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The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire. By Thomas H. Reilly. A China Program Book. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. xi + 234 pp. $45.00 cloth.
As David Mungello reminds readers on the back of this volume, "the Taiping movement [is] one of the major events in four thousand years of Chinese history." This in itself is enough reason for the recent interest in the religious movement, the prophetic warrior (Hong Xiquan), and interpretation of this Christian apocalyptic movement in Chinese history. Mission historians often talk about the "fascination" that missionaries and mission agencies had with China in the nineteenth century. Today we can talk about the ongoing scholarly fascination with the same region. I believe the recent explosion of Chinese historical studies-both Western and Chinese-is warranted, and this volume does much to advance the understanding of one of the critical events in modern Chinese history. Reilly lists a new book or dissertation on the Taiping Rebellion, on the average, every other year for the past thirty years.
After the 1996 publication of Jonathan D. Spence's God's Chinese Son, one might ask if it is really necessary to read this smaller and more focused volume. For a clearer understanding of the religious currents in China, even today, I will argue in the positive. Past volumes have focused upon the Taiping as developing a new ideology (Vincent Shih, The Taiping Ideology [Reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967]), as expressing a typical messianic eschatology of America in the nineteenth century (P. Richard Bohr, "The Politics of Eschatology: Hung Hsiu-ch'uan and the Rise of the Taipings, 1837-1853 [Ph. D. diss., University of California,...