<P> Heavy rains in autumn 1314 began several years of cold and wet winters . The already weak harvests of the north suffered and the seven - year famine ensued . The Great Famine was the worst in European history, reducing the population by at least ten percent . Records recreated from dendrochronological studies show a hiatus in building construction during the period, as well as a deterioration in climate . </P> <P> This was the economic and social situation in which the predictor of the coming disaster, a typhoid (Infected Water) epidemic, emerged . Many thousands died in populated urban centres, most significantly Ypres . In 1318 a pestilence of unknown origin, sometimes identified as anthrax, targeted the animals of Europe, notably sheep and cattle, further reducing the food supply and income of the peasantry . </P> <P> The scenario that would place the first outbreak in central Asia agrees with the first reports of outbreaks in China in the early 1330s . The plague struck the Chinese province of Hubei in 1334 . On the heels of the European epidemic, a more widespread disaster occurred in China during 1353--1354 . Chinese accounts of this wave of the disease record a spread to eight distinct areas: Hubei, Jiangxi, Shanxi, Hunan, Guangdong, Guangxi, Henan, and Suiyuan, throughout the Mongol and Chinese empires . Historian William McNeill noted that voluminous Chinese records on disease and social disruption survive from this period, but no one has studied these sources in depth . </P> <P> It is probable that the Mongols and merchant caravans inadvertently brought the plague from central Asia to the Middle East and Europe . The plague was reported in the trading cities of Constantinople and Trebizond in 1344 . </P>

When did black death appear in china in the last millennium to later spread to the west
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