Jesus’s Brother and the Chinese Periphery

Abstract

The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom generated one of the most cataclysmic rebellions in history. It rose from a tiny upstart religious sect in an inaccessible backwater to capture the economic core of China and nearly topple the Qing Dynasty. From a few hundred adherents calling themselves God Worshipers (Bai Shangdi Ren) in 1845, the movement had thousands of followers by 1851 when it named itself the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and founded a new dynasty.⁶ It had an army of over a million when it captured Nanjing in 1853 and proclaimed the city its new Heavenly Capital, Tianjing (Michael, 1966–71, I:70). The dead far exceeded 10 million.