Between 1876 and 1879 a serious and large-scale drought occurred in China, leaving some 13 million people dead out of the total of 108 million. As the world was emerging from its last period of cooling known as “The Little Ice Age,” a drought in the Yellow River basin area began in earnest in 1876, worsening the following year with the almost total failure of rain. This was by far the worst drought to hit the region in the past 300 years, and definitely caused the largest number of casualties. Shanxi province was the most affected by the famine, with an estimated 5.5 million dead out of a total population of 15 million.
Previous droughts had been less devastating because a strong centralized state stored grains for such disasters, and redistributed the stored grain when harvests failed. But in the 1870s, the Qing Dynasty was weak thanks to rebellions and increased western imperialist incursions, the greatest of which were the Opium Wars with Great Britain. The Qing Dynasty had not been stockpiling grain for a disaster, and would not have been able to redistribute any stockpiled grain anyways. So 13 million died.
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