When Peng's grand-uncle died in 1911, Peng left home and worked at a coalmine in Xiangtan, where he pushed carts of coal for a wage of nine yuan a month. In 1912, shortly after the founding of the Republic of China, the mine went bankrupt and the owners fled, which cheated Peng out of half his annual wages. Peng returned home in 1912 and took a number of odd jobs. In 1913, Hunan suffered another drought and famine, and Peng participated in a public demonstration that escalated into the seizure of a grain merchant's storehouse and the redistribution of grain among the peasants. Village police issued a warrant for Peng's arrest, and he fled to northern Hunan, where he worked for two years as a construction laborer for the construction of a dam near Dongting Lake. When the dam was completed in 1916, Peng assumed that he was no longer in danger of being arrested and returned home and joined the army of a local Kuomintang-aligned warlord, Tang Xiangming.