Chinese Imperial forces, until a few weeks before under the command of British officer Captain Charles "Chinese" Gordon, finally stormed the walled city of Nanjing, the center of the Taiping Rebellion. The rebel leaders were executed and the rebellion essentially defeated. Historians consider the Taiping Rebellion easily the bloodiest conflict of the century, causing the deaths of perhaps as many as twenty million people. (By John Osborne)
Source Citation
Spencer C. Tucker (ed.), A Global Chronology of Conflict: From the Ancient World to the Modern Middle East (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 1405.