In Asia, the volcano disrupted the monsoon cycle in India and Korea. This caused rice crops which really rely on that monsoon cycle to fail all over. The change in the weather also affected which bacteria could thrive in the Bay of Bengal. One species that did thrive was a new strain of cholera which people had less resistance to than previous strains. In Yunnan province in southwestern China,. crops failed in the face of just bitter, bitter cold and a much wetter season than normal. And the book Tambora, the eruption that changed the world author Gillan Darcy Wood connects this and this massive crop failure in famine to the rise of opium growth in Yunnan as farmers