51 Facts About Hong Xiuquan

Hong Xiuquan, born Hong Huoxiu and with the courtesy name Renkun, was a Chinese revolutionary and religious leader who led the Taiping Rebellion against the Qing dynasty.

Hong Xiuquan established the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom over large portions of southern China, with himself as its "Heavenly King".

Hong Xiuquan came to believe that his celestial father he saw in the visions was God the Father, his celestial elder brother was Jesus Christ, and he had been directed to rid the world of demon worship.

Hong Xiuquan rejected Confucianism and began propagating his own unique version of Christianity in southern China.

In January 1851, Hong Xiuquan organized a rebel army and routed the Qing forces at Jintian, marking the beginning of the Taiping Rebellion.

Hong Xiuquan then declared himself the Heavenly King of the Heavenly Kingdom of Peace.

Hong Xiuquan became increasingly suspicious of Yang Xiuqing, his fellow Taiping leader, and engineered Yang's murder in a 1856 purge that spiraled into the further purge of more Taiping leaders.

The kingdom gradually lost ground and in June 1864, in the face of Qing advance, Hong Xiuquan died following a period of illness and was succeeded by his son, Hong Xiuquan Tianguifu.

Hong Xiuquan, born "Hong Huoxiu", was the third and youngest son of a Hakka family.

Hong Xiuquan was born in Fuyuan Springs, Hua county in Canton, Guangdong to Hong Jingyang, a farmer and elected headman, and Madam Wang.

Hong Xiuquan showed an interest in scholarship at an early age, so his family made financial sacrifices to provide a formal education for him, in the hope that he could one day complete all of the civil service examinations.

Hong Xiuquan began studying at a primary school in his village at the age of five.

Hong Xiuquan was able to recite the Four Books after five or six years.

Hong Xiuquan then took the local xiucai preliminary civil service examinations and placed first.

Hong Xiuquan was unsuccessful and, his parents being unable to afford to continue his education, he was forced to return to agricultural work.

In 1836, at the age of 22, Hong Xiuquan returned to Guangzhou to retake the imperial examinations.

In 1837, Hong Xiuquan attempted and failed the imperial examinations for a third time, leading to a nervous breakdown.

Hong Xiuquan was delirious for days to the point that his family feared for his life.

In later embellishments, Hong Xiuquan would declare that he saw Confucius being punished by Hong Xiuquan's celestial father for leading the people astray.

Hong Xiuquan stopped studying for the imperial examinations and sought work as a teacher.

In 1843, Hong Xiuquan failed the imperial examinations for the fourth and final time.

In contrast to some of the later leaders of his movement, Hong Xiuquan appears to have genuinely believed in his ascent to Heaven and divine mission.

Hong Xiuquan began by burning all Confucian and Buddhist statues and books in his house, and began preaching to his community about his visions.

Hong Xiuquan collaborated with them to destroy holy statues in small villages, to the ire of local citizens and officials.

In November 1844, after having preached in Guangxi for five months, Hong Xiuquan returned home without Feng and resumed his previous job as a village teacher, while continuing to write religious tracts.

In 1847, Hong Xiuquan was invited by a member of the Chinese Union to study with the American Southern Baptist missionary, Reverend Issachar Jacox Roberts.

Hong Xiuquan accepted the invitation and traveled to Guangzhou with his cousin, Hong Xiuquan Rengan.

Once there, Hong Xiuquan studied Karl Gutzlaff's translations of the Old and New Testaments, converted to Protestantism and requested to be baptized by Roberts.

Roberts refused to do so, possibly due to Hong Xiuquan being tricked by the other converts into requesting monetary aid from Roberts.

Hong Xiuquan left Guangzhou on 12 July 1847 to search for Feng Yunshan.

In January 1848, Feng Yunshan was arrested and banished to Guangdong, and Hong Xiuquan left for Guangdong shortly thereafter to reunite with Feng.

Hong Xiuquan ministered to the faithful in outdoor meetings strongly resembling the Baptist tent revivals he had witnessed with Issachar Roberts.

In 1847, Hong Xiuquan began his translation and adaptation of the Bible, what came to be known as "Authorized Taiping Version of the Bible", or "The Taiping Bible", which he based on Gutzlaff's translation.

Hong Xiuquan presented his followers with the Bible as a vision of the authentic religion that had existed in ancient China before it was wiped out by Confucius and the imperial system.

Hong Xiuquan made some minor changes in the text, such as correcting misprints and improving the prose style, but adapted the meaning elsewhere to fit his own theology and moral teachings.

Hong Xiuquan preached a mixture of communal utopianism, evangelism and oriental syncretism.

When Hong Xiuquan returned to Guangxi, he found that Feng Yunshan had accumulated a following of around 2,000 converts.

However, the instability of the region meant that Hong Xiuquan's followers were inevitably drawn into conflict with other groups, not least because of their predominantly Hakka ethnicity.

Hong Xiuquan's followers emerged victorious and beheaded the Manchu commander of the government army.

Hong Xiuquan declared the founding of the "Heavenly Kingdom of Transcendent Peace" on 11 January 1851.

However, in March 1853, Hong Xiuquan's forces managed to take Nanjing and turned it into the capital of their movement.

Hong Xiuquan created an elaborate civil bureaucracy, reformed the calendar used in his kingdom, outlawed opium use, and introduced a number of reforms designed to make women more socially equal to men.

Hong Xiuquan ruled by making frequent proclamations from his Heavenly Palace, demanding strict compliance with various moral and religious rules.

Hong Xiuquan became increasingly suspicious of Yang's ambitions and his network of spies.

Hong Xiuquan's solution was to order his subjects to eat manna, which had been translated into Chinese as sweetened dew and a medicinal herb.

Hong Xiuquan himself gathered weeds from the grounds of his palace, which he then ate.

Hong Xiuquan fell ill in April 1864, possibly due to his ingestion of the weeds, and died on 1 June 1864.

Hong Xiuquan was buried in a yellow-silk shroud without a coffin in the bare ground, per Taiping custom, near the former Ming Imperial Palace.

Hong Xiuquan was succeeded by his teenage son, Hong Tianguifu.

Sun Yat-sen came from the same area as Hong Xiuquan and was said to have identified with Hong Xiuquan since his childhood days.

Scholars that promote the opinion that a strong similarity exists between Li and Hong Xiuquan note that both rallied a large number of people behind a religious or spiritual cause in order to challenge the status quo.