The disaster of ding Wu's strange famine
In the second year of Guangxu (1876), the drought was aggravated and the affected area was further expanded. Zhili, Shandong and Henan are the main disaster-stricken areas, with Liaoning in the north, Shaanxi and Gansu in the west and Jiangsu and Anhui in the south, forming an unprecedented vast dry area.
In Shi Jing and Zhili areas, due to drought, the harvest of the whole province was halved. The drought triggered a plague of locusts. From north to south in Tianjin, locusts cover the sky and devour withered crops. During the summer and autumn, due to continuous rainfall, Daqing River, Hutuo River, Zhulong River, South Canal, Zhanghe River and Weihe River flooded at the same time, resulting in drought and locust plague on the land. In this year, 63 counties in Zhili Province suffered from floods, droughts and hailstorms.
The disaster situation in Henan Province is similar to that in Zhili. From spring to summer, the drought is getting more and more serious. Especially in Zhangde, Huaiqing and Weihui, north of the Yellow River, the drought is more serious. After the summer, the drought eased slightly, but Zhang De, Wei Hui and Gwangju were flooded again, and the fields were flooded. But as far as the whole province is concerned, it is still dominated by drought. The agricultural harvest in this province was poor, and the output was reduced by about half. So "many poor people are short of food". In Kaifeng alone, there are more than 70,000 victims who rely on disaster relief porridge factories to eat.
This year, Shandong Province has suffered from drought all the year round. Except for some small areas such as Zhangqiu, which were slightly flooded for a period of time, most areas suffered from drought, and the province's harvest was less than three points. "Shandong Tongzhi" said that the province was "a drought and the people were hungry". According to Shenbao, due to the drought, victims in all parts of Shandong have fled, causing famine or begging for rain. But praying for rain is useless. "There are many people who are hungry and sell their children and girls, and their sufferings are beyond words" (declaration, 1876, 1 1 February).
Heroes and heroes abused the south, affecting northern Jiangsu and northern Anhui. From the spring of this year to the end of the year, it has been raining, and large areas of farmland and cotton fields in Haizhou (now Lianyungang) have reduced production or lost grazing. The drought triggered a plague of locusts and the seedlings were swallowed up. Under the pressure of drought and locusts, the victims are "countless people who fled and starved to death", and some victims even "prey on others when they are hungry", resulting in "travelers often disappear and avoid foot binding". Due to the severe drought, the social order in northern Jiangsu has become chaotic. In order to survive, hungry people have crossed the river to the south, and local officials in southern Jiangsu, Songtai, Jiangyin, Zhenjiang and Yangzhou have taken in more than 90 thousand refugees.
The drought in northern Anhui is similar to that in northern Jiangsu. After the summer, the drought continued; In many places, even seedlings can't be planted: although it rained a little later, it "continued to bask in the sun". Even the replanted Zhuanghe mostly died; That year, the province's harvest was halved. In some places, there is no grain harvest. As a result, groups of hungry people merged into four people who fled the famine.
This year, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Liaoning and other northern provinces are also threatened by drought. Shaanxi is dry all the year round, and the harvest in summer and autumn is not good, and most places can't grow in winter and spring. Due to the severe drought in Shanxi, the autumn harvest failed. There is almost no grain harvest in Jiexiu and Pingyao counties. In Fengtian Yizhou (now Yixian County, Liaoning Province), there are as many as 100,000 hungry people because of drought and no rain, and farmers are struggling in hunger.
After nearly two years of drought, the disaster situation in most parts of North China reached an unprecedented state in Ding Chou Year (1877), especially in Shanxi Province. Ceng Guoquan, the governor of Shanxi Province, said in his memorial that the disaster area was "bare land thousands of miles away, and there were five or six million hungry people, which was unprecedented in ancient times" (Volume 8 of Zeng Zhongxiang's Memorial). The severe drought has caused a long-term and large-scale reduction of production in rural areas of Shanxi. The famine for two consecutive years has made farmers' stocks empty, pushing more and more victims to the brink of death. In order to "catch my breath", or "grind pebbles to satisfy my hunger" or "dig Guanyin white mud to satisfy my hunger", the result is that "the mud will swell and burst in a few days, and both sides will perish together" (1877 "Shen Bao" on June 30).
With the development of drought and the exhaustion of edible things, the tragedy of "cannibalism" occurred. In the winter of the third year of the drought (1877), the phenomenon of cannibalism was everywhere in Shanxi, the hardest hit area. People who eat human flesh and sell human flesh abound. Some people eat dead human flesh, some people kill old people or children alive ... ruthless drought demons turn the disaster area into a hell on earth!
The disaster in Henan is similar to that in Shanxi. In the early morning of two consecutive years, the rich Zhongzhou Plain became a thousand miles of bare land. At that time, Shenbao published a message saying that Henan Province was "more than 50 counties with poor harvest and 28 counties with complete famine". However, Yuan Baoheng, the left assistant minister of punishments who was ordered to help the disaster relief in Henan, arrived in Henan and announced that there were five or six million hungry people in 87 counties and counties in the province.
The shadow of drought also hangs over the whole Shaanxi Province. Disasters in Dali, Chaoyi, Taiyang (now Hotan), Chengcheng, Hancheng, Baishui and nearby counties. Extremely heavy and tragic. "Desperate hungry people are desperate to take risks, gather people to grab guns and grab food, and some even" block roads and correct looting, and write down the words' it is difficult to break the law, it is difficult for hungry people' ".
There has also been a once-in-a-century drought in eastern Gansu and northern Sichuan. "Nanjiang County Records" recorded the drought in northern Sichuan in detail: "Dingchou is old, and northern Sichuan is also dry, especially in Ba (Zhong), Nan (Jiang) and Tong (Jiang) counties ... Hundreds of miles of bare land, rice seedlings were burned, and rice prices soared day by day, while the poor suffered from lack of food: vegetable chaff was exhausted. Those who throw pigeons into the stream and despise their bodies can be heard in the wild every day. The father abandoned his son, the brother abandoned his brother, the husband abandoned his wife and cried on the road ... it was winter again, and the next spring, or the whole family died quietly. Adults eat each other, and there are more than 10,000 corpses. "
This year, Zhili and northwestern Shandong, including Shi Jing, as well as parts of Jiangsu and Anhui, still have severe droughts. Take Zhili County as an example, there are more than two million victims in Hejian alone. In the era of famine and social unrest, many victims risked their lives. In Wuqiang county, there is a "machete meeting" composed of victims; In Bazhou, Tongzhou and other places, many victims organized armed forces to compete for food.
By the beginning of 1878, the drought continued in most parts of the north. Since Zhixia entered the spring, the drought has not eased; There was a short rainy season in June, and then the drought continued until July of the following year. However, judging from the whole disaster area, the drought began to ease, and the drought in Shaanxi, Shandong, Henan, Zhili and other provinces tended to ease. However, after three consecutive years of severe drought, the people's tolerance to natural disasters is close to the limit, and all kinds of human tragedies caused by drought have not decreased correspondingly because of the relief of drought, but have intensified. In Shanxi, more and more villages and families are destroyed by natural disasters. In Henan, most of the hungry people who survived by luck are dying. "There is no meat to eat and no right to chop people." The victim who still has a breath is a hungry dog after falling to the ground. In Hejian Prefecture, Zhili, some young and hungry people "fell to the ground while receiving relief." At the turn of spring and summer this year, a large-scale plague hit the disaster area. Almost ten people in Henan province were ill, and in Shaanxi province, "after the disaster, the plague confronted the road;" Twenty-three out of ten people in Shanxi province died of this epidemic.
In the fifth year of Guangxu (1879), although the drought in Shanxi remained the same, after all, rain fell on the vast land from Lu Zhi in the east to Shaanxi and Gansu in the west, and the dry riverbed rippled again, and the cracked land began to wet and turn green again. The drought is over and the years of suffering are coming to an end. However, just as the survivors were preparing to rebuild their homes, a new disaster suddenly came. This is an earthquake with magnitude of 8 and intensity of 1 1 that occurred in Wudu, Gansu Province on July 7. Most of the areas damaged or affected by the earthquake are in arid areas.
Plague and earthquake pushed "Ding Wu Qi Huang" to a terrible situation! According to incomplete statistics, from 1876 to 1878, only five northern provinces, including Shandong, Shanxi, Zhili, Henan and Shaanxi, suffered from drought, accounting for 222,402 and 33 1 respectively, with a total of 955 counties. The number of residents seriously affected by drought and famine in the whole disaster area is estimated to be around1.600 million to 200 million, accounting for about half of the national population at that time; The number of people who died directly from famine and plague was around10 million; At least 20 million people fled the worst-hit areas (see Li Wenmei and others' Ten Famines in Modern China).
The severe drought in the late Qing Dynasty was a catastrophe in the history of the Chinese nation! At that time, Qing officials mentioned this drought, calling it "an unheard-of tragedy at the end of more than 230 years" in the Qing Dynasty.