Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 259 - The Taiping Rebellion Part 4: The Heavenly King Has A Tummy Ache

Episode Date: May 7, 2023

The conclusion to the saga of the Taiping Rebellion! Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad free and is totally supporter driven we use that money to pay our bills buy research materials that make this show possible and support charities like the red crescent the flint water fund and the halo trust consider joining the legion of the old crow

today and now back to the show hey everybody welcome back to lines led by donkeys podcast i am joe and with me still is fellow brother of the Hong Christ of the Heavenly King, Nate. How are you doing, buddy? I'm doing well. I'm doing well. I'm excited to learn more about this series. I'm excited to learn more about how weird it can get. Because I said this online, I don't really use social media that much anymore, but I did say this online that I'm learning a lot about Chinese history and particularly the... I was not expecting the Irish execution squad. My head is still kind of reeling from that one. And I made a comment, and I just feel like we need to say this in advance because on one hand, it's like you

don't want to be... We try to avoid, and this show is much better than many others, about trying to avoid being the podcast where you recap Twitter. We don't do that. This is a history podcast. You do a great job. You did a ton of research. But I have to thank comedian Jacob Hatton, friend of one of my other shows, for sending

me a screenshot of a tweet, which I'm not 100% a fan of the Pepe Grouper fucking avatar. Yeah, I did see that. I was like, ooh boy. Fuck. Ooh boy, yeah. This is not good. However, this is an extremely funny tweet relevant to the series

where the tweet says, Chinese history is like Warlord Wu Tutai of the Flying Panda Faction engaged Prince Li Zhi of the Qing Dynasty at Dragon Pass in the War of Heavenly Ascension. Casualties, 30 million. That's just basically what we're experiencing in this series

and this is not the most extreme example from you know uh like early modern or pre-modern chinese history so uh yeah yeah excited i i do have to say this this series and you know we've done a couple other episodes uh like the the pirate queen uh really got me stuck on chinese history um like because everybody who's listened to the show for a while, and especially you, who's had to deal with my bullshit for almost five years now, uh, knows I get, I get caught in like wormholes of, of, of different pieces of history that I cannot get out of because I'm interested in it. And that, that is how my, my research methods

goes. Like what is interesting to me? Cause I'm the one that has to read everything. methods goes like, what is interesting to me? Because I'm the one that has to read everything. So that is definitely where I'm at now, to the detriment maybe of people who are sick of hearing about Chinese history. Deal with it, I guess. I don't know. I don't know. It's just rules. And I also think that we said this before on the previous episode, that obviously there's an amateur's take here because we're not experts and we don't know nearly enough about Chinese language and culture. But even going on what you might call like in terms of academic history, a relatively superficial dive into this stuff, it's still really entertaining and interesting. And I think the thing that I keep coming back to when we talk about this stuff is the sheer massive scale of it, the size of the players involved, the duration of some of these

things, the kind of like overlapping events, the fact that oftentimes you're having both domestic crises, revolutions, rebellions, things along these lines. You're also having tons and tons of international pressure because China is this jewel in the crown of various empires in terms of what the kind of plunder they want to take from it. And so it's always fascinating. It basically, once again, to use my newest and now most beloved metaphor, it's basically playing Age of Empires IV on absurd mode. Chinese history is just the AI can gather resources twice as fast as you and it's just constantly human waving you. It sucks, but it's fascinating. And before we get started, I do have to acknowledge, ever since the episode came

out about the dog blood horse shit gunpowder, I have had so many people send me detailed recipes of how exactly this works. And no, I cannot legally read them because that's illegal um uh putting out effectively a bomb recipe on a podcast but i thanks i guess um like i didn't know that we had so many people that were amateur or professional chemists that listened to the show i mean it's funny as a side note and we won't we won't we won't derail this, but this has happened to me before on What a Hell of a Way to Die when I've talked about my continuing adventure as a guy who just woke up one day and discovered that he was an IT manager, dealing with network equipment and running connections and finding hardware solutions or cabling solutions for some just the specific issues that I've got here at the studio for like what we want to do. And I've gotten some great emails from people and some great DMS from people, some really good advice, you know, just like, it's been interesting the degree to which, you know, if we talk about like, we talked about sandwiches and, uh, I need to thank this person. I I've been lazy and haven't replied. I've got a

very detailed message from an American in Switzerland about here's some great options for sandwiches in Geneva. Talked about running a display port over USB-C and doing a long hybrid fiber cable to try to solve a problem. And I got a message from someone being like, hey, I work in IT and specifically like, if it works, it works. But this may not be a good idea because it's kind of like an unproven, it's an uncommon setup. So there's a good chance stuff won't work with it. And yeah,'s been cool i enjoy that and so i i think for me that feedback's incredible but also like it makes me wonder sometimes like what kind of bizarre niche occupations some of our listeners have and for this episode in particular like uh i hope we haven't offended any of the 19th century chinese historians who listen

um to the research chemists and or amateur bomb gunpowder dog shit horse blood builder uh aficionados uh we appreciate your enthusiasm but we also have to say please don't do anything incriminating to you or us yeah i uh this is a i What's this? I'm getting a call from our podcast lawyer, Carrie. We have to say, please do not build bombs out of dog blood and horseshit. And on a personal level, I just don't want to know where you get that much dog blood from. Yeah, exactly. Now, when we left you last time, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, ruled, of course, by who else? Jesus Christ's little brother, was rapidly circling the drain due to the combined effects of famine, military losses, Chinese military reform, and large-scale Western help.

So just to go back to what happened the last episode after the failed rebel attack on Shanghai, I cannot overstate enough how catastrophic this was to rebel forces at the time. Because previous to this, remember, like we talked about, this is like a river born rebellion for a long time. They controlled the rivers, hence the rapid advance. You know, they made a deal with a pirate named big head uh to let them do it um but those days were long long gone and a lot of this comes down to a guy named zhang gao kwan uh now i do have to put out there does seem to be something of a bit of a cult of personality around him um and he also has a brother uh same thing they're they're kind of lionized despite the fact all of the awful shit we're about to talk about what they're going to do. He was a very successful leader in the imperial government, and he had sent gunboats behind the rebel line of retreat, conducting what I guess is most easily described as a river-wide drive-by shooting with cannons.

Rebel troops troops I mean kind of cool let's be real but that whips that fucking whips I was kind of like you know I was trying to be cautious in my praise for it but now that I can be honest now that you've broken the ice it fucking whips ass

I'm sorry that's cool it's nice when there's like no good guy uh or like nobody here is particularly worse than the others like obviously the heavenly king is nuts and his troops have committed horrific crimes but i will say that the imperial government does significantly worse shit in this episode so there's there's really there's no good guy here and nobody involved is a nazi so you don't have to worry about saying like okay something this guy did was actually pretty cool and end up praising a nazi so like we're kind of in new territory here as a show yeah that is exactly i mean in a way when you are not obligated to

out of some semblance of you know like empathy okay maybe you want to have empathy you don't want to be complete sociopath but when there's not an obvious good and bad side that does at least free you up to just abandon that your standard like moral parameters and just assess things on a badassness metric yeah and, on the dude's rock scale, yeah. Exactly. This is one of those things where we're Americans, and even if we weren't Americans, it would be pretty challenging to find yourself.

You would be a huge piece of shit if you supported fascist Italy and you supported Mussolini. But obviously, we also know that the US Army commits and has always committed incredible amounts of atrocities. We were in the U.S. military and we saw people fucking the way that shit gets spun when there was, you know, an obvious wrongdoing and they did everything they possibly could. Side note, everything they possibly could to explain it away. And side note, just as a clear thing, just call this Nate's Law. explain it away and side note just just as a clear thing just this call this call this nate's law if you ever see a thing online like a viral boomer meme about like this american soldier was falsely convicted for killing someone in afghanistan he was defending america and he was

fighting terrorism and the woke american military prosecuted him listen if they were convicted for in afghanistan or they were charged in afghan in iraq, in the country that they were deployed to, and they were convicted by the military justice system, they fucking did it. They fucking did it. They will do everything they possibly can to find some plausible deniability. Wait a minute. Are you telling me that William Kelly is actually guilty? What the fuck?

Well, yeah, but I mean like Mike pahana and fucking all these other guys but what i'm trying to say is so that's that's my side note but getting back to my point which you've heard of rule 34 this is rule nate yeah right well on on trash future we have riley's law which is that once someone starts turf posting they'll never post normal again that's 100 true yeah 100 true uh but having having said this okay obviously i want to close i've closed one set of That's 100% true, yeah. us army is fucking badass however you have to say that it is at least badass that in the italian campaign in the european theater of operations in world war ii uh gi's determined that a useful ersatz mine clearing method was to drive around in a jeep with a dude on the hood shooting mines with a 45 that is badass that fucking rocks so like once again what i'm saying is that you and

that is really high up there on the dude's rock scale, I have to say. Yeah, it fucking whips. Like, we aren't abandoning our morals, our ethics, our understanding of a desired mode of human behavior. But we are at least going to acknowledge that since there's not an explicit good guy and bad guy here, we're going to allow for some badassness, even on the side of the people who, let's be real, are insane. Yeah. I mean, everybody here kind of sucks. And I have to point out how large scale this

boat-borne drive-by shooting was because rebel troops have been trying to flee back across the river. And there were so many of them that they covered the riverbank for two miles so the target rich environment for our for our boat heroes here um and as they and not to mention remember behind them is you know they have the river on one side full of gunboats shooting at them uh and then behind them is the imperial army and like mercenaries and western forces as well um and some while they're getting absolutely ethered with cannon fire they have to try to like swim of course this doesn't work because remember they have been starving and marching for thousands of miles they're so weak that they can't swim across the

river and also like if you're trying to swim to safety if they've got well look international swimming is in kilometers apologies but two miles is 3200 meters like you can't swimming across the river you're gonna get fucking killed or you're gonna drown and swimming to a safer part of down the riverbank. Well, unless you are like ultra Michael Phelps, you're swimming 3,200 meters under fucking gunfire to find a part of the riverbank that is not lined up with people. So, kind of in a bad spot there. Caught between a rock and a hard place, and the rock and the hard place is also being shot at by a guy in a boat.

And also, you're not Michael Phelps, and even if you were you don't have the fucking nuclear grade weed that gave him superpowers so it's just not it's not happening for you just some taiping conscript ripping like the fattest bowl of shatter on earth and racing across the river yeah exactly he doesn't have to worry about the distances involved because if you smoke that much fucking wax you actually can open a time portal and just pass right through it it's like when spongebob was right again david hasselhoff's back yeah like like i i set this this morning of a screenshot of captain kirk and a bunch of people from the bridge of the original enterprise on the original series choking and grabbing at their necks choking and just saying, this is old guys when they try the new weed.

So this morning, my brain was already in this position of just sort of like weed is not for me because they fucking put it in an expansion machine. It's just everything about it is so much stronger now. I really appreciate your ultra specific reference to shatter there because that's just yeah like it's it's like it's like all like in my day weed was just the weed you got from the weed man it was weed flavored that was the strain and now it's just like now it's like it's just you know it's like they you've gone from like a basic hammer and nail to one of these just like insane German precision engineering you know setups

like you've got like a hydraulic press level of fucking the power this thing has got and it's just it's not for me anymore it sucks but you know what this is why I just drink yeah I don't drink yeah I basically don't drink anymore

cause it's a weird side note but yeah once again derailing Joe yeah i don't drink healthy yeah i don't i basically don't drink anymore uh i because because it's a weird side note but yeah once again derailing joe but the meds make me not want to drink and if you do drink on the meds like it can be kind of bad so uh yeah it's probably a good call well you don't feel it so it's like you don't feel you just i said this to you in private but it's just a strange sensation because yeah you drink three pints and you're like i'm just mentally clear and i'm not drunk and then you just bump into every table because you are actually drunk but your brain doesn't feel that way so you can imagine how dangerous that is and it makes the hangover worse so yeah i just like i like have a beer if it's offered to me or a glass of wine but like i don't drink at

home on my own i just like don't drink anymore it's actually it actually kind of rules but i don't have like a mind-altering substance i can really take i guess i could get into like fucking shrooms or something i don't know but i just it's gonna start dabbling in crocodile yeah i just i i vape i vape elf bars they're terrible for the environment like that's my vice i know they're in my hand i have one right next to me right now and i know for a fact that like fucking that they're gonna you know like like on a long enough timeline like you could do a whole battery powered freight train with the amount of lithium batteries, these things throw in the goddamn rivers.

But like, I'm going to build a, I'm going to build an E car that's powered only by my fucking elf bar cartridges. I throw in the trash and then it's going to catch on fire and kill me. But it's probably better from the environment than the diesel Volkswagen Jetta with a front hood smokestack for rolling coal that I saw in Bedford, Indiana. This smokestack literally

obstructed the driver's field of vision. I don't want to move back to the Midwest, but there are times when I'm just like, oh, man, we just do it different than anywhere else. We're all insane. Speaking of insane, while all this is going on,

obviously things are not going great for the rebellion, right? And if things weren't bad enough for the heavenly King, she decay, the vaunted wing King and restaurateur of fried chicken was, you know, at this point after the last episode, he's a political opponent of the King because mostly because of his

strength. He, he was, in my opinion, the best commander that the rebels had, and he surrendered to the imperial government in 1863. Now, this wasn't because of political problems back in the capital, like his family being massacred that we talked about. His army was surrounded and exhausted. They had been campaigning nonstop. They covered 15 provinces and 6 000 miles

his army had fallen into shambles from war losses the progressive creep of famine and widespread disease that was a grip that was gripping every rebel formation but as well as every city that the rebels held there was just nothing left for them. After having his strength sapped for so long and being chased by the now much more competent imperial forces, he saw no way out other than surrender. So he simply walked into the local imperial commander's camp and gave up, offering, because he knew he was going to be executed.

He wasn't stupid. He's like, yeah, I'm fucked. But he offered, like, look, I'm fucked. Yeah. But he offered like, look, execute me, but spare my men. Specifically, like the core of his army was like this core of veterans have been with them since the very beginning. It was like 4,000 or so guys. And he knew he was dead no matter what. He's like, spare my men and you know uh leave my family alone because he had another family with him uh he had like five wives and several kids uh like only a few of his wives and a few of his kids had been massacred uh in the heavenly capital um so

well it turned out he was 100 right He was executed by slow dismemberment. However, the government didn't see this as a fair exchange and execute his entire army in the thousands. Uh, yeah. His family went with him. Christ.

Yeah. All right. Well, um, once again, if you heard the various atrocities committed by Hong's forces and you thought to yourself these are the bad guys and they suck I guess you've now received

a dispensation to admire some of the badass dumb things they do because obviously the imperial government is just as bad just as fucking bad this is where I get to say that they they're going to do worse things it's going to get much worse I love our show's catchphrase whoops um now these defeats absolutely singled

the the the imperial government's campaign of free conquest that was not going to slow down so in the middle of all this what did hong the the heavenly king have to say about this back in the capital? Nothing. He didn't even acknowledge his rebellion setbacks, and he wasn't really acknowledging much of anything anymore. As his kingdom died, Hong, it turned out, had stopped hearing the word of God. And his older brother, Jesus Christ, had stopped coming to him in his dreams. So he took this as like, I have to wait. I have to wait until they tell me what to do next. So he just didn't do anything. And General Li Shicheng, the rebel commander who had led the failed attempt on Shanghai, managed to survive long enough to get

back to the capital. Li was smart enough to see the writing on the wall all around him at this point uh and he knew that well we're well and truly fucked the kingdom is dying and he told hong the best thing they could possibly do if they want to continue the fight was to stockpile everything that they had left namely food and ammunition inside the heavenly capital and turn into a fortress because they knew the siege was eventually going to come. Small problem with that, though. Hong pretty much didn't control anything at this point. Remember during the last episode how he surrounded himself no longer with his celestial family,

but his real one? Yes. These guys turn out to be much worse at governing than the Celestial family. It's weird to think that the degree of nepotism involved here doesn't really change that much, and yet one is significantly worse than the other. I think what it comes down to is the Celestial family were true believers. Right, right, right. For whether you want to consider that a pro or a con, I'll leave that up to you. But his family wasn't. From the very beginning, remember, his family wasn't really putting up with his shit.

But once he gained power and immense wealth, they were along for the ride. Of course, yeah. Rather than stockpile the shit they would need to continue to live and to continue to fight, the royal Jesus family, which is what I'm calling them for some reason, was forbidding civilians within the wall from buying any food. The reason for that was, ah, but to buy food, you need a permit for that food. And you couldn't get that because remember, food. You need a permit for that food. And you couldn't get that because remember, there's no private trade within the city walls. So they would have to buy food outside the city walls in order to leave the city. You need a passport. So you'd have to buy that passport to go anywhere.

The problem is at this point, the rebellion had effectively rang everybody dry. There's nothing left. Because remember, if you had money, if you're, let's say, above middle class, they took your money and they put it all in that community treasury, which they then used to build palaces and shit. So the people left with anything couldn't afford to do this. And that's not even accounting and all the years of war, famine, disease, and poverty that comes with all of those things. So anybody with any real amount of money found themselves paying more and more to the rebels and getting nothing back. And then the few people who actually

could afford this process, which was very, very few, found their money being given directly to Hong's family. Then they would get the passport. They would go outside, buy food, and bring it inside. Only, surprise, there's a new tax. All the food being brought into the city is taxed to hell, making it cost five times as much as it would in any sane world. And then on top of that, half the time they'd go out, they'd spend their money on their passports to go buy money on food and prep to pay this insane tax and they came back in, but then there was no food to buy. And this isn't because the heavenly kingdom didn't actually have food, but we'll get to that in a bit.

So let's say if you're the few people who could bring in food, then even fewer people who want to do it after seeing how badly they're getting fucked. So after someone goes through this process once or twice, like I'm not doing this anymore. So therefore, the rebel food supply remained completely outside their own capital walls. And you can see how this is becoming a bit of a problem for anybody staring down the barrel of a siege. Yeah. Yeah say i mean um there there is a a microsoft real-time strategy game that i name a lot of times and name check and i don't need to name it again in which you might have gained experience to learn that this is a bad idea and so i feel as though

if your average person you know playing a uh you know perspective like a isometric perspective strategy game keep like no that sounds like a bad. I feel like it's probably a bad idea. And most people were telling Hong this as well, but he just didn't care. If your fortress is like a tiny river confluence and there's literally no room to grow food there, well then, yeah, that makes sense. You probably have to get it elsewhere

and store as much as you can. Get a Russian oligarch in London series of sub-basements installed in your river fortress or keep and get it stocked up and provisioned. Lots and lots of barrels on top of barrels. Looks like a craft beer place. And then you have to employ Donkey Kong to throw those barrels. Yeah, exactly. Well, that's the side bonus is that Donkey Kong can be like your quartermaster.

But then if you actually get overrun, then he goes full sicko mode. He would keep the one Italian guy away from the last episode. Exactly. Yeah, you know what? He can't really help you against the Imperial Army, but he might be able to help you against the fucking pesky Italians. Basically, by both hitting them with a barrel and also recommending a really fucked up recipe for a bolognese sauce.

Snapping noodles in half before you put them in the water. Oh, yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's just like hypnosis on Italian troops. What I'm trying to say, though, is that in the absence of environmental conditions that make it impossible, you feel as though you kind of want to, at a bare minimum, safeguard your food supply as much as possible and like i don't know if you got the option which it sounds like if i understand it correctly and i realize there's not a visual in front of me if i understand it correctly they had the some option of some kind of you know

safeguarding food within oh yeah they absolutely could have done this if they wanted to yeah so basically what really happened was that he wasn't getting visions from christ because the china white that he was smoking wasn't actually fucking working anymore yeah i mean he got so high he employed fucking donkey kong well yeah yeah i mean like that's that's that's the thing though dude i'm gonna be honest with you is that like that could be an opium delusion but given the stuff that's come out of left field in this series so far if you told me that this point that like they had a trained ape that was throwing barrels at people i would believe you i would genuinely believe you to quote futurama i know that monkey his name is donkey um now none of this information was a secret to the imperial government the rebel

like camp at this point was thick with spies and formants and they were perfectly able to freely travel as the wheels of the rebellion rapidly fell off because remember the police state that hong and his functionaries had kind of set up with all the different camps and everybody being ran by a fucking 18 year old sergeant or whatever that began to melt away pretty quickly under the stress of starvation and disease as well as all of these functionaries are eventually just being forced into the military so the the mechanisms of control are also failing and you know there's spies all over the heavenly capital so in june of 1863 bao chao of the shiying army a man who had literally worked his way up

from a fucking cold stoker at the beginning of this rebellion to being an army commander by its end, ordered his fleet to run down the Yangtze River and take Jiufu Island, which controlled the northern shore of the river and therefore the northern approach to the heavenly capital. So the noose is rapidly closing on on the rebellion. And while this is happening, the rest of the Imperial Army had been marching towards them steadily from the west. The few rebel armies that had still managed to be duct taped together in that direction virtually evaporated at the first sign of combat. This is due to a complete collapse of any logistical system that they had in place and the fact that they're all victims of the famine like the army isn't being fed the army isn't being supplied and soon just

like starving dudes at a trench line with no ammo probably a fucking surplus of dog blood and and horse shit but nothing else yeah i can't really eat that you can make it explode but you can't eat it yeah as the armies move in closer and closer, they seize the outlying towns and villages right outside the capital. And that is where the Imperial Army finds the kingdom's food stock in the hundreds, possibly thousands of tons. Now, if you're thinking as to why there was such a horrible goddamn famine if they had so much food lying around, nobody is entirely sure.

But we do have some ideas and I also have some opinion. Remember, the Taiping Christian belief was that suffering brings you closer to God and heaven. And you don't die. You simply ascend to the celestial kingdom and the promised land. So relieving the suffering of those in need would actually go in direct opposition to that idea, right? You'd think. But I don't actually think that's why. That is just my working within their ideological framework. I'm trying to come up with something.

But I don't think that's actually why. What I think what actually happened is by this point, the famine was even hurting the royal family within the capital. So they were either so bought into their own shit, they allowed themselves to suffer, making them the first royal family in human history to ever do so. transfer the food into the city or simply did not know they had it due to bad record keeping due to the rampant bloat and corruption that had worked its way into the rebel civilian administration. Because even the army wasn't getting the food. So there has to be some disconnect. Nobody was just hoarding it. Everybody's starving. Look, I mean, you might be able to fund free college education for every American with the money that was wasted

on people using open supply codes in the deployment supply system to buy like Gerber tools that they just thought looked cool. But our supply system would at least make sure that it knew if we had food. And if you wound up getting a pallet of sundry items like fucking dish soap and laundry detergent instead of food, it was because someone put the wrong shit in there, not because there wasn't food.

So we also know a lot about corruption and bloat and imperial incompetence, but we also typically got fed. we also typically got fed. So this does feel as though like, yeah, you're right. The ride or die wing kings probably wouldn't have tolerated this degree of fucking sucking at things. But unfortunately, they were gone. Yeah.

It seems that the true believers who are actually good at administration, because they did exist a couple episodes ago. Yeah, I recall that. Yeah, you can't be bad at administration and put in such a psychotic level of control over a large kingdom, to be fair. But under the stress of everything that's happening, not to mention everybody dying and starving. And remember, cannibalism is everywhere at this point.

Oh, yuck. So like, understatement of a lifetime, cannibalism, yuck. Oh, yuck. So like, understatement of a lifetime. Cannibalism, yuck. Oh, yuck. Yeah, this is bad. And especially like, it seems that everybody that was good at their job

had been purged. They'd been killed in combat, died from disease, died of starvation. This is a shell of a kingdom. It's a shell of a rebellion at this point. So it's not that big of a stretch of belief

that they just didn't know how to do it. Or they just didn't do it because they didn't know. Either or. Whatever the reason for the non-use of the food, Imperial troops kept getting closer and digging in.

I mean that very, very literally. They built a 10 mile long moat from the river that stretched all the way around the southern tip of the capital and around to the east. When the last rebel held towns outside the capital, Xuzhou quickly falls and the government promises everybody inside a full pardon if they surrender. So, of course, the gates are thrown open and you want to guess what happens next? I'm going to guess that the government goes back on their word here and executes all of them horribly. Yeah, they massacred the entire city.

Yeah, I was sort of figuring that. It tends to be kind of a trend here. Yeah, I was sort of figuring that. It tends to be kind of a trend here. They didn't have Yelp in the 19th century to review how the Imperial Army treated you when you surrendered, so nobody knew. But yeah, we, with the benefit of hindsight and historical record and analysis,

are able to know that they're probably not going to keep that promise. And unfortunately, this is where a reverse counter genocide becomes very apparent which is a sentence I have never written despite this being my field of study

like we talked about as the rebels advance they killed pretty much every manchu they found because in their belief system and through their propaganda they were told that they were literal demons and also as people the rebels are racist as fuck in response to this horrible carnage and because they already really fucking hated the haka people which you remember is is the is the group that most rebels belong to there's also other minorities that are also part of the rebellion. The government

hated all of them. And the government was now very, very, very, very quickly returning the favor. So whenever they retook an area from the rebels, they had questioned the local populace. And if they spoke with an obvious dialect or accent, which all these minorities had, With an obvious dialect or accent. Which all these minorities had. They would be killed. Most of like. Very few people within the rebellion. Were given a pass.

Yeah. This is sounding. Yeah. We started with. Two miles of boat drive-bys. And now we're. It's getting to be like a regular lines. Led by donkeys episode.

That is the podcast guarantee. Yeah. Who would have thought that a podcast hosted by a man who went to school for years to study genocides constantly finds genocides? Yeah. Now, by December, the imperial forces were at the walls of the capital, though the rebels starving disease and not having been allowed to bust a nut in years, were able to hold them off. Though the damage was already really already

done, the government forces had tunneled under the city walls, blowing massive sections of them to nothing. The rebels did their best to try to repair the damage, but there was only so much they could do. And every time this happened, they would repair a little bit, but then the imperial government would come back with more men. It was a massive mismatch in every way. And especially when it came to weaponry, which at this point was completely insurmountable. Because remember, there was a point where the rebels were better armed. That is no longer the case. Yeah. Because just i seem to

recall this early on that one of the advantages that they were facing with or that they they enjoyed was the fact that like their opposition was so disorganized and once they got armed it wasn't a fair fight the the opposition was so disorganized and then at a certain point they became better armed and so it really was like just you know running roughshod all over them but enough time has elapsed that that's no longer the case. They've become the outnumbered, outgunned, and incredibly incompetent ones. Yeah, by far.

I mean, they were always incompetent, in my opinion. They were just less incompetent. And they also had the zeal of belief behind them, which powers people to do insane things. And for example, at this point, most of the rebels trapped in the Heavenly Capital, at best, had a musket, but they had been mostly reduced to swords, spears, and other melee weapons

because they had run out of gunpowder and any route of resupply. I assume they've killed every dog in sight to get their blood by this point simply no dogs available yeah no dogs allowed anymore yeah and the the there was sections of the imperial army which was still very very factional and warlord adjacent they were using bolt action rifles um they the chinese were now producing their own home-built bolt-action rifles on top of things given to them by Europeans, specifically advanced artillery, which they had been trained how to use by the French and the British, as well as better training is used quite, you know, gratuitously. In a lot of cases, British and French officers were just leading sections of the Imperial Army. So, and specifically commanding artillery batteries, which is something Europeans are

very, very good at in the late 1800s. Yeah, no kidding. But also, like, I think that puts into relief something else, which is that, you know, if this were the early days of, I mean, in in china the early days of gunpowder weapons would have been like i think before the renaissance certainly during the renaissance i believe around uh like 12 1300s they started fielding like cannons and rockets and stuff and so but at this point when you're dealing with you know um with cartridges and bolt-action rifles, things that can be loaded with early versions of feeder tubes and magazines and things like that,

the idea of facing off against that with swords, knives, halberds, pikes, spears, etc., it's just... I mean, you're going to kill a couple of your enemy just because at a certain point, they're going to be overwhelmed. They run out of bullets. They can't reload fast enough. But the ratio there is going to be pretty dismal. Yeah. The KD ratio is all fucked up.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing, right? Is that there's some extremely funny jokes to make here. But then just from a practical perspective, from just sort of assessing this, you realize how much the tide has turned and that they are really set up for extreme failure here. Oh, God, yeah. And I mean, there were people within the rebellion that saw how hopeless the situation was. One of them was General Lee. He did seem to be the last general alive within the rebellion with any brain cells bouncing around in his head. And I don't mean to say that he wasn't a believer in Hong. He absolutely was, but he also wasn't stupid. He told them that there's no way they could defend the Capitol.

And I'm willing to bet that he left out the part that they absolutely could have if he just fucking listened to him a couple months before. But and I also should point out here, according to every source on this, Lee still sees Hong as the son of God. So you could imagine that he really didn't want to tell him, Mr. God, we're fucked. And eventually Lee does tell him, we have virtually no soldiers left. Most of our city is starving and dying civilians who are eating

one another. And he even points out that they have more court and civil officials than soldiers. And those people are eating all the goddamn food that we have left. So he tells them like, look, God,

Jesus, whatever you are, we need to abandon the city, break out and like link up with other armies that are still in the field. Cause they did have other armies in the field, mostly in the South, but the armies in the South lack the ability to come in and relieve the Capitol, which is something

else that Lee points out. At one point Hong Ring gone, the shield king attempts to do this breaking out towards the city from the south, but he finds out he just can't because his soldiers are too weak from starvation or dying from, I don't know,

whatever horrible intestinal diseases rip through the ranks of whenever you and 100,000 of your closest buddies go camping in the 1800s. This is kind of the moment where, correction, this is kind of a moment where Hong is in a room with his trusted advisors and gets told,

and then a bunch of yelling happens. Someone is going to make a re-edit of Downfall with Hong Shikua now, and I can't fucking wait. That's fine, but that's... Yeah, it's going to get interesting. And, you know, also, there's so much cholera happening right now. I know that people probably assume that, but everybody has fucking chol cholera lice and like various forms of the pox um and lee despite his very very practical corrections of the

of the ongoing situation is answered by an absolutely deranged rant from hong which is so goddamn funny i'm going to read it in whole uh because hong is very long-winded so i've made sure not to like quote from him directly i mean he's as long-winded as much as you think anybody who believes themselves to be the son of God to be. So I guess he isn't unique in that. I'm just imagining Bruno Gans delivering this. So please, I'm excited here. So quote, I've received the sacrament and the command of God, the sacred command of the heavenly brother Jesus to come down into the world to become the only true sovereign of the Myriad countries under the heavens. Why should I fear anything? There is no need for you to petition and no need for you to

take charge of the administration. You can do as you like. Remain in the capital or go away. If you do not serve my invincible kingdom, there are those who will. You say that there are no troops, but my heavenly soldiers are as limitless as water. Why should I fear the demons? You are afraid of death, so you may as well go and die. That's almost like thematically that is the same speech. Yeah. Yeah.

And Hong then takes immediate direct command over the defense of the capital and declare that anyone who disobeyed him would be disobeying God and therefore be immediately executed. He then proudly proclaims that worry not, God will defend the heavenly kingdom. Spoiler alert, God does not in fact defend the heavenly kingdom. Sigh. Yeah, Sucks when this happens. Now, this also happened to coincide with Imperial forces fully locking the capital down. They had built a double line deep of defensive earthworks all around it.

And Nanking is not a small city. So just imagine how big these defensive works are. They had stationed long range artillery on every high ground surrounding it. Nobody could leave the capital now. They were completely and totally trapped. Any hope of breakout is gone. However, that leads to one hell of a problem. Leaving the capital was the only way rebels, soldiers, civilians alike were getting food. So, desperate and surrounded rebels began rappelling off the top of the city's

defenses at night to sneak around and forage for weeds and grass so they'd have something anything to eat again dudes rock like yeah completely badass although i gotta be honest with you at this point like no matter how much I might have professed my belief in the no nut kingdom of heaven and Jesus' little brother I think that if I were you know ranger qualified in the 19th century and rappelling

down a mountain or correction rappelling down the castle wall city walls earthworks what have you I would probably just get the fuck out I'd probably just bounce yeah like I heard yeah like hey I heard there's a really i'm gonna go scout us some more food about 20 miles from here yeah i heard there's a single grain of race like 10 miles away why don't we go there fucking zonk just get out of here now the truly funny part darkly funny is the government knew that they were doing this they watched them rappelling off the city walls, probably wondering, well, that's fucking sick. I want to do that. That

looks fun. But they also thought that killing them would be a waste of ammo because it was obvious that they were just going to die from something anyway. So they might as well just let them go. I mean, it is very funny to imagine that you're like, you know, Juba the bad dad sniper of the siege of nanking on like you know 19th century chinese huge cannon array some kind of like direct fire artillery piece like you can absolutely william tell anyone with this thing and then you're watching these guys foraging and they're like oh this is badass they'll never see us like you can absolutely see them and you're just like those guys look pretty malnourished

i don't i don't really think i don't want to reload this bitch i really don't want to have to like clean out the fucking powder residue in this cannon barrel like just just guys who are like little more than skeletons with skin stretched around them with like they haven't came in like 10 fucking years at this point with long ponytails like you know what maybe we shouldn't fire at them but at the same time like then i realized that kind of like spoils the mental image that i've created because yeah in this state of just absolute decay and wasting you know like the degree to which these people are malnourished and desperate they're probably not be like this is so fucking badass but in my mind it's funny to envision them as sort of like captain planet henchmen you know

what i mean like like the captain planet henchmen. You know what I mean? Like the Captain Planet henchmen that are like totally building a pipeline to dump sewage into the river, which is just British government policy. Like Captain Planet never had to go to Britain because he knew it was a lost cause. Captain Planet also never had to rappel off the city's walls to eat some weeds.

Well, yeah, because he could fly. I mean, obviously that changes things, you know. That's cheating. Exactly. It's basically fucking iddqd god mode like you don't want to be if you can fly then all of the work that the imperial army has done is besieger see i'm looking around like fuck y'all i'm out hits the konami code and flies away flies away exactly it's like he absolutely has no respect for the sport if he does that. And so, yeah, I don't know. It's difficult to reconcile because you kind of envision them as just because it sounds cool, it being cool. But actually, no, it was just more like a person realizing that a sort of basic repelling method means they might be able to eat a dandelion tonight versus start to death.

And so they just do. There's probably not a lot of bitchin' guitar riffs playing in the background when they're doing this. Yeah, nobody's playing Sweet Child of Mine as you return to your family like, family, I've gathered us a banquet. It's like a dandelion, some fish tank rocks, and a palm of dirt.

But Joe, surely it would be Freebird. That's true. Yeah, that's definitely true. Now, within the city walls everything was collapsing and for a lack of a better term people turned fucking feral on one another armed gangs of soldiers posted up by the gates not to secure them but to rob and murder anybody who was attempting to flee because at this point you know on top of people doing sick repel tricks to get some grass to eat they they were also fleeing the city doing the same thing.

And soldiers knew this, so they would act like they're on guard duty and then catch people as they ran. Not as punishment, but because they wanted to steal whatever it was that they had. One imperial commander announced that he would spare any woman and child that made their way out of the city and to the camps. And there was also cannibalism everywhere. It wasn't uncommon for these groups of soldiers to stalk around looking for people to eat. And the imperial commander that said that, hey, if you make it out this way, we'll take care of you. Everybody was forced into slavery um horrible things happened to the women as you can imagine the children were put into slavery forcefully adopted out um so yeah yeah everybody here sucks you got

you got a roving gang of like cannibals on one side and a literal slave market on the other yeah that that yeah i mean in a way it's just so depressing that you don't even want to joke about it but like at a certain point it becomes like the first time you're like oh that's awful the second time you're like yeah wow they did the same thing the third time you're like yep they did the same thing and there's like the hundred millionth time yep they did the same thing. And then like the hundred millionth time, yep, they did the same thing. It definitely seems as though they are big fans of the old bait and switch. And yeah, it's just, once again, it's just. You run out of the city and make it to the imperial camp

and they pull the old switcheroo on you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In a way, it feels somewhat disrespectful to refer to it as the switcheroo. And it's like you're getting fucking put in slavery. And yet that is what it is. It's, you know, yeah, it's bad. Like I said, civilians are not the only people attempting to run away from the city.

It's not as many as 200, 000 rebel soldiers also snuck off to surrender turning themselves into imperial camps and most of them are executed within hours uh some made it days others are put into slavery um there this was absolutely a no quarters situation despite the fact the imperial government kept telling them there was in fact quarters now the war above ground had ground into a stalemate so of course they went underground tunnels and counter tunnels began to be dug rapidly from both sides towards one another in some cases the tunnels would run into one another leading to underground gunfights and sword duels again, in a vacuum, that shit rules. Yes. What if mole people could use a saber, you know?

While others would punch holes through the enemy tunnel and flood them with sewage or fling unstable bombs at them that were just as likely to blow themselves up as kill the enemy. So, in response, the government built a tunnel

and then made a giant fire and pumped toxic smoke into the rebel tunnels with bellows uh so you know ye olde chemical warfare yeah yeah also like flooding the tunnels with sewage it is a bit striking the degree to which like this is you know the kind of like flinging dog shit at each other version of biological warfare. It seems to come up a lot. There is just a lot more excrement-related content in this series than I was expecting. That is something I always promise. There's always more liquid shit involved in military history than people give credit.

Oh, yeah. I mean, look, anyone who's actually been in the military knows that no matter how badass the warrior involved is, he, she, they, anyone, they all have a story of shitting themselves. It just happens. Everyone has done it. It just happens to you. By 1864, these tunnels had become an industry. They're huge. Dozens of them are constructed up to seven feet tall and dozens of different branches going off in every direction. Sometimes so many of these tunnels are built, they simply collapse onto one another, killing hundreds or even thousands of people at a time. We don't know how many people died in the tunnels because the job came with a pre-built grave and nobody thought about digging them back up.

Yeah. And by the spring of 1864, General Lee, who is still somehow alive and in the city, begins to ask an important question. Mr. Hong, God, Jesus, what the fuck are we going to eat? We are literally out of food. When asked this, Hong cites Exodus 16, where God preserves the children of Israel for 40 years in the desert by scattering manna on the ground with the morning dew each and every morning for them to eat. So Hong orders the rebels to stockpile manna.

Small problem here, though. I'm not much of a Bible scholar, but nobody knows what the fuck manna is. And I'm sure it never actually existed. The Bible only says it tastes like honey, is white, and smells like coriander. So, Hong translated this in his own Bible to mean two different specific kind of Chinese herbs,

which were kind of thought to be medicinal. However, there was nothing like those in the city. Shocker. I know. I'm sure they'd already been ripped up and eaten at this point by somebody. But due to Hong's previous order, not making with the manna means they will be executed for not listening to him and therefore God. So they just begin to ripping up any remaining weeds and grass they could possibly find and be like look sir we found manna manna from heaven there it is yeah so when questioned by lee about food he simply tells everybody let's eat manna hong then orders people to bring the manna to him because he'll be the first one to eat it despite the fact they don't

have any and so the scene is, you know, in the middle of all this is just horribly grim. It plays out like something of a sketch comedy because people soon are just piling up random bits of weed and grass in front of a man they believe to be the son of God who has declared this shit will keep everybody alive through the miracles of heaven. And then Hong begins chowing down on them like he's at the world's worst buffet. You want to guess how this ends? I mean, typically when dogs eat a bunch of grass, they throw up. So is that what happens?

Hong Shikwan only eats grass when he's very distressed. Yeah, exactly. When his tummy hurts, it's just a thing he does. It's like an evolutionary tick. Yeah. Does that what happens? Does he puke? Does he get sick?

Or is the grass not enough to feed everyone? Or does everyone get sick? Does it become diarrhea fest? We could go anywhere here. Hong gets sick as hell from eating the random shit that grows around his palace. He quickly refuses any kind of medical help, declaring that God will heal him, and then he dies.

No. You are fucking with me. He dies from eating grass yeah he dies by grazing around his palace like he's a fucked up cow oh my god all right okay you know like in a way with the twists and turns this series has taken it's fitting but like i'm really glad you did like spoiler alert kept the secret from me because no, man. Now, some people say he was poisoned, but we don't have any evidence of that. We just know from the people who survived, he ate a whole bunch of random weeds and fucking killed over and died. And you're going to get DM and say, hey, you know, you can make Roundup from horse blood and dog shit.

Yeah, it's like the episode of Breaking Bad where they keep making rice in over and over again. Now, nobody is exactly sure the day he died, but I noticed in Hong's name was published in May of 1864 saying he had pulled a poochie and his time had come to return to heaven. There was no big

ceremony or anything when he dies. He's simply wrapped in a cloth, a yellow cloth and buried in a shallow grave in the courtyard of his palace. Five days later, his 14 year old son, Chang Yu Fu takes the throne of rebellion. Again, he's 14.

He's pretty much powerless. And the real power falls in the last semi competent man around general Lee, who wrote quote, the young sovereign came to the throne. There was no grain. There was chaos in the armies. The young sovereign had no ability to make decisions. No one, civil or military, could think of a solution.

So, yeah. Yeah, cool. So, we are now, Jesus' little brother has gone back to his home planet. We have a middle schooler in charge. We're starving. We definitely know that eating grass is out. It's not going to work.

And the best you can hope for is to rappel off the walls in order to find some other weeds and small shrubs and things along those lines that can be eaten without making you have to go to the veterinarian and pass away. The heavenly veterinarian just checking Hong's teeth like, oh, he's such a good boy. Man, you just sent him to fucking heavenly behavioral school,

like doggy training camp. He's only biting people because he's nervous. Yeah, so I mean, but if I understand it correctly, just from a cursory glance, the Taiping Rebellion does go on a little longer than this. Oh, yeah. It's not about to end. Oh, yeah. It goes on.

In July, the imperial government blows up their main tunnels in the eastern section of the city walls, leveling it, and soldiers quickly pour in through the breach. This time, the rebels don't hold. They shatter. through the breach. This time, the rebels don't hold. They shatter. And they attempt to retreat in the midst of a level of carnage that had only been seen since the last time the rebels took a city. The young king, which is

what Fu is called, and General Li say, fuck this and book it. Running away from the unfolding massacre as fast as they could. The king even leaves his wives and brothers behind to die. There's just total chaos and the king cannot get out, being turned back at his own gates. He and his bodyguards, along with General Lee, throw on government

uniforms and escape in the middle of the night as imperial forces became too busy raping and murdering every living thing that existed within the heavenly capital when it fell. They run so fast, obviously, that Lee's horse collapses and dies and the king and his bodyguards simply leave him behind. If that isn't insulting enough, as Lee's horse collapses and dies, and the king and his bodyguards simply leave him behind. If that isn't insulting enough, as soon as he hits the ground, a bunch of local villagers run up and beat the shit out of him and rob him before turning him over to the government, who then promptly murder Lee. Ah. Yeah, he falls quite quickly. Yeah.

Imagine, like, ten minutes ago, you were the most powerful person in the heavenly capital and then some villagers are coming up and running you for your fucking shoes yeah i mean in a way it's fitting but also this is a little more um dramatic drastic immediate than i thought it was going to be yeah and as as the young king is running away with his bodyguards, the slaughter in the capital continues. And remember, the heavenly capital is Nanking, so this is like only the second worst thing that's ever happened in the city's history. The numbers are quite iffy at this point, but the slaughter is even worse than what the rebels had done when they had taken the city and the surrounding countryside, not to mention the rest of China, as the government went on a full-on revenge mission, specifically targeting the Hakka and other minorities. During the peak of the murder spree, it's thought that throughout the area reconquered by the Chinese government, 30,000 Hakka are murdered per day. Within Nanking itself, nobody is sure how many people die, but it's hundreds of thousands what remains of

the heavenly kingdom falls rapidly after the death of the heavenly capital hong ring gone holding this this last city is the next to be feeded and captured and with him is the young king uh though he manages to run away once again though his city is mostly dead by the time the government shows up due to an absolutely uncontrolled cholera epidemic within its walls. And then, uh, rain gone is executed in November. The young King continues the run though.

Now he's alone with no survival or life skills to speak of through the countryside. He quickly cuts off his long hair, which was as we point out a telltale sign of a follower of Taiping and then promptly gets robbed of his clothes by one man and forced into slavery by another. At the end, I mean, he just winds up a slave, and that's all we know, or does he get out?

Like, wow. He does eventually get out. And I do have to say I respect the random Chinese villagers to see a guy who had the power to murder them on the spot two days ago being like, fuck that asshole. Let's steal his wallet. Like nothing but respect. Do you know,

do you know how to use a shovel and a hoe and a rake where you're about to fucking learn? Yeah. Now he is eventually found out, uh, like the government spies come around and like tell the guy who owns him as a slave. Like that's Hong Shikwan's son.

And like, Oh, well you guys can have him uh he's captured by the government november he puts all of the blame rightfully so on his father saying he had absolutely nothing to do with it i am 14 years old uh that didn't matter though he's executed a few days later a week before his 15th birthday now with this the the Celestial Family and the Heavenly Kingdom were functionally dead. Though the rebellion does not end there. It evolves and spills over into the surrounding countries.

The last Taiping armies fought under the banner of Hong inside of China until the 1870s. Though outside of China is where shit gets weird. And I should also point out that most of these Taiping armies within China effectively turned into bandits. They knew they couldn't do anything else at that point. Now, for starters, the rebellion had spread into Vietnam via a Taiping commander named Wu Lingyun, who declared himself the, I'm not going to make a joke, the King of Dingaling, an area that encompassed most of the Sino-Vietnam border. Like everyone else, this king brought with it pestilence, disease, and famine before his kingdom was destroyed years after heavenly capital in 1869.

However, he's still not the last guy. Most of the Taiping army that managed to avoid a large-scale defeat marched on for some time as true believers in the messaging of Hong, at least for a little while. Their generals rapidly devolved into rival warlords, and then little more than bandits and gangs, as roving bands of soldiers pillaged their way across the countryside, knowing that surrendering to the government meant certain fucking death, so they had no other options. One of these was the awesomely named Black Flag Army, commanded by Wu Kun. The Black Flag Army crossed from China into Vietnam and set up an extortion racket along the way, before doing a quick face turn and helping Vietnam fight the invading French military as they pushed into the Tonkin region in the late 1800s. Despite being a remnant of the Taiping Rebellion, they also threw their lot in with the Chinese government, fighting against the French again during the Sino-French War, after which time

the army eventually disbanded, though it would pop up a few times after that when the need arose. Other remnants of the Taiping broke down into so-called flag gangs and moved as far away as thailand and laos fighting the force of the thai king ramna the fifth to the complete and utter confusion of every single thai person they came across they had no fucking idea who these guys were or where they came from and why they're destroying all their buddhist temples it's like who the fuck are you from and why they're destroying all their Buddhist temples. It's like, who the fuck are you guys? Why are you setting all the temples on fire?

They could kind of figure out who the ones in Vietnam were, though, because they were constantly singing this refrain that they had just adopted as their national anthem that went like, we're gonna have a TV party tonight. It's a black flag joke for the real heads out there who

are way older than me probably now these gangs in thailand and laos survived until beyond 1890 and eventually they just assimilated into the countryside or were murdered by like the local military it's kind of absurd they just like carried on be it slowly i mean they like devolved into just outright banditry with a weird veneer of taiping christianity tacked on to the absolute confusion of the thai government so basically like in terms of actual adherence to the principles and this idea of being a fraction of like a larger whole they lasted longer than the confederate remnants who fled to brazil yeah like yeah kind to try to do the confederacy and absentia before they just you know then realize that what they

actually wanted was you know plantation slave state money life of luxury and being completely useless at life and so they were like oh we don't we don't worry about retaking the south we'll just live disgustingly here though unlike brazil i don't think there's any like thai cities that dress up like taiping rebels and have a party every year we i know we're nearing the end of the episode but there's i'll see if i can find it and share it on our Discord. There's an article from years and years ago where a journalist went down and interviewed the still living grandchildren of Confederates who had fled to Brazil. And they spoke English as their first language, but obviously all their families spoke Portuguese. And these people even grew up bilingual. But the way they spoke English was like a preserved dialect of deep South dialect from the mid-19th century.

God, that's so cursed. And the guy was just like, it's the syrupy-est voice you have ever heard in your life. Now, for the true cost of this war, it's something we'll never really know, despite it being somewhat quite recent. Although keeping accurate records of something Imperial China traditionally did very, very well, the decentralized nature of the Imperial war effort and the fact that it was a civil war and therefore very chaotic, and not even again, like I've pointed out before, this is not the only civil war happening in China at the

time, meant that reliable figures are impossible to find. The destruction of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and the Heavenly Capital also meant that the majority of records within it were also destroyed, with Chinese historians think that at best, only 10% of the records that the rebels kept actually survived. So we don't really know a whole lot about that. So losses amongst the imperial government are completely unknown and could only be guessed. Most of the soldiers I've been talking about weren't soldiers at all, but regional militiamen levied as regional forces campaigning nearby in order to fill their losses. In a lot of cases, these militias didn't even have roles or rosters for their men.

So when someone died, no one even took note of it. As for the Taipings though, it's thought that 90% of their forces died, which is conservatively in the millions over the course of the decade plus the war would go on. Though the real course of this war, like all wars, is the horrific devastation that it brought on the civilian population of China. In the region where the war took place, that cost was almost complete. Economic and agricultural destruction was virtually apocalyptic. And when those two things became rampant, uncontrolled spread of disease that always comes with the deprivations of war claimed even more people. Again, the true numbers are unknown, but conservative estimates put the death toll at 30 million, with some saying that it could even be up to 50 million, and some even say 100 million.

This makes it, even in the mid-range numbers, the most deadly civil war in human history, with the high end making it even more deadly than World War II, causing more human misery. human misery, though we will never be fully sure. And it's kind of a black hole of information due to the thorough nature of destruction at the fall of the heavenly capital. But even in the 50 million dead range, the only war that's thought of to be more deadly than it is World War II, for fuck's sake. Which is nuts because when you think about it, the degree to which World War II's casualty estimates are obviously still loose figures, even though there is more accurate record-keeping just because of the scale of it. So that's not to say that this is guaranteed

that the high end is correct, but if it were, then this implies that, like, well, it's fundamentally unknowable how much devastation it caused. And it's, I mean, it kind of, obviously, there's so much darkness in this series that it's not as if it's anything novel to say, oh, we're, you know, this is ending on a somber note because you realize just how horrific it was. But that is really eye-opening to think about that, that this is one of many rebellions, one of many mass atrocities in relatively recent years. I mean, my grandfather died in 2020. He was born in 1921. When he was alive, when he was

young, there would have been plenty of people still alive who had suffered, especially the later phases of this, who would have suffered this, who would have been people, plenty of people still alive who had suffered, especially the later phases of this, who would have suffered this, who would have, you know, experienced this. It's not that long ago. And it's,

it's, yeah, it's, it's really, it's really, really eyeopening. And, and frankly,

jaw dropping when you think about it, just, just the extent to which this upended so many people's lives. And that like, it's not that like people are unwilling to acknowledge it. It's that it's almost impossible to acknowledge it on the scale it would deserve. It's kind of baffling. We did a series on Curse a while back,

and the scope of the human misery involved was kind of breathtaking, and it was nothing like this. I mean, there can't be a topic we ever cover that can even come close, but it's one of those things that oftentimes you see it get brought up online from time to time, specifically about Hong and where he came from failing his civil service exam and believing he's the son of God and Jesus Christ's little brother, which of course we had fun with that here on the show as well. But I think when you focus on that too much, you kind of forget the sheer amount of human

misery that was brought on by both Hong and the Chinese imperial government. The massive amount of deprivations that civilians went through, the untold amount of death and destruction is always kind of left by the wayside for the ha-ha quality of laughing at how insane Hong was. I try not to do that during the last four weeks of podcasts. But oftentimes, the human cost of war gets lost on people because they're just so desperately looking for levity. And I mean, that's what we do here is we try to make things fun and entertaining. But at the end of the day like this kind of catastrophic damn near

apocalyptic event is sadly not remembered um or known about outside of i assume china uh the western world really doesn't know about it uh i mean an american historical understanding is kind of trapped in the same era of the u.s civil war on. And we often think about how awful the American Civil War was because it was fucking terrible. But going out at the same time on the other side of the world was something that would make the US Civil War look like one battle from this. Yeah. Yeah. One campaign at best. I mean, that's always an eye-opening thing. I can't remember the exact figure, but people are often surprised that the U.S. Civil War was the deadliest American war in history. But then when you kind of do the simple arithmetic that both sides were Americans, it makes sense because Americans lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers in World War I and World War II, but nowhere near as many.

I believe that you could combine World War I and World War II, and it would either be just about the Civil War's total casualty rate or a bit less, actually. But I believe, and like I said, I mean, this is rough math, I believe it's still under a million casualties, still certainly under a million dead. And yeah, like you said, that's just, I think a million people died at the siege of Leningrad so you know it's you realize how how much broader the scope was and how much more horrific this these events were and specifically this one so i mean like yeah i'm not backtracking i mean we had jokes because we do jokes on this podcast and we you know we like to find the absurd things and point them out but yeah like there's a degree to which this ends you think yeah, that's most of the people caught up in this had no choice.

They didn't volunteer to be involved. They just, it was either get killed or live under this. And so like most people are going to opt to live under it. And then they wind up suffering and in many cases, suffering far worse

than the perpetrators did because of the fact that they just happened to be unlucky where they were in their life, you know, where they were born, where they grew up, where they lived. And yeah, it sucks. It's really bad. So I guess thanks for joining me for the last four weeks on this awful thing, Nate. I guess for the sake of some levity, we do have this thing called Questions from the Legion, which we don't do those during series.

We put them at the end of the series. And if you'd like to ask us a question, Legion donate to the show and ask us through Patreon or on the Discord. And this one's kind of interesting. It says, you've both been doing podcasts for years. This is how you make your living,

which is true. I've been doing this for like almost five years. It'll be five years in June, I think, which is kind of crazy to think about. And you've been doing it longer than I have on even more different shows. Yeah, my first podcast started towards the back half of 2015. So yeah, I've been doing this for almost eight years now. And they ask, what are some of the weirder complaints that you get as a podcast creator? I think for me, the weirder complaints are oftentimes people just kind of want to have a reason to contact you. And so you'll find that someone takes issue with something small, that maybe it's an oversight, maybe it's

a technical thing, maybe it's just literally like a decision you made. But rather than saying this bothers me, it winds up being framed as like, you're a bad person for doing this. And sometimes it's completely accidental. Sometimes it's literally like we couldn't help it. It's like a problem with the hosting platform. But I had some complaints before um where it felt as though people wanted to really kind of exaggerate the importance of a thing and like obviously if it's like an oversight where you've said something you know monstrous by mistake by omission you want to fix it and you want it to be treated with the seriousness it deserves. But sometimes it's just like, look, man,

I realized that a sensor beep getting dropped in randomly can be distressing to you if you don't like random noises. But the only way to make the show make sense without either publishing something that's libelous or legally actionable or making a cut where it makes no sense at all. Besides those choices, my only real

realistic choice is to do something that kind of like normally will just let people know what's happened without having to have it explained. And quite frankly, if interruptions bother someone then like me cutting in and doing like, hi, it's Nate, the producer. I had to cut this out because we libeled someone and someone else said they wanted to kill someone and we can't

put that out on our show you know what i mean like right so things like that um in terms of like the specific weirdest complaint um to be honest with you they are so specific often that i feel as though if i did that that it would be the person who had done it might know and it would feel as though i i'm kind of putting them on blast to our audience so i'll leave it alone but um i i i get i get weird ones don't get me wrong yeah so i'm interested for you what what's what's the strangest one you've gotten i i know that we had a guy who um was mad about a thing you'd said on an episode and so basically paid to subscribe to the discord and patreon and therefore discord of every single show that i produce or that any of my co-hosts on other shows produce

in order to raise a complaint and demand an answer on those discords and then was promptly banned and then subsequently moved on to raising those complaints on the twitch stream for tf that i'm not even on and was subsequently banned and so in in the long run, probably was out of pocket, like $40 or $50 to raise these complaints about a thing that was just a difference of opinion with something you'd said in passing. Yeah. I mean, as someone who runs a history show, I am going to get the normal complaints, specifically a military history show, which I understand that most shows about military history attract the worst kind of people, which is specifically why we started this show. It's because I am a huge...

Obviously, I went to school for history. I am deeply interested in military history. And it really bothered me that whenever you go into any... You go far enough into military history content on the internet you're going to find some weird guy that's really a big fan of rhodesia or something so like getting complaints from those idiots doesn't like that that comes with the territory and i don't consider those complaints i just think those are just angry old white south africans who can't move on um but you know over the years uh some people like you know we did i think our first big series that we really got under like we thought we found our

our thing you know we got our groove was the iran iraq war series um and I got like someone once accused me of being a big fan of the Ayatollah for some reason. Um, because I, I believe what I said was that like, you know, you couldn't blame people for being pissed off at the Shah. of the ayatollah for not supporting reza pallavi or they could call you a fan of the ayatollah because you you were like uh your rockies were bad or something like that like in what they did yeah and it's just like yeah either way it seems as though you're you're i remember a a tactic of like idiot college republicans when i was in school was to interrupt any speaker talking about any expert anyone talking about uh the ongoing u.s occupation of iraq which i started college in 2003 so it was very very new by asking them who would have made a better successor uday or kusei and it's just like man shut the fuck up who gives a fuck like right roger saddam we know saddam was bad great like you know that kind of thing so it's like

yeah you know wait wait waste my time some more why don't you that comes with the territory i think especially when it cut you know the way that we run the show we try to make light of things where we can and of course we do have series where we don't make light of anything because it's not respectful um and you know we get we get the weird complaints that you would expect um when it comes to stuff like that uh or my my personal favorite was someone claiming i was disrespectful for mispronouncing mispronouncing things uh or vaguely racist or something um and it's like they're like uh someone once said that i i could make the effort to pronounce armenian things correctly so why can't i pronounce this other thing correctly and my

counter is you understand so little about the Armenian language that you don't know I'm mispronouncing it because I am. My friends make fun of me all the time. I mean, I make fun of you for saying, I make fun of you constantly in our producer chat for saying escape. So like, it's, yeah, like, it's just,

you're from Michigan. It's how people from Michigan talk. But yeah, I mean, like, none of that is done out of disrespect. Like, and we do make an effort to make sure that we're doing it correctly. But I mean, at a certain point, we're not going to sound 100% authentic, even if we do our damnedest. My previous anecdote about trying to pronounce a very basic thing in Cantonese and then realizing that I will just never speak Cantonese.

Sometimes you butt up against a challenge here. And so we do our best. And it's not going to make me back down from covering something. It'll just require a little bit extra work to try to get the pronunciations in the right ballpark and do you think it would have been better if i had punched in a recording of myself saying ajan core like 350 times when you did your episode on the battle of ajan court like no yes the episode that will never die uh agon court that. That's okay. I believe I said Agincourt. Yeah. I mean, like, right, right. Agincourt.

Like, look, let's be honest here. Like, it's a challenge. We speak English. And so unless stuff is, you know, in the English language and originally written in the English language, like, chances are very good we're going to fuck something up.

And I think we try to go about it. You have always, I mean, in the years I've been editing and then since I've been on the show, we, we, and you have always gone about, you know, trying to do it in such a way that even if you're wrong, it's not like you're not being like defiantly wrong and convinced that you're right. Yeah. And I think like, that's, that's, that's an approach that I certainly would take in my

own work in life versus like, you know, the, the sort of like British public school blustering your way wrongly through things, but being super confident in it um and so hopefully most people will forgive us forgive you forgive me for uh mistakes we make and things along those lines um mixing up famous historical figures in the one conflict where you really don't want to mix up anything because then you will be called a charlton and idiot forever um shout out to the to the fan who listened to the recent bonus episode and corrected my i knew what i was talking about but i absolutely just swapped out the wrong name and who boy was it such a wrong thing that like it was just instant credibility death so um thank thank you anonymous fan who helped me and um i apologize i should sleep more um but yeah

yeah uh and you know what uh thank you, everybody. I should say we get significantly more compliments than complaints. But when you make a show for so long, it's going to happen, especially on the topics that we cover. Nate, thank you again so much for joining me for four weeks of just absolute misery. And you can use this area to plug your various shows. Yeah, so I do a podcast with friend of the show, Francis Horton called What a Hell of a Way to Die. It's a podcast about why you shouldn't join the military. And we also talk about dumb, funny, military

and veteran related news. We both have a free show that comes out once a week. And we also have a Patreon much like Lions Led by Donkeys. We share our Discord with the Lions Led by Donkeys Patreon community. And for $5 a a month you can get every bonus episode we've ever done dating back to early 2017 so that's a whole lot of content

you can hear the audio quality get slightly better as I start to learn how to do my job and I also produce a film podcast called kill James Bond that's hosted by three extremely funny trans people Alice Caldwell Kelly Abigail Thorne of philosophy tube and Evan it's extremely good.

They just did a bunch of live shows. Those are coming out very soon. They also have a Patreon if you want to hear more. And then I produce a show called Trash Future, a podcast about why we think tech pessimism is more realistic than tech optimism and making fun of British news and discussing British news in a way that doesn't make you feel like you're being

lied to or talked to by your kindergarten teacher trying to just talk about what it's like to live in this country. So hopefully any of those shows that are interesting to you, you can check out that they all have free episodes and then they all have Patreons. So if you find you connect with one, then you can get more. Absolutely. And thank you everybody for listening. If you like our show, what we do here, consider supporting us on Patreon. Like the the other shows you can get almost five years of bonus content for five bucks you can donate more or less on what you want or what you can afford um or you know i mean along with bonus you get discord access you get episodes for free i'm currently reading my first book the

hooligans of kandahar and public uh it on Patreon. These people have been asking for that for years. I won't say fun doing it because I hate that fucking book, but it is an interesting time to go back and see how I was writing when I was that young compared to how I write now. I do plan on doing that in the future as I legally can with my other books. You can get all that for five bucks. But if you don't have anything, you don't want to give us anything, that's perfectly fine. Do what you will, but leave us a review on where you,

wherever it is you listen to podcasts. It helps us greatly. And yeah, until next time, the next episode will not be this sad. That is, that is the Joe guarantee. Yeah.

But the Joe is basically the Imperial army and he will a hundred percent go back on his fucking promises. And it's like next one is just to be genocide, terror, misery, volcanic eruption that kills people while they're jacking off and calcifies them as mummies. That is true.

And I will not warn my co-hosts ahead of time. You certainly won't, but thank you, Joe, for all this informative content. Thank you for enlightening me about, uh, the Irish execution squad in China and the emperor God's son that died eating grass like a dog. This has been incredible.

Yeah, it's been probably one of my new favorite series in a while. So I hope everybody enjoyed it as much as you can enjoy topics like these. I hope I at least made it interesting and consumable. like these. I hope I at least made it interesting and consumable. And until next time, don't eat the grass outside of your front door thinking it is a gift from God. It might look

like mana, but it's just grass.