At the heart of the Heavenly Kingdom's rise were a failed Imperial Examination candidate (Hong Xiuquan), several evangelical Protestant missionaries, and a miscellaneous cast of pirates and local gentry. Economic pressures exacerbated by European trading activities played a part as well, and so did Qing decline. But this story is a wonderful example of one of the great Lessons of History: Things Happen for Reasons. And, to put it another way, Accidents Happen.
from Chinese Cultural Studies: The Taiping Rebellion, 1851-1864 ("an excerpt from the basic document of the Taiping Kingdom, called "The Land System of the Heavenly Kingdom." published in 1853.")
...All the fields in the empire are to be cultivated by all the people alike. If the land is deficient in one place, then the people must be removed to another, and if the land is deficient in another, then the people must be removed to this place. All the fields throughout the empire, whether of abundant or deficient harvest, shall be taken as a whole: if this place is deficient, then the harvest of that abundant place must be removed to relieve it, and if that place is deficient, then the harvest of this abundant place must be removed in order to relieve the deficient place; thus, all the people in the empire may together enjoy the abundant happiness of the Heavenly Father, Supreme Lord and Great God. There being fields, let all cultivate them; there being food, let all eat; there being clothes, let all be dressed; there being money, let all use it, so that nowhere does inequality exist, and no man is not well fed and clothed.
Reverend Issachar Jacox Roberts and the Taiping Rebellion Yuan Chung Teng Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 1. (Nov., 1963), pp. 55-67.
Christ's Brother Goes to China (historyhouse.com)
Hong and his followers paraded from region to region, breaking things and looting freely, until they happened upon a man in the rural principalities who had established himself as quite the divine healer. This man, Yang Xiuquan, danced about and muttered gobbledygook, creating an air of feasibility with a high "coefficient of weirdness" (i.e. the stranger and more incomprehensible a message is, the more likely it’s really divine).[5] Through his apparent efficacy as a miracle-worker, Yang had acquired a satisfied clientele himself, and no doubt viewed Hong as a threat to his autonomy. Not content to just be an adept healer, Yang proclaimed himself to be a medium for God. This was not just any God, but the Judeo-Christian God who was supposed to be Christ’s, and therefore Hong’s, father. Before long (fall 1848) another medium, Xiao Chaogui, showed up, and claimed to channel for Jesus. Alongside these theological giants, Hong’s role as Jesus’s brother was starting to look like small potatoes. Yang/God and Xiao/Jesus would often demand that Hong defer to their higher status when possessed by their respective spirits. This must have been unsettling to Hong who, we imagine, thought he had the market cornered on divinity when he first decided he was Christ’s brother.
Rivendell Educational Archive on the Taiping Rebellion
The Taiping Rebellion is one of the forerunners of China's awakening. It is one of the early tremors of a Communist earthquake, and the ultimate rise of a dynasty of the people, rather than the conquerors. China had been slowly breaking away from tradition for several hundred years, and the Taipings only widened the rift between modern China and its ancestors....Although a technical failure, the Taiping Rebellion changed the way the Chinese government functioned. The devastation and loss of life in the Yangtze Valley left the once-fertile area a desert for the next hundred years. The Land Tax which the Ch'ing leaned upon so heavily was simply no longer a source of any money at all. Soon, the Manchus were relying solely on the Maritime customs taken in by non-Chinese port operators, as well as on the sale of offices in the administration. The examination system fell into serious neglect and eventually passed away altogether. Now, the main way to advance in class was to buy into political rank. Province leaders and generals assumed a greater power than the central bureaucracy, because the Emperor had bestowed power upon warlords to raise a large enough army18. Most of these armies remained under private command rather than returning to the Emperor, and the entire society became factionalized as a result.
March of the Taipings (summary map of territories occupied)
review of God's Chinese Son, and another and a third
From the first:
there is a question here of peculiar poignancy, one that troubled the Western powers at the time and that ought trouble Christians now. Were the Taipings Christian? They baptized; they prayed in the name of Jesus; they regarded the Bible as the word of God; they believed in God as creator of all that is, as the only proper recipient of love, worship, and praise. They were not, of course, orthodox by Catholic Christian standards, but that is not quite the same thing. Considering seriously the question of whether the Taipings were Christian provides a splendid focus for the broader theological question of just what makes someone, or some group, Christian.
And from the second:
It's very hard to admire the Taipings, and I won't make the effort. They were fanatics and they were absurd, their redeeming features more than outweighed by such charming practices as branding Taiping Tienguo on the faces of conscripts to prevent their desertion ... Yet stories like theirs --- of the amazing actions performed by desperate people in the grip of bizarre ideas --- form a large part of the story of our times. To ignore such convulsions is to falsify our own view of the world, to say nothing of showing disrespect to immense tragedies. Twisted and terrible, the Taiping and their spiritual kindred deserve to be remembered; they, at least, have at last found their chronicler.
Taiping Christianity was a unique East-West amalgam of ideas and practises geared to militant action, the like of which was not seen again until China borrowed and sinified Marxissm-Leninism...
review of Wakeman's Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839-1861. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.
...the economic and social crisis around Canton after the Opium War directly caused the Taipings to form... (pg 131)
Faerie Christianity in China (Larry McAneny)
What are we to make of this tale? Most Western writers dismiss the Tai Ping religion as quasi-Christianity at best, and a megalomaniac cult at worst. It is not an unreasonable view. Clearly Hong Xiu Quan fell prey to his personal failings. All of the Tai Ping leaders were farmers, hardly up to the challenges of running a nation, nor likely to resist the corrosive effects of power. There is more than a hint of David Koresh and the Branch-Dividians in the Tai Ping story. One can view the affair as tragic mental aberration writ large.I find that I cannot label Hong a lunatic. He seems a lot like me: Quiet and scholarly, no great success but apparently well respected in his locality, devoted to the life of the mind and to family. I can get no hint that he seeks out the feverish dream which changes him, or that his thought processes afterwards are distorted. Hong is simply unfortunate enough to receive a great lump of stimuli, as vivid and as real as any stimuli we receive from our senses. He cannot dismiss it, though he tries. His life and his writings become an attempt to comprehend that data and to act on it, to reconcile his dream with information he gets from his environment. Hong's appeal is that he is engaged in a spiritual quest, a search for truth and meaning to which he brings all the reasoning power and scholarship that he can muster.
review of Jean Chesneaux ed. Popular Movements and Secret Societies in China 1840-1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972.
"...Hong Xiuquan, the infamous leader of the Taiping Rebellion, appears to have been the first to systematically employ songs as protest or propaganda devices and he was inspired by the hymns of protestant missionaries." (EASC Indiana)