The suppression of a revolution _ab extra_ always reverses the wheels of progress, and in this instance who can tell by how many centuries it has postponed the adoption of Christianity by the Chinese? ... Looking back at this distance of time, with all the light of subsequent history upon the events, we are still inclined to ask whether a different policy might not have been better for China. Had foreign Powers promptly recognised the Taiping chief on the outbreak of the second war, might it not have shortened a chapter of horrors that dragged on for fifteen more years, ending in the Nien-fei and Mohammedan rebellions and causing the loss of fifty millions of human lives.... More than once, when the insurgents were on the verge of success, the prejudice of short-sighted diplomats decided against them, and an opportunity was lost such as does not occur once in a thousand years."[2] Other witnesses of these times and events speak in a similar strain. On the other hand, it has to be remembered that there was no little failure on the part of the Taiping Wang to realise the need for reconstruction of a new kingdom, and seeming lack of ability to use the fruits of his victories. The suppression of the Taipings took fourteen years (1850-64). The outside world has forgotten, if it ever knew, the extent and horrors {267} of that terrible time. Not so the Chinese people. Small wonder is it that when Li Yuan Hung's army began their terrible slaughter of the Manchus in Wuchang, young and old, rich and poor, taking only such clothes as they wore or such goods as they could carry, quietly and in a sort of unorganised order started, eight hundred thousand of them, on their flight from doomed Hankow. For there were many who still remembered the coming of the dreaded Taipings, and still shuddered at the thought of that "tomb of the seventy thousand" outside Wuchang city, and still remembered the similar flight of fifty years ago. They knew, too, of the Taiping rebellion, that nine provinces had been desolated by it. Towns and cities had been left mere heaps of ruins (like unto Hankow at this present time), and in them wild beasts had their dens, while some twenty millions of people had been sacrificed in that terrible struggle of a nation at war with itself. Almost concurrently with the Taiping movement came the great Mohammedan rebellion, under the leadership of Yakub Beg. About this time there was more than one attempt on the part of Islam to avenge the insults of the arrogant Chinese, a by no means insignificant rising, occurring in Yunnan, where the Panthays, taking advantage of the Taiping troubles, captured the western half of Yunnan, and made Talifu their capital, under Sultan Sulieman. But by far the greatest rising, both in duration and effect, was that of the north-west, which originated in eastern Turkestan, swept over the Tien-Shan Mountains, into Ili, on through Kansu, and into the province of Shensi.