Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (17 page)

For the survivors of the first two years of famine, 1817 offered some initial relief from outright starvation. Parts of western Yunnan experienced snow for the first time in memory, but in the mountains of the more populous central region, the wheat and broad bean crops ripened promisingly. Hungry villagers rushed to dig up the beans and fill their empty baskets. But the rate of mortal starvation, which slowed for some months, accelerated again when, for the third year running, the vital summer months were cruelly cold. Snow fell again over Kunming and frosts covered the ground from June through August. The farmers of Yunnan—crop scientists all—had planted five different strains of rice, each calibrated to specific temperatures and elevations. But none of them was hardy enough for Tambora. By now, the disaster crippling Yunnan had the attention of the Qing court, thousands of miles to the east. In the autumn of 1817, the emperor’s remote subjects on the southwest frontier faced their third comprehensive rice-crop failure in succession, and the greatest crisis in their history.

THE POETRY OF FAMINE

Qing China is best described as an autocracy with shallow meritocratic structures. Central to its organization were the imperial examinations, conducted nationwide, in which Chinese subjects regardless of class or background could compete for academic distinction and a government appointment, which was the surest path to upward social mobility.
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The Confucian administrative ethos of popular welfare embodied in the celebrated granary system also permeated Chinese culture and education: a philosophy of governance in which the state ensured its ruling elite was thoroughly steeped. Confucian texts thus dominated the bureaucratic curriculum, in which students learned the importance of filial loyalty, social service, and self-sacrifice. Literacy also featured prominently and was tested in the form of poetic composition. The “mandarins” produced by these examinations were trained as scholar-bureaucrats, with a literary polish to their education comparable to the requirements of the elite European gentleman of the same period.

The imperial examination system, finally dismantled at the beginning of the twentieth century after seven hundred years, has been blamed for China’s sclerosis in its “century of humiliation,” for the inability of its ruling elite to respond effectively to the forces of modernity brought by aggressive Western states. An internal weakness of the system lay in its vanishingly small reward structure: only a handful of examinees in any given year were offered government postings, leaving the rest to private sensations of bitterness and failure that were potentially at dangerous odds with the precepts of community harmony they had worked so hard to imbibe. Having learned the necessity of social hierarchy in the Confucian system, unsuccessful examinees very often faced the reality of their own place in its lower ranks.

A Yunnanese man named Li Yuyang was one such disappointed Confucian student in 1815.
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But his story was so close to being one of emblematic success for the empire. By birth he belonged to the Bai ethnic minority in Yunnan, a hill people brought under the wing of the Chinese state and encouraged over many generations to adopt the
language, manners, and aspirations of their conquerors. During the active colonization of the southwest during the Ming dynasty, Li Yuyang’s Bai forebears had been forced from their fertile lowland villages into the hills so that Chinese agriculturation of the land could take its remorseless course. But imperial assimilation policies over time assuaged the family’s resentment. Sinicization was sufficiently advanced in the family of Li Yuyang for him to leave his home in the ancient capital of Taihe, near Dali in northwest Yunnan, for a prestigious Confucian academy in Kunming. It was a remarkable and ambitious career move for a young Bai. And, at first, he found success. In bustling Kunming, Li Yuyang studied under a well-known
mandarin
master, gained notice as a composer, and joined an exclusive group of poets under the master’s tutelage. This group, of which he was the star, became known as the Kun Hua Five after the student neighborhood they inhabited.

But at some point, the aspirations of this rising would-be
mandarin
to complete his evolution from ethnic provincial subject to imperial Chinese ruling class began to falter. He failed, year after year, to achieve the necessary distinction in the imperial examinations. Genteel poverty was expected, even celebrated among the literati, as it was among the bohemians of faraway Paris and subsequent generations of the urban creative classes in the West. But at some point Li Yuyang’s family went bankrupt, forcing him to leave his beloved academy and its neighborhood of intellectuals. He moved to the outskirts of Kunming, where he worked as an ordinary small-acre farmer in the rice fields alongside illiterate peasants. He had not long joined the ranks of the peasantry when Tambora’s Frankenstein weather hit Yunnan, bringing chaos and death.

As the Tambora disaster began to unfold, Li Yuyang was thirty-two years old and in the process of constructing a new identity for himself as a poet of the people.
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In September 1815, during the first blighted post-Tambora harvest, Li Yuyang looked back over the disastrous summer with its cold winds and incessant rain. By his account, the intensity of the volcanic downpours damaged houses and brought flash flooding to low-lying villages near Kunming. Here is his first Tambora poem, titled “A Sigh for Autumn Rain:”

The clouds like a dragon’s breath on the mountains,

Winds howl, circling and swirling,

The Rain God shakes the stars, and the rain

Beats down on the world. An earthquake of rain.

Water spilling from the eaves deafens me.

People rush from falling houses in their thousands

And tens of thousands, for the work of the rain

Is worse than the work of thieves. Bricks crack. Walls fall.

In an instant, the house is gone. My child catches my coat

And cries out. I am running in the muddy road, then

Back to rescue my money and grains from the ruins.

What else to do? My loved ones must eat.

There are no words for the bitterness of

An empty September. The flood-drowned fields

harvest three grains for every ten of a good year.

And from these three grains? Meals and clothes till next September.

In Chinese folklore, the cloud dragon represents life-giving rain from the east, the crop-sweetening spring rains. But Li Yuyang conjures here an angry, unpredictable weather Dragon, roused to punish the people.

Environmental historians have linked the vulnerability of the flood-prone agricultural zones of Qing China to the policy of unconstrained logging and land clearance operated over several centuries. While the intensification of agriculture, including widespread double cropping, had to some degree decoupled crop yields from normal climatic variability, the manufactured agro-ecosystem was much more vulnerable, at the system level, to high-impact climate events such as Tambora. Bigger yields meant a bigger society, but it also meant that many more lives were now exposed to the dangers of a failed harvest.
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Yunnan, ordinarily an exporter of grain to the rice-poor east, now faced a drastic food shortage of its own.

In a subsequent poem, Li Yuyang turns an accusing eye on local officials, who show no mercy even in the time of crisis, demanding the people pay their taxes as usual. Meanwhile, the legendary
Shang-yang
, bird of rain, still flies:

Grain tax! the policemen shout. Their whips

Slice the air, and the agony of the people

is neverending. Who can plug heaven with a stone,

or command the
Shang-yang
stop flying?

If only the sun would rise where it should,

And the dragon with his dark clouds disappear.

O our free hearts then! But when I ask if tomorrow

will be fine, the flower under my feet says nothing.

As the bad weather continues into the fateful year of 1816, Li Yuyang frets increasingly about the crop-destroying rains. He writes of feelings of helplessness as he watches his wife and children waste away from hunger. He takes to sitting up alone at midnight. Brooding over the painful images of the day, his hair begins turning white:

Rain falls unending, like tears of blood

from the sentimental man.

Houses sink and shudder

like fish in the rippling water

I see my older boy pulling at his mother’s skirt.

The little one cries unheard. Money gone, and

Rice rare as pearls, we offer our blankets to save ourselves.

A single
dou
of grain, and nothing over to fix the house.

We have only a few acres, and these grow nothing.

My wife and children portion out their grains across

The wide year. At least the taxman stays away.

How could anyone fill his deep pockets?

Local sages, steeped in the “moral meteorology” of Confucian philosophy, were quick to blame the bad weather on some lapse in the conduct of the people, in the loyalty of sons or the chastity of daughters. Emperor Jiaqing, for his part, blamed the incompetence of the administrative class beneath him for compromising the goodwill of Heaven toward the state. In an imperial edict, Jiaqing explicitly deflected responsibility for the 1816 food crisis onto “provincial officials,” who

had they managed affairs diligently and in a completely public-spirited manner, all cooperating with each other, there would not have been a situation such as this…. The wheat harvest has already proved deficient. If the great fields are not sown in good time, there will be no supply of food for the humble folk.
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Spin doctoring aside, the very existence of such an announcement from the emperor shows a style of paternalistic noblesse oblige in the Chinese social contract unfamiliar to the recently restored monarchs of Europe. The obligation to express sympathy for the peasants in times of crisis held true along the entire chain of command—from the emperor to the local magistrate level where scholar-bureaucrats frequently published poems that memorialized the suffering of the people. Anthologies of Qing-era poetry contain entire sections titled “Famine and Calamities.” Li Yuyang’s poetry thus takes its place within an established paternalistic tradition in Confucian culture.

From Li Yuyang’s reference to absent tax collectors, it seems that by late 1816 the provincial government of Yunnan had taken some measure of the humanitarian disaster and turned its attention from taxing the people to saving them. It’s not difficult to see why. Li Yuyang’s poems from the following year, 1817, turn increasingly from the desperate situation in his own home to the epochal human tragedy unfolding around him. The streets of Kunming present a spectacle of suffering and social breakdown to which no right-minded Confucian official could be immune. Desperate parents have begun bringing their children to market for sale:

300 copper coins for a bag of grain

300 copper coins for three days of life

Where can the poor people find such money?

They barter their sons and daughters on the streets.

Still they know the price of a son

Is not enough to pay for their hunger.

And yet to watch him die is worse.

Think of our son’s body as food, as grain for one meal.

The little ones don’t understand, how could they?

But the older boys keep close, weeping.

Stop crying and go with him. Selling is

a blessing, because to buy you he must feed you.

The cold wind blows in their faces,

The parents wipe their tears away.

But back home they cannot sleep

While the birds moan like old men in the night

Li Yuyang devotes another poem to an heroic minor official named Liu, who at this critical time took action to dismantle Kunming’s new slave market for children. Liu hunted down the buyers and forced them to return their purchases to their families, including the daughter of a blind man who duly “prayed for his sight to be healed / if only to turn his grateful eyes upon Magistrate Liu.”

By early 1817, the rising death toll and food panic in Yunnan had grown into a full-scale human emergency, forcing the government to open the granary doors and dispense its precious reserves for free. State-organized famine relief, essentially unknown in Europe until the twentieth century, stands as one of the greatest achievements of premodern Chinese civilization. All across the wide empire, for hundreds of years, Chinese officials perennially regulated the price and supply of its people’s staple food by purchasing rice in the abundant autumn, storing it in state granaries, then selling its reserves in the winter and spring as supplies dwindled and prices rose.
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Because of its isolation, Chinese rulers perceived Yunnan as a region particularly susceptible to food shortages; it was accordingly well-supplied with granary stock.
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By the time of the Tambora emergency, reserve granaries had functioned in Yunnan for over a thousand years. The granaries of Yunnan, at least according to the officials who managed them, stored a one-month supply of food for every grown man in the province, the highest ratio in the empire.

But there may be reason to doubt these official figures. Increasingly in the early nineteenth century, disturbing reports reached the Peking court describing the dilapidated state of provincial granaries, which may itself have been the consequence of an imperial policy of deliberate neglect. The state management of the granary system proved so expensive that bureaucrats looked more and more to the grain markets as a means to rationalize food distribution. Why stuff every province with reserve grain when an efficient marketplace, in time of crisis, could transport it to the disaster zone according to the logic of supply and demand?