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Historical person
1814–1864
Hong Xiuquan was a Hakka Chinese religious leader who founded the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and led the rebellion that became one of the deadliest conflicts of the nineteenth century. After repeated failure in the imperial civil-service examinations, he interpreted earlier visions through Christian missionary literature and came to believe that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, commissioned to destroy idolatry and establish a purified divine order in China.
Hong’s followers developed into the God Worshipping Society and then an armed movement that proclaimed the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace in 1851. The Taiping captured Nanjing in 1853 and made it their capital, while promulgating radical religious and social rules and challenging Qing authority across the Yangtze basin. Internal purges, military reverses and increasingly effective Qing regional armies weakened the regime. Hong died in Nanjing in June 1864, shortly before Qing forces recaptured the city.
Hong is central to Katherine Paterson’s Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom and appears within the Taiping setting of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman and the Dragon, Robert Elegant’s Mandarin and Andrew Wareham’s Building the City of Mammon and Intermission. Jonathan D. Spence’s God’s Chinese Son concentrates on Hong’s religious world, while Stephen R. Platt’s Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom examines the rebellion’s final phase.
Series
The ‘Twas on the China Station series follows George Mayhew as he leaves naval life and builds a merchant house in Shanghai during the violent transformation of mid-nineteenth-century China. Beginning in 1850, the novels place commercial ambition beside the Taiping Rebellion, Qing political weakness and the expanding power…
All books in this series
The Flashman Papers present the supposed memoirs of Sir Harry Paget Flashman, the bully expelled from Rugby School in Tom Brown’s School Days who becomes a decorated Victorian soldier despite being a coward, liar, opportunist and sexual predator. George MacDonald Fraser places this fictional witness inside documented nineteenth-century…
All books in this series
The Imperial China Trilogy traces the collapse, survival and reinvention of Chinese imperial power across three centuries. Manchu follows a European artilleryman through the fall of the Ming and the Manchu conquest; Mandarin moves to the nineteenth-century crisis of the Qing state; and Dynasty carries a Eurasian Hong…
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Standalone books
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
