Flamboyant Emperor

Throughout the thirty-odd centuries of her dependable history China has had a way of reaching down every so often into the masses of her simple folk to snatch up some fellow in a very humble situation and make a grand dramatic spectacle of his career. Although any Chinese student could reel off a score of wonderful stories about such characters, almost all of them rose, flourished flamboyantly and died, either in their glory or as tragic failures, wholly unknown to the contemporary West, and still unknown to all but a handful of Europeans and Americans who have puzzled their way through the records of China’s twenty-odd dynasties. But a century ago today, in the great city of Nanking on the Yangtze, there sat a former farm boy on a high throne, in a palace overrun with women, whose doings had for about nine years held the close and constant attention of every government in the Occident that had any kind of a stake in the Far East.

He was Hung Hsiu-ch’uan, the organizer and leader of that seismic upheaval known abroad as the Taiping rebellion. He came from a relatively poor farm family in a little village about thirty miles northwest of Canton, a family as little distinguished from the great mass of such households as any that the Chinese fates could have picked. But, as the self-styled T’ien Wang, or Heavenly King, who claimed to have been given the mandate to rule China—and the world for that matter—in a personal interview with the Heavenly Father, he did actually rule 25 or 30 million Chinese in the rich heart of their country a century ago, and was reckoned a menace to the survival of the decadent but arrogant Manchu dynasty.

RG

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Rodney Gilbert

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Throughout the thirty-odd centuries of her dependable history China has had a way of reaching down every so often into the masses of her simple folk to snatch up some fellow in a very humble situation and make a grand dramatic spectacle of his career. Although any Chinese student could reel off a score of wonderful stories about such characters, almost all of them rose, flourished flamboyantly and died, either in their glory or as tragic failures, wholly unknown to the contemporary West, and still unknown to all but a handful of Europeans and Americans who have puzzled their way through the records of China’s twenty-odd dynasties. But a century ago today, in the great city of Nanking on the Yangtze, there sat a former farm boy on a high throne, in a palace overrun with women, whose doings had for about nine years held the close and constant attention of every government in the Occident that had any kind of a stake in the Far East.

He was Hung Hsiu-ch’uan, the organizer and leader of that seismic upheaval known abroad as the Taiping rebellion. He came from a relatively poor farm family in a little village about thirty miles northwest of Canton, a family as little distinguished from the great mass of such households as any that the Chinese fates could have picked. But, as the self-styled T’ien Wang, or Heavenly King, who claimed to have been given the mandate to rule China—and the world for that matter—in a personal interview with the Heavenly Father, he did actually rule 25 or 30 million Chinese in the rich heart of their country a century ago, and was reckoned a menace to the survival of the decadent but arrogant Manchu dynasty.