THE SEVEN SORROWS OF YUNNAN - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 63

whole elaborate system quickly cracked under the strain. That very year, 1817, an official
edict to the Qing court lamented the state of the national granaries, pointing to years of neg-
lect and bad management. 17 The timing could not have been worse for the suffering people of
Yunnan.
In his poem about relief operations, would-be mandarin Li Yuyang swallows his pride and
joins the starving crowds at the main gate of Kunming, where the granary managers set up
tables and force the people into orderly queues for servings of a weak rice porridge. The vital
work is poorly managed, and supplies are inadequate, but the emperor's charity is now the
only recourse for a starving people:
You open the Li Gate, and the hungry millions moan
At the smell of gruel. You give a bowl to the grown man,
half to the child. But don't you see the strong men push forward,
while the old stumble? We wait until noon,
Bellies hollow like thunder. But your porridge
Is like water. I will come again tomorrow,
if I am not already dead. I will beg again
For porridge, but quietly, so not to anger you.
The “porridge” was poor stuff indeed, consisting of barley flour and broken rice seeds mixed
with buckwheat or vegetables—a deliberately wretched potage so that only the truly fam-
ished would line up to consume it.
Given that the standard granary reserves in Yunnan were sufficient to feed a maximum of
15% of the population at any time and that the years preceding the Tambora emergency were
drought years, it is not surprising that the government's means to stem the famine were soon
exhausted. In “Bitter Famine,” Li Yuyang describes the food crisis at its worst in the autumn
of 1817, as the people of Yunnan descend into a living hell, their prosperous communities
transformed into a Dantean circle of starvation and death, but with no innocents spared:
Outside, the starved corpses pile high,
While in her room the young mother
Waits upon her child's death. Unbearable
Sorrow. My love, you cry to me to feed you—
But no one sees my tears. Who can I tell which aches
More? My heart or my body wasting away?
She takes her baby out to the deep river.
Clear and cool, welcome water …
She will care for that child in the life to come.
Confucian values focus on the sacred debts of children to their parents who have dedicated
their lives to their offspring's welfare and protection. The infanticide that concludes this poem
thus makes for a wrenching irony. The young mother fulfills her Confucian duty only by
drowning her child and herself.
With the food situation at its gravest, Li Yuyang wrote another bitter poem about family
loyalty, this time of a poor man whose filial virtues go unrewarded. He sacrifices his own
family to feed his mother, according to his Confucian bond, but then dies himself anyway,
leaving his mother alone and desperate: