Yunnan's population fell steeply during the Panthay Rebellion, but that collapse combines the war's own combat and reprisal deaths with a major plague epidemic that swept the province in the same decades, and no modern historian has disaggregated a war caused figure from the rest.
What would resolve this A modern demographic or historical study working through Yunnanese provincial and Qing administrative records to separate combat, reprisal and famine deaths tied directly to the fighting from the mortality caused by the era's plague epidemic.
OpenChinese history; historical demographyDavid G. Atwill, The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856-1873