What major epidemics have occurred in the history of China?

Since Qin Shihuang achieved reunification, it has been a normal state for China governments to record the plague. The truly large-scale outbreak of plague was recorded in the second half of the 2nd century (about AD 170) until the half century of AD 220. During this period, there were almost constant plagues in China.

At the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Yuzhou, Qingzhou and Xuzhou were the areas with the most serious plague. This is the eastern Han regime-that is, the region where the three kingdoms regime is located, the eastern half of the whole Central Plains. During the Eastern Han Dynasty, the population in that area was the densest, agriculture was very developed, and the living environment was quite crowded. And there is the problem of frequent floods. This submerged place is the best environment for cultivating bacteria. Due to humidity, diseases occur in the local area every year.

There is something more important these days, that is, Zhang Zhongjing, a "medical saint" in China, appeared. He is from Nanyang, Henan, and there are more than 200 people in his family. Three-thirds of them died of the plague in two dead. Therefore, he combined his clinical experience to study the plague and wrote a book called Treatise on Febrile Diseases. This book is a concrete and practical method to classify and analyze diseases from your own medical experience and put forward diagnosis and treatment plans. During this period, the mortality rate in the Central Plains was very high. At that time, China had a population of about 50 million, and the area where plague broke out on a large scale had a population of about 20 million to 30 million, making it the most densely populated area.

The plague in the city is almost as serious as that in the countryside. The medical environment in rural areas may be worse, but people in cities have no effective way to deal with the plague. For example, the "Seven Scholars in Jian 'an" in history were seven famous scholars at that time, and five of them died of infectious diseases, the severity of which can be imagined.

Such a large-scale plague in the north can be said to have had a great impact on China, especially in rural areas. When China was still an agricultural country, intensive agriculture depended on both land area and labor force. If a family has three laborers, two of whom are older and one is younger, if one or two people die of the plague, the productivity of this family will be terminated. The total wealth of the central plains region where the plague broke out accounts for about one-third of the country. The scale of agricultural production in this area is not enough, which will definitely lead to the economic situation of the whole country. The consequence of the outbreak of plague affecting agricultural production was a sharp increase in hungry people, and then these hungry people joined bandits and local troops, which just provided soldiers for hegemony in the Three Kingdoms period. Moreover, the war itself will also lead to plague, because many people who died of military casualties are piled up and nobody cares, which also leads to the proliferation of bacteria.

Therefore, the consequences of the plague, first, will make the population of the plague gathering place decrease rapidly, the economic productivity is weak, and the social order is chaotic; The second is that the bacteria bred in the plague will continue to multiply and even spread everywhere.

After the great plague, especially after the plague that lasted for many years, a chaotic and uneasy situation will be formed, which may have a long-term impact of 50 to 60 years or even 1200 years.

After the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, it was the "five random flowers" in the Wei and Jin Dynasties. After the Northern and Southern Dynasties, the ethnic distribution in China was different from that in the Han Dynasty. Ethnic minorities entered China and merged into the melting pot of China. They slowly sinicized and took root in China. The population of Sui Dynasty is different from that of Han and Jin Dynasties in terms of its essential genes. The biggest reason for this change is the serious plague.

In addition to this great plague that led to the disintegration of the Eastern Han Empire, several other serious plagues broke out in the history of China. One of them happened in the Yuan Dynasty. Genghis Khan attacked the state of Jin from the northeast and fought all the way to the west, establishing the largest Mongolian empire with the strongest and widest territory in the world. On the way from Shangdu to Europe, the Mongolian empire followed one post road after another, and there were many people coming and going. The Mongols' maritime power also extended to far away places. At that time, businessmen from Arab countries, Indian and southern China all took part in maritime activities, and ships kept coming and going between ports.

These constant ships and business trips turned the Black Death, which broke out in Europe in the14th century, into a global plague, which affected China from Europe. The influence of the Black Death was so great that even the map of Europe changed greatly. Plague led to the shortage of manpower in Europe, and gradually formed a trend of replacing human labor with machine production. This great plague in the Mongolian era lasted from15th century to16th century.