Hello again everyone, L'Lauslau Montgomery here. Thanks for downloading this latest edition of the China History podcast.

Last week we looked at the Ching Dynasty from 1800 to 1853. It was a time of great internal suffering in China. All the

greatest hits of China's sorrows were all happening simultaneously.

Natural disasters, corruption on a debilitating scale,

inflation, social problems, peasant discontent,

and beyond all this accumulated misery you had widespread

opium addiction, rebellions in Central China and in the frontier plus foreign

aggression in the form of demands for more open trade. In the Western powers,

mainly Great Britain, France, and the US, they backed up their demands with all the

firepower and weapons that the Industrial Revolution had yielded up to this point.

And as bad as this time period was, the next 50 years will be no better.

In fact, the entire 19th century was a 100 year long migraine

headache for China. We left off last time as the Taiping rebels left their stronghold in Yong-An and marched on Nanjing, taking

Wu Chang 1st in January of 1853. Following this, the Taiping Rebel Army has taken the ancient Ming capital of Nanjing in March of 1853.

It is then renamed to Tianjin. Everything is Tian this and Tian that with the Hong Shil-chun. He was the Tien this and Tien that with the Hong Shien.

He was the Tien Wang, the heavenly king, of the Tien Guo, or Heavenly Kingdom.

And he is now setting the movement up in Tianjing, the heavenly capital.

So I guess you could figure out what Tian means.

We'll resume our sad story right here as Hong Shou-Tran enters Nanjing, carried on a golden palanquin wearing his imperial

yellow robes in the crown of a Christian king.

And he then takes up residence in the former Ming Palace where Ju Ju Ju Ju Ju Ju

Jang set himself up 500 years before. And it was here in Nan Ching that the

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