Hong Xiuquan, a failed examination candidate who believed himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ, founded a movement in Guangxi that in 1850 became a rebellion, captured Nanjing in 1853 and held it as the capital of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom until 1864. Britannica describes it as probably the most important event in nineteenth-century China and puts the death toll at an estimated 20 million. The war combined ideological revolution - land redistribution, the prohibition of opium, foot-binding and the traditional cults - with conventional campaigning of extraordinary destructiveness: repeated sieges of great cities, the systematic devastation of the richest agricultural region in the empire, and massacres by both sides on the fall of towns. Suppression fell to provincial armies raised by Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang, assisted late in the war by foreign-officered contingents including the force commanded by Charles George Gordon. Nanjing fell in July 1864.
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom under Hong Xiuquan fought the Qing state and its provincial armies across the Yangzi valley and south China
Qing Board of Revenue registers gave about 430 million people in 1851, the peak of the dynasty's recorded population. The war was fought mainly in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Jiangxi, Hubei, Hunan and Guangxi, which together held roughly a third of that total, and the provinces of the lower Yangzi recorded the sharpest falls in the post-war registers. Death-toll estimates range from about 20 million to 70 million, and rest on comparing pre- and post-war registration rather than on direct counts.
Britannica's estimate of 20 million lives is the standard figure and forms the lower bound. The upper bound reflects the higher end of published estimates, which extend the count to the famine and epidemic mortality that followed the destruction of agriculture in the lower Yangzi and to the concurrent Nian and Muslim rebellions' effects in the same years. All figures derive from comparing pre-war and post-war population registers rather than from any count of the dead, and the registers are unreliable precisely where the war was worst.
Britannica's account and the standard histories of the war document massacres on the capture of cities by both Taiping and Qing forces, prolonged sieges that starved urban populations, and the devastation of the countryside by armies living off the land.
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