The Late Ming Epidemics: A Preliminary Survey

-1THE LATE MING EPIDEKLCS : A PRELIMINARY SURVEY Helen Dunstan Newnham College Cambridge, England The sixteenth century Spaniard Martin de Rada writes as follows of the towns of Fukien: The main streets are very broad, and they all have a large number of triumphal arches, some of very well wrought stone and others of wood. For every very great man prides himself on leaving as a memorial such an arch, inscribed with his name and the year it was built, and other notable things which he did. These main streets serve as market-places, and there are to be found in them every kind of meat, fish, fruits and vegetables; and stalls selling books, paper, knives, scissors, bonnets, shoes, straw sandals etc. As these main streets are so wide, there is a good space left in the middle, with room to pass between the stalls and the houses, although the stalls stretch from one end of the street to the other. The other streets .are all filthy little alleys. By the end of the paragraph de Rada is describing the. burial-places of the wealthy, and thus, tantalizingly , is cut short what might have been a fascinating glimpse into another China, the domain of malnutrition, mice and microbes, of filth and famine, penury and pestilence. It is not only hygiene and sanitation, however, that have largely The following paper is based on a dissertation submitted in lieu of a special subject paper for the B,A. degree at the University of Oxford in June, 1973. My thanks are due to a number of people for help and advice in various ways, but particularly to Dr. Mark Elvin, now of St. Anthony's College, Oxford, who suggested, directed and sustained the project and was a constant source of ideas and useful references not-individuallv acknowledj; been neglected as subjects for research among Western historians of imperial China. No demographic - or, indeed, more broadly, no economic, social or political - historian of Mediaeval or early Modern Europe would think of approaching his subject without an awareness of the chronology of at least the more notorious outbreaks of serious epidemic disease: yet until the present decade mentions of epidemics in Western works on Chinese history have by and large been incidental only: there has been 2 no specialized treatment. Since the publication in 1973, however, of Mark Elvin's The Pattern of the Chinese Past, the attention of sinologists has been definitively drawn to the demographic cataclysms constituted by the great epidemics of the late 1580s, the early 1640s and 1820-1822, and 3 to the pioneer survey by lmura Kozen to be discussed below. The object of the present paper is to present as much detail as possible on the first two of these catastrophes before going on to offer a few remarks about governmental and popular measures taken in face of epidemics, and Chinese epidemiological theory and the work of Wu Yu-hsing. Readers are for the time being referred to Imura's original article for the chronology of epidemics throughout the rest of recorded pre-modern Chinese history. Before embarking on the main theme of the paper, however, 1 wish to make some prefatory remarks first on its sources, scope and limitations, and secondly on our present knowledge of hygienic and sanitary conditions generally under the Ming. Our sources of information on epidemics in pre-modern China fall roughly into two categories. First, there are the indidental references, more or less detailed, occurring scattered among the different kinds of historical and literary writings, and the compositions which, although devoted specifically to epidemics, have been included in more general compilations which not only have never, in most cases, been indexed, 4 but may also lack even a detailed table of contents. Clearly, the collection of these materials, potentially probably far more rewarding than those belonging to the second category, would demand a very lengthy full-time combing of a vast number of sources, from the I-wen fî. ¦£_ and some other sections of the local gazetteers through official compilations such as the Veritable Records for each dynasty for which they survive to such miscellaneous sources as private collections of biographies, memorials and...