Re: [DL] any idea what's going on.. [China]

[Markus Finster <markus.finster@chello.at>]

At 06:45 16.06.2002, captrose@magicaldesk.com wrote:
 >in China during the Weird West?

I had a Chinese Mad Scientist in my posse, so I did a little digging.

China went thorugh some turmoil in the 2nd half of the 19th century:
1850-1864 there was the Taiping Rebellion, which cost about 20 Million 
lives. The Rebels controlled about a third of the country, claiming to 
found a heavenly kingdom on earth.
You can find a short info about it in the Great Maze Sourcebook, in the 
Marshal's section.
In a nutshell, the leader Hong Xiuquan combined Confucianism with 
Protestantism and formulated an eclectic ideology.
He quickly gathered thousands of followers and formed an army. 1851 he 
launched an uprising.
Hong proclaimed the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace (Taiping Tianguo, or 
Taiping for short) with himself as king. The new order was to reconstitute 
a legendary ancient state in which the peasantry owned and tilled the land 
in common; slavery, concubinage, arranged marriage, opium smoking, 
footbinding, judicial torture, and the worship of idols were all to be 
eliminated.
The Imperial Army lost most of the battles in the beginning, until France 
and Britain decided that they would rather deal with a weak, bureacratic 
China than with an independent Taiping.

Then, 1863, some Muslim tribes rebelled against their Manchu's, thus 
starting the Muslim Rebellion which lasted until 1877. Russia send troops 
into the region to protect his border as well.

Then, of course, The Second Opium War, 1856-1860.
And there were a lot of "smaller" incidents, like the Tientsin Massacre in 
1870: a chinese crowd massacred the nuns and priests of a Roman Catholic 
convent.

You can finde more information on the above there:
http://www.onwar.com/aced/nation/cat/china/findex.htm

Hope that helps,
Markus