The History of China - #194 - Intelligent Speech: Hidden Narratives from the Middle Kingdom

Episode Date: July 1, 2020

My presentation to the 2020 Intelligent Speech Convention, on Women, Minorities, and reading between the bamboo scrolls of history to find the hidden stories. Also with a Q&A session after. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. 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. presentation that I gave the Intelligence Speech Conference this past weekend. It was a blast. In it, I discussed some of the lesser-known stories and ideas from Chinese history,

as well as take on a battery of listener questions live. Big thanks go out to Sam Hume from the History of Witchcraft podcast, which you should definitely check out, for being such a great moderator and helping me through a few technical hiccups at the very beginning. Hope you enjoy, and now, on with the show. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. So today I'm going to be talking about hidden narratives of the Middle Kingdom, specifically looking at women, minorities, and what I call reading between the bamboo scrolls. So even in 2020, to many, China remains kind of itself a hidden story, front, back, and center. I and many of the other people who've lived here before comment jokingly, but kind of only half jokingly, that it's often feat enough to try to get people to realize that China is a real place on Earth that exists in the corporeal realm. So sometimes I compare it to the outside world,

what's known in China as a Xian, the ethereal immortal spirit who wanders the desolate areas of the world, drifting around on a distant mountain ridge covered in fog. You see it in a lot of the Chinese ink paintings. You can see one here. Distant, far away, untouchable, something there, but you can't really make out any of the details.

It's kind of alien and otherworldly. These Xian immortals, by the way, were also the type of immortal that many emperors, including Qin Shi Huang, wanted to turn himself into by drinking mercury. We don't think it worked very well, but hey, what do we know? No small part of that mystery has been, both historically and even today, a deliberate policy by the government of China, or whatever government controlled it at the time, both the stories and the images that it sought to tell to the outside world, as well as to its own people. China has frequently sought to set itself apart from and to be beyond external or international affairs and to be seen both at home and abroad as a unified, monolithic unit. This includes the state's current incarnation as the People's Republic under the Chinese Communist Party, and they've certainly furthered that tendency. So again, that's no modern invention or Maoist anything.

That's a continuation of a centuries, millennia-old policy of projecting unity through careful management of narrative. I don't expect you to read all this, but these are the 24 histories, the officially approved histories of China. If unity and secrecy can be said to have been a national directive across the ages, it must follow that the versions of the past that scholars and historians across the epochs have published and have promulgated, which were almost always with the official dispensation and editorial power of the central government itself, have sought to further those aims. It's not for nothing that the official histories of the various Chinese dynasties typically come in these compiled single tomes from Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historians, which start from the beginning of time and go all the way through the Han dynasty, all the way through the Book of Ming, which is the second one from the end there. The last one is actually the 25th book of Chinese history, the Book of Qing, or the Draft History of Qing, which is still incomplete. It was nominally published in 1928, but it was rushed. It's not considered a complete or final version. Both Beijing and Taipei have pledged to finish it. Eventually, they both promised to get around to it. Who knows?

So any of these histories that we look at, be it these specific books and publications or subsequent English-language publications or even my own podcast that are largely based on these sources and contextual volumes, it's very easy to fall into seeing China and its history in exactly the way that it has always wanted to present itself. That classic propagandistic line of China has 5,000 years of uninterrupted cultural history, blah, blah, blah. Much like the long-vaunted mandate of heaven that justified and legitimized the emperors who sat the dragon throne across millennia, such tales about China's history being a singular, a monolithic thread, serve as a cornerstone

of an internally projected social stability, as well as externally projected strength. Kind of this line of, well, citizens don't fret too much if times are tough, and foreigners don't even think about meddling with us in our internal affairs, because China is, it always has been, and it always will be.

And that's a potent, useful story, and if history is anything to go by, it's at least as successful as it has been not successful. There are very good reasons to have this version of history, but it certainly comes with its own drawbacks and downsides. To unify is to simplify, and to simplify is to lead things out. Let me just give you a quick linguistic example here. One of the more infamous easy examples of this is when the PRC introduced their simplified character set beginning in 1956. It was discovered that among the thousands and thousands of changes that were made to simplify the character set, one of them was this character, the character for Love, I. It's a 13-stroke character. It's pretty, I mean, it's not the easiest character to make.

So they decided that they were going to make some changes by reworking it and simplifying it. They replaced two of the ideograms, xin and sui, with the single character, you. And so the traditional character becomes this simplified character, which takes out three strokes, makes it easier to write. One minor problem with this, okay, is that xin in Chinese means the heart, and you means friendship. Hmm. So in order to simplify the language, they cut the heart out of love,

all to save three pen strokes. Ah, bureaucracy. Ah, simplification. The point of the story is something's always lost when we try to simplify too much. In terms of the historical narrative of China, these stories that typically get left out will come as very little surprise because they're the ones that are most often left out of many histories. They're the ones that are hidden and destroyed and burned and buried, if we're going to channel Qin Shi Huang for a second, all throughout history in every civilization. There are the stories of those without power, women, minorities, and the lower classes in general. Obviously, I can't do all this in the time that I have allotted here, but let's just look at some examples anyway. Women have long

had a pretty rough go at things in traditional Chinese historiography. From the very founding legends of the formation of the current incarnation of the world, we see a pretty strong running theme. This is a text called the Huai Nunzi. It's from the second century BC, and it's a story of Nuwa, who is the all-mother goddess of the world. Here we'll see her intervening in the mortal world and repairing catastrophic damage done to it by two other masculine deities, Gonggong and Zhuanshu, as they fought.

It says, the four pillars were broken. The nine provinces were in tatters. Heaven did not completely cover the earth. Earth did not hold up heaven all the way around its circumference. Fires blazed out of control and could not be extinguished. Water flooded in great expanses and would not recede. Ferociouszed out of control and could not be extinguished. Water flooded in great expanses and would not recede. Ferocious animals ate blameless people. Predatory birds

snatched the elderly and the weak. Thereupon, Nuas smelted together five colored stones in order to patch up the azure sky, cut off the legs of the great turtle to set them up as the four pillars, killed the black dragon to provide relief to Fiji province, and piled up reeds and cinders to stop the surging waters. The azure sky was patched, the four pillars were set up, and the surging waters were drained. Okay, so already we've got the very first female entity in existence, and she's already cleaning up somebody's mess.

This is not a good sign. Things go downhill for her pretty quickly from here. She winds up creating humanity from the clay for companionship. And for a while, she rules over them as the prime matriarch of a female-led society in which people didn't even know their fathers. They only knew their mothers, and that was the only family that mattered. Ultimately, though, she makes the fateful decision to get married. And she gets married to her elder brother which sounds awkward and weird but it's fine they're gods they're allowed to do that her brother's name is fuxi he however

upon marrying her basically immediately takes over the whole operation uh overthrows her from power and establishes himself as the first and greatest of the three sovereigns that begin the human world as the Chinese understood it. That's what you can refer to as the world's very first dick move. And it established the pattern ever after. Throughout Chinese history, women are notable not so much for their presence as their conspicuous absence. When they do show up, it's almost always to serve as kind of a moral prop than as a real person, either as paragons of the kind of quiet, submissive, filial devotion to the men in their lives that's associated with the yin elements and femininity itself. Or else, if they're not that, they're full on the other side of the coin. They're a dire warning of the sort of havoc and danger that a woman who goes against that natural moral order can wreak on the world if she's allowed to have her way.

So let's take a look at the example of a good woman first. Some of the most extreme examples we find occur in the Tang Dynasty. One such example that we see here is in the New Book of Tang, or the Shintang Shu, in the chapter about exemplary women. This is a tale of the Lady Lu. It's very, very short, just 54 characters long. And it goes, the woman Lu, wife of Fang Xiuling, was of unknown ancestry. Xuanling was still an obscure man when he took ill and nearly died. Seeking to absolve her of further duty to him, he said, my illness has turned for the worst, but being young, you should not live alone. Better to devote yourself to the next man. The woman Liu, weeping,

then went to her room, where she gouged out an eye, proving to Xuan Ling that there would surely be no second man. Later, Xuan Ling recovered and treated her with courtesy for the rest of her days. So, I mean, that's supposed to be the mark of the ultimate woman. Another example, Mulan. This is a version of Mulan which definitely did not make it into the Disney cut, either of them. Now, Mulan seems like a pretty odd choice for this topic of conversation, right? This is supposed to be about the hidden stories, and here I am bringing up maybe the most well-known story about China outside of China itself. Well, give me a chance to explain here, because I'm pretty sure you haven't heard this version yet.

The version that I'm talking about is a 17th century iteration of the story by a guy named Chu Zhenhou, which is very much like the New Book of Tang's exemplary women chapter. He is inordinately focused on the concept of women either killing themselves or mutilating themselves in order to show that they have virtue equal to that of a man. So briefly in this version, Mulan, who is not a pureblood Chinese, but in fact half Chinese and half Turkic, she goes off to fight for the Duke of Tang, who is not a pure-blood Chinese, but in fact half Chinese and half Turkic, she goes off to fight for the Duke of Tang, who will soon become the first emperor, Gaozu of Tang, against the Sui. She meets up with and maybe kind of sort of falls in love with another badass warrior princess,

is captured, and then by the end of the conflict is set free to return home. So home she goes, only to find that her father, who she joined up with to kind of protect, died in the interim. And not only that, her mother remarried, and he turns out to be a complete jerk. But things just get even worse for Mulan, because it turns out that she's summoned by the great Khan of the Dukhturks and

he wants her to become one of his concubines. So instead of obeying the Khan's orders and also the Emperor's orders because the Khan and the new Tang Emperor they're buddy-buddy and he's like, yeah, you need to go. Instead what she does is kills herself as a

moral lesson, which is that even a half Chinese woman would be better to die than to serve in the harem of a barbarian warlord. Historiographically, I'm pretty sure I don't have that right.'ve got to remember it's also being written in the 17th century. The Ming are in the process of being overthrown by the Manchu Qing, so we can maybe forgive Chu Run Ho for some of this all-for-the-fatherland victory-or-death rhetoric. But it's still pretty interesting. In terms of the second version of women in Chinese history, the dangers of them breaking with that submissive, subservient role afforded to them by Confucian ethics, one doesn't need to look very far. Queen Da Ji of Shang is so evil, or thought to have been so evil, that she was actually said to have been a malevolent fox spirit, or hu li jing. She famously liked to have people tortured to death

by roasting them alive, and who fueled King Zhou of Shang's descent into madness, cruelty, and lakes of wine and trees of meat and all that stuff. Another one is Empress Lu Zhi of the Han Dynasty. She supposedly killed anyone who got in her way of her rise to power, even mutilating and dumping a rival into a pigsty

while she still lived. But if you've listened to my show very long at all, you knew this was going to come up. The Chinese cautionary tales about women in power surely must culminate with the one who went all the way, the exception who proves to rule, Wu Zetian, the only female emperor to ever set the dragon throne. Now, I noticed before that women very rarely get their own names in history books, and this is even true with her. Zetian is a name of hers of sorts, but it's one that she created for herself. We don't actually know her birth name. We know her family name, Wu, but the closest we get to her birth name is Wu Mei, but even that's just a nickname given to her by her first husband, which is just him describing

her as being glamorous. We don't even know what she was called as a child. Wu, both as empress and then sovereign, was certainly ruthless and cunning, but then again, that was a baseline requirement for anyone engaging in high-level imperial politics. Objectively looking at it, her rule was a net positive for the empire, and she was surely no more cruel or bloodthirsty than any number of men who sat the throne, and far less than a lot of others. And yet for more than 1,200 years after her death, Confucian historians who simply could not, and still in a lot of cases cannot, abide the dire crime of ruling while possessing a uterus, cast her as some sort of a demon queen made flesh. This goes so far as to deny her her legacy. Outside of many imperial tombs, there were erected giant stone steles, monuments to the sovereigns resting within that tell their deeds to the ages. A lot of these still

survive in China, and one such steles still stands outside of Wu Zetian's tomb. These things, they took a lot of time. They were constructed well ahead of the monarch's death, so it was done and ready to go by the time she died peacefully at the age of 81. Yet the controversy that surrounded her name was so churning even by the time she died that she never got anything carved into her stelae. It remained, and still is today, a blank. Kind of a big final screw you to her life as one could probably be conceived as at the time. So for about 1200 years, she was just the pariah of Chinese imperial politics. How dare this woman think to rule? And it was really, it's kind of ironic because it was only

in the 20th century that her historical image began to be re-evaluated and even rehabilitated. And it was by none other, ironically enough, than by the Communist Party of China, who sought to rebrand her as a kind of hero of the proletariat. Because since she came from peasant stock and was of common background and rose to power on her own merits, they could use that and kind of turn her into this anti-monarchical monarch. It doesn't really make sense, but they went with it. She's a fascinating woman, certainly one of my very favorite historical actors of all time. Let's go on to the second topic, though, that I wanted to get to before I run out of speech time today. Oh, I'm already at that time, but I'll do it anyway. Quickly. Okay, I got five.

I want to talk a little bit about the minority peoples or the Shao Shun Min Zu of China. Those have been getting a lot more coverage today than they might have gotten in the years past. Certainly the Uyghurs in Xinjiang are getting a lot of press and deservedly so for the terrible situation they're in. Now, it's no big secret that China is composed overwhelmingly of the Han ethnicity, tracing itself back to the eponymous Han dynasty, and in legends further, all the way back to the earliest confederation of peoples known as the Hua Xia. But that doesn't mean that there haven't been numerous other peoples that have been and still are a part of China or of its story.

Now, obviously, I don't have time to get into all 55 of the officially recognized minority groups in China. So I really only have a couple examples to pick out. Chinese history has long been very internally self-focused, like I said before. Anything much beyond the central civilizing light of the one true culture of the Yellow River was often deemed as being of so little importance that it could kind of be broadly categorized and then filed away and mostly forgotten. Especially in the earlier dynastic records, it often referred to its own ethnic neighbors as little more than just like which direction they lived in or some animal that they might be associated with. In all human history, there are few stories like that of ancient Egypt. On the banks of the Nile,

these people created one of the most enduring and significant cultures. Their tale comes to life in the History of Egypt podcast. Every week, we explore the tales of this amazing culture, from the legendary days of creation and the gods, all the way to Cleopatra, and everything in between. The History of Egypt podcast is written and produced by a trained Egyptologist. We go much deeper than your average documentary or magazine article to uncover tales of life, great endeavours, and the amazing arc of a mighty kingdom. The History of Egypt podcast is available on all podcasting platforms, apps, and websites. Come, visit ancient Egypt and experience a legendary culture. One group that stood out from this pattern though, that rose to challenge and even for a time

humiliate and defeat the rising power of the Han dynasty, was known as the Xiongnu Confederacy. Now these guys are kind of like the Mongols before they were called Mongols. They're centuries before them. And they were the classic terrifying step riders, the nomadic raiders and traitors in likewise classic fashion. They were wholly illiterate, no writing system at all. As such, the only records that were kept of them at all were by the Chinese, and unsurprisingly, they're not complimentary at all. As such, the only records that were kept of them at all were by the Chinese, and unsurprisingly, they're not complimentary at all. This goes to their name, for instance, the Xiongnu. It's not their name. What it is, it's actually an epithet, and it means

the fearsome slaves, a mark of just exactly what esteem they were held in by the ancient Chinese, in a pattern that they repeated many, many times with other foes and neighbors. For instance, for a period of several centuries, the Japanese were known in China as the Wokou, meaning the dwarf pirates. Not a very nice name either. The ultimate fate of the Xiongnu Confederacy is a tale as old as the Asian steppes themselves. It's not entirely clear what happened to them. We know that they kind of eventually broke up into their constituent elements,

and some apparently moved vaguely westward and very tantalizingly that roughly coincides with the emergence of the Huns of Attila about a generation later into the pages of European nightmares ever after. Others were enveloped and amalgamated into broader Chinese culture, eventually losing much of their own ethnic identity in the process of being amalgamated into the all-consuming Han. But I want to get one more in before I run out of time, and that is of a culture that maybe you haven't heard of. And that is the main culture of the Guangxi autonomous region known as the Zhuang people or the Beizhuang. In fact, Guangxi is not even a true province of China. It is an autonomous region precisely because of this. The big culture hero of the Zhuang is a guy named Nong Zhigao.

As of the 11th century, they were able to fight off both the Dai Viet Kingdom and the Song Dynasty simultaneously, declaring independence as the great southern kingdom under the leadership of Nong Zegao. Though this kingdom was short-lived, it lasted just three years from 1052 to 1055, the Nong retained their identity. They were not absorbed by either the Vietnamese nor the Song Chinese, and instead they were able to retain their identity up through the present day. Today, Guangxi reports some 32% of its population of 48 million as being Zhuang, which is more than 15 million people. This is a staggering percentage because in China overall, less than 8% of the population are considered minority people. Just give a few points of comparison. In Inner Mongolia, less than 24% of the population is Mongol, so that's about 6 million Mongols.

In Xinjiang, 55% is being non-Han, which is mostly Uyghur, which is about 14 million people. And in Tibet, it's 90% Tibetan, but that still is just about 3 million people total. Okay, last little bit. So the topics I brought up today barely scratched the surface. I could not do that in 20 minutes if I wanted to. One could choose any of these topics and spend an entire career plumbing its depths alone. Ultimately, it's not my purpose here to try to give you some encyclopedic account, but simply an acknowledgement that these stories are there, and they are there to be learned about and told. In spite of the drive towards historical narrative being simplistic and unifying, it is and

always has been the case that China, which is a nation as physically large as the United States or Europe, is just as multifaceted and complex. Just as there's no single history of Europe or of America, there's no single history of China. In spite of its monolithic image that it's often itself sought to convey and has often succeeded, it's not the tale of a single kingdom or empire, but of 1.4 billion fully realized, fully human people who can be summed up neither by 24 history poems nor 200 podcast episodes. And it remains in our modern interconnected world now more than ever,

fully worth it for all of us to continue to plumb those depths and learn all that we can about it, including and perhaps especially those tales that are left less often remembered or recounted. Thank you. Thank you, Chris.

Can everyone hear me? Is it working? Yes, I can hear you. Oh, fantastic. It wasn't working before this. Thank you, Chris. That was a fantastic talk. So we have a few questions,

including one you answered before the end, which I'm sure Charles was very happy to see. But before this actually went live, we had an email come in from a listener called Ira, who wasn't able to make it, unfortunately. They asked, the cycle of collapse and reunification in Chinese history appears to map onto global climate trends. For example, all the old world empires collapsed in the third century CE, Rome, Parthia, Kushan, the Han. At a time all the old world empires collapsed in the third century CE, Rome, Parthia, Kushan, and the Han. At a time when the climate cooled, rain became less reliable and disease spread. Similarly, the Tang dynasty maps on to the medieval warm period, and the Ming

collapse onto the onset of the Little Ice Age. What is your take on viewing the history of China through the lens of climate? That's a really good question. And it's interesting because I went on a tangent about this in one of my recent episodes, in fact. You did? Yes. It's a very, very important factor in trying to understand why these things happened and when they happened and how they happened.

The one that I most recently was looking at was the ongoing in my show Collapse of the Yen and why it was that in a hundred year period, Chinese population could drop from about 120 million people to 60 million people, which some of that could be accounted by just bad record keeping because the UN officials were pretty historically bad at keeping great population records. But then even 100 years later, you get to the Ming doing their own census, their own population data. And it's they're like, no, no, it's actually about 60 million people. And how in the world could that have happened?

How could you go from 120 million to 60 and then it just stays at 60? And one of the major theories about that is that you actually had the end of the medieval war period in the roundabout the 14th century. And prior to that, during the Song, you'd have this population explosion because they brought up this uh double croppable rice from vietnam and champa southeast asia that was able to provide so much more calories and thereby provide a lot more well a lot more calories for a lot more people but if a quote if a cold period was setting in the theory goes that maybe a lot of those rice, those semi-tropical or tropical rice varieties no longer could grow as well in central and northern China.

And so you had droughts, you had locusts, you had plague, like the Black Death. I've been hearing that come up a lot today, and I very much understand why. But yeah, I think it's really climate as it relates to history is really still an under studied and underappreciated facet of it but i think more and more we're getting to the point where it's we're accepting that it's kind of impossible to fully tell the story or understand the story of what was going on without understanding what the climate was doing to us at the same time. That's a very sensible answer. We've got quite a few, actually, questions coming in now. Andrew Fields, were there many foreigners or minorities who the historical Chinese genuinely admired or spoke

about well? Let's see. There were foreign populations that I guess probably the one that initially comes to mind is the Koreans. And about the best that the Koreans could do or be thought of in terms of the Chinese mindset for most of its history was kind of like the little brother. You're almost like us. You are you dress appropriately. You act appropriately. You learn almost like us. You dress appropriately, you act appropriately, you learn the correct language, and so you're just about as good. And yet, for all that, I think it's much to Korea's ongoing credit that, in spite of the fact that it was heavily colonized not only by China for centuries, but then Japan thereafter, that it managed to retain its own individual culture and language as well. In terms of other cultures that China, you could really say it respected, in the Song Dynasty, it was kind of forced into a grudging respect of some of its neighbors,

especially the Jertan Liao, and to some some extent even the Tanguts of the Xisha. They never liked them, but they were kind of forced to admit that they had met their match, at least militarily. What about the Tibetans? I know that they were a local power. And then they certainly beat the Chinese multiple times. Yes, they did. They were more than a local power. They were a regional power for quite a time. And they gave – yeah, when the Tibetans came into their own, it was during the Tang Dynasty. And that was a real big shock for the Tang government at the time.

And it kind of came at the worst possible moment because that was right about the same time as you'd get the An Lushan rebellion with breaking out in the north. And An Lushan himself was ethnically not Chinese either. That was a very common thing to do with armies at the time. Why use our own people when we can just get foreigners to guard us for us? But the Tibetans, I think that in a lot of respects, they remained kind of so culturally and even physically distant from the heart of China. They were kind of always on the periphery and never thought of as being quite as so much up in their face. The Chinese always had to deal with them. Okay. From Blanje, I think I'm pronouncing that correctly.

Are the foreign sources about Chinese history more detailed or more concerned about women than minorities? What I would say is that it's not necessarily so much that the foreign sources are more concerned about it. I think they're doing a good job, but I also think there's a lot of modern sources in Chinese history which are also doing a lot of very good work and revising and relooking at the more, the lesser talked about versions. The problem with a lot of this though, is that, and it's with any history, is you kind of have to work with what you got. And so if the ancient

sources are all that you have, and they didn care it's it's pretty hard to get a real full picture of the lives of people who nobody wrote about so there there's still a lot of gaps in everybody's records unfortunately i i would imagine that at least in some cases the chinese historiography has got to be pretty ahead of English language historiography, and a lot of it just hasn't been translated yet, unfortunately. That's something that's common across, like you say, coming across loads of other different fields of history as well. So we have a couple more minutes from Boris Kaiten. Can you speak to the Manichean religious minority that existed in China?

I've read that they influenced the White Lotus Society, who I imagine we'll be seeing on your podcast rather soon, and other religious movements. But what happened to them? Oh, that's a good question. I'm not going to be able to speak very much as to the Manicheans, much more than what you've posted in the questions so far, unfortunately.

I need to brush myself up on them. I know that they blended with the White Lotus, that with the Maitreyan Buddhist sect, so it turned into a real apocalyptic kind of millennialist cult that thought that the ultimate battle between good and evil was right at the doorstep uh that was the manichaean perspective as i believe it was um and then they mixed that with the buddhist idea of cycles of life and death that the old world needed to end so the new world could be born anew. And that really was a thorn in the side of quite a few dynasties.

But yes, I will be getting into that soon. So I look forward to being able to talk about that more at length once I do the reading on it. The last two questions, just because we are short on time, I'm going to give to you at once because they are somewhat similar. The first is from David B. NYC. Are there any immigrant tales or slash parts of the official historical narratives? And Preston,

historically, was it easy for outsiders to sinicize themselves or as a community over one or two generations, or were they still seen as foreign? So they might mix. Yeah, sure. Especially the So they might mix. who are at the very top echelons of society. You not only have the Mongols who are in charge, but you have the Central and West Asian officials who are doing most of the actual work of empire on their behalf. And as the Mongols get kicked out of China,

a lot of the West Asians who've, for several generations at that point, been living among, and actually they were the ones who had to learn Chinese and be able to deal with the Chinese people. at that point been living among and actually they were the ones who had to like learn chinese and be able to deal with the chinese people so they'd taken chinese wives they'd taken on chinese names a lot of the time and a lot of them decided that the less bad of the two options since their paymasters were getting kicked out was to just go full native and they they, by that point, they'd kind of bred themselves into looking Chinese enough to be able to pass. And so in the Ming dynasty, for instance, we've got one of the more famous explorers of all time, Zheng He, who will go on and command the treasure fleets of the

Ming that sails all around the South seas and over to Africa and stuff. And he's actually a descendant of one of the Khwarezmian Muslims who pledged himself to Genghis Khan, a great great grandson. And he or his father was Haji, so he completed the Hajj to

Mecca in his lifetime. So, yeah, there are plenty of foreigner stories in china another one during the tang dynasty a very sad tale is where one of these rebel warlords he takes his rebel army and marches down to guangzhou and finds about a hundred thousand or so arab merchants arab and indian merchants living there and decides to kill them all it's known as the guangzhou massacre but yeah they pepper themselves all. And in terms of being able to live amongst them and sinicize themselves, the Chinese have often been very tolerant of that effort because they

kind of see it as the natural, or they have seen it as the natural order of things. Yes, the foreigners, they come here to the real culture and they learn about culture and then they become like us. Sure, yeah, that's normal. That's natural. So that's often been the expectation. Not that Chinese would go to other cultures and learn those cultures, but that the foreigners would come here. Okay, well, we'll bring this session to an end. Thank you very much, Chris. That was a brilliant talk.

I think most people here already are listeners of you, but if they're not already, you can find the History of China on all good podcast apps. Thank you, everyone, for watching this. Thank you, everyone, who's given questions. And thank you, Chris,

for coming on and talking to us. Thank you very much. And thank you all for coming and listening to me. Enjoy the rest of the day. 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.

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