This is an often-popularized figure that the evidence doesn't really support (as much as I enjoyed Pinker's Better Angels, it bears a lot of the blame here). Th

This is an often-popularized figure that the evidence doesn't really support (as much as I enjoyed Pinker's Better Angels, it bears a lot of the blame here). The "after" number is net of the loss of territory representing a quarter of the empire's territory, coincident with the breakdown of the census system, and post-removal of certain classes of people from being counted in the census. It's not a good proxy for lives lost during the course of the Rebellion. On top of that, the armies involved added up to a million people total, a tiny fraction of China's total population. As is almost always the case with large wars historically, the majority of deaths came from famine and disease caused by upheaval.