Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (18 page)

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 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 neglect and bad management.
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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 famished 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:

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.”
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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 temperatures into the 1820s.
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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.”
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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 emerging
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 sought them out and, on October 8, met alone with Percy. Whatever passed between them, his cool, ambiguous behavior was the final straw for the abandoned Godwin sister. In a sad, regret-filled poetic fragment, Shelley later recalled how “Her voice did quiver as we parted, / Yet knew I not that heart was broken.” Fanny immediately left Bath, traveling on to Wales. The following day, in a Swansea hotel, she scribbled a note blaming herself and asking her loved ones to forget her. The chambermaid found her dead the next morning from an overdose of opium.

The fact that a respectable and inexperienced young woman in Britain chose suicide in the form of a half bottle of laudanum demonstrates both opium’s easy availability in the immediate post-Waterloo years and the fact that, though valued for its medicinal properties since ancient times, the poppy’s dangers were not yet widely appreciated or regulated. In 1816, most English opium was imported from the Near East along the trading routes of the Mediterranean. But since British deregulation of the Indo-Chinese trade in 1813, the global market for opium had expanded rapidly, while the center of production and consumption shifted to the Far East. By 1827, Britain’s success in penetrating the Chinese market for opium had reversed the flow of silver between the trading partners, which had so long been to the advantage of the Chinese.

From that point, the long-powerful Chinese empire suffered a series of crushing setbacks through the nineteenth century and beyond. It lost its leading role in world trade to Britain, certified by the ruinous terms of surrender that concluded the Opium Wars in 1842 and 1857. Consequently, per capita income for its citizens actually declined through the nineteenth century while the Euro-Atlantic zone raced ahead in economic growth and technological advancement.
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For the Chinese
Communist Party rulers of the 1950s, looking back over the ruins of the “century of humiliation” that followed China’s first defeat by Britain, opium was to blame for the civil strife, famines, and military defeats that had ruined China’s once great empire and thrown the country into economic and social chaos. This anti-Western narrative—a pillar of Communist Party historiography—focused on the evils of
imported
opium, a market Great Britain had unscrupulously created and kept open with military force.

Our Tambora story, however, takes us further back in time in the history of Chinese opium to the site of what would become the thriving center of
domestic
opium production in the Qing empire: the southwest provinces at China’s frontier. The Qing court had long been concerned with the importation of Indian opium by the British and sought to control the trade along its southern ports. Beginning in 1820, however, only two years after the end of the Tambora-driven famine, Chinese rulers in Peking were startled to receive reports from faraway Yunnan of a sudden explosion in opium production there. A poppy anticultivation program was instituted for Yunnan that very year, the first in a series of ever more desperate government measures to curb the southwestern drug industry. But to no avail. Opium in ever greater quantities continued to flow south along the Red River into Vietnam transported by enormous caravans, and from there by sea to Hong Kong and Canton, or eastward overland through China. Nothing could stem the tide, and by 1840—during the first Opium War with Britain—Yunnan was the acknowledged heart of domestic opium production in China. Not all of Yunnan’s opium left the province, of course. By this time, more than half of Yunnan’s garrisoned soldiers were reckoned to be drug users, including the officer corps.
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What caused Yunnan’s sudden transformation, in less than two decades, from a grain-producing province well integrated with the empire’s agricultural system to a rogue narco-state in thrall to the international drug trade? With Tambora’s specific dates in mind, what follows is a probable scenario.

By the time of the Tambora emergency, the commercialization of agriculture in southwest China had evolved to the point where self-sufficiency was not the dominant working rationale of the common Yunnanese farmer. Rather, he found himself forced into the marketplace to raise money for taxes and buy grain in the off-season. In this light, the state bureaucrats who habitually railed to the court against the “stupidity” of the peasants for selling their excess harvest rather than storing it as a wedge against crop failure appear disingenuous indeed. For the low-acreage farmer subject to this commercial market, and in the teeth of a famine, opium must have represented an irresistible temptation: the poppy was worth twice as much per acre of yield than the average grain crop and would grow in inhospitable conditions on marginal soil. Sown in the fall, the opium flower grew to maturity in March and could be harvested for its sap in summer. It could thus to some degree be grown in conjunction with, or as supplement to, conventional food crops. At a critical point in the late 1810s, after years of the worst famine in their experience, the desperate peasant farmers of Yunnan came to the collective realization that opium was as good as money and more reliable than food.

Whatever the advisability of large-scale conversion of land to opium production from the empire’s point of view, for the individual freehold farmer of Yunnan, food security was best served by significant investment in opium as a security against grain shortfalls and the recurrence of famine. Just as important, growth in poppy production served the interests of unsalaried local officials themselves, who were under pressure to meet tax revenue both to pay their own wages and to remit quotas to the court. The empire’s long-successful system of provincial revenue extraction failed to adapt to the drastic climate change episode of 1815–18 after which the lure of opium as a cash crop was overwhelming. Once the opium land conversion had occurred, officials had no incentive to enforce anticultivation measures when they could tax the lucrative crop instead. In 1820s Yunnan, the foxes took guard of the opium henhouse.