The History of China - #122 - Special: End of Dynasty Q&A

Episode Date: May 1, 2017

We've made it to the end of the Tang and questions abound! From portrayals of Han Emperors, to my favorite Emperor, and the best Dynasty EVER, to battle tactics and armor, to grat Chinese kung fu movies and how much a protsitute would have been worth... we've had a whole host of excellent questions that I do my very best to answer! Cheers! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Episode 122, End of Dynasty Q&A. Hey everyone, and welcome back. Today I'm going to sit down and answer as many of the great questions you wonderful listeners sent in as I possibly can. This is probably going to take up the whole episode since so many of you wrote in. So in a minor change of plan, I'll likely be putting out a follow-up that recaps the whole Tang Dynasty period in the next week or so before we get into the nitty-gritty of the Five Dynasties arc. Before getting into the questions, though, I'd be absolutely remiss if I didn't give a huge shout-out to all of the people I've been terrible about recognizing recently. I mean, of course, all of you wonderful folks who have decided to donate to the show. So let's run down the list of new additions to the Eternal Imperial Courts VIP page. First and foremost, the Prime Ministers of the

Realm, Lam El, Alvin Kay, and Robert El, all kneel before their magnificence. Next, our mighty Imperial Governors, Oscar P, Paul El, Andrew El, Yuan El, Zachary M, Alex G., Samuel M., Sean G., Christopher M., PG., Robert N., Hang C., Dillo C., and our three newest additions to the governorship, Sambavi L., Benjamin C., and Forrest. Truly yours is a mite unparalleled. And note, your name might not be up on the page yet, but it will be soon. Big update in progress on the VIP page. I would love to continue on down the line, but we would probably be here all day. No matter what your support is, from simply listening and enjoying, to recommending the show to a friend, to rating and reviewing,

or even donating at any level whatsoever, I really, really appreciate it and you. I give each and every one of you your choice of a great big hug or the grandest of kowtows. All right, let's get down to business. Our first question today comes from David A., who asks about the Han Dynasty, and specifically the grand historian Sima Qian. He wrote in asking how and why Sima Qian was able to portray the founding emperor of the dynasty, Gao Zu, as a drunk and a coward only half a century or so after his death. How was the Han government okay with such a portrayal? Why was it not suppressed or its author punished for such seeming impudence? And did Sima Qian's castration have anything to do with his work,

or was it for other offenses? So this is a great question to start out with, because it goes back to the Han Dynasty, which is the last great period of Chinese civilization prior to the Tang. It's also a question that I'm not going to be able to give you a definitive answer to, because after all, we would have to ask Sima Qian personally why he wrote the way he wrote it. That said, I can at least take an informed guess, or semi-informed guess, as to why such a depiction might have been risked on Sima Qian's part, and for that matter tolerated by the government. First off, you're right that though Sima was indeed a eunuch, it was not for any depiction

of his in this shiji. That work was government-approved through and through. Instead, Sima was castrated for his involvement in the so-called Li-Ling Affair, where two Han generals were defeated and then taken captive by the Xiongnu Empire of the North. Emperor Wu, and virtually the whole of the imperial court, condemned only one of the commanders though, Li-Ling, for what amounted to incompetence in duty. Fatefully, Sima Qian attempted to defend Li-Ling's reputation, which the emperor took as him attacking the other commander, Li Guangli, who was married to one of the emperor's sisters, and so sentenced the grand historian to death because that's just how he rolled. Now, at the time, there were two methods

that one could commute the death penalty. The first was to simply buy your way out with a suitably huge payment to the government. But for those poor souls without the cash on hand? Yep, that's right, castration was the only other alternative. Sima opted to lose his manhood rather than his life, but even after the punishment was carried out, he still spent the subsequent three years being routinely beaten and humiliated in prison. Upon his release, strangely enough, he was actually expected to commit suicide rather than bear the shame of eunuchhood, since suicide was seen as an honorable death as opposed to state execution, which would in turn forfeit all honors, titles, and property. But Sima decided not to end his own life and instead took up residence as one of the palace eunuchs in order to finish his history.

Okay, so as to the depiction of why Sima may have chosen to depict, and why the Han government had been alright with, the founder of the Han, Gao Zu, as a drunk and perhaps a coward, I think it's important to remember that Gao Zu, or as he was known in life, Liu Bang, quite famously came from peasant stock. Now, mythical rainstorm rapey dragons aside, Liu made no bones about his lowly origins, which helps to explain some of the less savory aspects of his personality, such as in addition to being given to drink, being generally lazy, disliking reading, and often running afoul of the law. I mean, he would, after all, take power by being a rebel against the government, so a general

all-rightness with being on the wrong side of the law is kind of a precondition. As for the alcohol especially, I'd have to say that there's much less of a cultural taboo in imperial annals, and even modern China, about drinking and drunkenness than in, say, puritanical America, that once decided that alcohol production should be outlawed at the federal level via constitutional amendment. Saying that a rabble-rouser like Liu Bang got roaring drunk before wrestling a dragon wouldn't have been an indictment of his character so much as a pretty relatable character trait for most of the people reading it. I mean, unless drinking binges are accompanied by rage-induced homicidal blackouts, the Chinese

histories are generally pretty much fine with their emperors getting smashed on the regular. But as for your second point about him kicking two of his own kids out of the cart in order to escape from Peng City and Xiang Yu's attack, yeah, I've got nothing. That was just a crappy thing to do. I wish I could say that he felt sure that Xiang Yu wouldn't hurt children or anything like that, but on the whole it seems much more likely that since it was one of his daughters and one of his younger sons, there was probably a sizable element of, well, if something bad does happen, they're expendable, mixed in. As to why that would have been allowed or included in the Shiji, well, Gaozu had only died about 50 years before Sima Qian was born, meaning that the cultural

memory for all of the founding emperor's exploits would have still been relatively fresh. His flight from Peng was a pivotal moment of the Qu Han contention, and must have been very famous indeed. So to leave it out would have been a huge and glaring omission. Our next question brings us up to the Tang Dynasty, and is from Alan D., who wrote, I have recently watched the movie House of Flying Daggers, which is supposed to be set during the Tang Dynasty. The question I have is that during the scene in the restaurant at the beginning of the movie, the main character throws out what looks like a miniature silver ingot as payment. What were these, and why were they shaped that way? Why was it used as payment instead of regular coins? Was this a result of the lack of coinage you have mentioned several times throughout the

episodes? So before getting into the question directly, let me set the scene a little bit more for any of you who might not have seen the movie, which you should. It's very, very good. An Imperial police officer named Jin has been tasked with investigating a beautiful blind dancing girl with suspected ties to an anti-Tang rebel group known as the House of Flying Daggers. Jin has infiltrated a high-class brothel called the Peony Pavilion Entertainment House, in which the suspect girl, named Xiao Mei, works. Jin is undercover in this scene, posing as a wealthy citizen. He asks about this new girl in the madam's employ, and then

asks that she is brought to him. The madam hesitates, but then Jin junkily throws several silver ingots onto the ground, prompting the madam to quickly overcome her hesitation and rush off to fulfill the client's wish. So that reaction on the part of the madam should tip you off as to what kind of a currency we're dealing with, and especially since we're talking about high-class courtesans here. That's right, the silver he threw constituted some pretty big money being offered for the flower of the new girl, who pointedly refuses to take the name of a flower, unlike the other plain girls. The ingots used were period-appropriate, and are commonly known in the English-speaking world as saisi,

and in Mandarin as yuanbao. Saisi is actually a corruption of the Cantonese word saisi, meaning fine silk, probably stemming from gold and silver's ability to be strung into fine strands like silk, or possibly related to their lustrous quality. The Mandarin term Yuan Bao is a truncation of the Tang era official term for the ingots, Kai Yuan Tong Bao, meaning currency put into circulation for the beginning of an era. Yuan Bao ingots actually long predate the Tang dynasty and undercover officer Jin's infiltration of the House of Flying Daggers,

and can instead be traced back as far as the Qin Dynasty of the 3rd century BCE. But at least by the Tang period, the exchange rate with the copper Tongbao cash coins had been at least officially set at 1,000 copper coins, constituting one full string, equaling 10 silver ingots or 1 gold ingot. Interestingly, unlike the copper coins, at least the official ones, since we all well know that counterfeiting said coins was a booming enterprise in the late Tang,

silver and gold ingots were typically not produced at government mints, but instead locally created according to weight. The standard unit of weight for both currency and other transactions was, and in many cases in China still is, the tail, or in many cases in China still is, the tail, or in Mandarin, the liang.

Now, how heavy a tail is exactly has shifted over time. Modern tails are set at 50 grams, but in the Tang era, it seems to have been slightly less, set between 36 to 40 grams. Standard units, then, were ingots ranging from one-tenth of a tail all the way up to a hundred tails. In the movie, those look like they're in the five to ten tail range, and Jane appears to throw two of them. So how much money was the young blind girl's company worth? Well, if we were to take the current market value of a tail of silver, that would be between $1,500 and $3,000 RMB, or about $200 to $400.

So nothing to sneer at. But this is the late Tang Dynasty we're talking about, and not only was the economy going into a tailspan, crashing into a hillside, and exploding in a giant fireball, but silver was also much, much rarer of a commodity then than it is now. As such, a tail would have been able to purchase about 2,000 RMBs worth of goods. So Officer Jin was casually throwing around between $1,500 to $3,000 to see a blind girl dance. No wonder that Madam was so quick on her feet. Then there's the fact that silver ingots weren't in regular circulation among the general public during the Tang, on account of the ore's scarcity, and therefore were pretty much restricted to high-level government transactions and imperial

gifts, so a young libertine in the 9th century would be about as likely to throw silver ingots onto the floor of a brothel as one today. It seems likely that the director, Zhang Yimou, simply didn't know about the value discrepancy between modern and ancient silver values, or figured that the audience wouldn't particularly care about such minor details. After all, in later dynasties like the Ming and Qing, silver ingots would indeed become a pretty standard issue currency, to the point where it was common for merchants to carry around their own tail scales and weights to ensure the value of the ingots they were receiving. It's an entirely forgivable oversight.

But having researched it now, I'm pretty struck by the unintentional hilarity of the scene. A government agent trying to play it cool and remain undercover, by casually throwing around ridiculously massive quantities of money, and in a currency that only government agents would have access to. Yeah, way to keep a low profile, Jin. One final thing, and that's regarding the shape of the Scythe ingots. The most popular and common we see, and the one featured in the movie, is a boat shape, which is also sometimes called a silk slipper shape. But though that is far and away the most immediately recognizable and famous,

it's by no means the only shape that was produced. Like I said, they were produced by private minters and assessed based on their total weight. So essentially, as long as it was properly stamped, guaranteeing its metal purity and weight, Like I said, they were produced by private minters and assessed based on their total weight. So essentially, as long as it was properly stamped, guaranteeing its metal purity and weight, it could be just about any shape that they wanted. Squares, ovals, tortoises, flowers, and a whole host of others have been found. Our next question comes from user ak22016, who asks, Who do you feel was the best emperor during the Tang Dynasty? If not the same person,

what about throughout all of Chinese history up to the end of the Tang Dynasty? What makes a good ruler? Would Socrates and Confucius agree on what a good ruler is? And if so, what drink would they share in such a budding bromance? This question really made me think and I really enjoyed that. I'm not going to surprise too many of you by saying that my answer to both of the first two questions is Taizong. No ifs, ands, or buts. I consider his to have been not just the best emperor of the Tang Dynasty, but of the whole Chinese Imperium put together. A while back, I managed to successfully convince a majority of panelists on the Agora Exchange that Taizong, a figure most of them hadn't even really heard of before the show, outstripped the likes of the Roman philosopher king Marcus Aurelius. The guy was a powerhouse, extremely learned, hardworking,

and requiring his aides and officials to run on staggered schedules so that he could call on them any time, day or night. A figure who not only commanded, but listened to and respected his advisors and even those who had disagreements with his decisions. And he was also an extremely competent leader in both war and peace. For me, Taizong outperformed the other two lead contenders for best emperor ever, namely Qin Shi Huang and Han Wudi, respectively, for a few reasons. While the first emperor founded the Chinese empire and brought the warring states to an end,

he did so only with extreme brutality and a pretty sadistic streak to boot. It's hard to call the guy level-headed when he's burying thousands of scholars alive, torching every piece of literature that doesn't explicitly agree with his worldview, exterminating entire family lines for relatively minor infractions, and drinking mercury to live forever. Shi Huang's empire was one based first and last on terror, and as such it did not long survive his ironic death. As for Wu of Han, he shares quite a lot in common with Taizong, expansion of the empire, initiating a long and successful dynasty, and demonstrating competent governance. However, where Wu takes a major hit is his economic policy.

The guy was named after his favorite pastime, after all, military campaigns, and his great love of war and conquest left the Han dynasty in a pretty sorry economic state by the time of Wu's death. Contrast that to Taizong, who not only co-founded his dynasty, but inherited an imperial treasury that had been utterly drained by the Sui Emperor's ridiculous failures in Korea, to the point where they couldn't even afford new paper to draft edicts on, and so had to use the reverse sides of old edicts. On that shaky premise, Taizong built a government that was financially solvent, militarily powerful, and used the non-Chinese people surrounding them, most notably the Gukturks to the north, to help his empire rather than fight against it. Given the fact that China had been warring off and on against the

steppe nomads for a couple of millennia at that point, turning them into what amounted to mercenary allies is some next-level judo maneuvering that Wu of Han would have never thought of. His greatest move was marrying off princesses to the Xiongnu Khans and hoping for the best. As for the second half of your question, what makes a good ruler? I'd have to say that it has less to do with specific accomplishments or lists of things to do, and more with outlook. Taizong happens to be a really easy choice for me because he was both a victorious conqueror and a wise philosopher all at once, but it's not always so clear-cut. Rulers, both great and small, are usually dealt a hand to play

with that they have little say in, initially. If they inherit a government that's humming along nicely, that can give them more leeway in terms of things like foreign policy. But that can get them into trouble, too. Just look at the two Sui emperors. They managed to take all the goodwill and gains one had made in reunifying the empire and flush it all down the toilet through boneheaded policies. On the other hand, an emperor might be given a really bad hand. Xuanzong of Tang and Guangwu of Han come immediately to mind,

but manage to stabilize the situation and just maybe keep their governments intact through strategic internal reforms. Now it's not nearly as sexy as riding off to go a conquering, but it's no less important. Oftentimes far more important, in fact. We could even look at the Confucian nightmare that was Empress Wu's reign. For all the hatred heaped upon her over the centuries, she was an amazingly effective monarch,

and yet conquered no new territories and engaged in no major offensives against external enemies. Her battles were primarily fought against her own courtiers, and in one of her best lines ever, said to her chancellor, Emperor Taizong had a horse with the name Lion Stallion and it was so large and strong that no one could get on its back. I was a lady-in-waiting attending Emperor Taizong and suggested to him that I only needed three things to subordinate it,

an iron whip, an iron hammer, and a sharp dagger. I will whip it with the iron whip. If it does not submit, I will hammer its head with the iron hammer. If it still does not submit, I will cut its throat with the iron hammer. If it still does not submit, I will cut its throat with a dagger. Emperor Taizong praised my bravery. Do you really believe that you're qualified to dirty my dagger? It doesn't get much more cold-blooded than that. As for the Socrates-Confucius bromance, I smile at the thought.

I think they'd either love each other instantly or immediately find one another insufferable. They were both, after all, famous proponents of the Socratic method of teaching, so they might both simply ask each other open-ended questions in an escalating game of metaphorical one-upsmanship until the sun set. Still, I like to think that, babblefish lodged into their respective ears, of course, they would have immediately hit it off as kindred spirits. I think that they would have found that there was a tremendous amount that they agreed on in terms of government and society. Both believed that the morality and ethics of the ruler determined the success or failure of

the civilization as a whole. Both thought that a ruler should be wise, learned, deeply inquisitive, and act as kind of a moral paragon-slash-father figure for the whole kingdom. And both would have agreed that democracy was a terrible idea and a surefire path to chaos and war. As for their beverage of choice, interestingly, they would again probably find their tastes remarkably similar. Far from the ridiculously strong jet fuel baijiu that would come to popularity later in Chinese history, the rice wines of Confucius' time were very low alcohol in content. Confucius himself was said to say, only wine drinking is not limited, but not so much as to make you confused. I.e., you can drink as much as you want, so long as you don't lose control of yourself. Socrates, too, would have

likely expressed similar sentiments. In Greece, much like Rome later on, the popular way to drink grape wine was to heavily dilute it with water. Socrates wouldn't have probably been as freewheeling as Confucius' drink-till-you're-tipsy approach, though, since he was an out-and-out ascetic and probably would have confined himself to only a glass or two. And so, there they'd sit, Socrates in his white Haimation toga and Confucius in his silk robes, discussing how awful democracy was, how moral rulers was the key to a successful society, and was the only way that the citizenry would be moral themselves, and very slowly sipping from their respective cups of low-ABV rice wine and watered-down grape wine.

Maybe later in the afternoon, they'd really get crazy and try a cup of the others. Good times. Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered. Follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over 10 generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era, then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast. Questioner Cosmin writes in asking,

How is the Tang Dynasty regarded in present-day China? Well, very well, in fact. The Tang is ranked alongside Han and Zhou as one of the top three, often number one. It took the highest highs of the Han and cranked many of them up to 11. It expanded out to territories rivaled only by the Han, and culturally and institutionally was in many ways its superior. In terms of culture, art, poetry, and production, the Tang was the Chinese flower in full bloom. A period of grandeur, glory, and global reach that has only been surpassed, really, in the past 40 or 50 years.

And even then, only in a certain sense. Technologically, yeah, no question, but culturally, meh. Go watch The Great Wall or Shi Yang Yang and ask yourself if that really outshines the Tang. Additionally, in terms of sheer amount of time in power, it ranks highly, surpassed only by the Han and Zhou. Now, it must be said that in that equation, I notably have disregarded the Yuan and Qing dynasties because they were both, well, stains on the silken fabric of Chinese honor.

Though both of those empires have many of their own glories to revel in, and we will get to both in due course, it's understandably hard for the Chinese to be too terribly proud of Mongol or Manchu accomplishments. Our next question comes from Caleb B., who asks a two-parter. Number one, the bureaucracy that was created during the Tang dynasty was vast. Following the fall of the dynasty into the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, and then into the Song, how did the massive institution for the Middle Kingdom survive the test? Well, I'd say that the bureaucratic mechanisms survived the fall of the

Tang for much the same reasons that they had survived the fall of pretty much every other dynasty, up to and including the Qing. The simple fact that from an administrative standpoint, there's little point in reinventing the wheel. This is also tied to the infamously long cultural memory of the Chinese people, which is decidedly backward-looking and circular versus the Western European standpoint of progress being forward and linear. And I certainly don't mean that as an insult, rather that when the philosophers and aristocrats sought to make reforms, they did so not by innovating or coming up with novel solutions, ultimately to their respective dynasties' dooms, as it were,

but rather by looking backward and trying to essentially ask themselves, what would the Yellow Emperor do? Because fundamentally, they were all eternally trying to recreate the legendary perfect rule of the Three Sovereigns, or at the very least, the rose-colored memories of the Zhou Dynasty. Hence, Empress Wu naming her own dynasty of one as such. Thus, the drive has been, and often still is, not to create new institutions or solutions, but rather to restore those centuries-old institutions and traditions that served father,

grandfather, great-grandfather, on and on down the line. Say what you will about the wholesale cultural destruction of Mao's Cultural Revolution, but at least in a certain sense, he did kind of have a point. China would never voluntarily leave behind the old thoughts and traditions of its collective ancestors. Caleb B.'s second question is, It's clear that when emperors are only on the throne for a short period of time, there is a troubling time in the empire. When empires are on the throne for 10 plus years or even 20 plus years, that stability usually ushers in a time of prosperity. If the Tang had

periods where rulers reigned for longer periods, would the stability of the dynasty have lasted longer, or would it have still collapsed into itself due to the known issues in the later periods of the dynasty? Well, it's kind of tough to say because the Tang did have several emperors who were there for 10, 20, sometimes even 30 years or so. Some of them were able to do great things like, again, Taizong or Xuanzong. Some of them were there and didn't do much of anything, even in that time. I agree that emperors who are only on the throne for a short period of time tend to be in periods when the dynasty's in trouble, whether we're talking about the Tang or the Han or later dynasties as well. But I hesitate

in attributing that too much to the emperors on the throne. Usually when a dynasty's in trouble, it starts rotating through emperors because the emperors have already lost a lot of their power, and therefore their courtiers and their officials can run through them, utilize them as a puppet, and they tend to get stabbed in the back or get poison in their wine. A lot of the emperors who are only on the throne for a very short period are child emperors who have no real power of their own and are really only there as a puppet. And once they get too old and start making decisions for themselves, well, it's time to get a new child on the throne, the puppeteer says at least. As for if the Tang Dynasty had more long-serving emperors, would it have survived? I don't think it would have. There were a number of competent,

long-serving emperors in the late Tang Dynasty that did their best to turn the situation around and to repair their government. And yet, even the best of them, Xuanzong and Xuanzong II, proved completely unable to halt the momentum. And I think that's because the dynasty collapsed not all at once, not because of some terrible emperor or one bad harvest, but it was this mounting series of problems and institutional failure that just cropped up more and more and more as the years went by. The biggest one I've found among them over the course of this series is actually economic policy. And it's impossible to blame the emperors or even the government for the economic failure of the Tang, because you see

that in virtually every pre-modern empire and dynasty that there is, this fundamental lack of understanding of how economies work, how money works, how things like interest or inflation work. We'll see it again in the Ming. We'll see it again in the Qing. We see it in Japan. We see it in Spain. We see it in all over Europe at different times. And from our modern perspective, it's easy to think, well, those guys are just idiots. You know, why couldn't they see that this was going to happen? But we say that from this perspective of, well, being in the present and having learned these lessons by studying history. And so we know that if you're having economic problems, the solution isn't to just mint more money or get more silver shipped into your country. That's not going to solve the

problem. It's just going to create a whole new host of other problems. But they didn't know that because when they looked back at history, there was no example for them to really definitively be able to say, ah, well, we shouldn't do it that way. These were new problems. The Tang emperors, as I've said many times, were literally running out of money and so had to kind of invent new solutions on the fly without any kind of understanding or historical background to do so. So they were trying their best. I mean, that goes back to Empress Wu and her economic reforms up to Shenzong and all the way to the end of the dynasty. A lot of these monarchs are really trying their best to patch some kind of solution together. And they're trying to do it in this slapdash, short term kind of solution way because the long term solution would be so painful and so far reaching that it might rip the dynasty apart then and there if they actually were trying

to enact it. So I think it becomes quite clear at the end of the dynasty that not even the best person, I don't think even Taizong would have even, if he'd been resurrected and placed back on the throne in the 9th century, I don't think even he would have been able to stave off the inevitable decline of the dynasty. And a lot of the major, major military issues that come up at the end of the Tang, I mean, ranging all the way back to the An Lushan Rebellion and then the rebellions of the 9th century, those are in large part stemmed from the fact that it was no one great mistake, but just this sort of cropping up of economic and political and military issues, like the proverbial straws on the camel's back. And once they're

there, they just add weight and add weight. And eventually, you know, the camel's back breaks. But that's a really good question. And yeah, thanks for asking it. Our next question comes from C. Lewis, who asks about Chinese military tactics. He says, as I understand, the actual way the battles were fought and any tactics used weren't recorded too thoroughly in Chinese history. As best you can, can you shed any light on the evolution of tactics or army composition from conscripted armies to professional forces over the centuries? Also, is there any data on how the soldiers of varying classes would be armed and armored and how that changed from the Warring States period to our current Tang period?

So we actually know quite a bit about ancient Chinese tactics and strategies and armor and weaponry, thanks in large part to the survival of several key manuals about warfare written in those periods. The first and most famous, of course, is Sun Tzu's The Art of War. We actually did a whole episode on that back in episode 15. But there's also about seven other widely known military classics from across the dynasties. One of the most influential was the 36 Stratagems by General Wang Jingzi of the Southern Qi during the Southern and Northern phase of the Great Period of Disunity in the 6th century. From that, and from the art of war, we get a lot of information about Chinese battle strategies as well as battlefield tactics.

Most of them are what we would probably think of today as pretty standard practice in terms of warfare. So some examples from the 36 stratagems are to cross the sea without the emperor's knowledge, meaning to deceive and surprise your enemy and never let them know what you're really up to, also known as the open feint. You know, if you actually want to go west, you have to make it look like you want to go east. Another famous strategy is to attack waved in order to rescue Zhao, which means don't attack a strong force head-on, but instead take your army, march it somewhere else, and attack something you know the enemy cares about but is weakly defended. That forces the enemy to respond to you rather than you going to him and responding to him.

Another one is to kill with a borrowed sword, which is pretty straightforward. You get someone else to fight on your behalf. That way you don't risk your own strength. And this strategy goes to the heart of the Tang military policy, which is to make the barbarians fight the barbarians, make the non-Chinese people the army, and leave them on the borders and then we don't have to worry about it. Which works great, until the people with the swords decide they don't want to listen to you anymore. Another one is the idea of looting a

burning house, which means that you wait until an enemy state is beset with internal troubles, like famine, or civil war, or disease, and then you march in and destroy it completely, so that you don't have to worry about it anymore. One particularly notable strategy, though, seems to have come from the steppe people themselves, which you may remember the Tang Imperial Li clan actually comes from as well. It says, in order to capture it, one must let loose. Now, this strategy we'll see later on was employed by the Mongols and the steppe tribes to great effect under commanders like Genghis Khan. It's a very traditional attack strategy that likened an enemy army to game animals, and noted that humans, just like these animals, would attack and fight to the bitter end if they felt like they

were well and truly cornered. But if you provide what at least seems to be an escape route, a hole in your line, something that they can run towards, make a run for it, they will. They'll throw down their weapons, they'll throw down whatever they have, and they will completely lose their will to fight. And by the time it becomes clear that the escape was a fake out,

they will have been completely defeated. So in terms of actual battle tactics, the Chinese stratagems kind of evolved in what at least initially looks like a kind of a backwards direction from places like medieval Europe or Japan. More accurately, though, the Chinese warfare strategy modernized, you know, a thousand years before either of those other states, by which I mean that it progressed from the small professional aristocratic warrior nobles fighting little cabinet wars in the warring states period of the 500s BCE to the idea of mass mobilization of peasants conscripts for

basically all its subsequent wars. Europe wouldn't start doing that until the Napoleonic Wars of the 1800s. And Japan wouldn't do that until the Meiji Restoration of the late 1800s. So the warring states in China is actually more similar to the idea of European knights or Japanese samurai. Whereas the subsequent wars, like the Period of Disunion, the Sui-Tang Wars, all of that is actually, in terms of idea and strategy and tactics much more similar to what we think of as modern military tactics, or at least pre-modern 18th century tactics. The warring states used aristocratic chariots as their primary battle units, with peasant infantry serving as a secondary role. The infantry would march in and engage the enemy army, and the chariots would try to circle around

to the flanks and attack from the sides or the rear. By the end of the Warring States, though, you essentially have this complete burnout of the idea of warrior nobility. They'd essentially kill each other all off, and what had replaced it was this idea of just using massive amounts of people, human wave attacks almost, with crossbow archers supporting huge infantry formations and the infantry using spears and dagger axe weapons to essentially move in on an enemy unit, stab in with a spear, and then rake back with the dagger axe

to try to take off their head. A dagger axe, for any of you not familiar with that, is essentially you have a spear and then attached at the tip of it is actually a secondary cutting device which essentially functions as kind of a scythe. And so you can kind of cut back with it and cut off somebody's head as though it were a shaft of wheat. Both of these tactics, both the archery with the crossbows and the dagraxes, fundamentally were based on the idea of using just regular people pulled up, and so they didn't require any kind of great elite training. If you can plow a field, you can thrust a spear.

If you can load and crank the crossbow, you can shoot it with relative accuracy. So once we get to the Tang Dynasty, we actually get an addition into the Chinese army that hadn't really been there before. We had horse-drawn chariots before, but by the Tang Dynasty, enough of the Central Asian steppe culture has become infused into China that it has added in cavalry as one of the primary battle units, given that again, the royal family was coming directly from the people of the steppe and horse and bow. Thus, the Tang armies would have extensively employed horse archers, much like the Mongols would later on. Still, in pretty much all these instances, most of the Chinese strategy was based around simply trying to overwhelm any enemy with endless troop numbers rather than having some particularly elite warrior

class within the society like the knights or the samurai. One other thing of note is the reliance on siege tactics in Chinese wars versus open field battles. Now you get both, but the Chinese really specialized and excelled in building defensive fortifications and walls around cities. I mean, they're famous today for it. As well as how to ring your army around one of those fortifications and break them down, often through just sheer patience or siege weaponry, or if it's available, using the environment itself in order to force surrender, like diverting a river to flood the city that's under siege. Later on in the Mongol era, Genghis Khan and his sons and grandsons will actually take Chinese siege engineers and use them to great effect against the other enemies that they would

conquer, because the Mongols themselves were pretty roundly terrible at trying to take cities, but the Chinese were excellent at it. In terms of armor, China had no real problem in producing enough material to properly outfit its armies. This is in contrast to, say, something like Japan, which was resource-starved in elements like bronze or the ability to produce iron. And so, even into the 18th century, unless you were one of the elite, elite top samurai daimyos, your armor might be primarily constructed out of lacquered wood. In contrast, Chinese armor for even basic soldiers would have been first copper, then bronze, and then later on iron and steel.

Full-on plate armor, you get that a little bit later on, but it never caught on like it did in Europe. Instead, what was typically used was scale and lamellar varieties of armor. During the Qin and Han, like I said, it was primarily made from bronze, but that was phased out over time in favor of stronger alloys like iron, starting in the later Han and then beyond. Like most armor systems, you'd have successive layers of protection. The metal would go on the outside, of course. Underneath that would be hardened leather armor. And finally, the most interior layer was typically silk. Now that last one might seem a little strange. Silk is part of the armor system? The answer is yeah. It actually acted as a surprisingly strong final barrier to

things like arrow and bolt attacks. Silk, of course, has extreme tensile strength, and so it could sometimes stop a projectile penetration that had defeated the first two layers of armor. And even if it couldn't stop an arrow or a bolt from penetrating into the flesh, that silk would have the tendency to stretch rather than rip and kind of sheath the arrow or the bolts in itself. That would do a couple of things. First off, it would act as an immediate bandage into the wound. It would stop and stymie blood flow. It also would act as at least a partial antiseptic, preventing infection by not allowing the iron or the dirty bolts to really enter into the bloodstream.

And then, since it was sheathed in this silk, it made it much easier to later on remove the bolt without causing significant additional injury to the wounded soldier. By the period of the Tang, one of the most famous types of armor, it was a scale armor called mountain pattern, or Shan Wen Kai, that had become very common. It was made out of iron and sometimes even steel. And it was called this because the scales of the armor looked a lot like the Chinese character from Mountain, Shan. By that point, chain mail had begun to be introduced from Central Asia, but it remained pretty uncommon and was typically reserved only for nobility up until at least the Mongol conquests. Longtime friend of the show, Silly Valley, asked a question,

a couple questions in fact. He said, in the latest episode, you mentioned the use of peasant rebellion as a traditional label. I wonder how far back that phrase was used. The modern phrase is used through the communist textbook from Chen Sheng and Wu Guang's time, as the same text considers the first empire also the formal beginning of feudal economy when a formal peasant class started to exist. But I cannot easily relate the phrase to an ancient form. Unrelated, thinking about the traditional communist explanation of the Chinese history makes me wonder how agricultural revolution is related to the transition to feudal society. I had this strong impression that the feudal society began to form with the agricultural revolution. In formal history text, I learned, although feudal economy

had existed since the spring and autumn, the first emperor was the first one who formalized the system throughout China. But even if this is correct, the Yellow Emperor is supposed to have taught people how to farm. This would push the Chinese agriculture revolution very far before spring and autumn. So were farmlands mainly in the hands of royalty before that time? Okay, so it's entirely possible, and likely even, that you're right on and I've been modernizing the terminology without kind of 100% realizing it myself. As in, I was saying that it was traditional in the English sense, where, as you point out, it seems to have been more neologism

in Chinese. From Fort Sumter to the Battle of Gettysburg. From the Emancipation Proclamation to Appomattox Courthouse. From the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Compromise of 1877, from Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, to Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. I'm Rich. And I'm Tracy. And we're the hosts of a podcast that takes a deep dive into that era, when a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans. Look for the Civil War and Reconstruction

wherever you find your podcasts. The difference would seem to come, as you suggest, with the Nationalists' and then Communists' revision of Chinese society. From one highly favoring aristocracy to one in which the farmers and laborers, the hammer and sickle, were the salt of the earth and the backbone of state power. Nonetheless, it's worth noting that in the imperial social pyramid, the landed farmers, the nongmin, were the highest non-aristocratic class, above both the urban artisans and especially the despised merchant class. This stemmed in large part from the tax policies on most of the dynasties being based often entirely on land tax rather than anything like income or sales tax. But to be a peasant farmer was to both hold land for

yourself and provide a vital commodity to the society, and so it was highly respected. Still, the tension between calling something a peasant rebellion versus banditry or whatever other disparaging name seems to have come from the ever-present tension in the very foundation of the Chinese Empire, all the way back to the Shang kings overthrowing the Xia. That is, the Mandate of Heaven. You know, that ultimate in retroactive self-justifications. Under the Mandate of Heaven, if the rebellion is successful, well, then it was divinely sanctioned all along, and its leaders were the heroes of the story.

Yay! But if the rebellion fails, well, those despicable bandits were acting against the divine order of the universe and got what was coming to them. So should we call them noble agrarian revolutionaries or bandit hooligans? In traditional Chinese historiography, it pretty much depends entirely on whether they won or lost. In terms of your question about the transition to feudal society and how that relates to the agricultural revolution or agrarianism as a whole, yeah, that's very interesting. I'm most inclined to go with the more modern explanations stemming from archaeology than Tales of the Yellow Emperor.

But in fact, other than overt timeline, the order of events are pretty similar regardless of which story you go with. Pre-agricultural societies seem to have been uniformly tiny tribes, like a couple dozen people max, of nomad hunter-gatherers. They also seem to have been significantly more egalitarian than agricultural societies. The going explanation is that pretty much everyone in a given tribe would have had to be by necessity a generalist rather than a specialist, and that everyone's pretty much all performing the same survival tasks. If they're all hunting mammoths and collecting berries, then of course there's nothing really to trade. No real surplus, no real ideation of wealth.

With the advent of sedentary agriculture, whether that was spontaneous or whether it was taught by the Yellow Emperor, or whether, as is my favorite theory, they did it because they wanted to get drunk, fewer people in any of these systems can then start producing more food than even the whole community can eat, which leads to a surplus of calories. This allows other members to specialize into other professions, and in due course, changes the egalitarian tribe into a hierarchical society as we understand it. People have more things and more food, which critically makes them more vulnerable to being attacked or robbed by one another and their neighboring societies who might be jealous of how much more stuff they have. This of course leads to

a pressing need for military defense, which requires a strong government authority to organize and manage. So under this theory, agriculture as a direct line leads to warfare. This is often explained and justified by those with the most power as being divinely ordained. And in order to retain that heavenly mandate to power, the gates to the divine are frequently closed and locked behind them. That is to say, a priest class is developed and outside access to the divine is forbidden. For instance, we could think about the strict regulation on fortune-telling and pyromancy in the Chinese empires.

You could often suffer the death penalty for being caught doing that. So it quickly becomes the king saying, yes, of course, I have heaven's blessing and you'll just have to take my word for it, and all the priests nodding their head along in agreement because they benefit from being in this existing social order. In terms of timeline, the traditional histories are really, really sketchy at best. Archaeological digs around the Yellow River from the 1980s on up through today have been showing, for instance, that while Sima Qian et al tell of Xia and then Shang and then Zhou in succession, it's more likely that they were co-extant civilizations, probably all settled, all agrarian, all specialized, and almost certainly

all hierarchical, and thus, in a sense, already feudal. In terms of when it was formalized, I would say that goes back well before Qin Shi Huang, to at least the Zhou kings. Shi Huang's big change was that he appointed his lords on the basis of oaths and power, versus the Zhou who ruled mostly through kinship ties. In terms of rulership over the land, the feudal-style system seems to extend back just as far. Though nominally united, the princes slash kings were day-to-day the law in their respective regions, which functioned much more like city-states than any kind of unified empire or kingdom. Control of the land itself would have been parceled out to the lower nobility and then parceled out again and again, all the way down to individual families that physically worked the

land, just like feudalism. The key difference between this system and, say, the post-Roman European feudalism was that, in general, there was no serfdom in ancient China. Granted, you had a slave class, which would be abolished with the formation of the Chinese empire, but the peasantry was not legally bound to the land that they worked like they were in Europe. Thus, by the time we get to the spring and autumn period, we see a surprising amount of physical mobility among the populace to move from states and territories to ones like Qin, for instance, that seemed more prosperous or successful. That wouldn't have been possible in medieval Europe. Francis B. has our next question, and he writes,

Do you have any information about the development of lion dances in China? I know there are differences between Northern and Southern traditions of lion dances. I would like to learn more about how they differentiated. Having seen more than a few of these myself, I've often wondered kind of the same general line of questioning. And so I'm glad that I had the chance to dig into it a little bit more. The lion dance is indeed a very old ceremony in China and other East Asian countries. It can actually be traced, ritualistically at least, all the way from the early Qin dynasty, in which shamans were written to have worn ceremonial bearskin masks while performing exorcisms and other rites. In the Han period as well, performers known as mimics or mimes

were written to dance while wearing masks of fish, dragon, and even phoenixes. Now, one thing you might have noticed in that brief explanation was that none of those things I just mentioned are lions. You may have also noticed that the lion is not at all native to China, and you would be absolutely right. So how did an African animal come to the Middle Kingdom? Well, during the Han Dynasty, China had branched out westward and into Central Asia, eventually coming into direct contact with the Persians. Persian emissaries purportedly even gifted one or possibly a pair of lions to one of the Han emperors. It's suspected that as a result

of this interaction, lion as both a concept and even as a word, in Persian it was sir, and in Chinese it's shi, was introduced. Indeed, the lion is still heavily associated in China with the concept of Central Asia and the Far West. The lion dance itself is described in detail for the first time during the Tang Dynasty, and tellingly, it is described as being a distinctly foreign style of dance and typically performed by the Hu people, which is to say, Central Asians. This is where the northern style of lion dance originated, then known as the Taipingyue, meaning the Great Peace Music. This northern style featured five lions of different colors, some apparently as large as nine feet tall, and each color representing one of the five classical elements of the

universe. The Southern Lion Dance is probably more familiar to a lot of Western audiences, since it originates from Guangdong, which has traditionally made up the bulk of overseas Chinese migrants. It is derived from the earlier Northern Dance, but with its own very distinct qualities. The Southern Dance is typically performed in a rigorous manner that utilizes a whole variety of demanding and difficult Kung Fu maneuvers, and as such, unlike the more playful and kind of relaxed Northern Dance, oftentimes Kung fu schools only allow their advanced members to perform these routines. In the traditional southern dance, there are three lions, or up to three lions, depending on the proficiency of the kung fu school performing, each of them of different colors and named for one of the three famous oath brothers from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Liu Bei,

or in Cantonese, Lao Pei, is represented by the yellow lion, and is so colored because he became the legitimate empire of the Xu Han kingdom, and the successor state to the Han dynasty. Liu Bei's tail is five-colored, again representing the five classical elements and signifying that he had heaven's blessing. The second brother is Guan Gong, or in Cantonese, Guan Kung, and he sports a red face with black whiskers, a long black beard, and a long red and black tail. The third and youngest brother is Zhang Fei,

with a black face, small ears, and a black and white tail. All right, our final question today comes from Matthew G. He writes, I suspect you are saving a significant exploration of Neo-Confucianism until you come to the Song, but if you could discuss anything worth noting you've He writes, I agree. And you're certainly right that we'll be going further into depth on the rise of Neo-Confucianism in the Song and Ming periods. But that by no means precludes me from giving you an answer here and now. Honestly, it's been with so much else going on at the end of the Tang's lifespan, it's often quite easy to just let things like philosophy slip through my fingers. But Neo-Confucianism does indeed trace its origins back to the late Tang, and

specifically to two writers, poets, and all-around Renaissance men named Han Yu and Li Ao of the late 8th and mid-9th centuries, respectively. Han Yu is often seen as the real progenitor of Neo-Confucianism, and is of particularly special note in this regard. He's also regarded as basically the second best writer of prose in all of Chinese history, second only to Sima Qian, the grand historian. And he's been likened by biographers like William Neinhauser Jr. as comparable in stature to Dante, Shakespeare, or Goethe. Hanyu's posthumous revolt against the creeping influence of style over substance

began, innocently enough, he rejected the fashionable writing style of the time, called pianwan, meaning parallel style, for what he considered more traditional, straightforward, and clear styles of writing. He was also an ardent anti-Buddhist and anti-Taoist, which are both hallmarks of what would become Neo-Confucianism. Probably one of his most famous writings is when he wrote to the emperor, Shanzong, who was himself a devout Buddhist who was at the time finalizing plans to have the Buddha's finger bone brought to his court and honored as a holy relic. Han Yu wrote him, quote,

Your servant begs leave to say that Buddhism is no more than a cult of the barbarian peoples, which spread to China in the time of the later Han. It did not exist here in ancient times. Now, Buddha was a man of the barbarians who did not speak the language of China and wore clothes of different fashion. His sayings did not concern the ways of our ancient kings, nor did his manner of dress conform to our laws. He understood neither the duties that bind sovereign and subject, nor the affections of father and son. If he were still alive today and came to our court by order of his ruler, your majesty might condescend to receive him, but he would then be escorted to the borders of the state, dismissed, and not allowed to delude the masses. How then, when he has been long dead,

could his rotten bones, the foul and unlucky remains of his body, be rightly admitted to the palace? Confucius said, respect spiritual beings while keeping at a distance from them. Your servant is deeply shamed, and begs that this bone be given to the proper authorities to be cast into fire and water, that this evil may be rooted out, the world freed from its error, and later generations spared this delusion. Then may all men know how the acts of their wise sovereign transcend the commonplace a thousandfold. Would this not be glorious? Would it not be joyful? End quote. So yeah, he made no bones, har har, about his disdain for the barbarian religion that had so infected his people. Hanyu likewise criticized Taoism, which he saw as better than Buddhism only in the sense that it was a homegrown delusion rather than an imported one. Laozi's belief that the world was petty and insignificant compared to the eternal Tao, Hanyu rebuffed, saying, quote, when Laozi treated benevolence and righteousness as petty,

it was not that he was slandering them, it was that his perspective was petty. If someone sitting in a well and observing the heavens says, Heaven is small, it is not that heaven is small. End quote. Both styles of monastic orders, however, he argued as being enormous drains on the state economy and that Confucianism could and should be a better vehicle since it promoted involvement in state affairs rather than discouraging them and linked private individual life with the overall welfare of the society.

He wrote in his essay, The Origins of the Tao, quote, Someone may ask, this way, what way is it? I reply, this way of which I speak is not what the Taoists and Buddhists refer to as the way. Instead, this way was transmitted by Wen, Wu, and the Duke of Zhou to Kongzi, which is Confucius. It was transmitted by Kongzi to Meng and the Duke of Zhou to Kongzi, which is Confucius. It was transmitted by Kongzi to Mengzi, Mencius. When Mengzi died, it did not succeed in being transmitted. Xunzi and Yang Xiong grasped parts of it but not its essence. They spoke of it but not in detail.

Prior to the Duke of Zhou, these sages were rulers, hence their actions were put into effect. After the Duke of Zhou, they were ministers, hence their actions were put into effect. After the Duke of Zhou, they were ministers, hence their theories have been long lived. This being the case, how should things be dealt with? I say, if they are not blocked, Taoism will not flow. If they are not stopped, Taoism will not be practiced. Treat their people as people, rather than as monks and priests. Burn their books, convert their temples into houses, illuminate the way of the former kings in order to guide them. Let widows, widowers, orphans, the bereft, the abandoned, and the sick be nurtured.

Would this not be acceptable? End quote. All of these aspects would develop in the Song into the Neo-Confucian ideology that sought to undercut the appeal of Buddhism and Taoism metaphysics by combining metaphysical-slash-spiritual elements with the more traditional state-centered philosophies of earlier Confucianism. Alright, so we come to the end of yet another highly successful Q&A. I'll get the retrospective out shortly, and then we will finish shoveling dirt on top of the Tang Dynasty's grave and forge

ahead into the realm Divided. In terms of scheduling, the next couple of weeks are probably going to be pretty rough for me, as I've got a class taking their AP exams and then a week-long excursion up to Beijing as part of a school field trip. Fun times. But recording is going to be slower than usual. The upside is once that's all done, I should actually have significantly more time to pump out episodes faster than I've been able to do so over the past eight or so months, meaning we might just get out more than two episodes a month over the summer. Fingers crossed. Regardless, thanks so very much for your patience in the matter. Trust me, I wish I could get these out faster too. And thanks to everyone who sent in questions or just

dropped by to have a chat. If you didn't hear your question today, that is entirely my fault. There might have been a couple that slipped through the proverbial cracks. If so, please ask me again, and I'll answer to the best of my ability directly. How might you get in touch? Some of you might be wondering. Well, the fastest way is by joining the Facebook page, facebook.com slash the history of China, since I am an absolute Facebook fanatic and seem to be checking it about every 15 seconds or so. The second fastest way is by following the show on Twitter. We're under the handle at THOC podcast. The third fastest way is by using the email account, THOC podcast at gmail.com. I try to check that as often as I can,

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of some of you beautiful people, both. Or simply go to patreon.com slash thehistoryofchina. And as always, thanks for listening. Have you ever gazed in wonder at the Great Pyramid? Have you marveled at the golden face of Tutankhamun? Or admired the delicate features of Queen Nefertiti? If you have, you'll probably like the History of Egypt podcast. Every week, we explore tales of this ancient culture. The History of Egypt is available wherever you get your podcasting fix. Come, let me introduce you to the world of Ancient Egypt.