Click to view in larger resolution.Īmong the hundreds of victims of this panic was an itinerant beggar by the name of Chang-ssu, who came from the province of Shantung. The soulstealing panic took place along the country’s eastern coast, between the Yangtze and Beijing.
They also led to one of the strangest outbreaks of panic and rumour known to history.Ĭhina under the Manchus, showing the empire’s growth between 16. Tens of thousands of such forced migrations led inevitably to conflict. By the late 1760s, many peasants were forced to turn to begging to survive, wandering miles from their homes to throw themselves upon the mercy of strangers. For those living at the bottom of the food chain – both metaphorically and literally – starvation was a constant possibility, one that grew ever more starkly real the further one travelled from the rich agricultural floodplains around the Yangtze River. China remained a country of great contrasts: its ruling classes rich beyond the dreams of avarice, its peasants scraping a bare living from the soil. This meant trouble, for it meant that wealth was far from evenly distributed. At its peak, this growth was accelerating at an annual rate in excess of 13%. But it had also grown vastly more crowded political stability, and the introduction of new crops from the Americas, led to a doubling of the population to around 300 million. It had grown larger, richer and more cultured, its borders reaching roughly their modern extent. Under the rule of a strong emperor, Hungli, and a well-established family (the Qing, or Manchu, dynasty), the Middle Kingdom was by then half-way through the longest period of calm in its long history.
Engraving from Mason & Dadley’s voyeuristic classic The Punishments of China (1901).Ĭhina, in the middle of the eighteenth century, was the largest nation in the world – and also, by a distance, the most prosperous. A Chinese prisoner – wearing the long pigtail, or queue, that was mandated for all indigenous subjects of the Celestial Empire – is interrogated by a Qing magistrate.
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