What Remains Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China [Hardcover]

The Taiping Rebellion was one of the costliest civil wars in human history. Many millions of people lost their lives. Yet while the Rebellion has been intensely studied by scholars in China and elsewhere, we still know little of how individuals coped with these cataclysmic events.

Drawing upon a rich array of primary sources,What Remainsexplores the issues that preoccupied Chinese and Western survivors. 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.

Driven by compelling accounts of raw emotion and deep injury,What Remainsopens a window to a world described by survivors themselves. This book transforms our understanding of China's 19th century and recontextualizes suffering and loss in China during the 20th century.

Meyer-Fong taps a rich source of materials, which, precisely because they were written in the context of Qing restoration, have often been overlooked by historians more focused on tracing the sources of Chinese revolution. This book shows the insights that may be derived from such ignored sources when a scholar of Meyer-Fong's quality breaks free of conventional questions. . . [A] must-read not only for any student of the Taiping Rebellion but also for anyone seeking understanding of the effects of and response to war in late imperial China. The source base for this work is remarkable. It is a synthesis of diffuse genres, answering questions that few have thought to ask. The subject matter is compelling. Its value to historians wishing to understand the nineteenth century (in China and elsewhere) is very highonly a few scholars have dealt with the long impact of the Taiping War, fewer still have looked at these materials, and only Professor Meyer-Fong has synthesized them to provide such detail into experience of war rather than the ideologies of the combatanl"