On April 2, Dr. Stephen R. Platt, a 2008-2010 fellow in the National Committee's Public Intellectuals Program, discussed his latest book,Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War, at the Luce Foundation office in New York. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom is a military history of the nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, one of the largest civil wars in history. This comprehensive account sets the rebellion in a global context that weaves together the story of the domestic conflict between the Qing dynasty and the Taiping rebels with the larger forces of Chinese-foreign relations that led ultimately to Britain's crucial intervention in the war.