﻿rockhill] the population of china 313 



stronghold, 50,000 were killed and a vast fruitful and thickly popu- 

 lated tract turned into waste. At Chuguchak and its environs 40,- 

 000 men perished at the hands of the Chinese, and the town was 

 left without a single inhabitant. 



Doctor Macgowan, who was residing in China during the whole 

 of the T'ai-p'ing rebellion, says of it: 1 " Nine provinces had keen 

 desolated by it ; flourishing towns and cities had been made heaps of 

 ruins, and wild beasts made their dens within them ; whilst fully 

 thirty millions of people had been put to death by these ruthless 

 robbers " (rebels and imperialists). 



Another authority says: " During the first year of the great Tai- 

 ping rebellion the registered population declined by two-fifths, hut, 

 though many millions must have perished, it is not at all likely that 

 the numbers of 1850 (414,493,000) were more than decimated. 

 Even then, to kill or starve 43,000,000 people in ten years, would 

 mean 12,000 a day, in addition to the 40,000 a day who (at the rate 

 of 30 per thousand per annum) would die naturally, and would 

 balance about the same number of births. Moreover, the rebellion 

 covered only one-half the area of China, so that 24,000 a day is cer- 

 tainly nearer than 1 2,000. ~ 



The loss of life attending the crushing of the two Mohammedan 

 and the Nien-fei rebellions (1860-75) mounted certainly to over a 

 million. Then we have a quarter of a million killed in the suppres- 

 sion of the Mohammedan rebellion in Kan-su in 1894-95. If 

 we add to this terrible source of loss of population that resulting 

 from famines and floods, the total is nearly doubled. There were 

 great famines in 1810, 181 1, 1846, and 1849, which, according to the 

 Tung luia hi, the best official authority we have on the subject, re- 

 duced the population by 45,000,000. Although this figure may seem 

 excessive, we know that in the next great famine — that of 1877-78, 

 which visited only four provinces of the Empire with great severity, 

 no fewer than 9,500,000 persons fell its victims. This figure I quote 

 on the authority of the China Famine Relief Committee of Shanghai. 



We must add to this again the loss of life which attended the great 

 flood of 1888, when the Yellow River broke its hanks and flooded 

 nearly the whole province of Ho-nan. According to memorials sent 

 at the time to the Emperor, about 2,000,000 were drowned or starved 

 to death by this catastrophe. Then there is the unknown, but cer- 

 tainly terrible, mortality during the great drought and famine in 



1 History of China, p. 575. Conf. S. Wells Williams, The Middle Kingdom, 

 n, 623. 



2 E. H. Parker, China, p. 190. 



