...the Waikato War, fought from July 1863 in the country south of Auckland between the military forces of the Colonial Government and the federated tribes of the King Movement.

France establishes a protectorate over Cambodia in 1863.

The Chōshū Five leave Japan secretly to study at University College London, which is part of the ending of sakoku.

Members of the Chōshū han of western Japan who travel to England in 1863 to study at University College London, the five students are the first of many successive groups of Japanese students who will travel overseas in the late Bakumatsu and early Meiji eras.

All five students will later rise to prominent positions in Japanese political and civil life.

The Chōshū han, based what is now known as Yamaguchi Prefecture, is eager to acquire better knowledge of the western nations and gain access to military technology in order to strengthen the domain in its struggle to overthrow the Tokugawa shogunate.

The decision by Chōshū han elders to sponsor five promising students to study overseas comes in the middle of growing domestic political tensions and in the wake of reports from the First Japanese Embassy to Europe that had returned in January 1863.

At the time of the students departure it us still illegal to leave Japan and travel overseas due to the shogunate's maritime seclusion policy (sakoku or, as it is known at this time, kaikin).

This policy will finally be abolished in 1866.

Zuo Zongtang is governor-general of Chekiang and Fukien and one of the most powerful figures in China by 1863.

Born into a well-connected, scholarly family, he had helped organize local defense forces when the Taiping Rebellion began to spread through South China after 1850.

A former protégé of Zeng Guofan, Zuo had soon become one of the top imperial commanders.

The Qing government had sent the Mongol cavalry General Sengge Richen, who had recently crushed a large Taiping army, to defeat the Nian in early 1856.

Sengge Rinchen's army has captured several fortified cities and destroyed most of the Nian infantry, and defeats and captures Zhang Lexing himself, along with his son and adopted son, after an ambush in 1863.

Prior to being executed, he confesses that he can no longer remember how many places he had plundered; he also claims to not know the whereabouts of his wife, who had been chased off by government troops, or his brother Zhang Minxing, who had left for the southwest along with several thousand men, and that other Nien leaders have already been killed.

The Nien lack any effective central leadership after Zhang is killed and their citadel captured in 1863, and are unable to coordinate their actions with the Taiping rebels in the south.

Taiping general Shi Dakai has consistently refused to surrender, chiding the Qing officials for their cooperation with foreign barbarians, scorning the Qing government's offer of huge rewards and high rank.

Shi, who had hoped to establish an independent kingdom in the western province of Szechwan, is unable to win a popular base and is eventually caught and executed in June by government forces.

The Taiping leader Li Xiucheng occupies Suzhou from 1860.

Although it is one of the few places in which Taiping reform policies seem to have been effectively carried out, the city is, nevertheless, largely destroyed.

Under Gordon's leadership many walled cities and towns are taken.

Two Chinese armies raised and led by volunteers also aid in suppressing the rebels.

Li, repeatedly driven off from Shanghai by the Western mercenary armies, has to abandon his efforts in 1863 and go to aid in the defense of the Taiping capital.

Charles George Gordon, a British officer who had taken part in the 1860 capture of Beijing, receives a commission in 1863 from the Qing goverment.

His Ever Victorious Army, a Western-trained peasant force, joins the provincial militias in their suppression of the Taiping rebels.

The Muslim rebellion in Shensi against their Qing Manchu overlords promptly spreads to Kansu and the Tarim Basin, where it will last for fifteen years.

Their leader Yaqub Bek establishes an independent government at Kashgar.

Nikolay Chernyshevsky is exiled to Siberia in 1863, the year his novel What is to Be Done? a fictional illustration of his political theories, sees print.

The book will inspire many later Russian revolutionaries, who would seek to emulate the novel's hero, who was wholly dedicated to the revolution, ascetic in his habits and ruthlessly disciplined, to the point of sleeping on a bed of nails and eating only meat in order to build strength for the Revolution. (Among those who will draw inspiration from the character is Lenin, who will name a work of political theory of the same name, and who will be ascetic in his personal life: lifting weights, having little time for love, and so on).