In the first year of Jian'an, at the beginning, with the fall of Yuan Shu, the south of the Han Dynasty temporarily returned to calm, and the entire north was more orderly than the south under the governance of Liu He.

As far as the eye can see, except for Guanzhong and Liangzhou, where the warlords are still fighting, the rest of the places have stopped fighting, at least maintaining the peace and calm on the surface.

If this trend is followed, even if the central court's control over the local government cannot be restored to the heyday, it can at least allow the Han Dynasty to slowly recover from the quagmire of years of chaos and various natural disasters, increase the population, store food, and finally move towards the road of recovery and prosperity.

However, God seems to be sincere in his desire to oppose the Han Dynasty, and even this hard-won short-term peace is not willing to give it to the Han people. The situation, which had just improved, quickly took a turn for the worse and worsened due to some reasons beyond manpower's control......

This time, it was not a man-made disaster that broke the calm, but a natural disaster.

In the history of China, there have been many large-scale population declines, and in the last 50 years of the Eastern Han Dynasty, it has reached a shocking level. During this period, the decline in the number of Chinese populations and the tragic unnatural deaths of the people made it difficult to find a second era that could be compared with it in previous and future generations.

Throughout the Eastern Han Dynasty, the largest population was during the reigns of Emperor He and Emperor Shun, when the population of the Han Dynasty was close to 60 million. However, it was also from this time that the population of China began to grow negatively, but for a long time, the magnitude of the population decline was not obvious. During the reign of Emperor Huan, the imperial court organized a large-scale nationwide household census, and in this "census", the figure was that the Han Dynasty had a population of more than 56 million, slightly lower than the peak of nearly 60 million during the period of Emperor He, and the decline was not too large. But after the ensuing Yellow Turban Rebellion and Dong Zhuo's Rebellion. and the mutual civil war between the Central Plains heroes, and by the end of the Battle of Chibi, the population of the Han Dynasty had dropped to a shocking point.

Although the demographic statistics of the late Han Dynasty listed by various historians in later generations are relatively large, the overall decline is consistent.

Du You, a Tang dynasty, recorded in the "General Dictionary" that the Yellow Turban Rebellion during the period of Emperor Huan and Emperor Ling of the Eastern Han Dynasty began, after the Dong Zhuo Rebellion, and to the early period of Jian'an when Cao Cao "coerced the Son of Heaven to order the princes", the population of China at that time was "full of households." 12 out of 10", that is, compared to its heyday, only 20% remained. But at this time, there was still no peace in China, and under this grim form of not existing, there were successive battles between Cao Cao and Yuan Shao for hegemony, Cao Cao's unification war of pacifying Jingzhou and fighting Chibi in the south, and Liu Bei's capture of Bashu and Cao Cao's annexation of Hexi. Until after the Yiling War between Wu and Shu. Huaxia has only entered a relatively stable period. These large-scale wars are fought to the death with heavy casualties, which is nothing less than worse for the already pitiful Han population.

The early days of the establishment of the Wei state. Minister Chen Qun once said that the population of Wei at this time was similar to a large county during the reign of Emperor Wen and Emperor Jing. For example, Nanyang County, which has a large population, had more than 4 million people in one county during its most prosperous period. In the early days of the establishment of the Wei State, it had a population of four or five million.

According to the records in Du You's "General Dictionary", the Shu Kingdom was when Liu Chan ascended the throne. The population was 900,000, and when Shu fell, the population grew to 940,000, and in this year, the Wei State that pacified Shu added the population of Wei and Shu together, and the north of China plus Sichuan totaled 5.37 million people. According to the Book of Jin, the population of Wu at the time of the fall of Shu was 2.3 million. In this way, the total population of China does not exceed eight million. This is the number reached by the long-term recovery of the population after the post-Three Kingdoms era entered a period of relative peace.

Liu He remembered that the decline in the Chinese population during the Three Kingdoms period was unprecedented in the entire history of China. After the Three Kingdoms, the period when the population of China declined the fastest was the end of the Song Dynasty and the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty. At that time, the Mongols killed almost one-third of the world's population from the east to the west in one go, and the population of China also dropped by about 40 percent, which was already the largest disaster in China in the past thousand years, but compared with the tragic scene of the Three Kingdoms era at the end of the Han Dynasty, it was still "a small thing".

When it comes to the sharp decline in population from the late Han Dynasty to the Three Kingdoms period, many reasons can be summarized, such as the nationwide internal scuffle that began with the Yellow Turban Rebellion. At that time, the Yellow Turban Rebellion adopted the strategy of simultaneous action in various places, and from the moment it broke out, it was a full-scale civil war, and the war spread to almost the entire Han Dynasty.

Another example is that the warlords who rose in various places in the late Eastern Han Dynasty were all executioners who disregarded the people's power and killed innocents indiscriminately. After the powerful minister Dong Zhuo took control of the government, he adopted a policy of brutal oppression, and in order to expand his military strength, he continued to capture strong men, leading a large number of people in the Sili area to flee. At that time, the warlords of all walks of life in the north liked to use the common people as shields, and when attacking cities and plundering land, they often captured innocent people as "human shields" to block the front of the troops and block the enemy's attack.

In the time and space when Liu He was not reborn, Liu Yu was a loyal and benevolent elder, he knew that Gongsun Zhan had a heart of disobedience, but he did not recruit troops in the north to expand his army. And when Liu Yu hurriedly launched a crusade against Gongsun Zhan, he also asked his soldiers to cherish the houses of the people and not to burn the city, but he faced Gongsun Zhan, who was holding the people as a "meat shield", and then was easily counterattacked by Gongsun Zhan, and finally lost his life.

In fact, Youzhou, which Liu Yu was in charge of at that time, attracted millions of people during the Yellow Turban Rebellion because it controlled the civil unrest and border troubles well, and if Liu Yu wanted to "storm soldiers", he could summon more than 100,000 people at will, and with these hundreds of thousands of troops, it could be completely crushed to deal with Gongsun Zan and Yuan Shao, who were unstable in the Bohai Sea.

Liu Yu's approach at that time was undoubtedly not a qualified warlord, in that social background, blindly cherishing the people's power and protecting the population, in the end, he became a fat sheep in the eyes of others, and in the absence of self-protection ability, he cheapened Gongsun Zan and Yuan Shao in vain. At that time, after Yuan Shao annexed Youzhou and Jizhou, the number of troops skyrocketed, once reaching 400,000, because he enjoyed the "demographic dividend" left to him by Liu Yu and Han Fu.

The war from the end of the Han Dynasty to the Three Kingdoms was a reciprocating cycle across the country, and even if the common people wanted to flee, they had no way to survive and no way to escape. For example, in the north, the battle of Guandu has just been fought. Not long after, the Battle of Chibi broke out in the south, with the rebellion of Que Xuan, Zhenrong and others in the east, and the rebellion of Beigong Boyu, Ma Teng and Han Sui in the west...... At that time, almost all the territory of the empire, except for the remote Western Regions, was involved in the war, and the places that were not damaged by the war could only be remote and uninhabited places such as Jiaozhou and Yizhou.

War and rebellion may have been the main reason for the sharp decline in population during the Three Kingdoms period at the end of the Han Dynasty, but this was only a consequence. And not because of it.

At the end of the Han Dynasty, plagues and natural disasters were the triggers for a large number of deaths, while warlords fought and people rebelled, which was just a chain reaction after plagues and natural disasters continued to occur.

The occurrence of plague is a difficult problem that successive governments have to face since the middle of the Western Han Dynasty. Because of the war with the Xiongnu and the later annexation of the Southern Xiongnu, the "steppe plague" arose in the northern steppe region. In the following 100 years, it was continuously brought to the Central Plains. The large-scale plague in China began with Emperor Wu of the Western Han Dynasty and the demise of the Western Han Dynasty. The trigger was the peasant uprising in Shandong triggered by the plague. Moreover, this kind of plague was basically a terminal disease with no way out at the level of Chinese medicine at that time.

Even after the Western Han Dynasty perished and the Eastern Han Dynasty changed dynasties, the plague still did not converge. Basically, every one or two decades, it suddenly erupts somewhere. This situation basically ran through the entire Eastern Han Dynasty. It was not until Zhang Zhongjing, the most outstanding medical scientist in the late Eastern Han Dynasty, came out of nowhere and wrote the "Treatise on Typhoid Fever and Miscellaneous Diseases" that the destructive power of large-scale plagues began to be contained.

Another reason is that since the early period of the Eastern Han Dynasty, there have been continuous natural disasters in China. When people of later generations mentioned the scientific and technological achievements of the Eastern Han Dynasty, they naturally had to say that Zhang Heng invented the geodynamic instrument, and the great invention of the geokinetic instrument was due to the frequent natural disasters in the Eastern Han Dynasty.

In terms of earthquakes alone, the frequent occurrence of earthquakes in the middle and late Eastern Han Dynasty is rare in the entire history of China. For example, in the Longxi region of the Eastern Han Dynasty, large-scale earthquakes broke out in the Eastern Han Dynasty and the Emperors, Huan Emperors, Ling Emperors, and Xian Emperors.

At the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, there were also extremely abnormal large-scale locust plagues and droughts, such as the Eastern Han Dynasty Emperor Huan Emperor to Emperor Ling in the past few decades, large-scale locust plagues in the north appeared five times, the most severe of which was almost the entire Central Plains north of the Yangtze River. Such a large-scale locust plague can be compared with several times in the later history of China, that is, during the Kaiyuan period of the Tang Dynasty and the last years of the Yuan Dynasty, which can be called "once in a century".

At the same time, in the last 50 years of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the Yellow River broke four times, and Jingzhou and Jiangdong in the Yangtze River basin experienced five floods. During the same period, the grassland areas inhabited by the northern nomads also experienced large-scale droughts for many years, and the northern ethnic minorities went south to the Central Plains to seek internal attachment in order to escape the disaster.

Continuous natural disasters will inevitably cause widespread famine, and the country's economic reserves will be gradually emptied in the famine. At this time, the Eastern Han Empire had entered the period of gate valve government, and the power of the family gradually surpassed that of the central government. In some prefectures and counties, the imperial court only retains nominal moderation, which is harmonious in normal years, but once wars and natural disasters break out in the country, the weakening of central control will inevitably cause disasters to be more destructive. After all, the big families will choose to hoard and close their doors to protect themselves, and the central government does not have enough economic capacity to provide relief, and the desperate people can only choose to rebel.

For example, in the Jianghuai region, which had just ended the war, the Yangzhou Muwangyi appointed by the imperial court had no place to go and could only stay in Luoyang, while Jianghuai was divided by Cao Cao, Liu Biao and Sun Jian. These warlords only thought about how to seize it, but did not think about resuming production and construction, and once the plague and famine broke out on both sides of the Yangtze River, it was a tragic picture of sorrow and sorrow.

In fact, the Yellow Turban Rebellion, which later spread throughout the Eastern Han Empire, had a lot to do with the famine that lasted for many years. The Yellow Turban Army's measures of giving favors and buying people's hearts quickly gathered hundreds of thousands of believers. As a result of the Yellow Turban Uprising, it caused large-scale war in the north. It's a painful vicious circle, and one of the costs is a devastating population.

At this time, the natural weather in China has also entered the "abnormal" stage, and disasters have occurred in various parts of the Central Plains, such as the drought in Yuzhou, according to the records of the official history, more than 3 million people starved to death at one time, although the numbers are somewhat exaggerated, but at that time, the central government was difficult to protect itself, where can it still manage the people? Later, Dong Zhuo fled from Luoyang under the blow of the Kwantung princes and moved all the population of Luoyang to Chang'an, but only less than 100,000 people survived to Chang'an, and most of the others died on the road.

Liu Yu returned to Luoyang from Youzhou to preside over the government for half a year, and at first he was busy straightening out the official positions in the court, supplementing young officials as subordinate officials, and setting up the shelves in the court. The officials who were detained by Lu Bu in Anyi, Liu Yu did not plan to use them more, according to the construction of his son Liu He, this time Liu Yu used a large number of scholars who had completed their studies from Yenching University and Youyan Library.

The officials in the court have not yet been replenished, Yuan Shu is in Shouchun again, Liu Yu put his energy on the denunciation of Yuan Shu and the persecution of Yuan Shu's surrounding forces to fight Yuan, and after the fall of Yuan Shu, Liu Yu originally planned to conduct an inventory of the existing population of the Han states according to his son's construction, but as a result, the various disasters and chaos reported by snowflakes from all over the country made Liu Yu overwhelmed and worried.

According to the state's report, there is a severe drought in the whole state, the river water is cut off, and people and animals cannot even guarantee drinking water, let alone sowing and cultivating.

Longxi Guo Yan reported that there was a plague in Huangzhong, with countless deaths and injuries of people and animals, and a large number of people moving eastward, only fearing that the plague would spread to Guanzhong and even the entire Sili.

Cao Cao in Yanzhou reported that an earthquake occurred in Dong County, tens of thousands of houses collapsed, and tens of thousands of people were killed and injured.

Liu Biao of Jingzhou reported that floods in Changsha have inundated hundreds of thousands of hectares of fertile land and displaced hundreds of thousands of people into homes

Liu Zhang of Yizhou reported that the barbarians in Nanzhong rebelled, killed officials and seized cities, which had spread to several counties.

Jiangdong Sun Jian reported that the mountains in Yuzhang and Huiji were troubled, and they invaded the Han people, and repeated suppressions failed to work.

Even Youzhou, which has always been stable, has recently reported to the direction of Luoyang that signs of locust plague and drought have been found

……

In Taifu's mansion, Liu Yu raised his head and sighed, he really wanted to follow his son Liu He's example, and make a move towards the sky, that is, he raised his middle finger straight, and then scolded: Thief, do you still let the big man live? (To be continued......)