Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 257 - The Taiping Rebellion Part 2: Working in the Dog Blood Factory

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

The Taiping rebellion spreads and the rebels create the world's weirdest gunpowder Part 2/4 Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys

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Legion of the Old Crow today. And now back to the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Lion's Head by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, with me still uh is the true believer and the son of god hong shi kwan nate how's it going oh it's all good it's a it's a lovely day to learn about the taiping rebellion i'm excited it was it didn't feel as though we got to enough depredation and misery on the last one so i'm like feed me more joe oh i have some bad news every this is going to be four parts um it probably could have been longer i try not to get into the weeds and a lot of stuff because there's literally like eight rebellions going on at the same time as this one and at

various points they like you know that scene from the arnold schwarzenegger movie where like you son of a bitch and they fucking shake hands like that happens multiple times um so like but i promise every single episode gets progressively worse um however i i think the worst of it is probably saved for the future but uh yeah hong is is is going through it um for people who are joining us in part two of the Taiping Rebellion for some reason, go back and listen to part one. Don't be insane. But a quick recap. When we left you

last time, Hong Shikuan was claiming to be the literal son of God and Jesus' demon-slaying little brother, which Jesus also taught him how to use a sword to kill said demons, led an uprising against King China. It was quickly gathering steam as disaffected peasants and secret societies and triads and all types of people formed up an army to go on the march.

They had captured their first town called Yongan and were facing down a government counterattack. Now that they control their first town, Nate, this is where we see what will become the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, how it's going to be administered.

Because remember, it's a theocracy monarchy ruled by a man who thinks he's the son of God. So how do you think he starts administering these places? I'm going to say it's probably a little bit of purging, a little bit of heretic trials, a little bit of repression. Probably not Nordic social democracy when you snap your fingers yeah uh uh that would be interesting is that like oh no hong actually formed the social democrat party yeah exactly easy he's gonna he's gonna build a welfare state and slowly auction it off over the course of

decades yeah uh so he begins passing laws and of, as all cult leaders do, he builds himself a harem. Now, for people who are unaware, a harem is a large collection of women which you have sex with. fucking uh people because it's nasty uh but the cult the church the religion where the fuck it is you want to call it his kingdom rebellion had very strict rules regarding their followers in regards to sex uh so his harem grew so large that to this day nobody has any idea how big it was um hundreds hundreds of women at any given time um but he also knew how much of a hypocrite he was because he started passing edicts. He doesn't like pass laws per se. It's like he Martin Luther shit and just nails a new edict to the door.

And that's now the law. And this edict said anybody who talked about the harem, anybody heads getting cut off. This included the women in the harem so if anybody starts talking about like oh did you hear the you know the heavenly king is you know has 500 side pieces or whatever dead um if women talk about being in the harem dead he's he knows what he's doing um he also gets really into numerology. I assume everybody knew that annoying person in school at some point.

He began to use this to explain his decisions to people, like doing these weird... It's like QAnon people doing weird arithmetic to try to prove themselves right. Heavenly numbers. Yeah, like you're saying, you're sort of like yeah yeah uh figuring out you know divine combinations and which numbers like are the most fortuitous and things like that yeah that's that's like the the napkin math reading of it i realize that i'm oversimplifying yeah yeah um and the thing is is he like well numerology is a thing already especially china like he doesn't do actual numerology.

He just makes shit up as he goes because that's not something that Hong knows anything about. And he tells these math-based equations or whatever to his followers to rationalize his decisions. And they have to pretend they know what he's talking about. Otherwise, they fall out of his good graces. Of course, all of the numbers that he comes up with were delivered to him by God, you know, and they all support him. You know, weird how that works.

There is an extent to which it must be absolutely living life on easy mode if you're surrounded by people who believe that you are God's manifestation on Earth, the son of God, God in human form, and you can literally just make up anything yeah it's just sort of like yep god said it it's like wow like that's that must i mean ultimately aside from the the you know access to questionable consent sex

which is also a cult leader thing oh yeah this taking place here you also imagine that must be one of the biggest appeals of being a cult leader in the sense that you just basically have the IDDQD doom code that you can just go through life with until you all die or get arrested or whatever. The Jesus up, up, down, down. Yeah. Exactly. The attitude of his cult also began to change with it becoming incredibly paranoid with a very strict authoritarian bent. Because remember, we talked about in the last episode, people really like to frame this. I won't say a lot of people do, but some people like to frame this as a proto-communist revolution. Like Mao Zedong framed this as a proto-communist revolution. And to be fair,

you'd probably be a pretty big fan of the paranoia and authoritarian bent. To be fair, he'd probably be a pretty big fan of the paranoia and authoritarian bent. But Hong, despite being genocidal towards the Manchu, his attitude towards his own followers, which are mostly ethnic minorities within China, the Hakka and others. And I say his attitude towards his followers for a cult leader so far had been largely peaceful. And I know that's a lot of qualifiers, but things were changing. Anybody thought to be violating his heavenly edicts would find themselves being beaten with a stick for 100 strikes or worse. And I should point out, this is the seemingly the lowest level punishment that he had. It was a hundred strikes from a cane, which

is a lot worse than it sounds. Yeah. There's at least ten violations that end in immediate beheading, such as talking about the harem, of course. But he also began to think his ranks were infiltrated with traitors. Otherwise, because the rebellion's running into problems, right? And the way that he

rationalizes running into problems, there must be spies because his decisions cannot be wrong because he is the son of God and God is telling him what to do. And I cannot explain enough that Hong 100% believes this. He is not L-running this. He's not making this up for fun. He 100% believes this because he's a crazy person. But before long, an internal police force hunted for traitors in the ranks. But in order to be labeled a traitor, it required as little as having sinking morale or missing daily prayer uh the the tai pings also had a very particular hairstyle like growing their hair very long in a specific way and if people didn't do that or they trimmed it

traitor you know yeah um sounds bad yeah and for someone who's losing their hair like me i'm fucked uh i could not have the type pig hairstyle uh now uh they would be publicly executed a sign would be hung around their necks that said quote jesus our elder brother showed us the treacherous heart of this demon follower that sounds yeah extremely bad just just genuinely yeah not a thing you really want to have happen. Yeah, it seems bad. And this is, again, I should point out that at this point of Taiping administration, this is benign. The worst has yet to come. Ah, so I might need an animal fact is what you're saying.

Yeah, I mean, we are going to take a trip to Nanking soon. Right, okay. A city where famously nothing bad ever happened if you live in Japan. Nothing bad has ever happened. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we are going to take a trip to Nanking soon. Right. A city where famously nothing bad ever happened if you live in Japan. Nothing bad has ever happened. Yeah, exactly. While building up his sex cult, government forces surrounded the city. The rebels had surrounded the city with outposts. The Taipings were pretty big fans of pickets, effectively, for guard positions. And the government was starting to slowly chip away at

them the rebels tried to launch their own attacks against the government positions but pretty much all of them failed and soon the government had cut off the city's supply routes and food sources outside of its main walls um the the taipings have a very weird relationship with trade they really really really don't like private trade. And instead of coming up with a distribution system of any way, they simply ban it from every city that they're in, which forces the city's food supply to exist outside of its walls. Tactically, that's the dumbest shit you could possibly do.

Yeah, yeah. It doesn't really set yourself up for success there when you think about in the event of having a city under siege, for example. Yeah, that will become incredibly important in our final chapter of the series. Uh-huh. Now, credit where credit's due, the

Taiping's turn into an army of MacGyvers. Because they were cut off from supplies, they had to make their own gunpowder. Not necessarily an easy thing to do, especially because they didn't exactly have the supplies to make it. So they found them. They got saltpeter by crushing old building blocks, and they boiled it in booze, dog blood, and horseshit. All right, so I got to ask, did it work? Yes, kind of. It went boom. But look, we aren't chemists here.

And I have to say, even if you make an unstable explosive compound using those things, show disclaimer, do not attempt this at home. It's very impressive. Sometimes it literally blew up in their faces, but other times it worked. They could fire their muskets with it and their cannons. They built bombs with it and shit. Maybe if there's a chemist listening,

they could tell me how the fuck that works, but maybe don't because I feel like we might be committing a crime at this point. Yeah, I mean, there must be some kind of like, what is it, titration taking place there when you're doing the boiling and the soaking and all that stuff in. Yeah, I mean, there must be some kind of like, what is it, titration taking place there when you're, you know, doing the boiling and the soaking and all that stuff in order to, I think

maybe the verb is titrate or the verb is precipitate, whatever compound you want. So I suppose if it kind of works, it kind of works. If it's, you know, your options are that or nothing. But I definitely wouldn't want to be on the dog blood boiling detail or the horse shit smearing whatever you

know what i mean like if someone at formation for the taiping you know theocracy dictatorship was like information in the morning was like hey put your hand up if you like ice cream i would absolutely not put my hand up because i'm not i'm not doing that i I fell for this before, goddammit. I'm not boiling any more dog. Also, how many dogs do they have to kill? Jesus Christ. A small army of Pete Buttigieg is just milling the streets. Exactly.

Exactly. You know what? Pete Buttigieg is just a continuation of a proud tradition of people who understand that dogs are man's best friend, not just because of companionship, but because also sometimes you need to harvest their blood in order to create ersatz gunpowder for your Christian theocracy in the 19th century. Brother Buttigieg, a fellow follower of Jesus Hong, just like us.

as a fellow follower of jesus hong just like us exactly exactly you know what and uh and and we we were we also respect him because he's managed to game the system under taiping in the sense that he continues the proud tradition of looking busy and not doing any work now uh by spring the rebels had decided they need to get the fuck out of the city they had to break out hong passes the order to do so in the form of what else? Religious poetry. Now, he does this to cover up the fact that he was ordering his army to withdraw from the city. Some kind of, you know, yield encryption. It's not even yield.

This is the fucking 1800s. But like he figured, look, only true followers of, you know, typing Christ, whatever it is you want to call them, could understand my poetry. I would read some of these. They're very, very long. Hong is a long, long-winded motherfucker. But if you want to read a lot of them all the way through, the book God's Chinese Son has a lot of them at length. He's not a good writer, I should point out.

Maybe it's the translation, but maybe he failed those civil service exams for a reason. That's what I'm saying. This is a kind of early coded message for them. However, the problem is

Hong knew the code and just assumed the rest of his celestial family, which remember are his directional kings that we talked about. Those are his literal celestial family. And since they are also God's family, which remember are his directional kings that we talked about. Those are his literal celestial family. And since they are also God's family, they should be able to figure it out and

understand this poetry. Guess what? They didn't. Yeah. You know, in a way, not to gang up too much on Pete Buttigieg as much as we like making fun of him, but I absolutely could imagine Pete Buttigieg being the guy going out to the field and just being like, I'm sure they have the crypto fill for the radio. So I don't need to synchronize stuff. And then no one can talk to him. So in a way, he's just continuing a proud tradition. I mean, this is my imaginary version in which Pete Buttigieg goes to the field ever. But you know what I mean.

Pete Buttigieg and his dragon robes given to him by King Hong, by the heavenly king. Delivering weird stanzas of poetry that no one can understand. He's just like me. This is where we invite our audience to make this picture a reality.

Listen, you've done it before for other strange mental images that Joe and I have conjured up on the fly. So if you want to make typing rebellion, Jesus Hong, Pete Buttigieg in robes, issuing... Soaked with dog's blood. Soaked in dog's blood, issuing poetic edicts that no one can understand, please feel free. My only requirement is that there be a little bit of cultural sensitivity so it doesn't wind up looking like you're being racist. Make fun of Pete Buttigieg all day long. And I suppose

if you have to be racist towards Maltese Americans, the failed children of Marxist academics, I guess failed child is perhaps incorrect because he is the Secretary of Transportation. Do it. But don't go too hard in anything that's going to make it seem as though we're taking the piss out of the Chinese. Coming next on this podcast, Breakfast at Tiffany's. Fuck. Yeah, exactly. We're going to watch Breakfast at Tiffany's. We're going to watch The Good Earth, the 1940s version. We're definitely not going to raise any criticisms of their portrayals of certain ethnic groups. You know what? We're not going to raise any criticisms of their portrayals of uh certain ethnic groups you know what we're just gonna we're just gonna be like wow this is great

we love gonna read some early Heinlein when he really hated Chinese people oh yeah yeah I don't know if enough people know that the arachnids from starship troopers are supposed to be Chinese uh but they are yeah it's it's grim out there um now on april 5th they abandoned the city running east where government defenses are at their weakest but as they ran they lined the entire city with landmines and bombs again made out of horseshit and dog's blood uh as they go now the last man they left uh lit the fuse for the whole thing and the government was so confused staring on because they're like huh this city is blowing up I wonder why that's happening

and the rebels escape pretty easily though they do leave a rear guard action which is effectively like a reversed forlorn hope to stand and die and fight to the death because at this point the Taiping are zealots.

Like they do not retreat unless they are ordered to do so. So 2000 of them stand and die. So everybody else can get away. They retreat north into the mountains, lining the road behind them again with more mines and bombs. And the government forces at this point give chase, thinking that like, this is it. Like we're going to snuff them out here, here right so the government forces chase them into mountains and the taiping lead them into an ambush

of the entire army trapped on a thin mountain road littered with dog shit horse blood ieds and being shot by rebels with again ad, ad hoc gunpowder. Yeah, I was going to say, the world's most home-brewed-ass gunpowder. In a way, it's funny because it's like we're riffing, making jokes about how ridiculous and incompetent they are, and yet they managed to get one over. Like, well done, I guess. I mean, it seems like you guys are assholes, but still well done. It boils down to the philosophy.

If it's dumb and it works it's not dumb yeah uh so the government loses over 5 000 soldiers before finally breaking out of the ambush and retreating um yeah this is literally like this is the like the absolute apex if you're someone who thinks it's funny to light a bag of dog shit on fire and ring someone's doorbell like imagine if you could do that but it could slay an entire army like this is just you know this

is like like if you watch one of those videos of you know soccer's most perfect goals it's like this but for people who like ding dong ditching and lighting bags of dog shit because like they've literally no one can beat this there is somewhere there is like a 12 year old that's about to light a bag of shit on fire i don't know if people still do this i didn't actually see anybody do it when i was a kid but he's like wait a minute what if i play ding dong ditch but then i blow up the front of their house

with this yeah exactly it's it's really it's very very fortuitous, I suppose, that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold didn't study the Taiping Rebellion. shit-based gunpowder, as well as thousands of government uniforms. They use these government uniforms to disguise themselves and sneak up in the town of Guien. However, this doesn't really work as the garrison commander of the town thought like, hey, wait a minute, there shouldn't be any government soldiers coming this way. Because I don't really talk about this enough. The imperial army is incredibly decentralized. Virtually every formation we're going to talk about here is some form of private militia led by what is effectively a warlord. So they were not great at working together. So whenever another group of dudes show up at their gate, like, well, that's suspicious. vicious um so they slam the gates in their face leading to a month-long siege where the rebels learn that they don't have enough menace around the city making the siege pointless this city can just be reinforced and resupplied uh hong pays a massive bribe to a well-known government

affiliated pirate named i swear to god a big head yang uh yang to leave them alone and leave the waterways open. With this protection, they build some boats and fuck off out of the siege down the river heading south. So, yeah, big head yang pops up in this war on multiple occasions. You know what's funny? For a comparative literature seminar when I was in grad school, we had to read books by Mo Yan. And particularly, we read the book Red Sorghum, but there were a few others. The Republic of Wine was another one. And Mo Yan's a Chinese author, a contemporary author. I mean, he recently, I believe he won, he may have won the Nobel Prize, but he's definitely

won a bunch of big heritage establishment awards. And Red sorghum takes place in pre-revolution pre-chinese civil war i mean 20th century china and the thing that i guess was so surprising about it was just like how insanely bawdy it is and there are definitely characters like this and there's scenes like for example a guy who gets uh convicted of um having having sort of lied under oath to fuck over a business partner. And so the sentence is like, oh, well, you want to lie and you want to use your tongue to fucking commit evil deeds. Well, now you have to eat honey out of a dude's ass. I'm dead serious. And so in a way, I don't know hardly anything about China. And I guess I didn't really square with sort of what my impression of this sort of thing would be. And so in a way, like Big Head Yang definitely sounds like a character in a Mo Yan novel.

And if you've read any Mo Yan novels, you know exactly what I'm talking about. That reminds me of that ancient Chris Rock bit where he's explaining what getting your salad tossed in prison is. When you eat an ass. What was it? With jelly or syrup. I prefer syrup. He's like, when you eat an ass, you know it's ass. Yeah, probably the funniest little pre-meme days

when you were a middle school kid in the late 90s, early 2000s. You just had to repeat shit you saw off TV. And yes, that whole skit, I mean, I knew folks who had that committed to memory. I was one of them. I was absolutely one of them. I can't remember my times tables, but Chris Rock's Bigger and Blacker burned into my gray matter. Exactly. All the important things, the things that matter.

So anyway, Big Head Yang. Big Head Yang takes this huge bribe and lets the Taipings coast down the river. And this ends up kind of being their main mode of transportation. They become effectively like a boat-based rebellion here. their main mode of transportation. They become effectively like a boat-based rebellion here. Now, thousands of them pack into these small boats. They're mostly like junks and rafts and stuff like that.

They avoid heavily guarded cities, only walking into abandoned ones or ones that are unguarded or lightly guarded, taking what they need, and then got back on their boats. While on their boats, they sail by the city of Guangzhou. That's when the king of theuan zhao uh that's when the king of the south fang yun shan effectively the second of the second in command of the entire rebellion because he's a very close friend of hong at this point he is sniped off of his boat while seated on a sedan chair by a government cannon oh no it's the last thing you want this happens with frightening regularity in

this rebellion like maybe the imperial artillerists were just like fucking i don't know like juba the baghdad sniper up with this bitch oh man now this infuriates hong and he orders his army to attack the city in revenge the garrison commander of the city sends out a demand for assistance to other local commanders who just ignore him because remember they're mostly independent warlords um at this point when things get really grim he knows the city is going to fall he sends out another demand of reinforcements written in his own blood. Now, despite this being metal as fuck, it does not work. The rebels eventually storm the city in June,

slaughter every living thing they find inside, all within two days. It's thought that tens of thousands of people die in this. But since they also set a lot of shit on fire, we're not really sure. Then they abandon the city and keep heading north now half of the army is on boats and the other half is marching alongside them on the shore for protection um now according to god's chinese son uh the book uh not hong himself uh the mass

slaughter that the rebels committed in that city tuckered them out. They were sleepy from all the murder over the last two days. So they didn't bother to send any scouts ahead of them. It's also kind of unknown if they knew what scouting was at this point. They're kind of learning how to do army stuff on the fly. And that's where a local militia leader, Jiang Zhongyun, is waiting for them. Unlike a lot of people the rebels have been fighting so far, Jiang has quite a lot of experience. He's been commanding local militias and fighting rebellions for over 10 years. And at this point, China has a rebellion seemingly every six months. So he has a lot of combat and leadership experience so he sets up a complex

l-shaped ambush on the zhang river only five miles outside the city that the rebels had just annihilated has been cut down trees and blocked the river and a portion that was really fast and it goes around a bend so the rebels couldn't see it coming. The rebel boats round the bend of the river and slam into the trees, unable to stop themselves because of the strength of the current and because they didn't see the ambush coming. Once there, the militia opens fire on them

as more and more boats crash into the growing pile that it's forming along the trees. One of the boats eventually catches on fire, because remember, they're carrying a fuckload of gunpowder and explosives and this quickly spreads through the pile up burning thousands of rebels to death um the ground like the ground force of the rebels is actually on the other side of the river and cannot cross uh because it's too large and so they can't do anything they're literally just sitting there watching 10 000 people die in the river this is basically like if red cliff was a blues brothers

movie like this is insane and like the the rebels on the other side of the river were just like uh i guess we're gonna run away they just ditched them uh the king of the south who had yet uh died from his cannonball wound dies burning alive on his boat along with like i said 10 000 of his men um yeah it's now this absolutely could have ended the rebellion but zhang doesn't have nearly enough men to go after the ground force like he's outnumbered like five to 10 to one, something like that. So he just has to let them run away. Now the surviving army breaks away and heads towards the Hunan province, only to find the government had cut all of the bridges that allow them to cross the river. At this point, Hong has zero plan of where to go. So the army

just kind of wanders south, running into the city of Diaozhou and takes it over by mid-June. Here they camp out for about a month, destroying local temples, as they generally do at this point, wherever they go, but they have no plans. Hong is not a planning guy. So they settle in and try to convert the local population, seeing how they really needed to replace those 10,000 men that just burned to death in the river. Now, the only people who listen to them at this point seemingly want no part to do with the religious aspect of their movement, only the fuck the government part of the messaging. We've said on the show numerous times, it's the unifying theory of fuck that guy. The imperial government is inept and corrupt and people fucking hate it

so it doesn't matter if a guy is claiming to be jesus christ's little brother or not if you're going to give them a gun and let them go like take a shot at an imperial soldier they'll take it um now this is a combination of different people from different class and parts of society it was the poor the destitute who blame the government in a lot of cases for bad harvests, bad resource redistribution, incredibly high taxes. That's one thing that the King Imperial Court taxed the living fuck out of the Chinese people, especially the peasantry. And in a lot of places when the Taiping government, if you want to call it that, showed up, And in a lot of places, when the Taiping government, if you want to call it that, showed up, taxes dropped by 80%. So yeah.

Yeah. So at this point... Now, this will get bad as the rebellion starts to enter its what I'll call its terminal decline stage in a couple of years. Because this goes on for a decade plus. But in the early stages, saddling up with the Taipings, all of their weird religious set aside, was kind of a sweet deal for a lot of people. Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. Like you said, that in a number of these instances, just like the anecdote about the Imperial

Army just blundering right into a sort of on-the-fly linear ambush from a group of people that aren't an army, that aren't a military force at this point, it just seems that across the board, they've had so many opportunities where they probably could have crushed this if they'd wanted to, but it's just through total incompetence, corruption, whatever have you, they were not able to. And so it's just like, yeah, you can see that a lot of this is just, I don't know, it just starts to seem like pinball because there's not enough on the imperial side. There's none of people, none of resources to actually exploit a situation that could give them a decisive victory. Call it that.

Pretty much. The imperial army is very decentralized, like I said, effectively regional militias with someone who may or may not have any military experience in charge, like the local governor or something like that. They don't really work together. And their men are effectively untrained militiamen or levies from the local community.

At this point, this will change quite rapidly in the future. But at this point, the Imperial Army is as much an army as the Taipings are. So they just have better guns and better gunpowder for now. Now, a lot of the recruits are also the members

of the local triads, which is the mafia, because the Taiping effectively just let them do whatever they want. This may have been a practical move for them. I mean, they're smart enough to realize that a lot of these people don't believe Hong is

Jesus Christ's little brother. But you got to get it where you can get it. They'd absorbed a lot of these people into the ranks already, hoping they could turn them over to Jesus Hong later. And Hong sells them on joining the army by... And this is like entire families that go.

There's men, women, and children in all of these formations it's effectively a moving country at this point because they have yet to settle down somewhere um now he sells them on this by talking about how much the manchu suck they're barbarians and they need to be destroyed because again remember he believes them to be literal demons it turns out racism is a pretty good selling point uh in comparison to god uh because this really really works around 50 000 people join them in short order this is on top of the fact they already had hundreds of thousands of followers so like his message is is hitting um they eventually walk into the town of chen zhao where they set up their operations. But still, Hong comes up with no plans on what to do next.

So his West King, Zhao Chao Gai, hatches a plan to attack the provincial capital of Changsha. This does not go well. Zhao marches towards the city, but it had taken so long to get there that the imperial forces in the city were able to dig in and reinforce their positions. So the rebels decide to dig siege tunnels to go into the city's walls so they could then be blown up however now there's a lot of people in the taiping ranks who were miners like that's what they did you know because it's for they're recruiting for like destitute peasantry right so like a lot of them are manual laborers miners whatever they don't bring any of these guys with them for some reason to do this. So they have a couple, but they hire local miners to carry out the work.

The miners don't do a great job. Out of 10 tunnels planned for the operation, only three are finished. And then when things are going south, those miners fucked off into the countryside. So they have three finished tunnels. The defenders had known that they were digging. In mining, tunneling, military operations, generally they have someone like, you can tell when there's a tunnel being built. In God's Chinese Sun,

they can tell because the trees and stuff above will just start dying. Gotcha, yeah. I mean, this is a long enough timeline too that that sort of thing is going to become pretty apparent. Yeah, and they can hear it. When the tunnel's big enough, piles of dirt start

appearing. So it's pretty obvious. So they build counter tunnels, which is tunneling at them at a different angle. And then they drown these sneak attackers out of their tunnels with a mixture of water and human shit uh which just drowning underground in a torrent of sewage

so basically what happens is they are unable to maintain the element of surprise. Oh, they don't even have it. Yeah. And so the Imperial forces defeat them with dark version Shawshank Redemption. Yeah, pretty much. Now, seeing his men's morale failing, the Heavenly Kingdom's King of the West, Zhao, the guy who's leading this operation, rode onto the scene personally. the guy who's leading this operation, rode onto the scene personally. He dons his royal heavenly robes, which are bright yellow, and held the banner of Christ's brother in his hands, riding out to the front line on a white horse trying to cheer up his men.

You know what happens next, right? Well, I mean, considering that they have these 360 no-scoping-ass cannoneers on the Imperial side. I imagine that he probably gets taken out. He sure does. Again, by a piece of artillery. I have to throw this in as an aside and I don't want to derail us too much, but it is very funny when you think about the fact that the guy who got sniped earlier in this episode survived and was forced to be on a boat that

did the blues brothers car pile up on water and died that way. It's like, it wasn't enough to get fucking completely nailed by, you know, a one in a trillion shot with a cannon he then also lived and basically had to burn to death on water look i'm starting to think that uh that uh jesus lost the mandate of heaven here you know what i'm saying like i think jesus is pretty unhappy with his little brother at the moment you know uh and

again remember these these guys these directional kings are supposed to be jesus's cousins so like yeah there's some and there's some serious god family beef going on yeah exactly you know what this this is this is this is a like a divine episode of jerry springer right i'm just waiting for someone to find out that someone's cousin is pregnant from the other cousin and then they can fight. Oh, you are not the father. Just doing a paternity test with like 800 different fucking concubines. Jesus Christ.

An Imperial Army artilleryman saw him, probably looked at the way he was dressed like, that guy looks really important and unleashed a cannonball that connected him to god's wi-fi his entire army watched though depending on what reading of this is he didn't die immediately either but um some people say he died immediately the reason for this is very complicated so mostly that hong is weird but hong gets pissed again that another one of his directional kings, his celestial cousins got clapped.

So he ordered his entire army to attack the city. The siege went on pointlessly for another month before the attack was called off. Now, one of the reasons why we don't know exactly when he died is because in their ideology, these people cannot die, right? Like he's God's grandchild. How could he die? They don't die. You ascend to a higher state. And you can't acknowledge that they're dead by saying, Xiao died, or he's gone to heaven or whatever. So he simply never acknowledges death. He supports this in a decree from his own version of the Bible that he wrote called the Book of Heavenly Decrees and Proclamations that says, quote, the deeper you're suffering, the more awe-inspiring your reputation. So if death isn't real, you simply ascend.

That's the best thing you can possibly do. You don't die. You simply ascend to the heavenly kingdom. That is not earthly because they're also building heavenly kingdom. And another reason why we don't know when he exactly died is Hong kept issuing declarations to his army in the name of Zhao, the king of the West, never accepting that he was dead. He never even promoted Zhao's son to the old position because, again, that would be acknowledging that Zhao had died. Being divine and all, his son was only allowed to be the junior king of the West.

Ah, burn. Like, you have been, I mean, he probably has been waiting his whole life to ascend this meaningless throne, but, you know, he probably assumed he's going to be king. No, you're king junior, which sounds like a shitty fast food chain. Yes, fair. Now, while the siege of Changsha had failed, he did manage to steal close to a thousand boats from the region while it was ongoing because they had to replace their flotilla that had just burned up. So they load back into them and head north. After this, they sail towards the town of Wuchang, the capital of Hubei, covering 300 miles in just 25 days. They're moving really fast.

They don't stop for anything. They also cut all of the bridges behind them. So government forces would be slowed down or stopped if they're trying to follow them. Now, Wuchang is heavily guarded and easily defended due to its large fortifications. oh wuching is heavily guarded and easily defended due to its large fortifications so instead of attacking it directly because i assume they learned their lesson from the last time they seized two towns the north of the city from there they built massive pontoon bridges that could cross the yangtze river which if nobody's ever seen a picture of the yangtze it's fucking huge huge massive there's a reason why the world's i believe the world's biggest and or most powerful

hydroelectric dam is on the yangtze because it's so gigantic that you know it took them i think 25 years to build a dam to harness it and now it generates like yeah more hydroelectric power than anywhere else on earth i believe if it's not the number one it's like it's got to be number two and they built a fucking pontoon bridge across it um and now they use this to attack wu chang from the northern side because the yangtze is so huge the city's fortifications were built largely undefended on the side of the yangtze because like how could anybody possibly attack us from this angle right so yeah at this point the governor of the city panicked burned every home outside of the city's walls so that uh his artillery gunners had a clear field of view which i would argue at this point it's pretty clear they didn't even need they would just be able to they'd hit fucking hong between the eyes of the cannonball from 500 meters but uh

they then put a bounty on every rebel soldier. What they're trying to do is convince the civilian population to take part in the defense for the government. However, there's a small problem. When you order people out of their homes and then set them on fire, they start to fucking hate you. So the people of the city turn on the governor and stand aside, allowing the rebels to march in pretty much undefended on January 12th, 1853. And this is so far the largest town they had captured. They do all of the things they did in the other cities, stripping everything from the government officials and placing it in the central treasury. They also enforce a tithe on people in the city, even if they're not converts to the religion. That tithe happens to be everything,

all of your assets, from jewelry down to food and livestock. Of course, that idea is like it goes into the central treasury to be redistributed, but it never is. All trade within the city is banned and everyone is given a strict daily ration of food, which is not nearly enough.

It consists of three-tenths of a pint of rice and a sprinkle of salt. Ah, not good. Doesn't seem like a lot of sustenance there. Yep, yep. And remember, no food or private trade can happen within city walls. However, you have to get clearance to leave the city.

You have to pay for the paperwork to be processed and stuff like that. So if you're poor, which you almost certainly were because they killed all the rich people whenever they came in like you just had to live off of this bullshit um now this rule was eventually lifted somewhat um they did open shops outside the city because originally when they went into witching that was also banned i think that's just like something they did whenever they first moved in to solidify their control and get people in line. But when they lifted the shops, they decided there has to now be a separate shop for each gender.

Say one fish shop for men, one fish shop for women. And there could be no cross over that at all. No mixing was allowed. And if you were married, your marriage was no longer valid because it had been ordained by the Manchu demons. Right? So, nobody's married, really, anymore. I'm sure that makes people

very happy. That's how you win people over. It engenders a lot of support for the new boss. I mean, eventually you'll be starving to death from your sprinkle of salt so much you won't be able to fight back too hard, I guess. Now, the entire city is put within a military organization of the rebellion, with every citizen being grouped into a set of 25 and then ordered to listen to a sergeant. Literally, this was everybody.

This is not just the military. Everyone from old men down to toddlers. Everyone from old men down to toddlers. These sets of 25 were completely segregated by sex, meaning they broke up large families, marriages, whatever. Any kind of traditional life that people would have previously known, gone. Now, say you weren't a child or an old man and you had a trade, like bricklayer, cook, whatever.

You'd be put into a group based on that trade. This was your new life. These sets of 25 are placed into different camps within the city. And if you abandoned them, you'd get your head cut off. Yeah. This sounds, like I said, very dictatorial, obviously, very totalitarian, but also outside of us looking at it and saying, wow, the horrors of this insane cult, it's also just from a practical standpoint, it seems like this is how you create a situation in which these people will turn on you at the soonest opportunity. And it feels as though there's going to be a lot of opportunities. There is a reason why the Taipings had a pretty bad spy problem.

A lot of people are unhappy with them. But more importantly than turning people against you, this is an indoctrination process. This is like telltale cult separation, indoctrination, step-by-step. They're taken from their families and placed in a religious re-education camp led by a guy, the sergeant, who they're supposed to address as your worship and had absolutely no way out of it. That guy is in charge of everything to do with your life from when you go to pray, when you sleep, when you work, when you eat, everything. And this goes on for a month. So when Hong and his men march out of the city, they take tens of thousands of

new recruits with them. So it worked for their purposes, I guess. Though I also should point out here his benevolence towards people who aren't believers is starting to fade um so if you're a fuck the government type guy didn't care about the religious aspect of it you had to fake it um because if you didn't well you're an apostate apostate right and they have one punishment for that choppy choppy i was gonna say i presume death seems like it's a pretty consistent theme throughout now unfortunately the next target for the rebellion nan king 600 miles away down the river now nan king was a

massively important city not just regionally but throughout the entire all of Imperial China. It was the former capital of the Ming Dynasty. It was considered one of the capitals of scholarship and learning. It was a provincial capital of the country's richest province as well. This is one hell of a prize. Suitably, there are forts and garrisons along the river meant to defend this very important place. And you'd think this would be very hard for the rebels to attack, going down this increasingly more defended river.

But the rebels simply ignore them. They float by in their growing fleet of ships, jump out, loot whatever they could, but ignored most of them. They avoid places where a fight might be you know put up uh they attack smaller forts and garrisons at most that's what they attack and at this point they have grown so large that even the better armed better manned outposts are like we want absolutely nothing to do with this fucking fight and these garrisons let them float by without firing a shot uh and generally just hoping like maybe they'll leave us alone uh maybe we'll get to live uh and they do because remember like if you're a if you're a soldier in one of these imperial armies at this point you know what

what fate lies for you should you surrender which is real real bad uh they're like the tai pings are gonna kill you real bad So you don't want to... Your best bet is maybe if we ignore them, they'll ignore us. And it works. It's funny because I was thinking to myself as to drop in a joke here to say, I can only imagine that if news of this was traveling across what is now modern People's Republic of China, that you imagine people in Urumqi, really far western China in Xinjiang, are probably like, fuck, dude, glad we don't live on that big-ass river.

And then I looked it up on Wikipedia, and I'm not wrong in terms of the timeline of the Taiping Rebellion, but six years after the Taiping Rebellion is finally crushed, there is a battle between various forces in the region, and Urumqi is burned to the ground. So they probably did say, whew, glad I'm not that fucking guy. But then the 19th century in China came for them too. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't seem like anybody could

really get away from some form of rebellion or another. Now, at this point, spies are sent ahead, which are more missionary than spy. The followers of Hong Jesus infiltrate Nanking and begin telling everyone that salvation is coming. They warn the upper class that if they just take off their official signs that note their titles outside their houses, they'll be spared. Not counting Buddhist and Taoist monks who are told to leave immediately because they'll be put to the sword. Though the rebels go to the Muslims who live in the city and tell them, you know what, you're cool. You and your mosques are fine with us this is the only religion including other sects of christianity that they would give this treatment to very weird like they fucking hate catholics

they really don't like anyone who isn't a taiping christian muslims get a pass totally fine huh no explanation for this is given that's so strange i mean i guess it's one of those things where it's like you know perhaps pick your battles yeah in the sense that yeah like like this is they are trying to assert themselves as this like messianic sect of christianity already a messianic religion and i suppose it's just sort of like maybe hypothetically they might be like we'll deal with them later but maybe they just were like whatever we don't we have no quarrel with you i genuinely i find that very very strange because normally these kinds of things particularly within call it like you know charismatic evangelical cult christianity there's normally no exceptions granted no certainly in the american version of

this in terms of like christian dominionists in terms of their ideology there is no exception granted the the only real excuse i could think of is that that i mean this might shock you nate uh chinese muslims are a pretty marginalized group of people um yeah and i also reckon it's probably a relatively small group overall. Certainly in this part of China. It is a very small one. And they are pretty... They welcome most marginalized minorities in China with open arms

for the most part. Because they realize that the government has fucked them over as well. But this seems to be the only time they just hand-wave away an entire religion as being fine because they run into other groups of christians that they fucking murder you know like yeah geez um but that that seems not to go off on a tangent but like that seems it makes sense to me

because if you are uh you truly believe that you're following the little brother of jesus christ and the son of god every other christ Christian sect has to be heretical, right? Correct. Yeah. And Muslims are like, well, we don't believe any of that stuff. We're cool. Like, yeah, all right, fine. You guys write good stuff about Jesus. Maybe slip me into that book and we'll all be fine. It's just weird.

But also, it's really hard as the series goes on. You'll see that it's not in our best interest to treat them like rational actors um yeah fair enough i mean so far i feel as though i'm coming to that conclusion on my own but yeah yeah i absolutely understand their ideology is as ethereal it just goes wherever it's liquid it's like you know it flows like water wherever they need it it is like water until all the boats traveling on it pile up in a huge car crash and burn. Yeah. Now, it takes the rebels another month to make the trip down the river towards Nanking.

Nanking is the strongest city they've come across yet. The walls are 40 feet tall and so thick they couldn't be mined or shelled with what the rebels had available to them. But again, the fortifications are built with a very important weak spot towards the river. As whoever built them, just like before, probably assumed that tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of cult members wouldn't one day float down the river and attack them. And in this case, it was a Northwestern corner of the city. By mid-March, they'd put so much stress on the city by attacking that Northwest corner, as well as the work of missionaries within the walls telling civilians, working with the agents of the Manchu, make them demons.

People start to break within the city. They start turning against the government. And the rebels breach the city walls. The defenders are finding it hard to hold positions because so many people just refuse to work with them in the hopes that openly refusing to comply with the government would mean they would be spared when the rebels showed up. So the rebels begin to blow up their other defenses, though they still aren't exactly experts in this, more of an on-the-job training situation. Because in one situation, the rebels are attempting to blow up a portion of the wall uh and it just explodes while they're setting it vaporizing probably hundreds of them at once uh but it does take the wall out so you know you get your your your hong suicide bombers

there um i don't think that the heavenly king had developed a jesus-based osha equivalent yet uh so things were quite unstable yeah this doesn't sound like it let's be honest yeah who would have thought right really thought safety was the cornerstone of hong belief i'll have you know that i follow all mandated guidelines while boiling dog's blood and horse shit so make sure the most important part to remember when boiling your dog blood and horse shit mixed with saltpeter to make gunpowder. So where are your PPE?

Exactly. You know what I mean? You don't want to get boiling dog blood in your eyes. I was going to say, if we get to 100 days without an accident, we get a four-day weekend. You don't want to be the person that ruins it for everyone else. Yeah. And the sergeant that commands every single facet of your life really wants that four-day weekend. I can also imagine that the

days without a safety hazard or safety violation or accident at the dog blood horse shit gunpowder factory probably never got above one. It was like the days without a DUI counter at Fort Richardson, Alaska. It's like the days without a DUI fatality in Fort Hood. It never got above like 10 while I was there. Yeah, man. Yeah, believe me. I was there for four years. Yeah, Richards, the only time it ever got above 30

at Fort Richardson was when all of the units were deployed. But don't worry, they made up for the lost time when they got back. Oh, as is tradition, yeah. Now, at at this point the majority of the city falls within a day uh government forces are only holding the central citadel and they have about 50 000 men packed inside but like i had pointed out before these are dudes with no training and now absolutely no will to fight however they know what's going to happen to them if they're captured by the rebels they're going to be murdered real real bad so once the walls

are breached they start shooting themselves by the thousands oh my god they literally tried to kill it's a race how fast can i kill myself before the rebels kill me uh or capture me because god they they what's really popular the government uses it a lot and so does uh the taipings is slow dissection for execution you know the death by a thousand cuts yeah it's awful it take it can take up to an hour to die so you get all these conscripts racing to shoot themselves in the face before some dude with long hair can grab him through a crack in the wall. However, the rebels eventually breached the walls and commenced murdering everything inside that didn't already kill itself. This included the thousands upon thousands of civilians that were hiding amongst government troops, which was many of their troops and leaders' families. Now, over the next few days, the rebels begin a slaughter

that, if it was not for the Japanese, would be the most horrific thing to ever occur within Nanking. Because for people who aren't aware, go listen to our Nanking series if you really want. Maybe have a drink before. It is comparable,

but not as long. the the japanese slaughter goes on for months yeah um the the taiping stop after a couple days now every manchu man is rounded up and murdered the men are ordered outside thrown into a pit and set on fire chinese catholics are given the same treatment unless they convert on the spot, but many who are converted are murdered anyway, telling them, good news, now you'll ascend. Ah, yeah, this just starts to sound like the hallmarks of, you know, it's like we're ticking off all of our boxes on the genocide rubric and starting to sound like it. Oh, there's more than one genocide in this series. I regret to inform you, Nate. They murdered at a minimum

40,000 civilians within just three days. Most of them with hand tools and burning. Yikes. Okay, animal fact. Studies have shown that goats have accents just like people do. Aw. Yeah, it's adorable.

What goat would have the worst accent? Oh, that's a, I mean, I feel as though you kind of reveal your own prejudices about what countries you don't like, but can you imagine an Australian goat? Bah, cunt. Yeah, exactly. Just imagining

a Boston goat. Fuck me, yeah. I can't do a Boston accent. I won't even try. I can't either. We don't even have to fake it. We can just splice in shocks at literally any episode he's ever been in. Now, by the time the smoke had cleared in Nanking, Hong was carried into the city

on a golden palanquin chair by 16 people, dressed in his own designed imperial robes of heaven, yellow on yellow in case anyone's curious, which I'm not into fashion. I don't care aboutes of heaven yellow on yellow in case he was curious which i'm not into fashion i don't care about fashion but yellow on yellow clashes it's got to like it's got to be two different colors right i mean i guess if you're doing all yellow like you know the like you're in the video for the gucci man song lemonade but otherwise if it's like different different you know uh shades tints whatever of yellow like that's that's gonna look weird yeah i come to you the son of god dressed as a banana

yeah yeah man yeah you know what like there's i guess there's no accounting for taste when you're a cult leader yeah when you're the son of god you don't need taste some motherfuckers gonna rock and wearing board shorts crocs and, you don't need taste. A motherfucker's gonna rockin' wearing board shorts, crocs, and like, I don't know, a fuckin' Supreme shirt. I was gonna say. Sup, bitches? A Hurley hat, something like that, yeah. Oh, God, he's just gonna dress like Blink-182 from 2002. Yeah, man, I mean, look, let him who did not dress like a chud in 2002 cast the first stone, but...

Sometimes I was blessed to be poor because i couldn't afford to dress like that i did have the big the big skateboarding shoes that looked like they were uh looked like they were clogged you know at knees or oh yeah those lines oh yeah those were the days when when everybody's feet looked like mickey mouse feet exactly now hong officially renamed Nanking the unimaginably named heavenly capital of the heavenly kingdom. Now, with a capital for his heavenly kingdom, things get weird. Things have already been weird, but things get weirder. He comes up with ideas for a nation rather than a rebellion. This includes land distribution, you know, things that we're fine with.

And then also an incredibly rigid police state system wrapped in the robes of clergy. The military organization of the church would not go away, but now it'd be a permanent everyday facet of life. Now, before he rationalized this by saying like, well, we're on the march, we're a militant group. But now that they have a city, now life is just going to be that way. From corporal up to general, everybody would fall under a military officer who'd be in charge of every facet of your everyday life, even to make sure you went to church. Because pain and religious beliefs were considered the best way to improve your reputation within the army,

most of these people were complete and utter psychopaths because you'd get promoted for glorious acts on the battlefield, of course, but also being grievously wounded. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it bred a ruling class of bloodthirsty zealots. Detailed rosters remain of this time and show that many of the sergeants that are in charge of those groups of 25 people were teenagers. They were now put in charge of people's lives. And the entire nation, if you want to call it that, was now under that rule. And some of those generals were also teenagers who are promoted based on their level of belief and how long they'd been with the rebellion. Some of them had since they'd been children because they were also still kind of children rather than any actual skill now about those detailed records rebel authorities issued

registration forms out to every household expecting a detailed census to be returned to them so they could then be used for taxation and drafting people for military service as well as the previous mentioned class and gender-based segregation. And you can guess what the punishment for not filling this format was. Probably death. Yep, you got it. It's death. They also set up a publishing house and began cranking out their own edited version

of the Bible, which Hong himself edited. Now, this was hastily edited to cut out anything that could contradict Hong's teachings, and modern scholars generally say it makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever. Now, some of this is, of course, due to Hong's religious ideology. But some of it also has to do with the fact that the Chinese

version they were working on was also a translation from a German version, making things even more confusing. So a lot's being lost in translation. What isn't being lost in translation is being cut to ribbons and left on the floor. The job of making these books turns into a full industry employing thousands of people and cranking them out. Now, things also get weirder regarding sex. Despite Nanking being the heavenly capital, we do need to talk about what is called the heavenly paradise. Now, the heavenly capital, the heavenly

kingdom, and the heavenly paradise are all three separate things. The heavenly paradise is something that Hong has been promising everyone that they were on their way to. Think of it as like Shangri-La. Not the ICP version of Shangri-La, but just Shangri-La in general. Right.

Now, this heavenly paradise, ever since he began preaching, he was telling people that this paradise was a literal, physical place that he and his followers would find, though he never actually said where it was, and that only he and God knew where this place was and until that time they found this paradise all of these draconian laws that we've explained so far would be kept in place in order to prove their devotion and maintain their purity before their entry

into paradise and I should point out here at no point before Hong dies does he ever say where this paradise is it just slips from his mind, I guess. So it's basically, they've got a plagiarized Sparknotes Bible and a promise of the Tai Ting Big Rock Candy Mountain. Yes. So since this is not heavenly paradise, just a heavenly capital, total segregation among sexes, classes, all that is still demanded. This included married couples.

So remember, I mean, their marriages are annulled because Hong doesn't count them. But Hong wouldn't marry anybody else together until they found this heavenly paradise.

So you can see how this is going to be a problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, you're fucking with people's nuptials. You know what I mean? It's just kind of thing you want to do.

Hong and all of his celestial family have multiple wives. So like, people like, hmm, this isn't really adding up. So people do what they do. They sneak out and fuck. This included married couples who haven't been able to see each other, in some case, for years at this point. And prostitution runs rampant. So Hong echoing religious poetry in an order that would so from here on out he only passes edicts in the form of

religious poetry um so yeah uh pretty much from the time he enters nan king he just stops leading anything he just spouts off religious poetry and expects his celestial kings to enforce everything it's very weird well something that's interesting to me and i realized we're on a timeline for this episode like surely this results in for example children being born like it has to and so i'm wondering do they do they kill these children they punish these couples they punish uh you know women getting pregnant. Like, because if it's no sex allowed and no marriage allowed, like,

well, there's going to be some proof that I guess you could say like, yo, God's been really, really busy doing immaculate conceptions. But at a certain point, like folks are going to be, God fucks.

well, there is, so anybody that's found, um, sneaking out and fucking is put to the sword period um so you know obviously a pregnancy's evidence of this so women would have to hide their pregnancies until they gave birth um and generally it seems they let the they left the children alone um and of course if you're gay you know how this ends uh yeah i'll get the sword yeah shouldn't really have to point that out but

hong hong had a particular hatred for homosexuals not entirely sure why um other than it's the 1800s and he's running a theocracy but yeah they were so paranoid about people fucking that even so like i've we've already talked about these sex segregated stores right but one thing that really wasn't was like tailors, like wash and repair places were generally women. And it was kind of considered fine for men to give their clothes to women to be washed and repaired. But once they get to Nanking, banned entirely.

When you take that disgusting hair shirt from someone that they've just been boiling dog's blood in and you go to wash it, that means you're going to fuck. You can't do that anymore. Instead, we have to recruit a battalion of only heterosexual tailors who are men in order

to make sure that no twinks allowed working in the garment shop. Hong sitting up in his throne is like, I want that twink destroyed. Exactly. In order to further the segregation, all women and children in all of the territory controlled by the rebels are all set the Nanking. Trade is banned within the walls, again, forcing anybody to leave the city to the same kind of segregated stores as everywhere else. As you can imagine, create a religious police state controlled by various groups of corporals,

sergeants, and whoever requires a massive government. And soon the rebels create their own labyrinth of bureaucrats and administrators as staff of these people who are now in charge. So they've become what they hate. So soon, of course, the heavenly governing society balloons. Six government ministries are created. The ministries of heaven, earth, spring, summer, autumn, and winter, as well as

50 different departments under them. And of course, each king of each direction will need a palace. So they come with a department to handle that too, pouring resources into building vanity products for all of Jesus' local celestial family at a level that would make a Gulf state state tyrant not an approval meanwhile i mean this basically sounds like as you just described they've become the thing that they rebelled against yep rapidly

like it happened very very quickly um meanwhile the imperial government is beginning to panic losing nan king underlined that the empire was truly at risk. They began reaching out to foreign powers for help and assistance, namely the British and French, but also the Americans. Now, at this point, they're not getting a lot of help. Mostly, it boiled down to securing those countries' trading ports within China. Now, I'm not going to go into too much detail about the foreign powers because, as of yet, they aren't doing much. However, it's important to note here that the rebellion is slowly becoming something of an international problem. Representatives from the British, French, and the Americans all meet with the rebels at different points, and every party came to the impression that the rebels cannot be treated as an actual government because they're batshit insane.

But that didn't stop them from trading with them. Official trading posts are set up by all of these powers within the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. A lot of work is also done by smugglers, but they trade with them. There was a lot of official trade that tapers off later because eventually all of these groups get involved directly in the war. But there is a lot of stuff falling out of the back of the truck type situations happening all over rebel held territory through mostly British and French trading posts. Though any official acceptance of them as an actual power in China is shit canned. For example, when the British met with them, figuring they could be like, hey, we're Christians too, so let's trade and be friends. We don't care

about the war. The rebels countered by saying, well, if you're true Christians, you should swear allegiance to Hong, and your king is clearly a demon. When other delegates visited, I believe it was the French they got shot at. They're starting to realize these guys aren't all there.

Yeah, not particularly reliable, huh? Yeah, it's like setting up an embassy in ISIS-held territory. You're going to be walking on eggshells. And also, just like ISIS, a lot of countries did fucking business with them, officially and otherwise, and also Hobby Lobby. But that's a different topic. Now, back in the Heavenly Capital, Hong dispatched an army to advance on Peking to the north. The government was convinced that they would succeed and began evacuating the capital as well as important tax documents towards Manchuria.

The northern advance of the rebels ran smack dab into another rebellion taking place at the same time, something that'll happen a lot during this series. This was the Nian Rebellion, based again on the Imperial government not being very good at their jobs in the wake of several floods and famines in a particular region. And that's a gross oversimplification, but it had a lot to do with it. The two forces met one another, decided to throw their lots in, though only temporarily. They weren't going to buy into one another's political or religious ideology at all. The rebel army grew to be around 70,000 men and the advance quickly went badly.

The imperial government dispatched soldiers from Manchuria and Mongolia to insist the imperial army and rallied militias to fight and defend the various small towns that stood in the rebel army's way. They also gave strict orders for all boats to remain beached on the north side of the Yellow River, meaning the rebels couldn't hijack them and repeat what they'd been doing this whole time, so they'd have to walk. This also turned to

a bit of a problem as the rebellion was born and raised in the south, and southern men did not know the north whatsoever, so they just kept getting lost. The imperial government also understood pretty quickly that the rebels had no functional logistical system because they didn't. They brought almost nothing with them and depended on capturing towns and cities and looting them to feed and supply their armies. So now Imperial troops adopted a scorched earth campaign.

Anything that the rebel army could come even close to touching was put to the flame. So they had nothing. And then if that wasn't bad enough, the rebels didn't bother to secure their own line of advance behind them. So supplies sent from them from the heavenly capital would then be captured by the government. And then for reasons nobody's entirely sure of, when the road to Peking was largely wide open, they randomly veered west to lay siege to the town of Tianjin. And

then, because, you know, turning off the planned route to attack something else entirely takes time, winter sets in. The southerners weren't ready for the brutal northern winters and brought no winter clothing with them. The winter alone forced them to turn back towards the south from their attack on Tianjin, which shouldn't have happened in the first place. Soon, thousands of rebels were dropping dead from exposure and frostbite. Initially, when they went into town, people were happy to see them, as per reasons that we talked about before. Fuck the government, lower taxes, let's take all their shit. However, before long, the rebel army was starving, freezing to death, and dying of thirst.

So they fell on towns like plagues of locusts, and anyone they didn't murder outright turns back towards the government because they were clearly less insane in murdery than their supposed saviors. Before long, the rebel drive towards Peking, which had taken a full year and covered 2,000 miles,

bogs down. Their idiot choice to attack Tianjin had given the government the time they needed to come up with a counterattack, and things would now start going very badly for the heavenly rebels. And that's where we'll pick up next time on the Taiping Rebellion Part 3.

Alright. Well, you know what? It couldn't have happened to a nicer group of guys. Yeah, yeah. I'm starting to think that the god family beef is only going to grow from here on out. That's the. I'm starting to think that the God family beef is only going to grow from here on out. That's the impression I'm getting as well. Nate, thank you so much for joining me here on part two.

You can use this area to plug your various shows that you're involved with. Yeah, so I am the co-host of What a Hell of a Way to Die, a show that I do with a friend of the show, Francis Horton, basically explaining why you shouldn't join the military, but also talking about being guys, in his case, over 40, in my case, pushing 40, and the very dad-related things that we do. I'm also the producer of Kill James Bond, a podcast hosted

by three extremely funny trans people, Alice Caldwell Kelly, Abigail Thorne, and Devin, in which they have reviewed the entire Bond series, but now are moving on to other genres and films, et cetera, to include the entirety of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., the entirety of The Bourne series, and so many more. Great show. You should check it out. And of course, I am the producer and sometimes co-host of Trash Future, a podcast that makes fun of the tech industry and its self-talk, propagandizing, and insane public relations, as well as just weird financial crimes throughout the world and the politics of the United Kingdom, a country that I have lived in for almost five years and I'm now doomed to stay in. So yeah, check any of those out if they sound interesting to you.

They're available on basically every podcasting platform out there. And everybody, thank you so much for listening to this show. If you like what we do here and you want to support us, you can support us on Patreon. You get episodes like this one early, access to our Discord, five years of bonus episodes, which sounds weird saying that we've been doing this for five years already, and all sorts of other stuff. And if you don't want to do that, that's fine. It's your money. Do with it what you will. But maybe leave us a review on whatever platform you pod, you cast your pod on because that helps us a lot. That's how we got our history podcast of the year award, stuff like that. So support the show in one way or another.

We love it when you do either or. And Nate, thank you so much for joining me again today and until next time mix that dog blood with that horse shit it works it may not smell good but it works