In the history textbooks, the significance of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement is self-evident, promoting the collapse of feudal society and preventing the process of China's colonization, scholars once raised Hong Xiuquan to the height of "the first pioneer of the peasant uprising", and even Dr. Sun Yat-sen in the Republic of China period was willing to be "Hong Xiuquan second", which shows that the influence of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement on future generations is extremely far-reaching.
Although the main cause of the failure of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement was the joint suppression of the Western powers and the Manchu Qing Dynasty, the serious mistakes made by Hong Xiuquan cannot be ignored.
First, after the capture of Nanjing, Hong Xiuquan gradually had a feudal consciousness. A comfortable life made him no longer the revered "king of heaven", but gradually degenerated into a totalitarian ruler who valued the concept of hierarchy and was immersed in pleasure. From the literature, we can see that Hong Xiuquan in this period rarely left his palace and drew a clear line with the masses and soldiers.
We know that the actions of the leaders of a revolutionary regime in the process of its metamorphosis into a feudal dynasty played a decisive role. Since Hong Xiuquan's thinking has undergone a qualitative change, this change in thinking will quickly spread to the entire Tianjing in a short period of time. The more later, the more Hong Xiuquan behaved like a feudal emperor. The fundamental reason why contradictions broke out within the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was this change in thinking.
Second, in order to consolidate his centralized rule and prevent great power from falling into the hands of foreign surnames, Hong Xiuquan's employment line has also undergone great changes. From the initial "meritocracy" to the later "nepotism", Hong Xiuquan increasingly rejected other kings with different surnames. This kind of centralizer's peculiar thinking gradually corrupted the politics of the later period of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and laid a fatal hidden danger for the development of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.
Third, in his later years, Hong Xiuquan became more and more feudal and conservative in his thinking, fell into his own imaginary kingdom of heaven and could not extricate himself, and went farther and farther down the road of religious superstition. The jiangshan laid by Hong Xiuquan certainly experienced ups and downs during this period, but it also occupied half of the country in its heyday. In the history of our country, there are many short-lived dynasties like this, and their failure process is the same.
The reason for this is not that the soldiers are unwilling to shed their blood for the regime, but that the leaders of these regimes are too selfish. On the eve of the uprising, Hong Xiuquan also played the banner of "equality between officials and the people, equality between men and women" in order to win the hearts and minds of the people, but all this disappeared with the entry of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom into Nanjing. After coming to the comfort field, Hong Xiuquan and others quickly revealed their selfish, superstitious, and feudal sides. To civilians, especially women, Hong Xiuquan treated them as slaves and played with them at will.
It was also for these reasons that in June 1864, Hong Xiuquan died of illness, and the young king Hong Tianguifu succeeded to the throne, until July 19, 1864, when the Xiang army collapsed more than 10 meters of the city wall near the Tianjing Taiping Gate, and swarmed into the city, and the Xiang army in other directions also entered the city, and the Taiping army in the city either died in battle or self-immolated, and none of them fell... The fall of Tianjing marked the complete defeat of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Peasants' War. However, the hundreds of thousands of Taiping troops scattered on the battlefields in the north and south of the Yangtze River still bravely and tenaciously resisted the attack of the Qing army, and even so, it was difficult to reverse the decline of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.
So, how many women are there in Hong Xiuquan's harem?
After the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, someone wrote a "Notes on Spring Dreams in Jiangnan", which said that Hong Xiuquan had set up more than a thousand famous positions in the harem, from queen, ai niang, frolicking niang, miaonu, and jiaonu to concubines and yuannu. After that, in the face of so many beautiful women, how can Hong Xiuquan manage it alone, even if he has three heads and six arms, he is also lacking in the face of thousands of beautiful women. Moreover, so many wives and concubines, Hong Xiuquan can not remember one by one, so he simply numbered his wives one by one, with the number to remember the beauty, rather than the name of the beauty, every time he wanted to summon the beauty, Hong Xiuquan called out the number represented by the beauty, so there was the 67th wife, the 74th wife such a funny name.
These more than a thousand women were only qualified to share a bed with the King of Heaven.
It is said that in the Heavenly King's Palace, there were no eunuchs, and all the personnel who served the Heavenly King were "female officials". Roughly calculated, there were a total of twelve hundred female officials in the Heavenly King's Mansion at that time.
In summary, there were more than 2,300 women in Hong Xiuquan's harem, all of whom were Hong Xiuquan's forbidden concubines.
Hong Xiuquan's criteria for selecting women are extremely high:
First of all, there must be good looks, there is no doubt about it. Throughout the ages, women who can enter the harem of feudal rulers are all the colors of the country.
Secondly, the women selected by Hong Xiuquan must be born into a famous family, because only girls who have been regarded as pearls in the palm of their hands since childhood have soft skin and enchanting bodies.
In the end, the concubines and female officials accepted by Hong Xiuquan were all complete.
We know that the emperors of successive dynasties have made such a request when selecting and asking relevant people to verify the chastity of the palace women. However, Hong Xiuquan's way of verifying whether a woman is a virgin is very perverted. After the woman enters the palace, Hong Xiuquan will personally examine the girl's body, if the girl is a complete body, it will be included in the harem, if the girl is not a complete body, Hong Xiuquan will reduce her to a slave, and even, after killing quickly.
As an insurgent who flaunted "equality", Hong Xiuquan hid in the deep palace to enjoy the service of 2,300 beautiful women, and lingered in the gentle countryside all day long. Hong Xiuquan's practice will inevitably make Yang Xiuqing and others jealous, so it is inevitable that civil unrest will break out in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Although Hong Xiuquan skillfully quelled the civil unrest, the Taiping Army had already suffered a great loss of vitality in this infighting.
From the details of Hong Xiuquan's selection of women, we can see that although this person preaches "public ownership", he has taken the lead in violating this concept. In the final analysis, Hong Xiuquan is no different from those rebels who are proud of their achievements, so his fate is naturally inevitable. Obviously, Hong Xiuquan's uprising movement was fundamentally different from that of revolutionaries.
Therefore, no matter how "advanced" Hong Xiuquan's ideas are, this person should not be pushed to the height of the pioneer of the uprising by later scholars.
Resources:
【History of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom" and "Notes on Spring Dreams in Jiangnan"】