Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley, Tears from Iron: Cultural Responses to Famine in Nineteenth-Century China

Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley, Tears from Iron: Cultural Responses to Famine in Nineteenth-Century China, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2008, xxiii + 332 pp., illustrations. The “Incredible Famine of 1878-1879” (dingwu qihuang 丁戊奇荒), which devastated the northern provinces early in Emperor Guangxu’s reign, may be said to have been China’s first internationalised famine: it took place under other countries’ gaze, it was much reported in Europe, and within China itself it came to be deem...