This article starts off by explaining what the Taiping rebellion was and who the leader of this rebellion was, Hong Xiuquan. Following this, the article explains a bit about who Hong was and what happened to him to make him believe he was the brother of Jesus. After this, the article goes into detail about how the rebellion got underway, explaining how, to begin with, Hong and the Taiping's were successful. It then goes on to speak about the death toll and the change in the population due to this rebellion. Finally, it ends with why the Taiping rebellion failed. Some important things to pick out from this source comes from the last section, how the rebellion failed. "Ultimately the Taiping were beset with internal strife, lack of coordination, and poor leadership." Hong allowed other people to rule specific armies and conquer the territories that they led however, this led to these leaders gaining a lot of power within the Taiping community. "This development led to the Tianjing Incident of 1856, during which Hong Xiuquan himself ordered the killing of several essential political and military leaders of the Taiping. Hong was unwilling to cede power and eliminated the threats these leaders posed."
The parts that I picked out are very important for us to know so we can get an idea on why the Taiping rebellion failed after fourteen years. The lack of leadership by Hong was the ultimate downfall of the Taiping's. He initially allowed others to lead and be in charge of certain areas but this led to them gaining a lot of power within the Taiping rebels. Clearly Hong did not like this and went back on his initial idea of having people lead different areas. This then led to Hong ordering the killings of multiple essential political and military leaders within the Taiping population. It is clear from this that when Hong realized he was losing some of his power to the other leaders, he needed to get this back and the only way that he saw fit was by killing them. Hong decided to have a war between himself and his followers rather than focusing on the civil war at hand. This led to there being a large gap in leadership which ultimately led to the troops having low morale and from this the rebellion lost its power from the Taiping's. I included this because it is important for us to know why the Taiping rebellion failed on behalf of Hong and his men. The Taiping's were brought together by Hong, and they ultimately fell apart at the hands of him. Hong wanted all the power he could get, and when he realized others were getting some his only solution was to kill them. Unfortunately for Hong, this had more consequences than he would have thought, and it led to the end of the Taiping rebellion in 1864.