3 Taiping Rebellion 1850-1864 This is one of the most massive and most bloody civil wars the world has ever known. No other event devastated nineteenth-century China like the Taiping Rebellion. It was sparked by the leadership of one man from South China, Hong Xiuquan, who in 1847 failed the imperial examinations for the third time and fell into a delirium which lasted thirty days. When he recovered, he believed that he had been chosen to conquer China and establish the Taiping Tianguo—the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Harmony. Gathering followers (at first from the poor masses), he and his recruits gradually built up an army and political organization that went on to sweep across China. By the late 1850s, they controlled over a third of the country. Their movement was so strong and popular that it took the central government millions of dollars and fifteen years to defeat them. Not until 1864 was the rebellion brutally put down; it’s estimated to have been responsible for the deaths of more than twenty million people

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