Posted on 11/18/2021 6:43:18 AM PST by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1864, the sins of the father were visited upon the son when the Qing Dynasty dealt a coup de grace in what is perhaps history’s bloodiest civil war, executing the luckless teenager to whom leadership of the Taiping Rebellion had fallen.
Strangely little-known, the Taiping Rebellion shook the weakened Chinese state through the middle of the 19th century, nearly to its very foundations.
From 1851 until the 1864 death of its queer leader figure, prophetic Christian convert Hong Xiuquan, it maintained its own state in southern China, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.
Also of interest: Google freebies from the 19th century. Ti-ping tien-kwoh: the history of the Ti-ping revolution and History of the insurrection in China: with notices of the Christianity, creed, and proclamations of the insurgents.
China’s defeat in the First Opium War in the 1840’s set the stage for Hong Xiuquan’s movement, and not only geopolitically: western powers had pried open the Orient to proselytizers as well as poppies, and though Christianity would find a rough go of it in China, it did win over Hong.
Fired by his supposed divine vision, Hong’s Heavenly Kingdom conquered the Yangtze Valley and much of the south, with an outlook radically progressive as against the hidebound Qing: egalitarian land distribution and gender equity (the Kingdom’s administrative acumen is less generously accounted). Naturally, the “real” Christian missionaries abhorred it, which sincere theology happily comported with the policy of their national statesmen who abhorred the Taiping’s encumbrance upon the opium trade....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
The Qing Dynasty was representative of all late-stage empires - a bloated administration, supporting a huge class of useless elites in its capital, corrupt at its core, ideologically hidebound, mired in debt and printed money.
All of these characteristics are present in the USA today.
God’s Chinese Son by Jonathan Spence
https://archive.org/details/godschinesesonta0000spen
The Devil Soldier by Caleb Carr
http://17thstreet.net/other-books/the-devil-soldier/
George MacDonald Fraser
I never read any Flashman stories. Thanks for the tip.
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