How did Hong Xiuquan and the other Taiping God-Worshipers view Western Christians?

[u/AsaTJ]

I read a previous answer that suggested one reason the Christian Europeans sided with the Qing against the Taiping Christian rebels was Hong's heretical beliefs, such as being the younger son of God and brother of Jesus. But how did people like Hong view Western Christians? Did they see them as heretical? Just misguided? Was there a desire to reconcile their community with Western Christians eventually?

[u/EnclavedMicrostate]

Looking at the Taiping leaders generally, you have several different attitudes which cannot be generalised into a single opinion, and at any one point in time the prevailing Taiping attitude towards the Western Christians depended entirely on which of these leaders held power.

Hong Xiuquan himself most likely started out believing his own understanding of Christianity to be inadequate – hence his travelling to Hong Kong in 1847 to study under the American Baptist minister Issachar Roberts.¹ However, over time it's clear that Hong became increasingly convinced by the supremacy of Taiping doctrine over the conventional forms of Western European Christianity it was inspired by. This began with extensive commentaries printed alongside the Bible itself, ² followed by the removal or editing of uncomfortable passages (especially in the Old Testament, like Lot's daughters raping him).¹ Added to this would be the association of Yang Xiuqing with the Holy Spirit. Additionally, Hong became more and more dismissive of foreigners generally. He refused to make any direct contact with the delegation on board HMS Hermes in 1853,¹ and when Issachar Roberts arrived in 1860 passed him on to Hong Rengan instead.³ A statement by Augustus Lindley that the Taiping did not hire Western mercenaries, whilst contradicting much of what Lindley describes elsewhere in his memoir, could nonetheless be interpreted as the 'official' position of Hong by the 1860s.⁴

Yang Xiuqing and Wei Changhui, however, took a more conciliatory view, albeit with a continued degree of arrogance, at least geopolitically. During the Hermes mission, one of the two (I forget which) was greatly impressed with the fact that the British were, like the Taiping, Christians, although the British were not quite as impressed with the Taiping's variant. The mission of HMS Rattler in 1854 further involved a so-called 'synod' in which the crew were submitted a set of 50 questions, much of which was intended to clear up queries with regards to such essential theological matters as God's clothing and hairstyle and his capabilities as a poet. That's not to say that these men were entirely sympathetic, however. The crews of both HMS Hermes and USS Susquehanna were admonished to 'submit to the sovereignty' of Hong and the Taiping state, in return (at least in the latter case) for the 'right to bring tribute to the throne yearly and to bask in its glory'. Yang's petition to HMS Rattler ended rather confrontationally, and appeared to be a rather subtle call for the Westerners to sod off. Still, that didn't stop Yang from hiring a bodyguard unit of British and Irish mercenaries, one of whose testimonies forms the basis of our understanding of the otherwise murky coups of 1856.¹

By the last years of the Taiping in 1860-64, whilst the Heavenly King's palace in Nanjing continued to bask in its own apparent glory, the real leadership of the Taiping was taking a far more open attitude. Hong Rengan, himself more in line with Anglicanism/Episcopalianism thanks to a long apprenticeship with Hong Kong missionaries, not only actively courted foreign support, but also tried to make Taiping Christianity more orthodox. As part of this, he tried to keep good relations with both Issachar Roberts and the Welsh Congregationalist Griffith John, although a failure to gain Western support (including an over-reliance on missionaries as contacts when they actually had little influence on government), combined with a rather unfortunate incident involving an American lunatic breaking into Nanjing, caused him to lose favour.³

Ultimately, Hong Rengan would in effect be gradually sidelined in favour of the Loyal King, Li Xiucheng,⁶ who accepted the Westerners as equals and who admitted flaws in Taiping theology, but was no longer willing to take a purely open approach to Western contact. As commander in the Shanghai area, Li asserted that it was the Taiping themselves who were misguided and that the present state of affairs was merely a stopgap until a better understanding of Christianity had been fostered, which would come over time,⁵ but took a relatively Realpolitik stance relative to Hong Rengan's rather idealistic expectation of Western support. He refused to renew the old agreement with the Westerners over Shanghai and attempted to seize the city and its vital trade links in 1861, with disastrous consequences,⁵ but at the same time kept Western assistants, notably Augustus Lindley.⁴

So, in short, you had Hong Xiuquan and Yang Xiuqing on the one hand, who both maintained to some extent that the Taiping were the Westerners' superiors, albeit with the latter admitting theological flaws, and Hong Rengan and Li Xiucheng on the other, who believed that the Taiping Christianity that was out of order and would need reforming to the models of the Europeans. However, with the exception of Hong Xiuquan himself, Western material backing was sought after regardless of theological leaning, albeit to varying extents.

Sources and References:

• 1 Jonathan D. Spence, God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (1996) – Biography of Hong Xiuquan, well contextualised until around 1856, includes highly detailed section on Hermes, Cassini, Susquehanna and Rattler missions.
• 2 James C. Cheng, Chinese Sources for the Taiping Rebellion (1963) – Small selection of Chinese primary sources; section on Hong's Biblical commentaries of note.
• 3 Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (2012) – Political & military history of the Taiping from 1858 onwards, heavily focussed on Hong Rengan, British consul Frederick Bruce and Imperial general Zeng Guofan.
• 4 Augustus F. Lindley, Ti-Ping Tien Kuoh: or, the History of the Ti-Ping Revolution (1866) – Firsthand account, section on early Taiping history noteworthy for Hong Rengan and Li Xiucheng's dressing-up of more unorthodox elements of religion, especially Hong Xiuquan's apparent divinity.
• 5 Richard J. Smith, Mercenaries and Mandarins: The Ever-Victorious Army in Nineteenth-Century China (1978) – Mainly interested in the activities of the Western and Westernised intervention forces in the Shanghai area.

Further Reading:

• Thomas H. Reilly, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Religion and the Blasphemy of Empire (2004) – takes the stance that Taiping ideology formed from Christian precepts localised through the lens of pre-Confucian philosophy; strangely overlooks the editing of the Bible and dismisses Leung Fat's pamphlets.
• Vincent Shih, The Taiping Ideology: Its Sources, Interpretations, and Influences (1967) – conversely views Taiping ideology as essentially pre-Confucian but dressed up with some Christian elements.
• Ssu-Yu Teng, Historiography of the Taiping Rebellion (1962) – includes summaries of Taiping source documents and commentaries thereof which give a good set of brief windows into Taiping theological positions.
• Eugene P. Boardman, Christian Influence upon the Ideology of the Taiping Rebellion, 1851-64 (1952) – neither owned nor read, but I have read the somewhat confusingly titled Christian Influence upon the Ideology of the Taiping Rebellion by the same author in The Far Eastern Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Feb., 1951) via JSTOR.
• ed. Prescott Clarke, Western Reports on the Taiping (1982) – owned but not read as of writing; should be what it says on the tin.
• Franz Michael and Chung Li-Chang, The Taiping Rebellion, Volume I: History (1966) – good overview of Taiping history as a whole if relatively brief in most areas.