The Rebellion That Killed 20 Million – Taiping War on Maps

The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) was the deadliest civil war in history, and it began with one man. Hong Xiuquan, a Hakka schoolteacher from Guangdong who failed the imperial examinations again and again, came to believe he was the younger brother of Jesus. In Guangxi, a province crowded with landless migrants, bandits and an overstretched Qing army, his God Worshipping Society grew into an armed movement. After the Jintian Uprising of 1851, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom fought its way out of the south, seized Wuchang, sailed down the Yangtze River and captured Nanjing in 1853, renaming it Tianjing, the Heavenly Capital. A march on Beijing failed, the 1856 Tianjing Incident tore the leadership apart, and Zeng Guofan's Xiang Army, Li Hongzhang's Huai Army and the Ever Victorious Army of Frederick Townsend Ward and Charles Gordon slowly strangled the kingdom along the river, from the siege of Anqing to the fall of Nanjing in 1864. Follow the whole war on animated campaign maps, with sourced numbers, and see how at least twenty million people died in Qing China. 0:00 One Man, Twenty Million Dead 1:01 An Empire Running Out of Land 2:17 The Failed Scholar's Visions 4:33 The Rising at Jintian 6:43 Down the Yangtze to Nanjing 10:24 The March on Beijing 13:36 Murder in the Heavenly Capital 18:04 The Siege of Anqing 21:59 The Fall of Nanjing 25:58 Counting the Dead Sources: Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom (2012) Tobie Meyer-Fong, What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China (2013) https://www.perlego.com/book/745903/what-r... Jonathan Spence, God's Chinese Son (1996) Ho Ping-ti, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (1959) John B. Thompson, "The World's Bloodiest Civil War", Los Angeles Review of Books (2013) https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-wo... Interview with Stephen Platt, Maisonneuve (2013) https://maisonneuve.org/article/2013/02/12... Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), Asia for Educators, Columbia University https://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/chi... "China's Demographic Evolution 1850–1953 Reconsidered", The China Quarterly https://resolve.cambridge.org/core/journal... TaipingRebellion.com, "Down the Yangtze" https://taipingrebellion.com/yangtze.htm Taiping Rebellion, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebe... Tianjing incident, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianjing_inc... Third Battle of Nanjing, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Battle... Maps: drawn by Wars in Ink · base data Natural Earth (public domain) · terrain AWS Terrain Tiles · Illustrations: original artwork created for this channel (AI-assisted) · Archival art: Wikimedia Commons · Music: YouTube Audio Library Image credits: 猫猫的日记本 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) #history #documentary #militaryhistory