The Taiping Rebellion and its Bible

I. A War Fought over a Book

The Taiping Rebellion, which lasted from 1851 to 1864, was the largest civil war of the nineteenth century and one of the most destructive wars in human history. It was fought between the Qing dynasty, which had ruled China since 1644, and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Taiping Tianguo, founded by Hong Xiuquan, a schoolteacher from Guangdong who believed that he was the younger son of God and the younger brother of Jesus Christ. The war devastated the provinces of the lower Yangzi valley, and the number of deaths, from battle, massacre, famine and disease, has been estimated at between twenty and thirty million, though some estimates are higher.

The Taiping movement drew its religious ideas from the Christian Scriptures, as Hong read them in Chinese translation and as he interpreted them in the light of his own visions. The Taiping printed the Bible in their capital, Nanjing, and required their followers to study it. The Bible was thus at the centre of a war in which millions died, though few of those who fought on either side could read it. this page concentrates on the Bible itself, the translations from which the Taiping text derived, the Taiping editions and the changes that Hong made to them. The general narrative of the war is given in The Taiping Rebellion.

II. Hong Xiuquan and the Examinations

Hong Xiuquan was born in 1814 in the village of Fuyuanshui in Hua county, north of Canton, to a family of Hakka farmers. The Hakka, guest people, were a distinct group of Han Chinese who had migrated to the south and spoke their own dialect, and they were often in conflict with the older Cantonese-speaking population. Hong's family sacrificed to educate him for the civil service examinations, the route to official office and social advancement in imperial China.

Hong passed the preliminary examinations but failed the prefectural examination in Canton several times, in 1828, 1836, 1837 and 1843. In Canton in 1836 he received a set of tracts from a Christian preacher, entitled Good Words to Admonish the Age, Quanshi liangyan, written by Liang Fa, a Chinese convert of the London Missionary Society. Hong did not read the tracts at first.

After his failure in 1837 Hong fell seriously ill and experienced a series of visions. He saw himself carried to heaven, where an old man with a golden beard, dressed in black, gave him a sword and told him to destroy the demons who were deceiving the people of the world. He also met a middle-aged man whom he called his elder brother, who helped him in the fight against the demons. After his recovery Hong resumed his life as a village teacher and does not seem to have attached a religious meaning to the visions for several years.

III. Good Words to Admonish the Age

In 1843, after his fourth failure in the examinations, Hong read Liang Fa's tracts and concluded that they explained his visions. The old man was God, called Shangdi, the Supreme Lord, the term used by Liang Fa and the Protestant missionaries, and the elder brother was Jesus. The demons were the idols worshipped in China and the spirits of popular religion. Hong concluded that he had been chosen by God to restore the worship of the true God in China.

Liang Fa's tracts consisted of passages from the Bible, in the translation of Robert Morrison and William Milne, with commentary and exhortation. They included passages from Genesis, Isaiah, the Gospels, Romans and other books, with an emphasis on the creation, the prohibition of idolatry, the judgement and the salvation offered through Christ. Hong was particularly struck by passages such as the condemnation of idols in Isaiah 44:9-20 and the command to have no other gods in Exodus 20:3-5.

Hong and his cousin Hong Rengan baptised themselves and began to destroy the Confucian and idolatrous tablets in their village school, for which they lost their positions as teachers. In 1844 Hong and his friend Feng Yunshan went to Guangxi province to preach. Hong returned to Guangdong, while Feng remained in Guangxi and founded a religious association among the Hakka miners and charcoal burners of the region of Thistle Mountain, Zijingshan.

IV. The Chinese Bible before the Taiping

The Bible that the Taiping printed in Nanjing was the product of half a century of Protestant translation work in and around China. The first complete Protestant Bible in Chinese was made by Robert Morrison of the London Missionary Society, who arrived in Canton in 1807, and his colleague William Milne, who worked at Malacca. Morrison translated most of the Greek Scriptures himself and published them in 1814, and the two men together completed the Hebrew Scriptures. The whole Bible was printed at Malacca in 1823 in twenty-one volumes under the title Shentian shengshu, the Holy Book of the Divine Heaven.

Morrison had made use of an earlier manuscript translation of much of the Greek Scriptures, made by the Catholic missionary Jean Basset in the early eighteenth century, a copy of which was preserved in the British Museum. Basset's work was never printed in his lifetime, and the Catholic missions in China, in keeping with the practice of the period, did not publish a complete Chinese Bible. Morrison's translation was thus the first to be printed and circulated widely, and its style, which followed the wording of the original closely, was criticised by later translators as stiff and difficult for Chinese readers.

At about the same time the Baptist missionaries Joshua Marshman and Johannes Lassar, working at Serampore in Bengal, produced a separate Chinese Bible, printed in 1822. This translation was used mainly in the Baptist missions and had little influence on the later history of the Chinese Bible. The Morrison and Milne version, by contrast, became the basis of the revisions of the following decades, and through those revisions it reached Hong Xiuquan and the Taiping.

The translators faced the problem of rendering the Hebrew and Greek texts into a language with its own long tradition of religious and philosophical vocabulary. They had to choose terms for God, for spirit, for sin, for covenant and for baptism, and each choice carried associations from Confucian, Buddhist or Daoist usage. The words they chose would later be read by Hong in the light of the Confucian classics that he had studied for the examinations, and his interpretation of the Scriptures cannot be separated from the vocabulary of the translations he read.

V. The Gützlaff Version

In the 1830s a group of missionaries undertook a revision of the Morrison and Milne Bible. The group included Walter Henry Medhurst of the London Missionary Society, the Prussian missionary Karl Gützlaff, the American Elijah Coleman Bridgman and Morrison's son John Robert Morrison. Their revision of the Greek Scriptures was printed in 1835 or 1836, with Medhurst as its principal translator. The revision of the Hebrew Scriptures was largely the work of Gützlaff, and it was printed in Batavia and Singapore in the late 1830s.

Gützlaff continued to revise the text after the group had dispersed, and in the 1840s he issued further editions of the whole Bible under the titles Jiu yizhao shengshu, the Holy Book of the Old Testament in the sense of the former covenant, and Xin yizhao shengshu, the Holy Book of the New Covenant. His version used a freer and more idiomatic style than that of Morrison, and it was printed in large numbers for distribution in the coastal provinces. Gützlaff, who travelled widely along the coast and employed Chinese assistants to distribute his books, was one of the most energetic and controversial of the missionaries of the period.

The Gützlaff version was the text that Hong Xiuquan read with Issachar Roberts in Canton in 1847, and it was the text that the Taiping reprinted in Nanjing. Its renderings of names and terms became the standard vocabulary of the Taiping. For God it used the term Shangdi, the Supreme Ruler or the Lord on High, a name found in the Confucian classics; this choice allowed Hong to argue that the God of the Bible was the God whom the Chinese had worshipped in antiquity before they turned to idols. In the same period the missionaries were preparing a new translation, the Delegates' Version, whose Greek Scriptures appeared in 1852, but this version did not reach the Taiping in time to replace the text they had already adopted.

VI. Issachar Roberts

In 1847 Hong and Hong Rengan went to Canton to study with the American Southern Baptist missionary Issachar Jacox Roberts, who taught them the Bible and the Christian faith. Roberts, a native of Tennessee, had come to China in 1837. Hong stayed with him for about two months and studied the Gospels and other parts of the Bible in the translation of Karl Gützlaff and Walter Medhurst. He asked to be baptised, but Roberts postponed the baptism, apparently because of doubts about Hong's motives, and Hong left for Guangxi.

Roberts later remembered Hong as a man of modest appearance and serious character, who had told him of his visions. Some years after the Taiping captured Nanjing, Roberts accepted Hong's invitation and arrived in the city at the end of October 1860, and he lived there for fifteen months. He was at first sympathetic to the movement, but he grew disillusioned with Hong's theology and the conduct of the Taiping leaders, and he fled in 1862, declaring that Hong was a madman. His experience was shared by many of the Protestant missionaries who had at first hoped that the Taiping would bring about the conversion of China.

VII. The God Worshipping Society

In Guangxi Feng Yunshan had built up a large following among the Hakka and other poor communities of the Thistle Mountain region. The association, called the God Worshipping Society, Bai Shangdi hui, taught the worship of the one God, the destruction of idols and the observance of the Ten Commandments, and it offered its members mutual protection in a region torn by banditry and conflict between the Hakka and the Punti, the native Cantonese. Hong joined Feng in Guangxi in 1847 and became the religious leader of the society.

The society grew rapidly. Its members destroyed temples and idols, which brought them into conflict with the local gentry and their militias. In 1848, while Feng was in prison and Hong was away, two members of the society, Yang Xiuqing, a charcoal burner, and Xiao Chaogui, a farmer, began to speak in trances in the voices of God the Father and Jesus Christ, respectively. Hong accepted the authenticity of these possessions, which gave Yang and Xiao great authority within the movement.

The possessions became a central feature of Taiping government. Yang Xiuqing, speaking as the Heavenly Father, issued commands, punished offenders and even rebuked Hong himself. Hong interpreted the possessions in terms of the gift of the spirit described in the Scriptures, such as the outpouring of the spirit promised in Joel 2:28 and fulfilled at Pentecost in Acts 2:16-18. The Protestant missionaries, by contrast, regarded the possessions as a form of spirit mediumship derived from Chinese popular religion.

VIII. The War in Outline

The military and political history of the Heavenly Kingdom is described in The Taiping Rebellion, and only a brief outline is needed here. In January 1851 the God Worshippers rose at Jintian in Guangxi and proclaimed the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, with Hong as the Heavenly King. Their armies marched north through Hunan to the Yangzi, took Wuchang, and in March 1853 captured Nanjing, which they made their capital under the name Tianjing, the Heavenly Capital.

From Nanjing the Taiping sent a Northern Expedition, which reached the neighbourhood of Tianjin before it was destroyed, and a Western Expedition up the Yangzi. In 1856 a struggle among the leaders, the Tianjing Incident, ended in the killing of the East King Yang Xiuqing and thousands of his followers, and it weakened the movement permanently. The Qing government relied increasingly on the regional armies raised by Zeng Guofan and his associates, and from 1862 on foreign-officered forces in the Shanghai region. Nanjing fell in July 1864, a few weeks after the death of Hong, and the remaining Taiping armies were destroyed in the following years. The total number of deaths in the war is unknown; modern estimates commonly given range from about twenty to thirty million, and some are higher.

Throughout these years the printing of the Bible and of the Taiping religious texts continued in Nanjing. The history of those printings, and of the changes that Hong made to the text, is the subject of the following sections.

IX. The Heavenly Capital

In Nanjing the Taiping established a theocratic state. The population was organised in military units under officers who were responsible for both civil and religious affairs. Men and women were separated, and married couples were forbidden to live together, even among the Taiping leaders, though the kings themselves kept large households of women. Private property was abolished in principle, and all goods were held in common in the sacred treasuries. Opium, tobacco, alcohol, gambling, prostitution and footbinding were forbidden, and offenders could be punished with death.

The Taiping held religious services on the Sabbath, which they observed on Saturday, following the calendar they had adopted. The services included prayers, hymns, the reading of the Ten Commandments and sermons. Every unit had a church, and the officers were required to teach the doctrines of the kingdom to their men. Children were taught to recite the Ten Commandments and the Taiping texts, and the examinations for office in the Heavenly Kingdom were based on the Bible and the writings of Hong instead of the Confucian classics.

The Taiping calendar, introduced in 1852, also reflected the movement's religious ideas. It abolished the traditional lunar calendar with its auspicious and inauspicious days, which the Taiping regarded as superstition, and replaced it with a solar calendar of three hundred and sixty-six days, divided into twelve months of thirty or thirty-one days, with a seven-day week ending in the Sabbath. The calendar was printed and distributed throughout the Taiping territory and used in all official documents.

In 1853 the Taiping issued a document called the Land System of the Heavenly Dynasty, Tianchao tianmu zhidu, which proposed the division of land among families according to their size and the quality of the land, and the organisation of the people in units of twenty-five families, each with a church and a treasury. The document cited the ideal of the early Christians who had all things in common, described in Acts 4:32-35, and the Confucian ideal of the Great Unity. It appears never to have been put fully into practice.

X. The Taiping Edition of the Scriptures

The Taiping began printing the Bible in 1853, soon after the capture of Nanjing. They used the translation by Karl Gützlaff and Walter Medhurst, which Hong had studied with Roberts, and they printed the books of Genesis, Exodus and other books of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospel of Matthew, followed by other books. The printings bore the seal of the Heavenly Kingdom and were distributed to the Taiping officers and soldiers.

Hong revised the text in later editions. He removed or altered passages that he regarded as unworthy of the ancestors of the faith, such as the drunkenness of Noah in Genesis 9:20-27, the incest of Lot's daughters in Genesis 19:30-38 and the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38:12-30. He also added annotations to the text, which explained the Scriptures in the light of his own visions and his role as the younger brother of Jesus. These annotations, discussed in The Taiping Rebellion, emphasised that Jesus was the son of God but not God himself, and that God the Father alone was to be worshipped.

XI. The Nanjing Printings of 1853

Within months of the capture of Nanjing the Taiping set up printing offices in the city and began to publish the Scriptures. The first books to appear, in 1853, were Genesis and the following books of the Pentateuch as far as Numbers, printed under the title Jiu yizhao shengshu, and the Gospel of Matthew, printed as the first part of the Xin yizhao shengshu. According to the descriptions given by the missionaries and diplomats who obtained copies, the text followed the Gützlaff version closely, with few changes, and it bore on its cover the seal of the Heavenly Kingdom.

The British visitors to Nanjing in 1853 and 1854, including the party of the plenipotentiary George Bonham in April 1853 and the consular officers sent up the Yangzi by his successor John Bowring in 1854, brought back copies of these books, and the American and French visitors also obtained them. Missionaries in Shanghai who examined the books, Medhurst among them, recognised that the Taiping had reprinted the missionary text. Some of the missionaries hoped that the Taiping would bring about the conversion of China.

The printings were produced by woodblock, like most Chinese books of the period. The blocks were cut by craftsmen in the service of the Taiping, and the books were printed on Chinese paper and bound in thin covers, often yellow, the imperial colour. The printing offices were among the most important institutions of the Taiping capital, and they also produced the calendars, edicts and religious texts of the movement. The Taiping examinations, which were held in Nanjing and in the provinces, required the candidates to study the Scriptures and the Taiping texts in place of the Confucian classics.

XII. The Imperially Sanctioned Editions

In the later 1850s and early 1860s the Taiping issued new editions of the Scriptures under the title Qinding, imperially sanctioned or authorised, in which Hong's revisions and annotations appeared. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures were printed in these editions, under titles that were themselves revised with corrections in the text and with comments by Hong, called imperial annotations, written in the upper margin or inserted into the text. The precise dates and contents of the several editions are not fully established, since few copies survive and some survive only in part.

The study of these editions has been advanced by scholars who compared the Taiping text with the Gützlaff version line by line. Their work shows that most of the text was reproduced unchanged, but that Hong made a number of deliberate alterations, especially in the narratives of the patriarchs, and that his annotations concentrated on the passages that he regarded as confirming his visions. The changes were not numerous in proportion to the length of the Bible, but they reveal how Hong understood the authority of the Scriptures and of his own revelation.

To the two parts of the Bible Hong added a third, which the Taiping called the True Covenant, Zhenyue, a collection of the revelations of the Heavenly Father and the Heavenly Elder Brother given through himself, through Yang Xiuqing and through Xiao Chaogui. The term reflected Hong's view, discussed below, that revelation had continued in China and that the Bible was not the final word of God.

XIII. The Alterations to the Text

The best-known alterations concern the narratives of Genesis. Hong regarded the patriarchs as his own predecessors in a heavenly line and could not accept that they had acted shamefully. He therefore removed or rewrote the account of the drunkenness of Noah in Genesis 9:20-27, the account of Lot and his daughters in Genesis 19:30-38, and the account of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38:12-30. According to the comparison of the editions made by Clement Tsz Ming Tong, the episode of Lot and his daughters was simply omitted from the 1853 printing, while in the 1861 edition, which reproduced the 1853 layout, Noah was made to lie uncovered from weariness rather than from drunkenness, and the account of Judah and Tamar was rewritten as a pious narrative concerned with the continuation of Judah's line. Because the 1861 edition was a revised reprint, these changes were made by cutting out characters from the printing blocks and inserting the same number of new characters in their place.

Hong also made changes reflecting his view of God and Jesus. Because he held that only the Heavenly Father was God, he altered or commented on passages that could be read as calling Jesus God, and he insisted that Jesus was the first-born son of God and the elder brother of Hong himself. He added comments on passages about the coming of the kingdom of heaven, which he identified with his Heavenly Kingdom on earth, and on the prophecies of a new heaven and a new earth.

The alterations were defended by Hong as corrections of errors that had entered the text through careless copyists, rather than as changes to the word of God. He argued that the Heavenly Father would not have allowed his chosen servants to commit the sins described, and that the passages must therefore have been corrupted. The missionaries rejected this argument and regarded the alterations as tampering with the Scriptures, contrary to the warning in Deuteronomy 4:2 not to add to or take away from the commandments. The question of how the text of the Scriptures had been preserved, and how corruptions could be identified, is the subject of the Masoretic and textual studies described elsewhere on this site, in Who Were the Masoretes.

XIV. Hong’s Annotations on the Greek Scriptures

Hong's annotations were most extensive in the Greek Scriptures. In the Gospels he commented on the baptism of Jesus and the voice from heaven in Matthew 3:16-17, which he took as evidence that the Father and the Son were distinct persons. He interpreted the parables of the kingdom as prophecies of the Taiping state, and he read the promise of the Comforter in John 14:16 as fulfilled in Yang Xiuqing, who bore the title of Holy Spirit and Comforter among the Taiping. After the killing of Yang in 1856, Hong retained this identification in his annotations.

In the letter to the Hebrews Hong commented on the description of the Son as the reflection of the glory of God in Hebrews 1:1-3, insisting that the Son was not equal to the Father. In the Revelation he commented on the vision of the woman clothed with the sun and the male child in Revelation 12:1-5, and according to the studies of the annotations he associated the child with himself and his family in heaven. He identified the great dragon of the same chapter with the devil and with the demons whom he believed the Manchus served. In the vision of the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven in Revelation 21:2, he saw a prophecy of his capital, the Heavenly Capital at Nanjing.

These interpretations were consistent with the visions that Hong had described from 1837 onwards, in which he had ascended to heaven, met his heavenly Father and elder brother, and received a sword to drive out the demons. The annotations show that Hong read the Bible as a confirmation of his visions rather than as a correction of them. The Scriptures, in his reading, recorded the earlier stages of a history that culminated in his own mission.

XV. The Name of God

The Taiping use of the term Shangdi for God was part of a wider debate among the Protestant missionaries, known as the term question. The British missionaries, led by Medhurst, generally favoured Shangdi, arguing that it was the closest Chinese equivalent of the Hebrew Elohim and the Greek Theos and that it showed the ancient Chinese knowledge of the true God. Many American missionaries, led by William Boone, preferred Shen, the general word for spirit or god, on the ground that Shangdi was the name of a particular deity in the Chinese state religion. The disagreement divided the Delegates' Version into separate editions using different terms.

The Taiping adopted Shangdi and its compound Huang Shangdi, the August Supreme Ruler, and they insisted that this name belonged to the Heavenly Father alone. They forbade the use of the title di, ruler, by human rulers, and they condemned the Qing emperors for claiming it. This use of the term gave the Taiping theology a Chinese foundation, since Hong could argue that the worship of Shangdi was the original religion of China, recorded in the classics, which had been corrupted by Buddhism, Daoism and idolatry. The argument resembled the claim of the Hebrew prophets that Israel had abandoned the God of its ancestors for the gods of the nations, as in Jeremiah 2:11-13.

The Taiping did not use the divine name as it appears in the Hebrew text. The early Protestant writings had used a transliteration of Jehovah, Ye-huo-hua, written with characters meaning father, fire and splendour, and this form appeared in Liang Fa's Good Words to Admonish the Age. Hong is said to have changed his own name from Huoxiu to Xiuquan in order to avoid sharing the character huo with the name of God, and the form Ye-huo-hua, together with Ye, father, as a title of God, recurs in Taiping writings. The Gützlaff version, however, usually rendered the divine name in the Hebrew Scriptures as Huang Shangdi, the August Supreme Lord, and the Taiping printings of 1853 followed it, so that in Genesis 2:4 the Taiping text reads Shangzhu Huang Shangdi. The later standard transliteration Yehehua became established only in subsequent Protestant versions.

XVI. The Heavenly Commandments in the Armies

The Taiping armies were governed by a strict code of discipline based on the Ten Commandments, which the Taiping called the Heavenly Commandments, Tiantiao. The soldiers were forbidden to rape, to steal, to kill civilians without cause, to use opium, and to worship idols. Violations were punished by death. The Taiping military regulations required the soldiers to pray before meals and before battle, and to attend services on the Sabbath.

Western observers who visited the Taiping in the early years were impressed by their discipline. The British interpreter Thomas Taylor Meadows, in The Chinese and Their Rebellions of 1856, wrote favourably of the movement and argued that a Taiping victory would bring a vast population to take the Bible as the standard of its belief. Later observers reported that the discipline had broken down, and that the Taiping armies looted and killed as freely as the Qing armies. Both sides committed massacres, and the civilian population of the regions through which the armies passed suffered terribly.

The Taiping justified their wars against the Qing by appeal to the wars of Israel. Hong compared himself to Moses and to David, and he presented the Manchu as the Canaanites or the Philistines whom God had commanded Israel to destroy. In his edicts he cited the promise of God to be with Israel in battle, as in Deuteronomy 20:1-4. Yet he also drew on the Chinese tradition of the mandate of heaven, according to which a dynasty that had lost the favour of heaven could rightly be overthrown.

XVII. The Taiping Texts

Alongside the Bible the Taiping printed a body of their own religious and political texts, which were distributed to their followers and used in the examinations. The most important of these included the Book of Heavenly Commandments, Tiantiao shu, which set out the Ten Commandments with Taiping commentary and prescribed prayers for daily life; the Taiping Imperial Declaration, Taiping zhaoshu, which contained Hong's early religious writings; and the Book of Declarations of the Divine Will Made During the Heavenly Father's Descent to Earth, which recorded the words spoken by Yang Xiuqing in his trances.

The Taiping also composed hymns and doxologies, which were sung at their services. The Taiping doxology praised the Heavenly Father as the holy God, the Heavenly Elder Brother as the saviour of the world, and the Holy Spirit, whom the Taiping identified with Yang Xiuqing, as the Holy Wind, a title of Yang Xiuqing in the Taiping texts. The texts were written in a simple style intended to be understood by the uneducated, and they combined phrases from the Bible with the language of Chinese popular religion and the Confucian classics.

XVIII. The Missionaries Read the Taiping Bible

The first reaction of many missionaries to the Taiping printings was enthusiastic. Medhurst and others saw the reprinting of the Scriptures by the rulers of a large part of China as an opportunity without precedent. Missionaries in Shanghai and Hong Kong collected the Taiping books, translated them into English and published them in the North China Herald and in missionary journals. The Taiping texts were also translated and studied in Britain and the United States.

As the missionaries learned more about Hong's revisions and annotations, their enthusiasm turned to opposition. Issachar Roberts, who visited Nanjing in 1860 at Hong's invitation and stayed in the city for more than a year, at first hoped to guide his former pupil. He left on 20 January 1862, after a quarrel in which he accused Hong Rengan of killing his servant, denouncing Hong as a madman and the Taiping religion as a blasphemy. Other missionaries who visited Nanjing in 1860 and 1861, among them Griffith John and Joseph Edkins, reported their discussions with Hong Rengan and the Taiping officials, and their disagreement with the theology of the movement.

The missionaries' judgement influenced the policies of the Western powers, which moved from neutrality to support for the Qing in the early 1860s. The Taiping Bible was thus not only a religious text but a factor in international politics, since the foreign view of the movement depended partly on whether its use of the Scriptures was regarded as Christian.

XIX. Hong Rengan and the New Treatise

In 1859 Hong's cousin Hong Rengan, who had spent several years in Hong Kong working with the London Missionary Society missionary James Legge, arrived in Nanjing. Hong Xiuquan appointed him prime minister with the title of Shield King, Ganwang. Hong Rengan had a wide knowledge of the West and of Christianity, and he proposed a programme of reforms in a document called A New Treatise on Aids to Administration, Zizheng xinpian.

The New Treatise proposed the construction of railways and steamships, the establishment of banks, a postal service, newspapers and patents, and the reform of the law. Hong Rengan also proposed that the Taiping should establish friendly relations with the Western powers, and he sought to bring Taiping doctrine closer to the Protestant Christianity of the missionaries. His proposals were approved by Hong Xiuquan, but the war prevented them from being put into practice.

XX. The Surviving Copies

Most of the books printed by the Taiping were destroyed when Nanjing fell, since the Qing authorities regarded them as heretical and sought to eliminate all trace of the movement. The surviving copies of the Taiping Scriptures and religious texts are mostly those that were taken abroad by missionaries, diplomats and soldiers in the 1850s and 1860s. They are preserved in libraries in Britain, France, Germany and the United States, among them the British Library in London and the university library at Cambridge, and in a smaller number of collections in China.

In the twentieth century Chinese scholars, located and published many of these texts. Xiao Yishan photographed Taiping books in the British Museum in 1932 and published them in 1936, and Wang Zhongmin, examining the Chinese collections of Cambridge University Library at the end of 1935, found ten Taiping books previously unknown in China, among them the New Treatise of Hong Rengan, which were published in 1948 as Ten Taiping Official Books. The Cambridge holdings came largely from the collection of Sir Thomas Wade, the first professor of Chinese at Cambridge, and the collections of Taiping documents issued in China in the 1950s made them widely available. The Western collection edited by Franz Michael and Chang Chung-li translated a large part of the Taiping religious and political documents into English. Comparative studies of the Taiping Scriptures and the Gützlaff version have since been made by several scholars, and they form the basis for the description of the alterations given above.

The survival of the Taiping Bible chiefly in foreign libraries reflects both the destruction of the war and the place of the Taiping in the history of the Chinese Bible. For later Chinese Christians the Taiping were an embarrassment, a movement that had used the Scriptures to justify a rebellion and had altered their text. For historians of the Bible, the Taiping editions are an example of how a translated Scripture could be received, rewritten and incorporated into a new religious system.

XXI. The Bible and the Taiping in Memory

The Taiping Bible was one of the most widely printed Chinese books of its time, yet almost all copies were destroyed after the fall of Nanjing. A few copies survive in libraries in Britain and elsewhere, brought back by missionaries and diplomats. The Taiping use of the Bible confirmed the fears of the Confucian officials that Christianity was a subversive religion, and it contributed to the hostility towards missionaries that culminated in the attacks described in The Boxer Rebellion.

In the twentieth century the Taiping were reinterpreted by Chinese nationalists and communists as revolutionaries who had fought against Manchu rule and feudal oppression. Sun Yat-sen admired Hong Xiuquan, and the communist historians of the People's Republic regarded the Taiping as a peasant revolution. Western historians, such as Jonathan Spence in God's Chinese Son of 1996, have emphasised the religious character of the movement and the role of Hong's reading of the Bible. The Taiping war, like the earlier wars of religion in China, such as The White Lotus Rebellion, shows the power of religious texts and visions to mobilise people in times of crisis. The surviving Taiping printings of the Scriptures, held in libraries in London, Cambridge and elsewhere, remain an important source for the study of the movement.

XXII. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.