Anniversaries of battles and bloodshed offer chance for reflection: Lam Woon-kwong
Time to remember the fall of Tianjing, the battle of the Yellow Sea and the first world war
This year should be one for serious reflection.
It marks the 150th anniversary of the fall of Tianjing - now Nanjing - capital of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, effectively ending a 14-year civil war (1851-64) that nearly overthrew the Qing dynasty.
It was China's first grass-roots rebellion that adopted a totally foreign idea: the Taiping rebels were Christians who advocated the abolition of Confucianism. They destroyed temples and ancestral halls, and tried to turn China into a Christian state.
The civil war brought horrific consequences. More than 20 million soldiers and civilians died, and the richest provinces were ravaged - more than 600 cities were left in ruins.
The fact that the Manchu rulers had to rely on their Han generals to save their throne paved the way for local warlords to split the nation immediately after the 1911 revolution that ended the Qing dynasty.
This year also marks the 120th anniversary of the battle of the Yellow Sea. That was a major naval contest between the Qing empire's Beiyang Fleet, a modern navy built up during the 30-year self-strengthening movement, and the Imperial Japanese Navy, modernised under the Meiji restoration.
The outcome was catastrophic for the Qing court, which saw its entire Beiyang Fleet annihilated. Taiwan and its neighbouring islands were ceded to Japan - a direct cause of the present-day Sino-Japanese conflict over the Diaoyu Islands, which Japan calls the Senkaku Islands - and the humiliation effectively ended the Manchus' mandate to govern.
