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Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War
by Stephen R. Platt
《天国之秋》裴士锋
本书扣人心弦地描述了中国19世纪的太平天国起义，这是人类历史上规模最大的内战之一。《天国之秋》充满了令人难忘的人物和生动再现的大规模战斗，这些战斗往往令人毛骨悚然——这是塑造现代中国命运的这场冲突的生动而又亲切的写照。
故事开始于19世纪50年代初，当时正值清王朝的末年，各省正在酝酿一场大革命，消息不胫而走，领导这场革命的是一位失败的公务员，他自称是上帝之子和耶稣的兄弟。太平天国起义军的力量来自穷人和被剥夺权利的人，释放了数百万中国人对满族统治者的民族愤怒。这场土生土长的运动似乎势不可挡，直到英国和美国出面支持满清：经过数年的大规模屠杀，有效地扼杀了数代反对清朝统治的人。
（Stephen R. Platt）以引人入胜的细节再现了这些事件，他的故事围绕着两个对中国未来有着截然相反看法的迷人人物展开：一个是保守的儒学学者曾国藩，他是一位意外的将军，却成为中国近代史上最具影响力的军事战略家；另一个是洪仁玕，他是一位杰出的太平天国领袖，其建立一个现代化、工业化和亲西方的中国国家的宏伟愿景以悲剧性的失败告终。这是一部关于太平天国运动兴衰的重要历史，令人着迷。
A gripping account of China’s nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, one of the largest civil wars in history. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom brims with unforgettable characters and vivid re-creations of massive and often gruesome battles–a sweeping yet intimate portrait of the conflict that shaped the fate of modern China. The story begins in the early 1850s, the waning years of the Qing dynasty, when word spread of a major revolution brewing in the provinces, led by a failed civil servant who claimed to be the son of God and brother of Jesus. The Taiping rebels drew their power from the poor and the disenfranchised, unleashing the ethnic rage of millions of Chinese against their Manchu rulers. This homegrown movement seemed all but unstoppable until Britain and the United States stepped in and threw their support behind the Manchus: after years of massive carnage, all opposition to Qing rule was effectively snuffed out for generations. Stephen R. Platt recounts these events in spellbinding detail, building his story on two fascinating characters with opposing visions for China’s future: the conservative Confucian scholar Zeng Guofan, an accidental general who emerged as the most influential military strategist in China’s modern history; and Hong Rengan, a brilliant Taiping leader whose grand vision of building a modern, industrial, and pro-Western Chinese state ended in tragic failure. This is an essential and enthralling history of the rise and fall of the movement that, a century and a half ago, might have launched China on an entirely different path into the modern world.
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