Do you know of the insane piece of history when China tried to kill all the sparrows in their country?
Join me on a #HistoryTour to revisit the Four Pests Campaign a mind bending action by Mao Zedong & the Chinese that resulted in disaster!
A crazy history 🧵
This story starts in the early 1900s when China was under Japanese occupation & in continuous civil war & high rate of poverty & hunger.
At this time, Russian Revolution had already succeeded & Communism was seen as a success story amongst Chinese Intellectuals.
2/n
The Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921 and it grew powerful in protest against the Japanese & as a potential hope for the common people
Mao Zedong was the popular leader of the Communist party & the face of the rebellion for a few decades.
3/n
The Japanese were finally thrown out by 1949 & the CCP came to power in China under the leadership of Mao. Mao's main goals were to unify China, drive a cultural revolution & invigorate the agrarian economy
By the 1950s China had severe famines & high rate of hunger deaths 4/n
As part of the economic & social reform, Mao introduced the 'Great Leap Forward' initiative where he wanted to increase crop yields, remove poverty & improve quality of life through people communes ( a collection of people to work towards specific goals ) 5/n
As part of the Great Leap Forward, a crazy idea emerged!
Mao identified that certain animals were only pests without any use to humankind.
He decided to kill them all!
Rats , Mosquitoes , Flies & Sparrows were the 4 pests that he declared to be made extinct 6/n
Mosquitoes brought Malaria
Rats brought Plague
Flies brought contamination
Sparrows ate grains
So, Mao started the 4 Pests campaign & called all people to come forward & kill these 4 pests!
7/n
Posters were made. Tools were given. Schools, communes, offices were all encouraged to work together
And the people responded to his war call
Estimated 1.5 billion rats, 24 million pounds of Mosquitoes, 220 million pounds of flies were killed over the next couple of years! 8/n
Special focus was given to Sparrows. Mao accused sparrows of eating 2kg of grain each every year & blamed them for the famine
People were called to shoot sparrows, hit stones, destroy their nests on trees, make noise with pans such that they are disturbed & die without rest! 9/n
Millions of people set upon this & it became so widespread that across China sparrows started dying enmasse.
It was so successful that sparrows started going to Embassy compounds of other nations as they were extraterritorial - only place where locals couldnt hunt them! 🥴 10/n
So many sparrows nested in the Embassy of Poland that China asked them to open up for hunting. When Poland refused , the locals surrounded the embassy with drums to make noise to disturb the sparrows that the Poles relented & had to use shovels to clean the dead sparrows!! 12/n
Sparrows were driven to near extinction.
But by 1960, the famine still raged. There was no end to hunger but something worse happened.
Sparrows not only ate grains, but they ate insects also!
With no sparrows around, a Locust boom happened!!
13/n
Without a natural predator, billions of locusts started destroying crops across China resulting in complete ecological disaster.
All grains gone.
A simple famine became acerbated to become - The Great Chinese Famine. An estimated 55 million people died from it 😥
14/n
Anhui, a fertile agricultural province had 20% death rate. One in 5 people died. Govt was over reporting grain numbers & diverting people to such measures like killing sparrows. The people believed it but finally had to face the brunt of corruption & stupid ecological decisions
The govt eventually realized their mistake & imported 250,000 sparrows from Soviet Union 🤦♂️
But the damage was done
History teaches us that nature is in balance on its own & making it bend to human whims leads to disaster!
RT this story if you liked it & pls follow for more!
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#OnThisDay 121 years ago on Dec 10th 1901, the first ever Nobel Prize Awards were given out amidst a lot of tension, drama and secrecy.
Join me on a #HistoryTour to revisit that memorable day that kickstarted a global tradition of excellence.
A brief thread🧵
Alfred Nobel was born in 1833 into a family of engineers & was an inventor himself. He bought the now infamous 'Bofors' steel mill to develop multiple weapons - most famous of which was the Dynamite.
Nobel amassed a fortune by selling all of his ammunition inventions
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In 1888, Alfred's brother Ludvig Nobel died. A French newspaper mistook that Alfred had died & published an obituary titled 'The merchant of death is dead' in reference his weapons
This disconcerted Alfred very much as he didnt want to be remembered this way post his death
#OnThisDay 2nd December 1984 - one of the world's greatest industrial tragedies happened in Bhopal
A mix of bad luck, small acts of carelessness, human negligence led to the deadly Bhopal gas leak
Join me on a #historytour to revisit that unforgettable crazy night
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Union Carbide India Ltd set up a pesticide plant in Bhopal, MP in 1939. It was owned by an US company UCC & produced the pesticide Sevin.
The plant produced a gas Methyl isocyanate(MIC), a highly deadly component, which combined with Naphthol produced the final pesticide
2/n
The world had moved to making pesticide without using MIC but UCIL still made & stored MIC in large pressurized gas tanks & used them in the final reaction.
In early 1980s, the demand for pesticides were low leading to large amount of unused MIC getting stored at the plant
A commercial flight from London to NewYork takes 8+ hours today. But a few decades ago this trip took less than 3 hrs!
Made possible by The Concorde, the supersonic flight! Join me on a #HistoryTour to know how it was to fly in the greatest plane ever made & how it all ended
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The Concorde was a collaborative effort between the British & the french. It was researched to become the first supersonic flight which could reach 2000+km/hr & reach altitudes of more than 60,000ft
Normal planes dont fly more than 800km/hr generally to get a perspective! 2/n
Introduced in the 70s, the main market was Trans Atlantic flights between main cities in Europe & the US. The supersonic speed meant London to NY could be done in < 3 hrs. 2 Financial capitals of the world. People could be in London for breakfast & be back in NY for dinner 3/n
#OnThisDay Exactly 100 years ago, Nov 4th 1922, the world witnessed one of the greatest archaeological finds - the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen - the boy pharaoh of Egypt!
Come join me on a #HistoryTour to witness the thrilling story behind this amazing find 🧵
The story starts way back around 3000 BC where the earliest Egyptian kings called Pharaohs came into power. Called the 'Old Kingdom' a series of kings built one of the oldest civilizations known to us in history.
And one thing fascinated all Pharaohs.
Death.
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Egyptians believed that post death, the spiritual body lived in an afterlife very similar to the living world. So a large part of life went in preparing for a comfortable death!
Pharaohs used everyone to build large memorials to prepare for their death
#IndiaAt75 In 1926, British Archaeologist Ernest Mckay dug up a small bronze statue in Mohenjodaro and it changed the way the world looked at India's history!
Join me to know the story of the 'Dancing Girl' from Mohenjodaro - the greatest find of the Indus Valley Civilization 🧵
The first Indus Valley major find was the discovery of Harappa in 1829 on the banks of Ravi river in Punjab. It excited the British a bit but the find was still largely academic that they had found an ancient inhabited town that no one knew existed. 2/n
Over the next 50 years, several such sites were found but more than history, Britishers and locals were interested in the high quality bricks that these sites provided.
They were plundered for building houses, ballast for railway lines all the way between Karachi to Delhi. 3/n
#OnThisDay 77 Years Ago, Aug 6th 1945 at 8.15AM, America dropped the Nuclear Bomb on Hiroshima.
The war came to an end. But a new nuclear world emerged overnight.
Join me on a photo tour as we travel back to that fateful day and what happened post that!🧵
Germany had surrendered by 1945. Hitler was dead. But Japan was still waging war as leader of the Axis powers. USA had a personal vengeance additionally due to the Pearl Harbour attack 4 yrs earlier
It decided to use its new found mega weapon - the Atomic bomb to end the war 2/n
The Hiroshima Peace Museum documents how this transpired with a fantastic collection of documents and photos.
By 1945, even US scientists were aware of the devastating effect of the bomb & discouraged their own government from using it.