Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (Platt, 2012)

A scholarly history of the Taiping Civil War by historian Stephen R. Platt, winner of the Cundill History Prize. It documents the July 1864 fall of Nanjing, the Taiping capital, to Qing forces under Zeng Guofan, when Zeng's Hunan Army embarked on a three day massacre of the city's Taiping population after breaching its walls, a killing Zeng's own report inflated to a hundred thousand rebel dead in order to magnify his family's and army's glory while masking the looting and atrocities his own troops committed. Its strength is Platt's direct use of Zeng Guofan's own correspondence and reports alongside Qing and Taiping sources to weigh the fall of Nanjing's death toll against the self serving purpose of the figures Zeng himself supplied. Its limit is that, as Platt's own account makes clear, no independent count of the massacre's dead survives; the number usually repeated is the perpetrator's own inflated claim. A print monograph with no publisher hosted canonical url.