The Taiping rebellion
A peasant war under the banner of the 'Heavenly Kingdom' takes tens of millions of lives—more than any war of that century.
In 1850 Hong Xiuquan, a village teacher who had failed the state examinations and declared himself the younger brother of Jesus, raises a rising in southern China against the Manchu dynasty. His 'Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace' takes Nanjing in 1853 and holds half the country for fourteen years: land is divided equally, opium and foot-binding are banned, men and women are settled in separate camps. The Qing put the rising down by 1864 with the help of new provincial armies and European officers. By estimate twenty to thirty million people died—the bloodiest war of the nineteenth century, of which Europe at the time knew almost nothing.
Sources
Documents of the period
- the documents of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom — the land law and the prohibitions
Scholarship
- studies of nineteenth-century China — the years 1850–1864 and the estimates of the dead
Basis: documents and evidence.