Georeactor Blog

It's almost two years since my trip to Guangzhou and the Hong Xiuquan hometown museum. For YouTube research I did a deep dive into the historiography of how China remembers Hong Xiuquan and the Taiping Rebellion, which I'll summarize. There was a 1979 paper New Directions in Chinese Historiography: Reappraising the Taiping, dozens of episodes of Chinese historical dramas from 1980s and 90s, and ties to some of my past reads' dives into politics and Orientalism. Really I am hopeful there is something meaningful here beyond "bro really thought he was Jesus's bro" which is all over history-tube already.

We understand Marxism-Leninism as a political thing, but both made a living on writing and being "idea guys". So you will find Engels and Lenin wrote about vegetarianism or anything interesting at the time. Communism was a natural law of the universe, and its inspiration to reform government gave credibility to all of their other pontifications. Most famously this led to Stalinists rejecting Mendelian genetics and embracing Lamarck to the detriment of Soviet agriculture and famine. Lenin also wrote about the structure of the atom (before anyone knew much) and this had effects decades later on the Soviet nuclear program, with their work questioned as anti-revolutionary ideology until the leadership got Stalin to intervene. I have read less about this ideology-to-natural-laws concept in China, but it was a major component of the breakout Chinese sci-fi series The Three-Body Problem.

The Taiping Rebellion ended with Hong Xiuquan's remains dispersed by cannon (I thought his hometown was razed, too? I need to check the book). But a perfect storm was brewing - Marx wrote about the Taipings in the 1850s and 1860s with the level of understanding that you might imagine for an "ideas guy" in Europe at the time. Hong had made some proclamations about land ownership reform, which Western historians uniformly say were not seriously pursued, but this gives some proto-communist breadcrumbs for histories of the movement.
Sun Yat-sen, the first president of the Chinese Republic, was born in Guangdong Province around veterans of the Taiping. Sun's early Christianity is a little peculiar, and one historian claims it was because his father was in the movement. He called himself the second Hong Xiuquan, wrote a preface for a Taiping history book, and ultimately got sworn in at the Taiping capital of Nanjing.

In the 1930s, with China divided between warlords, communists, KMT nationalists, and Japanese Manchuria, dramas based on historical conflict were successful. Could this history actually be a love triangle, or a story of betrayal? Since the Taipings had some overlap with the US civil war, you can draw parallels to American historical fiction (Gone with the Wind, 1939 y'all). This shifting of history to fit dramatic storytelling continues in the TV dramas which I'll mention later. I haven't corroborated this from Performing the Socialist State (2023) but holy crap:

Yang claimed in 1984 that he wrote "The Death of Li Xiucheng" in 1937 [...] in order to expose the KMT’s suppression of the CCP forces. Thanks to its contemporary relevance, the play was even staged successfully in the Japanese-occupied areas and in Yan’an. The KMT officials became so apprehensive about the play that they buried alive Li Ying, the lead actor who had played the role of Li Xiucheng, and imprisoned many cast members

When you get to the wars of the 1940s, a new generation was looking for historical legitimacy to unify China. The communists would see the Taiping Rebellion as a peasant revolt which was backed by Marx, foundational to the 1911 revolution from Mao Zedong's youth, and lionized in popular media. Chinese history must follow the natural arc of communism, with previous peasant revolts paving the way to their current movement. Both Sun and Mao gave explanations for how the Taiping failed to replace the Emperor, and this was taken very seriously and features prominently in the museum today.

After the foundation of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in late 1949, the first Taiping stamps were released in 1951 with the 100th anniversary of the Jintian Uprising. Oral histories were collected from original Taiping strongholds which focused on socioeconomic issues and "very little information on religion".
Though 1930s historical dramas included "The Death of Li Xiucheng" and "The Loyal King Li Xiucheng", for reasons unclear (to me) narratives switched. Director Chen Baichen was encouraged to make a movie for the centennial, but then "told that the film production could not proceed since Li Xiucheng was now viewed as a traitor". By the time of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) every description of the Taiping Rebellion would position him as someone who betrayed the revolution from within. This despite Li's "confession" giving us a good deal of what we know about their version of history.
The first Taiping museum opened in Nanjing in 1958, followed by the Guangzhou site getting studied and reconstructed from 1959-1961 (contemporary with the Great Famine). When I visited there were a few old-school cases of artifacts, reconstructed rooms from the village houses and school, and a big modern museum building with statues. On Google Earth it looks like circa 2006 the museum had more of those smaller buildings, and those were cleared after the construction of the larger museum around 2012-2014.

Finally I want to talk about these 1988 and 2000 TV dramas both titled 太平天国 in Simplified Chinese. You can tell them apart with production quality, like 1988 looks like a budget Bible story but 2000 is a war epic.

The 1988 show was made in Hong Kong so I believe they had less concerns with censorship. The episodes which I saw are pretty faithful to Hong Xiuquan's early troubles with exams, meeting the preacher, having visions with the 10 commandments, and starting his own religion. The only ahistorical part is there's a martial arts clash every episode, and sometimes a song. The episodes on YouTube were all dubbed into Vietnamese? Just strange.

The 2000 show starts with an impoverished village, and the Taiping movement already existing, I guess? Skipping around I found this scene where one of the Taiping leaders goes into a Jesus trance and their followers drop to their knees to hear the revelation. This scene is in the Cantonese-dubbed upload on YouTube and skipped by the higher-res Mandarin upload, so someone was uncomfortable with it. From the intro it looks like there is a crucifixion in the series? But otherwise I didn't see religion as present like in 1988. An odd framing device of this series is that many Taipings' sacrifices are observed by a Manchu general (?) who comes to respect them.