The Taiping Rebellion Kills 20 Million People
A failed civil servant claiming to be Jesus's brother launches China's deadliest civil war
Quick facts
- Rebellion dates
- 1850-1864
- Leader
- Hong Xiuquan
- Estimated deaths
- More than 20 million
- Overlapping conflict
- Second Opium War, 1856-1860
What happened
Hong Xiuquan, a scholar from southern China who had failed the imperial civil service examinations three times, fell into a prolonged delirium in 1847 and emerged believing he had been chosen to conquer China and remake it according to a new religious vision drawn partly from Christian missionary tracts. His Taiping movement, whose program included common property, land reform, equal status for women, and abstinence from opium, tobacco, and alcohol, launched a rebellion in 1850 that spread rapidly across southern and central China. The Qing government spent enormous sums and fifteen years fighting the Taiping forces before finally crushing the rebellion in 1864; the conflict is estimated to have killed more than twenty million people, roughly twice the death toll of the First World War, and parts of central China still had not fully recovered from the devastation by the 1950s.
Why it matters
The Taiping Rebellion is the deadliest civil war in human history by death toll, and it overlapped directly with the Second Opium War against Britain and France from 1856 to 1860, meaning the Qing state fought a foreign war and a catastrophic internal rebellion simultaneously. The rebellion's scale and duration exposed how badly weakened Qing military and administrative capacity had become in the decades following the First Opium War.
How we know
The rebellion's course and casualty estimates come from Qing government records of the suppression campaign and subsequent historical demographic analysis of population loss across the affected provinces.
Sources
- Asia for Educators, Columbia University. Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) · Reputable sourceafe.easia.columbia.edu · The domain "afe.easia.columbia.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Asia for Educators, Columbia University. Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) · Reputable sourceafe.easia.columbia.edu · The domain "afe.easia.columbia.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
See something wrong? . Corrections with a source get fixed fastest.
Part of a timelineHistory of China30 events · From Neolithic river villages to dynasties that lasted for centuries, then a revolution that ended imperial ruleView all →