By Stephen R. Platt
Winner of the 2012 Cundill Prize in History
A gripping account of China’s nineteenth-century Taiping uprising, one of many biggest civil wars in heritage. Autumn within the Heavenly Kingdom brims with unforgettable characters and vibrant re-creations of big and sometimes grotesque battles—a sweeping but intimate portrait of the clash that formed the destiny of contemporary China.
The tale starts off within the early 1850s, the waning years of the Qing dynasty, whilst observe unfold of an incredible revolution brewing within the provinces, led by way of a failed civil servant who claimed to be the son of God and brother of Jesus. The Taiping rebels drew their energy from the negative and the disenfranchised, unleashing the ethnic rage of thousands of chinese language opposed to their Manchu rulers. This homegrown stream appeared all yet unstoppable till Britain and the U.S. stepped in and threw their aid in the back of the Manchus: after years of big carnage, all competition to Qing rule used to be successfully snuffed out for generations. Stephen R. Platt recounts those occasions in spellbinding element, development his tale on attention-grabbing characters with opposing visions for China’s destiny: the conservative Confucian student Zeng Guofan, an unintentional common who emerged because the such a lot influential army strategist in China’s glossy historical past; and Hong Rengan, an excellent Taiping chief whose grand imaginative and prescient of creating a latest, commercial, and pro-Western chinese language kingdom resulted in tragic failure.
This is an important and enchanting heritage of the increase and fall of the move that, a century and a part in the past, may need introduced China on a completely various course into the trendy global.
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Extra resources for Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War
Example text
Even in the 17th century many of them were still armed with halberds, or with sword and buckler. E: CAVALRY, 1 8 T H C E N T U R Y 1 Manchu Horse-archer Although armour remained in use for high-ranking officers well into the 19th century, it seems to have fallen out of favour with the majority of Manchu cavalry at some time during the first half of the 18th century. Of the mounted archers depicted in the source for this figure - an engraving of 1774, based on drawings by Catholic missionaries depicting the Battle of Altshur in 1759 - none wears armour, and only a few officers have helmets.
In 1616 four more Manchu Banners were created, using flags of the same four colours but with contrasting borders. In addition, an army carried a black silk flag, which was used as a rallying point and seems to have been regarded as sacred; Nurhachi is described as offering sacrifices to it. Each Banner was divided into five jalans, or regiments, each of five nirus, or 'arrows'. A niru had a nominal strength of 300 men. An invaluable source for the appearance and equipment of Manchus of the conquest period is the Tai-tzu shih-lu, an illustrated biography of Nurhachi published in 1635.
Soon afterwards Tolbuzin reoccupied the site with 826 men, 12 cannon and a Prussian engineer, who supervised the rebuilding. Albazin was now well stocked with food and gunpowder. In July 1686 Sabsu returned with 7,000 men and 40 cannon. He placed his heavy guns on a hill a third of a mile away and the lighter pieces about 500 paces from the palisade. Then, under cover of a bombardment, the Manchus shot fire arrows and attacked from the cover of wheeled shields. However, several attempts to scale the walls with ladders were repulsed by the Russian guns.