- Wade-Giles romanization:
- Shen-hsi
- Conventional:
- Shensi
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By the 19th century Shaanxi was seriously impoverished. Although only marginally affected by the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64) in its last stages, eastern and southern Shaanxi were slightly disturbed by the Nian Rebellion between 1853 and 1868. It then suffered the bloody Muslim rebellion of 1862 to 1873, which affected much of the western and northern parts of the province. Although the effects of the rebellion and its savage suppression were not as terrible as in Muslim Gansu, about 600,000 were killed in Shaanxi, and the accompanying destruction left the province in serious plight.
As this rebellion was coming to an end, Shaanxi was also affected by one of the worst famines in modern times, brought about by a prolonged drought. It had virtually no rain from 1876 to 1878, and, when the government tried to remedy the situation in 1877, poor transport facilities prevented effective relief. Perhaps four to five million people died in Shaanxi alone, with some single counties in the fertile Wei valley losing more than 100,000 people each. As a result of the terrible death toll in the last decades of the 19th century, Shaanxi became a haven for a wave of land-hungry immigrants from Sichuan and Hebei provinces.
The end of the Qing period in 1911 brought yet further deterioration in living conditions. In 1912 the governors of Shaanxi and Gansu became engaged in a destructive civil war of an unusually brutal and violent character; the war, often affecting all of Shaanxi, continued until 1921, after which the province became involved in a still-larger war between Feng Yuxiang and the Zhili (Chihli, now Hebei) warlords. In 1926 the capital, Xi’an, was besieged and badly damaged; the death toll numbered nearly 100,000 from starvation alone.
In the earlier years of the 20th century Shaanxi also suffered badly from periodic famines, which occurred in 1915, in 1921, and finally in 1928. This last famine was as severe as that of 1877–78; it is estimated that at least three million people died of starvation, after which a wave of epidemics increased the death toll still further. Whole counties were virtually depopulated. This time, however, some measures of relief were forthcoming. The International Famine Relief Organization began to rehabilitate the derelict irrigation system of the Wei valley, while the extension of the Longhai Railway into the province meant that, if in the future famine should threaten, relief supplies could quickly be moved into the province.
A further political upheaval followed in 1936 when communist armies, driven out of their bases in Jiangxi, passed through the western parts of Shaanxi. They then established themselves in Yan’an in northern Shaanxi, which was to be the base from which they conducted their war of resistance against the Japanese and from which, after the end of World War II, they successfully undertook the conquest of all China. In Shaanxi itself they controlled the territory of the present Yan’an and Yulin prefectures from 1937 onward.
Southern Shaanxi
The history of the southern part of the province has been considerably more placid than that of the north. Until the late 17th century the area was very sparsely peopled, and much of it, apart from the Hanzhong Basin, has remained virgin forest. In the period after about 1680 the introduction of corn (maize) and sweet potatoes, followed in the 18th century by the introduction of the Irish potato, made upland farming possible. A pattern emerged of growing rice in the valley bottoms, corn on the lower mountain slopes, and Irish potatoes on the higher land. Southern Shaanxi, with its great amounts of vacant land, attracted immigrants on a large scale after severe famines and crop failures had occurred in Hubei and Sichuan provinces in the 1770s. In the early 19th century immigrants from central and southern China constituted as much as 90 percent of the population in some parts of southern Shaanxi.
Rapid and often reckless development of the uplands, however, often led to soil erosion, rapid loss of fertility, and declining crop output. Local disaffection broke out in the so-called White Lotus Rebellion of 1796–1804, which was centred in the Sichuan-Shaanxi-Hubei-Henan border regions. After its suppression, however, the area remained generally peaceful: in the 20th century it escaped the worst excesses of the northwestern warlords’ civil wars, as well as the repeated famines that occurred in northern Shaanxi.
Denis C. Twitchett Victor C. Falkenheim The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica