1864
Third Battle of Nanjing
The setting
Nanjing, capital of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom
A great walled city under a siege of months, reduced by mining beneath the wall.
Reveal the outcome
Recorded sideTaiping Heavenly Kingdom
Recorded resultdefeated; the city stormed, Li Xiucheng captured and executed. Hong Xiuquan had died on 1 June, before the fall
Qing victory. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom ended.
How the atlas explains it
Blockade first, then mining. The Xiang Army invested the city, starved it through the spring, and brought the wall down with a gallery charge in July. ⚠ The more consequential thing is WHO did it: not a banner army but a REGIONAL FORCE raised, paid and officered by Zeng Guofan on provincial revenue. The dynasty survived by devolving military power to Han provincial officials, and never fully took it back.
What followed
⚠ THE DEADLIEST CIVIL WAR IN HUMAN HISTORY ENDS HERE, AND THE ATLAS WILL NOT GIVE IT A DEATH TOLL — BECAUSE THE FAMOUS FIGURES ARE NOT DEATH TOLLS. Revised 2026-08-29 after adversarial review. Cao Shuji's 70 million is a POPULATION SHORTFALL: five provinces, a prewar base of about 157 million, a roughly 45% loss, computed as the difference between two population levels. A level difference counts people who are missing from a later register — it does not distinguish killed from starved, fled, unborn or uncounted. ⚠ Cao's own text calls it deaths, so the TYPE CANNOT BE INHERITED FROM THE SOURCE'S LANGUAGE; it has to be assigned by inspecting the method. Li and Lin's 71 million is not independent corroboration — it is the same construct in regression form. And the widely repeated attribution of a 70-100 million range to Ho Ping-ti does not survive checking. The atlas records a shortfall with its method and asserts no body count. On any reading the war is second only to the Second World War.