In Our Time - The Taiping Rebellion

Episode Date: February 24, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Taiping Rebellion.In 1850 a Chinese Christian convert, Hong Xiuquan, proclaimed himself leader of a new dynasty, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. He and his followers marched against the ruling Qing dynasty, gathering huge support as they went. The ensuing civil war lasted fourteen years; around twenty million people lost their lives in a conflict which eventually involved European as well as Chinese soldiers. The Taiping Rebellion was arguably the most important event to befall China in the 19th century. Chinese nationalists and communists alike have been profoundly influenced by it, and historians believe it shaped modern China in the same way as the First World War shaped modern Europe.Rana MitterProfessor of the History and Politics of Modern China at the University of OxfordFrances WoodHead of the Chinese Section at the British LibraryJulia LovellLecturer in Chinese History at Birkbeck, University of London.Producer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in 1843, a young man called Hong Shio Chun, in the southern province of Guangdong, in China, failed his civil service examination for the fourth time.

It was this failure which moved Hong to take up arms against the ruling Qing dynasty and established the Taiping or heavenly kingdom. Inspired by Christian teachings and disillusioned by the miserable plight of the people, Hong cast himself as a brother of Jesus Christ and vowed to purify the nation.

The subsequent rebellion was to last for almost 14 years and struck a mortal blow right at the heart of the Qing imperial forces. It's estimated that more than 20 million people lost their lives. Why was the Taiping rebellion as successful for so long and what did it ultimately achieved. With me to discuss

the Taiping Rebellion are Rana Mitre, Professor of the History and Politics and Modern China at the University of Oxford. Francis Wood, head of the Chinese section of the British Library, and Julia Lovell lecture in Chinese history at Birkbeck College University of London. Rana, what was the political

situation like in China for the Qing dynasty before the Taiping Rebellion broke out in 1850 or? So the middle of the 19th century, what's going on? Well, the Qing dynasty had been one of China's greatest and most flourishing dynasties, but by the middle of the 19th century,

a whole variety of different factors were causing it to fall apart. For instance, the British were bringing opium into the country and helping to break down a lot of the social norms of the country, essentially by spreading a form of drug addiction within the country. Internally, the country simply wasn't bringing enough taxes

to keep the number of armed forces and bureaucrats and other structural factors together. So essentially we're talking about a great empire that was slowly collapsing from within and being pushed from outside. And in this situation, there was the right possibility of social turmoil. Two factors here. One is that they were regarded as intruders, even though they'd come in in 1644 and taken over.

They were Manchus, and that, as I take it, there was always resented. And secondly, Voltaire called them the most perfect state imaginable. They were at a very high state of civilisation, not long before all this broke out. Absolutely. The Qing dynasty has, in a sense, as a brand name that falls very fast, Because although they were originally a nomadic people, as you said, Melvin, the Manchus, who literally came in on horseback from the northeastern plains into the central part of Chinese civilization,

very quickly they acclimatized and they acculturated themselves to the way in which most Chinese lived over centuries, as well as keeping some of their own ethnic customs. And as a result of this, they adapted to things, for instance, like the use of civil service examinations to allow entry to the bureaucracy. and that becomes important in the Taiping story. Now this is long before the British, for instance, use examinations for entry to the civil service here. This is a tradition that actually had many hundreds of years of history in China.

And even though they were men on horseback, the Qing dynasty adapted to that system very fast. So it was that system that people like Voltaire and the Enlightenment luminaries were looking at and thinking we could learn from these people and do better. And their culture, of course, their pottery, for instance. Absolutely. I mean, again, Jing Dejun, particularly in the previous Ming Dynasty,

became a town in southern China that was known globally for sending out that famous blue and white pottery, which we still associate with Chinese porcelain. Again, one of the first Chinese brand names on a global level. And a deeper background of this, the population had doubled in a very short time, and that put immense strain on the social network, the feeding network, and so that was disruptive. Hugely so. In the 18th century, just 100 years, we estimate that the population started at 150 million people and went up to 300 million. So that's doubling. And yet the system of taxation, bureaucracy,

you know, sewage, whatever you want to think of, did not keep pace with that growth. And that created a lot of impoverished and hungry. Young men in particular, people who had no prospect of getting married, for instance, and therefore created a very unstable social situation at the grassroots. The prospect of not being married was portified by the fact that young girls, baby girls tended to be killed.

Well, two things happen. I think it certainly is the case that female infanticide was known and fairly regular in Chinese society, but we shouldn't exaggerate the level. One of the other things that's very important is that rich men would take more than one wife, sometimes known as concubines.

And that would mean that if, say, one rich man had four or five consorts, then of course the number, in quote marks, to go round for the poorer male population was, of course, much less. And this, of course, was a great disgrace in traditional Confucian Chinese society, not to be married, not to have children, not to have ancestors, sorry, successors, who would look after your grave and your memory after you had died.

Then we seemed to have had a run of plagues, droughts, crop failures, all that meshing in. Francis Wood, how much influence did Christian missionaries have in China in the 1840s, and how free were they to rober out? They had, I think if you asked the missionaries, of course, they'd say it was enormous. but in fact they had very little. You have the great Catholic missions in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Jesuits.

Yes, but the Protestant mission movement in China doesn't really get going till the very beginning of the 19th century and then it's illegal and everything is done through outside printing is done in Surampore. It's underground almost in effect. Of course, missionaries push and push and push but it isn't until you've had the signing of the treaties at the end of the opium wars in the 1840s

that missionaries are allowed into China. So it's a very short period of time in which the Taiping ideology could build up on the basis of Christianity. And I think it's simply, it's partly a matter of geography that Hong Siotuan comes from Guangdong province and it is in Hong Kong and that area that the major early missionary activity takes place.

As this young man started the whole thing, can you tell us a bit about him? He was born in the area very near Guangzhou Canton. He was born in about 1814 to a fairly prosperous farming family, but he was a haka, where they're called the guest people in China. I mean, he was in a sense not as much as the Qing, but he was a sort of outsider because the haka are Chinese migrants, internal migrants, if you like.

And though his family is supposed to have moved to this area about 800 years previously, they were still regarded as outside. by the local people. So he comes from this Hakka group. He is, however, obviously very intelligent because he's chosen from his family to go and take the imperial exams.

A farming family want to have a son who passes the bureaucratic exams and therefore achieves considerable status in the local society. But the poor man fails at least four times. I mean, one of the things I think is probably important about what happened with the movement is that something that we don't know much about.

We know he was about 5 foot 5 and quite good looking, apparently, you know, fairly well-fleshed. But we know nothing about his charisma, and he must obviously have been a very charismatic character. Can we return to those exams for a moment because it seems failed exams four times, oh, a loser. But we're talking about an exam system which was ferociously difficult and less than 1% of people who applied got through. And inside that 1% were privileged persons. So somebody coming from a small farming background down near Hong Kong. might not have had much of a chance, clever as he might have been. There were some, I think there was a slight sort of favour towards the huckers.

They were allowed a slightly higher percentage of marks. But, no, fundamentally it was almost impossible to pass. And Chinese literature is just full of people who spent their entire life trying to pass the exam. So he's... Their entire life, just kept taking it. Yeah. That's a way to live, isn't it? If your family can afford it.

Now, he found Christianity or it found him. What do we know about that encounter between Christianity and Hong? And what did he get from it? What was his Christianity? What we know is that he, at one point when he was in Canton trying to take the exams, he picked up a pamphlet written by a Chinese convert, Liang Afar, who'd worked with many of the kind of major missionaries in the Canton area. He's supposed not to have read it.

The Protestant missionaries, mainly about this. Oh, this is entirely Protestant down here, yes. He, Protestant, but all sorts, I mean, you've got fights between the London Missionary Society and the American Baptists, but he doesn't seem to have read it at first, but then another time he was taking the exams and he fell into a delirium. He had a fever, he was delirious, and something about the pamphlet entered his head. And in his delirious dreams, God came to him and informed him that he was also his son. He was Jesus Christ's younger brother. And he took that on board?

He took that on board, believed it firmly and obviously saw that he had a cause. He was a Messiah. But just to get this absolutely straight, what was the basis for his Christianity? Did he read the New Testament? Did he know it well? Had he any acquaintance with the Old Testament

or the Ten Commandments? What did he know of Christianity to make him declare himself a Christian and the brother of Jesus Christ? At this stage, it's simply Liang Afar's pamphlet. I mean, Liang Arfah wrote quite well and he wasn't too off the beam if you like. But then in about 1847,

Hong goes to, as it were, to follow an American Baptist from Tennessee, Jaycox, Isakar Roberts, who was a fairly strict Baptist. And it already, at that time, it becomes clear that Hong's kind of view of Christianity, quite apart from considering himself Jesus Christ's younger brother, may have been a bit skewed because Roberts apparently originally promised to baptize him, full immersion and so on, and then refused. We're not quite sure why, but it does seem as if Roberts at this early stage

had some doubts as to the validity of Hong's Christianity. What were the main points of Christianity that Hong went for? I think one of the main ones was his closeness to God. I mean, the personal message, and I think that's fantastically important. Otherwise, well... I mean, did he believe in salvation? Did he believe in Love Thy neighbor?

Which bits did he take? He took bits of all of those in the sense that when he created the typing, he wanted to have equality between men and women. All the valuables should be shared and so on. Julia Lovell, when he went back after this fourth exam and said he didn't want to do exams anymore, he had this vision, he was going to start a new movement, and he went wandering around to start the new movement and was rejected and thought of as a fool for some time. And then he got going.

We could come to that in a moment because it's astonishing the way he did as it were get going. But what was his vision? What did he want China to be that it wasn't? Well, the place that he first goes to preach and to get adherence is in South West China and this is, I suppose,

a classic breeding ground for the kind of impoverishment and social discontent that Rana was talking about before. And what Hong and his associates are promising is something quite simple and quite reassuring to the desperate, dispossessed, often hacker communities, so ethnic minority communities that they find there.

What they're promising is a radical egalitarian vision in which all are equal. So all the adherents of this new religion are going to be equal before God, their universal brothers and sisters. Food, land and resources will be shared out. Also, importantly, from the very start of the movement, there's an intense militancy about it. So families and also professional groups are bonded together into militia self-defense units. And this militancy really grows through the 1840s. I think to begin with, Hong's vision is more a religious one.

His idea, at least in theory, is to convert the empire to Christianity. but it becomes increasingly anti-regime, anti-Ching through the 1840s. And by 1850, the Manchu's, the Manchu Qing, I think, have been very much identified as the evil demons who have to be expunged so that a paradise on earth in China can be achieved. But can we go back to those earlier days? He brought these people together. Before we know it, when I'm reading about this, he's got 10,000 followers. What were they following?

Just an extraordinary number. this at a time when charismatic, millenarian, idealistic, thought was, people would take it up whatever it was, whether, did it sweep across the country about it, was he just one of many?

Or was he giving them something special? And how is he getting it over that so many came and gathered around him for the ideas he had? I think, yes, it's true to say that he is one of many potential leaders of rebels existing in China at that time. the same time I think the fact that he espouses this foreign alien religion, Christianity does give an extra iconoclastic edge to his vision for transforming Chinese society.

I think it's more of a challenge to the Qing because it's so foreign. But you're quite right. He taps into what you've just called a long-standing millenarian tradition in Chinese thought. So periodically through Chinese history at times of social, or economic or political crisis, desperate bands of rebels have emerged through the empire. And their idea is that the empire is beset by social decline, moral decline, corruption and so on.

And that they will be led by a Messiah in a great apocalyptic battle. And after this battle, Paradise on Earth, a great peace will be achieved. And I think it's quite easy to see. if you look at China of the 1840s, all the old millinarian signs seem to be there. There's the economic problem, social decline, because the catastrophic defeat at the hands of the British in 1842.

The signs all seem to be there. So it's a real fertile breeding ground for a set of ideas such as Hongs. Well, of course, in the past, it was often Buddhism that inspired, and of course that's what's different that he takes Christianity. Yeah, just one more thing, catastrophically defeated by the British drugs as it were being forced in there Qing can't defend their borders

loss of face and all that but one more thing about this before we move on Christianity was alien as Francis was saying maybe you're better to say it than I'm in the sense that it was a single religion if you're a Christian you couldn't have any other religion it was above

the emperor and the empire this wasn't the way that China syncretic religions in China worked you could be a Buddhist and the Taoist at the same time So he was forcing through, and you use the word alien, an alien religion, that wasn't he? Yes, and obviously Francis knows a lot more about the syncretic tradition than I do, but I think the thing that we have to keep in mind with,

particularly 19th century China, is its tremendous pragmatism. It's at this time, actually, in the West, there's a lot of quite hard stereotypes about the Chinese are growing up, that they are xenophobic, that they're anti-foreign, they're conservative traditional. But actually, if you look on the ground, what's going on at China at the time, you see an astonishing pragmatism, and particularly in South China when people are used to contact with the foreigners. They're used to trading,

they're used to alternative sets of ideas, reading translations of foreign newspapers and so on and so forth. I said you were to come in and finish what I interrupted you when you started. Now I go to run. Well, I was going to agree with Julia very much that in the past, millinarianism, which does occur whenever you've got social and economic unrest was largely based on bizarre ideas based on Buddhism. And I think Julia is absolutely right to talk about

the extraordinary importance of Western ideas. I mean, the West is doing good things and bad things in China at the time. It's disrupting things like traditional shipping routes, bringing in steamers so that you've got an awful lot of unemployed boatmen who will join Hong Xiu Chuan. They add to the growing army. So foreignness is very important.

Rana. And I think it's those two things which actually get to the heart of why Christianity, remembering that over and ever again it's the outsiders in society, both ethnically and in terms of unemployment, who are being called to it.

And also something we just need to add to the mix. In the ideology of the Taiping, one of the big selling points for Hong Xiu-Tuan is that he really takes aim at the traditional Confucian-based nature of society. He essentially equates Confucius, the traditional philosopher of China, pretty much with the devil in the Christian tradition,

along with the Manchus, who are also devils. the Qing dynasty. And by doing this, by creating someone to hate, I mean, this is really kind of, you know, eliminationist language that he uses. He wants them put to the sword. He's able to concentrate this outsider feeling into a religious slash ideological weapon. You only talked about them becoming malicious. And by about 1850, they're organizing for war and conquest, as well as organizing for a heavenly society. Can you talk a bit about the way in which they did organise themselves. Again, it's sort of mysterious that, as it were, out of

poverty, hopelessness and nothing, they spring up. But we might come back to that. How did they organise themselves? Yes, well, it really was the church militant, I mean, literally in this particular case. Essentially, what they did, as with so many other aspects of their ideology, was to also draw on traditional forms of organisation, but adapt them. China had gone over the centuries over waves of very strong imperial central government to periods of great

weakness. In the times of weakness, it was traditional for local element society, particularly what you might call the local elites, sometimes known as the gentry. Or the warlords? Warlords actually suggest perhaps higher levels of central control than there would have been. We're talking at really very local bottom-up type society here. This is one of the things, again, we shouldn't be misled into thinking that the great emperor sits on the throne and controls everything that goes on in China, rather there's an awful

lot of grassroots activity. And so in places like this isolated Hakka community in southwestern China, Hong Shuo Tuan and his followers were able to kind of get together. and bind people, together with the ideology, into taking up arms, training and drilling themselves. This also came from the greater... Did he do? Did he have people? He doesn't seem to be the chap who organized that sort of stuff. He seems to be the charismatic, come and join us, come and join us. Who was sorting out this militia?

Yes, absolutely. He has a variety of other people, for instance, Yang Xochien, who becomes one of his, well, I was about to say followers, also rivals, really, in a sense, and other people within this hacker community who have a much greater sense of things such as military organization, in other cases, administration, and the practicalities that are needed to turn something from an apocalyptic message into an actual social movement. So although he declares himself, Heng Shuiang to be the heavenly leader,

very soon he has a whole coterie of other leaders around him who handle these more practical matters. Do you want to develop that, Julia, level, the internal structure of what became the type being military movement? Yes. It began to conquer, didn't it? It began to move across China and fed itself on victories and was joined by those it conquered. That's right.

And because it's a civil war, with every town that they conquer, they acquire arms, silver and more followers, of course. So it becomes a, it snowballs. To an enormous number. We begin quite soon to talk about a million people, all you people do in the nose side, right? That's right. And you just need to look at the record of military conquest. by 1853 they've taken this great prize, Nanjing, which is an ancient capital of the Chinese dynasty. And it's Nanjing is absolutely key strategically because it's the city in the southeast

where the tribute grain starts travelling up the Grand Canal to Beijing. So to hold Nanjing is to hold the Qing Empire by the throat, as it were. In terms of the organisation of the Taiping movement, of course it's important to remember it's intensely autocratic at the top there are these heavenly kings of which Hongstiotrana is one and their claims to divine status come from the fact that they regularly fall into trances during which God communicates policy changes

Is this the Christian God is communicating or is he a mixture of Christian and is it still a clearly Christian god? You're shaking your head, you're nodding, where do I go? No, I'm agreeing. He's still their version of the Christian God. But he's a very Confucian Christian God. I mean, the ideas like sort of obeying your parents' filial piety. They exist, of course, in the Christian Bible,

but they're given a very traditional Chinese term. So, Francis, you were this God, what, can you tell us a bit about this first victory over the Qing in 1850 and how that's solidified as it seemed to and fortified their cause? That's when the war begins. It's 14 years from, you're pointed to somebody else. That's the beginning of the 14-year war. Who's a taker?

Rana, it comes to you. Sorry, Melvin, I was going to say. So how does it rise, in other words? No, they have this. Can we just go into, Julia had mentioned this victory in 1850. Can you be more specific about it? And that begins what is a 14 year, a long time. Civil war involved with a toll will come to that, 20 million deaths.

So let's get going on the war. So the capture of this ancient capital of Nanjing, which Julia has mentioned, is essentially the turning point for the Taiping. It is the moment when they switch from being an insurgent, you know, almost you might say revolutionary movement, to actually being an alternative state on Chinese territory. I think that's the way that we have to think about the Taiping for those 14 years as an alternative rival to the imperial Chinese government.

And the reason we should think of it that way is because, as we'll probably discuss in a moment, the foreigners, including the British, actually spent a lot of time scratching their heads thinking which of these Chinese regimes should we support. And one of the reasons that they thought that is that very quickly, another character we haven't mentioned yet, also called Hong, who's a cousin of Hong Xiu-Tuan, Hong Rangangang, becomes essentially the Prime Minister of this new Taiping Tienguo, the heavenly kingdom of great peace.

And he puts forward the ideas that are supposed to solidify the movements. In other words, setting up a new type of government, based on this idea of Christian doctrine, but also with, for example, a banking system, post offices, the building of railways, which will increase communications around the typing areas. He wanted newspaper set up so that news could be spread. And all of these things were set down and brought to, heavenly king as a set of policy strategies.

And one of Hong Rengan, the Prime Minister's, reasonings, was that if they did this, then they would be able to attract international recognition, they would be able to declare that the Taiping was actually a stable, reliable state. Can I come back to our founders, Julian, Hong? Is he rather pushed your side now? Does he still have an influence once it becomes a, it's been called now a civil war, a powerful rebellion, a mighty thing. is he, we'll have him there for his original purpose,

but actually we're getting on with building up a big army and taking big cities and moving forward. As Francis said, we can infer he was an intensely charismatic man, but as a ruler he was also increasingly unpredictable, as you would expect from someone who expresses policy decisions through falling into a trance and having God speak. through him. I think one of the key points to make about Hong's rule is how double-standarded it was, in fact. On the one hand, the typing philosophy was an intensely puritanical, ascetic one. It made very, very harsh demands on its subjects. For example, it wanted to abolish private property exploitation. Everything was to be collectivised and supposedly for the common good. very harsh laws against drinking, smoking of tobacco or opium dancing.

The sexual behaviour of the followers was also very, very harshly regulated. The sexes were segregated, in fact, entirely, I think, until 1855, when that policy was resigned because it was bad for morale. But at one point, sexual relations, even between married couples, so husbands and wives, carried the death penalty. So on the one hand there's this very harsh moral stance. But it seems to be there was one rule for the ruled and another rule for the rulers.

So Hong Siotuan already, even when they're in the wilderness, he's calling his sort of rather modest hut, the dragon palace. And when he's carried into Nanjing, this great triumphant entry in 1853, he's carried in on a great yellow silk sedan chair with 16 bearers, and it's flanked by lots of beautiful women twirling yellow silk parasols. And once ensconced in Nanjing itself, he very much retreats behind his palace walls. He surrounds himself with an enormous harim, so again another double-stant, sort of double-sexual standard there.

In fact, in his palace he has no men at all. It's entirely peopleed by female officials and female servants. particularly obsessed with hygiene, clean towels, that kind of thing. Sorry, Francis, do you want to come in here? No, I was going to say that it is very important that he does retreat and that you have Hong Rangan as it were the acceptable face so that you do have an extraordinary division. I mean, people don't see Hong Siotrán at this time.

Foreigners are all piling in to Nanjing, wanting to understand you get the British from Hong Kong, the French are coming, and they all want to visit, but they never get to see the man himself anymore that all matters are handled by Hong Rengan. They seemingly advanced without much trouble towards Shanghai. Why didn't the Qing do more to stop them, or did it try and fail? The Qing essentially tried and failed.

Again, this was a moment of realisation and really horrific realisation for the Qing dynasty. Remember we said right at the beginning that, let's say, 150 years before, 200 years before, the Qing dynasty were nomadic warrior people. I mean, they were the Manchus who came in, and this was part of a very long-standing tradition. Now, as the Qing themselves saw it at the highest levels, becoming part of Chinese civilization, becoming settled, sedentary, part of that more Confucian system, had also made them soft. They were more interested in reading books than fighting and putting themselves to arms.

And while there was a certain element of myth-making in that, it certainly was the case that by the mid-19th century, the Qing armies, the national army, you might almost say, was not the honed fighting force that had been in the two centuries before. And so when they tried to fight the Taiping, which they certainly did, they kept losing. And this made the Qing realise that they had to do something about their military and fast. Prince, before we go on to that, Francis Wood, what are the Western missionaries saying about Tai Ping? In a sense, they're their boys, aren't they? Christianity has made a huge wedge into China. That's one way, rather cruel, but not looking at it. What happened?

I think absolutely. They are at the beginning very enthusiastic. and that enthusiasm is not just amongst missionaries but also amongst the merchant classes in Shanghai. I mean people look upon this. Christianity is obviously essential to the, as it were, the Western outlook. And it also

eventually gets into the Times and the Times starts saying things like, you know, the Qing is over, we have this alternative, as Ronan was saying, we've got this alternative administration. So there was considerable enthusiasm at the beginning, but it does wear off because Hong Sjou Chuan is

very much pursuing his own form of Christianity and though he's not for example seen but he exchanges letters with the Reverend Edkins of the London Missionary Society who writes large letters to him because it's widely believed that he's got rather poor eyesight suggesting that he's not

that God actually only had one son what you get is then Hong Rangan using the Hong Sochuan using the imperial red brush striking that through not only son I'm the other one and also that possibly that you've got to think about religion in a slightly figurative sense all this is

crossed out. No, real, he says. So Hong Xiao Tuan himself destroys quite a lot of missionary support that had been there in the beginning. Just to add, Issa Kar Roberts, the man who Francis mentioned earlier, actually comes back during the period of the Tai Ping's highest pomp, because he, you know, is quite inspired by this idea, and he spends, what about a year or so there, and, you know, day by day his jaw begins to drop as he realizes that this vision of Christianity is not remotely what he and his Baptist colleagues were thinking of.

The Qing realised that they'd lost face abroad by being beaten by the British and the drug wars, and they'd lost face at home. Their armies couldn't take on the Taiping. So they were in a bad way. They called in Western persons, one of whom was Chinese Gordon, who reorganised the Qing military forces with Western weapons and Western methods. Can you tell us what effect that had? I think it does have an important effect in changing the tide, well, turning the tide of Qing defeats at the hands of the, of the Taiping. It's really a strategic miscalculation by the Taiping movement. They decide in the early 1860s they'd like to take Shanghai.

Shanghai makes good sense. It's the center of Western trade in China. it's one of the fastest growing treaty ports which opens after the Opium War. So it's the centre of Western wealth and Western military technology in China. And when Taiping armies try to take it, the Western forces in Shanghai,

they decide they're going to slip out of their neutrality towards the Taiping's and actually repulse this attack. And once the Taiping attack on Shanghai has been repulsed, At this point, yes, European and American commanders, they start to train Chinese fighters, Chinese soldiers alongside Western soldiers. They also give the Qing armies access to Western artillery and rifles. And this is really key in the Qing assaults on typing-held walled cities in Southeast China

because it means that these once impregnable walled cities are no longer. so defensible. Having said that, there is an important Western influence in turning the tide against the Taiping, but there are also internal factors to the Qing armies themselves. What we see in the 1850s and the 1860s, in order to suppress the Taiping rebellion, is the emergence of new sorts of provincial armies in the Qing army. So these are organised by ruthless, well-disciplined local commanders. And their units are intensely loyal to these local commanders. So what you're seeing is no longer a hereditary elite,

which had declined, the Qing Manchu hereditary elite had declined by the 1840s. But we're seeing local forces with an intense vested interest in keeping local order. Francis, how did the typing react to being defeated and being pushed back? Did they blame it on themselves? Well, they tended to regroup. I mean, it took a long time for the Westerners to actually completely destroy them. There's an incredibly long period between their attempts to deal with Shanghai and the eventual over the...

What's an incredibly long period? Six years? Several years. Four years. Yes. Between their attempts on Shanghai. They then go in other directions. I mean, at one point they reached within 70 miles of Peking, the Qing capital.

And I wanted to just say that, you know, we've been talking about the Qing army, we were talking about the Western armies, which do in the end, of course, defeat the Taiping's. But one has to remember that the Qing army, even before its reorganisation, was very thinly spread and was dealing with rebellions in the centre of China, in the south-west of China, was dealing with foreigners. I mean, you get the second opium more in the middle of all of this. And in fact, what resists the Taiping, the local resistance, if you take counties near Hangzhou just south of Nanjing,

The typings come looking for land, looking for material, sweeping through present areas. And the only resistance you get is from the poor local gentry, the people who've passed the exams. And you get stories in 1861 in the Xiaoshan area. For example, one man Tang leads 50 of his lineage, armed mainly with hose and shovels against a great typing force. I mean, the typing are much better organized, much more ferocious. Another one leads 500 members of his lineage. they're all wiped out, Bao Village, 1,000 people, again, armed only with agricultural implements, are besieged.

So all over the Taiping area, which is much of sort of central China, you've got the Taiping's endlessly skirmishing. And at the same time as skirmishing, they also destroy things like dikes, sluces and waterways. So they cause incredible destruction. And the Qing army and the Western armies seem very far away. Ronner, there were finally, of course the Taiping, we could say, if there's quite a finally to any of this,

in 1864 by the Qing Imperial Forces. Can you give us some details of their final stand which was regarded as the bloodiest battle recorded so far in history? Pretty much, I mean, although we don't have exact statistics, clearly the number of casualties in just three days at the last battle of Nanjing, their last stand at their capital, had over 100,000 deaths, and we're talking about very brutal, violent deaths.

By this stage, essentially, the Taiping leadership had broken down. For instance, Hong Xotien, the Heavenly King, had died by this stage, partly because the city had been besieged by the Qing forces. There was no food left. How did he die? We think that he died of some sort of food poisoning. By what we mean is there was very little eat inside the city. People were gathering herbs and weeds.

He actually ordered this. He said there was going to be manner from heaven. He took a biblical message even in the last days. But unfortunately there was no manner in the traditional sense. Instead, people pulled these weeds together. And it seems quite likely that some of the weeds were poisonous. And he died. He died quite quietly in that sense.

He didn't die by the sword. His son, who was just a boy by that stage, was put on the throne in his place. But of course, by this stage, this had very little power, very little significance. And of course, the besieging of the city meant that essentially the last days had come. But what was noted by the Qing attackers,

who essentially are the records we have to read because the Taiping left very few records. Do they have Western leaders and Western soldiers with them at the time? They don't have Western leaders. They have Western advisors by this stage. The key figure is, Julia mentioned these provincial The key figure is a man called Zheng Guo Fan from Hunan province, essentially a traditional, loyal, Confucian servant of the Qing, and he basically reformed the army of the province

to essentially make it into a fighting force, but with Western advice. So he's besieging Nanjing at this stage. And in the records afterwards, he says, I never encountered any rebels as brave and as determined as these. And since being a rebel against the emperor is one of the worst things you could do in Chinese tradition, this was quite a compliment. So they went down fighting with blood and the sword.

And was there some stories Iverend that rather than surrender, they collectively burnt themselves? Is that true? Mass suicides, again, fighting to the last drop of blood if possible, partly because they knew that if they were captured, and indeed, having said that, many were captured and made prisoners of war, there would be no mercy for them, they would be executed. Interestingly, some of the high officials who were captured, for instance, Prime Minister Hong Rangan were given some chance to write down their sort of confessions and recollections, partly as a means of providing information for the dynasty

before they had their heads cut off. What impact did the rebellion have on the Qing dynasty? After that battle it slowly peters out, so what influence did it have? Well, obviously, an immediate physical impact. As Francis mentioned, the human destruction caused by the typing rebellion was extraordinary. Can we just get to that figure?

I know. I said it in the introduction and in the trial that 20 million were killed. Now, how do you arrive at that figure? What evidence do you have for that? Well, the latest Chinese figures that Rana's been researching, actually say 70 million. Perhaps Rana you'd like to say... Well, I'd say, not personally,

but this is one of the... I mean, basically the People's Republic of China, which has taken a very great interest in its recent history, has calculated that if you include children who are never born, so to speak, so the demographic disaster, then you get up to 70 million. That's slightly different from people actually being killed. Essentially, we have to look at things like population registers. I mean, Imperial China and the Taiping's as well

were quite good about keeping registration of population for tax purposes. And by looking at how those numbers change, you can make some sort of demographic estimation of how many people were killed, although you have to also factor in things like refugee flight, people who left areas of registration. By and large, you think you can stand up the figure of 20 million. This is the kind of figure, I think, that we feel is right.

But also tremendous destruction of property as well. I think something like, 600 cities as supposed to have been destroyed. China has 18 provinces. I think 16 of those provinces are affected in some way by the Taiping rebellion. Francis Wood, can you put the Taiping rebellion in the greater context of Chinese history?

I think we've already mentioned rebellions and there were disastrous rebellions towards the end of many dynasties. So that it's, in some ways, if you take a rather boringly traditional view, you can say it's just another one of those. in it's part of the cumulative death, if you like, of the Qing dynasty. Because I think it's important to remember that there were many other rebellions, as we were saying,

going on at the same time in the southwest where people from Dali were hoping to join the British Empire rather than the Qing emperor at this sort of time. So it's it helps to finish off the Qing. On the other hand, it does another thing, which is that it does. They do last for another 50 years, though, that's into the 20th century. One of the things I think it does do, which is that it does. is quite important which Julia mentioned, is that it, I mean, one of the ways in which the Qing does survive is that it has given huge impetus to the modernisation of armies. And it also, I think, does, it's all part of the beginning of the attitude of many of the younger reforming provincial leaders that they want to look at the West, they want to learn from the West.

And a lot of this is through armaments and military training. So in a sense, the Taiping has forced the Qing into much more of an engagement with, technology? I think in the, if you're looking at the impact of the Taiping rebellion, you see the seeds of two of the big stories of 20th century China. One is the modernisation and the westernization of the military machine, which would be so much a part of the fight to take control of 20th century China. And the other big story, I think, is decentralisation of power. Particularly after 1911, when the Qing dynasty finally falls in that revolution, China quite quickly fractures into kingdoms, which are ruled by local warlords. And I think these men are very much the direct political descendants

of these powerful regional commanders who emerged in the 50s to fight the Taiping's. I think I want to exactly echo that last point that Julia has made. Because essentially the Taiping triggers off this period, I mean, you referred to it as the warlord period, I think earlier, Melvin, and perhaps we can call it a period of militarism. It's one of the reasons why today, in the present day,

and going into the future, the government now, the People's Republic of China, is so paranoid about the idea of the country. splitting up or being, you know, torn apart from within, because within the living cultural memory, if not literally the living memory of people, the post-typing settlement in which the country was in danger of splitting up is very fresh in their minds, and that affects policy today in the here and now. And Marx made quite a lot of the typing, didn't he? Yes, he had this very colorful phrase.

When he heard about it, he was very excited and said that this might be the blow that would touch the mummified corpse that was Qing China and turn it into dust. It didn't quite work out that way, but you can see why the common property element in particular would inspire him. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Rana Mitter, Francis Wood, Julia Lovell. Next week, we'll be talking about the age of the universe. So thank you very much for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud,

where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit BBC.com.com. UK forward slash radio four