The Taiping Rebellion was a Chinese civil war fought against the ruling court of the Qing Dynasty, which ruled from 1644 to 1912. The rebellion was led by Hong Xiuquan (1814–64), who preached his own unusual mixture of Christianity and succeeded in establishing the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, which controlled a large swath of southern China before its eventual defeat at the hands of a Qing/French/British alliance. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom spent its brief life under constant siege by the Qing army, and stands as the fifth-deadliest armed conflict in history, killing between 20 and 30 million people—more than World War I. There were a further 10 million deaths as a result of the Dungan revolt (1862–77), an attempt to establish a Muslim state in western ...