Title

The Historical Consciousness of Hong Xiuquan – It’s Relation with His Religious belief and the Reality Awareness

Author

Hua Chen

Genre

Article  

Pages

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Language

Key words

Historical Consciousness, the Savior

Abstract

      This article is to explore the historical consciousness of Hong Xiuquan. Hong’s understanding of “the past” was mainly a result of the combination ( or sometimes the Confucian ) of the Confucian classics and Chinese history. He later founded a new religion under the influence of the Christian religion and joined the biblical history to the Chinese history, mixing the sacred with the secular. As a consequence, Hong’s historical consciousness cannot be fully understood without taking into account both his ethical belies and his religious belief. Moreover, Hong on one hand modified part of his thinking along the course of the Tai-Ping Movement yet on the other hand clung to other part of his thinking. Therefore, sections of this article were divided according to change of situations to show how the rebellions leader, who claimed to have had apocalypse and wished to found a heavenly kingdom on earth, placed himself and his followers in the context to manifest their holiness, rightness, and necessity.