Anyone who has seen the movie "1942" knows how much the food shortage caused by the disaster has caused people. In China's modern history, there was a major famine in the late Qing Dynasty. The famine, which began in 1875 and peaked in 1877-1878, spread to the provinces of North China, causing more than 10 million people to starve to death and more than 20 million displaced people to flee the famine. It was the year of Ding Ugly and Peng Yin in the lunar calendar, and the history was called "Ding Peng Qihuang". It is worth mentioning that this disaster is both natural and artificially aggravated.
Droughts are frequent and governments are corrupt
In the mid-to-late 1870s, while the Qing Dynasty was busy with the Western affairs movement, a disaster was quietly taking place in northern China. Beginning in the first year of Guangxu, that is, in 1875 AD, the provinces of North China fell into a severe drought. In agricultural society, droughts and floods are normal, but this drought seems to have stopped. Successive droughts and delays in disaster relief allowed this natural disaster to ferment and finally reach its peak in 1877 and 1878.
It is impossible to know exactly where the drought began, but Shanxi and Henan are the worst. As a traditional grain province, it often faces the risk of the Yellow River breaking its banks, and Henan is not immune to every natural disaster. If there was a statistical map of the famine at that time, then the most serious places were Shanxi and Henan, and the second most serious places were the neighboring provinces of Jinyu - Shandong, Zhili and Shaanxi, and people who could not survive could only choose to flee the famine, and northern Jiangsu, northern Anhui, Longdong and northern Sichuan also became disaster areas.
How could a drought cause such a catastrophe? In addition to natural disasters, it is more of a man-made scourge – in the final analysis, the dark rule of feudal dynasties. The first is that ordinary peasants need to bear too many taxes, including the cunning and plundering of corrupt officials and corrupt officials. Secondly, the government's own financial difficulties, inability to organize a strong and effective rescue, in addition to the traditional porridge, more attention is focused on the prevention of displaced people.
Even if the government organizes relief, at the grass-roots level, which is already rotten, it is indispensable to exploit the layers of treacherous merchant landlords. The people, who had no means of subsistence, could only turn to the gentry, and in the end they were in exchange for usury and became poorer and poorer. In addition, the legalization of opium cultivation has made the fertile soil that should be producing grain a hotbed for opium growth. The blockade of local silos and beggars has also exacerbated the situation to a certain extent.
Jinyu was starving, and hunger was everywhere
When industrialization had emerged in the West, ancient China was still struggling with a traditional agricultural society. Chinese who watch the day and eat, they are often faced with the situation of "not enough to eat and hungry", and they have encountered rare disasters and famines, which are naturally difficult to deal with. Beginning in mid-spring in 1875, there was drought in Beijing and Hebei. From spring to winter, the rain throughout the year is difficult to solve the drought, and even spread to more places.
In the year of the great drought, locust plagues broke out everywhere, from Tianjin to Zhili, and the locusts covered the sky and the sun, and they could not see their heads at a glance. Wherever they went, there was no grass, and all the remaining grain was devoured. In the summer and autumn, the flood season of the main rivers arrives, and the disaster-stricken land is facing floods again. After the flood, the drought continued, the agricultural harvest failed, the production was reduced by more than half, and "there are many people who lack food and poverty." Floods have only exacerbated the situation, and drought is still the main cause in most of the affected areas.
Without food, the victims of the disaster are not effectively relieved, and they can only find their own way out. In order to survive, some people choose to leave their homes, while others embark on the evil road of robbing their homes. Those who take their wives and children even sell their wives and daughters in order to eat a full meal. When the situation got worse, the tragedy of cannibalism occurred. Those desperate hunger people have also exacerbated the factors of social instability.
Zeng Guoquan, then the governor of Shanxi, called the disaster "a disaster that has not occurred in more than two hundred years." The most difficult year of 1878 passed, and it was difficult to get more rain, the drought eased, and Gansu had a major earthquake of eight magnitude on the Richter scale. Most of the areas affected by the earthquake were just drought areas, followed by major earthquakes, and plagues and earthquakes exacerbated the Ding Pengqi famine. Its tragic situation is "the misery of the last sight, the sorrow of the unheard."
The Qing court was powerless, and the people provided relief
In the face of the catastrophe of the century, the Qing Dynasty also appeared to have more than enough and insufficient strength at this time. On the one hand, the imperial court was indeed short of money, and in the first twenty years it was busy suppressing the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and the Twister Army in the north, and its finances were empty and economically difficult. On the other hand, the helplessness of the agrarian society, without modern social relief, can not cope with such a tragic famine. The government was weak, the people rose, and relying on the rescue of the Jiangnan gentry and foreign missionaries, the faltering late Qing Dynasty actually survived.
North China was affected by the disaster, Jiangnan relief, this is the most special place in the Ding Pengqi famine. In order to survive, a large number of hungry people from the north to the south, the economically rich Jiangnan region, once again became a place of healing for the Chinese nation. Historically, as long as the north was in turmoil, the south would provide room for survival. This was true of the Yongjia Rebellion of the Western Jin Dynasty, and the Anshi Rebellion of the Sheng Tang Dynasty. The gentry of the Jiangnan region played the role of savior in the Ding PengQi wilderness.
In addition to local disaster relief, the gentry of Jiangnan will also come to the disaster area to vigorously build porridge shacks and carry out the most basic humanitarian care. In fact, in addition to helping the victims, the establishment of porridge shacks also has a deep-seated effect - to appease the displaced people. If there is food to eat, it will reduce chaos; if there is no food to eat, then rebel and rise up. The problem of displaced people in the last years of the Ming Dynasty eventually led to the fall of the country, and Yin Jian, who was not far from Li Zicheng's uprising, sounded the alarm bell for the Qing Dynasty.
The gentry with limited economic conditions were also thinking about the long-term way. They fantasized about distributing money and food to the victims in the winter, sending the hungry back to their villages to work as farmers, and once again preparing for spring farming. But years of famine have turned the well-fed displaced people into new hungry people. In addition to the Gentry of Jiangnan, foreign churches and missionaries also played a special role. Whatever the starting point, they did carry out effective disaster relief, and the British missionary Timothy Lee was one of them.
postscript
Ding Pengqi famine is famous for its large time span, wide range of disasters, large number of victims, and great social impact. While we grieve over the tragic situation on earth, we are shocked to find that this great disaster has not caused a national or even regional mass movement. The late Qing Dynasty successfully escaped a disaster, and modern China also ushered in new changes. The spontaneous rescue of the gentry in Jiangnan and the cross-border relief in the disaster area are all showing the wisdom and resilience of the Chinese nation!