Jeffrey Wasserstrom: The Battle for China's Soul

Mr. Wasserstrom is the author of "China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know."

In the early 1860s, a violent fight raged to determine the fate of a vast country. An insurrection had split it in two, leaving much of the southern half governed by men who claimed to be the leaders of a new state but were dismissed by their foes as illegitimate "rebels," outlaws who had given themselves fancy titles. The conflict involved legendary generals with names that schoolchildren still memorize, and it had not just local but international significance: In far-off London, debates raged over whether the British Empire should back the rebels, with whom some Britons felt a sympathetic bond.

American readers might naturally assume that this description refers to our Civil War. In fact, I had in mind an Asian conflict, which may be little known to Americans today but which was far bloodier than the struggle that pitted Grant against Lee (tens of millions dead, compared with under a million). The insurgents with fancy titles in this case were the self-proclaimed "Kings" of the Taiping Uprising, a movement that at its apogee held sway over a territory roughly the size of Italy.

Hong Xiuquan (1814-64), the "Heavenly King" who was the movement's supreme leader, strove to transform China by fulfilling a quasi-Christian millenarian prophecy. A frustrated scholar who had been exposed to a missionary tract while preparing to take the all-important civil-service examination that would secure him a post in the official bureaucracy, Hong went into a trance after failing the grueling test and awoke convinced that he was Christ's younger brother, selected by God to save China from rule by barbarian "demons," his term for the Manchu members of the Qing royal family.

Stephen Platt's "Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom" is an impressive, gracefully written account of the war that ensued. Like many historians of our War Between the States, Mr. Platt presents stirring accounts of battles and finely etched portraits of military commanders. On the insurgent side, the commanders included figures like Chen Yucheng (aka the "Brave King"), who started his life in poverty and ended it near the top of the Taiping hierarchy. Ranged against Chen were men such as Li Hongzhang, a famous military modernizer, and Li's mentor, Zeng Guofan. A shrewd strategist torn by competing loyalties—to his family, his home province of Hunan and the dynasty he served—Zeng did more than anyone else to topple Hong's Taiping Kingdom. Mr. Platt's richly textured portrait of this complex, conflicted official is one of the strengths of the book....