Taiping Ideology and the Rewriting of the Chinese Bible

Abstract

When the Taiping insurgents overran the ancient Chinese capital of Nanjing in 1853, the barely two-year-old Christianity-inspired armed uprising appeared to be unstoppable, controlling a large area of Southern China south of the Yangtze River. One of the urgent tasks for the leader of this new “Heavenly Kingdom of Peace” (Taiping Tianguo), the self-proclaimed second son of God, Hong Xiu Quan, was to match his Taiping ideology with the teachings of the Bible—an important source of his inspiration and authority. Two official translations of the Bible were subsequently published by the Taipings, in which much alteration was done in order to promote Hong's brand of theology and beliefs and to remove stories of potential embarrassment for the regime. This article examines some of the major cases of rewriting found in the two Taiping editions, and provides possible reasons for the heavy-handed tampering with the biblical texts.