{"id":131361,"date":"2012-02-10T22:48:07","date_gmt":"2012-02-11T05:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/?p=131361"},"modified":"2012-02-10T22:55:39","modified_gmt":"2012-02-11T05:55:39","slug":"a-chinese-civil-war-to-dwarf-all-others","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2012\/02\/a-chinese-civil-war-to-dwarf-all-others\/","title":{"rendered":"A Chinese Civil War to Dwarf All Others"},"content":{"rendered":"
The New York Times reviews a new book<\/strong><\/a>, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War<\/a>, which looks at the Taiping Rebellion, one of the bloodiest periods of Chinese history, which is little known by non-specialists outside the country:<\/p>\n \nThere should be a term in German that describes the sinking feeling you have when reading a serious book of scholarship, one whose determined author deserves praise and tenure, that no civilian reader should pick up, that will not warm in your hands, that will make you regret the 10 hours of your life lost to it, and that, once put down, will not cry out to be picked back up.<\/p>\n Such a book is \u201cAutumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War,\u201d by Stephen R. Platt, a young academic who has a Ph.D. in Chinese history from Yale and is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He\u2019s written a dense, complex work, about a war too little known in the United States, in which the narrative pilot light never ignites.<\/p>\n This Chinese civil war lasted from 1851 to 1864, overlapping in its end with America\u2019s Civil War. Mr. Platt describes it as \u201cnot only the most destructive war of the 19th century, but likely the bloodiest civil war of all time.\u201d<\/p>\n Some 20 million people lost their lives, many of them in grotesque ways. There are enough beheadings, flayings, rapes, suicides, disembowelments, mass killings and acts of cannibalism in \u201cAutumn in the Heavenly Kingdom\u201d \u2014 more about these things in a moment \u2014 that it can seem like a version of Sun Tzu\u2019s \u201cArt of War\u201d spat into being by Cormac McCarthy. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n