The figure most often repeated, roughly one hundred thousand rebel dead, circulates in general reference works without a traceable scholarly derivation, and no historian, including Dai's recent archival study, has reconciled it against Qing military records or attempted to add the civilian toll of the pacification campaign's scorched earth tactics and the famine that followed in its wake.
What would resolve this A study working systematically from surviving Qing provincial and military archives, of the kind Dai draws on for the campaign's administrative history, extended specifically to build a reconciled casualty count across both combatant and civilian deaths for the war's full eight years.
OpenLate imperial Chinese history; Qing administrative and military archivesYingcong Dai, The White Lotus War: Rebellion and Suppression in Late Imperial China