Northern Chinese Famine (1876-1879): Drought and Starvation

The Northern Chinese Famine of 1876–1879 was one of the deadliest famines in recorded history. Years of drought destroyed harvests across five northern provinces of Qing China, and an estimated 9–13 million people died of starvation and disease, most of them in Shanxi and Henan. The disaster drew some of the first large-scale international relief efforts in China and reshaped debates about the Qing state’s ability to protect its people.

Background: drought and a weakened state

Northern China depended on rain-fed wheat and millet. From 1876 the rains largely failed across the North China Plain and the Loess Plateau, and the drought continued in many areas into 1878. Climate historians link it to an exceptionally strong El Niño event that also caused catastrophic drought and famine in India and northeastern Brazil in the same years.

The Qing dynasty was poorly placed to respond. The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) and the Nian and other uprisings had devastated the empire’s finances and killed millions. The state granary system, which in the eighteenth century had stored grain against bad years, had decayed. Resources were also being spent on the reconquest of Xinjiang in the far west.

Geography made matters worse. Shanxi is a mountainous province reachable from the coast only by narrow roads and mountain tracks. There were no railways, and grain had to be moved by cart, pack animal or on people’s backs.

Course of the famine

Crops failed first in parts of Shandong and Zhili in 1876. In 1877, the year of Dingchou in the Chinese calendar, the drought was at its most severe in Shanxi and Henan. Grain prices rose many times over, and people ate seed grain, chaff, tree bark, roots and earth.

Officials and foreign observers reported scenes of extreme suffering: villages emptied by death and flight, families selling children and women, and bodies left unburied. Contemporary official reports and gazetteers also recorded cases of cannibalism. Typhus and other diseases followed hunger, killing relief workers as well as famine victims.

Millions of refugees left the worst-hit areas. Rain returned to parts of the north in 1878, but recovery was slow because farmers had eaten or sold their seed, tools and draught animals. By 1879 harvests were improving in most areas, although hunger and disease lingered in the poorest districts for some time afterwards.

Life in the famine districts

For ordinary families the famine unfolded slowly and then catastrophically. Households first sold livestock, furniture and land, often at a fraction of their value, to buy grain at soaring prices. When those resources were gone, families broke apart: men left in search of work or food, and many women and children were sold to traders who took them to other provinces.

Relief officials and missionaries described roads lined with the dying, deserted villages, and towns where the gates were closed to keep starving refugees out. Pits were dug for mass burials when individual graves became impossible. In parts of Shanxi whole lineages died out, and local gazetteers written decades later still recorded the famine as the defining catastrophe of the century.

Women and girls suffered particular hardship. The trafficking of women was so widespread that relief committees from Jiangnan made rescuing and ransoming them one of their aims, and some officials tried to forbid sales of people across provincial borders.

Relief efforts

The Qing court remitted taxes, released grain from what stores remained, opened soup kitchens, sold official titles to raise funds and allowed relief grain to move without internal transit duties. Zeng Guoquan, governor of Shanxi, and Li Hongzhang, governor-general of Zhili, were among the senior officials who organised the response. Their efforts saved many lives but were overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster and hampered by transport problems and, in places, corruption.

A striking feature of the famine was the role of private Chinese philanthropy. Merchants and gentry in the prosperous Jiangnan region around Suzhou and Shanghai organised relief committees and raised large sums. Activists produced illustrated appeals, later known in English as “Pictures to Draw Tears from Iron”, and the new Shanghai newspaper Shenbao reported extensively on the crisis.

Foreign missionaries were also active. The Welsh Baptist Timothy Richard distributed relief in Shandong and then Shanxi, and Protestant and Catholic missionaries worked alongside him. In 1878 a China Famine Relief Fund in Shanghai collected donations from foreign residents and from Britain and the United States. Foreign aid was modest compared with official and Chinese private relief, but it was one of the first international humanitarian campaigns for China.

By the numbers

Why relief fell short

Even where money existed, moving grain to the interior was the central problem. Grain bought in the south or imported through Tianjin had to travel hundreds of kilometres inland. Carts and animals were scarce because draught animals had been eaten or sold, and the mountain roads into Shanxi were jammed with traffic. Relief shipments could take months to arrive, and transport costs often exceeded the price of the grain itself.

Information also travelled slowly. Local officials sometimes under-reported the crisis, either to avoid blame or because tax collection depended on it, and the court in Beijing debated priorities while the death toll rose. The famine therefore became a frequently cited example of how distance, poor infrastructure and limited administrative capacity could turn drought into catastrophe.

Consequences

The famine permanently reduced the population of Shanxi and parts of Henan, and land lay abandoned for years. The government later encouraged migration from more crowded provinces to resettle it.

The disaster fed into debates about China’s future. Some Chinese reformers and foreign observers argued that railways, modern communications and new technology could prevent such catastrophes, giving support to the Self-Strengthening Movement. Timothy Richard became an influential advocate of reform in the following decades.

Historians have also noted that contemporaries blamed the spread of opium poppy cultivation in Shanxi for reducing land under grain, a factor still debated today.

Comparisons and interpretations

The famine is often compared with the Great Irish Famine and with the Indian famine of 1876–1878, which together form part of a wave of deadly late-nineteenth-century famines. Mike Davis has argued that global climate shocks combined with imperialism and market integration to make these famines so deadly. Other scholars place more emphasis on internal factors such as the decline of the Qing granary system and the cost of mid-century wars.

Timeline

• 1876: Drought causes harvest failures in Shandong and Zhili.
• 1877: The famine reaches its height in Shanxi and Henan.
• 1877–1878: Timothy Richard and other missionaries distribute relief in Shandong and Shanxi.
• 1878: Jiangnan relief committees and the China Famine Relief Fund collect donations; illustrated appeals circulate.
• 1878: Rain returns to parts of northern China, but disease and hunger continue.
• 1879: Harvests recover in most areas; the famine ends.

Why it matters

The Northern Chinese Famine killed more people than almost any natural disaster of the nineteenth century. It exposed the weakness of the late Qing state, stimulated new kinds of Chinese and international charity, and remains a key case in the study of how climate shocks, politics and poverty combine to produce famine.