Mavericks › Uprising Leaders
Li Xiucheng
Taiping general who broke the Qing southern siege camp in 1860, took Suzhou and Hangzhou as the Loyal King and wrote a long confession before his execution in 1864
A mountain camp at night, with a beacon fire burning on a wooden platform at the upper left, several white tents on the slope and a red cloth tied to a rope; a wooden palisade with a gate stands at the right beyond a timber bridge over a rough river, under a clouded moon.
Also known as Li Yiwen · Loyal King
- Roles
- Uprising Leaders
Li Xiucheng, a poor farmer from Teng county in Guangxi, joined the Taiping army in 1851 and rose through the ranks to high command. In 1858 he and Chen Yucheng broke the Qing northern siege camp outside Nanjing and destroyed Li Xubin's Hunan army at Sanhe, and the next year he was made Loyal King. In 1860 he smashed the southern siege camp, took Changzhou and Suzhou and set up a new province in southern Jiangsu, and at the end of 1861 he captured Hangzhou. When the Hunan army stormed Tianjing in 1864 he was separated from the young Heavenly King during the breakout and seized at Fangshan outside Nanjing. In captivity he wrote a statement of tens of thousands of characters, after which Zeng Guofan had him put to death; the original manuscript, kept by Zeng's descendants, was published in facsimile in Taipei in 1962.
Life and times
Dates 1823 CE–1864 CE