The Taiping Rebellion was born in the Guangxi backcountry of southern China, where the wound of the First Opium War was still raw. Hong Xiuquan, an ordinary rural scholar who had failed the imperial examinations four times, took up the visions of a fevered illness from 1837 and, years later, fused them with a missionary tract to declare himself the younger brother of Jesus. Around him the God-Worshipping Society (Bai Shangdi Hui) coalesced; Hakka minorities, poor peasants, coal miners and outlaws joined the movement. In 1851 the 'Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace' (Taiping Tianguo) was proclaimed.

Its ideology was a strikingly hybrid and modern mix: a Christian theological frame; a Heavenly Kingdom Land System pledging communal land ownership in the name of the peasantry; a foot-binding ban, women soldiers, and more equal inheritance rights challenging patriarchy; bans on opium, alcohol, gambling and prostitution; and a strict regime of personal morality. Together these amounted to a root-and-branch challenge to the Manchu Qing dynasty, the Confucian classical tradition, and the landed gentry. In 1853 Nanjing fell and was renamed 'Tianjing' (Heavenly Capital); rebel control extended over some of the richest regions of China.

The Qing's regular Eight Banner armies had long decayed. The forces that actually crushed the rebellion were new regional armies organised by Confucian provincial gentry: Zeng Guofan's Hunan Army (Xiang Jun) and Li Hongzhang's Anhui Army (Huai Jun). Around Shanghai, the foreign-officered 'Ever Victorious Army' under the American Frederick Townsend Ward and then the Briton Charles 'Chinese' Gordon supplied reinforcement. The Taiping's internal fractures — the 1856 Tianjing palace coup in which thousands of Taiping leaders slaughtered one another — were as decisive as military pressure. In the summer of 1864 Tianjing fell, Hong Xiuquan died during the siege (probably of illness), and the city was destroyed by sack and massacre.

Death-toll estimates from modern demographic studies run between 20 and 30 million; some regions lost more than half their population. The figure measures both the human cost behind the movement's grand ideological mix and the scale of devastation a 19th-century civil war could reach even before full industrial capacity. Historians read the Taiping in different keys: for some — Mao included — it heralded a peasant revolution; for others it was the pathology of a charismatic cult; for still others it was the traumatic shock that pushed the Qing onto the path of top-down modernisation. The regional armies that suppressed it also seeded the militarised, fragmented provincial power — the later warlordism — of the following half-century.