Section: Famine and Commerce

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Sometimes famine cannibalism had a commercial side—human flesh was not only eaten by desperate people, but also sold and purchased; living people were bought in order to butcher and consume them. About a famine in the mid-sixth century, one of the dynastic histories writes that “everywhere, human flesh mixed with beef and horse meat was sold.” Remarkable in this account is that human flesh appeared on the market even before other sources of meat were completely exhausted—in addition to mentioning beef and horse meat, the account also states that slaughtered cows and dogs were sold at very high prices.2

This was no exception. Describing a famine in the early tenth century, one of the official histories notes that “one jin of human flesh was valued at 100 qian,” while those who bought dog meat had to pay five times as much.3 And a survivor of a famine in the early twelfth century remembered that “the price of human meat was lower than that of dog meat or pork.”4 During famines, human flesh was eaten not by the wealthiest, but by those who could no longer afford other kinds of meat.

The poorest, on the other hand, probably had to do without meat altogether, or they had to sacrifice the life of one of their family members in order to get it. Over thousands of years, children—in patriarchal China, most of them girls5—were the victims of a practice known as “exchanging one’s children and eating them.” When threatened by starvation, poor parents gave a child to another family, receiving one of their children in return; each family then slaughtered the child they had been given. In this way, explains the British journalist Jasper Becker, they could “alleviate their hunger and . . . avoid consuming their own offspring.”6

The oldest documented occurrence of this practice was in 593 BCE, when a city, Song, was besieged by the neighboring Chu people. The inhabitants sent a messenger to the Chu commander, telling him: “In the city we are exchanging our children and eating them, and splitting up their bones for fuel. Notwithstanding, if you require us to make a covenant with you under the walls, we will not do so.” Realizing that the people in the city would never give up, the besiegers aborted their attempt to conquer the city and withdrew.7 The exchange and consumption of children is also documented for various later sieges, both during the early “Warring States” period (ca. 475–221 BCE) as well as in later times, up to the twelfth century CE.8

Famines caused by drought or warfare led to the same reaction. During the early years of the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE), the land was in turmoil and famine was widespread. Emperor Gaozu (256–195 BCE), the founder of the dynasty, reacted by allowing families to eat their own children or to exchange or sell them for cannibalistic purposes.9 The exchange and subsequent consumption of children is also documented for later famines, including one in the year 400 CE.10

The same practice is mentioned in many accounts of the so-called Incredible Famine, a disaster that struck several northern provinces in the late 1870s. With an estimated death toll of nine to thirteen million people, it is considered the most lethal drought-related famine in Chinese history.11 The deadly child exchange reappeared, for the last time, during the great famine in 1959–1961 caused by Mao’s disastrously misdirected “Great Leap Forward.” Decades later, Becker spoke with a famine survivor from the Anhui province in the east who “recalled that a traditional practice called Yi zi er shi (‘Swop child, make food’) was common.”12 This is the same phrase mentioned in many of the older documents, also translatable as “exchanging one’s children and eating them.”

Starving parents, the witness remembered, stopped giving food to one of their children—usually a girl, as boys were considered more valuable to continue the family line. Once the child was dead, her body was given to neighbors who in turn gave up one of their own children. (In older times, it seems that living children were exchanged and then killed by the recipient family. Maybe the new practice was perceived as safer, since there was no risk of anyone witnessing a murder and calling the police.) The dead body of the neighbors’ child was used to make soup and nourish the family for some time. Sometimes up to seven women agreed to share their children in this manner, each giving up one child to save the rest of the family.13

The interviewee stated that “people accepted this as it was a kind of hunger culture” and did not criticize those who made such “swops,” understanding that they were driven by desperation. He explained that people remembered this practice from severe famines of the 1930s where it had also occurred—he does not seem to have known that the practice was actually thousands of years older than that.14

In fact, the deadly child exchange was not limited to China but has also been reported from other parts of the world. On the “barren and rocky islands which form the windward [southeastern?] portion of the Fijian group,” the English-Australian missionary and ethnologist Lorimer Fison heard of an ancient practice known as Veisaungone or “child-barter.” An old and “thoroughly trust-worthy man” stated that, when he was young, the older people often spoke of earlier bad times of famine, during which “children [were] commonly eaten until the hungry time was overpast.” He explained: “Our fathers did not eat children of their own tribe. . . . People of other towns used to bring their boys and girls hither to us, and take away ours in exchange and this was called ‘Veisaungone.’”15 The Methodist missionary Walter Lawry also mentions this custom.16

The French explorer and captain Jules Dumont d’Urville (1790–1842) recorded recollections of the same practice in Mangareva, one of the islands of French Polynesia. In August 1838, he wrote: “It is even said that in a time of famine, parents went so far in forgetting their most natural feelings as to sacrifice their own children [for food]. But to avoid being reduced to eating them themselves, they were careful to exchange them between neighbors.”17

And among the Zande in Central Africa, starving men sometimes exchanged either their daughters or their wives—sources differ—to be “butchered and eaten up,” as already mentioned.18 While mentions of this practice from elsewhere are not as frequent as those from China, it is remarkable that the same famine practice could be found throughout the world. Since it is very unlikely that such hunger customs in China, Polynesia, and Africa had somehow influenced each other, it seems that this approach to ensuring the survival of families at the cost of their weaker members—without, however, having to go as far as eating your own relatives—emerged spontaneously in various parts of the world. It is also notable, though not surprising, that in all these male-dominated societies it was children—girls more often than boys—or occasionally women who were sacrificed for food, never men.

A comment in one of the official histories also shows that being able to eat an unrelated child was considered a less appalling form of cannibalism than having to eat one’s own. During the troubled times at the end of the Sui dynasty (581–618), notes the Beishi, things turned bad so quickly that people did not even have “time . . . to exchange the children before eating them.”19 Other sources confirm that having to eat one’s own relatives was considered the worst calamity—something that only happened when people had run out of all other options. During a famine in 1622 (writes another of the histories), people proceeded from eating “the flesh of the dead” to eating “people . . . alive”—killing others to eat them. Ultimately, some became so desperate that “relatives ate each other.”20 Centuries later, Liu Xing, a survivor of the “Incredible Famine,” described the same progression of events. After consuming everything else that was available, even tree bark and clay, people resorted to eating human flesh. First, they consumed the dead, he writes, then they killed and ate the living, including finally their own family members.21

These notes indicate that killing and eating strangers was seen as a less terrible choice than having to kill one’s own children or relatives—people never got used to the latter, but sometimes, it seems, to the former. Wang Xilun, a poet who engaged in relief work during the “Incredible Famine,” later described “how children whose starving parents had abandoned them in ditches were slaughtered and eaten by other famine victims as though they were sheep or pigs,” without the perpetrators showing any visible concern for the humanness of their victims. A booklet published during the disaster by a group of Chinese philanthropists collecting money for relief efforts complains that some had discovered that “killing people is as easy as killing pigs,” leading to orphans and abandoned children being butchered without mercy “since meat has become more valuable than human life.”22 That children were kidnapped, killed, and consumed during the famine was also confirmed by various newspaper accounts published either during or after the famine as well as by several survivors, among them Liu Xing.23

While poor families had to exchange one of their children for one they could eat (if they did not want to become kidnappers), wealthier people could sometimes pay with money for a human life. The historians Korn, Radice, and Hawes point out that, in times of hardship, poor parents were often forced to bring one of their children to the market and sell them in order to allow the rest of the family to survive. What happened afterwards was left to the buyers. In normal times, most of the sold children will have faced a life of servitude and exploitation, but in times of famine, when servants were abundant but meat was scarce, their lives were sometimes brutally cut short.24

If sold to private buyers, parents might have had no idea what would happen to their children, but in some cases, there could be no doubt. Describing a siege in 883, one of the dynastic histories reports that husbands brought their wives and parents brought their children to butcher shops to sell them; those sold were “butchered like sheep and pigs.”25 In other cases, the sources do not clearly reveal the origin of the human flesh that appeared on the market26—much of it might have come from corpses, but in other cases it likely came from persons who had been either kidnapped or purchased.