Rats and Plagues in Yunnan

And if you thought Yunnan was only strawberries, bananas and flowers — well, good thing you weren't walking these roads in the nineteenth century. For alongside the highway robbery, the wretched infrastructure, the regional rebellion and the sectarian violence, far worse winds blew through the lanes.

The heights of Yunnan had long sat on a local reservoir of bubonic plague — perhaps a legacy of the Mongols — and when it erupted, in step with the crumbling of the Qing empire, waves of death and panic were sent out across the province, and eventually beyond it, in what is called the "Third Plague", which took the lives of some fifteen million people.

Though the plain explanation available to people of the time saw plagues as a punishment of cosmic make — one that might yet be turned aside by pleading to Guan Yin and other benevolent beings — the mass deaths of poor wretched creatures, rats, stood as an agreed and unmistakable sign of the black blow about to fall on human communities.

Xi Da'unan, a Yunnanese literatus whose life story is lost, put it like this:

Rats dead to the left, rats dead to the right!

When people see a dying rat, it is as if they had seen a leopard. Days after the rats die, people fall — like collapsing walls.

Do not ask how many die each day! The sun is dim, veiled in grief. Three set out on ten steps; two are already dead, blocking the road.

At night, when someone dies, no one dares to weep. When the plague winds blow, the green lamp's flames tremble. Body and spirit, corpse and coffin — sharing one space in the same hut. ... The dead cover the ground; houses lie abandoned. Bare bones crumble to rubble.

If there is no one left to reap the grain in the fields, whom can the government tax?

I would ask to ride up on a celestial dragon... May the earth of the world soak a thousand beds,

so that those who dwell below may rise again, and the Yellow Springs (the world of the dead) turn — into spring rain. . . Xi Da'unan and his household perished in the Third Plague.

May their memory be blessed.