{"product_id":"autumn-in-the-heavenly-kingdom-isbn-9780307472212","title":"Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom","description":"\u003cb\u003eWinner of the 2012 Cundill Prize in History\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA gripping account of China’s nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, one of the largest civil wars in history. \u003ci\u003eAutumn in the Heavenly Kingdom\u003c\/i\u003e brims with unforgettable characters and vivid re-creations of massive and often gruesome battles—a sweeping yet intimate portrait of the conflict that shaped the fate of modern China.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThe story begins in the early 1850s, the waning years of the Qing dynasty, when word spread of a major revolution brewing in the provinces, led by a failed civil servant who claimed to be the son of God and brother of Jesus. The Taiping rebels drew their power from the poor and the disenfranchised, unleashing the ethnic rage of millions of Chinese against their Manchu rulers. This homegrown movement seemed all but unstoppable until Britain and the United States stepped in and threw their support behind the Manchus: after years of massive carnage, all opposition to Qing rule was effectively snuffed out for generations. Stephen R. Platt recounts these events in spellbinding detail, building his story on two fascinating characters with opposing visions for China’s future: the conservative Confucian scholar Zeng Guofan, an accidental general who emerged as the most influential military strategist in China’s modern history; and Hong Rengan, a brilliant Taiping leader whose grand vision of building a modern, industrial, and pro-Western Chinese state ended in tragic failure. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThis is an essential and enthralling history of the rise and fall of the movement that, a century and a half ago, might have launched China on an entirely different path into the modern world.“A refreshing and gripping account that illuminates how civil conflicts can suck in outsiders and why the West has had great difficulties in trying to maintain a façade of neutrality and protect its commercial interests at the same time. . . . \u003ci\u003eAutumn in the Heavenly Kingdom\u003c\/i\u003e may not have said the last word on the Taiping Rebellion, but the story it tells is powerful, dramatic, and unforgettable.” —Minxin Pei, \u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Structurally, Stephen Platt’s \u003ci\u003eAutumn in the Heavenly Kingdom\u003c\/i\u003e is a thriller. . . . We read in starred reviews things like ‘the book brings history to life.’ We read these words so often that we have forgotten what they mean, but this book reminds us. It makes history immediate and personal, one that speaks to us on a sensory, moral, intellectual and emotional level. They should teach this one in schools.” —Gerard Martinez, \u003ci\u003eSan Antonio Express-News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“A compelling and often meticulous account. . . . Platt is at his best when dissecting the often absurd dynamics of Western intervention.” —Ross Perlin, \u003ci\u003eThe Daily Beast\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“An intricate and compelling historical narrative rich in military campaigning, vivid personalities and, above all, diplomatic misunderstanding. When Confederate artillery fired on Fort Sumter in 1861, the Taiping rebellion had been raging for 10 years, and it would continue until rebel supply lines collapsed in 1864. With a wonderful flair for storytelling, Platt explores the relationship between the two conflicts. . . . Authoritative and fascinating, Platt’s work will interest both the specialist and the casual reader (like me) who wants to learn about an event that presaged China’s entry into the modern world.” —Tom Zelman, \u003ci\u003eMinneapolis Star Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“China’s brutal Taiping Civil War erupted in the 1850s and raged until the fall of rebel-held Nanjing in 1864. The bloodbath paralleled our own North-South conflict, but dwarfed it in terms of casualties, geography and global fallout. . . . [Platt] juxtaposes the competing ideologies and leaders of the ruling Manchu Qing dynasty and the Hunan Taiping rebels with savvy and assurance. By neatly folding in the machinations of the British, Platt paints a picture of combat dire enough to have choked the Yangtze’s flow several times with discarded victims.” —Jonathan E. Lazarus, \u003ci\u003eNewark Star-Ledger\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Platt has skillfully converted his erudition into an eminently general-interest treatment of what may have been the most lethal civil war in history.” —Gilbert Taylor, \u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Splendid. . . . An upheaval that led to the deaths of 20 million, dwarfing the simultaneously fought American Civil War, deserves to be better known, and Platt accomplishes this with a superb history of a 19th-century China faced with internal disorder and predatory Western intrusions.” —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly \u003c\/i\u003e(starred review)\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Stephen Platt’s history of the Taiping rebellion in mid-19th century China sheds an authoritative and comprehensive window on a major event in world history that up until now has too often been consigned to a footnote in the West. It is a critically important achievement.”  —Robert D. Kaplan, author of \u003ci\u003eMonsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Stephen Platt brings to vivid life a pivotal chapter in China’s history that has been all but forgotten: the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century, which cost one of the greatest losses of life of any war in history. It had far-reaching consequences that still reverberate in contemporary China. \u003ci\u003eAutumn in the Heavenly Kingdom\u003c\/i\u003e is a fascinating work by a first-class historian and superb writer.” —Henry Kissinger\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“A splendid example of finely calibrated historical narrative. The civil war that erupted in China between the early 1850s and 1864 was perhaps the bloodiest in human history; with a wealth of vivid detail, Platt shows how the fates of China’s rulers and many millions of their subjects were manipulated by British diplomatic and commercial interests, as well as colored by the rebels’ own unorthodox religious and political beliefs. It is a tragic and powerful story.”\u003cbr\u003e—Jonathan Spence, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Search for Modern China\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The ambitious scale and lively writing make Platt's book an excellent entree into a pivotal event in world history.” —CHOICE MagazineStephen R. Platt received his Ph.D. in Chinese history from Yale University, where his dissertation was awarded the Theron Rockwell Field Prize. He is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is also the author of \u003ci\u003eProvincial Patriots: The\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eHunanese and Modern China\u003c\/i\u003e. An undergraduate English major, he spent two years after college as a teacher in the Yale-China program in Hunan province. His research has been supported by the Fulbright program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation. He lives in Greenfield, Massachusetts, with his wife and daughter.\u003cb\u003eCHAPTER 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTHE PREACHER'S ASSISTANT\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHong Kong in 1852 was a  diseased and watery place, a rocky island off the southern shore of the  Qing Empire where the inhabitants lived in dread of what one described  as \"the miasma set free from the ground which was everywhere being  turned up.\" A small British settlement sat between the mountains and the  bay, but the emerald and sapphire glory of the scene belied the  darkness below the surface. Leaving the concentration of godowns,  military barracks, and trading firms along the colony's nostalgically  named central streets (The Queen's Road, Wellington Street, Holly-wood  Road), one could find the grandest vistas in the gravel paths that led  up the coast into the hills, but the European settlement soon gave way  to scattered Chinese houses among fields growing rice and sweet potatoes  unchanged in the decade since the British took the island as their  prize in the Opium War. Some of the wealthier merchants had built  opulent mansions in those hills, with terraced gardens commanding a view  of the harbor and town. But as though their builders had strayed too  far from the protection of the settlement, the inhabitants of those  houses sickened and died. Marked as \"homes of fever or death,\" the  ghostly manors sat silent and abandoned, their empty gaze passing  judgment on the settlers below.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne of those settlers was  Theodore Hamberg, a young Swedish missionary with a thin chinstrap beard  that set off his delicate, nearly effeminate features. He was blessed  with a lovely voice, and in his youth in Stockholm he had sung together  with Jenny Lind, the \"Swedish Nightingale.\" But while Lind went on to  conquer the opera halls of Europe and America, bringing suitors such as  Frédéric Chopin and Hans Christian Andersen to their knees along the  way, Hamberg's life took an entirely different path. His strong tenor  found its destined outlet in preaching, and in 1847 he left his native  Sweden to sail to the opposite end of the world, to this malarial colony  of Hong Kong, with the sole purpose of bringing the Chinese to their  knees after a different fashion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTheodore Hamberg might well have  lived his life in obscurity, for his proudest accomplishments meant  little to anyone beyond a small circle of Protestant missionaries. He  was one of the first Europeans in his generation to brave the Chinese  countryside, leaving the relative safety of Hong Kong to preach in a  village outside the Chinese trading port of Canton a hundred miles up  the Pearl River (though for health reasons he finally returned to the  colony). He was also the first to learn to speak the dialect of the  Hakka, or \"guest people\"-a gypsy minority thickly populous in south  China. All of that might have meant little to anyone in the world  outside except that one day in the late spring of 1852, one of his  converts from the countryside brought a guest to meet him, a short,  round-faced Hakka named Hong Rengan who had a remarkable story to tell.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe  strangest thing about this Hakka, Hamberg recalled from their first  meeting, was how much he already seemed to know about God and Jesus  despite the fact that he hailed from well beyond the narrow reach of the  Hong Kong missionaries. Hamberg listened with curiosity as Hong Rengan  gave a baffling account of the events leading to his arrival in Hong  Kong. He spoke of visions and battles, armies and congregations of  believers, a heavenly prophet from among the Hakkas. He had, or at least  so he claimed, been hunted by the agents of the Qing dynasty and had  lived in disguise under an assumed name. He had been kidnapped, had  escaped, and had lived for four days in the forest, six days in a cave.  None of it made much sense, though, and Hamberg confessed, \"I could form  no clear conception of the whole matter.\" Not knowing what to make of  the story, he asked Hong Rengan to write it down, which he did, and  then-though Hamberg had expected him to stay for baptism-he left without  explanation. Hamberg put the sheets of paper with Hong Rengan's story  into his desk and turned his mind to other matters. He would think  little of them again for nearly a year, until the spring of 1853 when  the news came that Nanjing had fallen in a torrent of blood, and Hamberg  realized that the strange events sketched out in Hong Rengan's tale  meant more than he had ever imagined.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNews of the  mounting upheaval in China reached Hamberg and the other settlers in  Hong Kong and up the coast in Shanghai only in scattered and vague  accounts. From Chinese government reports there seemed no pattern to the  rising disorder of the early 1850s, no principle or cohesion. Local  uprisings and small-scale banditry in China's countryside were a  perennial thorn in the side of the imperial authorities, hardly anything  new or noteworthy, though they certainly did seem to have increased in  the years following the Opium War. Chinese travelers and clandestine  Catholic missionaries deep in the interior forwarded rumors of some  larger movement led by a man known as \"Tian De,\" or \"Heavenly Virtue,\"  but just as many accounts reported that the man was dead, killed by  imperial forces, or that he had never existed in the first place. In the  absence of any clear news, the foreigners in their coastal ports paid  little attention, concerned only that bandits might disrupt the  production of tea and silk.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut the fall of the southern capital  of Nanjing in 1853 brought a massive civil war right to the doorstep of  the foreign settlement in Shanghai, which was just two hundred miles  downriver at the mouth of the sea. Half a million rebels calling  themselves the Taiping Tianguo (\"Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace\")  flooded down the Yangtze from central China on a grand flotilla of  commandeered ships to Nanjing, leaving a swath of emptied cities and  shattered imperial defenses behind them, and the debate was settled;  this was no mere bandit uprising. Fear gripped the city of Shanghai.  There was no direct communication with Nanjing, no concrete information  (the American steamer Susquehanna tried to sail upriver to Nanjing to  investigate but ran aground). Rumors spread that the insurgents would  next march on Shanghai to attack the foreigners, and the city's Chinese  population boarded up their houses, packed up their furniture, and took  to riverboats or fled into the countryside for safety. The foreign  settlers called up their unready defenses, rallying a haphazard  volunteer defense corps to man the city walls and bringing up the few  ships in ready reach-two British steamers and a brig-of- war, and one  steamer each for the French and Americans.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut there it ended, at  least for the time being. The Taiping did not march on Shanghai, and  the city's vigilance eased off. Instead, the rebels set their targets  northward toward Beijing, the capital of the Manchu rulers, and dug in  for a long and bloody campaign with Nanjing as their base of operations.  Their \"Heavenly Capital,\" as Nanjing was now renamed, lay tantalizingly  just out of reach of Shanghai. One British ship did manage to visit in  late April 1853 but brought back conflicting impressions of what was  happening there, the clearest opinion being that of the British  plenipotentiary, who declared the Taiping to have an ideology of  \"superstition and nonsense.\" The visitors learned nothing about the  rebels' origins.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDespite the scarcity of clear information, raw  accounts of the civil war in China radiated outward from Shanghai and  Hong Kong to capture the imagination of the Western world. Europe had  been through its own convulsions just five years earlier with the  revolutions of 1848, and the events in China seemed a remarkable  parallel: the downtrodden people of China, oppressed by their Manchu  overlords, had, it seemed, risen up to demand satisfaction. The  Economist called it \"a social change or convulsion such as have of late  afflicted Europe\" and mused that \"it is singular to find similar  commotions at the same time in Asia and Europe.\" Here was evidence that  the empire at the other end of the world was now connected to the  economic and political systems of the West.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKarl Marx, in 1853 a  London correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune struggling to give  shape to his ideas on capitalism, likewise considered the rebellion in  China to be a sign of China's integration into the global economy,  describing it as the end result of Britain's forcing China open to  foreign trade in the recent Opium War. In Marx's terminology, what was  happening in China was not merely a rebellion or a hodgepodge of  uprisings but \"one formidable revolution,\" one that demonstrated the  interconnectedness of the industrial world. Indeed, it was in China, he  argued, that one could see the future of the West: \"the next uprising of  the people of Europe, and their next movement for republican freedom  and economy of Government,\" he wrote, \"may depend more probably on what  is now passing in the Celestial Empire- the very opposite of Europe-than  on any other political cause that now exists.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs he explained  it, the disorder in China had its roots in the opium trade; a decade  earlier, Britain had cracked China's markets open with its warships, and  in doing so it had undermined the \"superstitious faith\" of the Chinese  in their ruling dynasty. Exposure to the world meant the destruction of  the old order, he believed, for \"dissolution must follow as surely as  that of any mummy carefully preserved in a hermetically sealed coffin,  whenever it is brought into contact with the open air.\" But the effects  of the Qing dynasty's dissolution would not be limited to China itself.  The whole of the Taiping Revolution was, in his mind, Britain's fault,  and now the effects of her actions overseas were going to be felt back  home: \"the question,\" he wrote, \"is how that revolution will in time  react on England, and through England on Europe.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMarx predicted  that the loss of China's markets to the Taiping Revolution would  undermine British exports of cotton and wool. Merchants in a chaotic  China would accept only bullion in exchange for their goods, sapping  Britain's stores of precious metals. Worse, the revolution would cut off  England's source of tea imports, and the price of tea (to which most of  the British were addicted) would spike in England at the same time that  a poor harvest in Western Europe looked likely to send food prices  through the roof, reducing still further the demand for manufactured  goods and undermining the whole manufacturing industry on which  Britain's economy depended. \"It may be safely augured,\" Marx concluded,  \"that the Chinese revolution will throw the spark into the overloaded  mine of the present industrial system and cause the explosion of the  long-prepared general crisis, which, spreading abroad, will be closely  followed by political revolutions on the Continent.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf Marx was  keen to convince the readers of the New-York Daily Tribune that the  Chinese civil war was one of class struggle and economic revolution  analogous to the movements in Europe, the editors of the Daily Picayune  in the southern slave port of New Orleans saw it in rather different  terms, after their own particular vision of the world. It was, as they  saw it, a racial war, and China was a slave state in upheaval. The  Taiping had emerged, the editors explained, from the southern provinces  of Guangxi and Guangdong, whose inhabitants were \"principally of the  primitive Chinese race.\" The northern Manchus, in contrast, were \"the  ruling race in China\" who had taken the throne two hundred years  earlier, since which time \"China has been accordingly ruled as a  conquered country by its masters.\" The two races never mixed, they  explained, and in accordance with their southern vision of a harmonious  slave-based society, the Picayune offered that in China \"The quiet,  patient, laboring millions have submitted to their masters mostly with  exemplary gentleness.\" The sole threat to the stability of this  Manchu-Chinese country of peacefully coexisting masters and slaves was  these \"primitive\" people of south China who refused to submit to the  yoke. The Taiping Rebellion, then, was a dark analogy to an uprising of  African slaves in the United States.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe London Times, for its  part, was the most prescient of observers, honing in immediately on the  question of whether Britain should send its navy into the Chinese  conflict and, if so, on which side. In an editorial on May 17, 1853,  just after the news of Nanjing's fall reached London, an editorial in  The Times noted that the Taiping seemed unstoppable and that \"according  to all computable chances, they will succeed thus far in subverting the  Government of China.\" The Times had also run a report from a Shanghai  paper asking whether \"a change of masters\" was something desired by the  Chinese nation at large, offering that the Taiping-though hardly beloved  in northern China-represented a force of change that was indeed welcome  to the Chinese, and \"throughout the country the feeling seems to be  growing deeper that the exactions and oppressions of the mandarins are  no longer to be borne.\" By the end of the summer, The Times declared  flatly that the rebellion in China was \"in all respects the greatest  revolution the world has yet seen.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut the rebels themselves  were a cipher. The reader of The Times would easily conclude that the  Taiping enjoyed the support, grudging at least, of the Chinese people  and were poised to overthrow the Manchus and usher in a new era of  government. But the editors also sounded a note of caution about  Britain's ignorance. \"We are without any substantial information as to  the origin or objects of the rebellion,\" they wrote. \"We know that the  existing Government of China is likely to be subverted in a civil war,  but nothing more.\" Britain, they worried, simply didn't know enough  about the nature or ideology of the rebels to decide whether it should  support or encourage them: \"We cannot tell in the case before us on  which side our interest or our duties may lie-whether the insurrection  is justifiable or unjustifiable, promising or unpromising; whether the  feelings of the people are involved in it or not, or whether its success  would bring a change for the better or worse, or any change at all, in  our own relations with the Chinese.\" As it turned out, however, answers  to the most pressing of these questions-of the origins of the rebellion,  of who the Taiping really were and what they believed in-were to be  found in Hong Kong, scribbled on a few stray sheets of paper stuffed  into a drawer in Theodore Hamberg's desk.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eExcerpted from the hardcover edition\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303129665765,"sku":"NP9780307472212","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307472212.jpg?v=1767721979","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/autumn-in-the-heavenly-kingdom-isbn-9780307472212","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}