A Tale of Two Sieges: Liu Qi, Li Gao, and Epidemics in the Jin-Yuan Transition

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. Se...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of Song-Yuan studies 2021, Vol.50 (1), p.295-363
Main Author: Hymes, Robert
Format: Article
Language:eng ; chi
Subjects:
Allegory
Biographies
Death & dying
Deaths
Epidemics
Hair
Illnesses
Medicine
Mortality rates
Plot (Narrative)
Refugees
Testimony
Witnesses
World history
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Summary: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. See PDF ] (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 [ Image omitted: In what follows I will explore their respective plausibility and will try to show, for Li Gao, what sort of rough support one can find in contemporary sources and, since that support will be incomplete, how he could have known what he claimed to know; and for Liu Qi, why he omitted what he surely knew. Since Li Gao's testimony is far from completely confirmed elsewhere, and since it has even been suggested that his description of mass illness is allegory,7 it is worth asking whether his testimony is both reliable and meant literally, as to Kaifeng and elsewhere. Sadly. this was lost by the eighteenth century,12 so we have no narrative of the Kaifeng epidemic from Yuan's hand.
ISSN:1059-3152
2154-6665
2154-6665
DOI:10.1353/sys.2021.0028