The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (18511864) was a Chinese Christian theocratic absolute monarchy which sought to overthrow the Qing dynasty. The Heavenly Kingdom or Heavenly Dynasty, was led by King Hong Xiuquan and his followers. Its capital was at Tianjing (present-day Nanjing). The unsuccessful war it waged against the Qing is known as the Taiping Rebellion. A self-proclaimed younger brother of Jesus Christ and convert to Protestant Christianity, Hong Xiuquan led an army that controlled a significant part of southern China during the middle of the 19th century, eventually expanding to a size of nearly 30 million people. The rebel kingdom announced social reforms and the replacement of Buddhism, Confucianism, Chinese folk religion, and Islam by his form of Christianity, holding that he was the second son of God and the younger brother of Jesus. The Taiping areas were besieged by Qing forces throughout most of the rebellion. The Qing government defeated the rebellion with the eventual aid of French and British forces. Background During the 19th century, the Qing dynasty experienced a series of famines, natural disasters, economic problems and defeats at the hands of foreign powers; these events have come to be collectively known as China's "century of humiliation". Farmers were heavily overtaxed, rents rose dramatically, and peasants started to desert their lands in droves. The Qing military had recently suffered a disastrous defeat in the First Opium War, while the Chinese economy was severely impacted by a trade imbalance caused by the large-scale and illicit importation of opium. Banditry became more common, and numerous secret societies and self-defence units formed, all of which led to an increase in small-scale warfare. Protestant missionaries began working from Macao, Pazhou (known at the time as "Whampoa"), and Guangzhou ("Canton"). Their household staff and the printers they employed corrected and adapted the missionaries' message to reach the Chinese and they began to particularly frequent the prefectural and provincial examinations, where local scholars competed for the chance to rise to power in the imperial civil service. One of the native tracts, Liang's nine-part, 500-page tome called Good Words to Admonish the Age, found its way into the hands of Hong Xiuquan in the mid-1830s. Hong initially leafed through it without interest. After several failures during the examinations and a nervous breakdown, however, Hong told friends and family of a dream in which he was greeted by a golden-haired, bearded man and a younger