Person1814 – 1864

Hong Xiuquan

Also called: Hung Hsiu-ch’üan

Founder of the God Worshipping Society and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, who called himself the Heavenly King and made Nanjing his capital

Born to a Hakka farming family in Guangdong, he failed the civil examinations again and again. After reading a Christian tract he came to believe he was the younger brother of Jesus, sent to save the world. He founded the God Worshipping Society among the poor farmers and miners of Guangxi and in 1851 proclaimed the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom with himself as Heavenly King. After making Nanjing his capital in 1853 he withdrew into his palace and left government to his followers, dying shortly before the city fell in 1864.

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1 related event

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1851 – 1864Taiping Rebellionleader
A peasant army led by Hong Xiuquan rose to "destroy the Manchus and restore the Han", set up the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom with Nanjing as its capital and defied the Qing for fourteen years until Han Chinese militias and Western-led troops crushed it.

People who appear alongside

Zeng Guofan1811 – 1872
Han Chinese official who raised the Xiang Army to crush the Taiping and launched the Self-Strengthening Movement
Li Hongzhang1823 – 1901
Qing viceroy who steered policy toward Korea after 1882 and signed the Tianjin Convention and the Treaty of Shimonoseki with Itō Hirobumi

Themes this person appears in

The Opening of East Asia1839 – 1901
From the Opium War to the Boxer Protocol — sixty years in which China, Japan and Korea, forced open by Western gunboats, each tried to reform and went separate ways