The best known episode carrying the White Lotus name is the rebellion that broke out in the mountainous borderland where Sichuan, Hubei and Shaanxi provinces meet, beginning in 1794 and reaching full scale by 1796. Impoverished migrant settlers in this frontier region, drawing on Maitreyan prophecy, the belief that a future Buddha would descend to inaugurate a new age, and on resentment of Manchu Qing rule, rose against the imperial government under leaders who invoked White Lotus millenarian teaching and, in some cases, the promise of restoring the fallen Ming dynasty.
The Qing government's initial military response proved slow and corrupt, with campaign funds diverted and commanders reluctant to risk their forces in difficult mountain terrain against an elusive enemy. Only after 1800 did new tactics, organizing local militias called tuan to encircle and starve out rebel bands, begin to turn the campaign, and the last significant resistance was suppressed by 1804. The cost of the eight year campaign is widely regarded by historians as a turning point that ended the Qing dynasty's eighteenth century prosperity and exposed weaknesses that later nineteenth century crises would exploit.
Whether the rebels who fought under the White Lotus name in this war shared any organized continuity with Mao Ziyuan's twelfth century devotional confraternity, or with each other, is exactly the question ter Haar's scholarship treats with skepticism. What is not in dispute is the rebellion's scale and its consequences, and the name White Lotus has carried the weight of this rebellion in Chinese historical memory ever since, overshadowing the quieter devotional tradition the name began as.