New Research on Taiping Rebellion’s Impact

The Taiping Rebellion was one of the costliest civil wars in human history. Tens of millions of people lost their lives as Chinese rebels, imperial armies, and local militias clashed across the Yangzi Delta. Although the Rebellion has been studied from a variety of perspectives, we know little about how ordinary people coped with the enormous destruction. In What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in Nineteenth-Century China, Tobie Meyer-Fong draws on a rich array of primary sources to discover how individuals, families, and communities grappled with fundamental questions of loyalty and loss as they struggled to rebuild shattered cities, bury the dead, and make sense of the horrors that they had witnessed. At a National Committee program on October 10 in New York City, Tobie Meyer-Fong discussed the cultural, social, and emotional impact of the Taiping Rebellion.

Tobie Meyer-Fong is associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University. She received her bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1989 and her doctoral degree from Stanford University in 1998. She is a cultural historian of late imperial and modern China with interests ranging from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. Professor Meyer-Fong is editor of the journal Late Imperial China. She has been a visiting scholar at institutions in China, Taiwan, and Japan, and participated in the Public Intellectuals Program at the National Committee.

Politics & Foreign Relations

Politics & Foreign Relations

Recorded 10/9/2013