a fourth failure, he read Protestant tracts a missionary had handed him and concluded he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. Renamed Hong Xiuquan, he saw the Manchu rulers as the demons he had been commanded to slay, and in early 1851, after defeating Qing forces at Jintian, he proclaimed the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and crowned himself Heavenly King.

By 1852 his God Worshipping Society had grown into an army of half a million, and in 1853 it took Nanjing, renamed Tianjing, the heavenly capital. Hong banned foot binding and opium, segregated men and women even within marriage, and withdrew into a palace with a harem while his commander Yang Xiuqing claimed to speak as the voice of God the Father. The 1856 Tianjing Incident purged the inner circle, and Zeng Guofan's Xiang Army besieged Nanjing from 1862. The war that followed left an estimated 20 to 100 million dead.

• The American Baptist missionary Issachar Jacox Roberts studied with Hong in Guangzhou in 1847 but refused to baptize him, suspecting political ambition.
• Taiping soldiers refused to shave their foreheads or wear the queue, earning the name the Long Hairs.
• After taking Nanjing, Taiping forces killed the city's Manchu population, an estimated 40,000 civilians.
• Starving inside the besieged city, Hong ate wild weeds he called manna from heaven and died after a 20-day illness in June 1864.
• When Nanjing fell in July 1864, Zeng Guofan had Hong's body exhumed, cremated, and his ashes fired from a cannon.