A journey through the 5000 years of history documented by one of the world's oldest continuous civilizations. For all the episodes for free, as well as additional content, please subscribe and/or visit http://thehistoryofchina.wordpress.com.
377 episodes transcribedThe army that marches north out of Quanzhou in June 1852 is not the same one that left Jintian 18 months prior. It has left its prime architect in an...
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom has been proclaimed — but proclamations don't feed armies. As such, its Divine Host will enjoy all of 11 days before shee...
The God-Worshippers of Thistle Mountain managed to survive their first test — but now the world itself seems dead-set on finishing the job. When unpre...
The God-Worshippers of Thistle Mountain, under the dual leadership of Hong Xiuquan and Feng Yunshan, had gone from being a quirky, backwater oddity......
Amidst the ashes of the Opium War, a new flame is beginning to kindle – not in the halls of power, but in the distant, forgotten hills and mountains....
Even in the fallout of the Opium War, dreams endure—but what happens to a dream deferred? In Canton, one young man’s starry-eyed visions of success r...
TheKangxi Emperor’s Obsessive Pursuit ofGaldan Khanto the Endsof the EarthPresented: 02/28/2026audio-only cut (this is from my mic pick-up, so the hos...
The war is over. The treaty is signed, sealed, & delivered. Yet though the smoke has cleared, the haze of uncertainty over what - exactly - just happe...
The new envoy from London arrives at Qing's doorstep in August 1842 with a simple mandate: stop allowing Britain to be "humbugged" & finish the war El...
The Ransom of Canton.The lame-duck Superintendent watches helplessly as a triumvirate of Qing officials arrives to reverse every compromise his predec...
Britain carries the Opium War to Beijing's unready doorstep with steam and iron, moving the crisis from the border frontiers to the heart of the imper...
It's been 12 years since this initially was 'casted out - which means that the Year of the Horse is back, baby! Now it's the Fire Horse, but Happy Hap...
Britain and China both saw the opium crisis clearly enough to know it would end in disaster. Each believed it understood the situation, and the other,...
Lin Zexu believed moral clarity and the largest drug bust in history could end the opium crisis and avert war. Yet, as his solution drained into Humen...
Letter to the queen of England, from the high Imperial Commissioner Lin, and his colleagues. From the Canton press. Learn more about your ad choi...
In 1834, Britain sent a man to China almost perfectly unsuited to the job... only to forbid him from actually doing it. William John Napier, naval off...
In this empire business, you gotta make the opium first. Then when you get the opium, you get the silver. Then when you get the silver, then you get t...
Great Qing begins to buckle under early 19th c. internal pressures. Unrest first erupts not at the imperial core but along its social and geographic m...
The Qing Empire did not collapse because it stopped working. It collapsed because it kept working — just barely — under pressures that compounded fast...
From the koan chants of monasteries tucked between Himalayan peaks, to wending caravan paths stretching endlessly across the arid expanses of the Takl...
