THE SEVEN SORROWS OF YUNNAN - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 58

After a traumatic winter with high mortality, the people's hopes rose again in the late
spring with the coming of the rains, this time in normal, moderate quantities. But the sum-
mer, of which these rains would ordinarily have been the sweet harbinger, never prospered.
Instead, the bewildered and heartbroken Yunnanese endured unprecedented snows in July.
In place of sunshine, the critical months of late summer and early autumn brought incessant
rain, together with a meteorological phenomenon never before witnessed: great rolling icy
fogs that lasted days on end. Even as late as the end of July, hopes persisted for a late har-
vest. But August brought a fresh onslaught of frosts and wintry gales, and the rice crop failed
again, this time completely. The price of rice jumped once more into the thousands.
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 Kun-
ming 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 temperat-
ures 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 gov-
ernment appointment, which was the surest path to upward social mobility. 10 The Confucian
administrative ethos of popular welfare embodied in the celebrated granary system also per-
meated 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 cur-
riculum, in which students learned the importance of filial loyalty, social service, and self-sac-
rifice. 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 gen-
tleman 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 modern-
ity brought by aggressive Western states. An internal weakness of the system lay in its van-
ishingly 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