The 1281 burning destroyed a substantial, though not precisely quantifiable, portion of the Daoist textual tradition as it existed at the end of the Southern Song and early Yuan period, including material that had accumulated across the Celestial Masters, Shangqing, Numinous Treasure and other lineages over the preceding thousand years. Because printing blocks were targeted specifically alongside physical texts, the destruction also damaged the infrastructure needed to reproduce and redistribute surviving copies, compounding the loss beyond what the initial burning alone accounted for.
The scale of the loss is difficult to measure precisely because much of what disappeared is known only indirectly, through references and quotations preserved in texts that did survive, rather than through any surviving inventory of what existed beforehand. Later Daoist compilers working on the Ming dynasty's Zhengtong Daozang in the fifteenth century had to reconstruct the canon substantially from whatever material had survived the Yuan destruction and the additional losses of war and neglect in the intervening century and a half, which is part of why the surviving Daoist canon, though extensive, is understood by scholars to be an incomplete record of everything the tradition once held as scripture.
The episode also illustrates the degree to which Daoist and Buddhist institutional fortunes in imperial China depended on court favor and formal doctrinal contest rather than purely on independent religious authority, a pattern that shaped the relationship between the two traditions well beyond this specific episode.