Twenty Million

We were taught that the American Civil War was one of the bloodiest wars, taking nearly 700,000 lives. That seems like a lot, especially when you consider that fewer than 4,000 Americans have died in our current war. But according to a buddy of mine, A.J. Jacobs, who wrote a book about how he read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, at about the time of the Civil War, a war was raging in China that took about 20 million lives. TWENTY MILLION! The conflict is referred to quaintly, or bizarrely, as the Taiping Rebellion.