“There Is Nothing New In The World Except The History That You Do Not Know”
Harry S. Truman
The America Civil War lasted for approximately 4 years – from 1961 to 1965 That war left 620,000 to 750,000 combatants dead.
The Taiping Rebellion lasted for approximately 14 years – from 1850 to 1864. Estimates of the war dead from this conflict range from 20 to 70 million with some estimates as high as 100 million.
I was completely unaware of this chapter in Chinese history until I’d read “Autumn In The Heavenly Kingdom” and I suspect that most Americans would have to say the same. Like most of us, I’d studied and read about the American Civil war and have been sensitized to the horror and the tragedy of this conflict. Yet – in the same year that our Civil War began – the Taiping Rebellion was entering into its 11th year. Over the course of that 14 year war, anywhere from 20 to 100 times the number of Chinese combatants and civilians perished. I like to think of myself as a relatively well educated individual but that presumption is continuously put to the test by the simple act of opening a new book. I was – quite honestly – astounded that I’d had no prior knowledge of a conflict that stands out as one of the bloodiest in human history, the single bloodiest civil war in human history and the largest conflict in the 19th century. My thanks to Stephen R. Platt and this very well written book for opening my eyes and furthering my education.
This was the second step in my history walk-about – taking what I thought was a brief break from Science Fiction and Fantasy highway to do some more substantive reading. I started with Stephen R. Platt’s “Imperial Twilight:
http://booksofbrian.com/on-the-nightstand-imperial-twilight-7-22-2018/
A superb history of the First Opium War – another episode in Chinese history with which I was only marginally familiar. “Autumn In The Heavenly Kingdom” picks up about 10 years after the end of “Imperial Twilight” and touches on some of the ramifications of that conflict – particularly what it meant for the Western – primarily British – presence in China at the same time it chronicles the forces that would ultimately lead to the end of Qing Dynasty in the early 20th Century.
Where ‘Imperial Twilight” was a crisp and easy read, this one was far more challenging for me and it took far longer to finish – one of the reasons my posting has slowed over the course of the last two weeks – the others being an intense period at work and the bittersweet process of sending both of our children back to College. I found “Autumn In The Heavenly Kingdom” to be every bit as well-written and exhaustively researched as “Imperial Twilight”. It was a superbly constructed, narrative history.
Having said that, I suspect it was a far more difficult book for Platt to write. This period in Chinese history was more complex and he was required to spread his narrative across the perspective of a far more expansive group of players and powers. He was not only chronicling the Civil War between the Qing Dynasty and the Taiping Rebels – he was also describing a dynastic struggle that brought the Empress Dowager Cixi to power as well the foreign policy of the Western powers in China which began with the Second Opium War – a military expedition against the Qing Dynasty which resulted in the razing of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing – a cultural tragedy – and ended in a frustrating period of indecision as they swung back and forth between neutrality and – ultimately – active support of the Qing Dynasty.
There was a lot going on here and Platt tried to capture it all in a modest single volume – ambitious when you remember that Shelby Foote needed three massive volumes to record the history of the American Civil War – a conflict that lasted only a third as long and was – in some ways – more straightforward. It’s a challenge that Platt acknowledged in his Preface when he wrote “This book is not a comprehensive history of the Chinese Civil War, which, given it’s enormous scale, would too easily devolve into a numbing list of dates, battles and casualties. It is, however, an attempt to show the war from all sides, and to recapture a sense of what it was like to be alive at the time – both for the Chinese who were caught up in the conflict and for the foreigners who stood at the sidelines, traveled through it, and launched their own wars on top of it.”
While I struggled to finish this one – taking over 2 weeks to do so – I still found it incredibly rich, instructive and well worth the time and effort. The narrative raises so many what ifs over the course of the story – the most significant being – how would the world we live in today be different had the Western Powers chosen to actively support the Taiping Rebels – an independent state within China that was arguably more aligned with the West in areas as diverse as economic / social / judicial modernization and cultural / religious philosophy. Also interesting was the way in which Platt was able to tie events in China back to what was happening at the time in the Western Hemisphere. Britain’s economy at the time was tied to a triangular trade that began in the Southern United States and their cotton exports, through the modern mill towns of England and Scotland that turned that raw cotton into cotton fabrics and then on to China, where those fabrics – along with Indian opium – were traded for tea and silks. Britain found itself navigating the complexities of civil wars in the two countries that were, at the time, driving it’s domestic economy and the feeling of the Government at the time was that they were not adequately equipped to intervene in both conflicts. This was partly the cause of it’s decision not to intervene in the U.S. Civil War on behalf of the Confederacy – a fact of which I’d been completely unaware until I’d read this book.
Finally, as a former Diplomat, I found the interplay between the British Government in London and it’s representatives on the ground in China to be fascinating. During my time overseas, there was always some minor flexibility with respect to the way that U.S. policy was translated into diplomacy at the point of true impact. Even in an age of instantaneous communication, there are always ambiguities in the guidance Embassies receive that are sometimes exploited or manipulated by the local Mission and the Ambassador. During the time described in Platt’s book, when the communication cycle was measured in months and the ambiguities in guidance were far greater, I was fascinated by the liberties taken by the representatives of Her Majesty’s Government in effecting their government’s policies as well as their ability to influence the Government’s position with his own, unverifiable opinions. Over the course of the narrative, it’s easy to see the damage caused by that willingness not to implement but to create policy based on the prejudices and beliefs of those distant representatives.
So… this one was a labor…of love…and well worth the time. I would recommend both books to anyone interested in the period so long as you begin with “Imperial Twilight”. I put over three weeks into these two reads and I’m very glad I did. I suspect the best way to end the review is to quote Platt’s final comments in his Epilogue:
“If there is any moral at all to be gleaned from the outcome of this war, which brought so little of lasting benefit to either its victors or the country in which it was waged, it is not likely to be of the encouraging sort. For, in a certain sense, the blame of the war’s outcome might be laid at the feet of our intrepid preacher’s assistant, Hong Rengan. After a few years among the missionaries of Hong Kong, he believed that he knew the hearts of the British and could therefore be the one to build a bridge between his own country (the Taiping Rebels) and theirs. This belief led him to advocate a policy of appeasement and openness toward foreigners that ultimately proved the ruin of his own people. By the same token, blame could also be laid with the shy British Ambassador Frederick Bruce for imagining, after a short residence in Shanghai and Beijing, that the Qing dynasts were a force of civilized monarchy standing against a chaotic horde of rebels who had no king or governing vision – and on that basis, persuading his home government that it was necessary to intervene on behalf of what he thought was the only viable power in China.
Hong Rengan and Frederick Bruce had in common that each thought himself uniquely blessed with insight into what was good and knowable in the other’s civilization, and they also had in common that they were both grievously wrong. So in the end, perhaps the tale of the foreign intervention and the fall of the Taiping is a tale of trust misplaced. It is a tale of how sometimes the connections we perceive across cultures and distances – our hopes for an underlying unity of human virtue, our belief that underneath it all we are somehow the same – can turn out to be nothing more than the fictions of our own imagination. And when we congratulate ourselves on seeing through the darkened window that separates us from another civilization, heartened to discover the familiar forms that lie hidden among the shadows on the other side, sometimes we do so without ever realizing that we are only gazing at our own reflection.”
I would challenge every reader to take that suggestion and apply it to the history of America’s interventions in local conflicts since the end of the Second World War – particularly Vietnam and Iraq – and determine for themselves whether it resonates.
Now – the good news for me is that – having satisfied my need to spend some time expanding my education, I’m free to shift my time back to my 1st love – Science Fiction and Fantasy. I’ve spent the last few days digging into my backlog and I’ve managed to finish a number of titles that I’m looking forward to posting on. Thanks to everyone for their patience while I’ve been away and spending time with weightier fare. Now let’s have some fun. 🙂
Cheers