Taiping Rebellion
The apocalyptic mid-nineteenth-century civil war that nearly toppled Qing China and killed 20 to 30 million, among the deadliest conflicts in history.
Hong Xiuquan failed the imperial civil-service examination four times. After one collapse in 1837, the young Hakka schoolteacher fell into a delirium of visions that lasted days. Only years later, rereading a Christian missionary pamphlet, did he decide what they meant: he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, sent to cleanse China of demons. The demons, he concluded, were the ruling Manchus. Out of that conviction grew the deadliest civil war in human history.
The Heavenly Kingdom
Hong's God Worshipping Society took root among the poor Hakka of the southern hills. In January 1851 they rose in armed revolt and proclaimed the Taiping Tianguo, the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, with Hong as its Heavenly King. It was not a normal rebellion. The Taiping banned opium, foot-binding, and prostitution, abolished private property in favor of communal treasuries, redistributed land, segregated the sexes, and kept their own calendar. It fused a peasant uprising, a religious cult, and a social revolution into one apocalyptic movement.
The army swept north with terrifying speed. In 1853 it took Nanjing, one of the great cities of the empire, and made it the Heavenly Capital, Tianjing. For a decade the Taiping ruled much of the lower Yangzi, the richest region of China, while sending expeditions to threaten Beijing itself. At its height the movement controlled territory holding tens of millions of people.
A death toll beyond counting
The war that followed was catastrophic on a scale the world would not see again until the twentieth century. Somewhere between 20 and 30 million people died, and some estimates run far higher, most of them not from battle but from the famine and disease that spread as armies stripped the countryside bare. Whole provinces were depopulated. It remains, by most reckonings, the bloodiest civil war ever fought and one of the deadliest conflicts of any kind in human history.
How the dynasty survived
The Qing very nearly did not survive it. The dynasty's hereditary banner armies were useless against the Taiping. Beijing was forced to do the thing it most feared: hand real military power to provincial Han Chinese officials. Zeng Guofan built the Xiang Army in Hunan and Li Hongzhang the Huai Army in Anhui, regional forces loyal to their commanders as much as to the throne. They were aided near Shanghai by the Western-officered Ever Victorious Army, led first by the American Frederick Townsend Ward and then by the British officer Charles Gordon.
The end came in 1864. Hong Xiuquan died in June, probably of illness after eating wild weeds during the siege of his starving capital. Weeks later Zeng's army breached Nanjing's walls and slaughtered its defenders. The Heavenly Kingdom was gone.
But the Qing had won by mortgaging itself. Power had shifted permanently toward regional strongmen and their private armies, and the imperial center never fully clawed it back. The dynasty that crushed Hong Xiuquan limped on for another forty-eight years, hollowed out by the very victory that saved it.