Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER FIVE
THE SEVEN SORROWS OF YUNNAN
We know from a British emissary onboard a ship bound for Canton in the summer of 1816
that Chinese skies still bore their lurid volcanic imprint some fifteen months after Tambora's
eruption. The description is among the best we have of the most remarkable volcanic weather
seen on Earth for perhaps thousands of years:
The evening of the 9th of July, the sky exhibited such novel though brilliant appearances, as
led us to fear that they would be followed by formidable changes of weather. The course of the
sun, as it sunk beneath the horizon was marked by a vivid glory expanding into paths of light
of the most beautiful hues. They did not in the least resemble the pencils of rays which are
often seen streaking in the sky at sunset, but were composed of sheets of glowing pink, which
diverging at equal distances from the sun's disk, darted upwards from the horizon, diminish-
ing in intensity of colour, till they vanished in the azure of the surrounding atmosphere.
1
This much can be said of Tambora's plume: it was an attractive killer. A tragedy of nations
masquerading as a spectacular sunset.
One of the many bureaucratic and intellectual achievements of China's two-thousand-year
empire is its meteorological record keeping, which surpassed that of any other nation in his-
torical reach and detail. The fact that climate was reckoned so closely with crop yields means
that, in reconstructing the global impact of a large-scale climate event such as the Tambora
disaster, China is a fruitful place to turn for close-grained, regional analysis of its environment-
al and social effects.2
2
We know, for example, that the tropical latitude of the Chinese island of Hainan did not
protect it from summer snows in the summer of 1815 or a severe winter in which more than
half the forests perished. Eastern China likewise suffered from a suite of record low temperat-
ures and crop failures in the Tambora period. In Shanxi, the crop-killing summer frosts of 1817
heralded mass emigration from the province, reminiscent of the large-scale refugeeism being
played out across Europe and New England at the same time.
But no region in China, it appears, suffered so greatly as the southwest province of Yunnan.
3
When record low temperatures persisted with unprecedented severity over three successive
growing seasons, prosperous Yunnan descended into a Confucian nightmare in which all sac-
red bonds of community were severed. Famished corpses lay unmourned on the roads; moth-
ers sold their children or killed them out of mercy; and human skeletons wandered the fields,
feeding on white clay.
SOUTH OF THE CLOUD
By the time of Tambora's eruption in April 1815, the Chinese empire had achieved the massive
territorial dimensions it still commands today, some twelve million square kilometers. One of
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