The reason why the Ding Peng Qi Famine can be called a major disaster in Chinese history is that the "triple blow" of famine, plague and earthquake has pushed the "Ding Peng Qi Famine" to a tragic situation!

The reason why the Ding Peng Qi Famine can be called a major disaster in Chinese history is that the "triple blow" of famine, plague and earthquake has pushed the "Ding Peng Qi Famine" to a tragic situation! According to incomplete statistics, from 1876 to 1878, only Shandong, Shanxi, Zhili, Henan, Shaanxi and other five northern provinces suffered drought in 955 prefectures. The number of inhabitants of the entire disaster area severely affected by drought and famine is estimated to be about 160 million to 200 million, accounting for about half of the population of the country at that time; the number of people who died directly from famine and plague was about 10 million; and the number of victims who fled from the hard-hit areas was not less than 20 million.

Three years of disasters have harmed the land of the Three Jins and northern China!

The horrors of the Great Famine:

Diet: Because there was no food to eat, the victims could only eat bark and grass roots, resulting in swollen stomachs and swollen legs and feet, but these two foods were rare at that time, especially elm bark and vines, which were simply excellent delicacies. In the history of the late Ming Dynasty, the famous "Guanyin Soil" appeared again at this time, but in fact, after eating Guanyin powder, it could not be digested or excreted, and the second stool was blocked, which would only cause the eater to rise and die. One of the most hated was Duan Dingyao, Zhizhou, Jizhou, Shanxi, who, under the pretext of "grain in southern provinces and dispatching people to purchase," "sent all the 4,000 taels of official silver allocated by the provincial relief bureau to Jizhou for disaster relief" and "sent all of them back to their hometowns in Jiangxi." Only later did they learn that none of the money was "used for households."

Just when Duan Dingyao's family used this money to spend days and nights of wine, the hungry people could not even receive the porridge, "the poor people helped the old and the young, and there were dozens of miles of galloping, waiting for three or five days, returning empty-handed, and there were those who died of zombies." But paradoxically, in the four years before and after such a tragic famine, although there were countless small-scale popular uprisings, none of them eventually developed into a "peasant uprising" in the traditional sense. In the late Qing Dynasty, when government control could not penetrate deep into the lowest levels of society, this was a miracle.