Chapter 284 The terrifying plague

It was the ninth day of the first lunar month in the seventeenth year of Chongzhen, which was February 16, 1644 AD.

At dusk that day, on an empty avenue in Beijing, a Fujian man was walking lonely and tired with his head lowered.

Although it is winter now, it gets dark early, and there is still a long time before the night ban begins (1st watch, 19:00), but the doors and windows of all the houses on both sides of the avenue lined with signboards are strangely closed.

With.

Not to mention the fact that there were no other people on the road, there was no living thing in the surrounding corners, including beggars.

Even cats and dogs are extinct.

There is only emptiness!

But it is wrong to say that it is not popular.

The messy and loud sounds of clanking, clanging, clanking, and banging of iron tools in the surrounding houses are always heard.

Noisy people are annoying!

It also tells the world that there are people here, and there are people in most houses.

But it also makes everything around me seem weirder and more terrifying.

But Fujian people should not be afraid.

He walked slowly and leisurely, and occasionally he would stop and look up for a while, dazed for a while.

There was no fear on his face, only sadness.

The weather is very cold, and so are the hearts of Fujian people.

This New Year, he had a very bad time.

Although the severe cold in Beijing made him uncomfortable, for several days in a row, he still went out early every day with full hope.

For a person like him who has been filling the vacant post of county magistrate, the New Year is the best and possibly the most appropriate opportunity to get close to various real-power officials who were once difficult to get close to.

But unfortunately, he is only disappointed so far.

These days, apart from being exhausted and having runny noses from the cold, Fujian people have accomplished almost nothing.

Not to mention paying New Year's greetings to the officials in person, he didn't even enter the doors of most officials' homes. Even those who were lucky enough to meet him were not in high positions or had the right to speak.

The plague forced officials to refuse almost all strangers.

Even if he repeatedly reported and even introduced names and deeds that he thought he had some reputation for, it was of no use.

It was as if the dignitaries had no interest or no desire to be interested in what he was doing.

Of course, it is also possible that he is afraid of avoiding him.

Because sometimes, when they understood who he was, the servants of those officials would turn pale with fright, and then hide away in fear, and would use wooden sticks and brooms to separate themselves from each other without informing their masters.

Drive him away quickly.

This made the Fujian people very depressed and angry.

Suddenly, a pedestrian turned out at the corner of the avenue. This suddenness shocked both parties.

However, after being surprised, the Fujianese immediately smiled at the other party to show friendship, and then quickly adjusted their decadent demeanor.

But pedestrians continued to look at the Fujianese in horror, and stopped and hesitated.

After realizing that the Fujian people had no intention of stopping or avoiding each other, the man quickly became more frightened. Then he hurriedly ran to the side of the road, and then climbed up the wall with skillful hands and feet.

Seeing the other person start walking on the wall and climbing over the ridge skillfully like a veteran, and then jumped back to the road and ran away until he was far behind him, the Fujianese sighed deeply, and then had a wry smile on his face.

He knew that the man wanted to avoid the plague and had done nothing wrong.

"The screen of people is not good at dusk...even in the daytime, there are formations, walking on the walls and roofs, teasing the residents..." The notebook "Jiashen Dynasty Events" in the early Qing Dynasty recorded a true portrayal of the city of Beijing.

The mood of Fujian people is very complicated, very tired and very desolate.

After running around for days, he actually didn't mind that much whether he could get into the sight of the superior officials.

What he cared about was that he had no chance to recommend his findings to his superiors, or his experience in diagnosing and treating the plague over the past few months.

The plague was so raging, but the country was always passive and did almost nothing.

His heart is bleeding!

The Fujian native only came to Beijing in October last year, and the situation in Beijing at that time really shocked him.

A plague broke out throughout the north, and he, who was quite skilled in medicine, had already heard about it.

This plague actually began in the sixth year of Chongzhen, first in Shanxi, and then began to spread to surrounding areas, causing a major epidemic in many areas.

As a result, the plague not only intensified the chaos in the northwest, but also further stimulated and expanded the scale of civil unrest, and became an unstoppable and powerful driver of the vigorous development of the peasant army.

In the thirteenth year of Chongzhen, the epidemic also spread to Zhili. Severe epidemics occurred in Shunde Prefecture, Hejian Prefecture and Daming Prefecture, and most of the people died in many counties.

In the fourteenth year of Chongzhen, the epidemic developed further. In Damingfu, "there was no rain in spring, locusts ate all the wheat, the plague was rampant, fifty-six out of ten people died, and the year was very bad."

It was also in this year that the epidemic was introduced into Beijing.

However, it did not cause a major outbreak in Beijing at that time, but there were large-scale outbreaks in surrounding Tianjin and other places.

Due to the wide range of records and scope, as well as the saying that major disasters must be followed by major epidemics since ancient times, locust plagues and droughts have occurred continuously and even unprecedented scale plagues have broken out in the north. In some areas, the intensity of the plague has been extremely severe for Fujian people who know medical skills.

Not surprising.

It's just that people in Fujian didn't expect that the situation in Beijing would be so serious.

This is the capital!

In fact, the epidemic in Beijing fully broke out in February of the 16th year of Chongzhen, which was February last year, and then quickly swept the entire city with terrifying intensity.

In April alone, the number of dead in the city began to count in the tens of thousands. Five out of ten residents living in small households along the streets also died. Not to mention the children playing on the streets were no longer seen. Even the beggars were all dead. Finally, the city gate

They were all blocked by the coffins being shipped out.

Because the common people gave this plague the names "pimple plague" and "pimple plague", people in later generations were able to know exactly what this plague was.

That was the plague, and it was bubonic plague.

One of the distinguishing features of bubonic plague patients is swollen lymph nodes. At that time, "the death bed was in a state of chaos, all ten rooms were empty, and even all the households were wiped out, and no one could stop them." This kind of infection was so powerful that only the plague could have such power.

By December, the recorded death toll in Beijing was "With or without coffins, the nine-door count has exceeded 200,000."

This is still counted, but there must be others that are not counted.

You must know that the population of Beijing at this time was estimated to be only about 80 to 1 million, which means that the most conservative estimate is that the plague had killed one-fifth of the city's population.

If the civilians are like this, the military's condition will naturally not be good either.

Beijing's official army was nominally around 100,000, but after the epidemic, it was reduced by half. According to Zhang Yi, a Ming Dynasty survivor, when Li Zicheng came to kill, there were not even 10,000 soldiers who could go up to defend the walls of the capital.

Not enough people can get together.

It took five battlements on the city wall to have one soldier, and they were all old, weak, sick and disabled, "dove-shaped and duck-faced, just filling up the numbers".

There is even a statistic whose authenticity cannot be confirmed.

It is said that when the plague broke out in Beijing, there were 27,000 war horses. However, before Li Zicheng destroyed the city, there were only 1,000 fighting horses left in the army in Beijing.

A larger estimate and very uncertain statistics believe that the persistent plague during the Chongzhen period caused a total loss of 10 million people in the northern region.

At the same time, this plague also became one of the only two super plague pandemics in Chinese history.

Another super plague occurred from the turn of the Han Dynasty to the Eastern Han Dynasty.

At this time, I guess many people can understand why the huge army assembled by the Ming Dynasty in the Beijing area was incredibly ineffective in the face of the seventh southern strategy of the Qing army, and why the Qing army did not approach the city of Beijing in the face of huge advantages.

Definitely avoid some areas.

The super plague that is breaking out in Beijing and surrounding areas is definitely one aspect.

But when the epidemic reached this level, what did our Emperor Chongzhen do?

He didn't do anything at first.

Until July, the consort Gong Yongge sent a message to the emperor, asking the emperor to "remember the relic and urgently rescue him."

At this time, Chongzhen issued an edict to allocate 20,000 taels of silver, ordering the censors of the five cities to collect the dead bodies, and allocate another 1,000 taels of silver to the imperial hospital to treat the sick. However, there were too many patients, and this little money was not enough.

It's just a drop in the bucket, it's simply not enough.

Even in the face of unfortunate victims in the palace, Chongzhen continued to display his stingy nature. At first, every person who died in the palace would receive a pension of four thousand yuan. Later, although few palace residents died, even this amount was not given.

Gone.

This is all Chongzhen did in response to the epidemic.

There is also an interesting point that I have to mention here.

Although there was no understanding of the prevention and control of plague in ancient times, everyone understood the collective name under which it was classified—plague.

And this was also the official name written into various official records at that time.

Due to the special inheritance of Chinese history and culture, scholars basically know that it is best to stay away from plagues.

The focus of plague prevention and control is exactly isolation.
To be continued...