A Study Of The Famine In Yunnan During The Qing Dynasty

The social condition and circumstance were comparatively peaceful in Jiaqing and Daoguang periods in Qing Dynasty, accelerating the process of economy development. The commodity economy was active. The population increased rapidly, a large number of immigrants from other provinces into Yunnan, expanding agricultural reclamation activities to the mountains and mountainous areas. Corns, potatoes and other high-yielding crops was planted extensively by people, promoting social and economic development in Yunnan. Meanwhile, the global climate had become colder than before under the background of the "Little Ice Age". Otherwise, some mountain agricultural reclamation activities and some human economic activities were improper. They caused destruction of wide range of forest vegetation and soil erosion increasingly. Finally, droughts and other natural disasters happened frequently and exacerbated. Floods, droughts, earthquakes, plagues, cold damage were very common among all different kinds of natural disasters. A wide variety of natural disasters had a huge impact on society of Yunnan in many aspects, such as the loss of lives and properties, resulting refugee problems, the rise of food prices, threatening people’s lives and survival, impacting the social order, threatening social stability, aggravating conflicts between different nationalities and communities, impacting on the social ethics, culture and education. Local governments, local elites and ordinary people both made various efforts to cope with the disasters, involving the prevention and preparation before famine and relief in and after famine. There were many measures of disaster prevention and preparedness, such as developing agriculture and local economy, improving social resilience capacity against natural disasters, water conservancy, rivers dredging, afforestation, water resource conservation, strengthening the management of corn inventory, promoting the beneficial aspects and abolishing the harmful ones. National governments policies and systems of famine response as the basis of official relief, the disaster or famine was reported by official after its occurrence, it was bottom-up and step by step. And then, the official organized survey, and division of poverty grade, including extreme or average, and that was the inference standard for the official to take different level of rescue measures. The official relief followed common practice based on government rules, various measures including providing funds and corns, freeing or reducing the taxes, doing some public construction to increase jobs. Otherwise, the local governments organized the armed forces to maintain local security, suppressing local groups and forces that disturbed the stability of society, to avoid chaos and ensure social order was under government control during the famine. The gentry class as the core of local elites, had extensive influence in the community, belonging to the local powerful group. The government needed their support to carry on disaster relief policies and measures. They motivated citizens to join rescue activities and integrated different forces in society, enhanced the cohesion of people in difficult times. They actively involved in famine relief, organizing charity activities, playing an important role in the relief process, making up for the lack of official relief. The ordinary people in the famine were not completely negative to wait death, but doing anything they could and taking whatever measures to struggle with hunger and famine for survival. They usually seeded other crops, looked for alternative foods to eat and even escaped their land and left their families to beg food outsides. The author also focused on one aspect that cultural and religious response to the famine in this study of this paper. The restrictions of science and technology in traditional society made obstacles for people to know and understand disasters objectively. Political thoughts, cultural and religious ideas played an important role for the concept construction of disasters. On the other hand, disaster concept had an dynamic impact on the ways that people coped with disasters. Therefore, ideological and cultural patterns and belief systems in a specific historical period also put its own imprint in the famine response model. Finally, there were two cases studies about two most typical famines occurred in Jiaqing and Daoguang periods, those consist on the last section of the paper. One case was the huge famine in Yunnan, happening in1815-1817, the twentieth year to the twenty-second in Jiaqing period, the other case was the big earthquake happening in Songming in1833, thirteenth year in Daoguang period. Regarding these two cases as perspectives to reveal famine situation in Jiaqing and Daoguang periods in Qing Dynasty in Yunnan.