The Historical Image of the Heaven and Earth Society in the Qing Dynasty From the Perspective of Association Identities

In fact, the Heaven and Earth Society is not a unified like the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and the Xingzhong Society, but a dispersed and independent group with many people participating, established and dissolved multiple times in the southern China region and overseas, mainly in Guangdong. Considering this, we believe that if we adopt a research perspective similar to that of the Kangxi or Qianlong schools to examine the history of the Tiandihui, it will hinder our understanding of it.Guided by this idea, this article attempts to examine the scattered and independently active the Heaven and Earth Society as a whole. Based on this, with the transparency of the Heaven and Earth Society activities as the main content, the world that constitutes the Heaven and Earth Society is divided into "Internally formed world" and "Externally active world", as well as "Origin legends world". Firstly, a longitudinal study is conducted on these two parts during the period of approximately 150 years from the middle of Qianlong to the middle of Guangxu, and then the historical truth of the Heaven and Earth Society is understood by examining their horizontal connections.The conclusion of this article indicates that it is impossible to successfully understand the essence of the Heaven and Earth Society from the perspectives of the two schools of thought in the academic community, namely the Kangxi School with the aim of restoring the Ming Dynasty and the Qianlong School with the aim of mutual assistance. Due to its positive nature of mutual assistance, determination to overthrow the Qing Dynasty and restore the Ming Dynasty, and its positive nature as a means of survival, the Heaven and Earth Society has played a role in history due to its diverse social, political, and economic aspects. The Heaven and Earth Society, which emerged on the historical stage in the 26th year of the Qianlong reign, experienced the establishment and disintegration of scattered and independent associations in Guangdong and other places multiple times in the 19th century. Therefore, the interaction between their original wholeness caused varying degrees of adjustment and diversity of differences. And it is precisely the diversity of these harmonies and differences that is the most important scale for understanding the essence of The Heaven and Earth Society.