Librería Samer Atenea
Kálamo Books
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
In 1837, a failed scholar in a small Chinese village fell into a fever so violent his family began preparing his funeral. When he woke, he believed he had walked through heaven itself and met God the Father, who told him he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, sent to earth to destroy the demons corrupting mankind. Fourteen years later, that fever dream had become an army of two million people, a rival kingdom that ruled the richest provinces in China, and the deadliest civil war in human history.Between twenty and thirty million people died. More than the First World War. More than the Russian Civil War. More than the American Civil War, fought in the very same years, on the very same earth, and almost entirely forgotten by the country that unknowingly helped start it.This is the story the West was never told.It is the story of Hong Xiuquan, a man convinced he was divine, who built a capital of staggering wealth while his kingdom starved. Of Yang Xiuqing, an illiterate charcoal peddler who claimed to speak in the literal voice of God, and whose ambition triggered a single night of slaughter that killed more people than most wars ever fought. Of Shi Dakai, the most beloved general of his generation, who surrendered his own life at a river crossing so his starving soldiers might live, a sacrifice history would echo seventy years later when Mao Zedong’s Red Army faced the exact same river during the Long March.And it is the story of Zeng Guofan, the reluctant Confucian scholar who never wanted to be a soldier, who built the army that finally crushed the rebellion, and who, in doing so, permanently and irreversibly changed the fate of the largest nation on earth.This is not a dry academic account. It is a sweeping, character driven narrative written the way the greatest stories of empire, faith, and catastrophe deserve to be written, with the pace of a thriller and the weight of real history. You will meet kings who believed themselves gods, generals who wept over their own defeats, and ordinary families who vanished by the tens of millions from a story the rest of the world simply stopped telling.Drawing on real historical records, surviving confessions, and firsthand missionary and diplomatic accounts, this book finally gives the Taiping Rebellion the telling it has always deserved: gripping, human, and impossible to put down.If you have ever finished a great work of narrative history and wondered what else the world has forgotten, this is the book you did not know you were waiting for.Read it in a single sitting. Then ask yourself how a war this large, this consequential, and this human, ever slipped so quietly out of memory.
