The Taiping Civil War (1851-64) in China is always one that people get hooked on, and I am a pretty clear case of that! My recommended trio of books for this are the ones on the booklist: Jonathan Spence's God's Chinese Son (1996), Stephen Platt's Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom (2012), and Tobie Meyer-Fong's What Remains (2013), which more or less in chronological order cover the beginnings, end and aftermath of the conflict.

God's Chinese Son, a biography of Hong Xiuquan, is mainly focussed on seeking to understand its core figure. Who really was Hong Xiuquan? What led to his revelation that he was the second son of God, given a divine mission to cleanse the world of sin? How did this really rather ordinary person, the third son in a freeholder family from a minority group in China's 'deep south', come to hold such extraordinary sway, and lead one side in the most destructive conflict of the nineteenth century? Of course, other avenues are explored as well, such as how Hong's lieutenants responded to their sudden possession of immense wealth, armies, and political power within the rebel state; how foreign Christians reacted to the Taiping's religion, and vice versa; and how Hong's religious thinking evolved over time. In terms of broader political narrative the book is very thin on the ground after the events of 1856, matching Hong's growing seclusion by focussing increasingly on the theological dimensions of the Taiping. There is still reasonably complete coverage of affairs, but it is brisk.

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom is an absolutely magisterial work that picks up where Spence left off, in two key ways. Firstly, it does so chronologically, covering the period of Taiping resurgence and defeat in 1859-64. Secondly, it gives much broader geopolitical coverage, not just giving the Taiping perspective, but also that of the Qing imperial court, provincial loyalist militias, the British, the Americans, the French, even the Japanese at times! Like the concurrent American Civil War, the Taiping conflict can be seen as two linked theatres, a war in the west and a war in the east, both of which are covered by Platt in about similar measure. In the west, the anti-Taiping war effort was spearheaded by the Hunan Army of Zeng Guofan, who along with the Taiping's reformist prime minister Hong Rengan serves as one of the major 'characters' of the narrative, while in the east, Britain, France and private parties in the treaty port at Shanghai played an active role alongside Qing forces. Half of Platt's narrative is devoted to that latter theatre, and the question of why the foreign powers came to support the 'pagan' Qing, whom they had just finished fighting in the Second Opium War, over the Christian Taiping with their actively reformist, conciliatory prime minister. This is fundamentally a political-military narrative, though, and based on comments made to me in the past regarding this recommendation, many prefer to also get a sense of the religious and social aspects as well.

What Remains covers the thing that the other two books don't – how civilians responded to the war, the destruction it wrought, and the lives it cost. A broad range of aspects are covered here: the politics of commemoration; how civilians processed grief at the loss of their loved ones; campaigns to restore ritual purity to stave off disaster; the simple logistics of burying the millions of dead. While the above books aren't devoid of pathos, this one really hits home how the human cost of it all manifested.