Through an interesting and original mix of songs, poems, stele inscriptions, folklore, and oral accounts of the famine from Shanxi Province, 2000 IDRF Fellow Edgerton-Tarpley examines cultural responses to trauma and the more social side of a national tragedy. Occurring at a time of intense national crisis, the massive drought/famine that left nearly ten million people dead in north China during the late 1870s remains one of China’s most dreadful disasters. By countering those depictions with central government, treaty-port, and foreign debates over the meaning of the famine, she shows how the response to the events varied greatly between different levels of Chinese society. Buy from Amazon