Can you say what conflict caused the greatest loss of life in history? Not our Great War; it was the Taiping Civil war, which cost more than 20 million lives in a population of 400 million. The catalogue to The Citi Exhibition: China’s Hidden Century, the packed new British Museum show, observes that estimates vary between 20 million and 70 million. That margin of error is more than the population of Spain.
The century of the title, hidden from us, not them, is the long 19th – from the accession of the sixth emperor of the Qing dynasty to the abdication in 1912 of the Last Emperor of China, pictured here as a solemn little boy. In between was 100 years of profound change, documented in this ambitious exhibition with more than 300 exhibits, to tell the story of individuals and society, the grand and the humble.
