This review is concerned with the article titled "Enhancement of state response capability and famine mitigation: A comparative analysis of two drought events in northern China during the Ming dynasty", it is divided into three categories, namely, general comments, specific comments and technical comments.

General Comments:

The article titled "Enhancement of state response capability and famine mitigation: A comparative analysis of two drought events in northern China during the Ming dynasty" clearly reflects the contents of the paper, and the abstract provides a concise, complete, and unambiguous summary of the work done and the results obtained. Both these sections are pertinent and easy to understand. The manuscript is well-written and well-structured, delivering the idea, methodology, and results clearly and concisely. The figures are descriptive and of high quality, and the tables are informative. It is well-referenced with proper credit attributed to previous and/or related works, and the authors clearly indicate each of their contributions. The manuscript contributes interesting insights and a methodology to comparatively analyze the responses to two major drought events in China. Studying such past events is extremely important for comprehensive disaster risk management strategies for resilience at the county and national. Thus, this manuscript has good scientific significance, scientific quality, and presentation quality.

Specific Comments:

1. Historical Vs modern climate change adaption:
   • It would be useful to have a section with a simple comparison or explanation between these historical responses and modern-day disaster management strategies adopted in China. This would make the research more relevant to current discussions on climate change adaptation.
2. Formulations:
   
   
   • Could the authors provide a clear explanation (in the text) about how the formulations were derived? 

3. Graphical summaries:

   • The spatial distribution maps and graphs are useful. However, the authors could add additional visual representations of the comparisons between the two droughts (e.g., timeline diagrams) could further clarify the narrative.

Technical  Comments:

In general spaces between text and in-text citation are missing throughout the manuscript.

For example: production(Deng, 2011).

It should be: production (Deng, 2011).

1. Grammatical/sentence structure:
   • Requires correction: "Give that famine often stems from poor harvests..."
   • Corrected: "Given that famine often stems from poor harvests..."
   • Requires correction: "...as a time when ancient famine response policies were highly well-develop in China."
   • Corrected: "...as a time when ancient famine response policies were highly well-developed in China."
   • Needs clarification: Line 135, Ancient China gradually developed a comprehensive famine response system that deal with each step of processes to extreme drought-induced famines (Figure 2).
   • Needs clarification: Line 147, In ancient China, there were various emergency measures to mitigate famine, among which exemption and relied being the most common(Hao et al., 2021).
   • Throughout the manuscript counties classifications Type A, Type B and Type C are written as "Type a" or "type a", I believe that since it is a classification, the Latin letter needs to be capitalized for example use Type "A" or type "A" consistently.
   • Table 6: What is AD1 and AF1?
   • Clarification: What is the unit (mu) here? "6.51 mu per person"
   • Please look into the standardization of citation formatting in the references section.

General Comments:

The article accomplished the expected goal well. By comparing two cases of severe drought in northern China in the Ming Dynasty, which occurred 100 years apart, it is pointed out that the government's response capability greatly influenced the consequences of drought (such as famine). The conclusion has important reference significance for improving social resilience to cope with climate change and extreme disasters in the future.

Specific Comments:

A Compendium of Chinese Meteorological Records of the Last 3000 Years (中国三千年气象记录总集) is the main source of historical records about the government's response measures. However， the records of post-disaster response (relief, exemption) kept in this book are incomplete, as the  purpose of the contributors is to collect meteorological disasters and their consequences. Secondly, most of these records are extracted from historical local Chronicles, which mainly record the response behavior of local society, while the measures from the imperial court (central government) are not comprehensive. It is suggested to supplement the response measures (especially tax exemption and grain dispatching) of the imperial court in the Ming Shilu (明实录), compilation of government archives of the Ming Dynasty), which will be more comprehensive and helpful for later comparison of the strength of government response capability in Chenghua and Wanli reigns.

Technical Comments:

1. In line 101, "50 million" should be "62 million", see Cao, 2000, pp. 451~452. In addition, Zheng et al. (2014a) speculated that the total population of North China in 1580 was about 52 million (see Table S4 of the ESM), which would be a useful reference.
2. Line 104, "Dan (a weight unit in ancient China)" is not accurate. Dan (石) is an unit of volume in ancient Chinese, and in the Ming Dynasty, the weight of 1 Dan grain is about 60~70 kg.
3. The translation of "大旱/大饥" as "major drought/major famine" is inaccurate (e.g. Tab.1), great or severe might be more accurate.
4. In line 212, there should be a note on "Guanyin tu (观音土)", which is a kind of clay with fine texture that can be fatal if consumed in excess.
5. Tab. 3, in "countless starvation deaths (死者甚众), corpses as pillows (死者甚众)", Chinese and English do not correspond, so the original text needs to be checked.
6. In line 318-321, about the planting scope of American crops in China in the Ming Dynasty, current researchers believe that corn was mainly distributed in southern China at the end of the 16th century (late Ming Dynasty), and the planting area in the north was very small; The potato was probably not yet introduced to China (see Han Maoli, Historical Agricultural Geography of China, vol. 2, 韩茂莉：《中国历史农业地理》中册). The contribution of American crops to the improvement of social response capability in the Wanli reign is not significant.

This article analyzed the relationship between impacts and responses of extreme drought events and paid more attention to the effectiveness and change of government-led response measures in Ming China by comparing the two drought events. The article is generally well-structured and well-describe for most parts, but some minor revisions are needed.

General comments:

The literature review clearly outlines the main question of the article that shapes the paper, which is both precise and focused. Drawing on insights from previous researches, the authors nicely develop a model that explains how extreme drought events led to famine, how to mitigate famine and presents the complex interplay between impacts and responses in ancient China. In this model, responses measures are categorized into two types – preventive measures and emergency measures. It is a nice try to explore the connection and different effectiveness among these measures during disaster responses, presenting different kinds of strategies for climate change adaptation in ancient China. As the authors note, they are about defensive ability and emergency response capacity, respectively. Based on the model, especially, authors develop a framework and classify the drought and famine records to quantitatively compare and assess the change and effectiveness of state response capability. I believe that the article makes an interesting contribution to measurement. And results are reliable, and the reasoning behind them is persuasive.

Specific comments:

This study presents the impacts and responses of extreme drought events during the ancient China.  Broadly speaking, it can help understand the occurrence of famine and provide insights for countries or regions at risk of food shortage. Currently, China is already making a big contribution to world hunger and world food security. What we're more interested in is how historical Chinese famine responses influence modern-day disaster management? which measures are still in use today? I suggest the article should add a brief section about the inheritance of historical response measures.

Technical comments:

Line 318-322: Potatoes were not widely spread and planted until the Qing Dynasty. Does the article exaggerate the role of potatoes?

Are the AD1s showed in Table 4 and Table 6 same? In addition, this is a method of marking time based on the Gregorian calendar (Common Era), please try to change another short name.

References in text should be standardized, for example: in line 355 (Su 2010); in line 394 (Liang, 2008)

Publisher’s note: this comment is a copy of RC3 and its content was therefore removed on 16 October 2024.

Publisher’s note: this comment is a copy of RC3 and its content was therefore removed on 16 October 2024.

Publisher’s note: this comment is a copy of RC3 and its content was therefore removed on 16 October 2024.