THE SEVEN SORROWS OF YUNNAN - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 59

hard to imbibe. Having learned the necessity of social hierarchy in the Confucian system, un-
successful 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. 11 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 as-
pirations 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 evolu-
tion 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. 12 In September
1815, during the first blighted post-Tambora harvest, Li Yuyang looked back over the dis-
astrous 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.