Help With the History of the Early Taiping Rebellion

I'm interested in the Taiping Rebellion, particularly the early years and the failed Beijing Campaign. However, my only history of the war, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, mostly deals with events in 1857 and later. Can someone give me a comprehensive rundown of the military events and strategy, on both sides, from 1850-6? Or failing that, recommend a good book on the subject?
 
Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom is an excellent starting point; the other standard work in English is Jonathan Spence's God's Chinese Son. That's brilliant, but also infuriating since the damn thing is written in the present tense. It's been a while since I studied the Taiping during my masters, but I believe that Spence is a lot stronger on the early years.
 
Spence focuses almost entirely on Hong Xiuquan himself. It's not a military history and has very few actual details on military history.

The honest answer is that there is no real English-language work.
 
Franz Michael's The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents is dated, but reasonably comprehensive. There's also a very readable chapter in volume 10 of the Cambridge History of China by Philip Kuhn that deals with the Taiping Rebellion. You might also try to find The Taiping Revolutionary Movement, by Jen Yu-Wen. God's Chinese Son is pretty good also and, while it's not a military history per se, it does sketch out the Taiping ascendance well.

There's probably a bunch of other stuff that I'm forgetting.
 
Haven't read them myself but there's also Thomas H Reilly's The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and Hong Beom Rhee's Asian Millenarianism: An Interdisciplinary Study of the Taiping and Tonghak Rebellions in a Global Context, but neither of those are really military histories.
 
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