Shi Dakai left in anger, taking with him 100,000 Taiping troops, bringing "catastrophic disaster" to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

The "Tianjing Incident" that occurred in 1856 AD became the turning point of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement from prosperity to decline.

In this bloody internal conflict, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom suffered the most severe losses since the Jintian Uprising in 1851. More than 20,000 "old brothers from Guangdong and Guangxi" fell under the butcher's knife of their own people. These people were not only the most elite troops of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, but also the backbone of the most determined revolutionary will. In addition to the heavy casualties, the Eastern King Yang Xiuqing, the Northern King Wei Chaohui and the Yan King Qin Rigang were successively executed, and the leadership of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was also seriously weakened. Of the five kings and five army commanders who were conferred during the Yong'an system, only the youngest Wing King Shi Dakai remained.

It can be said that at this time, reusing Wing King Shi Dakai was what the entire Taiping Heavenly Kingdom wanted. Heavenly King Hong Xiuquan did immediately let Shi Dakai return to Tianjing to "manage government affairs" and promoted him to "Wing King, the chief general of the Holy Spirit Telecommunication Army" and let the military and civilians respect him as "King of Righteousness". However, at this time, Hong Xiuquan was worried that Shi Dakai would become the second Yang Xiuqing, so he also made his two brothers kings, the eldest brother Hong Renfa as King of An and the second brother Hong Renda as King of Fu. He also let them participate in the planning and implementation of military and national affairs in order to achieve the purpose of restraining Shi Dakai.

Faced with Hong Xiuquan's distrust, Shi Dakai left Tianjing for Anhui. After Hong Xiuquan learned the news, he immediately stripped his two brothers of their titles, and sent a gold medal engraved with "King of Righteousness" to Shi Dakai, trying to make this "pillar of the sky" of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom change his mind. At the same time, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was actively persuading Shi Dakai, hoping that he would change his mind. Unfortunately, Shi Dakai was determined to leave, and turned a blind eye to the requests of Hong Xiuquan and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom's military and civilians. In October 1857, he set out from Anqing to Jiangxi. Although Shi Dakai did not announce his departure from the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the harm he brought to the entire Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was equally great.

When Shi Dakai left, he did not take his old subordinates with him, but it was not because Shi Dakai did not want to take them with him, but because of the collective resistance of the new generation of generals, mainly Chen Yucheng and Li Xiucheng. Although he did not take these elite generals with him, Shi Dakai still took away almost all of the main forces of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom on the western front. However, there is no unified statement on how many troops Shi Dakai took away. Some say it is more than 200,000, and some say it is more than 100,000. If we look at the fact that Tong Ronghai, Peng Dashun, Ji Qingyuan, Zhu Yidian and others returned to Tianjing with more than 200,000 troops ("Fu Chaotian Army") in 1860, Shi Dakai at least led more than 100,000 Taiping troops to leave the court.

However, no matter how many people Shi Dakai took away, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was fundamentally shaken. Because after Shi Dakai left, the "elastic defense strategy" that the Taiping Army had adopted since 1853, which was mainly based on attack, was completely declared bankrupt. On the one hand, due to the withdrawal of the main force of the Taiping Army from the vicinity of Tianjing, a large vacuum zone appeared around Tianjing. Taking this opportunity, the Qing army immediately rebuilt the Jiangnan Camp and the Jiangbei Camp, and once again formed a siege on Tianjing from the north and south. On the other hand, when Shi Dakai left, he did not save Jiujiang City, which was besieged by the Hunan Army, which directly caused the fall of Jiujiang City, and more than 17,000 people including the defender Lin Qirong were all killed in the battle.

In order to strengthen the defense around Tianjing, the Taiping Army had to withdraw a large number of troops from the combat areas in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River to defend Tianjing. In this way, the achievements of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom's westward expedition from 1853 to 1856 were almost completely abandoned overnight. The focus of the contention between the Taiping Army and the Qing Army was advanced from the two lakes and Jiangxi to Anhui, which was closer to Tianjing. This greatly reduced the area where the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom could recruit soldiers and prepare food and wages. The only main fortress to defend Tianjing was Anqing in Anhui. Although the Taiping Army organized a second westward expedition in 1860 and attacked near Wuchang, it was already a spent force and could no longer recapture the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze River.

More importantly, Shi Dakai's departure gave Zeng Guofan's Hunan Army Group, which was already in a state of panic, a chance to breathe. You know, in the Battle of Hukou in 1856, the Hunan Navy had been annihilated by the Taiping Army, and the Army had also been severely damaged, so it could only be trapped in Jiangxi. If the Taiping Army could continue to attack the Hunan Army, perhaps the Hunan Army would have become a historical term from then on. As a result, Shi Dakai was stationed in Jiangxi for 4 months, and apart from summoning his old subordinates, he did not take any military action against the Hunan Army at all. When he led his troops away in 1857, he ignored Jiangxi and chose to enter Zhejiang, under the pretext of opening up the Zhejiang-Fujian base, but in fact it was more like "letting the tiger go back to the mountain" for the Hunan Army. The Hunan Army also took advantage of this rare time to regroup and became the most powerful enemy of the Taiping Army.

It can be said that the "Tianjing Incident" in 1856 caused the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to take a sharp turn for the worse, but Shi Dakai's departure was the final disaster for the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Because Shi Dakai's departure in anger caused the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to lose its strategic depth for a time, and also created a difficult situation of "no generals in the court and no soldiers in the country", which made the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom never have a chance to recover.