Hi everyone, Los Lamont-Gummery here, China History Podcast, part five today, and in this episode,

we're going to finish off the typing rebellion. How could Liang Affai have known, back in 1832,

when he wrote that set of pamphlets, explaining to his fellow Chinese, what Christianity was all about,

that 20 million or more souls would perish in every terrible way that a human could die?

What if Hongshou-Tran had never gotten his hands on that material? What if he had passed the civil

service exam and went on to serve in the imperial bureaucracy? Since part one, we've traced Hongshou-Tran's

life during his traumatic 20s, failing and forattempts to pass the civil service exam and how these

failures impacted him? In his 30s, along with his cousin, Feng Yunshan, he channeled this anger

and frustration into building this movement based on the visions and hallucinations he experienced

following his third failure to pass the exam. And then in his 40s, we saw how Hong flushed with

success following his rampage down river along the Yangtze from Wu Chang to Nanjing. We presided over

this bizarre and dysfunctional government that, thanks to the hopelessness of the times, counted

millions of faithful adherents and an army of almost two million soldiers, hundreds of thousands

of which were no more than opportunistic hoodlums and near-do-wells who had no belief in the

heavenlyness of the kingdom or the religion Hong preached. But their circumstances were bitter

enough to find plenty of merit in what the typings were trying to do, shaking things up for the

Qing Empire in all the preaching of egalitarianism. Between 1853 and 1860, the Typing Heavenly Kingdom

had been able to become the masters of almost the entire Jiangnan region of China, Jiangsu-Jia-Jian

mostly, along with parts of Anhui and Jiangxi. Going back to the time of Suoyang-Di at the dawn

of the 7th century with the opening of the Grand Canal, this had always been the richest and

most prosperous region of China, still is today. And ever since the capture of Nanjing by the

Typing's in March 1853, what followed was a massive disruption to commerce and upon the

...