Behind this beautiful, poetic title (reminding me of the Yuan-dynasty play "Autumn in Han Palace") lies a fascinating study of what was one of the most destructive and bloody wars of all time: the Taiping Civil War (so far in English called "Taiping Rebellion," but author Stephen R. Platt makes clear this was much more than a mere rebellion), which engulfed China from 1851 to 1864. It pitted the Chinese insurgents of the "Taiping Heavenly Kingdom" against the waning authority of the 200 year old Qing dynasty of the Manchus. In the course of the brutal war at least between 20 and 30 million people lost their lives - a death toll 30 times higher than that of the American civil war which partly took place in the same period. Most of the victims succumbed to the epidemics and famines caused by the civil war, but the number of direct victims of violence was also in the many millions. The rebels and the imperial forces that suppressed the uprising differed little in brutality and blood lust. It took the population in the region where the civil war raged (the provinces Jiangxi, Hubei, Anhui, Zhejiang and Jiangsu in central China along the Yangzi) 50 years to recover to its pre-1850 level. The destruction of cities and cultural monuments (Confucian and Buddhist temples and their art treasures) was also huge, although the conduct of the Taiping troops was not one bit worse than that of the imperial forces. The Taiping were no monsters (as was sometimes asserted) and life under the Taiping, for example in cities as Hangzhou and Shaoxing, was better than the unhappy fate of the citizens after those cities fell in the hands of government troops.
[Scene from the Taiping Civil War]
To compound the
miseries of China's rulers, in the late 1850s Britain and France mounted
a separate war against them over trading rights, which led to the
infamous destruction and looting of the Summer Palace near Beijing - a shameful
act of Western barbarism.
The main actors of the Taiping Civil War were:
-
Hong Xiuquan, a Hakka from a poor village in Guangdong, frustrated in
his ambition to become a scholar-official in the civil service. After
reading a pamphlet which he had received from a Protestant missionary,
Hong had a vision telling him he was the younger brother of Jesus and
that he had been sent to rid China of the "devils", meaning the
corrupt Qing government and the Confucian teachings. (Showing the pernicious
influence of missionary activities in a foreign culture, as in a
cross-cultural setting alien religious teachings can be completely
misunderstood).
- Hong Rengan, Hong Xiuquan's cousin, who joined the
Taiping forces in Nanjing in 1859 and was given considerable power by
Hong. Interestingly, Hong Rengan had been the assistant of Scottish
missionary and scholar James Legge and had helped him in his great work
of the translation of the Confucian classics into English. Hong Rengan
believed he could build a bridge between the Taiping and the British and
therefore advocated a policy of appeasement that ultimately proved ruinous when there was no positive response from the other side.
- Zeng Guofan, who
had set up a local irregular army in Hunan, which became the main armed
force fighting for the Qing against the Taiping (the regular Qing army
was too weak due to corruption). Zeng's personal army proved effective
in gradually turning back the Taiping advance and retaking much of Hubei
and Jiangxi provinces. After a long battle Zeng conquered the rebel
capital Nanjing in 1864, putting an end to the war. He could have continued on to Beijing to topple the Manchu dynasty, but he remained loyal to the empire and lived out his last years as a scholar.
- British
ambassador Frederick Bruce who after only a short sojourn in China,
believed that the Qing dynasty was a force of civilized monarchy
standing against a chaotic horde of rebels. Both Hong Rengan and Bruce
thought they had a deep insight into each other's civilization,
and both were wrong.
- Frederick Townsend Ward and Charles George
Gordon, commanders of the "Ever Victorious Army," a small imperial army
directed and trained by Europeans.
The army of the Taiping
insurgents was characterized by tight discipline, puritanism, and
fanaticism. The soldiers wore long hair (the braided tail imposed on the
Chinese by the Manchus was taboo among the Taiping). Men and women
serving in the army lived in separate camps and any sexual contact was
punishable by death. The Taiping were filled with an ardent desire for
reform. They dreamed of a sanctuary state based on social justice. In their fanaticism they remind me of the early Communists under Mao Zedong. The
Taiping state eventually expanded to command a population base of nearly
30 million people.
At the same time, the Taiping Civil War was a total war.
Almost every citizen who had not fled the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was
given military training and conscripted into the army to fight against
the Qing imperial forces. During this conflict, both sides tried to deprive
each other of the resources which they needed in order to continue the
war and it became standard practice for each to destroy the opposing
side's agricultural areas and butcher the populations of cities. The
Taiping were also extremely nationalistic and carried out widespread
massacres of Manchus, so much that one could even speak of a genocide
campaign.
Platt also shows that China in the 19th c. was not a
closed system, but that the empire was deeply integrated into the
world's economy through trade. China and the United States were
Britain's two largest economic markets, and faced with the prospect of
loosing both due to simultaneous civil wars, Britain abandoned its neutrality in China while allowing
the U.S. Civil War to run its natural course. As usually is the case
with interventions by Western powers in the internal affairs of other
cultures, the unintended outcome was wholly undesirable: the fact that
Britain saved the Manchus only meant that the Chinese were consigned to
another five decades of oppression by a corrupt power. When the Taiping
Civil War occurred, the Manchu Dynasty had reached the end of its tether
and by preventing its overthrow, Gorden and his "Ever Victorious Army" arrested a normal and natural process. It was a huge mistake
of Britain to help the Manchus in putting down the Taipings so that they
could continue their corrupt and inept regime which hampered reforms
and kept China weak. And it even didn't lead to increased trade for
Britain - on the contrary.
So the overall picture of the Taiping
Civil War is one of total devastation without any positive results - as is
the case with wars in general. The tale of the foreign intervention and
the fall of the Taiping is a tale of "how perceived connections across
cultures can in fact turn out to be fictions," as Platt warns, and he concludes: "When
we congratulate ourselves on seeing through the darkened window that
separates us from another civilization, we sometimes do so without
realizing that we are only gazing at our own reflection."