Stephen R. Platt
AUTUMN IN THE HEAVENLY KINGDOM

Stephen R. Platt received his Ph.D. in Chinese history from Yale University, where his dissertation was awarded the Theron Rockwell Field Prize.
He is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is also the author of Provincial Patriots: The Hunanese and Modern China.
An undergraduate English major, he spent two years after college as a Yale-China teacher in Hunan province. His research has been supported by the Fulbright program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation.
He lives in Northhampton, Massachusetts, with his wife and children.

"Platt has written the next great history of the Taiping rebels. And his argument — which is fresh and important — is that this idea that China was unchangeable and not a significant factor in the world's history in the nineteenth century is just plain wrong. Aided by the patently clear fact that China matters now, Platt has marshaled a powerful case that the rebellion — and China — mattered then.... Platt adds an absorbing new perspective on this bloody conflagration."
— The Washington Post

"A refreshing and gripping account that illuminates how civil conflicts can suck in outsiders and why the West has had great difficulties in trying to maintain a façade of neutrality and protect its commercial interests at the same time .... Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom may not have said the last word on the Taiping Rebellion, but the story it tells is powerful, dramatic, and unforgettable."
— San Francisco Chronicle

"Structurally, Stephen Platt's Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom is a thriller .... We read in starred reviews things like `the book brings history to life.' We read these words so often that we have forgotten what they mean, but this book reminds us. It makes history immediate and personal, one that speaks to us on a sensory, moral, intellectual and emotional level. They should teach this one in schools:'
— San Antonio Express-News

"A marvelous account of a largely forgotten but major event. Combines great scholarship with a driving narrative and sharp characterization."
— Jonathan Fenby,

author of The Penguin History of Modern China and Tiger Head, Snake Tails

"An intricate and compelling historical narrative rich in military campaigning, vivid personalities and, above all, diplomatic mis- understanding. With a wonderful flair for storytelling, Platt explores the relationship between the two conflicts.... Authoritative and fascinating, Platt's work will interest both the specialist and the casual reader (like me) who wants to learn about an event that presaged China's entry into the modern world."
— Minneapolis Star Tribune

"[Platt] juxtaposes the competing ideologies and leaders of the ruling Manchu Qing dynasty and the Hunan Taiping rebels with savvy and assurance. By neatly folding in the machinations of the British, Platt paints a picture of combat dire enough to have choked the Yangtze's flow several times with discarded victims."
— The Star-Ledger (Newark)

"Platt has skillfully converted his erudition into an eminently general- interest treatment of what may have been the most lethal civil war in history?'
— Booklist (starred review)

"Splendid.... An upheaval that led to the deaths of twenty million, dwarfing the simultaneously fought American Civil War, deserves to be better known, and Platt accomplishes this with a superb history of a nineteenth-century China faced with internal disorder and predatory Western intrusions?'
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Stephen Platt brings to vivid life a pivotal chapter in China's history that has been all but forgotten: the Taiping Rebellion in the mid- nineteenth century, which cost one of the greatest losses of life of any war in history. It had far-reaching consequences that still reverberate in contemporary China. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom is a fascinating work by a first-class historian and superb writer." — Henry Kissinger

"A splendid example of finely calibrated historical narrative. The civil war that erupted in China between the early 1850s and 1864 was perhaps the bloodiest in human history; with a wealth of vivid detail, Platt shows how the fates of China's rulers and many millions of their subjects were manipulated by British diplomatic and commercial interests, as well as colored by the rebels' own unorthodox religious and political beliefs. It is a tragic and powerful story."
— Jonathan Spence,

author of The Search for Modern China

The war that engulfed China from 1851 to 1864 was not only the most destructive war of the nineteenth century, but likely the bloodiest civil war of all time. Known in English as the Taiping Rebellion, it pitted the Chinese rebels of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom against the waning authority of the two-hundred-year-old Qing dynasty of the Manchus, and in its brutal fourteen-year course at least twenty million people lost their lives to warfare and its attendant horrors of famine and pestilence. In terms of the U.S. Civil War, with which it coincided in its final years, the death toll of the Chinese civil war was at least thirty times as high.

Like most Americans, I did not learn about the Taiping Rebellion as part of my standard education. I managed to get through twelve years of public schooling, four years of college, and the better part of a year in China before reading about it for the first time, and I do not think my experience was uncommon. This war remains little known in the United States not just because our own civil war naturally occupies the center of our histories of the period but also because of a long-standing misconception that China in the nineteenth century was an essentially closed system and therefore that a civil war in China — no matter its scale — was something with relevance only to the country in which it was waged. Part of my purpose in writing this book is to help restore China to its proper place in the nineteenth-century world. China was not a closed system, and globalism is hardly the recent phenomenon we sometimes imagine it to be. The Qing Empire was deeply integrated into the world's economy through trade, and there were thousands of foreigners living in Hong Kong and Shanghai. By consequence, the war in China was tangled up in threads leading around the globe to Europe and America, and it was watched from outside with a sense of immediacy. Furthermore, to compound the miseries of China's dynastic rulers, Britain and France mounted an entirely separate war against them in the late 185os over trading rights and the stationing of ambassadors, which overlapped with the ongoing Taiping Rebellion and helped push the empire to the brink of total collapse.

Americans should know about the Taiping Rebellion not just for the sake of understanding China's history, or because their own countrymen were involved in it, but also because it helps to illuminate the wider effects of the U.S. Civil War far beyond America's borders. The simultaneity of the Chinese and American civil wars was no trivial matter, and one of my underlying arguments in this book is that the launching of hostilities in the United States in i861 helped shape the final outcome of events in China, by forcing Britain's hand. The United States and China were two of Britain's largest economic markets, and to understand Britain's role in either war we need to remember that it was faced with the prospect of losing both of them at the same time. Order had to be restored on one side or the other, and while Britain could have intervened in the United States to reopen the cotton trade, for reasons that will be explained in the course of this book, it chose to launch itself into the civil war in China instead. In hindsight, the British prime minister would point to his country's intervention in China as being the reason why Britain could survive economic ruin while it allowed the U.S. Civil War to run its full and natural course unmolested.

Or in other words, Britain's neutrality in the U.S. Civil War came at the expense of abandoning it in China.

This book is not a comprehensive history of the Chinese civil war, which, given its enormous scale, would too easily devolve into a numbing listing of dates, battles, and casualties. It is, however, an attempt to show the war from all sides, and to recapture a sense of what it was like to be alive at the time — both for the Chinese who were caught up in the conflict and for the foreigners who stood at the sidelines, traveled through it, and launched their own wars on top of it. I have tried to thread my way through the events of this chaotic time by holding closely to the experiences of a handful of individuals on each side who, to my mind, best embodied the choices, terrors, and opportunities of the era. To such extent as any individuals can be said to have shaped a war encompassing millions, the central figures in this book were the ones I felt were most directly responsible for steering it to its final outcome.

These characters range from a Taiping prime minister who spoke English, preached Christianity, and dreamed of a China with free trade and railroads and newspapers; to the American mercenaries lured to Shanghai by the rewards of fighting in the Chinese war; to the Western diplomats and missionaries whose attempts to make sense of the strange foreign world around them wound up shaping that world in permanent ways.

On the dynasty's side, the character for whom the reader will need to be most patient — for he does not appear until chapter 6 when his role finally becomes central — is Zeng Guofan, the general who rose from a poor farming background to command a personal army every bit as vast, loyal, and ruthless as the army commanded by his counterpart, Ulysses S. Grant, in the United States, and whose power by the end of the war made even Grant look like a lieutenant in comparison. General Zeng's legacy has followed a rocky course in modern China: reviled for generations as a traitor to his race for supporting the Manchu ruling house, he has lately been resurrected as a model of what it means to be Chinese — or, more specifically, what it means to be moral and strong and disciplined in a truly native and Confucian way, uninfluenced by the West. He is one of the most popular historical figures in China today, with dozens of books on his life and letters readily available at any airport bookstore. The book at hand is the first in more than eighty years to try to bring him to life in English.

The story of this war is necessarily an international one, because the two sides in China were so intractably balanced that the final outcome was to a large degree determined by the diplomatic and military interventions of outsiders in the early 1860s. American and British historians have written a great deal of hagiography about the two most prominent foreigners who trained and led Chinese troops in this conflict, Frederick Townsend Ward and Charles Gordon. I have taken a fresh look at their records — and find that they appear quite differently when one approaches them with appropriate sympathy for the internal circumstances of the hideous war into which they inserted themselves. Ward and Gordon have traditionally been depicted as heroes, the foreigners ("gods," as more than one biography calls Ward) who swept in and put China right. Against the dismal succession of nineteenth-century Opium Wars and treaties at gunpoint, they have stood for rare moments of positive cooperation between China and the foreign powers. But that is a view based largely on ignorance of the circumstances of the larger war, and if there was any single spark that inspired me to go back into this period, it was an interview I happened upon from 1909, quoted in this book's epilogue, in which the eminent Japanese statesman Ito Hirobumi told a reporter that Great Britain's intervention in the Chinese civil war was not, in fact, a heroic example of Sino-foreign cooperation. Rather, he said, it was the single greatest mistake the British ever made in China. Nevertheless, when I first started the research for this project, I half expected to find that the foreign intervention had not actually mattered at all. Western historians have long tended to exaggerate the role of foreigners in Chinese history, and the British in Shanghai at the time unquestionably had an inflated sense of their own importance to the country — even as their understanding of what was actually happening in the interior was extremely limited. In contrast, the histories of the war written in Chinese tend to focus instead on the provincial militaries and other domestic forces, giving little weight to the likes of Ward and Gordon. The foreigners on the coast in Shanghai were but a pinprick at the edge of a much larger war in China's interior — which is why I was surprised to find that their role was, in fact, absolutely indispensable. Not only was the foreign intervention crucial, it was also (and this was the most surprising to me of all) largely informal, often halfhearted, morally fraught, and in many ways effective purely by accident. Nevertheless, remarkably, the actions of the foreigners coordinated neatly with those of the provincial militias from the interior, almost completely in spite of themselves. In reconciling the Chinese and foreign records of this war, what emerges is a peculiar instance of two forces fighting essentially the same war, independently of each other, each imagining itself to be the only force that mattered. There are therefore two interwoven narrative paths in this book: the one from outside that leads to the foreign intervention, and the one from within that leads to the rise of the Hunan Army. Together they tell the full military story of the war's endgame.

As regards the participation of foreigners beyond just military per-sonnel, the events of this period are a reminder of just how fine the line is that separates humanitarian intervention from imperialism — and how the trace and curvature of that line are often decided simply by who it is from the one country who succeeds in claiming expertise on the other. Much of the international side of my story concerns the efforts of outside observers to come to terms with what was happening inside the Qing Empire — whether it was a rebellion, a civil war, a national revolution, or simply a descent into anarchy — and how, on the basis of their conclusions, they tried to convince their governments to take an active role on one side or the other. At the heart of this process was an amalgam of individuals in the consular service, in business, in the Protestant missions, in journalism, and in government, who often disagreed fiercely with one another. Many of these individuals were conscientious and well-meaning.
Some were not.

But as is so often the case, even the monsters among them believed, at some level, that they acted only in the interests of humanity.

The reader who is already familiar with the events of the Taiping Rebellion will find certain differences in my telling of it. There are already excellent books in English on the origins of the rebellion and on the Taiping religion, so I have directed my energies elsewhere. This book focuses less on the origins of the war than on its conclusions, and less on the religious ideology of the rebels than on their attempts to craft a strong appeal on ethnic grounds. For a long time, Western historians of China believed that the ethnic differences between the ruling Manchus and the subject Chinese in this period were negligible or, at the very least, invisible. Conventional wisdom held that outsiders like the Manchus who invaded China simply became Chinese over time, and for that reason the racial — even genocidal — aspects of the Taiping were downplayed in relation to their religious appeal, which was assumed to be the more important.

In recent years, however, scholars who study the Manchus have found that in their own language, in their own documents, the Manchus were in fact fiercely aware of their ethnic differences from the Chinese. Judging from the propaganda circulated by the Taiping rebels in the later years of the war, it would appear that such feelings were mutual. In such a light, the more nationalistic appeals of the rebels — namely, that they were overthrowing alien rulers in order to restore the Chinese to power — need to be taken more seriously than they have been in the past. Religious conversion alone, even supplemented by conscription, can hardly explain the massive armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands that the Taiping were able to conjure in the later years of the war. The ethnic appeals of the rebels were certainly taken seriously abroad, where the strongest arguments for Taiping support in the Western world hinged not just on their alleged Christianity but on their perceived role as the liberators of the Chinese people from their Manchu overlords. The reader may also notice that I generally prefer to describe this conflict as a civil war (a term used commonly for it at the time) rather than as the more familiar Taiping Rebellion. In writing about this conflict, Western historians have long taken the side of the dynasty, at least in their choice of terminology. The Taiping were indeed rebels, but to call the entire war the Taiping Rebellion is to cast the rebels forever in the wrong, and to lay all blame on them for defying their legitimate rulers and destroying what on might surmise was otherwise a peaceful and stable empire. In going back to the time, however, it is very difficult to distinguish which side was the more destructive and violent, especially in the war's final years. Historians in the People's Republic of China have typically held the opposite bias, treating the Taiping as proto-Communist peasant rebels and referring to the war as "the Taiping Revolution" or "the Taiping Uprising." I hope it will become clear to the reader of this book that just as it is unfair to suggest that the Taiping were solely responsible for the devastation of the war, it is likewise an exaggeration to claim they were building some kind of peasant utopia. The most neutral Chinese term for this period, and the most alluring, is simply to call it "the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom?' It is a term with no taint of war or destruction, which recognizes that, whatever one's opinion of its quality of government, this power, which held a significant portion of China's most wealthy and populous territory for more than a decade, was nevertheless best described as a country. It is in that spirit that I have approached it, and it was in that spirit that many outsiders saw it at the time: as a competing government, a competing state, a competing vision of what China should be.

In closing, I would add that while this book is intended as a window into the tumult of a particular corner of the nineteenth-century world, and a means of giving insight into a turning point in China's modern history, it can also be read simply as a moral tale, of conscience and fate, set against the backdrop of a falling empire. The Chinese characters at its center did not have the luxury the foreigners did, of escaping. This was their world, to make or destroy. As it pertains to them, this is the story of a handful of individuals torn from the fabric of their familiar lives and thrust into roles of historical consequence beyond anything they had ever dreamed. It is about the deliberate choices from which one can never turn back, the acts that, once committed, can never be undone, and the relentless erosion of options in a time of crisis — until nothing else remains but to push forward into the cataclysm, in hopes of somehow finding peace on the other side.