I just finished Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, and it took my breath away. The Taiping Civil War was the Syrian Civil War of its time, but is now forgotten. It was fought between the Qing Dynasty and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom for 14 years and it was a total, civil war of annihilation. It ranks as the 6th highest war by death toll. Like I said earlier, this war is largely forgotten - and this is the first book I read on the subject after the Wikipedia.

I knew the general outline of the war and the book skips through many of its early years - at its outbreak and the Taiping’s quick rise. The Qing Dynasty had ruled for over two centuries, but had now become corrupt and incompetent. The Taiping Kingdom was much smaller than the Dynasty, but occupied some of the richest, most populous territories. It had been able to raise massive armies of 100,000 and more. Their generals were charismatic, brilliant figures who were born to peasants - proof that military competence is not genetic.

The story follows the path of Hong Rengan, cousin to the Kingdom’s founder Hong Xiuquan. He had called himself the brother of Jesus Christ, and practiced Christianity. Frankly, he does not appear much in this book - mostly because he had little to do with the whole war in of itself. He started it, and served as its leader - but spent all of it locked up in the city of Nanjing while his generals were fighting the war. Hong Rengan spent several years in Hong Kong and had great dreams for the Kingdom, wishing it to adopt great reforms with the aid of foreign intervention. Years later, Japan would take up these reforms themselves to great effect. Hong returned to the Taiping Kingdom and courted the intervention of the European powers, most notably the British. The British - influenced by their man on the ground Frederick Bruce - rebuffed those concerns and repeatedly intervened in favor of the Qing, giving them the needed push to end the war in a Qing victory. In the book’s epilogue, the author notes a quote from a Japanese Prime Minister 50 years later that the Manchus have done nothing since to prove that they have deserved to win. The Qing’s fall was merely postponed half a century.

The Civil War was cruel - with both sides doing immensely cruel things to each other. But the author’s depictions of what the Qing did was much more descriptive. The book has a clear Pro-Taiping angle to it - but it is hard to side with the Qing here. Total war was total war - the Qing won battles by betrayal, lies, deceit, and brutal force. When they took towns they annihilated the population within whether they were civilian or soldier. There is one instance in the book where the Qing took control of a small town that surrendered, with several thousand Taiping troops. The Qing did not want to keep prisoners and the Taiping had given over their arms. So they opened up the gates to their fort and brought the Taiping in 10 at a time, and then beheaded them. Imagine what it must have been like to be the thousandth person on that line, watching them vanish inside! I had to put down the book. Cruelty on an industrial scale has its own horrific angle, but there is something personal about inefficient brutality like this.

There is a small anecdote at the end of this book that took my breath away. It was recorded by a 16 year old girl who was captured near the end of the war by a Qing Imperial soldier when the city of Nanjing finally fell at the end of the war. The soldier killed her brothers and mother and mother’s wife and carried her away to be his wife for the rest of her life. She screamed for him to kill her but he said that he was in love with her. We only know her story because she wrote it down on two slips of paper at an inn, before killing him and hanging herself. There are thousands of other women carried off in this manner - virtually none of their stories survive.

This war was not fun - and with the thousands being casually slaughtered in a single sentence there were a million stories that we will never know. At the end of the 20 million dead, you have to wonder if it was worth the cost. For even the cherished cultural values of the West like such as property, taxes, and freedoms, would it be worth it to have this war? And before you answer your instinctual yes, I want to ask you again: Do you know how hard it is to kill 20 million people in the 1860s? You can’t just gun them down with high powered bullets from far away. You have to get in their face, and stab them. And not just the soldiers too. Infants, women, children, elders. They got their heads cut off or knives run through their hearts. One account has a Qing Imperial soldier taking a machete and cutting it through a baby’s heart like as if splitting a loaf of bread.

This book made me deeply emotional. The colonial powers - the British and the French especially - repeatedly intervened in the course of the war in the favor of the Qing. Perhaps the Qing would have won anyway - but the war would not have lasted 14 years and killed 20-70 million people had they not done so. Their quotes and profiles drip with the stupid arrogance of 1800s Victorian British that we are so familiar with in television and I took glee in deriding their buffoonish villainy. Reading this book, amongst others, I felt much more sympathy with the Chinese of today. I feel that I understand those in the Communist Party today who look to the West and see a bunch of high minded idiots lecturing on and on about their own cultural values. It is the cultural equivalent of today’s Baby Boomer saying, “Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.” I felt deeply the humiliation of each of the indemnities and treaties the colonial powers forced upon the country.

This book stunned me with every page and I deeply, fervently, and completely recommend it to anyone with an interest in this now forgotten dark period of the past.