Download PDF by Thomas H. Reilly: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of

Occupying a lot of imperial China�s Yangzi River heartland and costing greater than twenty million lives, the Taiping uprising (1851-64) was once no traditional peasant rebel. What such a lot unusual this dramatic upheaval from previous rebellions have been the religious ideals of the rebels. The middle of the Taiping religion keen on the assumption that Shangdi, the excessive God of classical China, had selected the Taiping chief, Hong Xiuquan, to set up his Heavenly nation on Earth.

How have been the Taiping rebels, professing this new creed, in a position to mount their uprising and recruit multitudes of fans of their sweep in the course of the empire? Thomas Reilly argues that the Taiping religion, even though kindled through Protestant assets, built right into a dynamic new chinese language faith whose perception of its sovereign deity challenged the legitimacy of the chinese language empire. The Taiping rebels denounced the divine pretensions of the imperial name and the sacred personality of the imperial workplace as blasphemous usurpations of Shangdi�s name and place. instead of the imperial establishment, the rebels known as for recovery of the classical process of kingship. earlier rebellions had declared their modern dynasties corrupt and hence wanting revival; the Taiping, in contrast, branded the complete imperial order blasphemous and wanting replacement.

In this research, Reilly emphasizes the Christian components of the Taiping religion, displaying how Protestant missionaries equipped on prior Catholic efforts to translate Christianity right into a chinese language idiom. previous experiences of the uprising have did not relish how Hong Xiuquan�s interpretation of Christianity hooked up the Taiping religion to an imperial chinese language cultural and non secular context. The Taiping Heavenly nation exhibits how the Bible--in specific, a chinese language translation of the outdated Testament--profoundly encouraged Hong and his fans, best them to appreciate the 1st 3 of the 10 Commandments as an indictment of the imperial order. The rebels hence sought to damage imperial tradition in addition to its associations and Confucian underpinnings, all of which they considered as blasphemous. Strongly iconoclastic, the Taiping fans smashed spiritual statues and imperially authorized icons in the course of the lands they conquered. by way of such activities the Taiping uprising transformed--at least for its fans yet to some degree for all Chinese--how chinese language humans considered faith, the imperial name and place of work, and the whole conventional imperial and Confucian order.

This e-book makes an immense contribution to the examine of the Taiping uprising and to our figuring out of the ideology of either the rebels and the normal imperial order they adversarial. it is going to entice students within the fields of chinese language heritage, faith, and tradition and of Christian theology and church history.