Famine is a distant and unfamiliar word for many of our young people today. How terrible is a mass famine? I can tell you very responsibly that it is more terrifying than any horror movie in the world, far beyond the imagination of all of us. Please be sure to collect it, take a few minutes to read it, you will definitely have some insights.
Famine, plague, war these three stubborn diseases have always accompanied the entire history of the development of human civilization, countless people have fallen below them, and famine is more terrible than plague and war, it will subvert all human moral laws, break through the bottom line of all human civilizations, and let mankind directly regress to primitive society. In addition, famine often leads to further plagues and wars.
Since ancient times, China has been a country with many disasters, due to the extreme instability of the monsoon climate, resulting in frequent droughts and floods, coupled with the influence of some human factors, large and small famines throughout the history books, almost every feudal dynasty will have several famines, starvation deaths. At the end of the Yuan Dynasty and the end of the Ming Dynasty, there was a large-scale famine, followed by a peasant uprising, and then a change of dynasty.
Far from it, the Ding Pengqi famine in 1877, the Great Famine in Henan in 1942, and the three-year natural disaster in 1958 in the whole country all made Chinese feel pain. Today, we will talk about the Ding Pengqi famine during the Qing Dynasty and Guangxu years, and deeply feel the tragic survival of the low-level people under the famine.
In the early years of the Qing Dynasty, in 1875, a rare drought that lasted for 4 years sacked the land of northern China, the countryside was barren, the grain harvest was cut off, coupled with the corruption and incompetence of the late Qing government, a purgatory on earth unfortunately descended on China, eating grass roots, gnawing on tree bark, and swallowing Guanyin soil, which were just the norm of famine, and were not enough to describe the serious horror of this famine.
This famine was called by Zeng Guoquan as "an unprecedented disaster in more than two hundred years" since the end of the Ming Dynasty, and the famine caused plague and weasel plague, and the disaster affected Shanxi, Zhili, Shaanxi, Henan, Shandong and other provinces, causing more than 10 million deaths, and more than 20 million disaster victims fled to other places, one after another tragic situation like the end of the world.
"The Tears of the Jin Disaster" is the copy of this famine after the disaster, in order to warn the world to think of danger in peace. Let's explain the face of this famine through a few pictures in this.
(Tip: The following may be too heavy, please be prepared.) ）
Jin Disaster Tears Figure 1
This image shows what hungry people were eating during a famine. We can see someone digging Guanyin soil on the mountain, someone pouring bark and grass roots into the house and so on, ready to make food, and the other two people have swollen calves and sighing at each other with their bulging stomachs.
During the famine, the people ate everything that could be eaten, and the eating that could not be eaten was also eaten, and the consumption of grass root bark was an extremely common phenomenon, and even when the grass root bark became a luxury, people could only eat Guanyin soil, but this stone powder could not be eaten, nor could it be digested, nor could it be excreted, which eventually led to the eater's stomach swelling and death, and the bulging stomach in the picture was caused by swallowing Guanyin soil.
Guangxu's "Chronicle of the County of the Continuing Yi Clan" records that in the third and fourth years of Guangxu, the Road was looking at each other, hungry and dead, and the bark of the grass roots and trees had been eaten, so they had to fill their hunger with stone powder and dry mud, and the white soil was not used as a meal. Similar records abound in the county records of the Guangxu dynasty.
Later, when the famine developed, people began to target the original taboo food, that is, human flesh. Liu Shi, the author of "Song of the Wasted Year", has personally seen brothers eating each other, husband and wife eating each other, and even self-harming people cutting the flesh on their own legs.
Jin Disaster Tears Figure 2
This picture shows the sad scene of hordes of women on the road to escape, forced to abandon their children.
In the face of the great catastrophe, women and children are undoubtedly the most vulnerable group, and incidents of selling wives and beards occur everywhere. The "Yonghe County Chronicle" records: "Young women have no one to take care of, and there are foreign traders who come here to buy, the beauties are only a thousand dollars, the lesser ones are worthless, and the lives of people are not as good as chickens and dogs."
On the way to escape, those women wrapped in a small script of three inches of golden lotus are inconvenient to walk, coupled with the burden of dragging children and daughters, it is difficult to get out of the vast disaster area, not to mention the protection of mother and child, and they can only helplessly leave their children to escape the wilderness alone. In more extreme cases, there is a situation of "changing children and eating".
Those abandoned children, waiting for them, either starved to death, or taken away by wolves, or caught and boiled and eaten, whatever the outcome, only death awaited them.
The women who remained in the disaster areas were even more miserable, inserting signs and selling themselves as slaves, asking for only a bowl of noodle soup, but still no one wanted it.
Jin Disaster Tears Figure 3
This diagram tells a very small story, but it reflects something that is unacceptable. The man's wife starved to death in her home, and the bystander hurriedly closed the gate and told him not to cry out loud for fear of causing the hungry to snatch or steal the body. Above, a man is exhuming a body in another courtyard. Because, in the eyes of the hungry, corpses are the source of food.
Later, when the famine developed, people began to wantonly grab corpses, and once some corpses were buried in the grave, they would be immediately dug up and eaten by the surrounding hungry people.
In Zhao Cheng County, such an incident occurred: the father of a villager had been dead for many days, and he received a door panel from a relative's house and worked together to carry his father to the cemetery for burial. When he returned, he found that some villagers had gone out in groups with shovels, felt that something was wrong, and immediately returned to find that his father's body was gone. Hurriedly finding the families, they found that their father's body had been cut to pieces, and they were preparing to eat it.
If eating dead human flesh is still the only trace of conscience, then some people have once again broken through the bottom line and even disguised human flesh as other meats and hung it in the market. Some of the human flesh inside are fresh corpses, some are captured children and women, and even more, they are directly slaughtered by pedestrians, as if hunting.
The society under the famine, human morality, morality, and law, has disappeared, and is worse than primitive society.
Jin Disaster Tears Figure 4
There is nothing special about this picture, but the events behind it will subvert people's three views again.
During the famine, because there were too many starving people to die of hunger, the survivors were too busy to take care of themselves, and even if they had the ability to bury the corpses, they could only let the corpses be placed in the home, and over time, they would be full of maggots and stench. One such event is depicted in the figure.
The 1789 "Declaration" records that the villages they went to were often full of corpses in their houses, full of maggots, or devoured by wild beasts, and their heads were in different places. There was also a death last year, unable to carry the coffin, with the urn to join, and now the urn is broken and mutilated, floating on the ground.
It can be seen that at that time, the explosion of corpses in the house has become a common phenomenon, not a minority. Some are really unable to bury, and some are afraid that someone will steal the body and eat it, and use water tanks and wine urns to bury the corpses. But the large-scale corpses were directly exposed without any treatment, which inevitably led to the occurrence of the plague. To make matters worse, the ensuing pandemic once again claimed countless lives that survived the famine.
Compared with the explosion of corpses outside and the plague to further kill people, corpses as food can save more hungry people, which is conducive to the survival of the whole society.
Sarcasm, right? Don't you dare imagine? In the environment at that time, eating corpses could protect more lives and save more people, which was an incredible thing!
Jin Disaster Tears Figure 5
This picture is a scene described by a person who returned to the south from the disaster area of Shanxi: the carriage is driving on the road, feeling where the wheel passes, clicking and breaking, unlike sand and gravel, checking to know that it is a tired dead man's white bone, can't help but be frightened. After walking a little further, there was none, and I was secretly thankful that a gust of wind blew through, and a roll of curly hair blew into the face, and when I took it down, it was the hair of the deceased on the side of the road, and some of them still retained the original style, and it could be seen that it was a woman's hair or a man's hair.
The missionaries who had experienced the disaster areas said: It is difficult for you to imagine the death at that time, the starving people can be seen everywhere, on the road, in the houses, in the fields, as if it were a land planted with corpses, and the hungry people who are struggling on the brink of life and death are described as withered, tattered, and walking in a hurry, and a gust of wind can blow them down.
The real doomsday scene of hunger and death, the road full of skeletons, makes people feel deeply frightened and desperate.
The above picture is only a microcosm of the Ding Peng Qi Famine, and the Ding Peng Qi Famine is only a microcosm of all the Great Famines. Famine is special because starvation is an extremely slow process, a pain that most people cannot bear, and therefore inevitably leads to the loss of humanity and the collapse of social order.
1942 movie poster
You should have seen the movie "1942", which has a more intuitive portrayal of famine, but the film is still more subtle, and the reality is probably more intense and tragic than the movie.
As a line in the movie says, turn over these old things, what is the picture? When we talk about famine, we do not want to scare everyone, but just to let everyone understand the horror of famine and the preciousness of food. The damage caused by famine to society is continuous, subversive, and difficult to heal. As the saying goes, "the people take food as the sky", and ensuring food security is the foundation of all national economies.
Finally, Elder Yuan, who experienced the Great Famine and witnessed the misery of the Great Famine society, made up his mind to increase grain production so that we Chinese could eat enough from now on.
Yuan Longping
China has you, which is the luck of the country and the luck of the people.
I am the third dimension of history, what kind of experience have you had with starvation? Welcome to leave a comment in the comment area to discuss~