In the more than two thousand years of feudal society, in addition to the curse of 300 years of hard to break in history, in fact, there is a similar phenomenon at the end of the dynasty, that is, natural disasters, at the end of the Yuan and the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, in addition to the wars in the Central Plains, floods, locust plagues, droughts continued for many years, in order to promote the productive forces of the Central Plains, there was a Great Migration of Yongle.
At the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, there were also disasters, and even a mysterious natural disaster broke out, "Wang Gong Factory Explosion" The dead were naked, so it ranked among the three unsolved mysteries of nature, but the biggest drought and famine was the "Ding PengQi Famine" in the late Qing Dynasty.
Ding Pengqi Famine was a rare drought and famine between the first year of Guangxu (1875) and the fourth year of Guangxu (1878) of the Qing Dynasty, which affected Shanxi, Zhili, Shaanxi, Henan, Shandong and other provinces, causing more than 10 million people to starve to death, and Zeng Guoquan, who was the governor of Shanxi at the time, called it "an unprecedented disaster in more than two hundred years".
The reason why this miracle occurred was because in the mid-to-late 1870s, the Westerners urgently increased taxes to develop the "Western Affairs Movement", and before that, a Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement broke out, the Qing government transferred troops from all over the country to reward the three armies, and agriculture lost its labor force.
Coupled with taxes and wars, grain production was constantly reduced, and after the First Opium War, opium circulation was not eliminated, and local officials openly allowed the cultivation of opium in order to enrich themselves.
In 1875, after the beginning of the great drought, the provinces watched the fire from across the shore, resulting in a further expansion of the disaster, even the Beijing Division was affected, and the disaster in North China was even more serious, Zeng Guoquan said in the middle of the recital: "There are more than a thousand miles in the red land, the number of hungry people is five or six million, and the great miracle disaster has never been seen in ancient times."
The imperial court gave the method of giving porridge, but even the establishment of a porridge farm in Beijing could not catch up with the speed of the birth of the victims, in order to control the flow of disaster victims, the provinces have been strictly guarded, even so, relative to the rich Jiangnan still poured millions of victims, after the sharp increase in displaced people, there was a riot.
Li Hongzhang, who has always advocated foreign aid, also accepted foreign aid for the first time in the world, and began to vigorously provide disaster relief, but it was mainly suppressed by soldiers, and in less than a year, all the things that could be eaten were eaten, even the Guanyin soil was not spared, and as the disaster continued to expand, people became food.
At first, the victims only used the dead as food, in order to prevent their relatives from being eaten, they did not even dare to be buried, but in the third year, the walking but weak living people also became food, in just three years, North China became a hell on earth, according to the Yonghe County Chronicle: young women are not cared for, the beauties are not more than a thousand dollars, the lesser is worth nothing, and human life is not as good as chickens and dogs.
It was difficult to vigorously relieve the disaster, and it was also the Qing government that used all the money from the national treasury to use the foreign affairs movement and the daily expenses of Cixi, and at that time, there was a famous couplet that wrote Li Hongzhang, "The prime minister of Hefei is thin in the world, and the si nong is familiar with the world."