The Jintian Uprising Site, in Jintian village about 20 kilometres north of Guiping, marks where Hong Xiuquan formally announced the founding of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom on 11 January 1851 and led his followers in open rebellion against the Qing dynasty. The park on the site includes a museum with documents and artefacts from the rebellion, the ruins of the original village fortifications, and memorials to the event. It is a serious rather than sensationalist account of what happened — the visitor centre contextualises the rebellion without either glorifying it or reducing it to spectacle.
The Taiping Rebellion is one of the most important and least internationally known events of the 19th century. The scale was staggering: somewhere between 20 and 30 million people died over 14 years, more than in the American Civil War and First World War combined. The rebellion drew in American and British military forces on the Qing side, reshaped the geography of southern China, and created religious and political reverberations that are still felt in Taiwanese political culture. Coming here with that context makes the site much more interesting than it would otherwise appear.