response from the peasants.  The programme of the T’ai P’ing, in some points influenced by Christian ideas but more so by traditional Chinese thought, was in many points revolutionary:  (a) all property was communal property; (b) land was classified into categories according to its fertility and equally distributed among men and women.  Every producer kept of the produce as much as he and his family needed and delivered the rest into the communal granary; (c) administration and tax systems were revised; (d) women were given equal rights:  they fought together with men in the army and had access to official position.  They had to marry, but monogamy was requested; (e) the use of opium, tobacco and alcohol was prohibited, prostitution was illegal; (f) foreigners were regarded as equals, capitulations as the Manchus had accepted were not recognized.  A large part of the officials, and particularly of the soldiers sent against the revolutionaries, were Manchus, and consequently the movement very soon became a nationalist movement, much as the popular movement at the end of the Mongol epoch had done.  Hung made rapid progress; in 1852 he captured Hankow, and in 1853 Nanking, the important centre in the east.  With clear political insight he made Nanking his capital.  In this he returned to the old traditions of the beginning of the Ming epoch, no doubt expecting in this way to attract support from the eastern Chinese gentry, who had no liking for a capital far away in the north.  He made a parade of adhesion to the ancient Chinese tradition:  his followers cut off their pigtails and allowed their hair to grow as in the past.

He did not succeed, however, in carrying his reforms from the stage of sporadic action to a systematic reorganization of the country, and he also failed to enlist the elements needed for this as for all other administrative work, so that the good start soon degenerated into a terrorist regime.

Hung’s followers pressed on from Nanking, and in 1853-1855 they advanced nearly to Tientsin; but they failed to capture Peking itself.

The new T’ai P’ing state faced the Europeans with big problems.  Should they work with it or against it?  The T’ai P’ing always insisted that they were Christians; the missionaries hoped now to have the opportunity of converting all China to Christianity.  The T’ai P’ing treated the missionaries well but did not let them operate.  After long hesitation and much vacillation, however, the Europeans placed themselves on the side of the Manchus.  Not out of any belief that the T’ai P’ing movement was without justification, but because they had concluded treaties with the Manchu government and given loans to it, of which nothing would have remained if the Manchus had fallen; because they preferred the weak Manchu government to a strong T’ai P’ing government; and because they disliked the socialistic element in many of the measured adopted by the Tai P’ing.