The Younger Brother of Jesus

In 1843, a schoolteacher named Hong Xiuquan failed the Chinese imperial civil examination for the fourth time. He was thirty years old. He had spent his life preparing for this examination — the only path to social advancement in Qing China — and had failed it repeatedly despite genuine intelligence and years of preparation. The experience was not merely disappointing. It was, in a society that defined personal worth by examination success, a declaration that Hong was nobody: a village schoolteacher who would remain one forever.

After his fourth failure, Hong suffered what later observers would describe as a breakdown: weeks of fever, vivid visions, and a conviction on emerging from the crisis that he had received divine revelation. Years earlier, he had been given a pamphlet of Christian missionary tracts in Guangzhou. Rereading them after his visions, Hong concluded that he understood the visions' meaning: God had appeared to him in the form of an old man with a golden beard; Jesus had appeared as his elder brother; and Hong himself had been entrusted with the mission of destroying the demons — whom he identified with the Manchu Qing rulers — who had corrupted China and must be exterminated before God's kingdom on earth could be established.

The synthesis was wildly heterodox by any Christian standard — Hong's God had a wife (the Heavenly Mother); Jesus had a wife (whom Hong called the Heavenly Sister-in-Law); and Hong himself held a rank in the divine order that had no equivalent in any Christian theology. Western missionaries who encountered the movement found it baffling and alarming in equal measure. But in the villages of Guangxi Province — among the Hakka minority who had been squeezed from their land by the dominant Cantonese population, among the men made unemployed by the disruption of the Canton trade after the Opium War, among the families who had watched their sons fail the examinations year after year — Hong's message of divine mandate and imminent redemption found an audience that no missionary had reached.

By 1850, the God Worshippers Society had tens of thousands of followers organized into a disciplined community — communal property, prohibition of opium and alcohol, daily worship — that functioned as a state in waiting. On January 11, 1851 — Hong's fortieth birthday — he gathered his followers at Jintian, proclaimed himself the Heavenly King of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and declared war on the Qing Dynasty. The Qing emperor, reading the report in Beijing, is said to have found it so absurd that he laughed. He was still laughing, in a manner of speaking, when the Taiping captured Nanjing two years later.