between China and other nations. The partial collapse of the tribute system meant a loss of the emperor’s virtue, a serious blow to dynastic rule in China.

During the turbulent years 1858–60, the Qing bureaucracy was divided between the war and peace parties. It was the peace party’s leaders—Prince Gong, Gui Liang, and Wen Xiang—who took charge of negotiating with the foreigners, though they did so not as a matter of principle but because the imminent crisis forced them to.

In 1861, in response to the settlement of the foreign representatives in the capital, the Zongli Yamen (office for General Management) was opened to deal with foreign affairs, its main staff filled by the peace party leaders. The Qing officials themselves, however, deemed this as still keeping a faint silhouette of the tribute system.

The delay and difficulty in the Qing adjustment to the Western presence may possibly be ascribed to both external and internal factors. The Chinese must have seen the Westerners who had appeared in China as purveyors of poisonous drugs and as barbarians in the full sense of the word, from whom they could learn nothing. But the Chinese staunchly held to their tradition, which also had two aspects—ideological and institutional. The core of the ideological aspect was the Confucian distinction between China and foreign nations. The institutional aspect had recently been much studied, however, and precedents in Chinese history had been found, for example, of

treaty ports with foreign settlements, consular jurisdiction, and employment of Westerners as imperial personnel; thus, the Chinese regarded the Western impact as an extension of their tradition rather than a totally new situation that necessitated a new adjustment. And at least until 1860 the Qing leaders remained withdrawn in the shell of tradition, making no effort to cope with the new environment by breaking the yoke of the past.

Popular uprising

The third quarter of the 19th century was marked by a series of uprisings, again as a result of social discontent. The most destructive of these was the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64) in southern and central China. The Nian Rebellion (c. 1853–68) was roughly contemporaneous with the Taiping in the eastern and central provinces. In addition, there were several prolonged uprisings between Muslims and Han Chinese in northwestern and southwestern China.

The Taiping Rebellion

In the first half of the 19th century, the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi, the homeland of the Taiping people, had been beset with accelerating social unrest. After the first Opium War, government prestige declined, and officials lost their capacity to reconcile communal feudings. The greatest among such conflicts was that between the native settlers and the so-called guest settlers, or Hakka,

who had migrated to Guangxi and western Guangdong, mainly from eastern Guangdong. The Baishangdi Hui (“God Worshippers’ Society”) was founded by Hong Xiuquan, a fanatic who believed himself a son of God, and his protégé, Feng Yunshan, an able organizer. Their followers were collected from among miners, charcoal workers, and poor peasants in central Guangxi, most of whom were Hakka. In January 1851 a new state named Taiping Tianguo (“Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace”) was declared in the district of Guiping in Guangxi, with Hong Xiuquan assuming the title tianwang (“heavenly king”). That September the Taiping shifted their base to the city of Yong’an (present-day Mengshan, Guangxi), where they were besieged by the imperial army until April 1852. At that point they broke the siege and rushed into Hunan. Absorbing some secret-society members and outlaws, they dashed to Wuhan, the capital of Hubei, and proceeded along the Yangtze to Nanjing, which they captured in March 1853, renamed Tianjing (“Heavenly Capital”), and made their capital.

The core of the Taiping religion was a monotheism tinged with fundamentalist Protestant Christianity, but it was mixed with a hatred of the Manchu and an intolerance of the Chinese cultural tradition. In the early years of the rebellion, this politico-religious faith sustained the fighting spirit of the Taiping. In the ideal Taiping vision the population was to give all of its belongings to a “general treasury,” which would be shared by all alike.

While this extreme egalitarianism was rarely implemented outside the original Hakka core from Guangxi, it probably at times attracted the distressed and lured them to the Taiping cause. The origin of many Taiping religious ideas, morals, and institutions can be traced to China’s Confucian tradition, but the Taiping’s allout anti-regime struggle, motivated by strong religious beliefs and a common sharing, also had precedents in earlier religious rebellions.

After the Taiping settled in Tianjing (Nanjing), village officials were appointed, and redistribution of farmland was planned in accordance with an idea of primitive communism. But in fact the land reform was impracticable. The village officials’ posts were filled mainly by the former landlords or the clerks of the local governments, and the old order in the countryside was not replaced by a new one that the oppressed people could dominate.

In May 1853 the Taiping sent an expedition to northern China, which reached the neighbourhood of Tianjin but finally collapsed during the spring of 1855. After that the Yangtze valley provinces were the main theatre of struggle. Of the government armies in those years, the Green Standards were too ill-disciplined, and not much could be expected of the bannermen. The Qing government had no choice but to rely on the local militia forces, such as the “Hunan Braves” (later called the Hunan Army), organized by Zeng Guofan in 1852, and the “Huai Braves” (later called the Huai Army),

organized by Li Hongzhang in 1862. These armies were composed of the village farmers, inspired with a strong sense of mission for protecting the Confucian orthodoxy, and were used for wider operations than merely protecting their own villages. The necessary funds for maintaining them were provided initially by local gentry.

The Taiping were gradually beaten down; with the capture of Anqing, the capital of Anhui, in October 1861 by the Hunan Army, the revolutionary cause was doomed. But the fall of Nanjing was accelerated by the cooperation of Chinese mercenaries equipped with Western arms, commanded by an American, Frederick Townsend Ward; a Briton, Charles George Gordon; and others. Nanjing’s fall in July 1864 marked the end of one of the greatest civil wars in world history. The main cause of the Taiping failure was internal strife among the top leaders in Nanjing. Not only did they give themselves over to luxury, but also their energy was exhausted and their leadership lost by an internecine conflict that erupted in 1856. In addition, religious fanaticism, though it inspired the fighters, became a stumbling block that interfered with the rational and elastic attitude necessary to handle delicate military and administrative affairs. The intolerance toward traditional culture alienated the gentry and the people alike. Presumably, the failure of the land-redistribution policy also estranged the landless paupers from the Taiping cause.

The Nian Rebellion

Often in the first half of the 19th century, plundering gangs called nian ravaged northern Anhui, southern Shandong, and southern Henan. In mid-century, however, their activities were suddenly intensified, partly by the addition to their numbers of a great many starving people who had lost their livelihood from repeated floods of the Huang He in the early 1850s and partly because they had become emboldened by the Taiping advance north of the Yangtze. From 1856 to 1859 the Nian leaders consolidated their bases north of the Huai River by winning over the masters of the earthwall communities, consolidated villages that had been fortified for self-defense against the Taiping. The Nian strategy was to use their powerful cavalry to plunder the outlying areas and carry the loot to their home bases.

Many influential clans, with all their members, joined the Nian cause, and the clan chiefs played an important role among the Nian leaders. Gentry of lower strata also joined the Nian. The greater part of the Nian force consisted of poor peasants, although deserters from the government-recruited militias and salt smugglers were important as military experts. The real cause of their strength was supposed to be the people’s support and sympathy for their leaders, but creating a power centre proved to be difficult because the Nian’s basic social unit was the earth-wall community, where a powerful master exercised autonomy. In 1856

Zhang Luoxing received the title “lord of the alliance” of the Nian, but he was far too weak to form a centre. Imperial pacification was launched by General Senggelinqin, who led a powerful cavalry into the affected area in 1862, but his pursuit was ineffective, and the general himself was killed in Shandong in May 1865. Thus, the last imperial crack unit disappeared. Zeng Guofan succeeded Senggelinqin as general and enforced a policy of detaching the earth-wall masters from their men and of employing the latter as his troops. Finally, Li Hongzhang succeeded Zeng in 1866 and set up encirclement lines along the Huang He and the Grand Canal, using that strategy to destroy the revolts in 1868.

Muslim Rebellions

Muslim rebellions in Yunnan and in Shaanxi and Gansu originated from clashes between the Chinese and Muslims in those provinces. Religious antipathy must be taken into account, but more important were social and political factors. In the frontier provinces the latedynastic confusions were felt as keenly as elsewhere, which aggravated the problems between the Chinese and the Muslims. Yunnan had been haunted by Muslim-Chinese rivalries since 1821, but in Shaanxi small disturbances had been seen as early as the Qianlong reign. Government officials supported the Chinese, and the Muslims were obliged to rise up against both the Chinese and the authorities.

Rivalry between the Chinese and Muslim miners in central Yunnan triggered a severe clash in 1855, which developed into the slaughter of a great many Muslims in and around the provincial capital, Kunming, the following April. This triggered a general uprising of Yunnan Muslims, which lasted until 1873. Lack of a unified policy weakened the Muslims, and the rebellion was brought to an end partly through the pacifiers’ policy of playing the rebel leaders off against one another.

Another Muslim uprising, in Shaanxi in 1862, promptly spread to Gansu and Xinjiang and lasted for 15 years. The general cause of the trouble was the same as in Yunnan, but the Taiping advance to Shaanxi encouraged the Muslims to rebel. The first stage of the uprising developed in the Wei River valley in Shaanxi; in the next stage the rebels, defeated by the imperial army, fled to Gansu, which became the main theatre of fighting. Encouraged by the Nian invading Shaanxi at the end of 1866, the core of the rebel troops returned to Shaanxi, and sporadic clashes continued in the two provinces. In the last phase, Zuo Zongtang, a former protégé of Zeng Guofan, appeared in Shaanxi with part of the Huai Army and succeeded in pacifying the area in 1873.

There were many independent Muslim leaders in Shaanxi and Gansu at that time, but they had neither a common headquarters nor a unified policy, nor were there any all-out revolutionaries. Pacification was delayed because the