From his base in south-west China, Hong’s movement built with astonishing speed and, by 1850, a Taiping force of more than 13,000 – it was to grow much bigger still – was moving steadily toward military confrontation with the empire.It was a struggle that brought 14 years of constant warfare until the Taiping were finally defeated. Hong began to preach and to refine his visions, adding to the Christian imagery his own millenarian elements drawn from the wealth of such material in the Chinese tradition. As he became more convinced of his mission, Hong and his followers began to attack the physical manifestations of the demons that so offended his Heavenly Father – the temples and shrines to other gods – thus bringing the Taiping into explicit conflict with official China. It was not until 1843, a year after the end of the first Opium War, that Hong rediscovered the tract and, on reading it, understood his mission.Against a background of a South China infested by pirates, brigands and secret societies. He had created and called on Hong, whom he designated his younger Son, to slay them. When his delirium abated, Hong did not forget his dreams, but since he could not understand them, he resumed his life and his (still unsuccessful) efforts to pass the exams.

On the second occasion of his failure, in 1837, Hong fell ill and experienced a series of visions in delirium that derived from a Christian tract he had picked up in Canton the previous year. In his dreams, he is summoned to Heaven, where a reproachful Heavenly Father, complete with long golden beard, laments the prevalence of demons in the world. Both were to become charismatic leaders whose delusions of omnipotence and omniscience brought disaster.Hong Xiuquan was the son of a farming family in Guandong province whose great ambition was that he pass the imperial exams and become an official For years he studied, but repeatedly failed. As the failed scholar Hong Xiuquan was reading his first Christian tract in 1836, the Qing dynasty, a Manchu dynasty already beginning to suffer from sclerosis, was losing its grip on the empire, undermined by the unceremonious challenge of the West and by incipient revolts within its borders. A century later, Mao Zedong was coming to political maturity in a time of post-imperial chaos, external aggression and warlordism. Both had reasons to reject the philosophy that had underpinned the empire for the best part of two millennia. The human cost of Mao’s dreams is still a matter of informed guesswork.

Even the margin of error is horrifying – somewhere between 43 million and 60 million people, Becker estimates, were to starve.
In both cases, the soil in which the ideas were to take root was well ploughed – or at least thoroughly disturbed – by social upheaval and the breakdown of the political order. In the case of Mao Zedong, it was the equally millenarian effect of Marxism, filtered through the lens of the Soviet Union, that led the Great Helmsman to believe that Chinese society could be transformed by force, that agriculture would respond to the power of his visions and that communism could be achieved in his own version of the Heavenly Kingdom. Both these books tell the extraordinary stories of what that meeting of thoughts produced: in the case of the Taiping, it was Christianity that blossomed in the mind of Hong Xiuquan, “younger brother of Jesus Christ”, into a dream of the Heavenly Kingdom on earth and a rebellion that took thousands of lives and shook the Qing empire to its foundations. Curiously, for a civilisation that prided itself on its intellectual, moral and political self-sufficiency, the most pervasive microbe was the dangerous and elusive one of the mind: Western ideas, transplanted, transformed in that alien soil, which took on new, strange forms. But when Westerners first breached the defences of China in substantial numbers in the early 19th century, the impact was not in diseases of the body – if anything, China’s microbes took their revenge for the impertinence of the early envoys, soldiers, traders and missionaries. The Visual Artists Branch of BECTU (the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph and Theatre trade union) has recruited Sunderland as a new member, and is helping to mount a “Free Simon Sunderland” Campaign.! ‘Graphotism’ magazine can be contacted at PO Box 352, Wallington, Surrey SM5 2WJ.. One of the tragic consequences of the expansion of Western power into new territories was the devastating impact that Western diseases had on civilisations previously unexposed.