What happened to the God Worshipping Society and followers of Hong Xiuquan, as well as the Taiping religion more generally, after defeat of the Heavenly Kingdom?
Did the God Worshipping Society continue to exist in China, or anywhere, following 1864? Were there small groups that continued to worship in secret? Are there any believers in Hong Xiuquan's religion alive today?
Alternately, if the Qing did manage to totally eridacte the religion how was this accomplished?
I know that after their defeat some former Taiping armies were pushed south, became bandits and caused problems for neighbouring states. Did these groups continue to practice the Taiping religion?
I also know that the tombstones of some Chinese emigrants to Australia during the Gold Rush show they were followers of Hong Xiuquan and that later groups resisting the Qing sometimes claimed to be inspired by, or successors to, the Taiping. Was there ever an attempt to revive the religion?
Any information on the above questions would be appreciated.
I've written answers on this in the past, but on reflection they are rather flippant and don't quite explore the issue as well as I would if I were to rewrite them now. Now, if only I could go back and rewrite them... oh wait.
Before we start, I'd like to make clear that from 1 January 1851, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was the God-Worshipping Society. Being the theocratic state that it was, the Heavenly Kingdom absorbed all the religious functions of its predecessor entity. Hence I'll be using 'Taiping' to refer to any post-1864 adherents.
Let's start off with that first question. What happened after 1864? The first thing to note is that there continued to be a resistance after Nanjing fell in July. French-backed troops in Zhejiang continued fighting Taiping remnants until October, and a Taiping remnant force under Li Shixian remained active out of Zhangzhou in southern Fujian through until May 1865. Li was, surprisingly, joined by a number of British defectors. After he was routed from Fujian, he retreated to Guangdong, where he was assassinated on 23 August by his lieutenant, Wang Haiyang, who surrendered six days later. On 6 June, Taiping remnants in Jiezhou, Gansu were wiped out by the Sichuan provincial militia. Taiping historian Jen Yu-Wen ends the Taiping Civil War with the defeat of Tan Tiyuan on his retreat from Jiaying in northeast Guangdong in early February 1866, though Franz Michael and Chung Li-Chang also include Lai Wenguang, a Taiping commander who joined the Nian in 1864 and held out until January 1868. However, all these examples were of resistance by conventional armed forces, not a guerrilla campaign. There's very little evidence if any for prolonged underground resistance.
As for secret unarmed worshippers, if they existed we do not know much about them, not least because, well, if there were any they evidently hid well enough to survive! While the possibility cannot be totally discounted, I'd say that at most very few actual Taiping devotees remained after the end of the Heavenly Kingdom, and not just due to Qing executions. First off, there is much to suggest that the number of steadfast devotees within the Taiping ranks had already dwindled significantly by 1864, so aside from those troops who fought to the death or were captured and executed, you might be hard-pressed to find any remnants. Secondly, the Taiping had grown very rapidly in specific social contexts, and the Taiping religion was very much linked in with Hong Xiuquan specifically. Unsurprisingly, a concerted proscription campaign combined with the death of that charismatic leader was not going to do much good for Taiping membership numbers in China. As such it's possible but highly improbable that any Taiping devotees remain to this day – compare, for example, Yihe Boxing. Are there any modern day Boxer Rebels? By eradicating the Taiping's public presence, such as by purging any Taiping documents that they could lay their hands on, the Qing destroyed the religion as an effective force.
If you're thinking of organisations like the Black and Yellow Flag Armies, then I'm afraid you've – directly or otherwise – bought into a French conspiracy theory. The bandit armies that coalesced in the northern Vietnamese borderlands were largely survivors of the Kingdom of Yanling, a separatist state in western Guangxi that claimed Taiping affiliation but otherwise had no direct connections. This may be the slight grain of truth behind French paranoia about 'Taiping' bandits disrupting the French colonial presence after their conquest of northern Vietnam in 1885, but in reality there was no significant Taiping presence among the Black Flags. Moreover, there was no significant – explicit – religious agenda to the Black or Yellow Flag forces, which were at worst opportunistic plunderers and at best anti-imperial resistors. Their targeting of Catholic missionaries can be understood as mainly a response to French encroachment, not the product of inherent religious zeal.
I'm afraid I can't give anything remotely close to a comprehensive answer about overseas Chinese, but talking a little closer to home, Hong Quanfu, Hong Xiuquan's nephew, is buried in Happy Valley Cemetery in Hong Kong, having been involved in an abortive bomb plot in Canton in 1903. There is little to suggest that he was still an active God-Worshipper, though the loose coalition of rebels in 1903 did attempt to revive some Taiping imagery. On the whole, though, I'd say there's little evidence for continued private belief, and basically none for an attempt to restore organised worship.
Sources, Notes and References