Taiping Rebellion · War Crimes & Atrocities

The Darkest Hours

The Taiping Rebellion's atrocities were not discrete episodes but the continuous background condition of the entire fourteen-year conflict — a war in which both sides routinely massacred the populations of captured cities, in which famine was used deliberately as a military tool, and in which the concept of non-combatant protection had essentially no purchase. Both the Taiping and the Qing employed massacre as standard post-battle practice: cities that resisted were typically put to the sword after capture, while populations in besieged cities were allowed to starve rather than permitted to surrender. The Taiping added a specifically religious dimension to their violence: Manchu populations, identified by Taiping theology as the 'demons' who had corrupted China, were targeted for extermination regardless of combatant status. The Qing reconquest was no more merciful — Zeng Guofan's forces at Anqing and Nanjing killed virtually every person in both cities after their capture. The aggregate of these practices, combined with famine and epidemic disease spreading through a population displaced by fifteen years of war, produced a death toll that remains one of the largest in human history.