Jiùhuāng Huómín Shū 救荒活民書
Famine Relief and Saving the People by 董煟 (撰)
About the work
The foundational Chinese famine-relief manual, by the Southern-Sòng official Dǒng Wěi 董煟 (Shàoxī 5 [1194] jìnshì; magistrate of Ruì’ān 瑞安). 3 juǎn: upper juǎn surveys ancient relief institutions to illuminate present practice; middle juǎn lays out the relief strategies in proposal form; lower juǎn gathers the discussions and policies of contemporary Sòng statesmen on famine relief. The catalog meta date 1184 likely reflects the composition date that gave rise to the work’s title; precise composition is around the 1184–1196 span. The work entered the imperial bibliographic record and shaped YuánMíngQīng famine-relief writing—it became canonical in Pierre-Étienne Will’s modern reading as the “earliest specifically devoted famine-relief treatise in the Chinese tradition.”
Tiyao
By Dǒng Wěi of the Sòng. Wěi, zì Jìxìng 季興, of Póyáng 鄱陽. Took the jìnshì in Shàoxī 5 (1194); served as magistrate of Ruì’ān. The book has the author’s preface at the head: the upper juǎn surveys the ancient as evidence for the present; the middle juǎn lays out famine-relief proposals; the lower juǎn describes in full the writings and policies of contemporary worthy ministers and scholars, both as model and as caution.
The work claims that the Chángpíng granaries began under Suí, and the Yìcāng righteousness-granaries under Táng Tàizōng—these are not deeply traced. Yet the recorded Chángpíng grain-counts are details the Suíshū misses. The Sòng-era tax-remissions and relief-grants are recorded in the Sòngshǐ annals and treatises and in the Wénxiàn tōngkǎo and Xù Zīzhì tōngjiàn chángbiān; this work captures the essentials, perhaps two- or three-tenths of the whole, but treats the contemporary advantages and disadvantages in detail—genuinely supplementing the Sòng zhì.
The Quànfēn (encouraging-distribution) policies are Sòng administrative practice; the Sòngshǐ misses them, but this work has them. Other matters—rent reduction and seed loans, the Chúnxī relief codes—can supplement the historian’s gleanings. The Sòng worthy ministers’ famine-relief policies are also valuable for cross-reference with the standard biographies. This is one of the practically useful old books.
Abstract
The Jiùhuāng Huómín Shū is the seminal Chinese work on famine relief. Composed between Dǒng’s jìnshì (1194) and his Ruì’ān magistracy—the catalog meta gives 1184, possibly an earlier draft date or a transcription error; common scholarly opinion places the work c. 1196–1206. The dating is conventionally given as 1184 in modern catalogs. We follow the catalog meta date here.
The work is uniquely important as the first specifically devoted Chinese famine-relief treatise. It synthesizes the HànTáng granary tradition, the chángpíng and yìcāng institutions, and contemporary Sòng emergency-relief practice into a single program. Pierre-Étienne Will, Bureaucracy and Famine in Eighteenth-Century China (Stanford, 1990), traces the Qīng famine-relief tradition (especially the Kāngjì lù of KR2m0049 and the Huāngzhèng cóngshū of KR2m0048) directly to Dǒng Wěi.
Translations and research
Standard editions: Wényuāngé Sìkù; modern punctuated edition Liú Mǎo 劉茂, ed., Jiùhuāng Huómín Shū jiào-zhù (Sūzhōu dàxué chū-bǎn-shè, 2008). Foundational Western scholarship: Pierre-Étienne Will, Bureaucracy and Famine in Eighteenth-Century China (1990)—especially pp. 33–88 on the Sòng tradition and the Jiùhuāng huómín shū’s influence; Pierre-Étienne Will and R. Bin Wong, Nourish the People: The State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650–1850 (Univ. of Michigan, 1991); Lillian Li, Fighting Famine in North China (Stanford, 2007). Chinese: Lǐ Jūn 李軍, Sòngdài huāng-zhèng yán-jiū 宋代荒政研究 (Bēi-jīng gǔjí chū-bǎn-shè, 2008).
Other points of interest
Dǒng Wěi’s life-dates are not precisely transmitted; CBDB has him with no dates. He is securely placed by his 1194 jìnshì and his Ruì’ān posting; modern scholarship places him fl. late 12th to early 13th century.