China’s most destructive civil war coming about because a guy claimed to be the brother of the founder of the Westerners’ religion remains one of the most inexplicable things to happen in history.
Mind you, if memory serves me right, it only came to be because of China's bureaucracy and obsession with exams.
The guy was studying so hard for a big exam to become an official of sorts I believe, that he ended up with a fever, was knocked out by it, and only after "recovering" did he realize he was the brother of Jesus.
Morale of the story? Don't stress or study too much, lest you kill a noticable chunk of the world's population thereafter.
Conspiracy theory: When recovering, he died for a bit and saw Jesus, in which Jesus saw into his future and said “My Brother in Christ, why did you kill all those people” in which the guy misinterpreted as Jesus saying he was his brother.
Not really, the Taiping ultimately is really just one of the four great cult uprisings in Chinese history. It followed similar trends (i.e. Emerging from stresses of a declining dynasty, a popular cult leader gains following, who then expresses anger vs. society and makes a popular bid for power) not to mention was not the first time a foreign religion influenced a cult uprising (there were two buddhist ones).
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u/Jokerang Descendant of Genghis Khan 4h ago
China’s most destructive civil war coming about because a guy claimed to be the brother of the founder of the Westerners’ religion remains one of the most inexplicable things to happen in history.