![[2000+_year_global_temperature_including_Medieval_Warm_Period_and_Little_Ice_Age_-_Ed_Hawkins.svg.png]] One place the plague *did result* in a major political change was where it had begun, China. Actually, by the time disease reached Europe, bubonic plague had been devastating the Chinese population for over a decade. The earliest outbreaks were seen in 1331, when chronicles in Hebei (around Beijing) described sudden mass deaths with swollen lymph nodes. Records from the 1330s to the 1350s describe "the great dying", with entire villages and city wards emptied, corpses left unburied, and Yuan tax collectors failing to bring any revenue back to the government because there was no one left alive to pay. Like Europe, China lost up to half its population, or about 40 million people. And like Europe, the Chinese population had already been hard hit by famines in the decades before the plague arrived. Changes in climate (probably also resulting from the Little Ice Age) caused disastrous floods of the Yellow River, the irrigation system was badly damaged, and when plague arrived there was no one to fix it or tend the rice fields. ----- Next: [[13.12 - Zhu Yuanzhang]] Back: [[13.11 - Plague in China]]