THE SEVEN SORROWS OF YUNNAN - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 62

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 pre-
cious 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 civiliz-
ation. All across the wide empire, for hundreds of years, Chinese officials perennially regu-
lated the price and supply of its people's staple food by purchasing rice in the abundant au-
tumn, storing it in state granaries, then selling its reserves in the winter and spring as supplies
dwindled and prices rose. 15 Because of its isolation, Chinese rulers perceived Yunnan as a re-
gion particularly susceptible to food shortages; it was accordingly well-supplied with granary
stock. 16 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 bereason to doubt these official figures. Increasingly inthe early nineteenth
century, disturbing reports reached the Peking court describing the dilapidated state of pro-
vincial granaries, which may itself have been the consequence of an imperial policy of delib-
erate neglect. The state management of the granary system proved so expensive that bureau-
crats 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?
Figure 5.3. Europeans were scandalized by reports of starving children brought to market to be sold for
bread during the Great Chinese Famine of the late 1870s—as dramatized in this newspaper illustration.
As we have seen in the case of the Yunnan famine of 1816-18, however, it was a culturally accepted last
resort for Chinese families facing starvation. (© The Granger Collection, New York).
By 1815, the Qing state, ever fearful of the social instability wrought by food shortages,
had come to favor a hybrid model of famine risk management that combined an integrated,
commercialized food distribution network—that is, a grain market—with a long-established
state-run granary system to guarantee food supply to its frontier peoples. This sophisticated
model of grain distribution, evolved over centuries, proved highly successful under conditions
of normal climatic variability. But when Tambora's 1815 eruption brought an unprecedented
wave of extreme weather to the region—possibly the worst of the millennium in Asia—the