THE SEVEN SORROWS OF YUNNAN - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 67

food security problem, hence the explosion of poppy farming in Yunnan from the late 1810s.
First, the mountain fields of bean and wheat were converted en masse to opium production.
Thereafter, poppy growers made their way brazenly to the central valleys, to colonize the
choice arable land of the province. Fast forward a century later, and Yunnan was growing
almost nothing but opium, importing most of its rice from Southeast Asia. At this time, eth-
nic hill tribes from Yunnan, such as the Hmong, began to drift southward into the Mekong
delta, to the mountains of modern-day Burma, Thailand, and Laos. With generations of exper-
ience in opium farming behind them, they brought with them the seeds and technologies to
establish a new global capital of opium production in these remote highlands of the “golden
triangle.”
Thus the Tambora period marks not only the beginning of a complete transformation of
Yunnan's agricultural economy from staple grains to an opium cash crop but also the first
emergence of the modern international illicit drug trade. That this evolution began in the
aftermath of the Tambora emergency shows the sinuous correlation that can exist between
high-impact climate change events—such as a three-year famine—and social disruption on
global scales and centennial time frames.
As the secretary-general of the National Anti-Opium Association of China reflected in
1935, in the midst of China's long, tumultuous civil wars following the collapse of the empire
in 1911, “the weakening of the race and the rapid increase of social evils can in the last
analysis be traced back to their source in opium.” 23 The early twentieth century was a time
when China held the dubious honor of exporting over 80% of the world's narcotics. In the
same period, in the onetime Confucian stronghold and Qing-era boom state of Yunnan, 90%
of adult males were drug users, half of them addicts. A Western observer gives a graphic ac-
count of the human tragedy of opium in early twentieth-century China at the village level:
The roofs of the houses are dilapidated and full of holes…. No one is selling vegetables in
the road, and the one or two shops which the village possessed are closed. In the shadow of
the houses a few men and women are lying or squatting—apparently in a stupor. Their faces
are drawn and leathery, their eyes glazed and dull…. Even some of the babies the women
carry in their arms have the same parched skins and wan, haggard faces. And the cause of
all this is opium. 24
This description of an opium-afflicted community reads like a “Seven Sorrows” poem in the
spirit of Li Yuyang. This long-suffering, long-forgotten writer—whose poems appear here for
the first time in English—fulfilled his destiny as a Confucian poet of the people in memorial-
izing the Great Yunnan Famine of 1815-18. But he spent the remainder of his life in scholarly
seclusion, as if in bitter meditation on the disturbing changes afoot in Yunnan and the nation-
al humiliation in store for his beloved China.