Yuluo Bashan

In the last years of Qianlong's reign, the Qinba Mountains suffered from successive famines, and several counties in Xiangyang Prefecture were without food. Land harvests were lost, official warehouses were depleted, and the original livelihood system collapsed rapidly. A large number of people were forced to leave their places of origin and migrate along official roads, eventually entering the sparsely populated depths of Daba Mountain, where they were called shantytowns. Zhao An is one of them. He used to make a living by keeping accounts in the city, but during the famine, he was no different from everyone else. After entering the mountains, the refugees relied on cutting firewood, collecting, exchanging grain, and simple farming to survive, forming loose and fragile settlements among the ravines and slopes. At first, they just wanted to survive and had no intention of resisting. As the population gathered, the government began to re-examine these people in the mountains. Clearances, bans, and bans came one after another, and the originally vague living conditions were subsumed into governance and suspicion. At the same time, secret religious networks have entered the mountainous areas, providing another source of support for the troubled people in mutual aid and faith. In the early years of Jiaqing, the White Lotus Sect rose up, and the Qing government launched a large-scale purge. The Qinba mountainous area was involved in the war, and originally they were just refugees seeking survival, but they were quickly characterized as part of the chaos. Some people were forced to participate, some tried to escape, and more people disappeared in the chaos. This book uses the experiences of a group of ordinary refugees as clues to show how they were pushed into the mountains and how they were silently lost in the course of history. This is a true historical profile that is simplified as "civil unrest".