Hong sought the religious conversion of the Han people to his syncretic version of Christianity, as well as the political overthrow of the Qing dynasty, and a general transformation of the mechanisms of state.

The Taiping rebellion gave incentive for an initially successful period of reform and self-strengthening although shadowed by social and religious unrest within the country exacerbating ethnic disputes and accelerating the rise of provincial power.

Instead, they referred to the tumultuous civil war as a period of chaos (亂; luàn), rebellion (逆; nì) or military ascendancy (軍興; jūnxìng).

[22] In 1837, Hong Huoxiu, a Hakka from a poor village in Guangdong, failed the imperial examination for the third time, frustrating his ambition to become a scholar-official in the civil service and leading him to a nervous breakdown.

[36][37] The Taiping Rebellion began in the southern province of Guangxi when local officials launched a campaign of religious persecution against the God Worshipping Society.

In early January 1851, following a small-scale battle in late December 1850, a 10,000-strong rebel army organized by Feng Yunshan and Wei Changhui routed Qing forces stationed in Jintian (present-day Guiping, Guangxi).

[38][39] In 1852, Qing government troops captured Hong Daquan, a rebel who had assumed the title Tian De Wang (King of Heavenly Virtue).

[41] Shortly thereafter, the Taiping launched concurrent Northern and Western expeditions, in an effort to relieve pressure on Nanjing and achieve significant territorial gains.

This tension culminated in the 1856 Tianjing Incident, wherein Yang and his followers were slaughtered by Wei Changhui, Qin Rigang, and their troops on Hong Xiuquan's orders.

The landowning upper class, unsettled by the Taiping ideology and the policy of strict separation of the sexes, even for married couples, sided with government forces.

In Hunan, the local irregular Xiang Army under the personal leadership of Zeng Guofan, became the main force fighting the Taiping on behalf of the Qing.

Zeng's Xiang Army proved effective in gradually turning back the Taiping advance in the western theater of the war and ultimately retaking much of Hubei and Jiangxi provinces.

An attempt to take Shanghai begun in June 1861 was repulsed after 15 months by an army of Qing troops supported by European officers under the command of Frederick Townsend Ward.

The younger Hong was inexperienced and powerless, so the kingdom was quickly destroyed when Nanjing fell in July 1864 to the imperial armies after protracted street-by-street fighting.

It was not until August 1871 that the last Taiping army led by Shi Dakai's commander, Li Fuzhong (李福忠), was completely wiped out by government forces in the border region of Hunan, Guizhou and Guangxi.

They were then engaged in the Haw wars (misnamed due to conflation with Chinese Muslims) against the incompetent forces of King Rama V (r. 1868–1910– ) until 1890, when the last of the groups eventually disbanded.

[66] The other Muslim rebellion, the Dungan revolt, was the reverse: it was not aiming to overthrow the Qing dynasty because its leader Ma Hualong had accepted an imperial title.

[70] The rebels announced social reforms, including strict separation of the sexes, abolition of foot binding, land socialisation, and "suppression" of private trade.

[73] The rebels used brilliant unorthodox strategies that nearly toppled the dynasty but inspired it to adopt what one historian calls "the most significant military experimentation since the seventeenth century.

The Hakka settled throughout southern China and beyond, but as latecomers they generally had to establish their communities on rugged, less fertile land scattered on the fringes of the local majority group's settlements.

As their name ("guest households") suggests, the Hakka were generally treated as migrant newcomers, and often subjected to hostility and derision from the local majority Han populations.

Among the imperial forces was the elite Ever Victorious Army, consisting of Chinese soldiers led by a Western officer corps (see Frederick Townsend Ward and Charles Gordon) and supplied by European arms companies like Willoughbe & Ponsonby.

[81] Aside from local militias, the organisation of the Qing army was: The Taiping government maintained an ambivalent relationship with the Western powers who were active in China during this period.

[89] Similarly to McCartee, Hong's director of foreign affairs I. J. Roberts wrote, "His religious toleration, and multiplicity of chapels turns out to be a farce, of no avail in the spread of Christianity—worse than useless.

[87] This expedition was the largest party of Westerners to visit Taiping territories, with the inclusion of many British military personnel, entrepreneurs, missionaries, other unofficial observers and two French representatives.

[91] According to Clarke, this refusal of cooperation and Taiping's occupation of Ningbo in December led to the limited intervention against the rebellion by the British and French in the following years.

[97] Reportedly in the province of Guangdong, it is written that one million were executed because after the collapse of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the Qing dynasty launched waves of massacres against the Hakkas, that at their height killed up to 30,000 each day.

American General Joseph Stilwell, who commanded Chinese troops during the Second Sino-Japanese War, praised Zeng Guofan's campaigns for combining "caution with daring" and "initiative with perseverance.

[112] The defeat of the Taiping Rebellion by military forces from Hunan led to the dramatic increase of Hunanese representation in the government, who played a role in reform efforts.

[114] Historian John King Fairbank compares the Taiping rebels with the communists under Mao Zedong who came to power a century later: In addition to the zeal, vigor, and puritanical discipline so often found in new political movements, they shared certain traditional Chinese interests, such as propagating and maintaining doctrinal orthodoxy, recruiting an elite of talent, realizing a utopian social order, and developing military power based on farmer-soldiers.