The Taiping Rebellion: everything you wanted to know

Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. It's considered to be the bloodiest civil war in history, but there's a fair chance you've never heard of it. The Taiping Rebellion convulsed China from 1850 to 1864, leading to over 20 million deaths and severely weakening the Qing dynasty. But it remains little known outside of China today.

In this Everything You Wanted to Know episode, Professor Stephen R. Platt takes us through the key events of the rebellion and explains why it hasn't received the attention it deserves. He speaks to Robatar. The Taiping Rebellion breaks out in 1850. What can you tell us about the state of China at this point?

The state of China is economic malaise, especially in South China where the Taiping Rebellion begins. This is coming less than a decade after the end of the Opium War, Britain's first war with China. And one of the results of the Opium War was that prior to the war from 1760 all the way up until 1840 or so, all of the British and American trade was restricted to Canton in the very south of China. It was extremely inconvenient to get goods to Canton. Most of the tea and the silk and the other products that the foreigners were buying were produced along the Yangtze River, which is in central China.

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