ABSTRACT
Taiping Christianity shared with earlier non- Confucianism movements a symbolic character, as a challenge to Confucian social superiors, a secession from the latter's intellectual world when its social cleavage seemed hopelessly sharp. If the Buddhist and Taoist religious challenges to Confucianism were softened both by their sufferance in normal times and their chiliastic character in times of rebellion, the Taiping deviation was consistent: just as the Taiping religion had no existence in normal times, so its character in rebellion was an equally novel feature. Confucianism and monarchy passed from expressing general reason, alive with a tense vitality, to making claims on a special Chinese emotion, but one with a dying fall. The core of the ideology which so disturbed literati- officials like Tseng was a blasphemy against Confucian monarchical premises. Bureaucratic historians, in their Confucian moralism, charged up to the emperor symptoms of social decay which were actually effects of the normal functioning of the bureaucracy itself.
