Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - *PREVIEW* Zhang Zhongchang, The Dogmeat General

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

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In 1925, he is named the military governor of Shandong, his birth province. And if you've ever heard any stories about Zhang, which some people, some listeners certainly have, this is from the era of where you heard it. Like every warlord in this era, he becomes a military governor, but it's more like an absolute dictator of a place with a population of around a hundred million people. He is the emperor of Shandong. And signs of him being, let's say, interesting, kind of weird, were already popping up to the point that other people were beginning to notice.

For starters, his mother went with him everywhere, absolutely everywhere, to include the brothel. This also included going to the frontline, riding on the armored train alongside him. So I think this is our first case of a battle exorcist, combat at close quarters ghost fighters. I'm not really sure what to call this. Yeah, this is interesting, isn't it? Cause it's like, this guy sounds tough as nails, but he's always got, he's like, I have my physical strength and my, you know, incredible money and weapons and hired, hired

all kinds of goons of every, every far East ethnicity. But I've also got my mom with me who can cast spells on people. Yeah. My mom comes with me everywhere and watches me fuck. Anybody who questions that gets shot in the face. The world's most lethal unsuccessful mama's boy. If your mom can be there in the brothel to cast a spell so you don't get venereal disease and you don't have to wrap it up.

Yeah, it's true. Once again, to continue the rap analogy, he's the, he, he got his mama out the hood. You know, he's like, he's got money, he's got power. He bought him his, who wrote a whole song about his mother telling him to knock people out. Yeah. There you go. LL Cool J also a big guy, or at least a strong guy. Yeah.

Not necessarily very tall, but strong. Jacked, et cetera. I don't think that man wore a single shirt until he was in his 40s. Now the other person always at his side was a Taoist soothsayer. Now he believed in this soothsayer entirely despite the fact by all accounts he was not that pious for any particular religion but specifically just for this guy. I have to point out here that this soothsayer was as much as a criminal as Zhang was. He knew he was full of shit and actively had a small gang of peasants at his beck and call.

And whenever he told Zhang that the stars or whatever were telling him that an omen would happen or something good or something bad would happen, he would then deploy this gang of peasants out to make it happen. And then when word got back to the soothsayer, the soothsayer would be like, oh, see, I told you. And Zhang would be like, wow, you're so wise. Thank you. On one example, the soothsayers told Zhang not to worry about guarding his flank during a battle, because any train that was bringing reinforcements into his enemy would derail and kill the soldiers on board. This did happen, and it happened because the soothsayer deployed his peasants to rip up

the tracks. Which is really weird here. Lovasharlot and like fucking this guy is just like, you the train will derail for no reason. Meanwhile he's there with a fucking like crowbar pulling up the fucking sleepers. Which is funny to me because why pretend to be a soothsayer when you're very obviously just really good at this? You could just be some kind of officer in his weird military. You don't have to say God made you do it or God did it.

You're actually kind of like bringing yourself down a peg by giving credit to the stars or whatever. Well, obviously like he believes in magic and witchcraft, you know, omens stuff because of his mom. So it sort of feels like he's probably got a million goons who are good at making people swing pickaxes. But if you can sell yourself, we're doing entrepreneurship, we're doing hustle culture for how to get yourself on the side of a Chinese warlord.

Selling yourself is from the spiritual angle. Most of these people, they can do prophecies. They can't send goons en route to fucking solve to make prophecy real You know what I mean? Yeah, he the soothsayer is waking up and doing like a morning ritual video like that guy with the eye With the ice bowl of the fucking banana peels Really fast on the road in his robe and flip-flops One side he's got his mother who's a witch and on the other side he's got the MLM magician who's fucking like ripping up railway lines. Remember how I talked about how he just

kind of used his army as a uniform bandit squad stealing everything that wasn't nailed down and as long as he gets kind of fine? Well, like I said, now he is the dictator of a province of about a hundred million people. And my God, did he steal. He stole fucking everything. He used the provinces actual bank as his personal bank account. He had long been addicted to gambling, to this specific kind of game that was kind of like Domino's called pie gal, which for some reason had the nickname of eating dog meat, which in turn earned him the nickname the dog meat general. Though I do have to point out there's several other stories of how he possibly got this nickname. One was that there was a specific Shandong regional liquor that

he would just chug like it was water, but to everybody else it tasted so bad they compared it to eating dog meat. And then there's a third explanation, which I actually believe the most. And that is he ate the meat of a specific breed of dog, the chow chow, every single day because it made him fuck better. And boy, did he fuck. Trey Lockerbie You're really emphatic in saying that, Joe. I'm just going to say this. I don't want to sound like I'm making light over disparaging or sort of exoticizing things, but I don't have any experience with Chinese warlords or mainland China for that matter. But I do have a decent amount of experience with Hong Kong, Macau, and South Korea and friends who are from all over that region as well.

And I can say this, there simply is a culture in what we would call Far East, East Asia, of this food and or animal part makes you fuck good. Like in Korea, there's ginseng roots among other kinds of roots that you go in the market. This is just like, Oh, you'll fuck good. Dear antler, you fuck good. Lots of rare animal parts in Chinese traditional medicine. You fuck good. There's just famously, there's a dick soup as well. I don't want to get it to the weirder side of things because it just sounds like,

Oh, they're so strange. But I'm just saying like culturally speaking, there is a tradition of this thing gives you plus 99 sex power and people just, yeah, they go with it. Who's the say that grinding up endangered animals and smoking them doesn't make your dick hard. I'm not the one to tell you not to do it. That's probably the cops. But yeah. Yeah. And or like the Siberian white tiger just eating you. Yeah. You try to fucking take its nuts to make sex soup. I am always on the side of the tiger in the situation. Yeah. Likewise. What's funny is the tiger also believes that eating the guy trying to eat his balls makes him fuck good. I mean, probably does actually. I was going to say, like, you can only imagine that the tiger, Tiger also believes that eating the guy trying to eat his balls makes him fuck good. It's a loop of fucking good.

It's real good. I was going to say, you can only imagine that the tiger, when it eats an entire human, can then, is powered up maximally and can go the tiger distance when it comes to however tigers get down. I don't know. It's best that we don't ask. Yeah, I don't really want to know. And speaking of the fucking, he had a brothel that went with him everywhere that had hundreds of women in it

I'm not gonna dwell on that one too much for the obvious implications there. Yeah bad stuff. It would be funny However, if there was just one dude just in case you know, he's like I haven't used them yet But I want to keep him around a kiss remember really thirsty for it You know, it's like it's like the you know, it's like having having the hired muscle and the witch and the Tao is fucking Geologist or whatever. This is my hired soothsayer. This is my hired exorcist. This is my hard bandit This is my twink. I haven't had to use him yet If the stars alive the mandate of heaven dictates that I have to fuck the twink. That's why I've got it I don't want to be at 3 a.m

Trying to find the twink. I got to have them close by like a chain wallet. You know, it's like I read, I read all about, you know, the sort of like the secrets of Clausewitz and Yomenina's logistics, logistics, logistics. All right. That includes a twink. Twink logistics are always very tricky. Yeah. Paragraph four of your op order has a subsection for twinks.

You got to always keep your professional bottom nearby just in case just rising from the bed after huffing like powdered tiger balls is like to win this. The soothsayer has told me, bring me the bottom. Yeah. This is like implying that like, I don't know where we did we find like old Chinese poppers in the situation? Like red deer hoof powders poppers in traditional medicine. They haven deer hoof powders to poppers in traditional medicine. They haven't even invented VCRs yet for me to huff things. So I had to get invented. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I mean, I love the idea that that actually is true that somebody figured out because they just happened to huff like, yeah, red deer hoof powder and it just made their asshole dilate. Snorting a line of red deer hoof. Just like bring me the man. Ass. I know it's really, really good for cleaning my fucking daguerreotype plate. I didn't go to the finest gas station in Shandong to get this.

It started out as powder to clean your fucking 1920s photographs. Someone realized that it took it also that it that it loosened things up everybody else Like did you hear really dilates the boss's boy ass? So that's very funny about this is that Joe is completely heterosexual I've never used poppers So it's just like in a way like this the fact that like we instantly all Homed in on that all three of us. It's just like that's the nature of this. I have been working with you for almost a decade now

Everything I know is through osmosis And hey, you never know what you got to keep it around just like Zhang He wasn't sure when he was gonna use the twink Joe that kind of applies like someday you're just gonna need to use poppers like like The Sun's gonna come up in a weird way and turn you gay for a day As as the British military is established it requires me to go to a very specific Yeah, yeah range of latitudes. Yeah, exactly