Abstract:

This article focused on the floods in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River in 1869.The authors consulted a variety of resources about this flood,such as archives,local gazetteers,diaries and other personal literatures.And then,based on the countylevel disaster index and details,the spatial and temporal flood distribution was reconstructed.The results showed that a westtoeast zone of disaster was between 28°N and 32°N,and the extremely serious areas were Hubei,Hunan,the southern parts of Anhui,Jiangsu and Zhejiang.Based on the climate records from diaries of Qing dynasty,the reconstruction of the precipitation time series in Hunan and other areas from 1869 showed that the continuous rainfall began from March 2nd to July 24th,and during this period there were five heavy rain events, moreover,the norain intervals were short.The plum rain season began at an earlier date.The start date was May 27th,and the rain season lasted almost 50 days with some heavy rain events during this process.The main cause of these features of this disaster was the occupation of the plum rain season.In contrast to the weather information of other diaries,we found that the ancient diary of the rain or sunshine was a highly reliable record in reconstructing daily precipitation.However,it still had some errors,which should be considered.〖