[Daniel]

The Timelines of War and several sites on the Internet state that 20 million people were killed in the Taiping Rebellion. Some even say it was 30 million.

That's more than the Holocaust. I think it's even more than the Mongol conquest.

What made this war so horrendously bloody? Was it mostly military deaths? Massacres of civilians? Famine? Disease?

And the sensitive question - whose fault? Can the blame be laid primarily at the feet of the rebels, or of the Qing government? Or are both equally to blame? Do the Western powers have any role in the death toll, other than helping provoke the rebellion in the first place by their humiliation of the Qing and opium selling?

[jiangji]

Daniel, on Jul 2 2005, 11:37 AM, said:

The Timelines of War and several sites on the Internet state that 20 million people were killed in the Taiping Rebellion.  Some even say it was 30 million.

That's more than the Holocaust.  I think it's even more than the Mongol conquest.

What made this war so horrendously bloody?  Was it mostly military deaths?  Massacres of civilians?  Famine?  Disease?

The first come off my mind is the scale of the wars. All 17 provinces were ravaged by the war with many farm destroyed result in massive starvation. It is mostly civilians death since the total army of Qing and the rebel are around 3 million. I think the three factors you point out are all contributed to the huge population losses. There also a huge population growth from the end of southern song dynasty to Qing dynasty. Population in the mid 19 century was about 4-5 times as many as it was in Song dynasty and this is why the war causes more population lossess. Didn't the An lusan rebellion in the Tang Empire causes the population to drop from 50 million to 17 million ? (Need confirmation on the figure)

Daniel, on Jul 2 2005, 11:37 AM, said:

And the sensitive question - whose fault?  Can the blame be laid primarily at the feet of the rebels, or of the Qing government?  Or are both equally to blame?  Do the Western powers have any role in the death toll, other than helping provoke the rebellion in the first place by their humiliation of the Qing and opium selling?

The articles below pretty much point out most of the important thing lead to the rebellion. I am not sure about the accuracy of the figure stated in the websites and where they get it. However, most of its point are quite accurate comparing to what I read from the book in "The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire" by Thomas H. Reilly. I didn't really finish the book since it is quite long to read and boring.

http://www.onwar.com/aced/chrono/c1800s/yr...taiping1851.htm

This post has been edited by jiangji: 02 July 2005 - 09:18 AM

[Yun]

Something I posted last year:

Quote

The huge death tolls in the Taiping Rebellion are probably a result not so much of battlefield casualties, but of the practice of slaughtering defeated armies and captured populations. When the Taiping capital at Nanjing was taken, the entire population of the city was put to the sword. Villages could also be massacred by either the Qing army or the Taiping army for putting up fierce resistance, and as part of a scorched earth policy to deny the other side of friendly support and supplies. And it didn't help that to the Taipings, the Manchus and the officials who served them were demons, while to the Qing officials the Taipings were mere bandits and maniacs.

This inhumane treatment of prisoners and civilians was routine in Chinese military history, and so the Taiping Rebellion was far from unique except for the fact that south China (especially the Jiangnan region) was now so overpopulated that it only inflated the scale and frequency of the massacres. The many Miao rebellions were suppressed with equal bloodthirstiness, and it is perhaps a good thing that we have no visual record of such mass beheadings (photography was only just beginning to enter China at the time).

I should add that famine, as well as starvation and disease among refugees, must have played a huge role as well in the death toll.

[Daniel]

Thank you both.

I should clarify that my question "whose fault" was not meant as "whose fault was it that the rebellion started?" but rather, "Once the rebellion started, whose fault was it that it killed so many more people than most wars?"

From what I see in your answers, it appears that a good deal of the fault lies with both sides. Though maybe more with the Qing, if the Qing slaughtered everybody in Nanjing while the Taiping rebels more usually just massacred villages? Or did the Taiping rebels ever wipe out the people of a large city like Nanjing?

BTW, I seem to recall the capital of the Taiping being called "Tianjing" rather than Nanjing. Did the rebels rename Nanjing as "Tianjing" after they occupied it?

[poirot]

Daniel, on Jul 2 2005, 08:14 PM, said:

Thank you both.

I should clarify that my question "whose fault" was not meant as "whose fault was it that the rebellion started?" but rather, "Once the rebellion started, whose fault was it that it killed so many more people than most wars?"

From what I see in your answers, it appears that a good deal of the fault lies with both sides.  Though maybe more with the Qing, if the Qing slaughtered everybody in Nanjing while the Taiping rebels more usually just massacred villages?  Or did the Taiping rebels ever wipe out the people of a large city like Nanjing?

BTW, I seem to recall the capital of the Taiping being called "Tianjing" rather than Nanjing.  Did the rebels rename Nanjing as "Tianjing" after they occupied it?

Yes, they did rename it into Tianjing.

[jiangji]

Daniel, on Jul 3 2005, 01:14 AM, said:

Thank you both.

BTW, I seem to recall the capital of the Taiping being called "Tianjing" rather than Nanjing.  Did the rebels rename Nanjing as "Tianjing" after they occupied it?

Yes, the rebel rename the city as Tianjing. (hehe poirot answer it before me).

This post has been edited by jiangji: 02 July 2005 - 08:59 PM

[Yun]

Quote

Or did the Taiping rebels ever wipe out the people of a large city like Nanjing?

They usually killed only the Qing officials and sometimes the local scholar-gentry (the former for being 'demons', the latter for being Confucians and loyalists of the Qing). When the Taiping captured Nanjing in March 1853, they massacred all the Qing officials and soldiers who had not already committed suicide, but spared the civilian population. On the other hand, when Taiping-held Suzhou surrendered to the Qing shortly before the fall of Nanjing, the Qing army killed the entire civilian population, and also the Taiping generals despite an earlier promise of amnesty.

'Tianjing' means 'Heavenly Capital', so it was the natural name for the Taiping capital once they had established it in Nanjing.

[Historian1996]

[kaixin]

Why was the Manchu slaughter at Yangzhou so bloody too?

[wlee15]

kaixin, on Jul 26 2005, 11:58 PM, said:

Why was the Manchu slaughter at Yangzhou so bloody too?

Generally any city that refuses to surrender will be mascared afterwords (if the attackers were sucessful). This was generally the rule across the world.

[Lafiel]

The figure of 20~30 million "killed in the Taiping Rebellion" does not necessarily mean that 20~30 million were killed in battle or afterwards by soldiers. True, massacres and reprisals were common on both sides. The death rate was horrendous, and definitely numbered in the millions. But we should also remember that in the years of the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) there were massive floods that destroyed the crops of the Yangzi and Yellow River floodplains. In the wake of these floods and troops marching back and forth across ravaged countrysides, famine and disease (smallpox, cholera, typhoid, etc.) killed far more people than weapons did. At the time, it was already difficult to keep count, much less separate the number killed directly because of the Rebellion from those killed by disease and famine. The causal factors of death were intertwined anyway. As a result, in our present-day accounting all of these deaths have been attributed to the Taiping Rebellion, which explains why the figure is so large.

Let's take a quick glance at some disasters in this period. The Yellow River shifted course in 1855, causing massive damage to the lands around the Huai River, its tributaries, and the Grand Canal. There was a big Yangtze flood in Hubei, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang in 1849, and also famine in Guangxi in that year, which made millions of people homeless and starving and helped fuel the Taiping Rebellion in the first place. Plus, around these same years the Qing was fighting the Nian Rebellion (1851-68), a Muslim uprising in Yunnan (1855~73), and a Muslim rebellion in Xinjiang (1862~78). Rampant opium addiction throughout the empire and Western imperialist threats certainly didn't help matters. It was a time of dire crisis, and the Qing dynasty was literally fighting for its life. With the empire on the brink of destruction, the Qing leaders were willing to take extreme measures to quell all of the rebellions. This helps explain (though of course it does not excuse) the scale of the massacres.

We should never underestimate the power of disasters like famine. The 20~30 million death toll of the Taiping probably includes at least 10~15 million dead from famine and disease. That may seem high, but we may recall that in the wake of Mao's failed Great Leap Forward (1958~1960) an estimated 30 million people starved to death from a combination of natural and esepecially manmade disasters.