Discussion Post 6: Skilton and Edgerton-Tarpley

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qihuang (the Incredible Famine of 1877–78), resulted in the death of roughly
ten million of North China’s 108 million people. In the formerly prosper-
ous Shanxi province, where mountainous terrain and transportation prob-
lems made famine relief work especially difficult, at least five million of
the province’s roughly fifteen million inhabitants either starved to death
or fled.2

As one section of a larger project examining Chinese cultural responses
to and descriptions of famine, this article introduces images of women
that became “icons of starvation” that male observers of the disaster in-
voked repeatedly. I explore why it was women more often than men or
children who signified the suffering and social disorder brought by the
North China Famine, and ask to what extent feminized famine images
shaped the range of responses that was expected of Chinese daughters,
wives, and mothers during the crisis.

Perhaps because the image of innocent human beings starving to death
is so disturbing, a famine provides a particularly vivid window through
which to view a culture’s response to disaster. As historian Paul Greenough
has noted, “disasters such as floods and famines activate discussion of the
culture’s ultimate values, [and] concepts of good and bad, legitimate and
illegitimate.”3 Although a major famine tests and stretches the values and
assumptions of any society, the images used to describe a famine and the
expectations about how a famine should be responded to may vary from
culture to culture. The cross-cultural studies of trauma that Arthur and
Joan Kleinman conducted, for example, show that while suffering is a
universal and defining human experience, the meanings and modes in
which that experience is expressed are greatly diverse.4

Recent scholarship on famines in Qing China has focused primarily
on the Qing state’s impressive famine-relief bureaucracy rather than on
cultural responses to and descriptions of famine.5 In contrast, the Great
Irish Famine of 1845–1849 has evoked a wealth of gendered and cultural
studies of famine. In her work on literary representations of the Great Irish
Famine and the twentieth-century Bengali famine, for example, Margaret
Kelleher has demonstrated that male observers engaged in a “feminiza-
tion of famine” by habitually portraying individual famine victims as fe-
male, thus inviting spectators to identify with a male gaze objectifying a
female subject. Kelleher judged that the feminized images of starvation
used repeatedly in Irish famine accounts, such as a dying mother offering
a dry breast to her already dead baby, signify the failure of “primal shel-
ter” and sustenance, and thus express the famine’s deepest horror.6

Observers of the North China Famine also used images of famished
women to signify deep anxiety about the causes and possible consequences
of such a massive famine. I begin by weighing the “exchange entitlements”

KATHRYN EDGERTON-TARPLEY2004 121

held by the many mothers, wives, and daughters introduced in famine
morality plays from the 1870s. I ask what these famine narratives tell us
about Confucian definitions of moral and immoral responses to famine,
and how such definitions affected the choices available to Chinese women
of different generations. Selling female family members to human traders
was sometimes the least immoral of several terrible choices facing a starv-
ing family, and famine accounts from the 1870s are filled with depictions of
sold women. The second section of this article explores local-level discus-
sions of the sale of wives and daughters, which portray famished women
as either defenders or destroyers of the Confucian moral order during a
time of great uncertainty. Then, in an attempt to view the famine’s effect
on gender and family dynamics through sources not so overwhelmingly
shaped by Confucian ideals of filial piety and female chastity, my last sec-
tion examines how famine and gender issues are addressed in demographic
research and in foreign missionary observations of the traffic in women.

Gender, Generation, and the Moral Economy of Families During
Famine

Chinese famine texts from the “Incredible Famine” abound with im-
ages of elderly mothers fed by filial sons, daughters-in-law in danger of
being eaten by family members, shameless young women who sold their
bodies to survive, self-sacrificing women who committed suicide in order
to preserve their chastity or save others, and victimized women who were
sold to human traders from South China. Such images raise the possibil-
ity that Chinese women at different stages of the life course had radically
different options open to them during the disaster. In her work on theo-
rizing Chinese women, historian Tani Barlow asserts that in late imperial
China there was no transcendent category of “generic woman.” Instead, a
person became recognizably female by acting within the boundaries of
kinship structures. Funu (kinswomen) were seen as nu (daughters), fu
(wives), and mu (mothers) instead of transcendent agents called “women.”7

In Chinese Feminities, Chinese Masculinities, Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Susan
Brownell also present a strong case for the realization that in pre-twenti-
eth-century China, social gender roles often trumped anatomical sex. “In
Chinese gender symbolism, sex-linked symbols are often secondary to
other, more fundamental principles of moral and social life,” they explain.
Anatomical sex was often viewed as simply one principle among many—
including kinship, generation, age, and class—that determined a person’s
status in the Chinese family and society.8

A vivid famine illustration published in Shanghai during the disaster
provides an example of how powerfully age and generation shaped a

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Chinese woman’s claim to scarce household resources during the famine.
This illustration is from a compilation of woodblock print illustrations
published in 1879 by Shanghai- and Suzhou-based merchant philanthro-
pists who hoped that the disturbing pictures would inspire other wealthy
Chinese to send aid to the starving north. “A Hungry Parent is Dying:
About to Kill the Daughter, the Knife Falls” depicts a small room with two
straw beds and three ragged people in it. In one bed sits an elderly woman,
hand supporting her haggard cheek, hair in a bun, clothing tattered and
patched. A frail young daughter rests under the ragged canopy of the sec-
ond bed. Her gaunt father approaches her bed with a knife, but the knife
drops from his hand. (Figure 1). The rhythmic accompanying text is chilling:

The old mother is too hungry to get up; the little daughter is too
hungry to make a sound. If the daughter dies, it is possible to
bear another; if the mother dies, she can never live again. The old
mother’s life is precious; the daughter’s life is light.
From this sprouted the intention to preserve one life by killing
the other.
Holding the knife straight ahead, his heart pounds.
His hand trembles, the knife falls and the sound clangs.
His own flesh, itself in pain; tears of blood fall.
How could the old woman wish this cup of broth?!
The old man cannot bear to take his child and boil her.
So, he sends her to the market, to exchange her for one or two
sheng of grain.9

Although the two females in this story belonged to the same family, their
respective claims to the family’s food supply were so unequal that a filial
son could contemplate killing his daughter in order to feed his mother.

This type of famine morality play demonstrates how Confucian ide-
als and the Chinese family system during the late imperial period shaped
what economist Amartya Sen has termed “exchange entitlement relations”
among family members during the famine. Sen’s path-breaking work on
famine causation asserts that during most famines people starve not be-
cause there is no food available, but because their “exchange entitlements,”
which include labor power, goods, and property, can no longer purchase
enough food to ensure survival.10 Scholars of the Irish famine have broad-
ened Sen’s class-based model in order to ask how the Irish family struc-
ture influenced which members of a family unit might be more or less
likely to be “thrown out of the lifeboat” when it became clear that an equal
sharing of the burden of hunger would doom the entire family.11

The Chinese family system had a powerful influence on the options
available to Chinese women in famine-stricken areas. In late imperial

KATHRYN EDGERTON-TARPLEY2004 123

China, the majority of women were part of a joint family system in which
women left their natal families and married into their husbands’ families,
often at a young age. Kinship in Chinese families was passed down the
male descent line from a common ancestor, and sons were generally pre-
ferred over daughters because they carried out the rituals for ancestor
worship, continued the family name, and were expected to live with and
support their aging parents. Daughters, however, were transient mem-
bers of their natal families. They were expected to marry into another fam-
ily, serve their parents-in-law, and bear sons for their husbands’ family
line.12 It was not until a young wife bore a son that she could begin to
build up what anthropologist Margery Wolf has termed a “uterine fam-
ily,” or “a small personal circle of security in the midst of the alien world
of her husband’s family.” Only if a woman bore at least one surviving son
and succeeded in securing his loyalty could she hope to enjoy a gradual
accretion of power and influence in the household. Women thus went to
great lengths to foster powerful bonds with their sons.13

Figure 1: “A Starving Parent Approaches Death; about to Kill the Daughter, the
Knife Falls.” Courtesy of the Shanghai Library.

JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY124

Sons and Mothers

According to famine narratives recorded in local gazetteers and fam-
ily handbooks from Shanxi, the province most ravaged by the famine, the
important position of the mother-son relationship in the Chinese family
system gave mothers with grown sons an edge during a time of crisis.
County gazetteers are rife with detailed stories about sons who sacrificed
their wives and children and sometimes even their own lives in order to
feed elderly mothers. A gazetteer from southern Shanxi’s Yishi County
(1880), for example, introduces a filial son named Wu Jiuren who aban-
doned his wife and carried his mother on his back in order to keep her
alive by escaping to another area during the 1877 famine. People called
him extremely filial.14

The filial piety section of a Quwo County gazetteer (1880) introduces
a grown son who had to choose between his stepmother and his children
during the famine. Ma Kongzhao is described as a filial son who was very
good to his stepmother after his father died. When the Dingwu famine
struck, the family was poor and lacked food; Ma Kongzhao exchanged his
property and sold goods for food in order to take care of his mother.15 She,
however, insisted on sharing her food with Ma’s children, which worried
Ma. After that, whenever he returned from the market, he left half the
food with an old neighbor woman, and asked her to invite his mother
over to eat the food so that she could eat all of it by herself. Ma and his
wife ate nothing but chaff and scraps each day, but his mother was well
fed. In the end Ma grew too weak, and he died.16

The final biography given in the filial piety section of the Quwo County
gazetteer is entitled “The Beggar Son,” and both the son and his mother
are unnamed. According to this story, during the North China disaster starved
corpses littered the roads, and a beggar son and his mother begged for food
from the Zhang family. The mother’s face was greenish, but the son al-
ready had swollen muscles and looked ready to be buried. The master of the
Zhang household pitied them and divided a flat cake of wheat for the son
to eat, but the son staunchly refused to take a bite until after his mother had
eaten more than half the cake. When master Zhang expressed surprise that
a beggar son would show such filial behavior, the mother wept and said: “We
were not beggars in the beginning. My son is starving, but up until today,
when he gets food, he never eats first. Even now, during this time of death,
he still persists in this.” The master sighed and said, “This is a filial son!”
After a few days, he heard that the son had died in the marketplace.17

These late-Qing depictions of how Confucian familial ethics defined
moral responses to famine echo an older and more famous morality play
introduced in the popular Chinese classic Ershisi xiao (Twenty-Four Ex-

KATHRYN EDGERTON-TARPLEY2004 125

amples of Filial Piety), which was first compiled during the Yuan dynasty
(1279–1368), and reprinted in illustrated versions throughout the Ming
and Qing dynasties. One story, entitled “Guoju Buries His son and Heaven
Blesses Him with Gold,” demonstrates, once again, that generation could
take primacy over gender in times of disaster. Readers are introduced to
Guoju, who supposedly lived in Henan during the Han period. Guoju
had a very filial heart, so after his father died he treated his mother with
respect, fed her well, and made her happy. Guoju’s wife was also a model
daughter-in-law, and all those who saw the couple proclaimed them a
“wonderful son and a wonderful daughter-in-law.”18

Then famine struck. Prices rose without respite until rice became as
precious as pearls. Guoju and his wife were reduced to eating weeds and
miscellaneous chaff to assuage their hunger. Despite this perilous situa-
tion, Guoju continued to give his mother food, drink, and even the delica-
cies enjoyed by the elderly. At that time, Guoju’s only son was three years
old. At each meal Guoju and his wife divided the food between their old
mother and their little son, but it was not sufficient. Finally, Guoju said to
his wife: “It’s a famine year and grain is expensive. My mother is already
old. We must do our best to take care of her, but I fear it won’t be enough.
Now our son takes part of mother’s food, so mother cannot eat her fill. It’s
better that we bury our son in order to take care of mother. If mother dies,
we can never have another mother. If our son dies, we can bear another.
Aside from this, there’s no other way.”

Guoju’s wife agreed, and the couple carried their son outside. Guoju
took a shovel in hand and began to dig a hole in the ground. Illustrated
versions of the story published in the late-Qing period showed Guoju dig-
ging a large hole outside his home, while his wife stood behind him anx-
iously, holding their little boy in her arms and peering over her husband’s
shoulder as the hole deepened. Fortunately, as Guoju dug the hole he dis-
covered a pan of gold that had been buried in the earth. On top of the gold
read the words, “Heaven rewards the filial son Guoju.” Guoju faced the
heavens and kowtowed his thanks. Then he and his wife, cradling their
spared son, returned to the house.19

The apocryphal tale of Guoju’s impossible choice, and the Shanghai
illustration’s depiction of a famished son forced to choose between his
mother and his daughter during the Guangxu 3 (1877)20 disaster, define a
quintessential Confucian response to the hideous moral choices raised by
a major famine. In both cases, the deep obligation the grown son felt for
his mother was captured by the statement: “If my child dies, we can bear
another; if mother dies, she can never come back to life.” And in both
scenarios, the filial son proved willing to sacrifice his child in order to
fulfill his deep obligation to his starving mother.21

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The Confucian roots of the moral decisions made by Guoju, Ma
Kongzhao, the beggar son, and the grown son in the Shanghai illustration are
brought into clear relief by the strikingly different definition of the proper
moral response to famine found in a famous famine story set in nineteenth-
century Ireland rather than late-Qing China. This morality play, Liam
O’Flaherty’s novel Famine, was published fifty years after the North China
Famine and is considered the most famous Irish famine text of the twentieth
century.22 Famine tells the story of the trials suffered by three generations of
the Kilmartin family during the Great Irish Famine of 1845–1849. Just as Guoju,
his wife, and little son lived with and took care of Guoju’s elderly mother,
so Martin and Mary Kilmartin and their baby son lived in a small dark hut
with Martin’s elderly parents and survived mainly on a small potato crop.23

O’Flaherty’s novel opens with the arrival of the potato blight. When
the disease destroys the Kilmartin’s harvest for a second consecutive year,
the family begins to starve. Mary’s young husband, Martin, is forced to
flee for his life due to his participation in an anti-landlord riot, and Mary
is left to care for her baby son, her own mother, and Martin’s aging par-
ents. Toward the end of the novel, the increasingly desperate Mary
Kilmartin realizes that it is impossible for all members of the family to
survive on what little food is left. While Guoju and his wife decide to
sacrifice their child in order to feed Guoju’s mother, Mary decides to aban-
don her elderly mother and her parents-in-law to their doom in order to
flee to America with her fugitive husband and their baby.

When Mary’s secret plan to flee to America becomes known, her sev-
enty-one-year-old father-in-law Brian confronts her angrily, shouting: “Was
that the plan you had? To desert us? Is that what you’re up to?” Mary’s
heated reply destroys any vestige of filial piety, and would thus be decid-
edly immoral in the Chinese context. Cries Mary, “You’d rather leave him
[Brian’s son, her husband] on his keeping until they find him and hang
him, I suppose. . . . Is that the kind of father you are? . . . You only think of
yourself, and you with only a few years to live. We are young. We have
our lives before us.” Rather than arguing further, the old man stops speak-
ing and lowers his glance in the fury of his daughter-in-law. “God forgive
me,” he says. “I didn’t think of it that way. You are right, daughter.”24 The
novel ends with Mary, her husband, and baby reunited on an emigrant
ship, while back home Mary’s elderly father-in-law falls while attempting
to dig a grave for his starved wife. He dies, abandoned by all but his howl-
ing dog.

The authors of both Famine and “Guoju Buries his Son” make it clear
that their protagonists are basically moral people who have been placed
in an impossible situation where there is no decision that will allow ev-
eryone in the family to survive. They show Guoju and Mary struggling to

KATHRYN EDGERTON-TARPLEY2004 127

feed both their young child and their elderly parent, but eventually realiz-
ing that an agonizing decision must be made before all starve together.
The main purpose of these texts is to bring home the horror of famine or
to highlight the filial behavior of sons rather than to sanction the aban-
donment of either elderly parents or young children. Nevertheless, these
cross-cultural morality plays about the impossible choices brought by fam-
ine demonstrate that what is defined as the least immoral of several ter-
rible options in one culture may be radically different from the morally
sanctioned choice of a different culture.

As famine texts from the North China disaster make clear, due to the
Confucian emphasis on the importance of filial piety, a grown son’s devo-
tion and obligation to his parents, particularly his mother, was expected
to outweigh the emotional ties he might feel for his wife or children. Ac-
cording to such morality plays, elderly mothers with grown sons had a
formidable claim to a household’s scarce resources during the “Incredible
Famine.”

Daughters in Danger

In contrast to elderly mothers, young daughters and newly married
daughters-in-law appear to have had a comparatively weak claim to a
family’s food supply during the famine. Oral famine folklore from con-
temporary Shanxi province and local-level famine texts written during or
shortly after the disaster place young daughters in a precarious position
during times of famine.

Four of the fifty-one local historians and elderly villagers I interviewed
during my research trip through ten counties of southern Shanxi in 2001,
for example, repeated different versions of what is perhaps the same basic
parable about a young woman’s powerless position in the family. Accord-
ing to the story, during the 1877 famine, a newly married girl discovered
that her mother-in-law or father-in-law wanted to eat her. She fled back to
her natal family in a panic and begged for help. Upon learning of her
plight, her father or mother replied: “If anyone has the right to eat you,
WE do, they don’t!” The daughter, in danger from both her own parents
and her husband’s parents, then took to the roads in despair.25

Written accounts of the North China Famine also place young women
alone on the dangerous roads, although in the textual sources daughters
and daughters-in-law have been abandoned or sold rather than literally
consumed. Girls wandering the roads often ended up with human trad-
ers from wealthier areas. “Young women had no one to take care of them,
so finally merchants from other areas came here and collected and sold
them,” explained the author of an essay in a Yonghe County gazetteer.

JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY128

“Beautiful women went for less than one thousand cash, and less beauti-
ful ones weren’t worth one cent.”26 Other gazetteer essays and stele in-
scriptions reported that young girls of seventeen or eighteen were not
worth more than a string of coins, and that girls as young as fifteen or
sixteen were out on the roads, willingly following whoever would offer
them food.27

According to the Confucian ideal of filial piety, generation trumped
gender during times of disaster as well as in more normal situations. Thus,
according to famine morality plays from the North China disaster, a
person’s access to household resources during a famine was determined
more by his or her age and status within the family than by his or her
anatomical sex. While local famine texts describe elderly mothers with
grown sons as persons who possessed a powerful claim to scarce resources
during the famine, these same texts place unmarried daughters and young
daughters-in-law in an extremely insecure position during the disaster.

Touchstones of the Moral Order

The Woman on the Roadside: Wayward Wives

In addition to shedding light on Confucian definitions of how ex-
change entitlement relations among family members should operate dur-
ing a famine, images of starving women were used to signify anxiety about
the causes and possible consequences of the disaster. Male members of
the local elite in famine-stricken Shanxi who wrote famine accounts gen-
erally portrayed famished women as either defenders or destroyers of the
Confucian moral order during a time of great upheaval.

Such local literati frequently identified the extravagant habits of
women as one of the offenses that angered heaven and brought about the
drought. Han Zhonglin’s piece in the “Literary Pursuits” section of a
Qinyuan County gazetteer, for example, draws clear connections between
female extravagance and the arrival of the disaster. Han wrote that be-
cause the people of Qinyuan County valued “the evil customs of extrava-
gance” over “industriousness and good traditions,” they brought the wrath
of heaven upon themselves. His list of vices is clearly gendered. Even fami-
lies that owned only a few mu of barren land insisted on buying silk cloth-
ing and gold jewelry for the women during weddings, he complained,
and far worse, Qin area women had neglected to spin and weave. Other
local women had added insult to injury by engaging in unfilial behavior
such as having sex with their fathers-in-law. It was impossible for such
people to avoid disaster, he said. Han concluded that if each class of people
became industrious and frugal, and taught the women in their families to

KATHRYN EDGERTON-TARPLEY2004 129

eschew bad habits, spend their time spinning and weaving, and act in a
morally upright manner, then the people would be able to survive future
famine years.28

Han Zhonglin’s assertion that female misbehavior was at the root of
the drought disaster echoes traditional Chinese attitudes that viewed
women, supposedly the weak and immoral sex, as “both the cause and
the victim of great catastrophes.”29 From Queen Possu, whose refusal to
smile was blamed for provoking King Yu to play tricks that eventually
resulted in the fall of the Eastern Zhou dynasty, to Yang Guifei, whose
legendary beauty is said to have distracted a Tang emperor from issues of
governance at a critical time, women were generally held responsible for
dynastic catastrophes in traditional historical works.30 Implicit in many of
these stories about women bringing about the fall of a dynasty is the be-
lief that women have great potential power, and that their power can af-
fect nature and society in dangerous ways if it is not controlled.31 After a
disaster on the scale of the North China Famine, then, it is not surprising
that some local literati traced the locus of the disaster back to women.

Numerous local-level sources repeated discussions of the role women
had played in calling down the disaster. In his lengthy famine lament en-
titled “Huangnian ge” (Song of Famine), a local observer from Southern
Shanxi’s Xie County identified several behaviors that he believed had an-
gered Heaven and brought about the famine.32 Although this author, sur-
named Liu, included unfilial sons, opium addicts, and wealthy merchants
in his critique, he reserved his harshest censure for wayward women. Af-
ter lambasting women who wore immodest clothing, wasted food, and
continued to behave extravagantly in spite of the famine, he wrote: “If
they don’t change, I fear they’ll offend Heaven and receive punishment
for their misdeeds. . . . In this life will come the spread of plague and
disease; in the land of the dead they will have to enter the pot of boiling
oil and climb the mountain of knives.”33

Liu was particularly critical of women who were willing to sell them-
selves in order to survive. After the famine years one could not marry for
a hundred pieces of gold, he observed, but during the disaster women
were cheap. He described young women who, bereft of all propriety,
grabbed hold of men as they passed and begged them for help. Others
were faulted for following one man after another in an effort to survive.
“I’ve seen many a young woman make multiple matches,” he wrote. “First
she’s matched with Zhang, then she’s matched with Li. She has no
shame.”34

Liu’s famine song includes a haunting depiction of an abandoned
woman standing along the road begging each passing man to take her in
as a wife, concubine, or servant. The woman’s lament is strikingly similar

JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY130

to one quoted in my introduction, and may have stemmed from a famine
folk song popular in southwestern Shanxi during the disaster. Cried the
woman in Liu’s text:

I lack a husband, and I’m seeking a good match.
Whichever wealthy household will take pity on me, I’m willing
to marry and serve you on the bed. I’ll be your wife or your ser-
vant—I’m fully willing. Even if you make me your scullery maid
or slave-girl, I’m not afraid. . . .
I can do both rough and elegant work. If we discuss age, this year
I’m twenty-three years old.
Each day I’ll only drink two bowls of noodle-soup broth.
I won’t eat buns; I’ll just drink broth and feel happy.
I won’t eat on the sly, I won’t go wandering around; I’ll just stay
and watch the house.
I’ll produce a fine child to stand before you.35

Certainly the image of the desperate young woman in this account
serves to move the reader. As she cries out to each passing gentleman, she
allows readers to glimpse the individual experience of the broad social
phenomenon of famine. But there is an unsettling, threatening quality about
the woman on the roadside as well. Since a young woman was expected
to remain in the protected domestic sphere of her parents’ or husband’s
home, her mere presence out on the public roads implies the breakdown
of families and the traditional moral order. Her determination to arrange
a match for herself rather than rely on a matchmaker also would have
been shocking to late-Qing readers. Liu accuses the women on the road-
side of shamelessness, and tries to assure his [male] readers that such bra-
zen behavior would not lead to salvation—the women’s pleas “fall on
deaf ears.” By leaving her home and wandering the public roads calling
out to strange men in an effort to arrange her own match, then, the woman
by the roadside transgressed the proper boundaries for a Chinese woman,
and thus presented a threat to the Confucian order.

Perhaps most disturbing of all to male gatekeepers of the moral or-
der, while the woman on the roadside has clearly lost all moral value in
Liu’s eyes, at the same time her actions demonstrate that she is acutely
aware that she has potential market value during the disaster, more mar-
ket value, in fact, than her male counterparts. When famished women
decided to sell themselves rather than starve to death, they embodied the
destructive effect the famine had on female chastity, an all-important vir-
tue in late imperial China. The women selling themselves along the road
had clearly rejected the Neo-Confucian assertion that “to die of hunger is
very small matter, to lose chastity is a very grave matter.”36 In the eyes of
such local literati as Liu, their unchaste behavior signified both familial

KATHRYN EDGERTON-TARPLEY2004 131

breakdown and the type of moral degradation that local observers be-
lieved had called down Heaven’s wrath in the first place.

Virtuous Widows: Chastity and Suicide in Famine Texts

If the image of women leaving their homes and taking to the roads in
order to survive epitomized the dangerous and destructive nature of fam-
ine, images of virtuous women who starved to death in their homes rather
than compromise their chastity provided reassuring evidence that famine
could not completely undermine Confucian ethics and the Chinese family
structure. After condemning the woman on the roadside and other women
who sold themselves in exchange for food for their lack of shame, Liu
proposed a more “virtuous,” if deadly, alternative. “There are also those
chaste-martyr women who keep themselves pure,” he wrote. “Willing to
starve to death rather than lose their chastity, they hang themselves on a
cross beam.” Liu then assured readers that these virtuous women would
both avoid shame in the present life and reap rich rewards in the next life.
“The chaste-martyr woman is reborn as a noble official in the next life,” he
concluded, “but the name of the shameless woman passes on a stench to
countless generations.”37

During the first decade after the North China Famine, the editors of
several Shanxi Province county gazetteers collected and published accounts
of women who placed Confucian values such as filial piety, chastity, and
self-sacrifice above survival. Such accounts demonstrate how the virtues
expected from women in ordinary times shaped and defined moral and
immoral responses to the horror of mass starvation. The “Encountering
Famine” [zaohuang] section of a Jishan County gazetteer published nearly
a decade after the famine provides a particularly rich discussion of virtu-
ous women during the disaster. It recorded the names and exemplary be-
havior of twenty-six women who either starved to death or committed
suicide during the famine in order to preserve their chastity or save an-
other family member. Ma Shichang’s widow, Jie Shi, for example, was left
widowed and childless at age twenty-six.38 She was reasonably well off,
and others tried to persuade her to marry again, but she only wept in
reply. When the 1877 disaster struck, Jie Shi shut her door and did not go
out of her house at all. When her neighbors went to check on her after
several days, she had already starved to death rather than remarry.39 Like-
wise, when the famine struck Jishan County, Yang Shanlin’s widow, Chen
Shi, and her eight-year-old daughter had no way to survive, so they wept
and hung themselves rather than compromise their virtue. Numerous
additional women were commended for either hanging or drowning them-
selves rather than selling their bodies in order to survive.40

JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY132

The decision to starve or commit suicide during the famine rather
than compromise one’s chastity was part of a broad “cult of widow chas-
tity,” which reached its high point in the Qing dynasty. Early Qing emper-
ors launched aggressive “moral education” campaigns that attempted to
promote Confucian models of behavior by, among other things, locating
and honoring chaste commoner widows as well as their counterparts from
elite families. During the eighteenth century, the numbers of chaste widow
biographies printed in local gazetteers rose dramatically, as did the num-
ber of monumental arches built to honor virtuous women. By the mid-
nineteenth century, honoring chaste widows had become an important
expression of family status for both local gentry and upwardly mobile
commoner families.41

As historians of Qing China have demonstrated, the rapid economic
growth, increasing commercialization, and unsettling geographic and so-
cial mobility that characterized mid-Qing China produced a general anxi-
ety about the blurring of boundaries between literati and merchant, or
respectable and mean. As that debate extended to a concern with the
boundaries between “polluted” and “pure” women, the importance of
female chastity as a marker of family honor and social position became
more pronounced. In the high-Qing context, explains historian Janet M.
Theiss, “the virtue of women—including not only sexual chastity but also
modesty, obedience to family superiors and propriety in manners, speech,
and dress—became a touchstone of social quality, moral refinement, and
cultural identity.”42 When Chinese famine accounts extolled women who
starved themselves to death during the 1877 disaster rather than remarry
or enter into prostitution, then, they differentiated between moral and
immoral responses to the threat of mass starvation, and they gave readers
hope that even the ravages of the famine had not succeeded in destroying
China’s moral and cultural norms.

The tradition of employing images of women as touchstones of moral
or immoral behavior during a disaster is not unique to China. In her study
of the representations of women in Irish and Indian famine narratives,
Kelleher argues that famine literature is an example of a very old tradition
in which images of women are often used as bearers of meaning because
they have greater power to move the reader or spectator. As Kelleher quotes
Marina Warner, “Onto the female body have been projected the fantasies
and longings and terrors of generations of men, and through them of
women.”43

During the North China Famine, anxiety about familial breakdown
and the destruction of social norms was expressed through images of
wayward women selling themselves along the roads, or bringing down
the wrath of Heaven by dressing extravagantly or wasting food. Likewise,

KATHRYN EDGERTON-TARPLEY2004 133

the desire to preserve pre-famine moral norms was expressed through
praise of women who starved or committed suicide rather than compro-
mise their chastity.

Another popular image found in local-level famine texts from the
1870s is the self-sacrificing woman who gives her own life in order to leave
more food for another (typically male) family member. Lan Runfang’s wife
Zhang Shi, for example, found it impossible to get enough food for both
herself and her only child during the disaster. Determined to keep her son
alive in order to preserve a descendent for her husband’s family line, she
stopped eating and died. Qiao Zhikai’s second wife, Zheng Shi, made an
even greater sacrifice. As a second wife, Zheng Shi was filial to her par-
ents-in-law and kind to her sons and daughters. During the disaster, how-
ever, it became impossible to keep the entire family alive. Zheng Shi wanted
to preserve her husband’s family line, so she gave extra food to her
husband’s son by his first wife, and she and her own children starved to
death one by one.44 Two other wives, a second Zhang Shi and a Yan Shi,

Figure 2: “Driven by both Hunger and Cold, They Hang Themselves from a Beam
or Throw Themselves in a River.” Courtesy of the Shanghai Library.

JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY134

decided to poison themselves because they feared they would become
burdens to their husbands as the food supply ran low.45

The plight of women driven to commit suicide during the famine is
given haunting visual expression in the previously mentioned compila-
tion of famine illustrations published by Shanghai- and Suzhou-based
merchant-philanthropists in 1879. The ninth woodblock print portrays
desperate people hanging and drowning themselves during the famine. It
displays one figure standing on a chair preparing to hang herself, while
three others prepare to jump in a river already populated by four silently
floating corpses.46 The illustration is strongly gendered: while the sex of
three of the waterlogged corpses is unclear, all four living figures in the
illustration, and at least one of the corpses, are female (Figure 2).

When local gazetteer essays and famine illustrations about the North
China disaster emphasized the virtuous behavior of women during the
famine, they tried to reassure Chinese readers that the Confucian moral
order had survived the disaster. In his landmark work on famine in peas-
ant societies, historian David Arnold makes the observation that “although
what happens during the course of a famine will bear many signs of ab-
normality, it will also continue to some degree to be shaped by pre-exist-
ing cultural norms and social relations.” He also asserts that the more dev-
astating the crisis, the more people may cling to “the cultural and social
wreckage of their former lives” in order to survive the trauma.47 The ex-
amples of self-sacrifice presented by the Jishan County gazetteer are un-
mistakably influenced by China’s Confucian moral order, according to
which a virtuous daughter-in-law should sacrifice herself to protect her
chastity and her husband’s family line. To some degree even the most
startling famine images, such as a second wife starving herself so that her
husband’s son by a first wife might survive, were indeed images that reit-
erated cultural norms during a time of great upheaval.

These didactic accounts offer a clearer understanding of what were
defined as moral and immoral responses for Chinese women faced with
disaster. Although all of these texts were written by men and thus do not
help us to reconstruct the actual lived experience of women in famine
areas, they do map how Confucian moral discourse shaped the options
open to women faced with starvation, and they demonstrate how deter-
mined gazetteer editors and other members of Shanxi’s Confucian literati
were to control the politics of memory regarding women. Furthermore,
since the indispensable foundation of political allegiance and societal
morality in late imperial China was believed to be correct familial rela-
tionships, these stories of self-sacrifice and obedience to family hierarchy
acted as powerful morality plays that upheld the Confucian worldview,

KATHRYN EDGERTON-TARPLEY2004 135

and they perhaps offered an anchor to persons attempting to deal with
the unbearable moral choices raised by famine.

Outside Confucian Ideals:
Famine Demography and the Trade in Women

The numerous local-level accounts of women who died to preserve
their chastity or save another family member while the famine ravaged
southern Shanxi are part of the repertoire of formulaic stories about chaste
widows and self-sacrificing daughters that dominated Confucian biogra-
phy in late imperial China. Because these local-level sources on women’s
experiences during the famine are so thoroughly embedded in the dis-
course of female chastity, and to a lesser degree the discourse of filial pi-
ety, these sources cannot be used in any straightforward way to recon-
struct the actual experiences of women during the disaster.48 Confucian
rhetoric about filial piety and female chastity undoubtedly influenced the
behavior of male and female family members in famine-stricken Shanxi,
but the portraits of filial sons and virtuous women offered by local-level
famine accounts are just too orthodox—too predictable—to be left
unproblematized. In the last section of this article, then, I explore alterna-
tive views of women and families during the famine taken from demo-
graphic studies of gender and famine and reports written by foreign ob-
servers in famine districts.

Gender and Famine Demography

Demographic research provides a useful tool for interrogating the
famine morality plays discussed above. Recent demographic research on
gender and mortality rates in China’s northeastern province of Liaoning
upholds the assertion that Confucian norms of family organization left
daughters at a disadvantage when it came to the distribution of scarce
resources in Chinese families. But demographic studies of famished popu-
lations in China and many other cultures show that famines often trans-
form rather than reiterate “normal” patterns of sex differences in mortal-
ity, and that men in fact generally suffer higher increases in mortality dur-
ing major famines than women.

In late imperial China, female mortality among commoner infants
and children was normally much higher than male mortality. In their study
of mortality among 12,000 northeastern peasants born between 1774 and
1873, for example, historian James Z. Lee and sociologist Cameron D.
Campbell discovered that in rural Liaoning, girls between ages one and
five experienced a 20 percent greater mortality than boys.49 Excess female

JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY136

mortality during infancy and childhood was probably due to discrimina-
tion against daughters in the allocation of nutrition and health care. Be-
cause families preferred sons—who carried out the rituals for ancestor
worship, continued the family name, and remained in the household after
marriage—boys generally had a higher claim to food, clothing, and medi-
cal care.50

The strong preference for sons meant that Chinese girls had to com-
pete for resources within the household far more than their brothers did
during normal times. In northeastern China, for instance, the effect that
adding another elderly person of either sex to the household had on girls
was dramatic. An additional man or woman age fifty-five or older increased
the risk of death for a girl between ages two and fourteen by 30 percent,
but did not increase the risk of death for young boys.51 The fact that the
addition of an elderly woman to the household—rather than only the ad-
dition of an elderly man—significantly increased a young girl’s risk of
death, however, reinforces the assertion that Chinese females did begin to
lay claim more to household resources as they aged.

Although Chinese girls were unable to compete with their brothers’
or their elderly relatives’ stronger claims to the household food supply
during ordinary times, in late Qing China as in many other cultures, fam-
ine may have actually transformed rather than replicated “normal” pat-
terns of sex differences in mortality. In their research on connections be-
tween price fluctuations, family structure, and mortality rates in Qing-era
Liaoning, for example, Lee and Campbell found that female mortality was
unaffected by rising grain prices, but male mortality at all ages increased
with the rise of food prices.52 Cormac Ó Gráda’s survey of gender and
mortality in several historical famines and modern “third world” famines
finds that men were also generally worse hit than women during major
famines, though often by a narrow margin. Studies of famine mortality in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland, Iceland, Japan, India, and Fin-
land show that males suffered more deaths than females during those cri-
ses, and recent studies of the Donner party and of Holland’s “hunger win-
ter” of 1944–1945 also show that women are more likely than men to sur-
vive when famine conditions are at their worst.53 (Explanations of this
stronger female resilience to famine include physiological advantages of
women such as smaller body size and higher percentage of body fat; re-
duced maternal mortality during famines due to decreased fertility; a lower
female probability for exposure to epidemic disease since historically
women were less likely to migrate in search of work during famines than
men; and the rising value of primarily female “emotional exchange en-
titlements,” such as the ability to provide comfort and nursing to others,
during a time of disease and death.54 )

KATHRYN EDGERTON-TARPLEY2004 137

In the case of late-Qing Liaoning, Lee and Campbell also propose a
“loss of privilege” hypothesis to explain the high male vulnerability to
fluctuations in the price of grain. Since males in Qing-era Liaoning gener-
ally received a greater proportion of a household’s surplus in ordinary
times, the loss of this privilege struck them more drastically than it did
women, who were more likely to be undernourished in normal years but
who suffered a less extreme reduction in food rations than their male coun-
terparts during famine years. Likewise, Lee and Campbell found that
mortality differentials among household members of high and low status
in Liaoning were also narrower when grain prices were high than when
they were low. When times were good, privileged members of a house-
hold apparently “appropriated a disproportionate share of the surplus,
leaving less-privileged members not much better off than when times were
bad.” When the surplus disappeared during bad times, however, the con-
sumption of high-status members of the household fell and their mortal-
ity rates rose, but the already high mortality rates and meager consump-
tion of less-privileged family members stayed roughly the same.55

Demographic research concerning the North China Famine itself is
sketchy. The most detailed work on famine demography in Shanxi, Liu
Rentuan’s recent article ‘Dingwu qihung’ dui Shanxi renkou de yingxiang (The
influence of the ‘incredible famine of 1877–78’ on Shanxi’s population), uses
population records from county gazetteers to estimate the population loss
of each county during the famine.56 Unfortunately, since county gazet-
teers generally recorded only the total population loss in each village, they
offer little information regarding gender and mortality during the disaster.

Although Lee’s and Campbell’s research examines demographic re-
sponses to short-term economic stress rather than to a prolonged disaster
such as the North China Famine, their discovery that Chinese males of all
ages were more susceptible to rising grain prices than females, and that
Chinese families divided scarce food supplies evenly among family mem-
bers of low and high status during times of crisis, raises interesting impli-
cations about how the moral economy of Chinese families worked during
the 1877 famine. Famine morality plays from the Incredible Famine re-
peatedly highlighted family members who, because of their desire to be-
have in a filial or chaste manner, chose to sacrifice the lives of low status
family members in order to feed more privileged relatives. Lee’s and
Campbell’s research shows, on the contrary, that at least in late-Qing
Liaoning Chinese families faced with rising food prices shared their dwin-
dling food supply relatively equally rather than allowing privileged fam-
ily members to maintain their normal consumption rates while less privi-
leged relatives starved.

JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY138

The Market for Women: Foreign Observers

Detailed reports written by missionaries and foreign relief workers
who visited famine areas during the late 1870s provide a second way to
view the famine’s impact on Chinese families from outside the Confucian
worldview. The famine accounts of these Western observers are as heavily
steeped in “Christian rhetoric” as the gazetteer editors’ accounts were in
“Confucian rhetoric,” and are marked as well by nineteenth-century Brit-
ish assumptions about China itself, the proper roles of men and women,
and how a famine should be handled. In spite of such qualifications, the
observations of foreign observers provide useful alternative first-hand
descriptions of the famine’s impact on familial and gender relations.

Such reports uphold the possibility that contrary to the message put
forth by Confucian morality plays, adult women fared as well as or in
some cases better than their male counterparts during the disaster. Walter
Hillier, for example, a member of the British Consular Service in Shanghai
who took a tour of inspection through the famine districts in early 1879
and reported his findings to the China Famine Relief Committee in great
detail, wrote that although all the people in famine villages looked gaunt
and pinched, “the women and children seemed in better condition than
the men.”57 C. A. Gordon’s work, An Epitome of the Reports of the Medical
Officers to the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service from 1871 to 1882,
also judged that women and children were in a better state than men at
the end of the famine, apparently due to possessing stronger constitutions
at the beginning.58 Such observations echoed a statement made by a Brit-
ish observer of Irish famine victims thirty years earlier: “In the same work-
house, in which you will find the girls and women looking well, you will
find the men and boys in a state of the lowest physical depression.”59

Chinese informants to foreign observers also noted high male mor-
tality rates. When missionary Jonathan Lees of Tianjin traveled into fam-
ine districts in June 1878, for example, an inn-keeper he interviewed in a
village along the way informed him that out of the village’s pre-famine
population of sixty family units or about three hundred people, thirty fami-
lies had fled to Tianjin during the winter, and fifty people—mostly men—
had died, thirty of starvation and twenty of famine fever.60

Some foreign observers attributed the possibly better survival rate of
women to biological differences, but others judged that it was the bur-
geoning market for females, however appalling, that gave women a bet-
ter chance to survive than men. In 1878, the London-based journal of the
China Inland Mission, China’s Millions, printed the diary of G. W. Clarke,
a missionary who visited the famine districts in Henan in order to distrib-
ute relief. Clarke wrote that when his party entered Henan, “We passed

KATHRYN EDGERTON-TARPLEY2004 139

daily many wheelbarrows loaded with women and girls who had been
bought by speculators; they looked to be in good health, and were re-
spectably clothed.” He went on to speculate that women might actually
have survived the famine better than men because they could be sold.
“Women would not suffer so much as men probably, because wives are
scarce, and they would be bought up, while the men would be left to suf-
fer or die,” he stated.61

Clarke’s supposition that women would be purchased before they
starved since “wives were scarce” refers to the imbalance in the marriage
market in Qing China. During the late imperial period, both female infan-
ticide and the proclivity of some elite men to possess one or more concu-
bines as well as a legal wife meant that there was a chronic shortage of
marriageable women in China. This shortage created a market for women
that expanded during hard times. Informal networks for the sale of women
always operated in cities and local market centers where there were poor
or unwanted women and children, explains Sue Gronewold in her work
on prostitution in China, but in times of famine, these normally clandes-
tine operations became public.62

Moreover, although the Qing government strongly condemned the
practice of “forcible sale” of women during ordinary times, during bad
times “parents who could show they had sold a daughter under financial
duress were treated lightly in the Qing code,” as were impoverished hus-
bands who sold their wives.63 This was even more the case after the mid-
nineteenth century, when the eighteenth-century vision of enforcing fe-
male chastity among the poor unraveled and the Qing Board of Punish-
ment largely abandoned its earlier efforts to suppress wife-selling that
was motivated by poverty.64

In the late 1870s, governmental attempts to control the sale of women
broke down in the face of the widespread famine, and the scale of the
trafficking in women was enormous. Chinese and missionary sources alike
reported cartloads of women being taken south for sale every day, while
additional women were transported from Tianjin to Shanghai by boat. In
his diary chronicling his journey through Henan, for example, G. W. Clarke
frequently recorded the number of women he passed as they were trans-
ported south to be sold, as well as the number of corpses he saw on a
particular day. On 3 May 1878, Clarke passed some men going north to
buy women and girls. The next day he came upon three cartloads of women
and children going south, and saw a dead man in a field. On 5 May, he
passed two dead men by the roadside. On the sixth he saw a dead man at
the front gate of the yamen. The following day he helped two old women
who were starving, and saw a dog gnawing the trunk of a man. On 8 May,
he passed three more cartloads of women going south to be re-sold, and

JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY140

another dead man on the road.65 Interestingly enough, throughout his account
Clarke never mentioned seeing a dead woman. All the corpses he saw were
male, while most of the women he mentioned were in carts being sold south.

Clarke’s perception of the sex of those who succumbed to starvation
or disease may have changed dramatically had he entered the homes of
famine victims rather than spending so much time out on the roads. Nev-
ertheless, his account does raise the possibility that rampant traffic in
women during the famine actually may have enabled women from fam-
ine districts to survive in greater numbers than their male relatives since
so many women were transported out of famine areas to be resold in more
affluent cities.

At the same time, younger sons and single men without families were
much freer than their female counterparts to escape famine areas by flee-
ing east to Beijing and Tianjin or north into Suiyuan. Both Chinese and
foreign newspapers in Shanghai commented on the massive number of
famine refugees who streamed into port cities such as Tianjin and Shang-
hai during the disaster years, and observers noted the majority of the suf-
ferers were men.66 Nevertheless, while migration was an option more open
to men than to women, famine victims in Shanxi, particularly those in the
southern half of the province, were surrounded by famine districts that
stretched for hundreds of miles in any direction. The nearest non-fam-
ished area, Suiyuan, was a long, harsh trek north. In order to escape the
famine by migrating to the wealthy Jiangnan region, famine refugees had
to make the incredibly long journey through famine-ravaged Henan prov-
ince. Finally, even those refugees who did make it to the crowded and
squalid urban relief centers often fell prey to epidemic disease, particu-
larly typhus fever. In 1878, for example, only 10,000 of the roughly 80,000
weak and disease-ridden famine refugees who had arrived in Tianjin the
following year were believed to have survived the winter.67 Emigration,
then, was a dangerous choice.

During the famine, some women came to view escaping famine dis-
tricts by being sold to human traders from wealthier areas as their best
chance of survival. The reports of Western observers who worked in fam-
ine districts echoed the claim (though not the moral censure) made by
local literati that during the famine many women chose to sell or give
themselves to human traders. Shortly after his arrival in Shanxi Province,
missionary relief worker Timothy Richard described the extensive traffic
in women that he witnessed on a two-day journey between Taiyuan and
Pingyao, a city south of the capital. “On the road we met, daily, about a
hundred carts returning, after sending grain southwards, and about half
of these had wretched-looking women in them, who were gladly availing
themselves of the only means of saving their unhappy lives,” wrote Rich-

KATHRYN EDGERTON-TARPLEY2004 141

ard. During his stay in Pingyao, Richard was approached by an inn ser-
vant, who told him that the main difficulty people faced was finding any-
body willing to buy or simply take starving women for free: “He said if I
would take any, a hint was enough, and a score would come in a few
seconds, glad to get away for nothing. To stay at home is certain death to
so many of them. Some attempt to beg their way northwards, but, unless
taken up by somebody, between hunger and cold they soon perish.”68

Richard also noted the prices that people paid for women and chil-
dren. In Pingyao, he observed that a man who stayed in the same inn with
him had recently purchased an eighteen-year-old girl for eight hundred
cash and three younger children—two sisters and a brother—for a total of
nine hundred copper cash.69 The market value of a young woman clearly
exceeded that of both male and female children, thus making it more likely
that the sale of a teenage daughter or a young wife would bring enough
money for a family to survive.

An additional report, this one a Chinese translation of an unnamed
Western missionary’s letter about famine conditions in Shandong, empha-
sized the extraordinary lengths some famine victims went to be sold. Al-
though the writer of the letter was staying at a small inn on Linqu Moun-
tain, his bedroom happened to be adjacent to a room occupied by seven or
eight human traders. Because the rooms were separated only by a thin
wooden door, the missionary could hear women being led into the room
one by one. Human traders examined each woman next door and either
accepted her for purchase or rejected her as too thin or too ill. “It was just
like they were looking at merchandise in the market and discussing the
price,” lamented the missionary.70

The writer of the letter suddenly heard a noisy disturbance in the
room. Upon investigation, he learned that the human traders had discov-
ered that one of the “girls” they were examining was actually “a little boy
who had worn earrings and bound feet in order to dress up as a girl so he
could be sold!” The females who were purchased by the traders were ea-
ger to escape Linqu. When the missionary woke up early the next morn-
ing, he heard the women say to their buyers, “When can you take me back
with you so I won’t have to endure hunger anymore?”71 All of the above
descriptions demonstrate that women were well aware that they could
make use of their market value in order to survive the famine, and many
were willing to do so, even at the risk of losing their moral value in the
eyes of their local communities.

Finally, an experience relayed by American missionary relief-worker
Reverend C. A. Stanley offers a particularly rich example of how the mar-
ket for women (and to a lesser extent children) provided a final escape
route for struggling families. Stanley described the plight of a family that

JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY142

had sold their house and all their possessions and was setting out to beg
along the roads. The family consisted of husband, wife, the husband’s
elderly mother, and two sons. When villagers led Stanley to them, the
husband was in the process of selling his wife and youngest son in order
to get them food and shelter while at the same time providing something
for the remaining three to live on.72

Stanley’s description of this man’s decision to sell his wife and younger
child in order to keep his elderly mother and oldest son alive provides an
interesting contrast to the previously discussed morality plays about filial
sons and their starving mothers. Although the Chinese editors of county
gazetteers in Shanxi would have clothed the man’s decision in the lan-
guage of filial piety and praised him for sacrificing his wife and son to
feed his mother, Stanley described the man’s decision as primarily an eco-
nomic choice. The market value of his elderly mother, not to mention the
man himself, was negligible. Because of the imbalance in the marriage
market in Qing China, however, a young or even a middle-aged woman
had market value as a concubine, maid servant, or second wife who could
run the household and care for the children of a widower. By selling his
wife and younger son, then, the man offered them a chance to survive
while also keeping himself, his mother, and his eldest son alive.73

Conclusion

Demographic studies of famine and gender and observations made
by foreign observers call into question the assumption that Chinese fami-
lies discriminated against women when dividing a famished household’s
dwindling food supply, and suggest that the burgeoning trade in women
in some cases enabled young women to survive the disaster more suc-
cessfully than their male counterparts. These discussions of the widespread
sale of women during the famine raise the possibility that, as is also hinted
by demographic studies, a disaster on the scale of the North China Fam-
ine reversed normal patterns of mortality within Chinese families and to
some extent replaced the moral economy of Chinese families with a mar-
ket economy. The same young daughters and wives who had the weakest
claim to household resources during normal times ultimately had the great-
est market value during the famine. In contrast, both elderly mothers and
men of all ages, who in ordinary times had much higher status in the fam-
ily than young women and who were often seen as the gate-keepers of the
traditional moral order, possessed virtually no market value during a time
of crisis.

Moreover, although young women who chose to commit suicide or
starve to death rather than use their market value were credited with great

KATHRYN EDGERTON-TARPLEY2004 143

moral value after death, women who acknowledged their market value
and actively sought to sell themselves in exchange for food lost all moral
value in the eyes of local literati but sometimes managed to survive the
famine. During the famine, then, it may have seemed that a person’s mar-
ket value went up as his or her moral value decreased. This turn of events
was clearly a real threat to Confucian family norms and it helps to explain
the vehemence with which male gate-keepers of the moral order de-
nounced the “shameless” women who sold themselves rather than starve.

NOTES

The two illustrations provided by Dr. Edgerton-Tarpley entitled “Jiqin chuibi;
shanu, zhuidao” (A starving parent approaches death; about to kill the daughter,
the knife falls) and “Jihan jiaopo xuanran touhe” (Driven by both hunger and cold,
they hang themselves from a beam or throw themselves in a river) were selected
from a book entitled Qi, Yu, Jin, Zhi zhenjuan zhengxin lu (Evidence for the relief
contributions for Shandong, Henan, Shanxi and Zhili) in the Shanghai Library’s
collection. As a public library, the Shanghai Library welcomes readers whose pur-
pose is research to use the library’s collection.

1Liang Peicai, Miliang wen, in Guangxu sannian nian jinglu [Annual Record of
the Third Year of the Guangxu Reign] (Taiyuan: Shanxi sheng renmin weiyuanhui
bangong ting, 1962), 86–87.

2Susan Cotts Watkins and Jane Menken, “Famines in Historical Perspective,”
Population and Development Review 11, no. 4 (1985): 650.

3Paul R. Greenough, “Comments from a South Asian Perspective: Food, Fam-
ine, and the Chinese State,” Journal of Asian Studies XLI, no. 4 (1982): 792.

4Arthur and Joan Kleinman, “The Appeal of Experience; The Dismay of Im-
ages: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times,” Daedalus 125, no. 1 (1996):
1–24.

5For examples of recent scholarship on famines in Qing China, see Pierre-
Etienne Will and R. Bin Wong, Nourish the People: The State Civilian Granary System
in China, 1650–1850 (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Chinese Studies, 1991); Pierre-Etienne
Will, Bureaucracy and Famine in Eighteenth-Century China (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1990); and R. Bin Wong and Peter Perdue, “Famine’s Foes in Ch’ing
China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 43, no. 1 (1983): 291–332.

6Margaret Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpress-
ible? (Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 1997), 7, 23–29. See also Chris Morash,
“Literature, Memory, Atrocity,” in ‘Fearful Realities’: New Perspectives on the Famine,
ed. Chris Morash and Richard Hayes (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1996).

7Tani Barlow, “Theorizing Women: Funu, Guojia, Jiating [Chinese Women,
Chinese State, Chinese Family],” Genders 10 (spring 1991): 132–34.

JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY144

8Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, eds., Chinese Femininities, Chi-
nese Masculinities: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 26.

9Qi, Yu, Jin, Zhi zhenjuan zhengxin lu—shou juan si sheng gao zai tu qi [Evi-
dence for the relief contributions for Shandong, Henan, Shanxi and Zhili—part I:
Pictures reporting the disaster in these four provinces], (Shanghai: Xiezhen gongsuo
tongren, 1879), 25.

10Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlements and Deprivation
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 1–5.

11David Fitzpatrick, “Women and the Great Famine,” in Gender Perspectives
in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Public and Private Spheres, ed. Margaret Kelleher and
James H. Murphy (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1997); and Cormac Ó Gráda, Black
’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

12Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 10–12.

13Margery Wolf, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1972), 32–41.

14Xu Yishi xianzhi (1880), 1:85a.

15The Chinese text uses the character for stepmother [jimu] in the introduc-
tory line, but for the rest of the story simply uses the character for mother [mu].

16Xuxiu Quwo xianzhi (1880), 27:8a.

17Ibid., 27:8b.

18“Guoju mai er tian cijin” [Guoju buries his son and heaven blesses him with
gold], Baixiao tushuo, ed. Kuo Lien-ch’ing (Beijing: Zhongguo shudian, 1996), 13–14.

19Ibid.

20Guangxu 3 (1877) refers to the third year of the Guangxu Emperor’s reign,
which was the worst year of the famine. In popular memory, the famine is often
referred to as “Guangxu 3.”

21Although expressions of filial piety certainly changed and developed over
time, the fact that the Guoju story and the text accompanying the Shanghai illustra-
tion, though six centuries apart temporally, offer a virtually identical message re-
garding the duty of a truly filial son, demonstrates that examples of filial behavior
set down in earlier dynasties continued to resonate in late Qing China. For a de-
tailed discussion of the dimensions of filial piety in late imperial China, see Hsiung
Ping-chen, “Constructed Emotions: The Bond Between Mothers and Sons in Late
Imperial China,” Late Imperial China 15, no. 1 (June 1994). For a more general intro-
duction to the place of filial piety in Chinese history, see “The Classic of Filial Pi-
ety,” Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook, ed. Patricia Ebrey.

22Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine, 135.

KATHRYN EDGERTON-TARPLEY2004 145

23Liam O’Flaherty, Famine (Dublin: 1937).

24Ibid., 387–389.

25Versions of this story were told by Mrs. Li Yingge (age 88) in Hongtong
County, Mr. Li Tong (79) in Linyi County, Mr. Li Yuying (81) in Linyi County, and
Mr. Tan Wenfeng (45) in Yuanqu County. All interviews conducted by the author in
March and April 2001.The versions differed as to whether it was mothers-in-law or
fathers-in-law who wanted to eat the young woman, and as to whether it was moth-
ers or fathers who turned their daughter away when she returned home for help.

26Jin Jincheng, “Qing Guangxu san nian bei zai shen da lue qingji” (Outline
of the circumstances of the big disaster of Guangxu 3), Yonghe xianzhi (1931), 15:592.

27Gazetteers that contain reports on the sale of women and children include:
Linjin xianzhi, Taipei Reprint 420; Xu Yishi xianzhi, 1880; Hongtong xianzhi, Taipei
Reprint 79; Jiezhou Ruicheng xianzhi, 1880; Xia xianzhi, 1880 edition.

28Han Zhonglin, “Jiu jie li yang” [Humble advice for rescuing people from
disaster], Qinyuan xianzhi, (Taipei reprint 404, 1928), 8: 918–922.

29Barbara Mittler, A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in
Shanghai’s News Media (1872–1912) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2004), 293.

30Lin Yutang, “Feminist Thought in Ancient China,” T’ien Hsia Monthly 1,
no. 2 (1935): 127–28.

31Emily M. Ahern, “The Power and Pollution of Chinese Women,” Women in
Chinese Society, ed. Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1975), 194–214.

32Liu ___. “Huangnian ge” (Song of the Famine Years), 1897, edited version
published in Yuncheng zaiyilu (Record of disasters in Yuncheng), ed. Zhang Bowen
and Wang Mancang (Yuncheng, Shanxi: Yuncheng shi zhi ban, 1986), 105–14. This
particular passage was edited out of the Yuncheng zaiyilu version. It is taken from a
more complete manuscript version of “Huangnian ge” owned by Mr. Nan Canghai
(Gaotou Village, Linyi County). Permission to cite given by Mr. Nan, 4 April 2001.
All citations to “Huangnian ge” refer to this particular copy, unless otherwise noted.

33Liu, “Huangnian ge,” 16.

34Yuncheng zaiyilu, 110.

35Ibid.

36This famous quote is from Cheng Yi (1033–1107), one of the founders of
Neo-Confucianism. Er cheng quanshu, vol. 1, 22.3a, Sibu peiyao. See also Marina H.
Sung, “The Chinese Lieh-nu Tradition,” in Women in China: Current Directions in
Historical Scholarship, ed. Richard W. Guisso and Stanley Johannesen (Youngstown,
OH: Philo Press, 1981), 63, 71–73.

37Liu, “Huangnian ge,” 18.

JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY146

38In Imperial China, it was customary for wives to be referred to by their
own family name followed by Shi, a title that is the rough equivalent of “Mistress.”

39Xuxiu Jishan xianzhi (1885), 2.72a.

40Ibid., 2.72b – 75a.

41Susan Mann, “Widows in the Kinship, Class, and Community Structures
of Qing Dynasty China,” Journal of Asian Studies 46, no. 1 (1987): 37–56.

42Janet M. Theiss, “Femininity in Flux: Gendered Virtue and Social Conflict
in the mid-Qing Courtroom,” and Susan Mann, “Grooming a Daughter for Mar-
riage: Brides and Wives in the mid-Qing Period,” in Chinese Femininities/Chinese
Masculinities, 48, 64, 89–95.

43Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine, 8.

44Xuxiu Jishan xianzhi (1885), 2.73b–75a.

45Ibid., 2.75b.

46Qi Yu, Jin Zhi zhenjuan zhengxin lu (Shanghai, 1879), 12.

47David Arnold, Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell Inc., 1988), 8.

48Gail Hershatter, “Modernizing Sex, Sexing Modernity,” in Chinese Femi-
ninities/Chinese Masculinities, 219–220.

49James Z. Lee and Cameron D. Campbell, Fate and Fortune in Rural China:
Social Organization and Population Behavior in Liaoning, 1774–1873 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1997), 64. See also Lillian Li, “Life and Death in a Chinese
Famine: Infanticide as a Demographic Consequence of the 1935 Yellow River Flood,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 33, no. 3 (1991).

50George Alter et al., “Gender and Mortality: A EurAsian Comparison” (pa-
per presented at the XXIV General Population Conference, Salvador, Brazil, Au-
gust 2001), 7.

51Ibid., 17–18, 32–35.

52Cameron D. Campbell and James Z. Lee, “Price Fluctuations, Family Struc-
ture, and Mortality in Two Rural Chinese Populations: Household Responses to
Economic Stress in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Liaoning,” Population and
Economy: From Hunger to Modern Economic Growth, ed. T. Bengtsson and O. Saito
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000): 391, 412–13.

53Ó Gráda, Black ’47 and Beyond, 101–103.

54 Ibid., 101–103; and Alter, “Gender and Morality,” 12–15.

55Campbell and Lee, “Price Fluctuations, Family Structure, and Mortality in
Two Rural Chinese Populations,” 391, 413.

KATHRYN EDGERTON-TARPLEY2004 147

56Liu Rentuan, “’Dingwu qihuang’ dui Shanxi renkou de yingxiang,” in Ziran
zaihai yu Zongguo shehui lishi jiegou (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chuban she, 2001), 91–132.

57North China Herald, 15 April 1879, 362.

58C. A. Gordon, An Epitome of the Reports of the Medical Officers to the Chinese
Imperial Maritime Customs Service from 1871 to 1882 (London: Bailliere, Tindall, and
Cox, 1884), 386.

59Ó Gráda, Black ’47 and Beyond, 101.

60North China Herald, 13 July 1878.

61G. W. Clarke, “The Famine in Henan,” China’s Millions (London: Morgan
and Scott, 1878): 118–19.

62Sue Gronewold, Beautiful Merchandise: Prostitution in China, 1860–1936 (New
York: Haworth Press, 1985), 3, 45.

63Mann, Precious Records, 42–43.

64Matthew H. Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 65, 310, 319.

65China’s Millions, 118–19.

66North China Herald, 28 December 1876. See also Shenbao, 16 April 1877, 2–3.

67C. A. Gordon, An Epitome of the Reports, 10.

68Timothy Richard, “Famine in the North,” The Celestial Empire, 28 December
1877.

69Richard is referring to 900 “wen” or copper coins with holes in the center.
The coins were often strung together in strings of 1,000 coins, and one string of
copper coints was supposed to exchange for one ounce of silver. By the late 1870s,
the exchange rate was between 1,275 and 1,500 copper coins to one ounce of silver.

70“Translation of a Western Missionary’s Letter about the Famine Relief in
Shandong,” Shenbao, 4 May 1877, 2.

71Ibid., 2.

72“The Rev. C. A. Stanley,” China’s Millions (1878): 116.

73My discussion of “moral” choices versus “rational economic” choices is
informed by James Scott’s and Samuel Popkin’s “moral economy debate” over the
basis of peasant behavior. For a concise summary of this debate, see Daniel Little,
Understanding Peasant China: Case Studies in the Philosophy of Social Science (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 29–67.