Two great Muslim risings shook the Qing empire in the same decades as the Taiping. Britannica records that a clash between Chinese and Muslim miners in Yunnan in 1855 escalated into massacres around Kunming in 1856 and then into a general rising that lasted seventeen years, under Du Wenxiu at Dali, and that a second rising beginning in 1862 spread across Shaanxi, Gansu and Xinjiang and lasted fifteen years, gaining momentum from Taiping and Nian pressure but never achieving unified leadership. Both were suppressed by dividing the rebel factions and by overwhelming military force, in the north-west under Zuo Zongtang, whose campaigns went on to destroy the state Yaqub Beg had established in Kashgaria and to restore Qing control of Xinjiang by 1877. Suppression was followed by the forced resettlement of surviving Hui populations away from their home districts and by the flight of communities across the Russian frontier. Britannica describes the damage and devastation caused by the rebellions as immeasurable and records that recovery was still incomplete in the early twentieth century.
Hui and other Muslim communities rose in Yunnan and in the north-west, and Qing armies under commanders including Zuo Zongtang suppressed the risings and resettled the surviving populations
No Qing census recorded religion, so every figure is a reconstruction from later provincial gazetteers, Republican-era surveys and the resettlement records compiled after the suppression. Estimates put the Hui of Shaanxi at several hundred thousand, those of Gansu at over a million and the Hui of Yunnan at roughly a million, giving an order of magnitude of about three million, with a credible range of two to five million.
Britannica states that estimates of casualties in the Muslim rebellions run to 20-30 million and that the real figure was likely higher, but no reliable count exists. The commonly repeated multi-million figures - such as the near-disappearance of the Hui population of Shaanxi - derive from the collapse in registered population recorded in county gazetteers, which cannot distinguish people killed from people who fled, were resettled elsewhere or simply ceased to be registered. Because the underlying source cannot separate death from displacement, no range is given here.
Britannica records massacres of Muslim residents around Kunming in 1856 that touched off the Yunnan rising, and the devastation of Shaanxi, Gansu and Xinjiang in the fighting and its suppression, with communities destroyed or forcibly resettled.
China, Kyrgyzstan