The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

by Michael Wood

the British and the other foreigners, however, their stake in China was too big to jeopardise, so they lent the Chinese government advisers and the latest weaponry to help crush the rebels.

Hong’s body was exhumed, burned and his ashes blown from a cannon so no resting place could become a focus for commemoration by Taiping loyalists.

Among the enormous number of works of literature that were lost were many unpublished writings of the historian and philosopher Zhang Xuecheng. It was as if, let us say, the scholarly heartland of Western Europe in the 1860s had been smashed from Amsterdam to Paris, its scholars killed or dispersed and its libraries destroyed.

In the Forbidden City, however, there was resistance to real structural change, and the reformers of the late nineteenth century were unable to translate their ideas to the imperial establishment, or to the grassroots administration of the empire. Every year between the Taiping revolt and 1911 there was a rebellion somewhere in the Chinese countryside, and the unravelling of the empire began to resemble the periods of social unrest that had brought down earlier dynasties.

The Chinese famine of 1907 was a short-lived event, but still took the lives of nearly 25 million people.

By the end, 90 per cent of the monasteries and nunneries were destroyed along with their artistic treasures and libraries built up over a thousand years. In 1980, a fact-finding mission found all the great shrines in ruins: Ganden, Sera, Gyantse, Drepung, the Jokhang in Lhasa – great centres of learning from the medieval heyday of Tibetan Buddhism which, especially in the eighteenth century under the Qing emperors, had played such a role in Chinese civilisation.

China spends more money on internal security than on external defence,