The Deadliest Civil War in History: The Taiping Rebellion

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Entire prefectures in the Yangze River Valley, the richest, most fertile, most densely populated agricultural heartland of Asia, had lost over 70% of their population. 70%.

[00:00:16]Imagine seven out of every 10 people, you know, just gone. This wasn't just from the immediate violence of the sword or the gunshot. The vast majority of these people died from the twin horsemen of the Taiping apocalypse, starvation and cholera. Because the Taiping had implemented the holy treasury system, which banned all private property and concentrated all grain in state warehouses, the traditional market networks completely collapsed. When a city was besieged, there was no food to buy, even if you had a room piled high with solid gold bricks. And so people ate weeds, then clay, then each other.

[00:01:00]When the war finally ended, the landscape was so empty that theQing state had to orchestrate massive forced migrations, moving millions of people from western provinces like Sichuan to repopulate the ancestral lands of Djang Su and Jang.

[00:01:16]The official death toll of the Taiping rebellion is usually cited as 20 million. But modern forensic and demographic modeling like the work of Steven R. Platt suggests that when you include the subsequent famines, the outbreaks of plague and the displacement, the real toll is closer to 70 million. 70 million people. That is more than the entire population of the United Kingdom today. It is significantly deadlier than the entire First World War.