The Taiping Rebellion was a rebellion in southern China from 1850 to 1864 that expanded into a civil war between the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom established by the rebels and the ruling Manchu-led Qing dynasty. It was a millenarian movement led by Hong Xiuquan, who announced that he had received visions in which he learned that he was the younger brother of Jesus. At least 20 million people died, mainly civilians, in one of the deadliest military conflicts in history.
Hong established the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom with its capital at Nanjing. The Kingdom's army controlled large parts of southern China, at its height ruling about 30 million people. The rebel agenda included social reforms such as shared "property in common", equality for women, and the replacement of Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism and Chinese folk religion with their form of Christianity. Because of their refusal to wear their hair in the customary queue, the Taiping combatants were nicknamed "long hair" (simplified Chinese: Chang Mao ; traditional Chinese: Chang Mao ; pinyin: Changmao) by Qing forces. The Qing government eventually crushed the rebellion with the aid of French and British forces.
The Taiping Rebellion was a source of inspiration for Sun Yat-sen, who led the Xinhai Revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1911. Mao Zedong glorified the Taiping rebels as early heroic revolutionaries against a corrupt feudal monarchy.


== HistoryEdit ==


=== OriginsEdit ===
China, while under the Qing dynasty in the mid-19th century, suffered a series of natural disasters, economic problems, and defeats at the hands of the Western powers; in particular, the humiliating defeat in 1842 by the British Empire in the First Opium War. The Qing government, led by ethnic Manchus, was seen by much of the Chinese population, comprising mainly Han Chinese, as an ineffective and corrupt regime. Anti-Manchu sentiments were strongest in southern China among the labouring classes, who felt so disaffected by Qing rule that they flocked to join Hong Xiuquan, a charismatic member of the Hakka community, a Han Chinese subgroup that inhabited southern China.

In 1837, Hong Xiuquan failed to become a successful candidate in the imperial examination again after having attempted it several times, and was consequently denied access to join the ranks of the scholar-officials in the civil service. He fell sick and was bedridden for several days until he recovered. After reading a pamphlet he received a year ago from a Protestant Christian missionary, Hong claimed that his illness was a vision to the effect that he was the younger brother of Jesus, who was sent to rid China of the "devils", including the corrupt Qing government and Confucian teachings. He felt that it was his duty to spread his interpretation of Christianity and overthrow the Qing dynasty. One of Hong's associates, Yang Xiuqing, who was formerly a firewood merchant from Guangxi, claimed to be able to act as the voice of God. Issachar Jacox Roberts, an American Baptist missionary, became a teacher and adviser to Hong.
In 1843, Hong and his associates founded the God Worshipping Society, a heterodox Christian sect, and used it to spread their ideas and attract followers. The sect increased its power initially by suppressing groups of bandits and pirates in southern China in the late 1840s. However, over time, persecution by Qing authorities caused the movement to evolve into a guerrilla rebellion and subsequently a widespread civil war.


=== Early yearsEdit ===
The revolt began in Guangxi. In early January 1851, after a previous small-scale battle resulting in a rebel victory in late December 1850, a 10,000-strong rebel army organised by Feng Yunshan and Wei Changhui routed Qing forces stationed in Jintian (present-day Guiping, Guangxi). Taiping forces successfully repulsed an attempted imperial reprisal against the Jintian Uprising. The two Opium Wars greatly influenced the Taiping movement.


=== Middle yearsEdit ===

In 1853, Hong Xiuquan withdrew from active control of policies and administration, ruling exclusively by written proclamations that often had religious content. Hong disagreed with Yang Xiuqing in certain matters of policy and became increasingly suspicious of Yang's ambitions, his extensive network of spies and his declarations when "speaking as God". Yang and his family were put to death by Hong's followers in 1856, followed by the killing of members within the Taiping community who were loyal to Yang.
With their leader largely out of the picture, Taiping delegates tried to widen their popular support with the Chinese middle classes and forge alliances with European powers, but failed on both counts. The Europeans decided to stay neutral. Inside China, the rebellion faced resistance from the traditionalist middle class because of the rebels' hostility to Chinese customs and Confucian values. The land-owning upper class, unsettled by the Taipings' peasant mannerisms and their policy of strict separation of the sexes, even for married couples, sided with government forces and their Western allies.
In 1859, Hong Rengan, Hong Xiuquan's cousin, joined the Taiping forces in Nanjing and was given considerable power by Hong Xiuquan. He developed an ambitious plan to expand the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom's boundaries. In 1860, the Taiping rebels were successful in taking Hangzhou and Suzhou to the east (see Second rout of the Jiangnan Daying), but failed to take Shanghai, which marked the beginning of the decline of the kingdom.


=== Fall of the Taiping Heavenly KingdomEdit ===
An attempt to take Shanghai in August 1860 was repulsed by an army of Qing troops and European officers under the command of Frederick Townsend Ward. This army would later become the "Ever Victorious Army", a Qing military force that would later be commanded by Charles George Gordon and be instrumental in the defeat of the Taiping rebels. Qing forces were reorganised under the command of Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang, and the Qing reconquest began in earnest. By early 1864, Qing control in most areas was reestablished.

Hong Xiuquan declared that God would defend Nanjing, but in June 1864, with Qing forces approaching, he died of food poisoning as a consequence of eating wild vegetables when the city ran low on food supplies. He was sick for 20 days before succumbing and a few days after his death Qing forces took the city. His body was buried in the former Ming Imperial Palace, and was later exhumed on orders of Zeng Guofan to verify his death, and then cremated. Hong's ashes were later blasted out of a cannon in order to ensure that his remains have no resting place as eternal punishment for the uprising.
Four months before the fall of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Hong Xiuquan abdicated in favor of Hong Tianguifu, his eldest son, who was 15 years old. The younger Hong was inexperienced and powerless, so the kingdom was quickly destroyed when Nanjing fell in July 1864 to the imperial armies after protracted street-by-street fighting. Most of the Taiping princes were executed by Qing forces in Nanjing.


=== AftermathEdit ===
Although the fall of Nanjing in 1864 marked the destruction of the Taiping regime, the fight was not yet over. There were still several hundred thousand Taiping rebel troops continuing the fight, with more than a quarter-million Taiping rebels fighting in the border regions of Jiangxi and Fujian alone. It was not until August 1871 that the last Taiping rebel army led by Shi Dakai's commander, Li Fuzhong (Li Fu Zhong ), was completely wiped out by government forces in the border region of Hunan, Guizhou and Guangxi.
In 1865, Liu Yongfu escaped in command of a splinter group known as the Black Flag Army (Chinese: Hei Qi Jun ; pinyin: Heiqi Jun; Vietnamese: Quan co den), which recruited mainly soldiers of ethnic Zhuang background, and exited Guangxi into Upper Tonkin in the Empire of Annam, where his forces engaged the French. He later became the second and last leader of the short-lived Republic of Formosa (5 June-21 October 1895).

Other "Flag Gangs" armed with the latest in weapons, disintegrated into bandit groups that plundered remnants of the Lan Xang kingdom, and then were engaged by incompetent forces of King Rama V (r. 1868-1910) until 1890, when the last of the groups eventually disbanded. Their victims did not know where the bandits had come from and, as they were plundering Buddhist temples, confused them with Chinese Muslims from Yunnan called Hui in Mandarin and Haw in the Lao language (Thai: h`,) which resulted in the protracted series of conflicts being misnamed the Haw wars.


=== Death tollEdit ===
With no reliable census at the time, estimates are necessarily based on projections, but the most widely cited sources put the total number of deaths during the 15 years of the rebellion at about 20-30 million civilians and soldiers.  Most of the deaths were attributed to plague and famine. At the Third Battle of Nanking in 1864, more than 100,000 were killed in three days.
The rebellion happened at roughly the same time as the American Civil War. Although almost certainly the largest civil war of the 19th century (in terms of numbers under arms), it is debatable whether the Taiping Rebellion involved more soldiers than the Napoleonic Wars earlier in the century.


=== Other rebellionsEdit ===

The Nian Rebellion (1853-68), and several Muslim rebellions in the southwest (Panthay Rebellion, 1855-73) and the northwest (Dungan revolt, 1862-77) continued to pose considerable problems for the Qing dynasty.
Du Wenxiu, who led the Panthay Rebellion, was in contact with the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. He was not aiming his rebellion at Han Chinese, but was anti-Qing and wanted to destroy the Manchu government. Du's forces led multiple non-Muslim forces, including Han Chinese, Li, Bai, and Hani peoples. They were assisted by non-Muslim Shan and Kakhyen and other hill tribes in the revolt.
The other Muslim rebellion, the Dungan revolt was the reverse: it was not aimed at overthrowing the Qing dynasty since its leader Ma Hualong accepted an imperial title. Rather, it erupted due to intersectional fighting between Muslim factions and Han Chinese. Various groups fought each other during the Dungan revolt without any coherent goal. According to modern researchers, the Dungan rebellion began in 1862 not as a planned uprising but as a coalescence of many local brawls and riots triggered by trivial causes, among these were false rumours that the Hui Muslims were aiding the Taiping rebels. However, the Hui Ma Xiaoshi claimed that the Shaanxi Muslim rebellion was connected to the Taiping.


== Taiping Heavenly Kingdom's policiesEdit ==

The rebels announced social reforms, including strict separation of the sexes, abolition of foot binding, land socialisation, and "suppression" of private trade. In religion, the Kingdom tried to replace Confucianism, Buddhism and Chinese folk religion with a form of Christianity, holding that Hong Xiuquan was the younger brother of Jesus. Troops were nicknamed "long hair", because they sported a traditional Confucian hairstyle that was different from the queue, which was customary in the Qing dynasty. The Qing government referred to them in official documents as the "hair rebels" (simplified Chinese: Fa Zei ; traditional Chinese: Fa Zei ; pinyin: fazei).
Within the land it controlled, the Taiping Heavenly Army established a theocratic and highly militarised rule. However, the rule was remarkably ineffective, haphazard and brutal; all efforts were concentrated on the army, and civil administration was non-existent. Rule was established in the major cities and the land outside the urban areas was little regarded.
Even though polygamy was banned, Hong Xiuquan had numerous concubines and frequently mistreated them. Many high-ranking Taiping officials kept concubines as a matter of prerogative, and lived as de facto kings.


== MilitaryEdit ==


=== Taiping forcesEdit ===
The Taiping army was the rebellion's key strength. It was marked by a high level of discipline and fanaticism. They typically wore a uniform of red jackets with blue trousers, and grew their hair long so in China they were nicknamed "long hair". The large numbers of women serving in the Taiping army also distinguished it from other 19th-century armies.
Combat was always bloody and extremely brutal, with little artillery but huge forces equipped with small arms. The Taiping army's main strategy of conquest was to take major cities, consolidate their hold on the cities, then march out into the surrounding countryside to recruit local farmers and battle government forces. Estimates of the overall size of the Taiping army are around 500,000 soldiers.
The organisation of a Taiping army corps was thus:
1 general
5 colonels
25 captains
125 lieutenants
500 sergeants
2,500 corporals
10,000 infantry
These corps were placed into armies of varying sizes. In addition to the main Taiping forces organised along the above lines, there were also thousands of pro-Taiping groups fielding their own forces of irregulars.


==== Ethnic structure of the armyEdit ====

Ethnically, the Taiping army was formed at the outset largely from these groups: the Hakka, a Han Chinese subgroup, the Cantonese, local residents of Guangdong province and the Zhuang (a non-Han ethnic group), which were minority groups as compared to the Han Chinese subgroups that form dominant regional majorities across south China. It is no coincidence that Hong Xiuquan and the other Taiping royals were Hakka.
As a Han subgroup, the Hakka were frequently marginalised economically and politically, having migrated to the regions they inhabit only after other Han groups were already established there. For example, when the Hakka settled in Guangdong and parts of Guangxi, speakers of Yue Chinese (Cantonese) were already the dominant regional Han group there and had been for some time, just as speakers of various dialects of Min are locally dominant in Fujian province. The Hakka settled throughout southern China and beyond, but as latecomers they generally had to establish their communities on rugged, less fertile land scattered on the fringe of the local majority group's settlements. As their name ("guest households") suggests, the Hakka were generally treated as migrant newcomers, often subject to hostility and derision from local majority Han populations. Consequently, the Hakka, to a greater extent than other Han Chinese, have been historically associated with popular unrest and rebellion.

The other significant ethnic group in the Taiping army were the Zhuang, an indigenous people of Tai origin and China's largest non-Han ethnic minority group. Over the centuries Zhuang communities had been adopting Han Chinese culture. This was possible because Han culture in the region accommodates a great deal of linguistic diversity, so the Zhuang could be absorbed as if the Zhuang language were just another Han Chinese dialect (which it is not). As Zhuang communities were integrating with the Han at different rates, a certain amount of friction between Han and Zhuang was inevitable, with Zhuang unrest on occasion leading to armed uprisings. The second tier of the Taiping army was an ethnic mix that included many Zhuang. Prominent at this level was Shi Dakai, who was half-Hakka, half-Zhuang and spoke both languages fluently, making him quite a rare asset to the Taiping leadership.
In the later stages of the Taiping Rebellion, the number of Han Chinese in the army from Han groups other than the Hakka increased substantially. However, the Hakka and the Zhuang (who constituted as much as 25% of the Taiping Army), as well as other non-Han ethnic minority groups (many of them of Tai origin related to the Zhuang), continued to feature prominently in the rebellion throughout its duration, with virtually no leaders emerging from any Han Chinese group other than the Hakka.


==== Social structure of the Taiping ArmyEdit ====
Socially and economically, the Taiping rebels came almost exclusively from the lowest classes. Many of the southern Taiping troops were former miners, especially those coming from the Zhuang. Very few Taiping rebels, even in the leadership caste, came from the imperial bureaucracy. Almost none were landlords and in occupied territories landlords were often executed.


=== Qing forcesEdit ===

Opposing the rebellion was an imperial army with a size over a million regulars with unknown thousands of regional militias and foreign mercenaries operating in support. Among the imperial forces was the elite Ever Victorious Army, consisting of Chinese soldiers led by a European officer corps (see Frederick Townsend Ward and Charles Gordon), backed by British arms companies like Willoughbe, Willoughbe & Ponsonby. A particularly famous imperial force was Zeng Guofan's Xiang Army.
Although keeping accurate records was something imperial China traditionally did very well, the decentralised nature of the imperial war effort (relying on regional forces) and the fact that the war was a civil war and therefore very chaotic meant that reliable figures are impossible to find. The destruction of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom also meant that any records it possessed were destroyed.
Zuo Zongtang from Hunan province was another important Qing general who contributed in suppressing the Taiping Rebellion.
The organisation of the Qing Imperial Army was thus:
Eight Banners Army: 250,000 soldiers
Green Standard Army: ~610,000 soldiers
Xiang (Hunan) Army: 130,000 soldiers
Huai (Anhui) Army: 70,000 soldiers
Chu Army: 40,000 soldiers
Ever Victorious Army: 5,000 soldiers
Village Militias: unknown thousands


== Total warEdit ==

The Taiping Rebellion was the first instance of total war in modern China. Almost every citizen of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was given military training and conscripted into the army to fight against Qing imperial forces.
During this conflict both sides tried to deprive each other of resources to continue the war and it became standard practice to destroy agricultural areas, butcher the population of cities and in general exact a brutal price from captured enemy lands in order to drastically weaken the opposition's war effort. This war was total in the sense that civilians on both sides participated to a significant extent in the war effort and in the sense that armies on both sides waged war on the civilian population as well as military forces.
This resulted in massive civilian death toll with some 600 cities destroyed and other bloody policies resulting. Since the rebellion began in Guangxi, Qing forces allowed no rebels speaking its dialect to surrender. Reportedly in the province of Guangdong, it is written that 1,000,000 were executed. These policies of mass civilian murder occurred elsewhere including in Anhui, and Nanjing.


== In art and popular cultureEdit ==


=== ArtEdit ===
Pieces of art depicting the Taiping Rebellion are on display at the Monument to the People's Heroes in Tian'anmen Square and other public places in Beijing and Nanjing.

On the pedestal of the tablet there are eight huge bas-reliefs carved out of white marble covering the revolutionary episodes, which are depictions of Chinese struggle from the First Opium War in 1840 to the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. The reliefs can be read in chronological order in a clockwise direction from the east: 1) Burning opium during the Opium War in 1840. 2) The Jintian Uprising during the Taiping Rebellion in 1851.


=== Popular cultureEdit ===
The Taiping Rebellion has been referenced in many different artistic mediums. For instance in novel form Robert Elegant's 1983 book Mandarin depicts the time of the Taiping Rebellion from the unusual point of view of a Jewish family living in Shanghai at the time. In Flashman and the Dragon the fictional Harry Paget Flashman recounts his adventures during the Second Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion. Lisa See's novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan takes place in China during the reign of Emperor Xianfeng; the title character is married to a man who lives in Jintian and the characters get caught up in the revolution. Amy Tan's novel The Hundred Secret Senses takes place in part during the time of the Taiping Rebellion. Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom by Katherine Paterson is a young adult novel set during the Taiping Rebellion.
The civil war has also been documented in various television shows and films. In 2000, CCTV produced The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, a 46 episode television series about the Taiping Rebellion. In 1988, Hong Kong's TVB produced Twilight of a Nation, a 45 episode television drama about the Taiping Rebellion. The Warlords is a 2007 historical film set in the 1860s concerning the Taiping Rebellion showing that General Pang Qinyun, leader of the Shan Regiment, is the man responsible for the capture of Suzhou and Nanjing.
Richard Berg created the boardgame Manchu which covers the entire rebellion.


== See alsoEdit ==


== ReferencesEdit ==


== Further readingEdit ==


== External linksEdit ==
Taiping Rebellion.com Narrative history, with many illustrations, a Timeline, and a detailed Map of the Rebellion.
The Land System of the Heavenly Kingdom Document of 1853. (Chinese Cultural Studies Brooklyn College)
The Taiping Rebellion [BBC] Discussion with Rana Mitter, University of Oxford; Frances Wood British Library; and Julia Lovell, University of London.