The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom

Hong Xiuquan was a village schoolteacher in Guangdong who failed the imperial examinations four times. After one failure he collapsed into a delirium and saw visions he could not interpret until, years later, he reread a Christian tract handed to him in the street. From it he concluded that the old man in his vision had been God the Father, the elder brother beside him Jesus Christ, and that he himself was God's second son, sent to sweep China clean of demons. The God Worshippers he and his cousin Feng Yunshan gathered in Guangxi became an army. They proclaimed the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace in 1851, took Nanjing in 1853 and held it for eleven years — banning opium, alcohol and footbinding, destroying idols and ancestral tablets, holding land in common, and printing their own scriptures alongside the Bible. The war fought to destroy them was among the deadliest in human history, with estimates of the dead running to twenty million, and when Nanjing fell in 1864 Hong was already dead and the kingdom went with him.