God doesn’t speak to just anyone. Communicating with the divine is mediated by clerics, sacred texts, by long and complicated rituals. Many traditions, such as Christianity, put a special emphasis on the written word, recordings of revelations from prophets, aeons, or the divine itself.

So what happens when God talks to someone who isn’t “supposed” to hear him? What distinguishes new divine revelation from blasphemy? How can you be sure it’s God speaking and not a devil or demon? Not a charlatan faking a religious experience for their own ends?

The emergence of new divine revelation that challenges or reinterprets the existing theology has happened in many traditions. In this episode we’re going to begin the story of how the God Worshipers – and then the Taiping – handled it when God began speaking regularly at Thistle Mountain.

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(Painting of the missionary Robert Morrison, who was successful and popular enough to have his portrait painted. The same can not be said for Issachar Roberts).

On the surface, Hong Xiuquan’s life in 1845 and 1846 was unremarkable. He was in his early thirties, married with young children. His job as a school teacher had been secured through a mix of qualifications & family connections.

And then 1847 happened. By the beginning of 1848 Hong was a wanted man, actively leading a growing & radical religious community and writing about his intentions to assume imperial power over the largest empire on earth. So what the hell happened in 1847? That’s the question this episode attempts to answer.

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Feng Yunshan preached and spread Shangdi’s good word. For nearly 3 years, he worked tirelessly to grow the movement that worshiped God and recognized Hong Xiuquan as Jesus’ younger brother. In this episode we’re going to learn what worshipping Shangdi meant, how it related to other practices in the area, and see increasingly violent iconoclasm that will help lead to full scale insurrection and the establishment of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

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In this episode, we look at the region where the Society of God Worshipers took root and grew, and what life was like there in the second half of the 1840’s. Pirates, bandits, secret societies, and everyday people trying to scratch out a living in a Qing “backwater”. This “internal frontier” was the place where Hong’s Christian beliefs took root & grew into the nucleus of what would become the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

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Hong Xiuquan finally lost his faith in ever becoming a Confucian scholar in the aftermath of the Opium War. After reading a set of Christian pamphlets composed by the Chinese writer Liang Fa, he discovered the meaning of his heavenly vision and his life’s new mission: To save his brothers and sisters from the demonic influences of the old gods & spirits.

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The story of the Opium War is usually told as part of a wider narrative of European colonial expansion, and the beginning of a “century of humiliation” from the perspective of the modern Chinese state. Last episode, we covered the main narrative of the war, a kind of “Great Man” history last episode. But it’s easy to forget that the fighting and loss of the Opium War had far-reaching consequences for tens of millions of everyday people living in the Qing Empire.

Hong Xiuquan was one of those ordinary people affected by the war, but drew very different conclusions from the hostilities than many of his neighbors. Hong saw in the British a people who followed a powerful God, one that two millennia of imperial ideology had replaced with false idols and demon worship. Worship of Confucius & Buddhist Bodhisattva, the practice of dark Daoist magic – these had led the people of China away from the all-powerful Father of Heaven who the authors of the Classics had called Shangdi. In Shangdi and his Heavenly Kingdom Hong found truth and order in the chaos and turmoil that surrounded him in the aftermath of the Opium War.

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