Taping Revolt Basic Info

The Taping Revolt originated when some Chinese man named Hong Xiuquan claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ. Hong's alleged goal was to free China from the "infidel" Qing dynasty and establish a holy kingdom under his altered version of Christianity. He then created a cult style kingdom called the Taping Heavenly Kingdom at the expense of the Qing Dynasty. The resulting war ended in the deaths at least 20 million people. The Taipings had initial success against the Imperialist government, but violent infighting among the Taipings and the European governments intervening on the side of the Imperial government saved the Qing Dynasty from falling. The Qing Dynasty only phyrrhicly defeated the Taipings. Some extreme estimates point the death toll as high as 100 million deaths. How could such a man with such a bizarre cult do so much damage? Well, China was very weak from corruption and humiliating defeats from the Europeans and the Japanese. 19th century China suffered various horrific rebellions (several of them had death tolls in the low millions) throughout its various regions. In various regions that were devastated by rebellion, tensions were so high that they only needed an almost comically trivial incident to fuse it. Some of the Dungan revolts in the Central Asian region of China were sparked by a pricing dispute over bamboo. Other notable large scale revolts in 19th century China was the Nien Revolt (got fused into the Taping Revolt), Dungan Revolts, Panthay Revolts, and the Miao Revolts. So the Qing Dynasty was quite vulnerable to any revolts, and even minor incidents could turn into violent uprisings. Soon the combinations of all those massive uprisings and other factors lead to the collapse of the last classical Chinese Dynasties in 1911.