East Asia · Empire, war and the modern states
Taiping Heavenly Kingdom
1851–1864
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (1851–1864) was a massive rebel state in southern China led by Hong Xiuquan, a failed examination candidate who believed himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ. Proclaiming a radical Christian-utopian regime (communal land-sharing, gender separation, and bans on opium and foot-binding), it captured Nanjing (1853), renaming it Tianjing ("Heavenly Capital").
- Existed
- 1851–1864
- Shown on the map
- 1853–1864
- Peak area
- 349k km²
- Region
- East Asia
Overview
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (1851–1864) was a massive rebel state in southern China led by Hong Xiuquan, a failed examination candidate who believed himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ. Proclaiming a radical Christian-utopian regime (communal land-sharing, gender separation, and bans on opium and foot-binding), it captured Nanjing (1853), renaming it Tianjing ("Heavenly Capital"). It was one of history's deadliest civil wars—Encyclopædia Britannica gives an estimated death toll of 20 million, while demographer Mark Elvin estimated roughly 20–30 million from pre- and post-war population data. It was finally crushed in 1864 by Qing forces and provincial armies (Zeng Guofan's Xiang Army), aided by Western-officered units.
Common questions
- What was the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom?
- The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (1851–1864) was a massive rebel state in southern China led by Hong Xiuquan, a failed examination candidate who believed himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ. Proclaiming a radical Christian-utopian regime (communal land-sharing, gender separation, and bans on opium and foot-binding), it captured Nanjing (1853), renaming it Tianjing ("Heavenly Capital").
- When did the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom exist?
- The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom existed 1851–1864. On this map it is drawn 1853–1864.
- How large was the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom?
- At its greatest extent drawn on this map, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom covered about 349,000 km². That is the largest area the border data gives it across the years it is drawn, not necessarily its greatest extent in history.
Sources
This compendium cites its sources once for the whole document rather than per territory. Its bibliography names the English Wikipedia article for each polity as the basis of these profiles, supplemented by Encyclopaedia Britannica, chinaknowledge.de, the World History Encyclopedia, museum and university sources, and the academic works it lists. The article this entry is anchored on:
- Wikipedia — Taiping Heavenly Kingdom en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Heavenly_Kingdom
This entry was last updated .
This entry was researched and drafted with AI from the sources above, and has not been reviewed by a historian. How entries are made
Text available under CC BY-SA 4.0: reuse it with a credit to The World Through Time and a link to this page. Passages drawing on the Wikipedia articles listed above are also licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by their contributors.
Border geometry for the map itself comes from Cliopatria v0.12 (Seshat Global History Databank, CC-BY-4.0).
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