The North China Famine of 1876–1879 has received some attention recently, but little of this work has focused on the north-western province of Shaanxi. This imbalance is reflected in the local histories that devote far more space to the documentation and commemoration of the Hui rebellion than to the famine. This paper argues that the drought of those years and the ensuing famine is historically much more significant than this biased documentation would suggest, and that the rebellion can only be fully understood by paying attention to the environmental and social conditions in which it unfolded. Further, the paper engages with Mike Davis’s argument that portrays the famine in China as part of a ‘late-Victorian holocaust.’ While persuasive, his focus on outside forces is problematic as it ignores the history of the Qing Empire as an expanding force in itself and inadvertently reinforces the victimization narrative that dominates modern Chinese historiography.
