Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World by Gillen D'Arcy Wood Read Free Book Online

problem, hence the explosion of poppy farming in Yunnan from the late 1810s. First, the mountain fields of bean and wheat were converted en masse to opium production. Thereafter, poppy growers made their way brazenly to the central valleys, to colonize the choice arable land of the province. Fast forward a century later, and Yunnan was growing almost nothing but opium, importing most of its rice from Southeast Asia. At this time, ethnic hill tribes from Yunnan, such as the Hmong, began to drift southward into the Mekong delta, to the mountains of modern-day Burma, Thailand, and Laos. With generations of experience in opium farming behind them, they brought with them the seeds and technologies to establish a new global capital of opium production in these remote highlands of the “golden triangle.”
    Thus the Tambora period marks not only the beginning of a complete transformation of Yunnan’s agricultural economy from staplegrains to an opium cash crop but also the first emergence of the modern international illicit drug trade. That this evolution began in the aftermath of the Tambora emergency shows the sinuous correlation that can exist between high-impact climate change events—such as a three-year famine—and social disruption on global scales and centennial time frames.
    As the secretary-general of the National Anti-Opium Association of China reflected in 1935, in the midst of China’s long, tumultuous civil wars following the collapse of the empire in 1911, “the weakening of the race and the rapid increase of social evils can in the last analysis be traced back to their source in opium.” 23 The early twentieth century was a time when China held the dubious honor of exporting over 80% of the world’s narcotics. In the same period, in the onetime Confucian stronghold and Qing-era boom state of Yunnan, 90% of adult males were drug users, half of them addicts. A Western observer gives a graphic account of the human tragedy of opium in early twentieth-century China at the village level:
    The roofs of the houses are dilapidated and full of holes…. No one is selling vegetables in the road, and the one or two shops which the village possessed are closed. In the shadow of the houses a few men and women are lying or squatting—apparently in a stupor. Their faces are drawn and leathery, their eyes glazed and dull…. Even some of the babies the women carry in their arms have the same parched skins and wan, haggard faces. And the cause of all this is opium. 24
    This description of an opium-afflicted community reads like a “Seven Sorrows” poem in the spirit of Li Yuyang. This long-suffering, long-forgotten writer—whose poems appear here for the first time in English—fulfilled his destiny as a Confucian poet of the people in memorializing the Great Yunnan Famine of 1815–18. But he spent the remainder of his life in scholarly seclusion, as if in bitter meditation on the disturbing changes afoot in Yunnan and the national humiliation in store for his beloved China.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    My grateful thanks, first of all, to my editor at Princeton, Ingrid Gnerlich, for her enthusiastic support for this project. She never flinched from the challenge of our highwire crossing between the sciences and humanities and has been a consistent and generous advocate. If our interdisciplinary ambitions have been realized here, others at Princeton University Press likewise share in that success, including Alison Kalett, Eric Henney, Debbie Tegarden, and Jennifer Backer—consummate professionals all.
    At the outset of my Tambora research, indispensable help in grappling with the scientific literature on Tambora came from climatologist and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) coauthor Don Wuebbles and his graduate student Darienne Curio-Sanchez. Other scientists in the fields of volcanology and climatology provided illumination at crucial points, including Michael Schlesinger, Stephen Self, Bob Rauber, and anonymous