ABSTRACT
Buddhism gave rise to the White Lotus Rebellion, which strove to establish a utopia on earth and also straddled the turn of the century (1796-1804), and to the 1813 rebellion of Lin Qing, which reached the Forbidden City in its aim to assassinate the Jiaqing emperor. Natural disaster helped to weld these bands together in what became known as the Nian Rebellion. Most of the rebellion's plundering occurred in Shandong, Henan, and northern Jiangsu in an area of about a 100,000 square miles. By the mid-nineteenth century, there were an estimated 1 million Muslims in the region of the Nian rebellion. The Panthay rebellion in Yunnan province grew from a mix of ethnic and religious tensions, but the spark that ignited it was economic rivalry. With the exception of the Panthay rebellion, the midcentury rebellions were suppressed not by Qing generals but by scholar-officials, civilians who had advanced degrees in the civil service system.
