Taiping Contemporaries
The suppression of the Taiping Rebellion placed a strain on the Qing finances and military from which it was never able to recover. This burden left the dynasty not only less able to respond militarily to the breakdown of social order, but also less able to exercise routine governance of the sort that would stabilise society.
As the dynasty entered into a period of steep decline, it increasingly neglected tasks such as dredging flood-prone rivers or delivering relief supplies, further exacerbating the stress of continued population rise. Official neglect allowed crises such as the North China Famine (1876-9) to become far more deadly than they would have under better circumstances.[69]As a result, the spiral of social dislocation and organised violence continued to accelerate throughout the remainder of the century. At roughly the same time the Taiping were emerging from Guangxi, armed bands known as Nian (the name most likely refers to skeins of twisted paper, although the precise provenance remains a matter of dispute) were organising in Huaibei, another impoverished region that spanned a tangle of provincial borders. While earlier interpretations emphasised the connection of the Nian Rebellion (1851-68) to an internally coherent White Lotus tradition, scholars since the 1980s have moved away from the idea that an existing religious tradition drove the formation of the Nian, and have instead come to see the movement as an opportunistic extension of the banditry that was endemic to the area. The distraction of Qing forces by the Taiping suppression gave these bandit gangs (and the communities that supported them) an opportunity to develop into a proper military force, which aimed less to expand their power territorially than to keep the Qing from returning. However, while the Nian may not have been driven by religion in the same way as the millenarian Taipings, religion should not be discounted entirely. As were other violent brotherhoods such as the Triads or the Heaven and Earth Society (Tiandihui), the Nian military was structured around a tradition of narrative, lore, rituals and blood oaths.11 Long after the Nian themselves were suppressed, this region would remain known for organised violence.[70] [71]
A far less compromising dynamic was at work in the 1866 conflagration of the Yellow Cliff Teaching (Huangya jiao) in nearby Shandong Province.
Originally a school of syncretic Confucianism called the Great Ancient (Taigu), the movement formed into a community of disciples who (in part as a measure of protection against Nian incursions) sold their property and relocated to a stronghold at the foot of the Yellow Cliff Mountain. There the community of a few hundred families developed the belief that previous teachers lived among them as immortals, and practised a strict regimen of prayer and ritual. Provincial authorities watched these developments with alarm. Governor Yan Jingming characterised the group as the ‘intersection of heresy and banditry' (xiejiao tongfei), and, beyond the usual charges of holding lewd nocturnal rituals and practising illicit magic, claimed that the community was storing up weapons.[72] Convinced that danger from the group was too great to ignore, Yan sent in a contingent of troops to force them to disperse, attacking the community and burning it to the ground. Leaders and their families were killed in the ensuing battle and fire, as were hundreds of followers who tried to defend the community. Rather than surrender, many of the remaining followers committed suicide, bringing the total death toll to thousands. Decades later, many ofYan's fellow literati continued to defend the teaching and criticise his mishandling of the situation.