A self-proclaimed younger brother of Jesus Christ[3] and convert to Protestant Christianity, Hong Xiuquan led an army that controlled a significant part of southern China during the middle of the 19th century, eventually expanding to a size of nearly 30 million people.

Their household staff and the printers they employed corrected and adapted the missionaries' message to reach the Chinese and they began to particularly frequent the prefectural and provincial examinations, where local scholars competed for the chance to rise to power in the imperial civil service.

One of the native tracts, Liang Fa's nine-part, 500-page tome called Good Words to Admonish the Age, found its way into the hands of Hong Xiuquan in the mid-1830s.

When he read the tract he saw his long-past dream in terms of Christian symbolism: he was the younger brother of Jesus and had met God the Father, Shangdi.

[11] The sect's power grew in the late 1840s, initially suppressing groups of bandits and pirates, but persecution by Qing authorities spurred the movement into guerrilla activity, and then into civil war.

[13] After minor clashes, the violence escalated into the uprising in February 1851, in which a 10,000-strong rebel army routed and defeated a smaller Qing force.

From there, the Taiping rebels sent armies west into the upper reaches of the Yangtze, and north to capture Beijing, the capital of the Qing dynasty.

In 1853, Hong withdrew from active control of policies and administration, ruling exclusively by written proclamations often in religious language.

[17][18] With their leader largely out of the picture, Taiping delegates tried to widen their popular support with the Chinese middle classes and forge alliances with European powers, but failed on both counts.

Inside China, the rebellion faced resistance from the traditionalist middle class because of their hostility to Chinese customs and Confucian values.

The land-owning upper class, unsettled by the Taiping rebels' peasant mannerisms and their policy of strict separation of the sexes, even for married couples, sided with the Qing forces and their Western allies.

An attempt to take Shanghai in August 1860 was initially successful but finally repulsed by a force of Chinese troops and European officers under the command of Frederick Townsend Ward.

Imperial forces were reorganised under the command of Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang, and the Qing government's re-conquest began in earnest.

Hong's ashes were later blasted out of a cannon in order to ensure that his remains have no resting place as eternal punishment for the uprising.

[22] In August 1871, the last Taiping rebel army, led by Shi Dakai's commander Li Fuzhong (李福忠), was completely wiped out by the Qing forces in the border region of Hunan, Guizhou, and Guangxi.

In the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, there were three levels of local government: province (省), commandery (郡), and county (縣).

[23] Other provinces mentioned in Taiping Heavenly Kingdom sources are: Anhui, Jiangxi, Hubei, Zhejiang, Hunan, Fujian, Henan, Shandong (珊東), Guangxi, Guangdong, Yunnan, Sichuan, Guizhou, Shaanxi, Gansu, Zuili (罪隸), etc.

[24] In the later years of the Taiping Rebellion, the territory was divided among many, for a time into the dozens, of provincial rulers called princes, depending on the whims of Hong.

[25] In 1the Gan Prince Hong Rengan, with the approval of his cousin the Heavenly King, advocated several new policies, including:[29] While the Taiping rebels did not have the support of Western governments, they were relatively modernised in terms of weapons.

One shipment of weaponry from an American dealer in April 1862 already "well known for their dealings with rebels" was listed as 2,783 (percussion cap) muskets, 66 carbines, 4 rifles, and 895 field artillery guns, as well as carrying passports signed by the Loyal King.

[37] The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom developed its own regulated system of clothing and fashion, in response to the cultural policy of tifayifu set by the Qing.

Equality of sexes in the Heavenly Kingdom also saw women's clothing forego the use of skirts, with a preference to trousers worn together with wide shirts with slimmer sleeves and lack of collars.

Characteristics of Manchu clothing such as the matixiu, or horse-hoof cuffs, and Qing dynasty's official uniforms and headwear were forbidden and replaced with Taiping's own clothing similarly informed by Hakka fashion, with the goal of restoring Han Chinese identity[38] as the Heavenly Kingdom abhorred and opposed the use of qizhuang, with Taiping leaders Yang Xiaoqing and Xiao Chaogui indicting the Manchu-Qing for "replacing the dress of the Chinese with those of barbarians" and "making the people lose their ancestral roots, transforming them into animals".

Heavenly Kingdom also developed its own headwear, such as the fengmao (风帽), jiaomao (角帽), and liangmao (凉帽), worn in accordance to rank and ceremony.

Similarly, a plan was outlined for official headwear and colors of clothing for scholars graduating from Heavenly Kingdom's imperial examination in Qinding shijietiaoli (钦定士阶条例) by Hong Rengan.

[41][42] However, because the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom had a limited understanding for prior hanfu fashions, many of their official clothing still retained similarities to qizhuang, such as the use of magua-jackets for military uniforms.