The great drought in Jiangdong that Chen Caozhi had feared had indeed arrived!
Since the autumn of the first year of Longhe, three of the nine provinces wholly under Eastern Jin jurisdiction had suffered drought: Yangzhou, Xiangzhou, and Jiangzhou. Yangzhou was the worst affected. In its ten commanderies, more than half the commanderies and counties had gone six consecutive months without any substantial rainfall. Many tributaries of the Taihu Lake water system had ceased to flow, leaving fish and shrimp embedded in the dry, cracked river mud. The occasional shallow pool held nothing but turbid sludge. Wild beasts from the mountains competed with the people for water. Not only was there no water to irrigate the fields, even drinking water for people and livestock was hard to obtain. The lands of the Three Wu, once blessed with abundant rain and crisscrossed by rivers, had become a thousand leagues of scorched earth. According to the elders of the villages, this drought was even worse than the great drought during the Huanglong era of Eastern Wu!
Yangzhou was Eastern Jin's largest province and led all the provinces in registered population and households. Nearly half the court's tax revenue came from Yangzhou. With severe drought there, tax receipts plummeted and the number of disaster victims grew, inevitably shaking the very foundations of government. Thus, from early in the fourth month, the Chancellery of the Book of Documents, together with the ministerial departments of Civil Affairs, Expenditure, and Guest Affairs, dispatched officials to the worst-stricken commanderies and counties to oversee drought relief. Zhu Yingtai, Military Adviser at the Western Headquarters, volunteered to go to Kuaiji Commandery to muster civilian laborers for drought relief. Her reason was that she had spent three months in Kuaiji the previous year as deputy commissioner for the Household Registration