TERRIBLE RESULTS OF THE CHINESE FAMINE.

Dunstan Times, Issue 908, 12 September 1879, Page 3

TERRIBLE RESULTS OF THE CHINESE FAMINE.

Mr Forrest, the English Consul at Tientsin, reports his belief that during the late Famine in China the deaths from starvation and want reached the enormous total of

9,soo,ooo—that is to soy, that a population more than twice that of Portugal was swept away within a fow months. This estimate would appear scarcely credible were it not supported by the report of Mr Hillier, of the Consular Service, who has lately visited the desolated provinces. His account of tiie condition of things is deplorable in the extreme. Towns which a few years ago were busy centres of trade, and villages which weie populous and well-to-do, ate now silent and d serted ; while houses which used to teem with life .ire now only tenanted by the dead and the few survivors who are le f t to tell the miseries they have undergone. Shocking as this sight must be of this mingling of the dead with the living, the ex planation is even more ghastly. When the famine was at its height the starving people, goaded by the pangs of hunger and unable to obtain food, dug up the bodies of the buried dead. Survivoas preferred therefore to share their homes with the coffins of their deceased friends rather than run the risk of committing them to the uncertain keeping of the ground At intervals the sides of the r..ads are strewn with the whitened bone of the wanderers who had lain down to die where their strength failed them ; and the horror of the scene is aggravated hy the presence of troops of wolves. Soon after the outbreak to the famine large quantities of stores were collected hy the Chinese Government at Tientsin and elsewhere for transmission to the famine stricken districts, but owing to bad roads iuelficie"t means of transport, they arrived on the spot in such sma’l quantities aud at such uncertain intervals that they failed to do more than relieve the sufferings of a few. “Camels, oxen, mules, and donkeys,” Mr Forrest says, “ were hurried along in the widest confusion, ami so many were killed by the desperate people in the hills for the sake of their flesh, that the transit couln only he carried on by the banded vigilance of interested growers of grain, assisted by the train-hauls or militia. The way was marked by the carcasses or skeletons of men aud beasts ; aud the wolves, dogs, and foxes soon put an end to the sufferings of ally wretch who lay down to recover from or die of his sickness in those terrible defiles.’'