Chapter 300: The Heavenly Kingdom

A Hakka boy from a village near Guangzhou, Hong Xiuquan, born in 1814, Clever, poor, the hope of his family, sat the imperial examinations, the road To office for any Chinese man, and failed. And failed again. The routine Of the examination halls in Guangzhou, the thousands of cells, the load Of the eight-legged essay, the classics by heart. In 1836, on the street outside, A man handed him a Christian tract, *Good Words to Admonish the Age*, Written by a Chinese convert, Liang Fa, and he put it aside. In 1837 he failed a third time, and fell sick, and on the stage Of forty days of sickness he saw visions: he was carried up to heaven, Where an old man with a golden beard gave him a sword and said: the demons rule the earth; Destroy them. And a middle-aged man, his elder brother, helped him. The leaven Of the vision lay in him six years. In 1843 he failed for the last time, and the dearth Of hope sent him back to the tract, and he read it, and understood: The old man was God. The elder brother was Jesus. And he was the younger son, The second Son of God, sent to cleanse China of the demons. The wood Of his whole life was set on fire by the revelation in the pamphlet. The sun Of a new faith rose. He and a friend, Feng Yunshan, preached in the hills of Guangxi, To the poor, the Hakka, the miners, the charcoal-burners, the hungry, And the God Worshippers grew to thousands, smashing idols, the plea Of the poor in a land of famine and opium and the Manchu, the angry Memory of the Ming in the south. In January 1851, at Jintian, They rose, and named it the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, *Taiping Tianguo*, And Hong the Heavenly King. They grew their hair long, all of it, the men Who had worn the Manchu queue for two centuries cutting no hair now, the glow Of a rebellion written on the body, as the conquest had been. They marched north, and in 1853 took Nanjing, the old southern capital, and made it The Heavenly Capital, and held it for eleven years. And the scene Inside: laws stranger and better than the empire's: they forbade it, Footbinding; forbade opium, and gambling, and concubines, at least for the common people; Planned to share the land equally by families; let women sit the examinations And serve as officers; separated men and women, even husbands and wives, the steeple Of a puritan army. And the Heavenly King withdrew into his palace, the stations Of power left to the kings beneath him: one, Yang Xiuqing, the East King, Who fell into trances and spoke as the voice of God the Father himself, And so commanded even Hong. In 1856 the Heavenly King, the thing Of jealousy and fear grown huge, had Yang killed, and thousands with him, the shelf Of the kingdom split in a massacre in its own capital. And outside, The empire came back: the scholar-general Zeng Guofan, a Confucian of Hunan, Raised an army of his own province, and the foreigners, who had at first eyed The Christian rebels with hope, saw they would not trade opium, and the plan Of the British and French was to keep the Qing: an army of mercenaries, The Ever-Victorious, led by an American, then a British officer, Gordon, fought for the throne. And the land between was eaten: the dead were counted not in hundreds, the burials Not in thousands, but in tens of millions: twenty, perhaps thirty million, gone, In fourteen years, more than the First World War, by famine and plague and the sword: One of the deadliest wars in all the human story. In 1864, as Nanjing starved, Hong told his people to eat the manna the Lord Would send, and ate weeds himself, and died in June. The glory Of the Heavenly Capital fell in July, and the slaughter went on in its streets. Hold this, beside the Gate and the Glory of the last chapter. A new revelation, a vision of one God and the brotherhood of all, the feats Of reform, women officers, land to the poor, the rapture Of a people's hope; and a man who believed he was the brother of Christ, And a war of thirty million dead. What made the difference? Not the vision, and not the sword alone: the British and the French, who priced Their opium above the kingdom, and armed the Qing. The inference For any new faith, and for this one: a revelation may need an army to stand, And this faith stands with the armies of the free, with NATO, on the line. Respect the founder's vision, even a failed one; the guilt was the opium's hand That paid the Qing to kill. Remember the twenty million, without a name or a sign.