C3365 The Food Crisis in Asia (1/2)

At the end of the nineteenth century, the gap between the rich and the poor was very large in Europe. The lives of the people at the bottom were extremely miserable, and the conflict between the working class and the capitalists was extremely acute.

France even had an unsuccessful proletarian revolution and a civil war!

But the misery of the lower classes in Europe, compared with the destitute peasants of China at the time, was like a paradise.

As long as ordinary citizens did not meet with natural disasters and plague, they would be able to survive even if they begged for more. They might even be able to buy wine and drink as much money as they wanted.

The death rate of the lowest class in Europe was extremely high. In fact, most of the deaths were due to disease and cold!

Yes, there weren't many Europeans who starved to death in that era. Of course, the Irish Great Famine was a tragic combination of natural and human disasters.

At that time, if Britain had opened its doors to disaster relief, with British Empire's power, saving a small Ireland would have been like playing a game.

Hunger did exist, but it was not the sharpest problem yet!

Poor people were most afraid of disease. Once they had a disease in those days, especially an infectious disease, the death rate was very high due to the lack of antibiotics.

The medical fees were only high because of one thing, and another because of the lack of technology!

In addition to dying of illness, the cold of winter was the enemy of the poor. The homeless could not survive the winter, and every year hundreds of frozen bones were collected from the streets of London.

It may sound tragic, but if we put the dynasties in the east, in China, which is already on the decline, the poor people of Europe will be living in heaven.

In the late Qing Dynasty, the destitute peasants did not even have food. They ate Guanyin, gnawed on tree bark, and even easily became food for their children. In the most serious region of Great Famine, even in the entire village, the population of the entire county appeared to have gone extinct!

For thousands of years, China has been restraining commerce and the movement of people. The worst result is the circulation of goods and materials!

Forget about mobilizing food from overseas, even food from the Jiang-Nan region would find it hard to travel across the prefectures. In an era where there were no railways and there was no efficient commercial logistics system, the Great Famine was like an extinct population!

History records that during the era of the Wasteland, when one's family was starving to death, one would not dare to cry or cry. As long as others knew that your family had died, then a group of people would take away the dead body and eat it!

Ten million people had been starved to death in the Qianxiang Qi Wasteland back in Guang Xu's year. If this was placed in Europe, the entire country would have perished!

Millions or tens of millions of people had died in the great calamity. Small regional famines and hundreds of thousands of natural disasters were common throughout the country!

The government did not care, even the citizens of Historian were not willing to waste time on it!

In Tongzhi's ten years of history, he had only recorded a few incidents where the provinces were plagued by calamities. It was as if the deaths of over a hundred thousand people did not affect Tongzhi's rise to prominence at all.

No one cared about the names of the hundreds of thousands of victims of starvation. How did they grow up, and did they have ideals? Are parents and their families grief-stricken... It doesn't matter.

In the eyes of the rulers, what was dead were only numbers. They were walking corpses without any emotions!

Only one person was not like that, and that was Xiao Letian. The Chinese leader had never neglected a disaster, and the Chinese leader had even gone as far as to have the largest strategic food reserve system in the whole of Asia.

The Chinese had the world's most advanced and effective disaster relief system!