演講摘要 : This talk will survey local gazetteers, militia-raising chronicles, commemorative records, and privately authored war histories authored during and in the immediate aftermath of the Taiping rebellion’s invasion of North China. Composed between 1853 and 1860, these texts were produced as the capital region remained unsettled, due to the heavy costs of the empire’s military campaigns, the destruction of the Yellow River floods, and a chaotic assemblage of new monetary policies. I argue that the “unfinished” nature of the Taiping War is crucial to understanding the motives and objectives of these narratives, martyrologies, and compilations, which were composed without knowledge of the eventual outcome of the war.
