The Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace sprang from a Chinese Christian evangelical movement with close affinities, but no institutional ties, to evangelical Protestantism in the United States, Great Britain, and the European continent. It originated with a vision of its later leader Hong Xiuquan in 1837, in which he was taken up to heaven and was ordered by an ‘old man’ to drive out of the heavens the demons who had taken possession of them. After he had accomplished this feat, the ‘old man’, who originally had created the world, ordered him to descend back down to earth and do the same, that is, drive out the demons, who had not only established control there, but had done so with the connivance of many members of the Confucian elite.