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country, with a population divided between Cantonese speakers and Hakkas, and already linked to international trade through the great port that it bordered.
    Hong was a bright young man, the pride of his clan. He was sent to the city to sit for the first-degree Qing civil service examination in 1836, bringing with him his family’s hopes for social betterment. Hong failed his exam and, the next year, went back and failed again. Returning to his village, heartbroken, Hong became ill, and, in between fits of what we would probably call psychotic depression, he read a set of tracts he had received from an American Protestant missionary in Guangzhou, a potted version of Christianity emphasizing God’s call to man and religion as a moral endeavor. Over the next five years Hong reinvented himself to his Hakka neighbors as a religious guide, at least in his own eyes. In his village, he was mostly seen as an embarrassment to his clan. In 1843, with the local area in disarray after China’s defeat in the Opium War, Hong Xiuquan announced that he was the son of God and the younger brother of Jesus Christ. He set out on a long march to Guangxi to win adherents for his heavenly father. Like so many founders of millenarian sects over the past two thousand years, Hong was an unbalanced man in unbalanced times; he and his gospel attracted the poor, the dispossessed, and the fearful, and made of them a formidable army that any earthly power would have found hard to put down.
    Qing authorities tried to arrest Hong several times, but were driven away by his adherents. By 1850, he had turned the tables on those who persecuted him and his followers. Having mobilized 20,000 men and women as soldiers of God, he began laying siege to cities in south central China. The following year he announced the formation of a Christian state in China that he called Taiping Tianguo, the Heavenly Kingdomof Great Peace. Its twin goals were to drive the Manchus from power and establish Hong Xiuquan and his elder brother Jesus as the sources of all authority. The result was a thirteen-year war that killed at least twenty million people and laid waste to large parts of south, central, and eastern China.
    Hong’s message was based on a revisionist version of the Bible in which he himself played a primary role. The Manchus were devils who had to be driven away or killed. The Chinese had to reorganize their society based on their own traditions understood in light of Hong’s Bible. The Taiping rebels believed that great peace would be established when the Heavenly Kingdom joined its foreign brethren overseas to form a universal Christian state. This was a message that won them many adherents in troubled times, not so much because of its religious content as because of its promise to set wrongs right. But the social aspect of their preaching also alienated most local elites, who by the late 1850s began to join the Qing to defeat the Heavenly Kingdom.
    For most Westerners in China, Hong was a troublemaker as well as a blasphemer. 13 His Taiping movement prevented the expansion of trade that foreigners had been looking forward to, and most foreign countries and companies were happy to assist the imperial armies against him, at least for a good fee. In east China, the Qing were much aided by a mercenary army led, first, by the American Frederick Townsend Ward and then by the British Charles Gordon (who later lost his head to the Mahdi’s army in Sudan). For the European governments—and for Britain especially—a weak Qing empire tied into international trade through accepted treaties was much preferable to a ferocious and fervent cult, albeit one underpinned by the Christian Bible.
    As Hong’s visions became more extreme and minor prophets of the Taiping began to fight among themselves, local elites in central China were finally able to mobilize enough support to destroy the movement in 1864. Other rebel groups that had risen in the wake of the Qing rout by Britain