The Wikipedia page on the Taiping Rebellion lists the death toll at one hundred million people, but doesn't give an answer as to how this is possible. How did it happen? And have there been more deaths ever before?
Just want to point out, the wikipedia article says:
Total dead: 20-30 million dead (best estimate)^[7] Highest estimate: 100,000,000
The source cited for [7] is Stephen R. Platt. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War. (New York: Knopf, 2012)
I don't have an answer, just doing this for clarification purposes
I know I'm a little late here, but in the episode of In Our Time on the subject, Prof. Mitter says that the higher estimates of 70-100 million are generally given by the Chinese government, and they include the next generation of children that were never born in the list of "casualties".
20 million seems to be the accepted estimation.
Might be a bit late, but I'll weigh in. I've just read 'Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom', as mentioned by the now-deleted person, this is the source of the claim. Platt doesn't actually claim this though. As John Paul II (the reddit account, not the pope) points out, this figure is including people who would've been born, but weren't because of the war. So whoever cited the figure on Wikipedia was either mistaken or misleading with their source. That's not a death toll, according to the source given, it's a figure of how much lower the population was including both deaths, and births that didn't happen.