The Great Drought and Famine of 1523

Date and extent

The gazetteer records a great drought in Lishui in 1523 and then two things immediately after: that people fled north and south, and that people ate one another. The first is a movement of population; the second is the gazetteer's summary of the severity of the famine, given without figures.

世宗嘉靖二年癸未，大旱，南北流移，人相食。遣侍郎席书赈之。 — Kangxi Lishui County Gazetteer, 卷之一·邑纪·世宗嘉靖二年癸未

Translated: In the second year of the Jiajing era there was a great drought; people fled north and south and ate one another. The vice minister Xi Shu was sent to relieve them.

Relief

The response was to send the vice minister Xi Shu to relieve the county. The gazetteer records only the sending of an officer, and gives no figures for money or grain, no method of distribution and no extent of relief.

Consequences

The disaster did not end with that year. The gazetteer records that in the spring and summer of 1524 an epidemic swept Lishui and the dead lay in heaps along the roads; that there was a great drought in 1544 and another in 1545, when people dug lotus roots in Danyang Lake and Shijiu Lake for food. The early Jiajing years are among the periods of densest calamity recorded for Lishui in the gazetteer.

Supporting records at the Nanji and Yingtian prefecture level

There is further testimony for the drought at the level of Nanji (the southern capital region, i.e. Yingtian Prefecture), to which Lishui belonged; it can be read alongside the gazetteer, but none of it can be used to assert conditions inside Lishui itself.

The History of Ming, juan 30, Treatise 6, "Metal and Earth" (Constant Drought), records for 1523 that "the two capitals, Shandong, Henan, Huguang, Jiangxi, and Jiaxing, Datong and Chengdu all suffered drought; the land was laid bare for a thousand li, and corpses and the starving lined the roads." "The two capitals" includes the southern capital region of Yingtian, to which Lishui was attached. The same work, juan 28, Treatise 4, "Water" (Epidemics), records that "in the seventh month of the second year there was a great epidemic at Nanjing, with very many soldiers and civilians dead."

The Jiangnan Tongzhi (Qianlong edition), juan 83, "Food and Money: Remission and Relief", records for 1523 that "Yingtian, Suzhou, Songjiang, Huai'an, Yangzhou, Huizhou and Chizhou and the prefectures and districts of Xu and Chu suffered a great drought," and that in that year "two hundred thousand taels of silver were released from the Grand Treasury and 900,000 shi of grain tribute were commuted for relief."

Both kinds of record take a prefecture or a capital region as their unit; they establish only that there was a genuine drought around Yingtian Prefecture in 1523 and that the court sent relief. The drought and the cannibalism within Lishui itself still rest on the county gazetteer as the only direct record.

Uncertainties

First, cannibalism is the gazetteer's summary phrase, with no figures, dates or places; it is reproduced here without estimating the death toll from it.

Second, the scale and method of Xi Shu's relief are not recorded, and the entry for that year mentions no remission of tax alongside it.

Third, the gazetteer does not say whether the movement of population was into or out of the county, or where people went.

Fourth, the entry for 1545 is printed with a textual correction from "the fourteenth year" to "the twenty-fourth year"; the corrected date is used here.

Fifth, a search across all seven source layers found that the History of Ming's treatise on the Five Phases and the Jiangnan Tongzhi's chapter on relief both record a great drought and relief in the southern capital region and Yingtian Prefecture in 1523, which serves as prefecture-level support; neither is a Lishui-specific record, and no source outside the county gazetteer was found for the drought, the cannibalism or the sending of Xi Shu.