The real toll of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) is itself contested — the war destroyed the census it would have been counted by. Every hop past documented fact compounds uncertainty, rendered here as fading confidence, not false precision.
Hop zero: even the REAL toll is a range
Because the war destroyed the census, famine/plague dominate over combat deaths, and three simultaneous rebellions (Nian/Panthay/Miao) confound attribution — say so before speculating at all.
≈ 45M (20M low – 70M mid – 75M+ high)
20M · Spence low70M · Cao Shuji75M+ · upper bound
Divergence toggles — all historically attested
Toggling recomputes only the nodes right of the SPECULATION HORIZON below — anchored facts never move.
Cascade depth
Scrub how far past the horizon the cascade is allowed to speculate. Confidence compounds hop over hop.
4 hops
Confidence-fade cascade
Node opacity ← running product of the per-hop multipliers below. Dashed rule = SPECULATION HORIZON.
compounded confidence: 100%
Adjustable-assumptions panel
These per-hop multipliers are illustrative, tunable knobs — not canon, not hardcoded. Moving one re-dims every node right of it.
Documented record
Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom (2012) — contingency thesis: "all signs pointed to a Taiping victory" before Western intervention flipped.
Spence, God's Chinese Son (1996).
Meyer-Fong, What Remains (2013).
LSE Working Paper 320 — likin / indirect taxation as fiscal workaround.
Caveat: Ferguson's Virtual History and Cowley's What If? contain no Taiping essay — cited here as Western counterfactual-methodology precedent only, not as a source on this scenario. Census figures for 1850–1864 are contested; treat every number on this page as a range, never a point.
Genre & further reading — incl. the Chinese-language counterfactual tradition
陈舜臣 (Chin Shunshin), 《太平天国》literary — major historical novel, fictional merchant 连理文 POV; the serious literary anchor.
黄世仲, 《洪秀全演义》 (1908) literary — early novel openly sympathetic to the Taiping; a period pro-Taiping counter-voice to Qing-victor history.
知乎 essay 「架空历史世界观：假如太平天国推翻了清朝」 analytic — argues a Taiping victory fragments China Soviet-civil-war-style; used below as the pessimistic branch.
《太平血》, 《这个天国不太平》, 《乱清》, 《回到太平天国当康王》 web-novel — living participatory genre, labelled color, not scholarship.
Clean province before/after totals still need Cao Shuji's monograph, not web sources.
This is an explorable explainer, not a frozen result — it computes over assumptions you can change above, and ships no canonical hash. When the underlying canon locks, ah_taiping_counterfactual can be promoted to a deterministic MCP chain (parameters → hashed identity), the way ch_stadium_capacity already is.
SOURCE // Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom (2012) · Spence, God's Chinese Son (1996) · Meyer-Fong, What Remains (2013) · Chin Shunshin, 《太平天国》. Anchors: Jintian 1850 → Nanjing/Tianjing 19–20 Mar 1853 → fall 1864 (~14 yrs). Taiping army ~500k · Xiang Army (Zeng Guofan) ~130k · Ever-Victorious Army 3,500–5,000. Likin tax introduced 1853, province-wide by 1860. STANDALONE explainer — no kernel, no hash. · Sitemap