The merchant girl did not know the hatred of the country, and sang the backyard flowers across the river.
- Late Tang Dynasty Du Mu, "Bo Qinhuai"
In "Bo Qinhuai", Du Mu cleverly borrowed Chen Shubao, the lord of Chen Hou, to pursue pleasure and thus lead to the history of the kingdom, satirizing the late Tang rulers who drunkenly dreamed of death and did not learn the lessons of history. And if Du Mu lived in the late Qing Dynasty and saw the scene of the "Ding Peng Qi Desert", he did not know what kind of emotion he wanted to express?
Ding Pengqi famine lasted four years, from the first year of Guangxu (1875) to the fourth year of Guangxu (1878), because the disaster of Ding Ugly Year (1877) was the most serious, Shanxi Inspector Zeng Guoquan said in the concertion that "a hundred years of strange disasters, never seen in ancient times", 1878 is the year of Peng Yin, so the history is called "Ding Peng QiHuang".
The severe drought lasted for four full years, and the disaster area covered as far as shanxi, Henan, Shaanxi, Zhili, Shandong and other northern provinces, especially Henan and Shanxi, and there was no harvest, so this disaster that affected the people (gentry, corrupt officials, and profiteers took advantage of this disaster to make a windfall) is also known as the "Jinyu Famine", and it has also affected northern Jiangsu, northern Anhui, Longdong and northern Sichuan.
Many people have seen the movie "1942", the scene of millions of people fleeing the famine in the film made the audience cry, the old owner originally took the family out to escape the famine in order to let people live, but only he was left alive, so the old owner went back and said that he would die closer to home.
There is also a very profound passage in the film, which is a dialogue: "The number of deaths, the government counts 1,620 people." ”
"Actually?"
"Three million people.".
However, the scene of "Ding Peng Qi Famine" is more cruel than the film, according to records, "Ding Peng Qi Famine" caused more than 10 million people to starve to death, and more than 20 million disaster victims fled to the wilderness, hundreds of millions of people slept on the streets, and underage girls were not worth a hundred yuan.
Why talk about women? In the late Qing Dynasty, officials levied a particularly large number of taxes on farmers, even if the harvest was good, the people could not eat enough to wear and warm, many families attached importance to inheritance, could not afford to raise female babies, and could only sell girls, so the child brides-in-law in the late Qing Dynasty were also common, and their status was extremely low.
According to the "Declaration" of December 11, 1876, due to the drought, disaster victims in various parts of Shandong fled the famine, made a famine or prayed for rain. But praying for rain did not help, and everywhere "many hungry wives and children sold their children and died, ... According to the "Declaration" dated June 30, 1877, the starving victims died in order to "take a breath of the Gou Ting, or "take small stones to grind flour and feed on noodles", or "dig up the white mud of Guanyin to fill their hunger", and the result was "within a few days, the mud was swollen, the abdomen was broken, and they all died." ”
Hell on earth is no more than that, and Timothy Lee, an English missionary involved in the disaster relief in Shanxi, also recorded the scene: a group of disaster victims were desperate, flocked to the home of a rich man, robbed the family, built a fire there to cook, and then went to another house together to solve a meal. A group of more than 500 victims, who plundered village by village for food.
Nowadays, if someone says "dream back to the Qing Dynasty", I am afraid that it will only laugh generously, because this disaster is rare for a hundred years, it is also a serious challenge for the Qing government, so the Qing government was also highly nervous, made corresponding policies, and some officials were more responsible during the period, such as Jiangsu Inspector Wu Yuanbing, who took the lead in fundraising in the case of funds that could not be implemented, and set up 17 porridge factories in Qingjiang.