Taiping Rebellion
I can’t compete with Best of Wikipedia, but I do occasionally stumble over pages that make me wonder how the hell I didn’t know about this already. Like this:
The Taiping Rebellion was a large-scale revolt in China from 1850 to 1864, during the Qing Dynasty, by an army led by heterodox Christian convert Hong Xiuquan. He established the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, namely Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace with its capital at Nanjing and gained control of significant parts of southern China, at its height ruling over about 30 million people. The rebels tried to institute several social reforms, such as strict separation of the sexes, abolition of foot binding, land socialization, “suppression” of private trade, and the replacement of Confucianism, Buddhism and Chinese folk religion by a form of Christianity, holding that Hong Xiuquan was the younger brother of Jesus. Troops were nicknamed the Long hair, as they sported a traditional Confucian hairstyle different from the queue of the Qing. Qing government papers refer to them as “hair rebels”.
The Taiping areas were constantly besieged and harassed by Qing forces; the rebellion was eventually put down by the Qing army aided by French and British forces. The rebellion had an estimated death toll of between 20 and 30 million.
The estimated death toll is higher than the death toll of WWI! The An Shi Rebellion also “scores” higher in terms of deaths, though that’s so long in the past that most of the deaths were probably due to disease. But still. The equivalent of a world war going on inside one country, and I hadn’t heard of it. But then again I know very little.
In case you also slept through The World Is a Horrible Place 101, Wikipedia also has a high score list of death, disease, disaster and destruction.
