The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (53 page)

HUI REBELLION

Death toll:
640,000
¹

Rank:
66

Type:
religious uprising

Broad dividing line:
Han (Confucian) vs. Hui (Muslim)

Time frame:
1862–73

Location:
Gansu Province

Major state participant:
China

Who usually gets the most blame:
it depends

Another damn:
Chinese peasant revolt

Economic factor:
bamboo poles

M
USLIM CHINESE, THE HUI (SEE “PANTHAY REBELLION”), HAD BECOME
rather common in the northwest along the caravan routes to the Middle East, abutting the Turkic lands of Central Asia.

During the Taiping Rebellion, Qing officials had formed local militias all over the country to defend small communities from Taiping raiding, but in the western province of Shaanxi, the Hui formed militias to protect themselves from their Han neighbors, with whom they had an ongoing feud.

Some Hui soldiers on their way home from fighting the Taipings got to arguing over the price of bamboo poles in the marketplace of Huanzhou. Fighting broke out and several Hui were killed.
²
That night, the local Han set the Hui quarter on fire, and from there it became a full-fledged civil war. As the war ravaged the countryside, supplies of food, fuel, and fodder ran out and prices rose beyond the reach of most inhabitants. Famine followed.

Hui militias brought the cities of Tongzhou and Xian under siege, but the Qing troops inside held out. Within a few months, Qing armies forced the rebels to retreat westward into the Gansu Corridor, a narrow strip of fertile land tucked between the western mountains and deserts that traditionally had connected China with the Silk Road to the Middle East. Here the war stalemated.

In 1868, a new Chinese commander, Zuo Zongtang, arrived in Xian. A former scholar, Zuo had come to prominence putting down the Taiping Rebellion. He was a meticulous organizer and took his time training, supplying, and planning his offensive. Finally, he fought his way outward town by town along the Gansu Corridor, eventually homing in on one specific Hui leader, Ma Hualong, as the man he needed to break first.
³

Ma Hualong was besieged in the Hui capital at Jinjibao for sixteen long, hungry months. After the Hui rebels surrendered in March 1871, General Zuo had Ma, his family, and over eighty of his officials put to death by slicing.
*
The last major Hui city, Suzhou, fell in November 1873 followed by a general massacre, but the war continued in the countryside for several years more. Many tens of thousands of survivors fled west, into lands under Russian control.

Confucian Confusion

I hate to admit this, but it took me a long time to realize that this uprising of Chinese Muslims in Gansu is not at all the same as the earlier chapter’s uprising of Chinese Muslims in Yunnan. Most books combine all of the uprisings against the Qing in the middle of the nineteenth century into one humongous mess, but let’s try to keep them separate for now.

Another possible source of confusion: the Russians call the Hui of this region who came under their control through migration and conquest by the name Dungans, so this war is often called the Dungan Rebellion. This has nothing at all to do with the Dzungars we encountered in an earlier chapter (see “Sino-Dzungar War”).

And finally, even though I’ve dedicated three distinct chapters to nineteenth-century pandemonium in China, this doesn’t exhaust the list. The Nian Rebellion, the Red Turban Rebellion, and the Punti-Hakka Clan Wars all erupted around this same time, but they probably didn’t kill enough people to make this list.

WAR OF THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE

Death toll:
480,000
¹

Rank:
79

Type:
hegemonial war

Broad dividing line:
Paraguay vs. everyone

Time frame:
1864–70

Location:
South America

Major state participants:
Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay

Who usually gets the most blame:
Francisco Solano Lopez

Another damn:
war of trenches and idiotic frontal assaults

Economic factor:
trade access

N
O LIST OF MAD CONQUERORS ROLLING OVER THEIR NEIGHBORS IN A
quest for glory and treasure is complete without Francisco Solano Lopez, dictator of Paraguay. The bad-tempered son of the previous dictator, Lopez had inherited South America’s largest army along with its poorest country. Unfortunately, some of the best stories you hear about Lopez’s self-destructive insanity were merely propaganda spread by his Brazilian and Argentine enemies. His story gets less interesting the more you look into it. (Damn you, research!)

For starters, the conflict erupted because of boring geopolitical intrigues rather than wild blood lust. The Río de la Plata is a broad estuary leading into the heart of South America, where wide, navigable rivers connect the trade of four nations: Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. It’s the only place in South America where countries adjoin one another near well-populated areas, so naturally this is where you will find the bloodiest interstate war ever fought in the Western Hemisphere.

During a border dispute between Brazil and Uruguay, the Uruguayan opposition party, the Colorados (Reds), joined Brazil for a coup against the ruling Blancos (Whites). This made Uruguay a Brazilian satellite, jeopardizing inland Paraguay’s access to the sea. Lopez decided to march in and throw out both the Brazilians and the Colorados.
²

At first, a really satisfying war seemed out of reach because Paraguay couldn’t get to Uruguay. The first shots were fired between warships off the coast of Uruguay, but Lopez failed to get control of the sea, so an amphibious attack was out of the question. The only road between the warring sides went through a panhandle of Argentina. When Argentina refused Lopez’s request to pass along this road, he attacked anyway in December 1864, bringing Argentina into what now became the Triple Alliance against Paraguay—11 million people in three countries against a single nation of a half million.

The Paraguayan offensive penetrated deep into Brazil, but Brazil is a vast country that chewed up and spit out the Paraguayan army in a hard campaign. The allies drove the survivors back to Paraguay in 1866. Meanwhile, the allies had already begun their counteroffensive elsewhere. By 1865, Brazil had bought so many ironclad warships from Europe and North America that it now had the largest modern navy in the world. The Brazilians destroyed Lopez’s wooden fleet in the Río de la Plata, opening the estuary and rivers to attack.

Allied armies and gunboats pushed up the Parana River until they stalled at the Paraguayan trenches covering the junction of the Paraguay River and the Parana, around the town of Humaita. It took three years and over 100,000 lives for the allies to slug across the next thirty miles, attacking each new line of Paraguayan trenches, one after another. Month by month, year by year, Lopez scoured the country for enough conscripts to fill his lines, progressively lowering his standards in desperation. Naturally he shot any of his men who failed to perform his duty to the utmost, and he planted spies throughout his army to report any treasonous utterances by his soldiers. In May 1868, the allies finally broke the stalemate and drove away the remaining 20,000 Paraguayan soldiers—emaciated teenagers, cripples, and old men mostly.

As his enemies closed in, Lopez lashed out against the conspiracies he knew had brought him down. Several hundred Paraguayan citizens—his brothers, brothers-in-law, cabinet ministers, bishops, and judges among them—were seized and executed. He killed over 200 foreigners including many diplomats. He had his own mother flogged and sentenced to die.

By December the allies had taken Paraguay’s capital, Asuncion, and installed their own puppet government. They declared the war won and went home, leaving a small force to clean up. Lopez remained at large somewhere in the jungle, “raising another army of 13,000, including eight-year-old boys wearing false beards and armed with sticks.”
³
He embarked on a guerrilla war and grew more insane as time passed. Finally, defeated and down to his last 200 men, Lopez was speared by a Brazilian grenadier while fleeing across a river.

His mistress, Eliza Lynch, a former Parisian courtesan who had horrified Asuncion high society with her arrogant manners, her reckless extravagance, and her low Irish birth, stuck with Lopez to the bitter end. Her Brazilian captors forced her at gunpoint to personally dig his grave after their last battle out in the wilderness.

In addition to territorial changes that shifted a lot of swamps, mountains, and jungles from Paraguay to its enemies, the war had reduced the population of Paraguay from 525,000 to 221,000, leaving only 28,000 men alive. Informal polygamy became commonplace among the surviving Paraguayans as the only way to care for the huge numbers of widows and orphans.
⁴