What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China

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 Remains explores 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 Remains opens 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.

Table of Contents:
Contents and Abstracts1War chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the main themes of the book and places it in historiographical context. The chapter argues that the Taiping Rebellion should be termed a civil war, and should be understood in relation to the questions and concerns of those who lived through it. It calls attention to the devastating human and material consequences of the Taiping War. The chapter identifies the reasons scholars in both the United States and China have tended to focus on other issues. Western scholars have emphasized the Taiping movement's Christian orientation or roots in local religious practice or the biography of the movement's founder. Chinese scholarship in general highlights place of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in the history of revolution in China. 2Words chapter abstractThis chapter uses the figure of Yu Zhi (1809-1874), a failed examination candidate and charismatic pro-Qing philanthropist, to explore the religiosity of pro-Qing Confucian orthodoxy. It thus adds to our understanding of the local elite activists who played a leading role in wartime defense and post-war reconstruction. 3Marked Bodies chapter abstractThis chapter examines how wartime identities were communicated and understood through tattoos, hairstyle, and clothing. It argues that the emphasis on (permanent) inscription of identities in fact bespoke profound anxiety about deception and betrayal, as wartime affinities were widely understood to be contingent and volatile. 4Bones and Flesh chapter abstractThis chapter asks what happened to the dead during the Taiping War. It examines the political meanings attached to corpses in Late Imperial China. The presence of unburied corpses represented a profound failure on the part of the dynasty and signaled a crisis of political legitimacy. Additionally, cannibalism—both rumored and real—indicated the total breakdown of society. Stories about coffins and corpses, lost and miraculously returned, heralded the virtue of the dead and their families. The act of burial conferred legitimacy upon those who did the burying: local officials and philanthropists. 5Wood and Ink chapter abstractThis chapter centers on efforts to commemorate the war dead in shrines and books. Using rituals and language provided by the dynasty, local communities sought to underscore their loyalty and obscure wartime ambivalence. This chapter deals with the construction of post-war myths about wartime loyalty and dynastic victory. It also examines the ways in which groups empowered by the war made use of commemoration to further their causes in the post-war. 6Loss chapter abstractThis chapter highlights one man's efforts to honor his deceased mother in writing. As a boy of eight, Zhang Guanglie witnessed his mother's murder during the Taiping occupation of Hangzhou in 1861. In his "Record of 1861," he both uses and challenges the conventions used in official commemoration for the war dead. His idiosyncratic and fragmentary book documents his deeply personal search for consolation. The chapter also deals with the role of publishing and newspapers as a medium for the formation of new types of post-war community. 7Endings chapter abstractThis short chapter considers the ways in which war transformed the lives of survivors. It looks at ghost stories, memoirs, and Buddhist rites as places where emotion and memory lingered, unsettled, giving lie to the easy narrative of dynastic victory and communal closure.

About the Author :
Tobie Meyer-Fong is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the History Department at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Building Culture in Early Qing Yangzhou (Stanford, 2003) and co-editor of the journal Late Imperial China.

Review :
"Meyer-Fong's book signals a welcome new direction in Taiping scholarship . . . I found most valuable the book's insights into the (often overlooked) religious dimensions of loyalty among the local gentry, and the reflections that it offers on the changing meaning of martyrdom in the late Qing—an account that has relevance for the contested politics of martyrdom in China today."—David Brophy, The China Journal "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."—Edward A. McCord, H-Net "An often riveting account of how different people—scholars, soldiers, women, children, officials, and turncoats, among others—variously experienced and remembered one of the most destructive civil wars in human history. Meyer-Fong makes clear that in both the short and the long term the Taiping was as crucial in personal as in political terms."—Joanna Waley-Cohen, Professor of History and Collegiate Professor, New York University "Tobie Meyer-Fong's pathbreaking study of the experience of war and its aftermath in 19th-century China is the rare kind of scholarship that resonates deeply not just on an intellectual level but on an emotional one as well. It is the first truly intimate study we have of human responses to the massive Taiping Rebellion, one of the darkest chapters of human history. A work of pathos and insight, What Remains is by turns thought-provoking, heartbreaking and above all eye-opening."—Stephen R. Platt, author of Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom "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 high—only 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 combatants. Her writing is elegant, and the subject matter, even apart from its high scholarly value, is riveting. Here are to be found cannibalism and decapitated mothers, gardens of mourning and restless ghosts. To me it read like a novel."—William Wooldridge, Lehman College "Tobie Meyer-Fong's What Remains is a rich and original work that adopts the perspective of individuals who experienced and survived the cataclysmic uprising, which lasted for more than a decade. Drawn from a wide and deep reading of contemporary sources, it is a close examination of what it was like to live through the Taiping conflict....The book, packed with vivifying details, effectively captures an intensely experienced world, and weaves in many large themes."—Joanna Waley-Cohen, The English Historical Review