A Tale of Two Sieges

A Tale of Two Sieges:Liu Qi, Li Gao, and Epidemics in the Jin-Yuan Transition Robert Hymes The Question: Liu Qi's Silence A million deaths are a lot to leave out. My title might as easily be "A Siege in Two Tales," as my problem is the drastically different stories two men told of what happened in Kaifeng 開封 under Mongol siege. In 1235, on the first day of fall, the scholar Liu Qi 劉 (1203–1250), once a student at the Imperial University of the Jin state but now in reclusion at his ancestral home in Hunyuan 渾源 (modern-day Datong 大同, Shanxi), finished the preface of Records from a Return to Obscurity (Guiqian zhi 歸潛志), a collection of notes and thoughts on things he had witnessed in the Jin's last years. Most of the [End Page 295] work offered biographical vignettes on late-Jin personalities; but in his eleventh chapter Liu offered a sort of chronicle of the Mongols' 1232–1233 siege and final seizure of the Jin's southern capital at Kaifeng.1 Though Kaifeng's fall did not end the Jin dynasty,2 once it fell there was no real prospect that Jin would survive, and both the siege and the seizure encompassed death of shocking magnitude. Liu Qi's account is the only extended eyewitness record of these events that survives, and thus has great historical value. But it leaves out one of the most devastating and historically important events of the time and place it covers: a devastating epidemic that killed as many as a million. I will show Liu's strange omission and try to explain it. This will require showing that a different (and historically somewhat more obscure) witness, the physician Li Gao 李杲 (1180–1251), is plausible just where Liu Qi is not; and the intertwined stories I tell here will turn out to revolve around three men: Liu Qi, Li Gao, and the much more famous poet, officeholder, and historiographer to whom each was separately tied, Yuan Haowen 元好問 (1190–1257). Writing in 1247, twelve years after Liu Qi but also claiming eyewitness status, in his On Misunderstandings in Distinguishing Inner from Outer Damage (Neiwaishang bianhuo lun 內外傷辨惑論) Li Gao gave a much briefer yet hair-raising account of just one phase of the siege and conquest period in Kaifeng. In the past at the change of eras, in the renchen 壬辰 year [1232], the capital was at maximum readiness up to the last ten days of the third month.3 In all it had suffered the enemy's attack for half a month, and after the siege was lifted,4 barely [End Page 296] one or two out of every ten thousand people in the capital did not get sick, and the sick who died followed another without end. At each of the capital's twelve gates, [the dead] sent out each day were two thousand at most and no less than one thousand at fewest, and this was so for almost [two] months. ... Earlier, during the Zhenyou 貞祐 and Xingding 興定 eras (1213–1222), [cities] like (ru 如) Dongping 東 (in modern-day Shandong), like Taiyuan 太原, or like Fengxiang 鳳翔 had been the same in the illness and death they suffered after their sieges were lifted.5 [Emphasis mine.] Li Gao's numbers imply between 600,000 and 1.2 million deaths from sickness in two months, in a city whose remaining inhabitants when the Mongols seized it the next year (whose number had probably been swelled in the meantime by new refugees from surrounding territories) were reported as 1.4 million: a rate of epidemic mortality for which there are few parallels in world history.6 Li Gao was so struck by the experience that On Misunderstandings offers a new theory of medicine, "Internal Damage" (neishang 內傷) theory, to supplement or even replace the then-dominant "Cold Damage" (shanghan 傷) epidemic theory. Yet Liu Qi had written nothing about any epidemic: the only mass deaths he mentions, as we will see, are from the siege itself or from starvation, and the latter only in the last stages before the Mongols seized the city, many months after Li Gao's reported epidemic. Li Gao and Liu Qi seem to retell different

Ancient history · Art · CONQUEST · Literature · Siege · Silence · Chinese history and philosophy · Classics · History

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