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Historical person
1814–1864
Hong Xiuquan was a Chinese religious leader who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus and founded the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. The rebellion he led from 1850 produced one of the nineteenth century’s deadliest civil wars before Qing and regional forces recaptured Nanjing in 1864.
George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman and the Dragon is set in Hong Kong in 1860, Flashman accepts money to escort what he believes is an opium shipment into Canton and discovers that he is carrying weapons for the Taiping rebels.
In non-fiction, Hong Xiuquan is discussed in Stephen R. Platt’s Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom. In Stephen R. Platt’s Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, the movement founded by Hong Xiuquan challenged Qing rule with a radical religious and social programme, drawing support from communities damaged by poverty, ethnic tension and ineffective government.
Series
The ‘Twas on the China Station series follows George Mayhew as he leaves naval life and builds a merchant house in Shanghai during the violent transformation of mid-nineteenth-century China. Beginning in 1850, the novels place commercial ambition beside the Taiping Rebellion, Qing political weakness and the expanding power…
All books in this series
The Flashman Papers present the supposed memoirs of Sir Harry Paget Flashman, the bully expelled from Rugby School in Tom Brown’s School Days who becomes a decorated Victorian soldier despite being a coward, liar, opportunist and sexual predator. George MacDonald Fraser places this fictional witness inside documented nineteenth-century…
All books in this series
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
