THE SEVEN SORROWS OF YUNNAN - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 64

Around the neighborhood, you can hear her crying,
That old widow, cold and hungry, and in rags.
She will tell you the famous story of her son:
His tireless hands, in the fields from dawn to dusk,
Could only feed two mouths. He took care of
His mother, hence his fame. But Death cared less
And took him away. The sweet bonds of their love
Untied, the grey-haired widow is all alone.
“My time is short, and I dream for our reunion,
But life teases me awake. Why do I still have breath
When I have no food? Take me, for his soul's peace!…”
But only the birds listen. They take flight into the darkness.
Lucky birds, however distant, fly home. Not her.
The early months of 1818 brought no relief from Tambora's suffocating grip on the grain-
growing seasons of Yunnan. A recent modeling study on the impact of Tambora's eruption on
the Chinese climate found that the coldest temperature anomalies occurred not in 1816 but
1817-18, which “may explain long lasting impacts like the three years famine in the province
of Yunnan.” 18 Indeed, several studies on Tambora's influence on Himalayan weather to the
northwest point to the eruption's great reach, in both space and time, extending cold tem-
peratures into the 1820s. 19 In the mountain city of Kunming, Li Yuyang writes of a heavy
snowstorm in January 1818, complete with lightning, thunder, and “purple rain” that blasted
the winter crops of broad beans and wheat. This is the last of his famine poems. Now well
into their third successive year of dearth, the suffering of the Yunnanese in early 1818 may
well have passed beyond description for Li Yuyang.
Mercifully for the survivors, this was to be the last of the Tamboran crop failures. By the
summer of 1818, the volcanic dust had at last cleared from the stratosphere, and the sun
and balmy southwest rains returned as normal to the land “south of the cloud.” A bumper
crop that autumn brought an end to Yunnan's long despair. As for Li Yuyang, he survived the
great famine in body, but there are signs of a permanent trauma of spirit. His brief official
biography tells of an increasingly reclusive man “who never left the inner door of the house,
and died at home.” 20 Sitting up at midnight during the dark days of the Tambora disaster,
Li Yuyang felt the white hairs sprouting from his head. Prematurely aged by the suffering to
which he had borne such eloquent witness, he died in 1826 of pulmonary failure, aged forty-
two.
THE OPIUM CONNECTION
Thousands of miles from Li Yuyang's family in crisis and the unfolding disaster in Yunnan,
Fanny Godwin's state of mind was deteriorating through the dreary summer months of 1816.
While her sisters, Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont, seized their roles abroad in an emer-
ging literary and cultural revolution, she stayed at home in London to bear the complaints of
her father and a hostile stepmother. This oppressive isolation, together with her unrequited
feelings for the irresistible Percy Shelley, brought sadness and anxiety in waves upon her. The
Geneva party had returned to England, without Byron, in early September 1816; but Mary
and Percy avoided the unhappy Godwin house in London, instead staying in Bath. Fanny