Reddit reviews Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War

RE: Population of China during those times

> "When the Manchus came into China, the population was about 100 million. By the 19th Century, after 200 years of economic growth, the population increased to something around 400 million. But arable land, that figure was only about 30% growth. So that added all the social stress."

RE: Death toll

> The most widely accepted estimates put the death toll of China's nineteenth-century civil war at somewhere between 20 million and 30 million people. The figure is necessarily impressionistic, for there are no reliable censuses to compare from the time, so it is typically based on demographic projections of what the Chinese population should have been in later generations.

> According to one American study published in 1969, by as late as 1913, nearly 50 years after the fall of Nanjing, China's population had yet to recover to its pre-1850 level.

> A more recent study by a team of scholars in China, published in 1999, estimated that the five hardest-hit provinces - Jiangxi, Hubei, Anhui, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu - together suffered a population loss of some 87 million people between 1851 and 1864: 57 million of of them dead from the war, and the rest never born due to depressed birth-rates. Their projection for the full scale of the war in all provinces was 70 million dead, with a total population loss of more than 100 million.

> Those higher numbers have recently gained wider circulation, but they are controversial; critics argue that there is no way to know how many of the vanished people died - from the war, from disease, from starvation - and how many took up lives elsewhere.

> Nevertheless, even the most subjective anecdotal reports from travelers on the lower Yangtze testfied to the deep scars on China's cities and countryside, which were still far from being healed even decades after the Taiping war, and those figures begin to give a sense of unprecedented scale of destruction and social dislocation that consumed China in what is believed to be the deadliest civil war in all of human history.

Pages 358-359, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom (Stephen R. Platt)

The death toll may not have been 70 million, or even half that, but the population during those times could and certainly did withstand it. There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your "common sense".

The Taiping Civil War (awesome book). Incredibly bloody (tens of millions dead) 19th century Chinese civil war. Lots of interesting stuff going on there - the leader of the Heavenly Kingdom side promoted the religious doctrine that he was the little brother of Jesus and wanted to create a modern industrial state, there was a lot of duplicity and inconsistency on the part of Western onlookers/players, etc. Very fascinating period, to my mind.

Read more.

This one

I guess that one is Macao?! HAHAHA NOOOOO I am living a lie!

How about something outside of the usual Western view of the world? In China, there was a civil war caused by Christian rebels that killed as many as 20 million people between 1850-1864.

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War