1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [106]
In the 1970s a team of researchers at China’s central meteorological bureau pored through huge numbers of local records, looking for descriptions of rainfall and temperature in past centuries. As one might expect, the researchers found few scientific measurements, but many verbal accounts. When they encountered phrases like—to use their examples—“10 consecutive days of heavy summer rain caused rivers to overflow,” “spring and summer floods drowned countless people and animals,” “summer and fall floods washed away the seedlings of cereal crops,” “several days of heavy rains such that boats could travel over land,” and “massive winds and heavy rains inundated fields and houses,” the researchers concluded that the area had experienced a flood, and marked the map with a 1 in the corresponding area. Descriptions of severe drought were marked with a 5. They gave conditions in between 2, 3, or 4. Although the resultant maps were subjective, the overall course of events was clear. Flipping through the maps in the meteorological bureau book was like watching an animated movie of environmental collapse.
Overwhelmed by the detail on the maps, I decided to look at four rice centers on the lower Yangzi: the cities of Nanjing, Anqing, and Wuhan, and the upper Han River, an important northern tributary of the Yangzi. Between 1500 and 1550, these areas had sixteen number 1s: sixteen major floods. Between 1600 and 1650, they had eighteen—roughly the same number. Between 1700 and 1750, at the height of the colder, wetter Little Ice Age, there were twenty-seven. Then the Little Ice Age ended, the weather became drier, and there was less rain and snow. But the number of 1s in these parts of China’s agricultural core kept increasing. Between 1800 and 1850 these four places alone had thirty-two major floods. Some of the floods extended for hundreds of miles along the river, the 1’s inundating city after city, each digit standing for thousands of wrecked lives.
Officials in Zhejiang Province, dismayed by the mounting problems, announced in 1802 that the government would begin sending the despised shack people “back to their native places.” They also banned planting maize in the mountains. Almost nothing happened. The officials tried again in 1824, banning the species outright—Zhejiang was supposed to be a maize-free zone. Again nothing happened. The imperial government had a network of “censors” entrusted with rooting out incompetence and corruption. Zhejiang’s censors repeatedly asked Beijing to send troops to rip out maize. There was no response. In the kind of phenomenon that makes one despair of the human race’s ability to govern itself, the pace of land clearing actually accelerated in the first part of the nineteenth century.
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Zhejiang censor Wang Yuanfang couldn’t understand it. In the past, he knew, landlords hadn’t understood that renting their unused upland property would have disastrous consequences. “Now [in 1850] the waterways are filled with mud, the fields are buried under sand, the mountains reveal their stones and the officials and people know of the great disaster, but they do nothing to stop it. Why?” (Emphasis in original.)
In part, the failure was due to an inherent problem with mass illegal immigration. It is not easy to deport huge numbers of people—tearing them from homes and families built up over years—without mass suffering. Governments that seek popular