
The Taiping Rebellion was a long-running civil war in China that pitted the Qing Dynasty imperial government against the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. The war raged between 1850 and 1864. It began when Hong Xiuquan, a religious leader who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ, established a breakaway state in south-eastern China with Nanjing as its capital. The theocratic state that he founded was known as the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Taiping means ‘great peace’. These actions led to war against the Qing Dynasty. The war lasted for a decade and a half and was one of the most devastating conflicts in history, leading to the deaths of tens of millions of people. It also became entangled with other conflicts such as the Second Opium War (1856–1860). These events set in motion a period of mass migration from China to places like the United States, Hawaii, Australia, Canada, Britain and the Caribbean.[1]
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Taiping Rebellion chronology of events

In the middle of the nineteenth century the Far East was undergoing a period of crisis and change. For about two and a half centuries, Qing Dynasty China, the Joseon Kingdom of Korea and the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan had been broadly closed to outside influences. All three powers had become wary of the intentions of the Europeans when Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English missionaries, diplomats and explorers had begun arriving to their shores from the middle of the sixteenth century onwards. To prevent the spread of what they perceived as dangerous foreign ideas such as Christianity, they closed their borders in the first half of the seventeenth century and only allowed the Dutch and Portuguese to continue trading with them through a number of designated ports. This continued until the middle of the nineteenth century, but beginning with the First Opium War, in which Britain waged war on China between 1839 and 1842 and forced it to open its ports to the sale of opium from British India, these three countries were forced to open themselves to foreign trade and diplomacy.[2]
A period of grave political and social instability followed in China, Korea and Japan as foreign ideas flooded into their nations. The Taiping Rebellion was the most catastrophic result of this. It began when a man named Hong Xiuquan converted to Christianity around 1843 after being exposed to the teachings of the newly arrived Christian missionaries. He then formed the Bai Shangdi Hui or ‘God Worshipping Society’, while also claiming that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. Over the next several years he built up a considerable following and in late 1850 launched a rebellion in southern China. This was the beginning of the Taiping Rebellion.[3]
Eventually Hong and his followers seized control of a considerable portion of south-eastern China and made Nanjing their capital after capturing the city in the spring of 1853. They then ruled over what they proclaimed to be the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom or Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace in line with Hong’s teachings. Unsurprisingly, the Qing Dynasty government was unwilling to accept this turn of events and waged war on the breakaway radicals. The resulting Taiping Rebellion would last for well over a decade.[4]

It also merged into other conflicts. Most notably, in 1856 the British sought to expand the trading privileges it had acquired from China in 1842 at the end of the First Opium War, as well as acquiring new land to add to the colony of Hong Kong it had secured during that earlier conflict. They were soon joined by the French in what has become known as the Second Opium War. It would end in 1860 with the British and French capturing Beijing and ransacking the Imperial Summer Palace. Britain was ceded new territory on the Kowloon Peninsula on the Chinese mainland near Hong Kong. Russia also joined the conflicts at this time, using the Qing government’s weakened position to acquire very large tracts of territory in Manchuria in the northeast of China.[5]

The Taiping Rebellion raged on for four more years after the end of the Second Opium War. Hong’s armies failed to take Shanghai in 1861. Thereafter the Qing government, which was now employing western military advisors and acquiring western weapons and artillery, raised what became known as the 'Ever Victorious Army'. It won a series of striking victories through 1862 and 1863. Then, in 1864, it laid siege to Nanjing and defeated the Taiping movement. Hong had died a month earlier from illness and between his death and the fall of their capital, the Taiping Rebellion collapsed in the summer of 1864. War, famine and other calamities are believed to have seen between twenty and thirty million people die in the course of the 14-year rebellion, but the exact scale of the mortality is still widely debated.[6]
Extent of migration during and after the Taiping Rebellion
The Taiping Rebellion caused enormous displacement within China as people tried to flee out of the way of both the fighting and of the famine which ensued from the instability caused by the war. They also had to contend with attacks by the British and French on Chinese cities during the Second Opium War. Millions of people ended up migrating varying distances. Most of the displacement was internal. A lack of records from the time as government procedures collapsed makes it difficult to determine the exact nature of the migration.[7]
There was also external migration. After the First Opium War (1839–1842), China had finally opened up to the world after two and a half centuries of isolation from around 1600 onwards. Many Chinese migrants had sailed for America in the late 1840s and early 1850s on foot of news of the California gold rush. This trend was strengthened by the Taiping Rebellion, as the instability and violence of China acted as push factors. As a result, tens of thousands of Chinese people left their homeland in the 1850s and 1860s during the era of the civil war. They headed for the United States and to lesser extent Canada in North America, as well as parts of the British Empire such as Singapore and Australia, while also migrating in substantial numbers to the Hawaiian Islands.[8]
Demographic impact of the Taiping Rebellion

The demographic impact of the Taiping Rebellion was most substantial in China. Many people there will have an ancestor who was displaced and moved to another part of the country back in the 1850s or 1860s as a result of the rebellion. Further afield, the years of the rebellion witnessed the first emergence of a significant Chinese diaspora abroad. For instance, by 1870 there were over 60,000 Chinese people living in the United States, most on the West Coast. That number had expanded to over 100,000 people by the early 1880s. Such was the concentration of Chinese people in some parts of California and the west of the country that in 1882 the US government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, placing major restrictions on further Chinese settlement in America.[9] Canada passed a less stringent law, while in 1901 Australia passed the Immigration Restriction Act. The Taiping Rebellion was not solely responsible for this wave of Chinese emigration, but it was a significant factor contributing to it.[10]
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Explore about the Taiping Rebellion
- Taiping Rebellion at History
- Chinese Genealogy: An Introduction to Jiapu 家譜 (Chinese Genealogy Records) at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Chinese American Research: Challenges and Discoveries at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Finding Genealogical Data in the Chinese Exclusion Act Case Files at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (London, 2013).
- ↑ https://www.e-ir.info/2013/11/04/chinese-and-japanese-responses-to-the-west-during-the-19th-century/
- ↑ https://www.history.com/topics/asian-history/taiping-rebellion
- ↑ https://www.thecollector.com/the-taiping-rebellion-the-bloodiest-civil-war-youve-never-heard-of/
- ↑ https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/second-china-war
- ↑ Tobie Meyer-Fong, ‘Where the War Ended: Violence, Community, and Commemoration in China’s Nineteenth-Century Civil War’, in The American Historical Review, Vol. 120, No. 5 (December, 2015), pp. 1724–1738.
- ↑ H. F. Lee and D. D. Zhang, ‘A tale of two population crises in recent Chinese history’, in Climatic Change, Vol. 116 (2013), pp. 285–308.
- ↑ Adam McKeown, ‘Chinese Emigration in Global Context, 1850–1940’, in Journal of Global History, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2010), pp. 95–124.
- ↑ Townsend Walker, ‘Gold Mountain Guests: Chinese Migration to the United States, 1848–1882’, in The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 37, No. 1, The Tasks of Economic History (March, 1977), pp. 264–267.
- ↑ Antony Taylor, ‘Chinese Emigration to Australia around 1900: A Re-examination of Australia’s “Great White Walls”’, in History Compass, Vol. 11, No. 2 (February, 2013), pp. 104–116.