| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Thomas H. Reilly. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 2004. Pp. xi , 235. $45.00.
Readers seeking a brief history of China's Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) might be attracted by the title of this book, but they should look elsewhere. This latest contribution to the voluminous scholarship on China's best-documented rebellion is not a narrative history with the usual attention to social and political context. It is instead a rambling essay on Taiping religious beliefs and practices, designed to demonstrate "the uniquely Christian character of the movement" (p. 11). Thomas H. Reilly is particularly intent on explaining the implications of the Taiping term for God: Shangdi. The first two chapters of the book explore prior Catholic and Protestant debates on the proper term for God, Shangdi having been rejected by Pope Clement XI in 1704 in favor of Tianzhu (Lord of Heaven) but later accepted by most Protestant churches. Early Jesuits such as Matteo Ricci and the Taiping favored the use of Shangdi because the term helped to link their God to ancient Chinese textual references to a supreme deity.	1
Reilly's most important contribution is to call attention to the political implications of the Taiping use of this term. Since the first empire of Qin Shi Huangdi, Chinese emperors had been called huangdi, the "di" meaning "Supreme Being" and being the same character used in Shangdi. The Taiping insisted that "di" should refer only to God and that its use for secular rulers was blasphemous. From this, Reilly concludes that the Taiping objective was "to topple the entire imperial institution" (p. 93) and that its historical legacy was the "delegitimization of the old imperial order" (p. 170).	. . .

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