Menghean Black Plague
The Menghean Black Plague (Menghean: 흑종 역병 / 黑腫疫病, Hŭkjong Yŏgbyŏng, literally "Black Tumor Epidemic") was a pandemic outbreak of bubonic plague which took place in Menghe between 1508 and 1514. Estimates of the exact death toll vary, but is believed to have killed off at least 60 million people, or more than half of Menghe's estimated population in 1500, and perhaps as many as 20 million more in other countries in the region. This would make it one of the most devastating disease outbreaks in the recorded history of Septentrion.
The Menghean Black Plague is believed to have originated from contact with Sylvan explorers and traders, who arrived in the southern ports of Sunju, Bokju, and Dongchŏn during the early 16th century. Several Sylvan cities experienced minor, periodic plague outbreaks in the years leading up to the voyages to Menghe, and the most widespread theory holds that rats stowing away aboard Sylvan trade ships introduced the pathogen to Menghean port cities, where it spread rapidly in the densely populated areas. For contemporary Menghean observers, the Casaterran connection was explicit, as the disease's symptoms had never before been observed and it struck soon after trade contact began in the very areas Sylvan explorers had visited.
In the long term, the Menghean Black Plague has been credited with toppling the Yi dynasty, reversing Menghe's trend of prewar development, and forcing Menghe into isolation. It also forged a strong cultural association between Casaterran traders and the plague's outbreak, feeding centuries of anti-Western sentiment. The experience of the plague remains a core part of Menghe's collective memory today, and is remembered as the beginning of the Four Dark Centuries.
Background
By the beginning of the 16th century, Menghe's Yi dynasty was at its height in terms of population, wealth, and territorial extent. On land, its control extended considerably beyond Menghe's present borders to include large swaths of what are now Innominada, Maverica, Dzhungestan, Polvokia, and mainland New Oyashima, and at its fringes were a number of protectorates which sent regular tribute shipments to the Menghean capital at Junggyŏng. Menghe's naval power was unrivaled within the Southern Sea area; while Khalistan and New Oyashima had respectable land forces in their own right, Yi Menghe was the first to develop large oceangoing ships with magnetic compasses and astronavigation, and had the lumber resources to build vast trade and counter-piracy fleets.
With the help of these fleets, Menghe had built a vast trading network stretching as far as Qusayn, New Oyashima, and what is now Aenvenlinck, bringing cotton, silk, spices, porcelain, gemstones, ivory, precious metals, and a vast list of other luxury goods between Septentrion's two eastern continents. Some of these goods were shipped to the Yi capital as tribute, traveling inland via a sophisticated network of roads, rivers, and canals, while others accumulated in the major coastal cities where oceangoing ships unloaded their goods. By some estimates, Yi Menghe had the highest GDP per capita and highest standard of living of any major country in 1500, including those in Casaterra, though due to the quality of historical data these figures are not considered precise.
In 1502, Sylvan exploration ships making their way along the Hemithean coast arrived in the Menghean port of Bokju, where they were greeted by curious locals. In Sunju, the city administrator welcomed them personally, hoping to open up trade with a newly discovered country. Impressed at the wealth they found, the Sylvan explorers returned home and spread the word, and before long Casaterran trade ships were flocking to Menghe. A follow-up exploration voyage, in 1504, was even allowed to visit the Imperial court as part of a larger tribute mission; the Gajŏng Emperor welcomed the new arrivals, but was reportedly unimpressed by the coarse wool cloths and dueling pistol they brought as gifts. By 1507, Casaterran trade ships under all colors were already flocking to Menghe's southern ports, lured by rumors of fine porcelain and silk not available on their home continent.
Chronology of the disease
First outbreaks
The Black Plague broke out more or less simultaneously in August 1508 in the port cities of Bokju, Sunju, and Dongchŏn, all of which had been popular destinations for Casaterran traders. The surrounding Rogang River Delta area was the most urbanized and developed region of 16th-century Menghe; some historians estimate that Sunju alone had a population of over one million in 1500, with upper-range estimates at 1.5 million, making it the largest city in the world on the eve of the outbreak. Packed with residents, criscrossed by canals and drainage ditches, and at the end of a 15-year stretch of above-average monsoon rain yields, the area was a rich environment for rat-transmitted pathogens, especially as plague fleas jumped from arriving rats onto native species.
Within the span of several months, the plague exploded to epidemic levels in the Rogang river delta, affecting not just the cities themselves but also the densely packed towns and villages around them. Survivors fleeing Sunju described streets "strewn with bodies of rich and poor alike," with the death toll rising so quickly that victims were buried in mass graves rather than cremated in standard Sindo practice.
Panicked by the sudden onset of disease, many residents of the coastal cities began to flee inland, especially first- or second-generation urban immigrants who still had families in rural villages. This mass exodus of people has complicated efforts to account for the plague's local death toll, with upper-range estimates suggesting that Bokju, Sunju, and Dongchŏn lost 90% of their populations but lower-range estimates suggesting that as much as a third of the decrease was due to out-migration. This includes the death toll from subsequent waves of the plague, which continued to affect the Rogang Delta area until 1515.
Spread
Out-migration from the first affected areas had another effect: it spread the disease inland. Imperial Menghe relied on a sophisticated network of rivers and canals for the transportation of goods, especially grain, which was inefficient to carry long distances by cart or mule train. These barges also carried plague-infected rats along Menghe's vast interior trade network, spreading the disease to other major cities. At the same time, oceangoing trade ships which had stopped in the main infected areas began arriving in other coastal trade cities, each with their own inland-reaching trade routes. By the end of 1509, outbreaks had already been reported in Kusadasi, Emil-si, Insŏng, Chŏlsŏng, Gyŏngsan, and Haeju.
By 1510, all of Menghe's most densely populated areas were reporting plague cases, with staggering levels of mortality. From the Sŭnghwa dynasty onward, Menghean scholars had made considerable advances in the field of medicine for their time, practicing rudimentary inoculation against smallpox and by some accounts aware of a distinction between air-transmitted and water-transmitted disease. The new outbreak, however, was entirely unfamiliar, as was its mode of transmission, and doctors treating patients' boils or buboes suffered the highest infection rates of all.
Hoping to save the inner court, the Gajŏng Emperor ordered that the Imperial Palace complex be sealed against all visitors, and that it draw water only from the wells on its grounds. Yet he, too, passed away in December 1511, as the plague ravaged the city around him.
The disease reached its furthest extent in 1512, erupting onto the northwestern steppes, where it was mainly spread by local wild rodent populations and the hunters who skinned them. The death toll here was relatively minor, as the sparse population and lack of trade exposure limited contagion. By this time, the plague had also begun to die down in the hardest-hit areas, due to a natural limitation built in to its spread: rats suffered the highest risk of flea bites, and died off at even higher rates than humans, removing the most potent vector for the disease's spread.
Less affected areas
Not all areas were affected by the plague equally, and a few were spared altogether. The province of Su was famously escaped the plague's effects, and fatality rates were generally low in the inland north, with some villages unaware that a major plague had struck at all. Usually, less-affected areas lay in the more isolated regions of Menghe, where extensive trade or migration were rare. These areas were less likely to be exposed to plague-infected rats, or to experience contagion between infected persons.
This, of course, did not prevent contemporary writers from attributing such an outcome to other causes. In response to panic at the thought of the oncoming plague, a large sect in already-pious Su Province had begun preaching a radical form of Chŏndoism known as Sudŏk Chŏndo, hoping that a combination of physical and moral cleanliness would save them from a disease brought on by foreign contact and urban squalor. As news of the plague loomed, and as it failed to infect the more isolated Su region, support for the Sudŏk sect surged, and it began to find new followers elsewhere.
Signs and symptoms
Despite variation in contemporary accounts, and often exaggeration as mass hysteria set in, there is general agreement over the symptoms of the plague that affected Menghe in the early 16th century. The most prominent was the sudden appearance of darkened, swollen lumps, earning the disease its Menghean name of Hŭkjong Byŏng or "Black Tumor Illness." Other widely reported symptoms included chills, acute fever, and the vomiting of blood, with death usually coming less than five days after symptoms became apparent.
Some particularly detailed accounts have survived, including this passage by the doctor Yi Ho:
The distinct mark of the plague came in the form of very large, black tumors (Jong), first on the victim's neck, armpits, or groin. These locations, and the speed of spread around the body, make amputation of affected limbs impossible. Once cut, the tumors release blood and pus, and cutting them does nothing to ease their growth. By the third day, the black tumors have spread to all parts of the body, and the victim has begun to vomit blood. By the fourth day, the skin has turned dark black and begun to rot, and the victim is in immense pain. By the fifth day, the victim is dead. Death occurs in some nine of ten cases and no herb or medicine has been found which will produce a cure.
Based on these accounts, and the examination of bodies exhumed from mass graves, modern scientists have identified the main culprit behind the outbreak as Yersinia pestis, and the specific form of the disease as bubonic plague. What contemporary writers described as tumors were in fact buboes, or swollen lymph nodes.
Other accounts mention a specific variant of the disease which affected the victim's lungs, leading to breathing difficulties and death within two days. This is believed to be the form which killed the Gajŏng Emperor in 1511. Such symptoms are consistent with pneumonic plague, in which the Yersinia pestis bacterium is inhaled.
Death toll
The exact toll of the Menghean Black Plague is somewhat contested, in part due to the breakdown of Imperial Menghe's meticulous record-keeping at the height of the pandemic. Urban death tolls are particularly variable, as estimates of pre-plague city sizes vary by factors of two or more, and out-migration to the countryside contributed to the decline in size during the 1510s.
Schroeder's estimates, which are considered the most reputable and fall around the middle of the range, calculate that Yi Menghe had a population of 110 million people on the eve of the outbreak, and that this figure had fallen to 50 million or less by 1515. If accurate, these figures would imply an overall mortality rate of 55 percent and a death toll of 60 million within Menghe alone. The highest scholarly estimates, by Menghean historiographer Sin Gyŏng-sok, place Menghe's population in 1500 at 140 million and the death toll at 95 million.
By any account, the Menghean Black Plague was one of the deadliest regional pandemics in Septentrion's history, and cost Menghe at least 40 percent of its population under the most conservative estimates. Its population would not recover to pre-1500 levels until the 18th century.
Long-term consequences
Political effects
The spread of the Black Plague was crucial in toppling the Yi dynasty, which lost not only the Emperor but many of his eligible heirs. More critically, it lost its legitimacy, with both Chŏndo and Sindo priests interpreting the catastrophe as a sign that the dynasty had angered the gods and lost the Mandate of Heaven.
In the old dynasty's place, the newly independent State of Su represented an influential center of gravity for the first time in Menghe's history. Having survived the plague entirely, it was not only much better off demographically than before, but also led many inside the state and outside it to believe that the Su rulers had been saved by divine intervention or Chŏndoist moral reciprocity. As the plague began to die down, armies marching out from the State of Su easily expanded its control onto the southern plains, which had been the hardest hit.
By 1526, Su forces had reached Yŏng'an, and by 1528 they had seized the old capital at Junggyŏng, a major victory in Imperial legitimacy. There, Prince Yi Dan proclaimed himself the Suchang Emperor, and established the Myŏn dynasty. In the decades that followed, the Suchang Emperor and his successors restored control over many of Menghe's previous domains, including the southwestern provinces.
Economic effects
There has been a large body of scholarly work investigating the long-term effects of the Black Plague on Menghe's economy, and more broadly on its development. The traditional view, widely held from the 18th century onward, was that Menghe was technologically behind the Casaterran powers already in 1500 and the plague served to set it back further along the same path. Some Marxian scholars, mainly in Casaterra, argued that the plague served a necessary function by placing Menghe back on a Feudal path so that it could advance through Capitalism and reach Socialism.
Beginning in the 1990s, however, a new school led by Michael Karloff has argued that Yi-dynasty Menghe already showed the signs of an industrious revolution, with a steady rise in cottage production for sale at local markets and major breakthroughs in agricultural technology and transportation infrastructure. If this trend were left unabated, the Karloff school argues, it is possible that Menghe would have arrived at a domestic industrial revolution, and emerged as the main colonial power in Septentrion. Already present in a less developed form for a century beforehand, this theory has become particularly popular among Menghean scholars and politicians, as it attributes Menghe's past economic backwardness not to technological or cultural deficiencies but to a biological stroke of bad fortune.
Beginning in 2010, a small but growing counter-current to this explanation has developed, mainly contesting the prediction that Menghe was on track to its own industrial revolution during the later Yi dynasty. The issue is still subject to academic debate, and has become politicized in the contest of the Menghean economic miracle in the 1990s onward.
Anti-Western sentiment
Although Yi-era scholars did not determine the exact biological transmission of the disease until it was too late, contemporary observers in Menghe were quick to make an association between the unfamiliar pandemic and the arrival of Casaterran merchant ships. The disease had originated in the Rogang river delta area, where Casaterran traders and explorers had been most active, and it had been unknown in previous centuries of Menghean history. It did not help that many of these Casaterran sailors, having been recruited from the dregs of society and put through long voyages in unsanitary conditions, appeared particularly unkept by Menghean standards, a description which was usually exaggerated as it filtered inland. Before long, it was considered common wisdom that the disease had originated from contact with "unclean Westerners," who were natural carriers of disease due to their uncivilized lifestyles.
With this logic in mind, as one of his first official acts the Taesu Emperor proclaimed that all Menghean trade ports would be closed to foreign ships, and that voyages beyond Menghe's immediate coast were forbidden. Foreigners who were caught on Menghean soil would be sentenced to death by a thousand cuts, in reference to the agonizing buboes that developed on plague victims. For the most part, this policy was successful in preventing major outbreaks on the scale seen in 1508-1514, but it also isolated Menghe from international trade and technological development at a time when both were booming internationally.
Even after Menghe was forcibly opened to international trade in the mid-19th century, anti-Western sentiment persisted, much of it rooted in the experience of the Menghean Black Plague. Historians and political scientists focusing on the Greater Menghean Empire and its role in the Great Conquest War have almost universally cited the plague as the origin of Menghe's strong anti-Western sentiment in those periods. Some more recent sociological work has even identified a subtle Westerner/plague message in the current Menghean government's propaganda and rhetoric.
Subsequent outbreaks
After the country's ports were closed, and after the initial infected rat populations had died off, Myŏn-dynasty Menghe suffered no more major plague outbreaks along the coast. Occasionally, localized outbreaks would take place in the northwestern and southwestern provinces, usually carried by wildlife or by nomadic tribes crossing the more porous land borders.
During the late 19th century, after the Myŏn leadership signed an unequal treaty opening the country to international trade, plague outbreaks resumed, though they were usually contained within individual cities or provinces and did not reach pandemic levels. Septentrion's first plague vaccine was developed in 1897, but its use did not become widespread in Menghe until the late 20th century, and even in the Democratic People's Republic of Menghe occasional outbreaks took place in particularly poor or underdeveloped areas. Since 1988, the current Menghean government has placed a particular emphasis on eradicating plague cases within its borders, making vaccination mandatory in high-risk regions and requiring local medical authorities to report any suspicious cases.
There are unconfirmed reports that during the Menghean Opium War Sylvan forces released plague-infected rats into Sunju, causing a major outbreak shortly afterward, and that rat releases from Altagracia took place in the years that followed. In the absence of any clear evidence from the Sylvan side, these accusations remain contested.
Kim Myŏng-hwan's parents are known to have died from a localized plague outbreak in 1914, an event which is believed to have influenced his worldview as leader of the Greater Menghean Empire.
Remembrance
In Menghe today, the Menghean Black Plague is remembered as a major national tragedy, the single largest loss of life the country has experienced. Monuments to the plague dead are a common sight, especially in the major coastal cities that suffered most severely. The largest of these is the National Plague Memorial Hall in Dongchŏn, which also appears on the front side of the 50-Wŏn bill. It has become a common observation that Menghe's plague dead are treated like war dead in the national collective memory.
In 2008, on the 500th anniversary of the first reported cases, the Menghean government held special mass ceremonies in Bokju, Sunju, and Dongchŏn, including a temporary display of ninety million candles in a roughly one-kilometer by one-kilometer field outside Sunju's city limits.