← Back to the front page

These Times History Took a Turn for the Batty

Khalid Elhassan November 3, 2019 34 min

33. “Jesus’ Younger Brother” and the 19^th Century’s Bloodiest Conflict

The 1860s were a bloody time. As the Civil War raged in the US, an even more destructive civil war was being fought on the other side of the world, in China: the Taiping Rebellion – a mixture of peasant uprising and millenarian Christian cult upheaval. It was led by Hong Xiuquan, who had failed the entrance exams into the Chinese civil service, had a breakdown, and upon recovery, declared himself Jesus Christ’s younger brother.

He amassed a following, and established the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom – an oppositional state that waged a brutal war from 1851 to 1864 against China’s ruling Manchu Dynasty. By the time the Taiping were defeated, about 30 million people had been killed, making the rebellion the bloodiest war in history, until its toll was exceeded by that of World War II.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.