The only widely repeated total, thirty six million, comes from subtracting one disputed Tang census count from another rather than from any direct accounting of the dead, and the compiler who popularized it later revised his own figure down by more than half using a different method on the same two numbers. Historians who have examined the underlying census data consider it unreliable for this purpose, but none consulted has published a replacement war death total of their own.
What would resolve this A demographic historian's reconstruction of Tang population loss across 755 to 763 that accounts for wartime migration, tax registration collapse and regional variation rather than a single before and after census subtraction, similar to the kind of regional accounting that has been attempted for other long, poorly recorded wars on this atlas.
OpenTang dynasty history; historical demography