106 China in World History
regulated or taxed. By 1880, China imported about 80,000 chests of
opium per year, twice the amount imported in the late 1830s.
As painful as it was, the Opium War was only the beginning of
the Qing court’s troubles in the nineteenth century. The serious eco-
nomic and social dislocations caused by the war and by the opium trade
itself produced conditions ripe for rebellion. In 1850, a religious and
military uprising threatened the immediate survival of the dynasty: the
Taiping Rebellion, named for a peasant movement called Taiping Tian-
guo (Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace), which was inspired by Hong
Xiuquan, a failed examination candidate from south China. Hong was
from the Hakka people, a small minority group in south China whose
women did not bind their feet. He had a nervous breakdown and suf-
fered hallucinations after failing the civil service examinations several
times. When he recovered, he recalled having read a Christian mission-
ary pamphlet that he now felt explained the visions he had experienced.
He came to believe he was the second son of the Westerners’ Christian
God and the younger brother of Jesus Christ.
Hong inspired his followers to pool their wealth, to worship this
new Western god, Jehovah, and to destroy Confucian and ancestral
temples as heathen idols. When local government offi cials tried to sup-
press this movement in 1850, Hong and his followers rose in open revolt
against the Qing dynasty. They quickly recruited desperate peasants and
unemployed workers to their cause, trained them to fi ght fi ercely, and
by 1854 had occupied the major city of Nanjing on the Yangzi, where
they established the capital of their self-proclaimed Heavenly Kingdom.
They asserted control of the prosperous Yangzi valley, and their armies
came within twenty miles of Beijing in 1855, but poor planning for the
northern winter and the dispersal of their forces in too many directions
at once doomed that effort to failure.
The Taiping movement was a curious combination of Western Chris-
tianity with many traditional Chinese elements. Hong Xiuquan lived
as a Chinese-style emperor in Nanjing, in palatial splendor with many
concubines, while his movement outlawed opium use, declared equal-
ity of land ownership and taxation, and abolished the painful custom
of foot-binding for women. Western missionaries were at fi rst amazed
and delighted at the thought of a Chinese Christian uprising that might
overthrow the Qing dynasty. But when they learned of Hong’s claim to
be the younger brother of Jesus Christ and his direct visions from God,
they quickly lost their enthusiasm. Western traders successfully pres-
sured their governments to support the Qing forces battling the rebels,
as they feared above all the Taiping threat to the opium trade.