Chapter 338: A Final Word on the Natural Disaster Question

In the related works section, there's actually a visual disaster distribution map, titled "Map of Natural Disasters During the Tianqi and Chongzhen Reigns."

The underlying data is likewise based on the "Five-Hundred-Year Atlas of Drought and Flood."

If you're interested, you can click the table of contents and take a look.

1. The droughts and floods did not start in the first year and then simply continue all the way to the seventeenth year of Chongzhen.

They appeared rhythmically, in distinct phases.

Take Shaanxi, for example: what happened next was drought in the first and second years, and then conditions returned to normal.

The early Chongzhen-era uprisings in Shaanxi were more the result of border troops and local bandits joining forces, brought on by the Jisi Crisis and fiscal collapse.

2. It's not that there were no truly great disasters, but their timing came relatively late.

Beginning in the tenth year of Chongzhen, there was a nationwide pattern of drought and flood lasting seven years, striking south and north together.

With ten years to carry out reforms right now, are we afraid we still couldn't solve this problem?

This is precisely why the novel's opening says that 1627 is, in effect, a heaven-sent opening hand.

3. The severity of these disasters was, in fact, amplified by a variety of factors.

First, the impact of war and soldiering — this needs no elaboration.

Second, the disrepair of waterworks — this also needs no explanation.

Third, because of fiscal taxation, harmful policies, and the slow spread of agricultural techniques, fields lay wasted and per-mu yields were low, meaning the Ming's civilian grain production capacity at this time was nowhere near its own limit.

Fourth, the impact of local fiscal resources being stripped away — on this, a few more words can be said.

During the Chongzhen period, a great deal of fiscal and tax reform was actually carried out, roughly in two major directions.

One was the centralization of imperial finances, centered on the Old Levies and the New Levies.

The other was the shifting of local fiscal resources into the central treasury.

The former was tolerable, but the latter had an enormous impact.

Let's not say things like "local funds left in the localities would just be consumed by corrupt officials anyway."

I've consulted a great many historical sources: during this period of the Ming, local granaries genuinely did hold grain reserves.

There may indeed have been some places where the grain in the storehouses was all sold off (which is actually a bit far-fetched — grain is not a very easy thing to embezzle).

But there are also very real, verifiable records of granaries being opened to distribute grain and provide disaster relief.

For example, the granary of Leting County held twenty-three thousand shi.

Local fiscal resources, beyond feeding corrupt officials, were also genuinely and verifiably performing their function.

If this were not the case, among the miscellaneous silver levies collected during the Tianqi reign, there would not have been one item specifically called "leveling-purchase granary grain."

This item required that half of each locality's annual surplus be turned over to the central government.

Moreover, in the second year of Chongzhen, after the Jisi Crisis, Chongzhen did something extremely harsh.

He directly dispatched Censors and imperial commissioners to every region to press for the immediate payment of taxes and grain, and regardless of the circumstances, directly transported the funds and grain from local treasuries and granaries to the capital.

— I don't have the time to look up the exact figure, but I recall it seems to have been a one-time collection of several hundred thousand to nearly a million taels.

This kind of depletion of local finances was a measure of last resort, but it was also a major factor that magnified local disasters.

4. Someone recommended I read the paper "An Analysis of the Impact of a Recurrence of an Extreme Historical Drought Under Current Defense Conditions — Taking the Great Chongzhen Drought of the Ming as an Example."

I've already read it long ago.

The core conclusions of this paper are:

Under current physical geographic and water-engineering conditions, should a drought similar to the Ming Chongzhen Great Drought occur,

the core drought region spanning nine provinces and municipalities would experience an average annual water deficit rate of 21.9% over seven consecutive years, with a maximum of 38.7%.

The average annual grain yield reduction rate would be 27.7%, with a maximum of 39.2%.

However, I delved further into the related materials.

First, the "Chongzhen Great Drought" discussed in the paper refers specifically to the great drought during those seven years from the tenth to the seventeenth year of Chongzhen.

Second, even within this extreme great drought, no single place suffered drought for seven straight years; rather, it occurred in waves, rising here as it subsided there.

Please look at the chart below. Looking only at Shaanxi, it was most severe in the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth years.

By the fifteenth year it had eased, and by the sixteenth and seventeenth years it had returned to normal.

And these records are the records produced under the combined influence of the aforementioned factors — war, waterworks, local finances, and so on.

In ancient times, there was no such data as "this year's rainfall: 200 millimeters."

The recorded degree of drought is an expression of outcome, not an expression of the true degree of water shortage.

Third, this paper is calculating results under "modern conditions."

At first, I understood this to mean: "If even modern society, so advanced, can't handle it, ancient times must have been far worse."

Upon careful study, I found it's not entirely so.

In ancient times, because conditions were poor, farmland was all distributed along watercourses.

In modern times, however, thanks to reservoirs, water-engineering projects, and the like, farmland distribution has achieved cultivation in "zones that were harsh in ancient times."

Therefore, I think a more appropriate interpretation is:

"Modern technology is more advanced, giving it an advantage over ancient times in coping with drought."

"But at the same time, because of water-engineering projects and technological factors, the scope of modern farmland is broader, and cultivation has also been carried out in certain areas where ancient water conditions were poor."

With these two offsetting each other, I still acknowledge this is a very serious matter, but I do not think it is reasonable to use this paper as a direct stand-in for the Ming dynasty's situation.

I will adopt these numerical values, but I estimate they will need to be adjusted with a conversion factor.

5. Finally, the primary cause of the Ming dynasty's collapse.

Corrupt officials, natural disasters, the Later Jin, fiscal taxation, and so on... in truth, any cause can be cited.

I have no interest in trying to distinguish what was the primary cause and what was secondary.

I only care about what the historical facts actually were.

What actions must the protagonist take, given what he knows and the historical facts he faces, in order to change history?

That is why the latest chapter gave rise to this theory that "Chongzhen had it really hard too."

Because when I try to imagine myself in his place — without memories of later ages, how would I know Shaanxi was going to suffer a great drought?

Even if a drought struck in the first year of Yongchang, how would I know it would keep going the next year?

And even when the second year arrived, if I saw the drought had let up, I'd breathe a sigh of relief and turn my attention to other matters.

Who could have guessed that the moment the tenth year of Chongzhen arrived, Heaven, seeing that my Great Ming still seemed to have a breath of life left, would hit me square in the face — drought in the north, flood in the south — and give me a full-body massage?

Don't think I've written the protagonist as a bit of a simpleton, not knowing this and not knowing that (a replica of myself before I wrote this book, because back then I genuinely didn't know).

But as long as he knows the broad outline, knows that the drought was utterly terrifying, and knows that Shaanxi was the source of everything —

that in itself is already an extraordinary golden finger.

Facing a boss for the first time, versus having watched other streamers fight the boss, or even having studied some guides beforehand — the difficulty is ultimately not the same.

Stripping away all the lengthy exposition above, the natural disasters of the late Ming really come down to two possibilities:

1. Within the Ming system, with a healthy bureaucracy, pushing existing resources to their limit (no opening of the seas, no outward expansion, no tech tree), the problem could be solved.

2. Opening the seas, outward expansion, and climbing the tech tree are absolutely necessary to solve it.

My inclination is toward the first.

Why? Please look at the six images below.

Disasters were likewise raging all across the country.

Shaanxi in particular suffered three consecutive years of drought (and before the period covered by these six images, Shaanxi had just barely endured a two-year drought and had only a single year to recover).

What time period is this?

— The thirteenth to the eighteenth year of Wanli.

The disasters of the Chongzhen period had in fact already occurred once before, during Wanli — only their intensity was not as great.

History, you see, is a little girl who can be dressed up however one pleases.

Sometimes, after reading too many academic papers, I can even detect how the author, when the historical sources are insufficient, selectively ignores and selectively trims in order to make the argument they are presenting seem complete and coherent.

(Though this is rare; it mostly appears in master's theses. I'm not mocking them — my own thesis back then was cobbled together as a makeshift effort too, and I understand perfectly. It's just that when I'm researching and run into this kind of paper, it's agonizing, and easy to get led down the wrong path.)

If academic papers are like this, the "fabricated historians" on the internet are even more so.

They care only about whether their expression of history can prove their own stance and attract the corresponding traffic.

Who would truly care about the truth of history?