The History of China - #216 - Special: Interview with Caroline Vahrenkamp of The Wonders of the World Podcast, Pt. 1

Episode Date: May 17, 2021

Part 1 of my interview with Caroline Vahrenkamp of "The Wonders of the World Podcast" all about Beijing and it's meteoric rise as (the once and future) capital of China in the early Ming Dynasty! 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. Hello and welcome to the History of China.

Episode 216. Interview with the Wonders of the World podcast with host Caroline Varenkamp, part one. Hey all, today I'm excited to bring you an awesome conversation that I had with the host of the excellent Wonders of the World podcast, Caroline Varenkamp. It paired so amazingly well with THOC's own timeline that I really just couldn't resist throwing it in here. So we're going to be discussing even more about the early Ming, the Honglu Emperor, the Yongle Emperor, and especially, given that Caroline's show is all about, well, the wonders of the world, the great pieces of architecture and history that are wrapped up in that great north capital itself, Beijing. Though this was a single conversation, we were having such a good time and it went on for so long that we actually decided to break it up into two parts in order to better accommodate your listening pleasure.

So please, I hope you'll enjoy this first of two parts. And don't forget to check out all of the Wonders of the World podcast's other episodes that span the globe and all across time. And so, without further ado, on with the show. You don't know what you might have said upon yourself. China in your hand. Tapao, 1987. Hello and welcome to the Wonders of the World, the podcast that visits the great places on earth to tell the story of our people, our civilization, and our planet. I'm your host, Caroline Varenkamp. This week, episode 81, the fourth wonder of Chinese architecture, the Temple of Heaven

in Beijing, China. Yes, I know I said the Forbidden City last time. I have the right to change my mind. Okay, Beijing, one of the biggins. Only London and Rome have more entries on this list than Beijing, but they've been around for centuries or even millennia from our vantage point here at the dawn of the 1400s. Beijing is new, kinda. We've mentioned Beijing before, and more than likely if you go to see the Great Wall, you'll be day-tripping from Beijing. And of course, I mentioned that the Mongol capital of China, Dadu, was where Beijing now is. So it's not completely new. But it wasn't yet Beijing.

The story of how Beijing became literally the northern capital, that's what Beijing means, is the story of one guy. This one guy was a nasty piece of work. A little paranoid, a lot cruel, narcissistic, ruthless, monomaniacal, and he was the emperor. Now you might be thinking, sure Caroline, we've been to China enough with you to know that most emperors are nasty pieces of work. Fair enough, and normally I would skip over someone like this. But the man they call the Yongle emperor is responsible for three wonders. No person, man or woman, has a bigger impact on this 200-place list of mine than he does. Excepting Buddha and Jesus, of course. So we're going to have to talk about him for the next three episodes.

In this episode, we're going to talk about how he became the guy. Next time on The Forbidden City, we'll talk about what he and his people did while he was the guy. And there's one more after that. Okay, so let's do this thing. The story of the Yongle Emperor really begins with someone else, a poor orphan in the desolate hills of Anhui province, along the Yangtze River Valley, just west of the Delta. Now, because I have only three episodes to discuss some of the more influential figures of Chinese history, I'm going to have to be really brief. So I strongly recommend that you listen to the podcast hosted by my guest. Yes, that's right. Chris Stewart of the History of China podcast is back to help us along with this tale that would

really make a good movie. You almost can't even make a movie out of it because people would be like, ah, no, it's not believable enough. You know, fiction has to be believable. Yeah. But reality is not bounded by any such constraint. It's crazy. He's this peasant farmer, son of parents whom we don't even really know the names of. that's how unimportant they were wow illiterate he'll wind up teaching himself to read there's a bunch of factors that actually come about right at this time that just sort of pool all together and create this insane situation that winds up with him on top. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Zhu Yan Zhang was the fourth son of a poor farmer, scraping a living from the earth. But he was born in 1328, which really was not a very auspicious time on earth to be born, with it being the awful 14th century and all. Peasants in the Middle Ages were usually just barely hanging on, even in good times, and these were not good times. Baseline background info, we're in the Yuan Dynasty, where China has been conquered and dominated for almost 100 years by the Mongols. Specifically, the grandson of Genghis Khan, Kublai, and then his descendants thereafter. Obviously, that hadn't created a whole bunch of great feelings between the ethnic Chinese,

especially not in the north, and their overlords. So there's this kind of smoldering, long-standing resentment, not only against the Mongols, but also against what are known as the semu basically the western asians and central asians who have basically been imported by the mongols to run the day-to-day tasks of empire while the mongols all you know play hunter and go on giant feasts and stuff yeah the mongols are good at conquering they're not great at ruling they don't really care so much about like the minutia, which is why they brought in these other guys. But then they don't care enough to really give much of a hoot about how well the empire is run either. So there's a whole lot of corruption. There's a whole lot of wasted taxes and bribery and skimming off the top.

Then it gets to be the early 14th century that is the 1300s and we get the end of the medieval warm period and the start of the little ice age right so climate change at a global scale the earth turns colder summer is shorter and less bountiful the winters are longer and harsher which leads to an upset of the balance of the whole system. Flooding, famine, locust plagues, you name it. It's the whole 10 from the Bible kind of thing, which leads to a lot more unhappiness. And people are not being able to produce so much to pay in their taxes while the taxes are being increased and jacked up even further due to even more bad mongrel policies. And then we get the Black Death coming in

and just taking a bad situation and flipping the entire table over and scattering the pieces. It's just devastating. It's devastating wherever it is. And we talk about it a lot, obviously, in the European context, but you don't, like China took it just as bad. And we just don't really mention it as much. If anything, China took it probably worse than Europe did because China was significantly more urbanized. And the urban areas are where the disease was at its worst because

people are of course packed so close together right and what that leads to is then this chain effect of already bad harvests or now you can't even get enough field laborers to harvest what you've been growing so at least even further death and starvation down the line in the midst of this and i really am trying to be brief here, but there's a lot of things. I know, I know, I know. In the midst of this, the Yuan officialdom has decided that they want to do some mega projects

because you can't really be a real Chinese dynasty if you don't do some mega projects. So what they want to do is they want to reroute the Yellow River. One of the biggest, most powerful, least controllable rivers in the world. Yeah, we're just going to reroute that and what that means is that they're going to take hundreds of thousands of

peasants off of their farms and send them to go do this dangerous unpaid labor usually during the like harvest season which obviously makes even more people less happy with the government yeah this project winds up working but it's it's a very Pyrrhic victory because everyone's so angry by this point that, oh, yay, we fixed the course of the Yellow River, but, you know, we're all dying of starvation. So then the last point, and I promise it's the last point, is the flame that lights the fuse here,

which is this weird religion or blending of religions, which comes to be known as the Red Turban Rebellion. The Red Turbans were the militant wing of the White Lotus Society, a sort of millenarian cult. They followed a blend of Manichaeism, which you might remember was all about duality, black and white, good and evil, and Maitreyan Buddhism. Now you might remember me mentioning way long ago when talking about Empress Wu that Maitreya was thought to be the future incarnation of the Buddha. The Buddha returned to earth to bring full enlightenment, like a second coming. It's a sort of messianic way to look at Buddhism, if you like. So basically, the Red Turban Movement...

It's a millennialist doomsday cult that thinks that the end of the world is nigh. And so... And honestly, it certainly looked like it was, right? Oh, God. Yeah, no, you can totally see where they were coming from. It's like, good point. Yeah, no, yeah, look around and... Yeah. God, it's looking like it might end tomorrow you know you have environmental cataclysm you have locusts and dust bowls and plagues and

total breakdown of society and yeah i mean make right with whatever god you got probably makes a lot of sense if ever there were a time for a doomsday cult, it was the 1340s for sure. Yeah. So China was a tinderbox. Let's get back to our peasant boy. Anhui had become a dust bowl, and the family had to marry off their daughters and sell off their middle sons because there just wasn't enough food. When Zhu was around 15 or 16, there wasn't even enough food for those who remained.

His father, mother, and brother all starved from famine. Zhu, barely alive himself and literally poorer than dirt, made it to a monastery, where he took orders as a Buddhist monk and would at least have food. Until the plague struck, and the monastery couldn't keep its monks fed. So Ju, 20 years old, wandered the province, a scrawny beggar, scraping just enough to survive. In virtually any other situation, the story would end there. Wandering beggars tend not to show up in history.

But this was China China in 1350, in the wake of the plague, when, as in Europe, everything was in turmoil. Order had broken down, and chaos ruled. Sometimes, in those times, things that should be impossible are just very highly improbable. And very highly improbable things happen all the time. Jew returned to the monastery to find it burned down, caught up in the Red Turban Rebellion. But here's where things began to look up.

An old friend recognized him and recommended that he sign on with the turbans at least they had food and within a few short months he began building a following of his own and it turns out he's kind of a wunderkid when it comes to military strategy totally self-taught but he rises quickly up through the ranks because he's a quick study. He's a quick learner. He gets it. And he's very charismatic as well. People want to follow him, which is especially curious because he's got a face like he was a was really charismatic and he did have to learn everything on the fly that meant not just generalship but history statecraft literacy beyond a purely functional level he was never going to be confused for an educated aristocrat but he picked up enough by 1355 when he was 26 he had grown a large enough army that he was able to cross the Yangtze and conquer the walled city of Nanjing, nestled beneath the Purple Mountain.

It wasn't called Nanjing back then, of course. Unlike in the West, where typically Paris is Paris and has always been Paris, or Rome is Rome and will ever be thus, Chinese emperors had a tendency to rename cities all the time, for propaganda purposes mostly. The city had had almost a dozen different names, and would have three different names throughout the period of just this episode. But honestly, it's all confusing enough without throwing that wrench into the works, so we're just going to call it Nanjing. Based in Nanjing, Zhu found himself one of several independent warlords controlling various states in the south, as the disintegrating Yuan dynasty pulled its forces back to the north. They do not like to admit this, but China does not have a history of being one consistently unified country.

For large periods, decades, or even centuries, China would fall apart into a variety of small independent states, all warring against one another. See the, um, warring states period. Typically, though, geography would play a role in how things would go down. Like in the 10th century, for example. After the Tang dynasty finally collapsed, China had what they called the period of five dynasties and ten kingdoms. In the north, centered on the flat and fertile Yellow River plain, one warlord after another would conquer, set up his own dynasty, and then fall to the next warlord, thus establishing five dynasties, until the final warlord's dynasty finally stuck as the Song. In the south, however, broken up by hills, mountains, and the mighty Yangtze and its gorges, small separate kingdoms could establish themselves, secure against their neighbors, but at the same time, powerless to conquer those same neighbors.

Generally, it took the whole might of the north to break down the south one by one until they could restore unity. Jew flipped that on its head. While the geography hadn't changed, the agriculture had. And now the warm, wet, terraced South grew immense rice harvests, supporting a much larger and more prosperous population. So he and the other warlords in the south had a lot more to work with, and that meant they had the muscle to throw at one another. And throw they did. Jew was sandwiched between one great warlord who controlled the Yangtze Delta and another who controlled the central Yangtze Valley. In an immense lake battle, possibly the largest naval battle on a lake in history, he defeated the latter and then swept over to defeat the former.

By that time he had firm control of the Yangtze and more than enough excellent generals to finish the job. He had long ago tossed all that red turban nonsense to the side. Now he was just fighting for himself. He had the entire economic apparatus of the South. He had the population numbers on his side. Had the North been a little bit more reunited, a little bit more paying attention,

maybe they would have put up more of a fight. But the Yuan court and the Yuan princes, they were so biting at their own heels and at each other's heels that they really just got behind the eight ball and allowed this giant steamroller to just come right up to Beijing, essentially, then called Zhongdu, and kick the door in and send everyone flying away with the clothes on their back and very little else. They could have done more. They couldn't stop their infighting long enough to really mount an appropriate defense. Part of the UN's problem, though, was that they suffered from a very common malady in Chinese history, which was that each dynasty would start

off really strong, in their case with Genghis Khan and then Kublai Khan, and then peter out as the generations went by. We see it over and over and over again. Powerful warlord conquers China, his heir has great success as a ruler, the next guy is okay, maybe, and then everything starts to fall apart, slowly but surely. There's an old phrase, I don't even know where it's from, but it's, you know, the first generation

builds the farm, the second generation runs the farm, the third generation is the one that loses the farm, something like that. But it does seem very appropriate. These princes, these heirs, they get very in their own little world of decadence and pageantry and they don't want to deal with the hassle of running the actual empire and so they let other people do it who then uh go do things for their own ends and you know eventually the party stops, the lights come up, and everyone says, well, what's next? Well, someone who did love the hassle of running his own empire was the Honglu Emperor now. Okay, so before I explain what I just said, I'd like to take a minute for an obscure bit of naming convention. In China, the emperor's name was taboo. You couldn't say it, you couldn't write it,

you couldn't say or write words that sounded or looked too much like it. Okay, well, that's no big deal at the time. You just say the emperor and you move on. But what would historians do when they have to talk about specific emperors? You can't just say the emperor, because which one do you mean? They would do two things. Sometimes they would use the emperor's posthumous temple name, which is what we've done so far. Taizu, Taizong, Gaozong, which is fine until you realize that every dynasty has a Taizu, a Taizong, a Gaozong. So in other cases, they'd use the name of the era in which the emperor ruled. For example, if you remember Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty, remember he had like a golden age and then the Anlushan Rebellion, so it was literally a bit of the best of times

and the worst of times situation. When he became emperor, he declared at the beginning of the Xianqian era. 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 endeavors, 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. the Kaiyuan era. So which one do you use now? Do you call him Xian Tian? Or do you call him Kaiyuan? Or neither? All of this makes Chinese history, before Zhu Yongzhong takes over, a challenge for historians. Well, here comes Zhu to save the day. You better believe that his name was going to be taboo. He, the poor orphaned begging monk, was now the emperor of China. Hell yeah, he was going to milk all that sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet status. But what he did do to help further historians was to announce that his era, the Hongwu era, would be his only era. And after him, every emperor would have one and only one era. So we call him the Hongwu Emperor, instead of Gaozu of Ming.

Oh, yeah, the Hongwu Emperor's new dynasty, the Ming, meaning brilliance. You've probably heard of the Ming Dynasty, given how many Hollywood movies have the bungling hero breaking the sophisticated villain's priceless 16th century Ming vase. Happens all the time. And what Hongwu means, I'm sure you know this, but I'll just say it anyway, is vastly martial or vast martial accomplishment, which is just reflective of his personality and his vision. Yes. No longer scrawny and starving by the side of the road. He was fast. He's come a long way.

He's come a long way, but he loved bureaucracy. I mean, he hated bureaucrats. It seems like, but he loved bureaucracy. I was going to push back a little bit on that, but a good,

a good caveat. He seems like he really liked everything to be exactly how he wanted it and however many rules he needed to put in place to make it exactly how he wanted it, he'd like to do. He loved rules. Absolutely. Everything needed a rule. And he absolutely wanted everyone to obey every single

rule, but he didn't want to have to rely on anybody else. He wanted to do it all himself. In that sense, he hated bureaucracy. Yeah. He liked rules. On your show, you're talking about how some of the things that he would put in place are still things that people were doing today, like the stupid stamps that you had to get when something went from one place to another place. The case you were talking about was the case of the pre-stamped documents, which is a very infamous

legal debacle in the early Ming period, where essentially, in order to collect taxes, the local officials had to go in and, you know, collect the taxes and, you know, stamp the documents and say that, yes, this is the correct amount, and then send it on to the capital and on from there into the treasury well what had become just standard operating procedure or you know as long as anyone could remember was you just send the documents out already stamped because nobody has time to stamp every document that they come across because why would you right you know, if I say that there's X amount of taxes here, and then it arrives, and maybe there was payments that had to be made, maybe there was something else, then the document that I made it, you know, point A is no longer valid at point B.

So I'd have to rewrite it again and restamp it again. It was just amazingly inefficient. It was estimated that it could take more than a year to count or effectively tally the amount of taxes of a given year if they did it the way that Hongwu wanted them to do it. So, I mean, it was just, it'd be insane to try to do it this way where everyone's doing everything at the exact point and spot that they should be. Hongwu doesn't care though. He's like, no, none of that. You're going to do it my way or the highway. And he winds up slaughtering tens of thousands of people in this wide cast net of corruption charges

that spans, I mean, years. It's incredibly brutal. That's the kind of guy that Hongwu is. No, and the wages of sin were death. I mean, it was... Jaywalking death. Yeah, that kind of thing. In terms of the civil servants that he needed, begrudgingly needed, he treated them horribly too. This is the thing of the pre-stamped documents case and other cases all across his reign of he will lay the law down against officials. And this really this kind of harkens back to all the way back to the very first imperial dynasty of China, the Qin dynasty.

And it's ethos, it's legal framework, which is legalism, which is I don't care about your feelings. Follow the law to the letter or face the harshest possible consequence that we can think of. And this was especially towards the officials and the civil servants. It was far more lenient on the commoners because, you know, they're just folk of the land. In addition to wanting everything just so when it came to running the government, he also wanted everything just so when it came to running the government he also wanted everything just so when it came to the succession oh yeah and it seems like his choice of the succession led to a very very obvious opposite of what he wanted yeah yeah in retrospect it was maybe he could have thought that through a little more.

He is very much a traditionalist in this regard. He is for absolute primogeniture. He wants the eldest son to inherit the throne. Yeah. And that is just the law that he wants everyone to follow forever and ever and ever. So the problem is, is that he raises his eldest son, whose name at the moment, forgive me, escapes me, because it ultimately doesn't matter. Yeah.

He raises this son to become, you know, the perfect guy, the model emperor. He's versed in all of the correct traditions and education, and he's surrounded by the best possible teachers and advisors, and he's also the eldest brother of all of these other imperial princes. So he gets this level of respect and admiration just by virtue of being the oldest. Hongwu had had many, many, many sons. He wanted his heir, Zhu Biao, to be the future king, and he wanted Biao's younger brothers to be the great generals and leaders on the frontier. So he sent them out to the borders of the empire to control armies, to make sure the Mongols didn't try anything, for example. And so they were raised in the saddle not the palace it was the perfect plan the problem is is that he dies before dad just through kind of random happenstance

which happens all the time right it's the 14th century this sort of thing happens all the time right i mean people die you get a paper cut you know they're gonna die it's a whole reason right sorry reason you have a spare in the first place or many many spares this is something i kind of like about especially the early ming dynasty they have the opposite problem of the song dynasty which came before them the song dynasty had a real problem producing heirs because they were like licking lead paint too much yeah and as a result they were having to go like really into the benches they were having to go really far out into the whole wider clan to find children to adopt and become the next emperor by the end Hongwu does not have that problem that guy has heirs spares and then some that's certainly not the problem the issue comes about by the fact

that though the crown prince dies before the emperor he does live long enough to have children of his own and his eldest son will become in pure primogeniture fashion, the son of the sun outranks the next son in line. So in the UK, if Charles kicks the bucket, William becomes the heir, not Andrew, for those of you who follow that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's the same principle. What winds up happening in the 1390s

is that the heir all of a sudden is a teenager he's well educated he's got all the same kind of education and staff and tutors as you know dear old dad once had but the issue is is that his uncles these incredibly powerful princes who have armies of their own. Yeah. And are all about the periphery of the empire put specifically by Hong Wu to, you know, guard and shield the realms of men from the barbaric,

you know, menace beyond. Right. They don't respect this kid because why would they? Right. They're like 40 years old and he's this like 15 year old brat. Yeah. But now we got to listen to to him are you out of your mind they're 40 years old and they're used to be having complete authority in their realms and they're used to people taking orders from them

and they're used to doing things by the sword they were specifically educated to be military war commanders that's just how they think. And going into Yongle, that's how he's going to live his whole life. They're very much like their fathers in that respect. They're warriors. And Hongwu specifically didn't want a warrior to be the next emperor. And so he tried to make the situation where you have this highly respected, highly educated capital class prince that's going to take over, but then that just falls to pieces and you're left with the other guy.

Yeah. The Hongwu Emperor died shortly after celebrating his 30th year on the throne. To protect his grandson, who'd be known as the Jianwan Emperor, Hongwu had written a series of ancestral injunction, rules about, well, everything that could not be broken, lest disaster fall. Remember, this is a culture just absolutely immersed in filial piety. You did not want to disobey your father, even if he was dead. Among these rules were that the princes couldn't control their armies directly, and they couldn't come to Nanjing under anything but the most extreme circumstances. Okay, that should work. But Hongwu was also worried about the generals and military leaders who had served him so well and for so long. What if one of them got it in his head to take over since the princes were all stuck in the provinces? We can't risk that. So he had them forcibly retired, or in most cases,

killed. He had a lot of people killed. Remember, this is a guy who trusts nobody, nobody, not his sons, not anyone. Right. And yet he's given his sons out on the peripheries this extraordinary, dangerous amount of power in terms of the armies they command. So late in life, he starts going back and revising the laws changing many of them specifically to try to strip them of this power that he thought was going to be fine with his eldest son but all of a sudden it's like super dangerous with his grandson because they don't respect him yeah yeah so they go back he goes back and tries to make this this split army system where none of the prince's armies are allowed to do anything or move unless they have both a command from their prince, but also from the imperial capital. Which sounds good on paper, I guess. that if the princes can make a case that the sitting emperor is actually being controlled and dominated and made into a puppet by evil advisors,

then they not only have the right, but the duty and the prerogative to come in and, you know, oust those advisors and restore order. So the second emperor, who goes by the title of Jianwen, he definitely makes it easy for Zhu Di, the Prince of Yan, to make that case. Ah, Zhu Di, the Prince of Yan. Zhu Di was Hongwu's fourth son, born of one of his many concubines, one of potentially Mongol descent. At the time his nephew ascended to the dragon throne, Zhu Di was the oldest remaining uncle and far and away the most powerful. He was based in what is now Beijing, in the ancient region of Yan, having developed significant military skill and army loyalty fighting raiders from the steppe. Unfortunately, Zhen Wan made it far too easy for Zhu Di. Because he hires on these advisors and then empowers them.

Hong Wu had depowered them, had made them useless functionaries. Anyone who would have been a military support, anyone who would have been a general in the field to serve Genoine, they, he killed them all. He killed all of them. He killed them. Or forcibly retired them.

And, you know, because he thought anyone, all, they would all be a threat to the grandsons. He's like, I don't want you to be a threat. So we'll just go ahead and,

you know, chop you in half. And. Yeah. So that anybody who would have defended him is dead. Yep. He's got these three useless functionaries he promotes, and they seem to think that the best way to go is ancient Confucianism,

and I don't know. I'm just stunned by the whole situation. They want to go with even the less fun version, the version that nobody invites the parties, which is Neo-Confucianism. Somehow they managed to leech even more fun out of it. But then the other thing is, is that probably not the advisors. It was probably Jianwen himself was actually pretty educated, intelligent, well-meaning. And he understood that his position that his grandfather had wanted was for him to revise and sort of revitalize the empire and take it in a new, more civil, more gentle direction.

And so he tries to make these relatively moderate reforms, but he realizes that one of the chief obstacles to any of this is that there's these very powerful military princes out on the periphery. He tries to go in and knife them in the dark a little bit. He goes in and takes the Imperial army and then one by one strips them of their powers, hauls them back to the capital, convicts them of plotting against the throne or other kind of spurious charges like that, and then either exiles them

or forces them to commit suicide or that kind of a thing. He starts in a way which seems like a good idea, which is he starts kind of with the littler princes, the smaller ones who don't have so much power and are easier to deal with. And then he's going to work his way up toward the big fish of the pond, which is Judy, the Prince of Yen. Unfortunately, what this does is just allow Judy the time that he needs to realize what's happening, what's in the cards for him, and start preparing and pulling his own forces.

Yeah, because any element of surprise is gone. And yeah, I can't help but think it could have been done better. At this point, Chris's son jumped on the interview to lend his commentary he should have went from the top like he first should have went to gd and then did whatever he did okay i agree with you now bye-bye that's a good point. That's a very good point. Sorry about that. That's adorable. That's adorable. He gets into it.

Oh, my God. And he's exactly right, because now Judy had time and he had the excuse. Saying that it was his duty to his father and his country that compelled him to save his nephew from those wicked ministers, he swiftly commandeered the northern army and came marching down toward Nanjing. It wasn't a cakewalk. A couple of the battles were touch and go and frankly could have gone either way. I can't help but wonder how differently things might have turned out had all the good generals not been executed beforehand. But they had been executed. And so it was that only three years after his coronation,

the young Zhenwan Emperor's charred remains, along with those of his wife and young son, were pulled from the wreckage of the Imperial Palace. Oh no, said Judy. My poor nephew. I was only trying to help him. Alas. Of course, they didn't have DNA testing back then,

nor dental records. So whispers began to grow that the bodies weren't really the Jianwen Emperor and his family. If they escaped, it would return someday. Honestly, ultimately, it doesn't matter whether it truly was Genowen and his family or not. It doesn't really matter because he's permanently out of the story. He never comes back. But for a while, at least, there is this sort of like King Arthur-esque, oh, someday he will rise again and reclaim the honor of his family line, blah, blah, blah. It's just sort of this hopeful whisper for a few generations thereafter,

especially after Yongle eventually dies. This sort of popular understanding that can't be said out loud of that, man, that was pretty messed up. Like, that shouldn't have happened. That's not right. That's not right. It's not right. To really reinforce the not right, there's the story of Feng Xiaoru. And he keeps one of the advisors alive.

One of these wicked advisors, right? Supposedly wicked. And he keeps one of them alive. He's like, you know what? You can stay alive if you sign this proclamation saying that I'm legitimately emperor, that doesn't go well. No, no. So Fang Xiaoru was this incorruptible guy. Eminent Confucian scholar, young guy, but just, you know, absolutely top of his game.

And though he was one of the advisors of the genuine emperor the late not so great genuine emperor he was considered like the not bad one there was the three bad advisors but he's like the guy who was just like sort of an advisor and just like i'm too cool for this so he didn't really get tainted like the other guys who were just immediately executed it's exactly right he gets called in of course to the throne room before the emperor because he's considered so incorruptible so moralistic and all that stuff if you say i'm cool then i'm definitely cool so i need you to not only sign the emperor wants him to write the proclamation of like his accession be the author of it i'll tell you what to write

but you know it's going to be your name on it kind of a thing yeah feng shui was having none of it he is just he is just i guess i i can't honestly i do my best to try to put myself in the mental headspace whenever and however I can of these ancient people. And it's, you know, it's, it's missed much more than it hits,

but this is one of those where it's just, I can't even get my brain around it of what would compel a person to be like this. Yeah. Cause what he does is my own subjective interpretation, just absolutely insane. He does the equivalent of flipping both fingers off to the emperor telling him exactly what he can go do and um makes this allegory that

you know the emperor had compared himself to the ancient duke of joe who had been protecting the realm for the eventual first king of Zhou and yada, yada, yada. And so Fang Xiaoyu says, well, then where's the emperor that you're protecting? Just calling him out on the mat of like, oh, you say you're this protector of the realm. Well, okay. Where's the guy you're protecting? That does not go well. Hongwu had revitalized and renewed the ancient policy of what's known as the nine familial exterminations which is that if you are convicted of a capital class crime uh you might not be the only one who pays the bill that can extend to as many as nine circles of influence of your family on either side of you

so you're you know like children parents grandparents aunts and uncles arcing out like that so you can have dozens and dozens of people murdered before you your entire family and then you're put to death in a terrible way and so the newly ascended Yongle emperor is like, you idiot. Are you trying to get this punishment? What are you doing? And Fang Xiaoru to his eternal sort of badassery says, yeah, the hell with your nine exterminations. Make it 10. Why don't you?

If you're so brave. And he gets his wish. Not only is it everyone in this family who is either killed, or in the case of women, they have the option of becoming slaves for the rest of their life. But then it's also all of his students and colleagues. That's the 10th level. So everyone he ever taught, everyone he ever worked with, they were all subject to this as well.

So it's like, wow, I mean, you made your point, Fong, but you're a real jackass. Nobody likes you. Can you imagine being some former student who's going on Merry Life, some functionary in some random provincial town, and suddenly they're like, well, your teacher said this, and we're going to have to call you now. I just couldn't

even imagine. Man. You just kind of got to salute them, but maybe only with the one finger. It's crazy. Yeah. I mean, honestly, it's one thing to be badass about yourself, right.

And be like, you know, showing like courage under the threat of death and, and martyring yourself, but martyring literally everyone you've ever dealt with and know and are related to. They killed 873 people plus or minus through the 10 degrees of punishment all for this one guy oh yeah but they

save him for last they save him for last the last member of his family who they put to death before him is his own brother who they make him watch which you know can't be fun and then they save the real fireworks for him, of course. They do a punishment which would eventually, in the Ming Dynasty, be outlawed thereafter. Because eventually, I can't remember the name of the emperor. He watches it happen and is so squicked out of it that he's like, no, this can't happen anymore. So that's the level of horrible it is. It's very squick worthy

oh yeah oh my god they cut you apart horizontally at the waist we're using what amounts to a giant person-sized paper cutter yeah now the rest of this is questionable because the sort of the biomechanics of it i don't know if you're going to be able to actually have enough blood in your body to do this. But the story goes, at least that after they'd done this horrible bisection. Yeah. and conscious long enough to dip his finger into his own pool of blood and then write out the word usurper on the floor before finally dying which i mean that is death metal at its core that's awesome yeah it is yeah it is that is extreme the chinese characters are very intricate and the idea that he's able to like do the strokes with his finger to do enough to be able to make the character i mean it's just like whoa if i'm

remembering right it's 16 strokes which is not simple it's no it's a complex character and he's just like yep gonna write this with my finger before i die he was principled principled to and well beyond a fault which makes him possibly the truest confusion that ever lived and then died judy was now the yle Emperor. Yongle meaning perpetual happiness, which is the kind of name you'd expect from someone like Yongle, who was a master of making the facts fit the truth. For example, it was pretty awkward that his mother wasn't Hongwu's chief empress. Well, never mind that. We'll just change who his mother was.

So now, in the official histories, Yongle is shown as the fourth son of Empress Wu, not the first son of the part-Mongolian concubine. The official histories now say a lot of very nice and kind things about the goodness and decency of his rise to power. He really was just following his father's commands. He really was trying to save his nephew from the wicked ministers. But it's rumored that the blood-red mark on the floor wouldn't come off. He knew better, and the people of Nanjing knew better. So it's no great surprise that he upped and moved the

capital to friendlier grounds, to the place where he had spent most of his adult life, Beijing. We'll cover the story of all the things he did there next time, but I can't go without a wonder. But before we talk about Beijing, I'd like to talk about Nanjing, the southern capital. It's reportedly a nice enough city, but it has borne more than its fair share of hardships over the years. Unfortunately, you probably know it best as Nanking, as in the Nanking Massacre or the Rape of Nanking, one of the most brutal episodes of mass murder and rape in history. Chinese estimates are that 300,000 people died at the hands of the Japanese army in 1937. But before that horrific event, it was known as the home of the Porcelain Tower, often listed as one of the seven wonders of the medieval world.

Commissioned by the Yongle Emperor, perhaps as a way to appease the locals after moving the capital, the tower was 79 meters tall, about 260 feet, with nine stories and a central spiral staircase. Its exterior was covered in gleaming white porcelain, which reflected the sun during the day and shone from the light of more than a hundred lamps at night. Along the sides of the tower, carvings in yellow and green and brown displayed intricate shapes of animals, landscapes, and scenes from the life of the Buddha. It's not there anymore. It was destroyed during a catastrophic 19th century civil war that we'll describe much later.

Some rich guy has built a new version, but every single guidebook I've seen that describes Nanjing leaves it out. They all leave it out, which makes me think it's, you know, not that great. So we pour one out for the lost porcelain tower. Would have been on the list. It's not on the list now. Instead, we're going to Beijing to talk about one of the two great wonders the Yongle Emperor commissioned there, the Temple of Heaven. To talk about the temple and Beijing in general, I'm delighted to bring back listener Jesse Oppenheim, who previously talked about Encore and Marrakesh. What brought you to Beijing? I studied law at Brooklyn Law School, and they have an international study program in conjunction with the University of Business and

Economics in Beijing. So I went and spent about a month at UIBE there, which is kind of northeast Beijing. Okay. You had described it earlier, trying to compare it from like an American perspective. I thought that was a really interesting metaphor that you were using. 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. By contrasting both the experiences of contemporaries and the conclusions of historians, Grey History dives into the detail and unpacks one of the most important and disputed events in human history. From a revolution based on hope and liberty, to its descent into the infamous

reign of terror, there's plenty to discuss, and plenty of grey to explore. One can't understand the modern world without understanding the French Revolution. So if you're looking for your next long-form, binge-worthy history podcast, one recommended by universities and loved by enthusiasts, Yeah, so I found it kind of a fascinating mix of LA and DC. So DC, you know, it's the capital. It's got all that very much center of the country, center of the world thing going on. It's got all the national monuments. It's got that whole feel to it. At the same time, it's an enormous city with all of the traffic jams and interstate highway

insanity of LA. And a lot of it feels like la i was there in the summer it's relatively important to note that beijing's surprisingly close to the gobi desert oh yeah and it gets hot it gets very very hot in the summer with any and everything that comes with talking about beijing and really china in general but like the scale of anything you're talking about is just incalculably vast it's enormous let's jump in then and let's start with the temple of heaven built by the only emperor or commissioned by him you know kind of a little bit south of canada square and it's got this huge park around it and people have seen it i think people have seen pictures of it they built a replica of it to represent china at epcot in disney world it's one of those things

that's on every lots of postcards but there's just more to it than what people i think think is just like a pretty little building oh yeah i mean almost all of the things in beijing are not standalone structures they're they're whole complexes that go along with them and you talked about the park which actually to me is the more central thing to talk about with what's ultimately known as the temple of heaven although usually when people are talking about it they're talking about the temple of good artists which is the famous real real big building right right which is cool no doubt like it's awesome and incredibly impressive on its own. There are, as with many things in Beijing, lots of staircases. And the staircases have cool, intricate patterns chiseled into them,

often resembling dragons. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is super cool. I've seen pictures of the inside of the Templar Harvest, right? Yeah. And just, it's this panoply of color. The trees that supplied the timber when it was originally built were no longer around. So they had to bring in new ones from Oregon.

I love that. Yeah, guys, you used American wood. Giant and colossal and colorful in person as it seems like it would be from photographs you know that's a funny question to answer because my experience of stepping inside is one beijing in summer super bright super hot and you step inside and it's dark and shaded and you you feel like you've stepped into heaven because it's amazing because you're out of the sun yeah and so my recollection of stepping inside is just being so happy to be in the shade. It is incredibly colorful. Everything at all of these sites is painted painstakingly, carefully, in vivid detail.

They clearly take a lot of pride in maintaining these sites. If I had one criticism, it's that they all kind of paint them to sort of kind of maybe look the same. Oh, yeah. They use the same color motifs, as it were, at many of these sites. Although, kind of when you think about it, the Temple of Heaven and Forbidden City having the same motifs makes a lot of sense when you consider what they were for and who they were to be used by. Right, right, right. It looks really nice, so you can't blame them. But they do use it a lot.

It's consistency. Of course. It all ties together. You've probably seen the Central Pavilion, the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, in pictures, looking almost like a brightly colored toadstool, but with three blue overhanging roofs stacked one atop another. The walls are red and intricately painted. The entire building is made of wood, with no nails involved, which is mind-boggling to me, as wood tends to decay and you have to replace it with exactly the same piece in exactly the same way. The hall was struck by lightning and burned to the ground in 1889.

And that's why they had to use Oregon wood when painstakingly restoring it. Rites were very important in Chinese society and rituals needed to be followed to the letter. Here, the Yongle emperor and his successors would come twice a year to perform the prayer rituals necessary to ensure a good harvest. It was a big freaking deal, and it required significant grandeur. The temple itself is very impressive, but to me, I was always way more impressed with the park around the temples. Which is huge. It is. It is huge. While most of the complexes in Beijing, from a Western tourist perspective, you're going to go to them once.

And even for people living in Beijing, you go to them once and even for people living envisioning like you go to them once and that's it yeah the temple of heaven with the parks around it people go to it like all the time yeah and i was incredibly impressed there are always people having exercise classes outside so it's kind of like a mix of dance and exercise and there's always like very cool moderately 80s type music playing that you've got a really cool mix of people of all ages but in my head it's always the old chinese ladies that are going around doing the dances and they'll just let you join in i'm assuming at some point there's money being exchanged with somebody, but they were always very happy to let me just join in. Oh, wow.

Okay, cool. I picture the little old people doing Tai Chi in front, completely oblivious to the tourists. There are people doing Tai Chi, also people practicing martial arts. There was a guy who, I'm going to say i became friendly with him i chatted with him for a while i went back a second time he was there and he and i like hung out a second time okay this cool martial art thing that basically had like a chain link with oh that he was just using it sounds sounds brutal. And in fact, if used in combat, probably would be. But he had this whole dance martial art that he did with it, which was one, super cool to watch. Two, pretty beautiful.

And three, a really good workout when you got into it. Yeah, sure. And he was super nice and let me play along, which was very cool. And, you know, he gave the the chain link whip and let me whip it good and you know took took some pictures because i was like oh nobody back home will believe me yeah no to me the temple of heaven is not the actual temple itself it's it's really the park that's going on around it and the exclusivity of the forbidden city i mean hell it's in the name forbidden right but then you compare that to the park where it's old ladies

having zumba classes i mean it's not zumba but it's totally zumba to me the temple of heaven was way cooler look i can I can't talk about Beijing food without talking about Peking duck. If you know anything about Beijing, it's that the Brits were terrible at transliterating foreign languages. And so they thought Beijing was Peking, which, honestly...

And so they have Peking duck. The most important thing about Beijing, as far as I'm concerned, is what do you eat when you're there? Oh, man. Because it's most famous for the one thing. But it's the one thing I can't do it as a recipe because I can't make it at home. You can't. It gets the name with the bastardization of Peking.

But the duck. Oh, man. The duck. You can talk forever about the duck. It is so good like i said i was there on a student budget and we spent most of our time eating street food and there's great street food eating in beijing but one night we were like okay we're saving up and we're going somewhere nice. We're doing this. I mean, I live in the south. I grew up with a family that duck hunts and duck hunting.

You can eat duck a lot of different ways. Duck is great. But they found a way to just do it better. And it melts. The duck melts in your mouth and they've got it with the scallions on the pancake, and it all goes perfectly.

And it's so good. Yeah. Oh, God. And I highly, highly recommend that. Cooking Peking duck takes a very long time, which is why so many restaurants require a few days' notice. Traditionally, you start with a duck raised in Nanjing. Oh, hello, Nanjing. See how everything ties together? You kill the duck, remove the feathers, take out all the innards,

and push air into the carcass to separate the skin from the flesh. Then you soak it in boiling water for a while to tighten the skin back onto the bird. Then you hang it in the open air for three days, slathering it every so often with a sugary soy sauce blend that you might include some Chinese five spice with. Then you slow roast it by hanging it in a large oven for half an hour in 500 degree heat so the fat renders away and drops down, leaving the skin bright red, glistening, and crispy. You have perfectly moist and tender meat with perfectly crispy skin, and it's all paired with thin crepe-like pancakes,

hoisin sauce, scallions, and cucumbers. It's delicious, and it is impossible to do correctly at home. Impossible. You cannot do it. Do not even try. So instead, let's go in a totally different direction. As I may have mentioned before, while we often associate Chinese food with rice, that's mostly a southern Chinese thing, largely due to the cultural connections between Guangzhou and California. Northern China was wheat country, and wheat noodles have long been a critical part of northern cuisine, as we discussed in both the Terracotta Warriors and Mongao Caves episodes. The Beijing noodles I'm going to talk about today are a fabulous blend

of salty, savory, and sweet. Xiaozhongmian, which basically means fried sauce noodles. Now traditionally, it's made with two key sauces. Ganwangjang, which is a fermented yellow soybean paste, and jianwangjang, which is a fermented sweet wheat paste. The first is kind of like miso, but much saltier, and the second is kind of like hoisin, sweet and syrupy. You'll find neither of these easily in the U.S. or Europe. Okay, fine. Try using a soybean sauce or red miso for the ganbongjang and hoisin sauce for the tianmangjiang. I tried red miso and hoisin and it was great. Okay, so this is super easy. You'll make some wheat noodles that are at least a quarter inch wide. Once they're al dente, set them aside. Next, in a small bowl, mix the gan wangjiang

and the tianmangjiang, or the substitutes that you have, maybe with a little sugar, a splash of dark soy sauce, and a splash of shaoxing wine, which is a Chinese-style cooking wine. Stir it all together so the miso dissolves. Set that aside. Then saute some shallots and garlic in a wok and add a little ground pork. Not a lot, just a little. And then the sauce. You want to cook the sauce over medium heat at first until it gets sticky. Then you add some water to thin it out, crank it down to low, and let it simmer. By using higher heat at first, you release the aromatics, and then by simmering, you let them have time to come together and for the sauce to reduce. After 20 to 30 minutes, add the noodles

and then serve with whatever fresh crisp veggies you like. Julienne carrots and cucumbers, scallions, radishes, bean sprouts, whatever you have on hand. It's easy and de-freaking-licious and very Beijing. Next time, both Chris and Jesse come back as we see what the Yongle Emperor does next. Will he be as paranoid as his father?

Will he strive to outdo dear old dad on everything? Will he commission a massive fleet to sail across the sea? No, yes, and yes. And, well, we'll get to it. The Forbidden City of Beijing, China, for real, next time on the Wonders of the World. Thank you so much to both Jesse and Chris. I have said this before, but the History of China podcast is one of my three favorite podcasts, if not my absolute favorite.

He's been doing it for years, and it has only gotten better. I firmly believe it to be required listening for anyone interested in murder, mayhem, and other shenanigans. Honestly, Chinese history can get pretty opaque, believe me. But Chris does an outstanding job in making it clear and accessible. Please check out my website at wonderspodcast.com for the first 50 or so recipes I've had so far. You can also contact me there and find my social networking connections. I'd love to hear from you, of course. Please do check out my Patreon page there as well.

As always, I can use the support. Thank you again for listening. You have your choice of podcasts, and I'm honored that you've chosen this one. See you next time. Thanks, y'all. Once again, I'd like to thank Caroline for being such a great host and interviewer for this show. Please tune in for the second and concluding part of this interview.

And I hope once again you'll check out her podcast. That is the Wonders of the World podcast available wherever fine podcasts are sold. And as always, thanks for listening. The French Revolution set Europe ablaze. It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and oppression. It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was the Age of Napoleon.

I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast. Join me as I examine the life and times of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic characters in modern history. Look for the Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts.