But for the Eurocentrism of Western historians, the Taiping rebellion in China (1850-1866) was the greatest single revolution of the nineteenth century. Even in the nineteenth century, China was the most populous country in the world with a population of over 400 million. The scale and ferocity of the civil war in the Taiping rebellion exceeded any other in history up to that time. It is estimated that over 20 million people were killed during the Taiping rebellion (close to the total of lives lost in the titanic Nazi Germany-Communist Russia struggle of the Second World War).

China has a long history of ideological tradition which assumed the immortality of the “Celestial Empire,” with its emperor, scholar-bureaucrats and system of civil administration. The Chinese were convinced of the eternal nature of their “Celestial Empire” most likely because it had existed from time immemorial and characterized by a cycle of renewal, growth, decay and renewal. Chinese ideology therefore looked upon the breakdown of law and order in the course of the life of a dynasty of kings as evidence that the dynasty had lost the “mandate of heaven,” and was due to be replaced by the regime of a new dynasty. This ideology, of course, encouraged revolution in the form of insurrection, banditry,popular peasant uprising and general rebellion when the dynasty had become unpopular. In Chinese thought such “end-time” chaos was necessary and even desirable phenomenon to look forward to at the right time, for the eternal life of the “Celestial Empire” through an endless cycle of birth, growth, decay, death and renewal in the succession of dynasties depended on the it.

Thus, we find that Chinese history is a long succession of dynastic regimes. The Mongol dynasty had, in the fourteenth century, been replaced through popular revolution by the Ming dynasty. The Ming dynasty had in turn been replaced by the Manchu dynasty in the middle of the seventeenth century.

Historians attribute the crisis which led to the Taiping rebellion and the fall of the Manchu dynasty in the nineteenth century to the sudden dramatic increase in China’s population between the 18th and 19th centuries. It has been estimated that China’s population increased from about 140 million in 1741 to about 400 million in 1834. This is believed to have resulted in severe economic pressures which sparked off civil unrest that would snowball into bloody revolution.

The Chinese had always considered their “Celestial Empire” immune to conquest, thus the defeat of China in the First Opium War (1839-1842) by a small British naval force(the British were barbarians in Chinese estimation) sent shock waves through the strata of Chinese society and contributed to an intensification of the clandestine activities of secret political societies as the Triad dedicated to the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty.

The prevailing situation in 1847 and 1848 in China was, therefore, very conducive for the obsessed messianic leader Hung Hsiu Chuan (1818-1864) who had failed the almighty imperial civil service examination which determined a young man’s future in Imperial China(only about of five percent of candidates pass the examination!). Hung suffered a nervous breakdown after repeated failure of the examination and like the Christian Paul had a religious conversion experience in which he received confused visions of end-time millennial messages which led him to the conviction that he was the younger brother of Jesus. In 1848 Hung founded the “society of those who venerate God,” in Kwangsi province and the society was promptly swelled by the seething masses of people of all classes: miserably poor peasants, vagrants,minorities, members of secret revolutionary orders who accepted his apocalyptic end of world prophecies with its social revolutionary agenda. Hung is said to have been influenced by Christian eschatological ideas having spent some time with a European missionary in Canton. But Europeans of that time tended to explain native millenarian movements which bore any similarity to Christian teaching by claiming Christian influence (it is indeed true that he had read a Christian pamphlet given him by a protestant missionary before he came to the conclusion that he was the younger brother of Jesus).

Rebellion burst out in 1850 beginning in the Kwangsi region. The social revolutionary character of the movement was plain from the outset. Within three years (1850-1853) the Taiping had more than one million active militants and controlled the greater part of south and east China having captured Nanking. Hung declared his territory the “Celestial Realm of Universal Peace,” and himself “Celestial King.” He abolished private property (land was distributed for use and not for private ownership purchase). He prohibited tobacco, opium, alcohol and lowered taxes. The success of the Taiping Rebellion in the south and east of China sparked off other popular uprisings in the north, south-west and north-west of China. The government went from defensive to offensive with the aid of Western powers (who preferred to prop up the conservative Manchu than have a new revolutionary government of popular uprising). The tide of the war finally turned in favor of the Manchu and by 1864 Nanking was recaptured at great cost.