The History of China - #140 - Special: Turn Of The Millennium Q&A

Episode Date: April 24, 2018

A Q&A like this only comes around once in a thousand years! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. 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. I'm Tracy. And I'm Rich. And we want to invite you to join us as we take an in-depth look at this pivotal era in American history.

Look for The Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 140, Turn of the Millennium, Q&A. Before getting into the thick of things today, as it's a Q&A episode and we're also pausing the narrative, and especially since we've had so many new supporters come and join the guardians of the realms of men, the watchers on the wall, the flames in the darkness. Yeah, that's right, eat your heart out, George R.R. Martin. I'm going to start off by fulfilling my oath to give the most glorious and harmonious thanks I possibly can to my newest Patreon supporters, one and all. Seriously, everyone, you are 100% the reason that this show has lasted for

140 episodes and is still going strong. I didn't make this show to get rich, and just to be clear, I am definitely still not rich. THOC began and remains my personal passion project. That said, being able to justify to my wife all the hours and hours and hours hunched over my computer with books open on arcane Chinese lore rather than doing, you know, normal things, is so greatly appreciated by me. meaning the number of arguments I've been able to avoid with my beautiful and fantastic wife by being able to say, yeah, but it's solvent, and here's a bouquet of flowers from my fans to you, is priceless, and totally keeps me going even when the going gets rough. So in the interests of keeping this intro even of a somewhat reasonable length, His Holy Imperial Highness has dictated that we read off our newest contributors since our last big on-air thank

you session from the general level and above. That is to say, those having newly pledged $3 or more per show, but please make no mistake, if you've pledged $1 or $2, you have my sincerest gratitude as well. Every level of support matters. After all, an army cannot consist solely of generals and ministers. I just don't want this to run into the hour plus link on the thanks section alone. All right, so here we go. The Eternal Imperial Court's newest generals are Buradan, Ricardo S., David E., Hazel H., Andrew, Andrew D. That's right, two Andrews right in a row. Saphira, Jacob M., and Thranit. Thank you, one and all. The realm's new appointees to governors are Cary H., Dan S., Andreas K., Cadaverish, Stian S., David M., and Samuel M.

Our newest Prime Minister is Simon O., and a THOC first, our inaugural Imperial Prince is Jose F. Thank you all very, very much. Your contributions are what is the lifeblood of this show. I really couldn't do it without any of you. And your new Imperial postings and honors and titles will be up on the VIP page very soon. All right, that all out of the way, let's get down to brass tacks. The questions that you have asked me over the course of the weeks and months since I put this missive out. Our first question, and please note that these are in no particular order, save for one or two at the end, as you'll see. Mostly I just put them in the order that they were dated by. Anyways, our first up is by Owners Inc., who asks,

When you mentioned that Augustus banned the purchase of imported silks with gold coins, I didn't follow why Roman gold coins had become irreplaceable. Okay, so this is about the Han Dynasty, and specifically about the interim period between the Western and Eastern Han dynasties with the usurper emperor Wang Meng and his Xin dynasty. So just to set the stage a bit, since the first century BC, the Romans had been absolutely bonkers for silk imported from China. Now they had no idea what the stuff was or where it came from. They actually thought that it came from some kind of a tree. This was of course a state secret of China that was preciously guarded. Not so much that it came from silkworms and other insects. That much would be easy enough to figure out over time, and indeed Europeans would deduce that as time went on. Rather, the state secret was the

specific silk moth that they had domesticated and utilized. They'd rendered it flightless, and they'd perfected the practice of boiling the caterpillars once they'd pupated so that they could keep their single, miles-long strand of silk intact, which made for a much, much higher quality of silk. Now, Roman obsession with the material made no shortage of old fogies in the Eternal City angry as all get-out, since they saw the material as fostering immorality and promiscuity. Seneca the Elder, for instance, said, I can't see clothes of silk if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one's decency, can be called clothes. Wretched flocks of maids labor so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or

foreigner with the wife's body. They were just too gosh darn sexy, as the moral hand-wringers of the age saw it, and Augustus was certainly one of those. So, as a matter of course, at least as part of Augustus' banning of the imports of silk, it had to do with his own near-obsession with public morality and decency. Remember, he is the emperor who said that adultery ought to be punished by death, not that that was almost ever actually enforced. But more than this, it was recognized that Romans' lust for silk garments was resulting in a huge trade imbalance. Getting back to the link with the economics of China,

Augustus' reign overlapped between the years of 6 and 14 CE with the reign of China and the usurper Wang Mang. Wang is sometimes referred to as the world's first socialist because his radical reforms sought to fundamentally redistribute and reorganize the society and economy of China in order to harmonize it and bring it back to the good old days of the Zhou dynasty. This manifested in terms that would affect the global economy as far away as Rome when he began in the year 6 when he was still merely the regent acting emperor for the infant emperor of Han, policies of withdrawing all of the realm's gold coins from circulation to be replaced by various other types of coins, mostly copper, but also tin, shell, lead, and others. This initial withdrawal was followed thereafter by a complete recall to the imperial treasury of all gold and precious

metals. China's pull on the global market was such, because of its exports via the Silk Road, of course, that it had a huge influx of gold as it traded its silk. But with Wang Meng's policy, that gold was essentially now disappearing into an economic black hole, draining the total amount of gold in circulation with alarming rapidity. So much so that at least in part even Caesar Augustus took note of the sudden rarity of the bullion and figured that it was the Roman obsession with silk that was the main cause of it. Thus he decided that in conjunction with its sinful nature, for the sake of Rome's economy, silk must be banned. Longtime listener, contributor, and questioner Silly Valley had a few questions

just to go around, and so let's get into those. His first one is that traditional Chinese history also have three kingdoms, five dynasties, 16 kingdoms, etc. So what makes Song so different that the Orthodox would not consider the Song era just another one of those. Those periods of disunion, he of course means. Well, as Silly Valley had mentioned in his preamble to this question directly, which in retrospect I probably should have kept in, but here we are. Certain elements of Chinese historiography characterize the other states surrounding China, especially to the north like the Liao dynasty and Western Xia, and they say that perhaps those should also be characterized as fundamentally

Chinese, just as China had incorporated other cultures into it in the Tang and prior. These are what at least Silly Valley refers to as progressivist elements of the Chinese historiography. And so my answer is as follows. I disagree pretty strongly with what you refer to as the progressive view there because, well, the Tanguts, the Khitan, and the Jershin were not Chinese. Not ethnically, not socially, and not politically. By the same token, we'd need to reclassify everyone from Korea to Kazakhstan as Chinese, wouldn't we, if we were going to go by that metric? Were the Mongols of Kublai Chinese? The Aizengoriyo Manchus? I mean, I sort of see where they're coming from, a bit at least,

but you've got to draw the line somewhere, don't you? Or else the term loses any meaning it might have ever had. In terms of what makes the Song dynasty different from the would-have-been dynasties of periods of Decenian, I'd say that that is related. There really hadn't been any significant confusion in this era as to what was or was not Chinese. Khitans practiced a largely different lifestyle than their southern neighbors, and in spite of the fact that they encouraged, slash, compelled, Chinese migration to their southern cities under the dominion, the separation remained much in effect. There's no mistaking that your rulers are not the same as you are, when their palaces composed of felt tents and disappeared from the capital entirely for months out of each year.

The Zhershens were likewise an identifiably different other that operated on very different terms than the Han Chinese. At the same time, the question gets to the very heart of what being Chinese, or at least being a Chinese dynasty, really means at its core. And I'd say that at its basis, it means that one is in control of both the territory and the cultural legacy of the Yellow River Valley. If we look at the different periods of civil strife, the dividing lines between what the core of Chinese territory is and what it is not come into what I'd say is pretty clear focus, and that is pretty much the territories of the warring states, plus the southlands below the Yangtze, the last part more and more as the beating heart of Chinese culture, as it flowed southward over the course of the Tang and throughout the five dynasties,

and of course culminating in the Song. It is, absolutely, an ever-shifting concept, so it's not carved into stone or anything like that. But that seems to have been what everyone up to the northern Song understood that claiming the mandate of heaven meant. If you held the Yellow River, the Yangtze River, and the Pearl River Delta, then you could legitimately claim the Chinese mandate of rulership. Even if you didn't hold, say, the Gansu Corridor, or Shiyu, or Liaodong, you know, those were all periphery areas, places to reconquer if you needed a feather in the cap to mark you out as

a truly great dynasty, but not integral territorial pieces that was China at its heart. Of course, that gets all kinds of confused in the 12th and 13th centuries when the Song loses control of the entire north and is forced to huddle behind the Yangtze River. Is that the same dynasty? Is that another period of disunion? Or is that just the product of a foreign invasion pushing them into a defensive posture? I would certainly, and I think many historians would agree, I would tend toward the latter explanation since the Jurchen were pretty self-evidently not Chinese. But then again, we can also look ahead to the end of the 19th century, when the Manchu Qing dynasty lost control of its own home territory in the northeast to Russia.

That legacy factor remained in effect, and I'd posit more than a little bit of, well, at least this regime is more Chinese than that regime, and thus it's more legitimate. That plays out in both the Songjin conflict and the Russo-Sino-Japanese conflicts of the 19th and 20th centuries. Silly Valley also asks, did I miss your discussion about the propagation of wheat in China? As you know, wheat is the dominant crop of the north. Many southerners abhor flour-based meal i suspect that

this was an instinctive protection against gluten intolerance could this population distribution be the result of natural selection due to crop dominance so this of course was posted and in reference to my breakout hit episode on rice which i just had put out as kind of a side thought and hadn't even really expected to get an entire episode out of, but it was much more wildly popular than I would have ever expected. So I'm glad, I'm glad so many of you enjoyed it. Um, but yeah, no, this is a fair question. You know, I talk about one grain and I completely short shrift to the other. So I'm glad to discuss it a bit more at length. Although, of course, this is not going to be nearly as extensive as my full episode on rice.

The gluten question, though, is an interesting one, as is the potential for the divergence of diet having something to do with a built-in aversion to something at a higher percentage of a certain population that one might have over another. That said, it took me a while to begin even beginning to look for evidence or sources about where answers to this question might come from. I'm of course no dietary scientist, no scientist at all. I'm just a school teacher. It's also very, very difficult because gluten sensitivity and particularly celiac disease was just not understood and not categorized or medically

acknowledged prior to, I believe, the 20th century, or at the very least, the modern era. So given that the disease tends to mimic the symptoms of quite a few other dietary problems and diseases, even in the West, up until very, very recently, it has remained pretty occult, unless they're looking very, very closely indeed. And anyone who's been to China or has lived in China or is from China would tell you that they're doing a great job for the most part. But most Chinese doctors and hospitals do not have the same level of equipment or tests or the ability to root out really obscure, hidden diseases like they might be able to do in some of the more post-industrial advanced Western countries. No slight against any of them at all, of course.

In fact, as I was looking up info for this question, I came across a 2009 paper in the Journal of Zhejiang University of the Sciences by Zhang Lingling, Zhang Bingling, and Liu Youshi called, Is Adult Celiac Disease Really Uncommon in China? And to summarize, what they found in a study of 62 Chinese patients between 2003 and 2008 that displayed symptoms in line with chronic celiac was that in spite of the long-standing idea that celiac disease was more of a European disease and relatively rare in Asia, they found evidence that at least among certain populations in China, the rate of celiac disease may be highly underdiagnosed and treated. As they put it, quote, it has been believed that CD, celiac disease, mainly occurs in Caucasians. However,

its prevalence in other populations might be underestimated. Especially in developing countries, the diagnosed patients could only be the tip of the iceberg. It was generally believed that CD is very rare in the Far East, including China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, etc. And there was only sporadic reports of the disease in the East Asia. However, this conclusion has not been confirmed by large-scale serological screening in the region. As the prevalence of CD has increased in developing countries, we believe that CD should be considered as an endemic disease. In this study, 4 out of 62 patients with chronic diarrhea were diagnosed with CD,

accounting for 6.5% of the patients surveyed. If we take this fact into consideration that rice, not wheat, is the main food in Zhejiang province, an area within southern China, the prevalence of CD may be even higher in northern China, where wheat is the main food. Therefore, we speculate that CD may not be rare in China." But where it gets interesting is that their finding seems to indicate the opposite of what you, silly valley, had suspected about the distribution of the disorder. That instead of what might be one's first guess that southern populations avoided gluten-containing foodstuffs and might cause a higher susceptibility to the disorder in the south,

it's actually the population of northern China who have grown and eaten the predominance of non-rice grains for the longest period of time that might actually have a higher incidence of the disease as this study suggests. This was surprising to me as well when I first read it, but then I thought to my own mild form of autoimmune disorder, my seasonal allergies. And when I thought of it that way, it kind of clicked for me. As is the case for basically all autoimmune disorders, the body's immune system basically misfires and begins to recognize harmless particles like dander, pollen, or proteins as virulent invaders to be destroyed at all costs. Thus, the body begins attacking itself in an effort to drive off these strawman invaders, damaging itself in the process. But the thing with allergies, and seemingly celiac as well, is that they must be acquired

by repeated exposure over time. Hence, being stung by a bee the first time is painful, but relatively harmless, but it's the second instance of stings and beyond that run the risk of anaphylactic shock to those at risk. Or in my case, a childhood spent with a large number of horse pastures and cottonwood trees as my backyard, leading to my inability to go anywhere near a horse now, although interestingly, not zebras. And in the case of gluten sensitivity, it would appear that it is very much the same. One must be exposed to the substance, and I think most often as a child, to give the body the opportunity to mistake the gluten protein for an actual threat and launch countermeasures. Anfam writes, why was the Han

and Tang considered the golden age of Chinese imperial history, even though the Qing is also as great, large, or influential as the other two? And also, why was the Northern Dynasty able to conquer the Southern Kingdoms, even though the North is constantly devastated by war, suffered heavy casualties, and they drive right at the heart of, I think, a lot of misconceptions about the nature of China prior to basically where we are now in the narrative, which is to say the Song Dynasty and China's great shift southward. In terms of your first question about why is the Qing not considered to be among the greats of Chinese history? It comes down to the simple question of, well, whose empire is it anyway? That is, the Tang, the Han, and even the Ming are typically seen as the high-water marks of imperial Chinese civilization

because they were quintessentially Chinese in their nature, rule, and ethnic makeup of the ruling classes. Contrast that to the likes of the Yuan and the Qing, or even Northern Wei during the period of disunion, because those were all conquest dynasties in which foreign populations ruled over and typically treated pretty harshly the ethnic Han Chinese population. It's hard to get too terribly excited over the greatness of the imperial ruling class that's currently crushing your people under its boot heel.

Similarly, I don't anticipate reading too many glowing reviews of the Han, Tang, or French empires from Vietnamese historians, or the rest of Indochina anytime soon either. 400 years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the centre of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Listen to Season 1 to hear about England's first attempts at empire building, in Ireland, in North America and in the Caribbean, the first steps of the East India Company and the political battles between King and Parliament. Listen to Season 2 to hear about the chaotic years of civil war, revolution and regicide which rocked the Three Kingdoms and the Fledgling Empire. In Season 3, we see how Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell ruled the powerful Commonwealth

and challenged the Dutch and the Spanish for the wealth and power of the Americas and Asia. Learn the history of the British Empire by listening to Pax Britannica everywhere you find your podcasts, or go to pod.link slash pax. On to your second question. As with most real estate issues, the answer comes down to three key factors, and they are as follows. One, location. Two, location. And three, location. In this case, it's the location of the population itself that explains the long-standing power discrepancy between the North and the South. If we look at population distribution based on the

imperial census of the various dynasties, the regions between the Yellow River Valley and the northern banks of the Yangtze River utterly dominate any other region, at least through the end of the Tang. The lands south of the Yangtze were remained very sparsely populated relative to the north, even as far as we've gotten thus far into the main narrative. But it will be during this song, and specifically the upcoming Jurchen and then Mongol invasions, that will force the mass migration southward of both the populace and the cultural hearth of China. Heck, the very name of the two southernmost provinces, Guangdong and Guangxi, mean, respectively, eastern and western wastelands.

That's how the Chinese thought of such regions when they were naming them. To that same effect, China's Hawaii, Hainan Island, which I know I've mentioned before, was seen from the imperial perspective as where officials' careers were sent off to die when they'd messed up. Going to the South was career suicide because it was just too far away from anything important. What that means in terms of warfare and the struggles between northern and southern states when China has been divided is that up until this point at least, it's always been an asymmetric conflict between the two sides, with the board heavily

tilted in the North's favor by virtue of sheer numbers. As we've seen, it's played out time and again that the three kingdoms, the 16 kingdoms in the Northern and Southern states, the five dynasties, that the South is forced by dint of not just having enough troops able to be fielded in order to make any kind of offensive or attacking posture. But instead, it's forced to adopt a permanent defensive position and just try to hold off the seemingly limitless waves of troops sent from the north. And while this can prove to be effective, at least for a time, it can never provide victory because you're never on the attack. So unless the northern state in question just somehow decided to give up and go home altogether and accept a disunified China, which is of course a political and also religious

impossibility given the nature of the Chinese theory of rule. It's been almost inevitable that in any period, if the northern state had the capacity to really put its back into reunification, and it wasn't distracted by step raiders or invasion from the even further north, as is happening in Song all the time, southern resistance, in spite of its elephants, in spite of its tropical diseases, in spite of the best efforts of its troops, could really only ever hope to delay the inevitable. As we saw with the Ten Kingdoms and the Five Dynasties, even when the North was in total disarray and under foreign occupation by the Catan, the Southern warlords never once really got it into their heads to try to declare against the imperial throne.

And even during the North's darkest hour, the southern kings never once diverted from their policy of sending their messages of submission and their taxes to Kaifeng. It just was not in the cards for them to try to really declare independence. Andrew Varenkamp had a multi-part question, which sadly I am only going to have the capacity to answer in part. So I'm sorry, Andrew, certain parts of your question were just too much in detail and very interesting indeed. And the aspects that I'm certainly going to be looking further into and hopefully being able to incorporate into future episodes and future ideas and topics. But I hope that at least the parts that I'm able to answer now will be sufficient to sate you, at least for now.

And I'll get back to you about the rest, hopefully a bit later on. So Andrew asks, the spring and autumn period to me feels like classical Greeks, many small states vying with each other, but sharing cultural attributes. Is that a fair comparison? How was the Joe emperor able to maintain titular authority? Was there any actual authority at all? I've seen quite a few sources refer to dukes, arkees, counts, etc. Are these reasonable approximations? Did the feudal states reflect the western feudalism of the middle ages? Which states were particularly awesome or interesting or powerful during this period? We think of the hundred schools of thought with Confucianism and Taoism taking the lead. What were some examples of other philosophical schools which

perhaps weren't able to resonate as well? So that's just that's part of the question. And that's the part that I'm going to answer. So you got to see it's already pretty deep. So so here we go with my partial answer. What I'd say is that I think the comparison to the classical Greeks is largely apt. But of course course there are a few significant and crucial differences, and one of them is the religious aspect. I'm no Greek historian, but from what I know of the Greeks, their pantheon of competing and human-like, jealous, warring gods never seems to have anything much more than a transactional relationship with the people of Greece. And what I mean by that is sort of it's kind of we'll offer sacrifices to Athena, or we will beg Zeus for mercy, or Zeus raped my wife, you know, and now I have a demigod as a son. Oh, what am I going to do? That sort of a thing. In terms of

leadership, there isn't, at least as far as I understand, anywhere near the level of divine mandate to rule as we see in even the early iterations of the Chinese governments, such as the Zhou. The Zhou kings were sovereign because they were divinely appointed. And very much related, they were the high priests of the animist rites and rituals that were necessary to understand and appease the heavens and the earth and make sure that all the crops would grow in the proper way and etc. Now something I'm certainly not trying to do is to downplay the devoutness or the religiosity of the ancient Greeks, or anyone for that matter. But I at least am not aware of the same level of confluence between ceremonial, religious, and political authority in the Greek city-states as was the case in Zhou China. The Zhou kings, even as things fell apart around them during the spring and autumn period, could at least take some comfort in knowing that, though their political clout might be virtually non-existent, they were still the central linchpin of the whole

religious structure, in a way that, say, the king of Sparta could never claim. It would be something more akin to like if the Oracle of Delphi not only claimed uncontested spiritual authority over all of Greece, but also commanded even nominal sovereignty over political power. The warlords of the warring states were compelled, at least, you know, until they weren't, to acknowledge that, okay, we don't really need this guy, but religiously, we still need this guy. So let's just let him sit in his room and play with his toys. I would say in that effect, it's kind of like the emperor of Japan during the shogunate, or today, or like the English monarchy. You know, it's there,

it's somehow symbolically important and tied to God's divine will somehow, but it doesn't really actually do anything. Obviously, this is all sharply shifted with the reforms of Qin Shi Huang and the rise of the imperial era of China and the centralization and all that, but all in all, I feel like my attribution, which I surely stole from somewhere but I can't remember exactly where right now, my attribution of the Zhou as the hub and spokes of a bicycle wheel, I would say remains pretty apt. Yes, my king, the warlords would say, we completely acknowledge your divine rule. Now shut up while we do important things. As for the titles you've read out, and I've certainly used myself, they are absolutely approximations. It's, you know, it's not a one to one sort of ratio. I'd say they're pretty close

in terms of their power and authority to their European counterparts. The main difference between Chinese and European titles is that Chinese titles were not hereditary. And what I mean by that is that just because you are the son of a Gong, a duke, for instance, is no guarantee that you're going to be the next in line. Once the title holder dies, that reverts back to the emperor himself, and it is his prerogative to choose whomever he wants as the next holder of that title, or perhaps no one at all. At least that's how it was supposed to work, theoretically,

and how it did work when the Chinese Imperium was at its heights. Tracing back to your last question, that was very much a facet of the breakdown of the Zhou regime, the bloodline diverging away from the throne's interests, and that's one of the things that Qin Shou Huang and the whole reorganization into an empire versus a kingdom or a set of kingdoms governed by a religious centerhead sought to fix. We only really start to see the re-emergence of hereditary positions when the differing dynasties start their death spirals and can no longer command enough power to force the issue when, for instance, a provincial governor

demands that his son replace him when he dies. For me, at least, it's one of the hallmark differences between the medieval and imperial eras, and China and Europe for that matter. China, at least ideally, which I know is asking a lot, functioned as an all-powerful monarch overseeing a meritocracy based on, what else, poetic talent, from the 3rd century BCE onward, whereas Europe functioned based on blood ties right up through the 18th century. Lastly, your question about the differing schools of thought during the warring states is a great one, and frustratingly one that I'm largely unable to answer. I mean, there's Moism, there's the school of Yin and Yang, the logicians, the school of diplomacy,

the agriculturalists, syncretism, and like a handful of others. As per your question, those are the schools that kind of largely failed to catch on that we know of. And we don't know much about a lot of even those handful. That's largely because the Qin dynasty did a pretty bang up job of destroying the records of all the schools that it did not approve of, and what it was not able to destroy, time and mismanagement and random fires, did the job even further. So unfortunately, the hundred schools of thought, and there were not a hundred exactly, that's, you know, the Chinese propensity to round out a number to make it sound nice is in full effect here, have no doubt. But anyway, the Hundred Schools are largely lost.

And it is a historical tragedy because who knows what we don't know. Even Confucianism's flame burned pretty darn low at the conclusion of the Warring States and really would only be rekindled in the centuries that would follow. Although, I feel like this is the place where I really ought to state this, since I know that I propagated the old Confucianist stories front and center in my early episodes, but I feel like I gotta go back and correct the record. Qin Shi Huang probably did not bury all the Confucian scholars alive and burn all their books. The records seem to indicate that while he might have ordered the destruction of the majority of the publications, pretty much all of them he kept at least one copy for safekeeping

in his imperial library, safe and sound, until of course it was destroyed in a fire later on as will happen such as the danger of only allowing one copy to exist they are very burnable that being said i'm a little uh torn about admitting this because this does completely undercut one of the main premises of my alternate Twitter account, aping the first emperor by admitting that he didn't likely do the thing that maybe he's the most infamous for doing. But there it is. Academic integrity above all, even Twitter likes. You're welcome. The next question comes from Earl Killian, who asks, The latest podcast, and I assume that is the rice podcast. Like I said, that is a surprisingly popular episode.

The latest podcast had me wondering about vegetarianism in China. Chinese people I know seem inconsistent on the status of vegetarianism in Chinese culture. For instance, someone from Hong Kong I know believes it is important to be vegetarian at the Lunar New Year, whereas someone from Beijing has never heard of such a thing. How far back in China's history does vegetarianism go? Is it primarily a Buddhist thing, or is it older? And why do some Buddhists go further and not eat root vegetables? Alright, so like an onion or a swamp-dwelling ogre, this question has layers that we must peel back. So number one, is Buddhism primarily a Buddhist thing in China? Yes, it is.

Though vegetarianism certainly is not limited to Buddhism, it stems from that religion's belief in samsara, or the endless cycle of death and rebirth. From that philosophy, all life is merely aspects of the larger cosmic whole, and therefore inflicting pain and death is not just destructive and harmful in the traditional sense, but also self-harming, since all life is, after all, one and the same. That carries over with some of the more stringent sects of Buddhism to not even eating root vegetables, you know, like onions, because that's just a logical some of the more stringent sects of Buddhism to not even eating root vegetables, you know, like onions, because that's just a logical extension of the same policy. If one acknowledges that plants are also alive, then destroying them for food must also be immoral

for much the same reason. Thus, fruits are acceptable because they are created by the plant with the explicit purpose of being eaten, and eating the non-root portions are okay because the plant can recover from the loss, but eating the roots kills the plant, so no carrots for them. Some particularly stringent schools, Jainism in particular, actually advises practitioners to wear breath masks when praying so that one does not accidentally ingest any microorganisms in the process and thus profane the prayers with such death. As for the question of why is it different in one part versus another part, well, China is a huge country, and much more diverse than most people in the West know or really give it credit for, at least. People from different regions

frequently don't even have a spoken language in common, and though they're usually referred to as dialects, this isn't like someone from Philadelphia talking to somebody from Albuquerque. Local spoken Chinese dialects are often completely mutually unintelligible. And that's not just at the regional level. This can happen even from city to city, or where the people on one side of a river speak a dialect that's so different from their neighbors on the other side of the river that they can't even communicate. That local differentiation extends to cultural and religious practices as well. And the practice of Buddhism in southern China is much more heavily influenced by the Theravada

school, which made their way from India to Southeast Asia, largely via oceanic trade, and which takes its rituals in a significantly more stringent, and you might say serious, fashion than the type of Buddhism that's spread across much of the North via the Silk Road, which is called Mahayana. Mahayana tends to be a bit more fanciful and freewheeling. It's not to say they don't take it seriously, but it is where we get things like flying monkey gods. But again, going down to the local level, it's important to remember that much like the spoken languages, most areas have their own little twists on the generic doctrines, which are deeply influenced by the local folk beliefs. It often gets lost in the background amid the comparably flashy Buddhism

and Taoism, but the fact is that most of the people, most of the time, believe primarily in their own little local customs, beliefs, and gods, at least as much as the big state-level religion that might have been in vogue at the time. It's one of the long-standing proclivities of China, so much so that it can be something of a running joke among those of us who see and hear it a lot, that they tend to be first and foremost pragmatists in their beliefs and ideas. And what I mean by that is that what many other cultures might think of as being a full set of doctrines and ideals that comes prepackaged and cannot be unwoven from one another, the Chinese tend to have a relatively easier time of taking the pieces they like and leaving the pieces they don't of an idea or a doctrine by the wayside. The most striking example in modern times must, of course, be China's

ongoing foray into nominal communism slash socialism. Now, let's be clear here, Mao himself was a total ideologue and hardliner when it came to Marxist philosophy. But since then, the Chinese leadership has, and with a completely straight face, utterly reinterpreted what socialism even means. Yes, we're socialist, but that doesn't mean we can't have Pizza Hut and KFC. Yes, we're socialist, but that doesn't mean we can't have iPhones. Because it's socialism with Chinese characteristics. And at the same time, it's capitalism with Chinese characteristics. And yes, getting back to the main point here before I completely lose my train of thought, it's Buddhism with Chinese characteristics. So rather than having a single overarching dogma about practices and rituals, practitioners all across the country vary widely in their beliefs and routines and infuse them with their own local customs and variations and dietary restrictions.

Next question comes from Stephen Dunn, and he had a multi-parter. First he asks, well he states that he thinks I skipped over a bit of poetry due to the necessary focus on military and political machinations. But he asks, isn't the Tongue famous for its? And the answer is yes. Yes, it is. It's one of the high watermarks of Chinese poetry and writing, but not just the very real time constraints, but also the fact that for the most part, the inherent beauty and intricacies of most Chinese poetry completely elude me. That's one of the big reasons that I've kind of steered away from those kinds of topics for the most part, although I have tried to include it a bit here and there. Mostly I'm at the nursery rhyme level of material myself and rely much more on those far

more learned and patient than myself to do the heavy lifting of translating poetic Chinese works, especially prior to the Tang and its emphasis on actually having written works that didn't require companion books to the companion books just to make heads or tails of what the original document was trying to say, I freely admit that I am not the droid you're looking for. He asked about other arts, including storytelling and popular art, myths, and again, absolutely. The arts were extremely popular and well-respected, especially painting, poetry, and music. They were considered the highest form of refinement and gentlemanliness in Confucian ideas, and thus much of Chinese history. On the other hand, martial prowess,

while respected in its own right and considered necessary, was considered pretty much the opposite of what an official should study or practice. The one way in to the imperial government, of course, was the imperial examination system, and it chose aspiring civil service workers by testing them on nothing but their ability to write in a poetic style, as well as how well they could memorize and rewrite the classic texts, and then compose flowing poetic works of their own on some given topic. 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 ten 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. Nothing of any further practicality was taken into account, not mathematics or military strategies, or even a particular adeptness at the actual tasks that their post might require, just their writing skill, style, and its attractiveness. To that end, one of the great Chinese art forms, even up through the modern era, has been calligraphy, with entire schools being devoted to training and improving

what amounts to artistic handwriting. As with poetry, I am completely blind when it comes to understanding how good calligraphy works or what makes good calligraphy or bad calligraphy. I just know that I can't read it at all about 80% of the time I look at it and simply get, I have to trust my friends and family when they assure me that yes, that calligraphy over there is beautiful and artistic, but no, Chris, your Chinese handwriting looks like a three-year-old did it, and the stroke order is all wrong to boot. But it is evidenced everywhere you may care to look while you're in China, from housing development names to the formal logo of the banks, such as the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, which is the largest bank in the

world, by the way. Having good calligraphy is deeply important and respected and appreciated. In terms of stories told, this would often be, again, done in a poetic or metered fashion, especially in the earlier dynasties. For instance, a good one is the Ode of Mulan from the 5th or 6th century, and of course of Disney's mangled fame. And I'm not going to certainly sit here and read the whole thing to you, but I'll give you a bit from its intro. So here it goes.

Tick, tick, and again, tick, tick. Mulan weaves facing the door. read the whole thing to you, but I'll give you a bit from its intro. So here it goes on from there. And unfortunately, no tiny dragon voiced by Eddie Murphy. More contemporary stuff tends to be more and more prose-like, especially as we get into the Ming and Qing. This is where we get novels like Cao Xueqin's Dream of the Red Chamber, and of course, Pu Songling's collection of the Weird and Wild Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. Both of those have translations, and they're very interesting to read. Indeed, that's where I pulled all of my Strange Tales series from.

Steven also asks about sports. What sports do people play? And he says that I mentioned football. Yeah. Well, football, according to FIFA itself on its very website, says that it began in China as a game Tsujiu, meaning literally kickball. It is evidenced as being played as far back as the Warring States period in the state of Qi, and is also described in Senachian's Shiji from the Han dynasty. In its early iterations, it was played with a leather ball stuffed with feathers, and played both for fun, even by the likes of Emperor Wu of Han himself, who loved the game, as well as part of the physical fitness training for soldiers. The modern sport of soccer slash football, depending on where you're from, is still called Zuzhou, named after one of the two versions of suju played in Han China and thereafter. The game consisted, like soccer,

of two teams with the objective to score points by kicking or otherwise striking, excluding, of course, hands or arms, the ball through a hoop or net. Unlike modern soccer's large goals, though, suju goals were quite small, perhaps only 30 to 40 centimeters across, and there was only a single goal positioned in the center of the field. This net was not on the ground, but rather Suju goals were quite small, perhaps only 30-40 cm across, and there was only a single goal positioned in the center of the field. This net was not on the ground, but rather elevated via a pair of long bamboo canes with a net stretched between them and the goal hole cut in the middle. So think maybe a little bit of Quidditch, but if the rules actually made sense.

There was on occasion an earlier version played that did use multiple goals, but the single-goal variant proved to be much more popular, and so it became the dominant version with time. This was often played in the imperial court itself, and a special field within the palace was even constructed by order of Emperor Wu. But it's not clear if there was a time limit to the game or a predetermined number of points that determined the winning team. Even though it was very popular at the highest levels of society, it nevertheless was played

by virtually every social class. By the time of the Tang at least, the feather-filled ball had been upgraded to an air-filled leather ball with a bladder inside so the air wouldn't escape. It was both lighter and more uniform shaped than the feather ball, and from what I've read, it's just a bit heavier than a modern full-size soccer ball. By the Song dynasty of the 10th through 13th centuries, where we are at current in the narrative, Zuchou had been largely eclipsed by another variant of the game that seems to have been invented during the Tang, called Baida. It would prove particularly popular, especially among women, but by the Song, it had become the dominant version of the game across the whole country. Baida, like Zuchou, had a goal, but unlike Zuchou, the point was not to score in spite of an opponent's attempts to prevent it, but rather to get bonus points by scoring with particular skills, style,

and ball handling, as determined by a judge or a panel of judges. The players, anywhere from 2 to 10 at a time, would attempt to maximize their bonus points through trick shots, and poor performance or sloppiness could even result in a judge deducting points from a player. Other very popular sports across time were the likes of archery, fencing, and many, many different iterations of martial arts. For what I think is pretty obvious reasons, your empire's at war quite a bit. You got to keep those skills up. Steven also asked about music that they listened to, partying, and jokes, which is kind of what I took an interest in. You can look up some lists of old Chinese jokes.

They mostly come from the Ming and Qing. I guess those are the ones that have survived until now. As I think I've mentioned in the past, though, humor often doesn't translate particularly well. It's so deeply tied into the specific culture that it comes from, and also just the linguistics of it. It's just, so they can sound a little stilted, a little strange. Also, Chinese humor tends to be much more about storytelling than a punchline in the way of Western humor. It's kind of the same way

with scary or supernatural stories as well. Like when I've been reading the strange tales from the Chinese studio, oftentimes the tales don't flow like a ghost story or a scary story would, as we would expect by the Western conventions. Same goes with humor. So you'll like as not listen to these and go, well, that wasn't very funny, rather than have some laugh out loud moment. But here it goes. Okay, this first one is from the Ming period, and it goes,

A doctor was detained by the furious relatives of a patient he'd killed with the wrong prescription, but he escaped by night and swam across a wide river to reach home. When he saw his son studying medical texts, he said, Don't be in such a hurry to study medicine. First things first, and first, learn to swim. Another one goes, A man was very hungry, and he went to buy cakes at a snack bar. When he finished a cake, he found he hadn't had enough, and so ate a second one. He felt so hungry that after eating six cakes in succession,

he still hadn't satisfied his hunger. Not till the seventh cake was eaten up did he feel satisfied. And then, suddenly, he had a feeling of regret. Ah, if I had known this before, I would have eaten the seventh cake first, and that would have been enough, and there would not have been any need to eat those six others. Badoom. Political humor is always funny, so here's some about money-grubbing politicians from the Ming period as well. On his birthday, an official subordinates chipped in to give him a life-size solid gold rat, since he was born in the year of the rat. The official thanked them, then asked, did you know that my wife's birthday is coming up? She was born in the year of the ox.

And I'll end off this comedy session with a classic nagging wife joke. It goes, after his wife had beaten him badly, a man crawled under his family bed. Come out here this instant, his wife screamed. I am man enough to do as I please, he said, and I'll come out when I'm good and ready. Reddit user Scarlet Sage asked about marriages, and particularly about the Chinese emperors who would marry their daughters or princesses to barbarian leaders, and the emperor tricking them by sending a cousin rather than his own daughter. And also about how they tracked genealogy

and how seriously that was all taken by the various elements there. So in China, and I'm sure pretty much all other pre-modern societies, genealogy was no laughing matter, but it was taken very seriously indeed. It's not for nothing that the dynasties we've covered more recently, one of the first acts the ruling family often does is to massage, or you know, just outright fabricate, their family tree into being traceable back to the Zhou dynasty or the gods before them. The ruling clan of the Song dynasty, to list one example, made sure that their family tree could be traced back all the way to Zhao Fu, a descendant of the legendary five sovereigns at the dawn of time.

While the ruling clan of the late Great Tang Dynasty made sure that their lineage was traceable back to none other than the immortal founder of Taoism, Lao Tzu. So we can be pretty sure that some rando showing up and claiming noble birth would be subject to the medieval equivalent of an exhaustive background check before they were accepted as any such thing. This isn't to suggest that bamboozles didn't happen, they almost certainly did from time to time, but typically there would have been sufficient enough documentation to either confirm or deny that a person presenting themselves as noble or royal was on the level. More specifically though, what you're asking about is the policy called Heqin, which literally means peace marriage, though it's more commonly called the marriage alliance system.

This was first adopted by the early emperors of the Han dynasty in the 2nd century BCE. Heqin was a measure of, well, not exactly last resort, but pretty close. If an enemy was too powerful to militarily defeat, as was the case for the early Han with the Xiongnu confederacy, the imperial court would and did attempt to appease their foe with a proposal of marriage to a Chinese princess. The questioner notes that the emperors could send distant relatives rather than their own daughters, and that wasn't some trick, pull, that was the general rule rather than some exception. We must remember that the imperial clan was usually quite large, even by direct blood tie, and it regularly was swelled with even more

people being granted the imperial surname and thus adoption, at least in part, into the inner circle of royalty. As we've seen time and again in the events of Chinese usurpation, as we've seen during the course of Chinese usurpation, one of the key steps a would-be usurper needed to take was to achieve the imperial surname and then be promoted to a prince of the blood in order to be within striking distance of the throne itself. So there was typically no shortage of nominal family members to choose from when it came to offering up a girl as part of a peace treaty. These collateral branches of the dynastic house didn't necessarily need to already have been ennobled before their betrothal to the foreign potentate in question, but could and often was only made into a princess just before she was

shipped off into the middle of nowhere to marry somebody she didn't know on the steps of Central Asia somewhere. In fact, the Hutchin policy seems to have been veritably built on the idea of declaring a girl a quote-unquote princess and selling her off as such, as from its very first implementation by Gaozu of Han, or rather his wife, the Empress, in 200 BC, the so-called princess in question was a name only and seems to have been little more than a lady-in-waiting who was suddenly, and by sheer necessity of Gaozu being trapped and surrounded up on Baidang Plateau, as later Chinese poems would tell it,

ennobled and gifted as a poor partridge delivered over to the wild bird of Mongolia, who was Modu Chanyu, the leader of the Xiongnu. The following 60 years would see every other instance of the Han-Heqin alliance with the Xiongnu Chanyus, ten marriages in all to three Xiongnu chieftains, utilizing these princesses in name only. It's only in the final decade of the 2nd century BC that the to-be-married-off princess actually starts having their names recorded, a sign that maybe Emperor Wu of Han had started taking things a bit more seriously. And it's not as though the foreign dignitaries would have

likely been under any sort of illusion that they were marrying the emperor's daughter or the like. I'd venture a guess and say that both sides went into these arrangements with eyes wide open as to the fallacy of it all. So, why bother? Well, on paper, it sure looks great. In your own court, it also looks great. And you have a publicly, officially acknowledged family tie, however constructed it might be, to the literal son of heaven and the ruler of the most powerful state on earth,

at least that you, the chief of this or that nomadic steppe clan, know of, it's just darned impressive to be able to say, yeah, yeah, that deer you hunted down is all good, but I've gotta get back to my Chinese princess bride, fellas, so see you later. It was a feather in the cap, an acknowledgement by the richest and most powerful state around that you were worthy of consideration. Next up, Cambyses189 asks, where I got the idea for a History of China podcast? And this is a question that's come up time and again by various different listeners, and it's one that I've typically given pretty wide berth. I think mostly out of my own aversion to self-aggrandizement.

What did that old movie Stigmata say? The messenger is not important? Yeah. But fine. You all have worn me down, and so here is the dull story of my road to the history of China. But don't worry, it is abbreviated. I was born and raised in Montana.

I'd clarify that by saying rural, but that would be redundant. To call my hometown milk toast would probably be giving it a bit too much color. Once I left for college, having tired of taking French as a foreign language, deeming it too easy. Yeah, that's right. Oui, oui. Je suis un pomme de terre avec fromage. I made my way out to Oregon and made the choice to pick between Japanese and Chinese as my new foreign language conquest. In the infinite wisdom of my 18-year-old self, I deemed Japanese a language only nerds would study, and so picked Chinese, thinking, well, this should provide some moderate amount of challenge. Ha ha, ha ha, ha, yeah. A decade and a half later, I still have all the repartee of a five-year-old.

Anyways, my main interest in school was history, and as I progressed through the years, I took a few classes about Chinese culture and civilization to complement my language classes. But as my senior year approached, I had to choose a capstone project, and I approached the professor who was in charge of the Asian Studies Department, Professor Barlow, and he took me on. I wound up researching the whole year on the Nanjing Massacre of 1937-38, and wound up pretty much with my jaw agape and my eyes wider than they'd ever been before. Yeah, just you wait until we get to the 20th century and the narrative, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Anyways, as it so happened, Professor Barlow had a program that he'd been a part of for some years with a university in Wenzhou, Zhejiang, China. I had managed to find my way into a two-week trip there in the summer of my junior year, going to places like Beijing, Xi'an, Guiyang, and Shanghai, and I decided to take a year before I launched into my inevitable master's program and live la vida China. I arrived that next autumn in Wenzhou and simultaneously fell in love and hate with the place, but found

I was pretty formidable in the realm of culture shock and so got by. I met a girl who wound up becoming my wife, and we decided to move to the big dumpling. That's right, Shanghai. This, by the way, was the year of 2008-2009, and when the whole financial crisis bottomed out the world economy, the plan to spend one year in China was lengthened out indefinitely because that seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. Once moving to Shanghai, I took a job as an ESL teacher to preschoolers, which afforded my almost criminal amount of downtime twiddling my thumbs in the office. And it got me thinking, gee whiz, as many classes as I took on China in college,

I still really understood pretty much nothing about it. How could I possibly improve that? But it wasn't until my move to a Japanese kindergarten that I was introduced in 2011 to the concept of podcasts, which was, you know, like a radio program, but apparently anyone could do it. My inaugural podcasts were, who else, Mike Duncan and Dan Carlin, and a thought started to tingle in my brain. A thought that has spelled the doom of many a naively excited person. Eh, this seems easy. How hard could it possibly be? I looked once to see if there was a podcast about Chinese history already, but somehow just didn't register that one did already exist,

the China History Podcast, and so thought, huh, well, there seems to be a gap here. I bet I could do that. It'd take me, what, like 20, 30 episodes max? No problem. And so here I am, 140 episodes and five years in, and with the finish line light years off. I bit off more than I could chew in 2012, no doubt, but by God, I'm taking it bite by bite, and I'm going to swallow this sucker down, even if it kills me, which it just may. Finally, finishing us out today, Thomas Daly asking, as always, the really important hard-hitting question, I'd like to know more about the ancient Chinese practice of funeral strippers. Well, let me first assure you all that yes, you heard that right, funeral strippers, and they are indeed a very real thing.

It originated, from what I've found, in the ancient and far-off era of the 1980s and 90s in Taiwan, which I am now in no way, shape, or form being compelled to tell you is in a legal and internationally recognized sense a part of the unified and single state that is China. So now these kind men from the Ministry of State Security can be on their merry way out of my recording studio. See you around, fellas. When I hit the 20th century, I'm sure. Good times. Good times. Anyways, though the practice is in itself rather extreme, it is an extension of actually a more ancient funerary custom called Ren Ao, meaning hot and noisy. Professor Mark Moskowitz says that it stems from the desire to draw a big crowd to any kind of

public events. He writes, quote, this is the idea that any public event should have a hustle and bustle for it to be noteworthy. In Chinese culture, everything connects to that. If you go to the beach, you want loudspeakers. You want a lot of people around for it to be fun. Drawing a crowd gives the event a feeling of being noteworthy. More people show up, which shows respect for the dead, end quote. There may also, and let's face it, is pretty likely an aspect of fertility worship going on here, which I know real shocker strippers having something to do with fertility worship. Wow. Another professor, Huang Jianxing of Fujian Normal University, which is a totally typical name for a university in China, by the way, writes, quote, in some local cultures, dancing

with erotic elements can be used to convey the deceased's wishes of being blessed with many children, end quote. It has also been described as appeasing wandering spirits and as well as giving the dead one last hurrah, Which, well, yeah, clearly. Were I a wandering spirit, I would be totally appeased. Then there is, of course, the ever-present desire for a simple display of wealth. From the Global Times, which is a Chinese newspaper, quote, Chinese rural households are more inclined to show off their disposable incomes

by paying out several times their annual income for actors, singers, comedians, and strippers to comfort the bereaved and entertain the mourners, end quote. And let me just pipe in to say tangentially, as someone who just went through one of my nephew's first birthday parties with about 80 guests, a multi-course meal, a professional DJ, and an announcer, and a budget of something more like a wedding than any birthday party I ever had, yeah, when and where they can, Chinese families like to go all in on public displays of affluence. It's no game. It is serious business. I can also attest via personal experience, applies to death as well as life.

Funerals are often multi-day affairs with parades, fireworks, and paid mourners, as in women a family will pay to come in and uncontrollably sob and cry over the dead. So, heck, I mean, why not have some strippers in the mix? I'm obviously going to be adding that to my own will. Unfortunately for the bereaved, who also wish to make it rain over some g-strings, mainland China has been cracking down on the practice in the last few years, which has typically been catching on in more rural communities rather than the big cities. Alas, no Shanghai funeral strippers for me.

This has much to do with the big brother role the Chinese government likes to play with the public's morality. Boo. Yes, this is the same government that decided that its 50-something episode drama on Empress Wu Zetian, starring superstar Fan Bingbing, needed extensive reshoots or would face cancellation because the 100% period-accurate costumes of the noblewomen from the 8th freaking century revealed too much cleavage for the hypocritically moralizing puritanical yes-men technocrats. Not that I have an opinion on that or anything. As well as the fact that, well, it came from Taiwan, which, in spite of the fact that it was, always, and shall remain

part of a single, unitary, and indivisible one Chinese nation, may it reign 10,000 years gloriously and harmoniously, amen. There's some feelings that, well, maybe some Taiwanese customs are just a bit too foreign for the mainland. Gasp. Instead, some regions have come to a compromise position of not hiring funeral strippers, but rather funeral cheerleaders, which is, at least to me, if anything, even more awkward when you think about it. So that's right, Thomas. You give me a joke question, I deliver a real answer. Boom. That rounds out the questions for today, and my answers.

Thank you all so much for sending them in, it's been fun researching this. Next time, we will be getting back into the main narrative, and getting into the time period of the longest reigning Song Emperor, of them all, Emperor Ren Zong, and especially his early years where his mother dominated the entire imperial court. Thanks once again to all of you listeners, those of you who sent in questions, and in particular, those of you who have deemed the show worthy of your almighty dollars.

It really means a lot. So I'll see you next time, and as always, thanks for listening. History isn't black and white, yet too often it's presented as such. Grey History, The French Revolution is a long-form history podcast dedicated to exploring the ambiguities and nuances of the past. From a revolution of hope and liberty to the infamous reign of terror, you can't understand the modern world without understanding the French Revolution. So search for the French Revolution today.