When Heaven Collapsed: Literature and Culture during the Taiping Civil War (1851– 1864)

Political conflicts and cultural upheavals provoke each other through the mediation of words. As great civil wars would plague a nation with unforgiving violence and dismantle existing belief systems, it would also demand a new framework for understanding the world. One of the most atrocious civil wars in human history, the Taiping Civil War (1851–1984) has been studied primarily as a political and military event. Nevertheless, the cultural ramifications of this war have remained largely neglected. As a result, current scholarship insufficiently explains the tectonic sociopolitical shift that occurred in nineteenth century China. Additionally, regarding the studies of cultural transmutations during political turmoil, an important comparative perspective from East Asia is absent.In 1843, Hong Xiuquan洪秀全(1814–1864) claimed that he was God’s Chinese son— the younger brother of Jesus–– who had descended to the human world to save the Chinese people from the demonic Manchu rulers. The Taiping Rebellion he led, however, cost upwards of thirty million lives and resulted in massive destruction across the board (Fong, 2015). Intriguingly, this event is oftentimes lauded as the precursor to the Chinese Communist revolution (1949). Though scholars have studied the Taiping Civil War as a political, religious, social, and military event (Shih, 1972; Chien, 1962; Luo, 2011; etc.), few have researched its profound cultural impact, especially in juxtaposition with other nineteenth century civil wars.My research project remedies this gap by exploring the cultural significance of this manmade catastrophe. I investigate the extensive cultural engagement with human calamity of the most violent kind as the world entered the modern age. The project consists of four parts. Part I considers the propagandistic works produced by the Taiping rebels and the Qing government; Part II examines an autobiographical fiction and a diary manuscript, both written during the war; Part III explores fantastic representations of the war in short stories serialized on late Qing newspapers; Part IV focuses on plays and historical romances that reinvent the war with an anarchic vision.           In my project, I bring in an unusual combination of genres including propagandistic texts, fiction, drama, and diaries written during and immediately after the war. I reckon with the extreme erosion of political and cultural order wrought in the name of pursuing ultimate transcendence. Rather than considering these texts “fixed” and one-dimensional, I examine them collectively as a tapestry woven by threads of various temporal planes, as evinced by the interstices of authorial edits, textual variants, and textual and historical referentiality. The myriad forms in which these texts mediate hope, desire, fear, and anxiety unveil how fantastic-mystic visions reconfigure unfathomable destruction, despair, and disillusionment via themes of coherence and stability. The unmooring of several generations of writers from traditional convictions during the Taiping era anticipated in many profound ways twentieth century revolutionary discourses.