Chapter 102. Mandate and Revolt: Secret Societies and Millenarian Rebellions from the Yellow Turbans to the Boxers

Chinese political theory contained its own justification for overthrowing the ruler. The ancient idea of the Mandate of Heaven, “that a ruler was selected by the deities to lead the people” [History of East Asia, #71236, Part 1 ch. 1], implied that Heaven could withdraw its choice, and religious movements repeatedly claimed to announce that withdrawal. Across seventeen centuries the sources show one pattern: a sect forms around a prophecy of renewal (Great Peace, Maitreya, a Heavenly Kingdom), organises the poor, is banned, goes underground and rises in arms. Two such risings helped end dynasties; a third, the Taiping, became one of the deadliest civil wars recorded. Popular history, reference works and esoteric “secret society” literature are kept distinct below.

The Yellow Turbans and the scripture of Great Peace

The Captivating History account of the Han states that “the founder of the Yellow Turbans, Zhang Jue, was a devotee of Taoism. He announced to the people that the Han domination was coming to an end.” His slogan was: “The Azure Sky is already dead; the Yellow Sky will soon rise”, the azure sky standing for the Han dynasty [History of East Asia, #71236, Part 1 ch. 3]. The reference shelf connects his movement to a text. Zhang Jue “taught ‘Taiping Taoism’ based on” the Taipingjing, the “Scriptures of the Great Peace”. That work held that the world was in chaos, shown by omens such as “droughts, floods, famines, epidemics”. It also held that a better age “can only begin with the emergence of a new healthy emperor, a new Heavenly Mandate and an end to evil omens” [Wikipedia: Taipingjing]. On this account the theology was itself a theory of dynastic replacement.

The size of the movement depends on the source. Annellen and C. Alexander Simpkins write that “most of China converted to Taoism by 184 C.E., with the exception of the area immediately surrounding the capital”. When the government threatened to prohibit Taoism, “more than 350,000 people joined together and rose against the government as one, wearing yellow turbans on their heads”. They conclude that “although they were not ultimately victorious, the rebellion seriously weakened the crushing grip of the Han dynasty” [Simpkins, Taoism for Beginners, #50704]. The Encyclopedia of World History’s timeline is briefer: “A peasant revolt in China contributes to the fall of the Eastern Han dynasty” [Encyclopedia of World History, #5204, “Revolt of the Yellow Turbans”]. Siroj Sorajjakool, drawing on Overmyer, places the movement in the history of religion. “Taoism was influenced by two sect movements: the Yellow Turbans (184–215 CE) and the Way of the Celestial Masters, sometimes referred to as the Way of Five Bushels of Rice (200–300 CE).” He adds that the Yellow Turbans “worshipped a mother goddess, Xi-wang-mu, the ‘Queen Mother of the West'”, believed to grant immortality to those who chanted her name [Sorajjakool, World Religions for Healthcare Professionals, #35015, ch. 5].

The White Lotus: Maitreya and the Red Turbans

The White Lotus tradition was the long-lived Buddhist counterpart. Micah Issitt and Carlyn Main describe it as growing “out of a Buddhist movement during the mid-Song dynasty” and becoming “an important part of the Chinese Maitreyan movement that lasted into the modern era”. In their view its uprisings were “partially motivated by religion but primarily providing a system of organization to broader groups that were united against governmental oppression”. Maitreya’s coming would bring “a golden age” [Issitt and Main, Hidden Religion, #66220, “White Lotus Society”].

The same entry gives the political sequence. The society joined an uprising in 1281. It was reorganised in the 1300s by Han Shantong, an opponent of the Mongol Yuan, and was then banned and forced underground. Han Shantong’s son Han Lin’er led an armed revolt in 1352 whose participants “wore red turbans”. These Red Turbans “helped Zhu Yuanzhang, the first emperor of the Ming dynasty, to capture Beijing in 1368”. However, “after Zhu Yuanzhang took control of China, he turned away from the Maitreyan movement and attempted to destroy the White Lotus Society, believing them to be a threat to his government”. In the 1620s the society was involved in “more than 20 armed uprisings against the Ming” [Issitt and Main, Hidden Religion, #66220]. The Captivating History account dates the outbreak a year earlier: “When the White Lotus organization was banned, they went underground. In 1351, the White Lotus movement spawned what was called the Red Turban Rebellion”. It calls Zhu Yuanzhang “the hallowed victor of the Red Turban Rebellion” [History of East Asia, #71236, Part 1 chs. 6–7].

The Qing: Sufis, the 1794 rebellion and the sect literature

Under the Qing, religious unrest came from several faiths at once. Toward the end of the Qianlong reign, the Jahriyya and Khafiyya branches of Sufism “erupted in violence” in 1781. The state executed the Jahriyya leader Ma Mingxin and sided with the Khafiyya. Activists who persisted “were frequently exiled to Xinjiang, Guizhou, and Yunnan to serve as slaves in the military garrisons” [History of East Asia, #71236, Part 1 ch. 8, “Religious Persecution: The Jahriyya Revolt”].

The White Lotus Rebellion of 1794–1804 spanned the transition from Qianlong to Jiaqing. According to the Captivating History account, its members “promised eternal salvation for loyalty to their cause and proclaimed that they adhered to Confucian values”. The Green Standard Army suppressed it, but there were spin-offs: “the Eight Trigrams, the Tiger Whips, and the Yihequan (‘Boxers’)” [History of East Asia, #71236, Part 1 ch. 8]. Issitt and Main say the rising began “as a protest against the tax system” under Liu Song and Liu Zhixie and spread to five provinces. They write that it drew “not only Maitreyan Buddhists but also members of many other religious and social groups united by a desire to see the end of the Qing dynasty and the return to Han Chinese leadership” [Issitt and Main, Hidden Religion, #66220]. For further study the Martial Arts of the World encyclopedia directs readers to Susan Naquin’s Millenarian Rebellion in China (1976), Shantung Rebellion: The Wang Lun Uprising of 1774 (1981) and “The Transmission of White Lotus Sectarianism in Late Imperial China” (1985) [Green (ed.), Martial Arts of the World, #88003, bibliography].

The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom

The Taiping took the pattern to Christianity. In the Captivating History account the rising “erupted when a deluded man by the name of Hong Xiuquan preached that he was the brother of Jesus Christ. Hong was a self-styled Christian with his own version of Christianity”. His Taiping Heavenly Kingdom had “religious ideals but also very opinionated political views”, and he told followers they were fighting “a ‘holy war'”. The same account judges that his motives were economic and political as well. It credits him with “the deaths of ten to twenty million” [History of East Asia, #71236, Part 1 ch. 8, “The Taiping Rebellion”]. The context: the treaties of 1858–60 “allowed Christian missionaries to spread their message across China peacefully, and perhaps worse of all, it legalized the import of opium” [History of East Asia, #71236, Part 1 ch. 8, “The Second Opium War”].

Casualty figures vary widely between sources. The Encyclopedia of World History says the revolt “lasts for 10 years and ends in failure” and “takes the lives of 20 million Chinese peasants” [Encyclopedia of World History, #5204, “1850 Taiping Rebellion”]. The reference shelf gives 1850–1864, with a death toll estimated at “20 to 30 million” and higher estimates of “73 to 100 million”. It describes Hong as “an ethnic Hakka who, after a series of visions, proclaimed himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ”, and notes that the rebels sought “to entirely upend the country’s social order” [Wikipedia: Taiping Rebellion]. The movement left survivors far beyond China. John Clifford Holt writes that in nineteenth-century Laos the “itinerant, militant, and greatly feared” Haw “were stubborn survivors of the failed millenarian Taiping rebellion” [Holt, Spirits of the Place, #66064, ch. 2].

The Boxers, the Triads and the secret-society frame

The Boxer rising of 1899–1900 targeted the missions directly. The Captivating History account calls the Boxers “well-meaning but naïve young men trained in the martial arts” who “started randomly killing foreigners and missionaries”. Empress Dowager Cixi sided with them; it ended with 20,000 foreign troops lifting the siege of the legations and an indemnity of “450 million ounces of silver” [History of East Asia, #71236, Part 1 ch. 8, “The Boxer Rebellion”]. The religious core was invulnerability magic. John Clark Archer writes in a footnote to his chapter on Taoism: “The ‘Boxers’ concocted a magical immunity, they thought, against the weapons of the ‘foreign devils’ whom they ruthlessly attacked and slew. They knew (?) how to prevent foreign blades from cutting them” [Archer, Faiths Men Live By, #55131, ch. 5 “Taoism”, n. 2].

Esoteric writers place the Boxers in a wider brotherhood. Philip Gardiner writes that Boxer initiates were initiated “in much the same way as any protection society across the world. Placed in darkness, they were made to fast and meditate, opening up their minds to cleansing. This Boxer Society came from an older group known as the Big Swords, and this was another name used by the Triads” [Gardiner, Secret Societies, #77350, ch. 18]. The martial-arts encyclopedia makes a narrower claim. There “continued to be an association between secret societies, radical religion, and the martial arts”, seen in the “Righteous and Harmonious Fists”. It adds that “in 1911, the Triads played a role in the overthrow of the Qing” [Green (ed.), Martial Arts of the World, #88003, “Boxing, Chinese Shaolin Styles”]. Issitt and Main are more cautious about the Triads. They trace the name to the Three Harmonies Society (Hongmen), founded “in the mid-1700s”. It went underground because the Qing banned fraternal societies, and it used “coded phrases and … secret handshakes”. They write that “historians now doubt” its legendary Ming or Shaolin origins, while “it is generally acknowledged that the triads began as anti-Qing revolutionary groups” [Issitt and Main, Hidden Religion, #66220, “The Chinese Triads”]. Issitt and Main themselves group the White Lotus with the Templars and Freemasonry (treated elsewhere in this study) as one “secret society” myth-type [Issitt and Main, Hidden Religion, #66220, Introduction].

Analysis: why every Chinese state fears sects

Three features recur. The Mandate of Heaven made dynastic failure readable as Heaven’s verdict, and the Taipingjing turned omens into a programme for “a new Heavenly Mandate” [Wikipedia: Taipingjing]. Millenarian hope gave the dispossessed “a system of organization” [Issitt and Main, Hidden Religion, #66220]. And victorious rebels became persecutors. Zhu Yuanzhang tried to destroy the sect that had carried him to power [#66220], and the Qing code applied its statutes “during the religious persecutions” [History of East Asia, #71236, “The Great Qing Legal Code”]. The modern Chinese state’s close regulation of monasteries, seen in the Tibetan case in Chapter 100, stands in this long line.

Key points

• The Yellow Turbans (184) drew on Taiping Taoism, the doctrine of the Great Peace. Zhang Jue proclaimed “The Azure Sky is already dead” (#71236). Simpkins claims 350,000 rebels and the mass conversion of China to Taoism (#50704).
• Sorajjakool names the Yellow Turbans and the Celestial Masters as the two sect movements that shaped religious Taoism (#35015).
• The White Lotus carried Maitreya millenarianism from the Song onward. Its Red Turbans (1351/1352) helped found the Ming, whose first emperor then tried to destroy it (#66220; #71236).
• The 1794–1804 White Lotus Rebellion produced successor sects including the Eight Trigrams and the Boxers. The Jahriyya revolt (1781) shows the Qing suppressing Muslim dissent as well (#71236).
• Hong Xiuquan’s Taiping Heavenly Kingdom joined a Christian messianic claim to social revolution. Death estimates range from 10–20 million (#71236) and 20 million (#5204) to 20–100 million (Wikipedia).
• Archer describes the Boxers’ “magical immunity” (#55131). Gardiner derives them from the Big Swords and Triads (#77350). Issitt and Main treat Triad origin legends with scepticism (#66220).
• In each case the sect claimed to read Heaven’s verdict on the dynasty, which explains why Chinese states have treated religious organisation as a political threat.