This decline meant that by the time drought spread across North China in the late 1870s, the Qing state’s first line of defense against serious food crises had for the most part been replaced by a “makeshift” system run by local elites who lacked the state’s power to maintain enormous granary reserves and to carry out vital inter-regional grain transfers. The decline of the granary system began in the 1790s and reached crisis levels after the mid-century rebellions. Especially in the drought-prone northern provinces, Qing officials relied on state and community granaries to keep grain prices down and to provide emergency relief during subsistence crises. The monumental effort expended to suppress the mid-century rebellions wreaked havoc on the Qing granary system. Simultaneously, the Nian rebels disrupted administration in large sections of four northern provinces, and the Muslim revolts in the southwest and the northwest depopulated entire areas. The Taiping war devastated some of China’s richest Yangzi valley provinces and cut off the capital from the land tax and salt monopoly revenue of thirteen provinces. According to some calculations, military expenses constituted nearly three-fourths of the total expenditure of the government. The combined fiscal impact of the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864), the Nian Rebellion (1853-1868) and the Muslim Revolts (1855-1873) was enormous. The mid-century rebellions that began in the 1850s depleted both national and provincial resources to dangerous levels, leaving the state woefully ill-prepared to deal with a major drought. It thus was no longer able to muster the degree of intervention necessary to prevent the drought from causing a famine. In contrast, by the late nineteenth century the Qing state had been considerably weakened by the mid-century rebellions, fiscal crisis, a lack of strong leadership, and the pressure of foreign imperialism.

During the eighteenth century, when the Qing state’s power and commitment to storing and distributing grain were at their apex, the state on several occasions effectively prevented serious droughts from resulting in mass starvation.

In a vast and highly commercialized economy like Qing China’s, a serious regional dearth did not have to result in a major famine. The severe drought that struck North China in the late 1870s was the catalyst but not the underlying cause of the Incredible Famine. By the time conditions began to stabilize in 1879, an estimated 9.5 to 13 million of the affected area’s total population of about 108 million people had perished of starvation and famine-related diseases. The drought in the Yellow River basin area began in earnest in 1876, and worsened dramatically with the almost total failure of rain in 1877.

Between 18, the most lethal drought-famine in imperial China’s long history of famines and disasters struck the five northern provinces of Shandong, Zhili, Shanxi, Henan, and Shaanxi.

Late victorian holocausts sparknotes