This Week in China's History | The Fall of Nanjing as the Taiping Capital

July 19, 1864

Anyone who has endured summertime in Nanjing will not forget it. The heat and humidity are relentless, such that even the smallest of movements — and sometimes not even that — sends sweat streaming down foreheads and backs. As a result, and especially before the advent of air-conditioning, the city in summer takes on an eerie stillness. On the afternoon of July 19, 1864, that stillness was literally blown apart as thousands of pounds of explosives tore through the city’s wall and allowed invading troops to stream in. This was the climax of a month-long campaign by Qing forces to recapture Nanjing from the Taiping forces that had occupied the city for a decade. Within days, the Taiping leaders had been captured and survivors had dispersed and fled. It marked in many ways the end of a bloody war that had reshaped China and caused unimaginable suffering.

The American Civil War is often held up alongside the Taiping War for reasons that make sense: they overlapped completely in time, and both were existential threats to their respective governments. But while the Civil War remains the deadliest in American history and its echoes remain loud in American politics and society, it was orders of magnitude less cataclysmic than the bloodletting in China. At least twenty — perhaps fifty — times more people died in the Taiping War, which lasted a decade longer than its American counterpart. I wrote about the early days of that war in one of my very first columns, but five years later, it seems worth revisiting, not least because its lessons desperately need to be learned.

“It is well that war is so terrible or we should grow too fond of it.” The traitorous general Robert E. Lee is said to have made this observation in 1862. To my reading, it sounds as though he is trying a little too hard to convince himself that, despite all its pageantry and play, war is not a good thing. (For a longer reflection on Lee’s quote, including its veracity, have a look at Kevin Levin’s post here.) But whatever Lee may have meant, I think it is undoubtedly true that a fascination with, even fetishization of, war has made the damnable practice hard to eradicate.

As evidence, look no further than the news (I first wrote “the nightly news,” before realizing that the concept is meaningless these days). The war that Russia launched against Ukraine has been ongoing for three years. War in Israel and Palestine for nearly two. There is war between Israel and Iran. It has been a generation since the end of the Cold War promised to deliver a “peace dividend.” While recognizing (as this column has often dwelt on) that the Cold War was only “cold” in Europe and North America, its end suggested to many that the world was going to be a safer and more peaceful place, free from the never-ending threat of nuclear annihilation.

But more than three decades after the Berlin Wall fell, it is clear that such hopes were naive.