Strange Desolation 1877

In 1877 AD, the third year of the reign of Emperor Guangxu of the Qing Dynasty, the year of Ding Chou of the lunar calendar, a famine that was rare in a century swept across northern China. The land was filled with hungry people and it was so miserable that it was known in history as the "Ding Wu Famine." In a small mountain village called Fengjiagou in Xinping County, Shanxi, the peace of the past was broken by this ominous disaster. Opium invades fertile farmland, villages and towns seize the fleeing women, grain merchants Zhang's family is heavily in debt, and they sell their daughters to repay the debts; the court sells officials, but those who buy them are corrupt and pervert the law; those who escape from famine cannibalize human bones, and cannot escape from the wolf's belly; the hungry people rob big households and occupy the mountains as kings; foreigners recruit believers and provide relief to the victims. It is really a chaos. You can sing and I will appear on the stage. Li Jiasheng, a young man from Fengjiagou, personally experienced this bizarre Dingwu Year. Scenes of tragedies continued to happen to the people around him. He witnessed this strange and famine year and the turmoil of the end of the Qing Dynasty. Natural disaster? Man-made disaster? In fact, what is more terrifying than natural disasters is often the people behind them.