A Bible printed by a state, and a land law written like scripture.
The Taiping printed their own edition of the Old and New Testaments with Hong's annotations, and set the Book of Heavenly Commandments and the Land System alongside them. Candidates for office were examined on these texts instead of the Confucian classics — the most complete replacement of a canon attempted in Chinese history.
The Taiping printed a Bible and then edited it, which tells you what kind of movement it was. Passages that embarrassed the theology — Noah drunk, Lot and his daughters — were removed or rewritten, and Hong added his own annotations as authoritative. The Book of Heavenly Commandments and the Land System of the Heavenly Kingdom were set alongside scripture as canonical. Most consequentially, the civil service examinations, the mechanism by which Chinese elites were made for a thousand years, were rewritten to examine on these texts instead of the Confucian classics. That is the most complete attempt at replacing a canon in Chinese history, and it is a large part of why the Qing gentry fought the Taiping so implacably.
The same ground, other faiths
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