Almost feels like I was specifically summoned for this, somehow...

A lot of laypeople's introduction to the Taiping is its apparently weird and wacky theology. As you can tell I'm already casting aspersions on this idea, not least because at one level if any piece of theology is wacky then all of it is, seeing how it's the study of the nature of transcendent forces whose effect on the universe – if they even have one – may not even be perceptible, and for another, there's a certain insensitivity about focussing exclusively on the personal religious experience of a handful of men, especially in isolation, over the political and social consequences of one and a half decades of warfare that many contemporaries saw in apocalyptic terms.

On the other, it is still interesting to talk about, and properly understood, there is much to be said about Taiping theology on its own terms. However, I'm not here to talk about Hong Xiuquan today, at least not primarily. He is interesting and all, but your question regards the second coming of Christ, and Hong's conception of his own divinity was very non-Christ-like, not least in claiming to be the younger brother of (and hence subordinate) to Jesus, and of having no inherently divine aspect, at least not while incarnated, only a particular personal connection to God. I'm here to talk about someone else entirely – Xiao Chaogui.

Taiping theology is often seen as purely a warping of Christianity, but this is deeply unfair. Syncretism is not simply a case of adding traditions to each other, but in fact integrating them together to form a broadly coherent set of beliefs. The aspect explored by Thomas Reilly concerns the Taiping's equivocation of the Abrahamic God, rendered in Protestant bibles as shangdi, with the head of the pre-Qin Dynasty pantheon, Shangdi. As a consequence of this, their promotion of the Bible and diminution of the Confucian Books, especially Mencius, was not seen as a complete break with the past, but in fact framed as an act of classical revivalism.

But one other aspect, and quite a significant one, was the interaction of the Taiping interpretation of the Bible and the folk religious traditions of rural Guangxi. Guangxi lay (and still does lie) within a region of southwestern China with a strong indigenous presence, and so settler peoples like the Hakka came to absorb many indigenous influences into their own folk beliefs, one of which was spirit possession. During a period in 1848 where both Hong Xiuquan and his cousin, Feng Yunshan, were away from the growing Taiping core near Guiping, a handful of God-Worshipping Society members claimed the ability to channel the voices of particular figures. Most of these were, it seems, declared inauthentic, but two men's channelings were verified: Yang Xiuqing, who claimed to channel the voice of God, and Xiao Chaogui, who channeled that of Jesus.

It is not exactly certain why Hong and Feng were so willing to accept the claims of these men when their position was so clearly threatened by it, given the power that would be held by someone able to speak as God at any moment. Was it genuine conviction? A belief that they would still hold sway over the two? Or had Yang and Xiao's leadership in Hong and Feng's absence left them too powerful to remove? Our sources say relatively little on the rationale at work, and the only supplementary information we have, in Theodore Hamberg's relaying of Hong Rengan's testimony in 1854, has nothing more to say except that Yang's legitimacy was bolstered by the performance healing miracles – but that still leaves Hong and Feng's motives for accepting the claims unstated. Similarly, the relationship between Xiao and the rest of the Taiping leadership is unclear. This has left some room for speculation. The 2000 Taiping Heavenly Kingdom miniseries produced on the mainland screws with the chronology and the motives by situating Xiao Chaogui's first trance during the Jintian Uprising in 1851, as a cynical move to counterbalance the growing power of Yang. This is to say the least unlikely.

So why don't we hear of Xiao Chaogui? During the early years of the Heavenly Kingdom, he was an immensely important figure, as the movement's West King, Lord for Eight Thousand Years (the third-highest in the Taiping hierarchy); and a number of statements citing Jesus as conveyed through his body were made while the Taiping were at their second major headquarters in Yongan in 1851. But during this time, Xiao was wounded in battle during a Qing assault. This was not fatal – as Taiping accounts show, he was killed in battle nine months later outside Changsha, and continued to make statements as the West King. Nevertheless, the voice of Jesus became silenced. Given that he was still alive, it is plausible that Yang Xiuqing, seeking to displace a potential rival, suppressed the weakened (both physically and politically) Xiao to boost his own political prestige. Thanks to this untimely demise, Xiao never got to make an impression on the Taiping quite like Yang, who at one stage was confident enough in his power to inflict corporal punishment on Hong in his God persona, and confer growing titles on his normal mortal shell (including, very nearly, Hong's own rank of 'Lord for Ten Thousand Years'). While Hong still had to reckon with Yang's legacy six years after the latter's assassination (as a last-ditch counter to his growing influence) in 1856, Xiao is largely though not totally absent from most later accounts of the Taiping's origins like the 1862 Taiping Heavenly Chronicle. Except for a few accounts centred on the Taiping's early years, Xiao thus is at most a footnote in the annals of Taipingdom.

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