General Tso Tsungtang was a major military leader during China's greatest civil war, the 14-year-long Taiping Rebellion from 1850 to 1864   which claimed millions of lives. The Taiping Rebellion was the greatest upheaval in 19th century China. It caused massive displacements and shifts in population. Hundreds of thousands of people fled or emigrated, many to America, where they worked building the transcontinental railroad, which was completed in 1869.  Tso Tsungtang smashed the Taiping rebels in four provinces, put down an unrelated revolt called the Nian Rebellion, then marched west and reconquered Chinese Turkestan from Muslim rebels. Tso was allegedly the model for Flash Gordon's "Ming, the Merciless", possibly because of his execution of rebellion leaders with the proverbial "death of 10,000 cuts."

Tso  began his military career as an adjutant and secretary for the governor of Hunan province. He raised a force of 5,000 volunteers and took the field in September 1860, driving the Taiping rebels out of Hunan and Guangxi provinces, into coastal Zhejiang. There he captured the big cities of Shaoxing. From there he pushed south into Fujian and Guangdong provinces, where the revolt had first begun and spread, and had crushed the Taipings by the time the rebellion ended in 1864.

In 1884, upon the outbreak of the Sino-French War, Tso received a commission as commander-in-chief and Imperial Commissioner of the Army and Inspector General overseeing coastal defense in Fujian. He died shortly after a truce was signed in 1885.
 

Tso Tsungtang