The civil war confronting the Taiping and the Qing Court in the middle of the 19th century has engaged historical scholarship for many decades in an often controversial debate. At the heart of this debate is the motivation driving the Taiping and the Han Chinese officials who were siding with the Manchu court; the long-term effects of the latters' saving the dynasty on the status of Han Chinese officials and the diffusion of military power; and the question of the historical “evaluation” of both sides. The victorious Qing made sure that their own version of events would reign supreme as long as they were in power, while pragmatic considerations prompted the survivors of the other side to conceal themselves. Most Taiping official writings only survive in the West, and the rare defences of the Taiping cause written shortly after their demise came from the pens of Westerners. Only in the 1890s did Chinese revolutionaries such as Sun Yat-sen begin to portray themselves as descendants of the Taiping and to claim their legacy.

The lives and memories of the many million little people, however, who lived or died during this civil war, seemingly left little trace in the historical record.

Tobie Meyer-Fong's absorbing What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China shows how this vast lacuna (at least for the Qing side) is due less to the lack of historical records than to the focus of historians on the great individuals or collective forces that “make history.” For this purpose she draws on a formidable array of sources, most of which were hitherto un- or underexplored. These include lists of martyrs in the local chronicles; the speeches, pamphlets, songs, dramas and illustrated booklets of Yu Zhi, a lowly and independent propagandist for the Qing cause; anecdotal evidence in Chinese and Western writings about the way in which both sides tried to permanently mark the bodies of those in their ranks so as to prevent their defecting, and on the fate of the vast numbers of dead bodies down to harrowing stories about cannibalism; the vast bureaucratic system of verifying and ranking the loyalty of the dead to the dynasty's cause and the records of the many local efforts to secure official standing for their dead, of which core features survive to this day; and finally on a single man's traumatic and repeated revisiting of his mother's death.

While even these sources do not allow reconstruction of the lives and deaths of those who had become convinced of the promise of the Taipings, they enable the author to show in great depth the agency of individuals, families, charitable organizations and local gentry in securing the official standing of their dead even during these trying times. The book shows how the official master narrative of the court failed to account for its failure to contain the Taipings, for the callousness of many of its officials, or for the ubiquitous massacres, rapes and pillaging of the Hunan and Anhui braves; meanwhile, local charity organizations fail to account for the motivations of status gain and tax exemption that were present in many of them. With a deft hand the author highlights these submerged features, showing how Yu Zhi ends up pleading for a benign treatment of those pressed into Taiping service; how a woman who had killed herself so as to avoid rape by the Qing court defenders is proposed for a very official tablet in the local Manifest Loyalty Shrine; or how all the official honours accorded to his mother failed to help Zhang Guanglie come to grips with his mother's death. The focus on mourning the dead was not shared by all, and some “ignorant people” are upbraided by officials for holding birthday banquets at the commemorative shrines, dumping their garbage there, or using the ponds to raise fish for a living.

The unspoken hero in many of these sources is Zeng Guofan. He extended the officially sanctioned commemoration rites to his own irregular braves so that eventually even commoners, monks and women could qualify. As he was in frequent contact with Westerners, the question is how far he had become aware of the benefits to esprit de corps that a dignified treatment of the war dead and their dependents – as it was practiced by then in parts of Europe – could bring. This war was very much an international event and for both sides the reactions of the international community were of great importance. These reactions, which stay outside the China-centred perspective of this volume, were to no small degree influenced by perceptions of the degree of civilized behaviour shown to prisoners of war or the civilian population, and the Chinese civil war with its huge cost in human lives is one of the driving forces in the development of international agreements such as the Geneva Convention.

Among the sources that might also have been explored with benefit is the Yinghuan suoji, a monthly published between 1872 and 1876 under different names by the Shenbaoguan in Shanghai. It published a fair number of biographies of “martyred” women and men, of poems and writings from their hands, and of commemorative essays. The perspective in these writings is uniformly pro-Qing. They share, however, the same local focus and refusal to smoothly fit into the official master narrative as the sources that fuel this important and engrossing volume, and would have enriched the analysis.