God's Chinese son : the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan / [print]
Jonathan D. Spence.
- New York, New York : W.W. Norton and Company, (c)1996.
- xxvii, 400 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
Walls -- The word -- Home ground -- Sky war -- The key -- Wandering -- The base -- Judgments -- Assembling -- Earth war -- The first city -- The hunt -- The earthly paradise -- Three ships -- The split -- The killing -- Family circles -- The wrong man -- New worlds -- Priest-king -- Snowfall -- Partings.
Whether read for its powerful account of the largest uprising in human history, or for its foreshadowing of the terrible convulsions suffered by twentieth-century China, or for the narrative power of a great historian at his best, God's Chinese Son must be read. At the center of this history of China's Taiping rebellion (1845-64) stands Hong Xiuquan, a failed student of Confucian doctrine who ascends to heaven in a dream and meets his heavenly family: God, Mary, and his older brother, Jesus. He returns to earth charged to eradicate the "demon-devils," the alien Manchu rulers of China. His success carries him and his followers to the heavenly capital at Nanjing, where they rule a large part of south China for more than a decade. Their decline and fall, wrought by internal division and the unrelenting military pressures of the Manchus and the Western powers, carry them to a hell on earth. Twenty million Chinese are left dead. https://www.amazon.com/Gods-Chinese-Son-Taiping-Heavenly/dp/0393315568/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MDJ0T0TYGUXY&keywords=god%27s+chinese+son+the+taiping+heavenly+kingdom+of+hong+xiuquan&qid=1574394002&sprefix=God%27s+Chinese%2Caps%2C139&sr=8-1