Have you ever met someone whose ideas were so bizarre, the only logical response was to back away slowly from them?

This is the story of one such person – a certain Hong Xiuquan, whose religious beliefs would lead him to start one of history’s bloodiest conflicts to date.

Born in Guangdong, China, in the 19th century, he lived in turbulent times. The Qing dynasty was being humiliated by western powers during the Opium Wars and, with borders forced open, China became the destination of many Christian missionaries eager to seek converts.

In 1837, while bedridden with illness, Hong – who was then a village school teacher – had a vision of a golden-haired man in a robe who told him to purify the land.

Most people would have waved this off as a silly dream, which Hong did, for a time. He focused instead on being a civil servant, which required him to sit for imperial examinations.

Just as how a certain Adolf would be rejected by art school a century later, fate was set in motion when Hong failed the exams.

Depressed, he ran into some Christian missionaries in 1843 and wholeheartedly accepted the new faith – a little too much, in fact.

He believed the man in his vision was God, and that he – Hong – was the younger brother of Jesus Christ.

Now, if you heard someone making such claims, you would call for an ambulance immediately. Unfortunately, nobody back then did.

A “divinely inspired” Hong established the God Worshippers’ Society and began preaching his warped version of Christianity to a small but growing congregation.

By 1850, Hong had 20,000 followers behind him. They, like Hong himself, were largely Hakka, the Chinese subgroup that had previously been persecuted by the Qing.

A confrontation with the authorities soon grew inevitable and, in December that year, a full-blown battle at Jintian saw Hong’s followers defeat the imperial force.

Buoyed by this victory, Hong declared himself “messiah” of the Taiping Tianguo, or “Great-Peace Heavenly Kingdom”.

With the Taiping Rebellion underway, Hong’s armies marched forth, taking many major cities in the south. The conquests saw many atrocities committed, with many civilians losing their lives.

A bloody rebellion

Speaking to FMT, historian Prof Wang Gungwu of the National University of Singapore says the rebellion was particularly bloody for two reasons.

Many people blamed the Qing for how China had been forced open by the western powers. Also, poor and landless peasants saw the rebellion as a means of turning against their landlords, the educated, and the upper classes.

Initially caught off-guard by the Taiping, the Qing eventually recovered and moved to push the rebels back.

By 1853, Hong had two million followers at his beck and call. A religious fundamentalist, Hong outlawed opium, homosexuality, alcohol and prostitution.

Foot binding was banned, men and women alike were welcomed into his army, and all land was to be owned collectively by the people.

It was not a utopia by any means, though – men and women were forcefully segregated, despite the fact that Hong kept a large harem of women for himself.

Violence against perceived enemies of the rebellion was also commonplace and indiscriminate. As Wang says: “They killed many more Chinese than Manchus.”

Cracks and crackpots

Having formed his own kingdom, Hong grew disinterested in matters of governance, and cracks began to grow among his followers.

As infighting erupted among the Taiping’s top ranks, the Qing moved to end the rebellion, through horrifically harsh methods at times.

Suspected supporters of the rebellion were massacred en masse; one horrified observer wrote about how he saw hundreds of corpses floating down a river in Guangzhou.

While all this was going on, the western powers watched on with interest, looking to see how they could profit from the conflict.

Initially, they thought of supporting Hong. After all, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, right? And a Christian China seemed easier to negotiate with than the Qing.

However, it soon became obvious that Hong was less a Christian than a heretic. As one American missionary put it: “I saw no signs of anything resembling Christianity in or near Nanjing.”

Deciding to root for the Qing, the western powers armed the imperial forces with modern equipment.

The imperial army began reconquering its cities, often massacring the Taiping defenders without mercy. The defenders preferred to fight to the last man, costing even more lives.

In 1864, with Qing armies surrounding his capital Nanjing, Hong – the madman who started it all – died from poison.

It is unclear if he had committed suicide to avoid punishment, or if he had overdosed on drugs intended to improve his virility. Some believe he had been assassinated.

The city fell, with thousands of Taiping followers choosing to commit suicide than be massacred.

Hong’s 14-year-old son, the new and last “King of Heaven”, tried to flee but was caught and later executed by Qing soldiers.

Tragically, the boy tried to point out that he had nothing to do with his father’s actions and simply wanted to go back to his hometown and become a scholar.

In a final act of spite, the Qing exhumed Hong’s remains and fired them out of a cannon to ensure he would have no final resting place.

By the time the rebellion was crushed, over 20 million people had been killed. The Taiping Rebellion remains among the top five bloodiest conflicts in human history.

It should be noted that despite the shared name, Taiping, Perak, does not have anything to do with the rebellion.

The town was initially named Klian Pauh, but was renamed Taiping in 1874 after the Larut Wars, with the new name meaning “forever peaceful”.