China’s Hidden Century at the British Museum review: marvellous and messy, but then that’s history


Source: standard.co.uk standard.co.uk

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Review at a glance C an 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 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...