The History of China - #181 - Special: 6th Anniversary Q&A

Episode Date: December 21, 2019

It's finally time to give holiday thanks and - of course - submit myself before the high inquisitors pelting me with questions day and night! Topics this year ranged far and wide: 1. How wide-ranging was Genghis Khan's last command in Western Xia? 2. How do I keep my loud mouth out of trouble with the PRC? 3. How "good" were the good times of dynasties for the normies? 4. Which Khan has got it goin' on? 5. Were there plagues in ancient China? How were they dealt with? 6. Did the Mongols trigger anti-foreign conservatism in the Ming? 7. Where should we divide "Chinese" history from "non-Chinese" history? 8. Just how incompetent was the Song Dynasty? 9. Why does THoC be like it do? 10. How did the Mongols relay orders over long distances before writing? 11. How much was opium to blame versus other factors in the decline and fall of the Qing Dynasty? 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 181, the 6th Anniversary Q&A. Hey everyone, and season's greetings. Today I am here with my list of questions that you've sent to me. Admittedly, a little bit later than I'd wanted to get this out, but it's my party, so I'll be fashionably late if I want to. Before getting into the questions at hand, let me take a moment to give my sincerest of thanks to all of you who have and continue to, thanks to your support, help me to be able to look people in the eye and say, I make a history podcast, when asked, what do I do? It's amazingly gratifying to release these out into the world for free,

and then to have people decide that they like them enough to donate money to me anyway. And to ask around, it feels pretty darn good on the other end of things as well. So let me start off by thanking those of you who have been exceptionally generous to the show. Let's start off with our highest tier, the Imperial Dukes. Thanks go out to Jesus, Lam El, and Travis A. My lords, you have the throne and the realm's deepest thanks. Next, the realm's chancellors. DC, Ryan W., Robert L., Simon O., John M., Alvin K., and Jose B.

Your continued service to the Empire is deserving of only the richest rewards. And to our Imperial Governors, without whom the provinces would surely fall into chaos and rebellion. C, Dillo C, Sambavi L, Benjamin C, Forrest, Patrick D, David M, Andrew D, Don R, Xanadan, Dan S, Cadaverish, Stian S, Michael M, Tom B, Ryan, David T, Arun A, John B, and Dboy Y. We bow to your eternal magnanimity. And at last, to those brave generals who command our armies against all foes, foreign and domestic, Joshua S, Theodore R, and Cassie L, your valor is unsurpassed. Of course, to all of our other defenders of the Great Wall, and even mere citizens of the realm, wheresoever the light of this podcast mandate of heaven reaches, thank you as ever for taking the time to come along on this amazing journey,

and with entrusting me as your guide. None of this could happen without people being interested, tuning in, and telling others about it. So thanks all very much. Now then, with the opening formalities taken care of, and the rites and sacrifices made to heaven and earth, let's get this Q&A on the road. Here they are, in no particular order at all. Your inquisition of this podcaster. Our first question comes from John Higgins, who writes that his wife is from Yintuan, China, and that he understands that Genghis Khan died while he was besieging the town from uncertain causes. His army followed procedure and razed the town and slaughtered the people. He asks if this is true or if it's an exaggeration.

The people in the area are very proud of their history with Genghis, and so his wife was shocked to hear about that bit of history. And it is indeed factual. Yinchuan, which is today the capital of modern Ningxia Hui autonomous region, was also historically the capital of Western Xia of the Tanguts. Now, for the full scope of the story, I'd recommend you go listen to the bonus episode number 6, that is Mongol 10, The Last Campaign,

available for as little as $1 over on Patreon. But here's the skivvy. When Genghis, who was then still Temujin Khan, had first burst out of Mongolia and into wider Central Asia, one of his very first targets had been the Tangut Kingdom, which served as a kind of warm-up match prior to taking on the Jurchen Jin dynasty. The Tanguts had surrendered quickly enough that the Khan had let them off with a fairly minimal amount of concessions. Essentially, bend the knee, pay up some tribute, and give me a daughter to marry, and super duper promise that whenever I need your help, you will send troops for my military campaigns. And the King of Xia says,

you got it, boss. I'm your man. So no problem. Well, time goes by, and lo and behold, some idiot governor over in Khwarizmia decides that it's a great idea to slaughter the Mongols' trade caravan and steal all the treasure that they've been sending as a peace and commerce mission. Then the Emir emir of Khwarezmia backs his murderous governor, and so it's on till the break of dawn. Genghis sends a message to Western Shah saying, hey, remember that time that I said that someday and that day may never come, I'd ask you for a favor? Well, that day is today, so get in, loser, we're going to Persia. But by this point, there was a new Tangut king on the throne, and moreover, he had an advisor who just hated the Mongols with every fiber of his being, a guy named General Asha Gambu. Asha sent his reply on the king's behalf, telling Genghis essentially,

Hey, if you needed our help in conquering, then you must be no Shukan at all, so we're not going to send you anyone. Deal with it. Well, Genghis was already far too invested in his war plans against the Khwarizmians at that point to deviate, so he filed this grievous insult away until he came back. And then, he came back. He had not forgotten, and he had not forgiven. In his, and most Mongols' eyes, to be a traitor or rebel was the worst, lowest thing you could possibly be, and deserving of only total annihilation. Genghis' plan was exactly that,

utter extermination of the entire nation's populace. But just prior to the campaign, the old Khan, who was now past 60, had an accident while hunting. His horse reared up in the snow while hunting wild asses in the Gobi, and he was tossed, apparently suffering grievous and excruciating internal injuries as a result. Over the next several months, he did his best to conceal his injuries from his men as they systematically tore apart Western Xia, but eventually succumbed prior to the final siege of Yinchuan. By that time, his own impending mortality had kind of chilled him out a little bit, so he amended his initial total extermination order

to only be the total extermination of the entire Tangut royal family, the official class, and all military personnel. That is to say, the bare minimum. Moreover, Genghis declared that the Tangut king's title, which was Berkhan, a name shared by the Holy Mongol Mountain, which meant God itself, was utterly unfit for a traitor such as this, who'd clearly been abandoned by heaven itself. Instead, he decided, let him carry a name that would hopefully cause him to, in the next life, since he was a Buddhist and would be reincarnated, remember his rightful place in the world and to do better next time. Let him have the name Shidergu, which means surrender to righteousness. Thus, having at least brought the wayward

profanity of the king's name back to the morally righteous path, Mōdī, or rather Shiragu, would now learn of his fate. He would be bound to a spit and then hacked to pieces. And to ensure that he could not be reincarnated into a member of his own royal lineage to later seek revenge against the Mongols, so too would his entire family. Exterminate the mothers and fathers, came down the edict, down to the offspring and their offspring. When that dirty business was completed, the royal tombs and shrines of the royal house of Li were one and all desecrated, defiled, and torn down so that they might never rise again. And so it was carried out to its grisly completion. The wider population was rolled into the Mongol war machine as one of what would

eventually be known as the Samuren class, the second-tier, high-level official class that actually oversaw the day-to-day functionality of the empire on behalf of their Mongol overlords. In spite of that sparing of the wider population, the city itself was near certainly plundered barren and its populace murdered in large numbers and dragged off into effective slavery. But Antoine did not face the same level of utter complete unmaking as, say, Chengdu, Bamiyan, or Baghdad. The next question, and like I said, this is just in kind of a randomized order, is of a personal nature rather than about the show. It comes from Nancy Greenwood, who asks, do I have any concerns that my sometimes critical comments about China and its government

could get me into trouble with the glorious leader? Do I take any concerns that my sometimes critical comments about China and its government could get me into trouble with the glorious leader? Do I take any steps to avoid that? Well, now this is a very interesting question. And yes, the short answer is yes to both. I absolutely do worry about it. Living in the belly of the beast, as it were, I am very aware that I could potentially be in a rather uncomfortable situation if some of my more lovingly critical sentiments made it onto the big BJ's radar. That said, I'm not doing this totally without protection. For one, I use, out of sheer necessity, a VPN that is not based in China,

and who I pay good money to keep my info private and anonymized virtually every time I'm online. This isn't just a paranoia thing either, though it definitely would not be just paranoia even if it were true. The Chinese government is incredibly nosy and big brotherish in terms of its tracking and censorship of information and opinion. But the fact of the matter is that thanks to the Great Firewall, or as it's officially known, Operation Golden Shield, anyone living in China who wants to use just about any

website based outside of China, from Google to Wikipedia to Twitter to Facebook, and heck, even to podcasting hosts like SoundCloud or Acast, has to use a VPN, even if it is in a legal quote-unquote gray zone. A personal favorite anecdote of mine about how gray zone it is, is about how one of the architects of the Great Firewall System, when giving a presentation to top-level party members and had his projector on, was recorded as loading up his own VPN to several web pages for his presentation, in full view of said officials. It's just understood that it happens, and that it's a necessary part of living in a modern way in China today, if you want to have anything other than, you know, Baidu and Taobao. Other things I do is to, well, do my best to not be an idiot. When I am critical of China, it's done through that VPN and through non-mainland services.

I don't, for instance, post criticism on WeChat group pages or on QQ or anything like that. I have at least that much sense of self-preservation. The fact is, the Chinese government cares very little what foreigners say to other foreigners. They care first, second, and third about controlling the information made available to their own people, and specifically those 700-800 million Chinese people who aren't coastal urbanites who have at least heard of a VPN before.

But rather, the people of the interior who make up the bulk of the total population and the backbone of their support as a regime. That is the focus of their censorship, and that is the third rail that if you touch it, you die. Hence why the whole NBA and Blizzard Hearthstone things went nuclear. Chinese people love basketball, and they love Blizzard games like Hearthstone and World of Warcraft, and so even a touch of politics leaking into that is worth all the derision it gets on the world stage by CPC calculations. A tiny English-language podcast not even accessible by Chinese within China? Meh. They've got bigger fish to fry like Matt Stone and Trey Parker. And yeah, saying that, I do realize that I'm horribly tempting fate,

so I'm going to find some wood to knock on. But if you'll just allow me one last little bit before I move on, and you will because I'm the one with the microphone, it's this. I believe deep down in my bones that the most effective censorship a government can achieve is not through technology or use of force, but in cowing a people so thoroughly that they censor themselves without any force at all. It's the exact concept of thought crime in 1984, to make even thinking the criticism literally unthinkable. And I'm not trying to make myself out to be anything other than the incorrigible loudmouth I am, but screw that. I'd rather at least make an oppressive

government work for their censorship. I'm certainly not going to help them along in it by shutting myself up preemptively. And lastly, and really this time, as the old saying goes, the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. If I didn't care about China and Chinese people and its culture, it would be the easiest thing in the world to just shut up about it and go on playing the idiot white monkey card for however long I'm here. But it's because I care that I feel compelled to speak out against the coercive and destructive practices of the government that rules over them and, by proxy, me. I do do the same thing for the US. Check my Twitter feed. So it's not just China. Countries that I don't particularly care about, like, say, and no offense here, Fijians, but say Fiji, yeah, I don't really talk about them

that much. It's nothing personal. The next question comes from the inimitable host of the Wittenberg to Westphalia podcast, Ben Jacobs, who writes, for most of Europeans' history, peasants lived on the edge of starvation most of the time, even when things much into that whole concept of the dynastic cycle in China, which I'm sure most of us have at least read a paragraph about in high school. One of the prime signals that a dynasty was decrepit and on the verge of losing its right to rule was the cropping up of things like famines and starvation, leading to peasant rebellions. I think a lot of us often put the cart ahead of the horse when looking at this part of the dynastic cycle. At least I certainly used to. It's often

portrayed as heaven shows its displeasure by inflicting the land with natural disasters, which is, of course, all very magical thinking that we know doesn't really happen. Oh, those silly ancient chroniclers, they were so imaginative and metaphorical. But it gets a whole lot more literal when we switch the cause and effects. No, heaven and earth don't show their displeasure at a bad dynasty. But you know what does happen all the time? Natural disasters. Bad harvests, locust swarms, floods, bandits, raids, plagues, hailstorms, you name it.

Those things are always going on, year by year, decade by decade. But an effective, well-run governmental order can keep those in check and be able to manage the negative effects sufficiently to not have the people rebel against them. In a fairly recent conversation, I compared it to the state being a body, like a human body, and that those kind of travails and negative happenings being like invasive diseases. They're always there, always around, always ready to pounce and fester. But a strong enough immune system keeps them in check almost all the time, and we hardly ever notice. But in a body where that immune system has been compromised, suddenly even the mildest cold or sniffle can blossom into a life-threatening sickness.

So, yes, the heights of the great dynasties we would expect a markedly higher quality of life overall than the periods of strife, even at the most basic subsistence levels and even in places that were not directly touched by the fighting. A system that most of the more forward-thinking dynasties built and maintained were massive grain stores, emergency rations that were paid into yearly as a portion of the peasantry's taxes, to be distributed during lean years or during disasters. Of course, when a dynasty became so self-involved that it no longer cared about stocking those silos, or so spendthrift that its officials pilfered the silos and sold off their stores to buy stuff for themselves, well, when the next famine inevitably strikes, all that's left is an empty silo. And of course, it only takes about four missed meals for a

populace to go from content to revolutionary. Moreover, the early emperors, or in some cases, just emperor, of a nascent dynasty understood, usually from a personal level, that their power was contingent on keeping the humongous masses of people happy enough with their rule to tolerate it. No small number of founding emperors had been the leader of peasant rebellions themselves, and so they knew what bad rulership looked like, they'd just gotten done fighting against it. And they knew that they had to demonstrate that they were the opposite of that in a concrete, material way in order to be accepted as the sovereign, i.e. gain the mandate of heaven. It certainly helped that typically, by the death throes of a failing dynasty, and all the more during long periods of civil war and disunion, infrastructure and

social order was typically so broken down and in disrepair that literally doing anything to improve the material situation of the people at large was tremendous. Things like repairing long broken dams and dikes, tidal breakers, the redredging of rivers that had become impassable and therefore blocked trade, all the way down to just implementing some basic sense of law and order, stabilizing the money system, something approaching legal and military protection from predations of bandits and barbarians. So yeah, it was far better to live in even an oppressive social system of order than one of chaos. The apocryphal saying goes that the Chinese would curse their foes, saying, may you live in interesting times. Well, times are pretty interesting these days, and our roads are still paved and the water still turns on when I flick

on my faucet, and I still get headaches. It's little wonder that virtually the only people you ever meet who are anarchists are those who've never experienced it themselves. Ben follows up with the question, which con has got it going on? And so, ladies and gentlemen, I present, without further ado, Genghis Khan has got it going on Genghis Khan has got it going on Genghis Khan has got it going on Genghis Khan has got it going on Kublai tried to rule over the southern sun. Southern sun. Tamar walked around with only one boot on.

One boot on. Bet you took a cool Russian trip though Novka Road gave them the slip but despite all that there's only just one con for me the heads are piled up right now, baby can't you see? Genghis Khan has got it going on. He's outside our house and he's burning our lawn. While everybody flees, it's just not the same for me. I know it might be wrong, but I'm in love with Genghis Khan. 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. James O'Connor wrote to me a while back, so sorry about the delay, James. But he asked whether plagues were a big part of Chinese history. He wrote, while the Romans had their Antonine and Justinian plagues, and medieval Europe obviously had the Black Death, I don't think the podcast has ever mentioned a pandemic sweeping across the whole Han or Tang dynasties.

So let's just be clear here. Plagues and epidemics were absolutely common across pre-modern China, just like they were across everywhere in the pre-modern world. Diseases and epidemics have been a part of humanity since, well, well before we've been humans. Ironically, in a more politically oriented show like mine, it almost always serves to make them more invisible to the narrative. What I mean is that they can tend to get baked into the background of the more flashy military and political movements and decisions being made

by politicians. But really, I love this question, and maybe one of these days I'll do what I can to work up an entire episode on it. We tend to have seen the effects of disease outbreaks only as a part of a larger set of disasters, like for instance during city sieges. One notable example, for instance, is when General Subutai pulled his armies back from the gates of Xiangyang City just in time to avoid a horrible outbreak of pestilence within the besieged city. They also pop up during other widespread crises like flooding or famine, and so they can tend to get lumped into the et cetera of events, since oftentimes they're not well described in terms that are easy to parse out. Which is frankly unfair to the diseases hard at work bringing misery and suffering to the

population. So let's go ahead and try to give them their due now. The most common and devastating infections over time won't come as any shock to anyone, since in most cases they're certainly not exclusive to China and have been the bane of humanity worldwide for millennia. I'm talking about typhoid fever, typhus, dysentery, smallpox, leprosy, measles, tuberculosis, and influenza, which were all some of the prime culprits reported in the Song Annals. And then after that, of course, is our good friend,

Yersinia pestis, aka the bubonic plague, aka the Black Death, which would descend out of the Central Asian steppes and into the urban breeding grounds of the Chinese cities circa the 13th and 14th centuries, before rippling across Asia via the Silk Road and over onto Europe. And the Chinese cities circa the 13th and 14th centuries, before rippling across Asia via the Silk Road and over onto Europe. And the Chinese were certainly no better off than their European counterparts. It's estimated that in the 15 years before the Black Death came knocking on the gates of Constantinople in 1347, it may have killed upwards of 25 million Chinese. In fact, East and Southeast Asia were still dealing with the horrifying plague outbreaks frighteningly recently. The so-called third plague pandemic began in Yunnan,

which is southern China, in 1855 and wound up killing more than 12 million Chinese and Indians. And it went on and on and on for more than a century, until the 1960s, when it was finally deemed to have been brought under control by killing fewer than 200 people per year. On the whole, however, for the majority of history, Chinese medical practices and theories were at least on par with, and often superior to, those of other contemporary civilizations. Though deeply rooted in Taoist mysticism and magic, the alchemists' studies, findings, and tinctures were often at least semi-scientific, or at least not overtly anti-scientific, in that they were rigorously tested and recorded, sought measurable, real-world results from

the compounds utilized, and yes, that includes the infamous mercury tinctures taken in pursuit of immortality by no shortage of Chinese emperors. Moreover, the Taoist medical focus on both strict hygiene and preventative care, thereby giving the body the maximum capacity to heal itself, rather than the more acute, active medical intervention that has become the Western tradition. And while I admit I may roll my eyes at some of the more out-there traditional medicines of China, like say, powdered ox penis, on the whole, there is certainly a lot to say for preventative medicine.

The old saying goes that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, after all. One notable exception to that preventative tradition is the idea of inoculation. Though it wouldn't gain traction in the Western medical world until the late 18th and 19th centuries, it was widely practiced in China since the 1500s with smallpox inoculations, and potentially as jinfeng, or forbidden prescriptions, aka secret folk remedies passed down from master to apprentice with utmost confidence, since as early as the 11th century. Though inoculations, that is, injecting an uninfected patient with live infection to bolster immunity ahead of full-on infection,

is of course a crude, dangerous, and disgusting precursor to the far safer practice of vaccination, a term so named, by the way, for the cows, vache in French and vaca in Spanish, that Edward Jenner successfully used to inoculate against smallpox circa the 1790s. Nevertheless, it was an important step in that direction, and being used for centuries prior to its discovery-slash-adoption by Western medicine. David Cooper asks, Do you see the Mongol invasion as leading to a Chinese conservatism that stifled scientific and technological development? Hmm, kind of. It certainly did nothing to help the notion that maybe we ought to keep those foreigners at arm's length from here on out. Still, on the other hand,

the first one and a half emperors of the Ming dynasty that overthrew the Yuan were all about getting out there into the wide world and letting everyone know that China was back, baby, in a big way. That's when we get to the great voyages of Zheng He and his hundreds of Baochuan treasure ships so massive that they made the Ningya, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria look like bathtub floaties. The largest of them, in fact, was so incredibly huge that I've read they physically couldn't even leave the Yangtze River that they were built on

because the flex of the wood over such a huge distance would have essentially caused the ship to become non-watertight in ocean-sized waves. But even after the Ming became less gung-ho about showering every port city from Guangzhou to Mogadishu with Chinese riches, and became significantly more insular, that wasn't done out of a significant fear of or hostility to foreigners, per se. More of a return to only giving a hoot about China itself, and leaving the distant lands to the distant peoples. Economically, it was a return to a more conservative, traditionalist, Confucianist view of what an economy is and ought to be,

from a rampantly trade- and commerce-oriented yuan, and back to a more Confucian, self-contained, meta-stable economy where nothing goes in or comes out unless strictly controlled. Not unlike, come to think of it, the Taoist concept of medicine and health practices, and I see that I'm drawing a little of a metaphorical parallel here in the course of this Q&A. Interesting. In the period after the Yuan, however, even China's relative insularity and shrinking back from foreign intercourse wasn't a particular negative for the empire. Looking out over its period of reign, what exactly might the Ming have been missing out on from about 1400 to 1644, even if it had totally isolated itself from the outside, which again, it didn't. Far more damaging to China and its position on the world stage was the significantly harder insular turn that the successor to the Ming, the Manchu Qing dynasty, took as of the late

18th century. Now that was a bad time to decide that you didn't want to know about or have any dealings with all those newfangled foreign technologies or ideas. But more on that in a little bit. Two questioners wound up asking the same question. Tim McDaniel and Yuan Liu both asked about the dividing points between what is considered a Chinese dynasty and what is not. Tim wrote, why does the Southern Song, something like 60 million Han, count as part of the history of China, but the Zhechengjin, who controlled the Yellow River Valley, the original heartland, and something like 40 million Han people, not count as part of the history of China.

Great question. It's absolutely an open question of where that line ought to be drawn, and I'd say nowhere does it quite get murkier than the period we just got out of where the Song, the Jin, and the Mongols are all butting up against one another at once. As I see it, there isn't a super good reason to say that the Jin dynasty isn't or shouldn't be considered as much a part of Chinese history as Southern Song or the Yuan, but let me posit a few rationales, even if I don't necessarily agree with them. A lot of it comes down to a couple of factors. One is the mandate of heaven as a concept of legitimacy, and second is the age-old question of who is writing the history books. So let's take those in turn. The mandate of heaven, as we're by now hopefully all aware, is one slippery little devil of a concept. A bit like obscenity, sometimes

you just know it when you see it. But I would say it boils down to about three main questions. Number one, do you control all of China's historic borders to that point, or at least near enough as makes no matter? Number two, have you received the formal surrender and submission of the previous regime, or at least made sure that all of them are dead? And number three, is there no one else out there who also claims to have or be seeking the mandate? If you can answer yes, yes, and yes to those questions, congratulations, you have the mandate of heaven. If you answered no to that last question, though,

well, a tie tends to go to the defender. Thus, the Song definitely had the mandate of heaven up until they got steamrolled by the Khitan in North China. But since they didn't give up, but stubbornly kept on existing in the South, the Liao couldn't claim to have really gotten the mandate from them. So too with the Jin. They were at no, no, and no for their entire existence. So, by that logic, they're obviously illegal usurpers

who can't possibly be a legitimate ruler of China, you see? Contrast that with the Yuan. They certainly did conquer all of China. They hunted the last Song emperors to the literal ends of the earth and watched the last of them hurl himself into the sea, which served as well as formally surrendering, and then got one of his family members to overtly surrender to boot. Double points.

And of course, by the reign of Kublai, there was certainly no one capable of mounting any challenge whatsoever to his supremacy or right to rule. The Yuan was at yes, yes, and yes. It got the mandate. The second part is, again, who is writing and compiling these histories? In the case of the Jin, though they did certainly write their own annals and histories, there were competing versions from both the Song of the Jin, though they did certainly write their own annals and histories, there were competing versions from both the Song and the Yuan. And guess which versions the Mongols and Han Chinese officials of the Yuan went with. Especially since the Mongols straight up hated the Jurchen since, like, forever. They had every reason to portray them as illegal, usurping barbarians that the Yuan,

in their magnanimity, had liberated the Chinese from. Wasn't that nice of them? Now, when we go looking at Qing-era interpretations of the Jin, we get a whole other picture, since the Aizengyuromanchus very much wanted to be associated with the ancient Jurchen tribes that had conquered North China, and they were emulating as of the 17th century. But yeah, the Jin remain a borderline case. Yeah, I cracked myself up. Tim McDaniel writes another question. He says, I have the impression that the Song military was usually the gang that couldn't shoot straight. I have the impression that the Song court was either usually driven by intrigue, stuck in unmovable conservatism, or both, and therefore unable to respond to anything. How did the Song actually manage to last? Why weren't they a crash on takeoff dynasty like Qin and Sui? Are my impressions wrong? Or

was it, to quote a much later leader, the economy, stupid? Song certainly can come across as the guy holding the wrong end of the sword from a certain light. And, full confession, I'm definitely guilty of taking the occasional comedic pot shot to that effect. Yet it is, and I never get tired of saying this, much more complicated than that. The Song were not military dunces. Much to the contrary, they had a tremendous military, especially when on the defensive, and it does show. I've said it before but it bears repeating that the Mongols were able to crush Xishan in less than a year Persian Khwarizmia in less than three

use a single raiding party to cut a bloody swath all across Asia and Europe so traumatizing that it's still infamous fight multiple full-scale continent-spanning wars simultaneously thousands of miles apart and consistently not only win, but utterly dominate. They crushed the Jin's capacity to do anything but sit behind their walled cities in a single fell swoop.

And yet the Song, the Deputy Barney Fife of the Chinese dynasties, they managed to drag out their own struggle against the Mongols for 45 years. And that was after more than a century of non-stop fighting against the Jinn. They used every tool and advantage they could, including internal canal-based lines of supply and troop redeployment so intricate and well laid out that I'm sure the First World War German Supreme Command would have been proud if they had seen it. Now, offensive war, that is one heck of another story. That, and diplomacy. When it comes to both of those, yes.

Make them all take their single bullet out of their revolver and put it in their front pocket, because man, oh man, were they ever a bunch of lions led by donkeys. Offensively, the Song commanders faced the same fundamental problem as had always faced the Chinese army's fighting step-troops, that they were so very much more mobile than the backbone of the Chinese army, its infantry. In a direct confrontation that could be, and brilliantly was, by commanders like General Yue Fei, accounted for and nullified. But when pressing outward, away from defensive positions and into the vastness of the Asian grasslands and deserts,

it quickly proves to become a logistical impossibility. And that's even before you get galactic brain decisions by commanders who want to, say, build a fort with no water supply. And diplomatically, what can I say about Song Diplomacy? Don't hug a Song diplomat too tightly because he's probably fixing to knife you in the back, even if he knows the blade will pierce his own heart in the process. They would cut off their own mother's nose to spite their face. It was patently ridiculous time and again.

The way they were able to survive such blunders, of course, was typically just outright cash payment. As you know, yeah, it's the economy, stupid. The absolutely obscene amount of wealth generated and controlled by Southern Song rendered them able to time and again essentially just buy off their own executioner when they'd literally gone and killed the negotiator. Until, of course, they tried that crap on the Mongols, who did not, as a matter of policy,

brook much with people who killed their negotiators. The results were predictable. Don Russell writes in, THOC is heavily oriented toward political history. While politics and intellectualism are interwoven more in China than anywhere else in the world, is the lack of intellectual or cultural history a personal preference or simply an artifact of the available source material? Yeah, it is heavily oriented toward political history, and I'll totally cop to it having largely been the way that I envisaged and designed the show from its outset.

This was conceived as being a narrative, chronologically oriented overview of Chinese history that kept things hopefully approachable and comprehensible enough for someone with little or even no background on the topic to drop in and be able to get it. Thus, conceptually, it tends to focus more on actions and events rather than background or cultural factors. I feel like a deeper dive into the arcana of cultural and intellectual histories would potentially lose a lot of people in the weeds. And I likewise don't know if I trust myself to deliver a faithful enough accounting of those very complicated traditions and schools of thought. Looking back on some of my earlier episodes where I've tried and epically failed, yeah, I feel like my fear is justified. It is and remains something that I've tried to interweave

where and how I can, and there certainly is always room for improvement, which I strive towards. At the end of the day, though, that might wind up being another podcast's job. It certainly isn't because I don't find the topic fascinating or interesting. It's just I don't know if this is the show for it at a really deep, granular level. Longtime friend of the show and high inquisitor Yuan Liu asks, How could the Mongols sustain such large-scale military operations thousands of kilometers from their homeland without written language? Even though Genghis did not intervene with remote generals' tactics, there had to be some complex tactic and strategic messaging between units.

Even if the Mongol troops required zero supply lines, large military operations would still require complex accounting. Even for the Great Khan, he must have had some messages either to his home base or to his remote generals that would be difficult to carry Pheidippides' style. Did they rely on foreign written language, transliteration, or did they have some written form that was the basis of the modern written language? The answer is songs. Prior to the invention of the Mongol written script, which was adapted from the old Uyghur alphabet, long-distance relaying of messages was still, of course, of critical importance. And the Mongols' solution, and I'm sure this is not at all unique, I would guess quite the opposite, in fact, among preliterate societies, was through rhyme schemes and songs.

Orders would be set to the meter of a well-known tune or poem and constructed in a way that it rhymed, or near enough. It would then be relayed to the messenger, someone well-known and probably trained to quickly and accurately memorize such things. And when it was ensured that he had memorized it precisely, he would be on his way to the intended recipient. Such riders could go for days without stopping, and these aero-messengers, as they were called, could cover as much as 250 miles in a single day, if it was truly an emergency. This practice was used more broadly as well. As Genghis put out his Yasa Code of Laws, it, too, was formulated into a simple, easily memorizable

way, and then set to beats and rhymes. His soldiers then, while marching or riding, would sing and chant their laws as a kind of marching song, so that all the Mongols would know all their laws by heart, that none could plead ignorance. Still, such a system was only a stopgap, and Genghis knew that his burgeoning empire would need the magic of writing if it were to continue to expand and thrive. Or else, no matter how good his messengers, they eventually would wind up playing the world's largest game of telephone, where the Khan says to attack Zhongdu, and the commander at the other end receives an order that the Khan wants more shampoo. And author's note here, Genghis Khan did not use shampoo. Though Genghis himself ordered the creation of a written script specifically for the Mongols, he, much like Charlemagne over in Europe, remained illiterate throughout his life,

though he made sure that his successors were taught literacy. And finally, sneaking in under the wire, I recently received a question from someone wishing to describe all of what was happening in the 19th century in Qing China in a simple sentence or two, and wanted to make sure that saying that buckling under the weight of its own decay and the battering of European imperial encroachment was fine. I said, obviously, yes. Perfect. Print it. That someone was, of course,

the noted historical monocausalist enthusiast Mike Duncan. Of course, he was asking about the broader events that led to the decline of the Qing. Specifically, how much the opium trade was involved in to be blamed versus other factors. So, here was my answer to him. Of course, you know that it wasn't, just as it never is, only one or two things that lead to a total systemic failure like that. Opium was a factor, but it was more symptomatic than causal. So here are my quick and dirty top three reasons the Qing went toes up. One, internal decay and corruption. The Manchu conquerors of China had, in the intervening centuries, like so many imperial families,

largely forgotten the strengths that had won them the throne in the first place, and instead become extremely isolated from the populace and only good at ruling from their barricaded-off capital cities and palaces. They were completely isolated from the needs of their populace and entirely dependent on their courtiers, officials, and eunuchs, who often hid information from them if they felt it personally benefited their own interests. So when things went bad in the later Qing empire, the emperor, paradoxically, was often the last to know. Second is insularity. I told you we'd get back to this. The Qing wasn't the absolutely most insular or xenophobic Chinese regime, necessarily, but it certainly ranked right up there. Even though the Manchus were not ethnically

Han, they had bought fully into the idea of China being the center and font of civilization, and that it needed nothing from the rest of the world. The embarrassing failure of the McCartney Expedition in 1793 put that imperial hubris on full display, with the Hongwu Emperor tweaking King George III's nose by referring to him as a trembling subject from whom China needed nor wanted anything. This could not have happened at a historically worse time, of course, because it turns out that the 18th century is about the last possible period you'd want to close the door to foreign trade and technology. By the time they figured that out, it was virtually too late. Even once they did figure it out, there were still elements

within the court, most notably the Empress Dowager Cixi herself, who adamantly resisted having too many foreign solutions too quickly. In fact, resistance to foreign interference is one of the prime causes of the infamous Boxer Rebellion right at the end of the dynasty. Third is internal disruptions and distractions. Yeah, the flooding of opium into the Chinese markets was certainly not a good thing, and it certainly did exacerbate a lot of problems. And the court knew this, and it rigorously tried to enforce its anti-drug laws as well as it could. But China is vast, its roads long, and the British Empire really, really wanted to sell the Chinese opium in exchange for tea. Moreover, the drug was seen as among the intelligentsia and officialdom at the time as more of a harmless pastime than

nefarious scourge. Thus, enforcement of the laws at the actual ground level was pretty lax. Meanwhile, the imperial court had much bigger fish to fry, even without looking at the wider global imperialist idea. Since the 19th century, it had seen, in addition to the foreign interest in China as a market, whether it wanted to be or not, a series of really super bad millenarian sects popping up. The big one, right after the first Opium War, was the sect headed by Hong Xiuquan, aka the little brother of Jesus Christ, the founder of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Basically, he managed to seize about a fifth of the country for himself for a decade,

resulting in the Qing having to pour resources and energy into trying to contain that, rather than really commit to a Meiji Restoration-style modernization program. Now, make no mistake, the Qing court did try to modernize, with a series of reforms called the Self-Strengthening Movement, round about the same time as the Japanese Meiji Restoration itself. But whereas the Japanese government ultra-super-committed itself to out-western-ing the West, the Qing government, again, primarily under Empress Cixi and her allies, did so only in fits and starts, and very over-cautiously.

While the Japanese brought in foreign experts by the boatloads, the Chinese government was committed to only buying the parts to build, let's say a German-style munition factory, but then insisted on basically teaching themselves how to construct and operate it as they went, rather than hiring foreign experts or factory workers to teach them. It was the classic, I don't need the instruction manual screw-up. So those are probably my top three reasons. Ultimately, though, it turned into a vicious cycle. Perceived weakness from the outside led to more foreign imperialism, which led to more pulling away from increased international trade and further insularity, which led to even further

weakness and so on. Sickness unto death and all that. But, you're very right. It certainly wasn't just the opium. Well, that's a nice place to round out this year's anniversary Q&A. Thank you again to everyone who sent in their questions, and once again to all of you for being

great listeners. And if I somehow managed to miss you this time around, please accept my sincerest apologies. Next time, we'll be returning to the Yuan Dynasty under Kublai, as he learns in his twilight years that maybe the disaster at the Japanese coast wasn't some one-off fluke, and maybe island campaigns really just aren't his people's forte. Until then, wishing you all a shendang jie kuaia and a Xinyan Kuaila. Thanks for listening. 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.