The Darkest Day of the Taiping Rebellion: 100,000 Dead in 72 Hours

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]Thousands of women, typing followers, residents, girls from the pleasure houses, realized what the Hunan soldiers were going to do to them if they were captured.

[00:00:11]They chose suicide. They threw themselves into the river by the thousands.

[00:00:17]In her brilliant book, What Remains, historian Toby Meyer-Fong digs into the contemporary diaries of the survivors who wandered the ruins afterward.

[00:00:27]And she uncovers this devastating detail.

[00:00:31]The river didn't run red with blood.

[00:00:34]That is the cliché we always use for massacres.

[00:00:37]The primary sources say the Qinhuai ran black.

[00:00:41]It turned black and solid because it was completely choked with the silk robes of thousands of drowning women.

[00:00:49]The bodies were packed so densely together that the water literally stopped flowing.

[00:00:55]It was a literal dam of human flesh and fine silk sitting there in the summer heat while the city burned around them.

[00:01:03]Over 100,000 people died in those 72 hours.

[00:01:09]To put that in perspective, that's more than the entire civilian death toll of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima compressed into three days of hand-to-hand butchery.