Precipitation and Institution: The Taiping Rises Up

Abstract

The late 1840s utterly transformed the God Worshipers’ movement, from the arrival of its two founders with their odd religious ideas in 1844, to the proofs of God’s power in temple destruction and curing a few years later, and finally to the charismatic chaos at the end of the decade. In 1850 the movement suddenly crystallized into a rebellion waiting to rebel, with both new social patterns and a new self-identification as rebels settling out from the multiple possibilities that had flooded them the year before. Calling their scattered following together in the town of Jintian, the group encamped in the gender-segregated units that would characterize them for the next several years; they realized their communal economy through the creation of a Celestial Treasury; they created a full range of military and political titles; they developed official dress and ceremonies, including a yellow imperial robe for Hong Xiuquan; and by no means least important, they put a forceful end to uncontrolled possessions and recaptured control over interpretation. Only at this point did they dub themselves the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (Taiping Tianguo), a political entity for the first time. Within a year they were occupying their first city, publishing texts and perfecting their new state apparatus.