On 19 July 1864, the city of Nanjing fell to Qing imperial forces, ending history's bloodiest ever civil war. From 1850, an army of holy warriors, numbering at times over a million strong, had fought to overthrow the imperial household and establish a theocratic Heavenly Kingdom in its place. Inspired by a failed candidate for the imperial bureaucracy who saw himself as Christ's younger brother, the Taiping (‘heavenly kingdom’) faith fused elements of Chinese folk religion with evangelical Christianity to energise a millenarian movement of exceptional resilience and ferocity. For almost fifteen years, the Taiping rebels paralysed the Qing dynasty, spreading from their base in Guangxi province to seize control of the ancient imperial capital of Nanjing, from where they briefly ruled a territory as large as France and Germany combined. By the time leader Hong Xiuquan died and imperial forces had massacred his remaining followers, the rebellion had claimed at least 20 million lives. Coming at a time when the Qing dynasty was already weakened by fiscal crisis and accelerating Western predation, the Taiping rebellion gravely weakened the imperial core of a suzerain state system that had governed East Asia for the better part of the millennium.