Painting of a wealthy Qing family.

Integrating tens of thousands of new adherents, while planning and launching an insurrection against the Qing, put strain on Taiping society and pushed them to reorganize their society in novel ways. In this episode we’ll look at how the Taiping navigated these challenges in the lead up to their first battles with the Qing government and declaration of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. The shape into which Taiping society formed was mediated by their cultural expectations and mores, by what they read in the Bible, and by the idiosyncrasies of Hong Xiuquan himself.

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In 1850, Guangxi was wracked by all kinds of social maladies and natural disasters – corrupt officials, disease and epidemics, ethnic conflict, drought, and all kinds of organized and less organized crime. In this tempest the Society of God Worshipers grew stronger than ever and transformed into an insurrectionist, revolutionary movement, The Taiping Tianguo, the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace, with Hong Xiuquan as it’s Heavenly King.

In this episode, things finally boil over and the Heavenly Kingdom is finally declared after the God Worshipers & Qing soldiers come to blows.

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The Daoguang Emperor died in 1850. He has been the Qing Emperor for the past dozen episodes and his actions (or lack thereof) helped set the stage for the cataclysmic decade that will be the 1850s. But he didn’t live to see it. Instead, the Qing Empire was left to his teenage son.

In this episode, we’ll take a look at the state of the Qing Empire and see how global forces combined with poor imperial policies to create the massive financial crisis and economic depression that beset China during the 1840’s.

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