Shi Dakai, one of the original five Taiping rebel leaders, assumes the title of i-wang.

The most literate of the Taipings, Shi is an avowed enemy of the alien Qing rulers of China.

It is Yang Xiuqing, the Taiping minister of state, who has organized the new Taiping state and mapped the strategy of the Taiping armies.

Yang has begun to chastise Hong and to usurp his prerogatives as supreme leader.

To legitimize his authority, Yang occasionally lapses into trances in which his voice supposedly becomes that of the Lord's.

In one of his trances, Yang claims that the Lord demands Hong be whipped for kicking one of his concubines (although Taiping followers are allowed no sexual relations with members of the opposite sex, Taiping leaders maintain enormous harems).