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famished would line up to consume it.
    Given that the standard granary reserves in Yunnan were sufficient to feed a maximum of 15% of the population at any time and that the years preceding the Tambora emergency were drought years, it is not surprising that the government’s means to stem the famine were soon exhausted. In “Bitter Famine,” Li Yuyang describes the food crisis at its worst in the autumn of 1817, as the people of Yunnan descend into a living hell, their prosperous communities transformed into a Dantean circle of starvation and death, but with no innocents spared:
    Outside, the starved corpses pile high,
    While in her room the young mother
    Waits upon her child’s death. Unbearable
    Sorrow. My love, you cry to me to feed you—
    But no one sees my tears. Who can I tell which aches
    More? My heart or my body wasting away?
    She takes her baby out to the deep river.
    Clear and cool, welcome water …
    She will care for that child in the life to come.
    Confucian values focus on the sacred debts of children to their parents who have dedicated their lives to their offspring’s welfare and protection. The infanticide that concludes this poem thus makes for a wrenching irony. The young mother fulfills her Confucian duty only by drowning her child and herself.
    With the food situation at its gravest, Li Yuyang wrote another bitter poem about family loyalty, this time of a poor man whose filial virtues go unrewarded. He sacrifices his own family to feed his mother, according to his Confucian bond, but then dies himself anyway, leaving his mother alone and desperate:
    Around the neighborhood, you can hear her crying,
    That old widow, cold and hungry, and in rags.
    She will tell you the famous story of her son:
    His tireless hands, in the fields from dawn to dusk,
    Could only feed two mouths. He took care of
    His mother, hence his fame. But Death cared less
    And took him away. The sweet bonds of their love
    Untied, the grey-haired widow is all alone.
    “My time is short, and I dream for our reunion,
    But life teases me awake. Why do I still have breath
    When I have no food? Take me, for his soul’s peace!…”
    But only the birds listen. They take flight into the darkness.
    Lucky birds, however distant, fly home. Not her.
    The early months of 1818 brought no relief from Tambora’s suffocating grip on the grain-growing seasons of Yunnan. A recent modeling study on the impact of Tambora’s eruption on the Chinese climate found that the coldest temperature anomalies occurred not in 1816 but 1817–18, which “may explain long lasting impacts like the three years famine in the province of Yunnan.” 18 Indeed, several studies on Tambora’s influence on Himalayan weather to the northwest point to the eruption’s great reach, in both space and time, extending cold temperatures into the 1820s. 19 In the mountain city of Kunming, Li Yuyang writes of a heavy snowstorm in January 1818, complete with lightning, thunder, and “purple rain” that blasted the winter crops of broad beans and wheat. This is the last of his famine poems. Now well into their third successive year of dearth, the suffering of the Yunnanese in early 1818 may well have passed beyond description for Li Yuyang.
    Mercifully for the survivors, this was to be the last of the Tamboran crop failures. By the summer of 1818, the volcanic dust had at last cleared from the stratosphere, and the sun and balmy southwest rains returned as normal to the land “south of the cloud.” A bumper crop that autumn brought an end to Yunnan’s long despair. As for Li Yuyang, he survived the great famine in body, but there are signs of a permanent trauma of spirit. His brief official biography tells of an increasingly reclusive man “who never left the inner door of the house, and died at home.” 20 Sitting up at midnight during the dark days of the Tambora disaster, Li Yuyang felt the white hairs sprouting from his head. Prematurely aged by the suffering to which he