In our last article, we explored the fascinating food scene in the mid-Ming Dynasty – the lavish dishes, the new cooking techniques, and the extravagant feasts… Late Ming was the time when gastronomic development of imperial China culminated, but it also showed the signs of large-scale famines that lasted till the Qing dynasty. This article will talk about how the Chinese diet degraded from delicious meals and snacks to barks and tree roots in just a few decades.
It was not obvious to the people at the time that they would face famines. In late Ming, “New World '' grains, like corn, sweet potatoes, and potatoes were bought to China through marine trade. These high yield crops had spread to the whole nation since mid-Qing. These crops were resilient to low rainfall, could be stored for a long period, and could be planted in mountainous areas in poor soil with minimum cultivation. While they were important alternatives when rice was in shortage, they were considered much less desirable than mains, a daily source of carbohydrates, due to Chinese customs and their tastes. Scholars pointed out that corn and sweet potatoes were far from extensively consumed during the Qing period, as the traditional diet remained mostly unchanged during imperial Chinese history.
Thus, these imported high-yield crops did not save the land from the deadliest famine in the history of imperial China. In late-Ming, the drastic drop in temperature during the "Little Ice Age" froze the soil and roots of grains, thus leading to years of famine. However, the worst was yet to come. Between 1876 and 1879, famines struck the northern provinces, following the drought in the Yellow River basin area and low rainfall. When the situation became more stabilized in 1879, there were about 10 million deceased due to starvation and famine-related diseases, among the 100 million people who had suffered from malnutrition and refuge in the region.
Why did the drought hit China so badly? Why wasn’t food available to the northerners? The answer is complicated (as always!), but it was not entirely due to the insufficiency of food across China, and the drought is not the only one to blame. Many historians attributed the famine to the problem of overpopulation, after the population boom from 1700 to 1850, with which grain production could not catch up. On top of that, the famine exposes the weakened Qing state’s incapability in controlling national resources. Facing internal rebellions and foreign threats of invasion, the late-Qing state was falling apart, and could not control localities nor had the financial resources like a century ago. State-sponsored granaries were not under tight supervision and were often embezzled and emptied by corrupt local officials. The northern famine was part of the result of failure in large-scale coordinated campaigns of transporting food across the nation. The area which relied on planting cash crops in exchange for grains and money suffered severely during a national shortage of grains. Unfortunately, the central government could not distribute resources among regions and control the circulation of grain effectively.
Catastrophic famines were almost always a product of both natural disasters and man-made food crises. Those who were devastated in the late-Qing famine were not the last batch of victims of unequal distribution of resources; and also not the last to resort to cannibalism. Their descendants in the Republican era would continue to suffer from insufficient food, on top of rapid nationwide civil wars.
References
Edgerton-Tarpley, Kathryn. “North China famine, 1876-79.” https://disasterhistory.org/north-china-famine-1876-79
Li, Lillian M. “Introduction: Food, Famine, and the Chinese State.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 41, no. 4, [Cambridge University Press, Association for Asian Studies], 1982, 687–707.
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