The History of China - #216.2 - Special: Wonders of the World Interview, Pt. 2 - The Forbidden City

Episode Date: May 23, 2021

We're back with Part 2 of my conversation with Caroline Vahrenkamp of The Wonders of the World Podcast, this tie all about the little city that Yongle built mostly to show his dead dad up - Beijing, and at its heart, the city-within-the-city, the Imperial Purple Palace - The Forbidden City! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Four hundred years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the centre of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Learn the History of China. Episode 216.2, Interview with the Wonders of the World, Part 2, The Forbidden City. Hey all, we are approaching the end of May 2021, and me and the family are busily packing up our stuff and getting ready to move out for the first time in,

oh, about seven or eight years. We're going to be going all the way to the building next door. That's right, big move. It's so convenient that it's almost inconvenient, since it's almost impossible to justify to myself hiring actual movers for this. Therefore, we're just using good old-fashioned muscle power. As such, we're making a lot of long overdue decisions about what comes with us and what just gets junked. It'll feel good, I'm sure, in the end to have lightened up those piles of useless stuff that just tends to accrue over time. But that's neither here nor there, really. Something that's certainly coming with

us all is the podcast. And so let's get right back into that. Today, we're back one more time to deliver straight into your ears the second part of Caroline and my very fun conversation all about the once and future capital of the Ming and beyond, Beijing. Especially that city within a city, the Imperial Purple Palace, with 8,888 rooms, the Forbidden City. I hope you enjoy, and now, on with the show. I'm going for the ring. I went to Beijing and came back with the bling. Lil Wayne, 2009. In our last episode, the wandering beggar Zhu Yuanzhang took advantage of a country in chaos to overthrow the Yuan Dynasty and become the Hongwu Emperor, founder of the Ming. His best-laid plans came to naught, however, as his eldest son died prematurely, leaving a child as the emperor's heir.

Hongwu tried to secure his grandson's inheritance, but in vain. When that teenager became emperor, his uncle Zhu Di revolted, marched to Nanjing, and seized the throne over his nephew's charred corpse. Despite the misgivings of the Confucian scholar Fang Xiaoru. The scholar paid for those misgivings with his death and the death of 873 of his family and friends, but he wrote the word usurper in his own blood as he died, which, we all agreed, was pretty metal. Today we'll continue the story with Chris Stewart from the History of China podcast and listener and former student in Beijing, Jesse Oppenheim. But just like Return of the King starts with a seemingly unrelated flashback, we're going to start this episode with a seemingly unrelated flashback.

Picture the wild and rugged mountains of Yunnan province. The year 1381 flashes on the screen, and the camera shot pans to center on a ten-year-old boy, a Muslim, sitting in stunned silence as he hears the news. His father is dead, killed in battle with the forces of the new Ming emperor. Ma He, the boy, asks his mother what will become of them. She is quiet, somber.

She fears the worst. Enslavement? Death? What awaits the people of Yunnan, the last province loyal to the Mongol dynasty? Well, nothing good. Ma He was only 10, so he wasn't killed. But along with 370 other Mongol and Muslim boys around his age, he met a fate much less common today.

The Ming cut off his balls and sent him north. He would become one of the trusted eunuch servants of the emperor's son, the Prince of Yan. I get the irony of a transgender woman talking about someone who had his balls involuntarily cut off, but work with me. We've mentioned eunuchs quite a bit in this podcast, because from Constantinople to Nanjing, eunuchs have held a critical role in governance. Because they couldn't have kids, they weren't a threat to the legitimacy of the hereditary imperial monarchies. In China, this meant that within the walls of the palace, eunuchs had outsized influence, as only they could have access to the empress and the other wives and concubines. And that gave them far more access to the emperor than the other officials had. The eunuchs were usually orphans and couldn't have any children, obviously, so they had no

family to support them. They owed their lives, their position, and their wealth to the emperor, and so they tended to serve him and his family well and loyally. In Ma He's case, that meant serving the Prince of Yan, Zhu Di. I don't know if they botched the operation. After all, castration in the 14th century wasn't carefully done with a scalpel, anesthesia, a sterile operating room, and letters of consent. Or maybe it was just one of those genetic whoopsies that happen sometimes. But where most eunuchs would mature to be slight, soft with a higher pitched voice, Ma He didn't. He became broad, tall, with a voice like a bullhorn. And Zhu Di, 10 years older, took a shine to him, bringing him into his inner circle. That position gave him command of troops, even saving Zhudi's army after the prince launched his rebellion

against his nephew, the Jingwan Emperor. In exchange for his bravery at the Battle of Zhenglun Ba, Zhudi gave his loyal retainer, and maybe even friend, a new name, Zheng He. Okay, cue the opening credits. 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 82, the fifth wonder of Chinese architecture, the Forbidden City in Beijing,

China. So first off, I just heard about, I haven't watched it yet, but I see it's got really good reviews. This isn't actually about Zhu Yanzhong or Hongwu, this is about his son, the Yongle Emperor. But there's a 2019 TV show, like 62 episodes long or so. In English, it's called Ming Dynasty and in Chinese, it's Da Ming Feng Hua. So it starts with Yongle's ascent to power and all the craziness of his reign. Apparently, it's got really good reviews.

I think I saw it on YouTube as a full series. So I plan to check that out and I recommend you and anyone else who might be interested do the same. Obviously, it's in Mandarin, but it's got subtitles. Well, yeah. So that sounds great.

Check that out if you're a TV streaming aficionado. Now, let's get back to the story. Judy moved his capital to friendlier climes, to the place where he'd once been a prince, the faraway city he named Beijing. He called his era Yongle, eternal happiness. I love the name Yongle. I love that as the era name of just because how sort of extremely dissociated it is with his life and times. It kind of reminds me, you know, when the Japanese empire was expanding across Asia in the Second World War, what did they call themselves?

The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. It's all good. It's all happy. It's all nice. Yeah. Nothing bad. It's just a sphere of prosperity. Co-sperity.

Sharing it. It's fine. It's great. It's great. Yeah. Yeah. Not as though the current Chinese government has had any similar situations with names. I don't know what you mean.

There's everything glorious and harmonious here. That's the kind of guy he was, a real propaganda master. To maximize his propaganda and eternal happiness, in Beijing he commissioned hundreds of thousands of workers to create his imperial palace, a palace so vast and so exclusive with reportedly 8,886 rooms. They called it the Forbidden City. He goes about, he's going to build this northern capital and take this city that he has known so well right as prince and he's going to make it the place the place you know and in a way like his fingerprints are all over that city he could have taken his military instincts and really just sort of made it a functional capital but he made it monumental. Why?

That's a good question. As you mentioned, this is where he's lived the majority of his life. It is his home base. He was not born there, of course, but he was sent there as an adolescent, basically to brush up on his military training and just to rule there and then be out of the way. During the majority of the Hongwu reign as adults, these princes were not allowed within a crow's flight of the capital unless it was for a very special occasion and under like heavy guard. That's how distrustful dear old dad was of them. They have to stay the hell away.

So he has no right to Nanjing at all. Beijing is and has been a very important city, both in terms of economics and I dislike the word, but it's the one I think of optics. So it had long been a former imperial capital, last as Chengdu, the Yuan capital. Right. And even Hongwu himself had understood that Nanjing is fine and dandy, but no Chinese government, no Chinese dynasty ever has maintained a capital south of the Yangtze.

They've always had a capital in the north, and that has been the prime capital. And so even Hongwu understood that that should be, ultimately, the thing that Ming does too. Okay. He'd actually sent several sort of feeler parties out, including some of his princes out, including even the crown prince.

Right at the end of The Crown Prince's Life, the crown prince was going around to these different places, feeling out which one that he thought might be the best possible capital. So Beijing was by no means the only possible option. Other ones included other former imperial capitals like Kaifeng, Luoyang, and Xi'an. What did the late crown prince think of these places we don't know because he actually died on this mission so we don't know what he thought which one he preferred yeah but as for zhudi as for the young emperor it was a no-brainer it's like of course it's going to be my hometown come on is this even a real question well he doesn't rebuild the city whole hog because the

city's already been rebuilt and rebuilt in very much the style it was built as for hundreds thousands of years beforehand which is a classical chinese style city square it's a square within a square within a square with a rectangle center and at that center will be the all capital. It will be a city within a city that only the elite of the elite can be admitted into. It will be the forbidden city or the purple forbidden city as it's sometimes rendered. And it too is built in a classic, typical imperial style. If you look at a overhead map or rendering of the old imperial capital at Nanjing, which unfortunately is not there anymore. It's been long destroyed and paved over and apartment complexes are all over it now.

But we still have maps of it. It looks very similar in terms of its layout and construction and design to what we see still there in Beijing. Okay. Why build this giant walled off, moated capital palace grounds in the middle of your city? Well, why the hell not? You know, it's a symbol. It's a symbol. We're back, baby.

China is back. We're not, baby. China is back. We're not under these dirty Mongolians anymore. No offense to Mongolians, by the way. I love you. And y'all better watch out because we're back and better than ever. And for the Yongle Emperor, it's going to be the repeating le motif of his whole reign of I'm going to outdo everything my dad did. I'm going to make it bigger, faster, better, stronger. I don't care what it costs.

So the Forbidden City, it takes 14 years to build. The young old moves in before it's totally completed. Which is impressive because the Chinese seem so good at marshalling ridiculous numbers of laborers to make things happen fast. The fact that they could do that and still take 14 years to build is sort of like, whoa. Oh, yeah. I've pulled up a few numbers. It had about 100,000 skilled artisans working on it with an additional million laborers. I mean, not all at once, butcrical, but in the course of that construction process, which is just incredible. They weren't just pulling from locality. They were not

building stuff from what was just lying around. The Forbidden City was built to be an icon and an embodiment of the power and the majesty and the breadth and the depth of the empire. And so to that end, they were not cutting down the trees next to Beijing to make the palace. No, they were importing, not importing, but you get the idea. Yeah, yeah. From Southeast Chinese coast, this very precious, very valuable white wood called nanmu. They had millions upon millions of these. They were called gold bricks.

They're not made out of gold, but they're this gold color clay from Suzhou, specially made and shipped up there. They were just like, this is going to be the place and everyone's going to know that this is awesome. One of the really cool things about the Forbidden City, if you go there, when you go there, I recommend anyone go there, is that the palace buildings themselves are so intricately and well-constructed. I mean, this is a 400-year-old complex. And obviously, it's been renewed, renovated, repaired, and all that kind of stuff. But the structure is still the same. And there's no mortar. There's no tack. It's all just held together by this wood fitting together so perfectly that it just is a perfect building. It's incredible.

Obviously, wood decays, right? So you're going to have to replace it exactly the right way for centuries. Absolutely. Which also floors me, right? Because that's one of the big issues we have when we talk about a comparative history. The Europeans often built with stone and you know the middle eastern stone and brick and things that kind of last a while in asian so much of asian architecture was wood lightweight fantastic but that's not exactly you know it lasts right so just the notion that you had

these intricate pieces fitting together and you had to consistently keep up that quality for that long you had to keep a deep deck of artisans and people who knew exactly what they were doing and had that deep pool of talent and expertise to be able to do that i mean they certainly didn't have to do that this is a stylistic choice on their part they didn't have to build with wood. They could have done rammed earth like they make the exterior walls out of, which is better than industrial grade concrete. It's incredibly strong and incredibly well lasting. Instead, they said, no, on the interior, this is a space where it is for delicate, refined, cultured, the finer things in life for an emperor, of course. So they're not going to build out of stone and harsh things like that.

No, no, no. And yes, it will take more work and it will cost more, but are we not worth it? From Fort Sumter to the Battle of Gettysburg. From the Emancipation Proclamation to Appomattox Courthouse, from the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Compromise of 1877, from Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman to Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history.

I'm Rich. And I'm Tracy. And we're the hosts of a podcast that takes a deep dive into that era, when a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans. Look for the Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts. I took a second and googled this. Okay. What can I compare this to so people will get it? I think it's kind of like the Vatican,

70% bigger than the Vatican. Okay. The whole Vatican, which even when you like go visit the Vatican, you don't usually see the whole Vatican. Like you go, you go to St. Peter's, you stand in the square, you go to the museum and like, you stand in the square, you go to the museum and like, that's kind of it. And like, that's kind of just a little corner of the Vatican. There's a whole lot more going on that you don't see, which is cool. And it still takes a whole day. So the forbidden city is 70% bigger than the Vatican. Right. But that's not doing it justice. Because if you pull it up on a map, the way they define the Forbidden City goes off of the moat around the Forbidden City. But that's a really bad way of doing it. It's impossible to start at the moat. You've got, I mean, you've got to get

there somehow. And the way that you get there, at best, at closest, is the north end of Tiananmen Square. Right. That's where the metro station is. It's where a bus is going to drop you off if you can even get a bus to take you that close. That's where you're going to start. Tiananmen Square, politics aside, is like a worthwhile thing to see and is a giant, enormous square, which is pretty cool. It's got the Great Hall of the People, kind of like their equivalent to Congress and the National Museum of China and the Monument to People's Heroes. It's got the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong, or as I quickly made it, the Mausoleum.

And really, most people start at Zeng Yingmen. My Chinese pronunciation is abhorrent, and I apologize to any and everybody who just heard me try to do that. Most people start down there, and then you work your way up. Fun fact, men translates to gate in Mandarin. So you'll see men all over Beijing, and it's referring to gates. They had gates set up all over the place, both as like population controls and security and all kinds of reasons. Most people, I certainly did, started down at Zeng Yang Men. And then you walk all the way north through Tiananmen Square. And I don't know, I'm probably overestimating when I say it's half a mile, but it feels like half a mile because it's always packed full of people. And I think I mentioned earlier, Beijing, summer, desert, hot.

Right. Right. So you work your way up through Tiananmen Square, and that's super cool. And then you get to Tiananmen Gate, the literal gate. Tian, heaven, it's like the heavenly gate. Right. You then need to get from Tiananmen up to the Meridian Gate, which is the official start of the City. But that's not a short walk from Tiananmen to the Meridian Gate. to say that this place is incalculably vast. It's clearly intended for this purpose, but it makes you feel tiny. It's courtyard after courtyard after courtyard of just enormity,

and it's open and it's empty. Now, when I say it's empty, it's packed full of people. Right. It's visited by at least 10 to 15 million people a year. It's always packed. It's incredibly packed, but you still feel very, very small. And it's courtyard after courtyard of that. And when you look at it on a map, you're like, oh, there's all this stuff happening off to the sides. Nobody I've talked to who went and visited has done a lot of that and i tried

caroline i did i did i was like oh i'm gonna try to do that i'm gonna like get off the main path and check out the stuff on the side there's a whole lot of cool stuff temple or two there's a museum on clocks which is you know actually sounds like something worth checking out like it's a big deal yeah yeah yeah you just don't like by the time you even get into the forbidden city you're already like oh wow i've walked like a couple miles and it's hot let me see this thing go through these just enormous courtyards and then you start getting into equally enormous halls that just stretch seemingly forever on an impossible scale to comprehend. And even when you're there, even when you're in the middle of it, standing in the middle of the forbidden city looking around you cannot comprehend just like your brain doesn't do it right you're like okay well this must be the big square

and then you go to the next one and it's even bigger and you're like okay um well this is this is gotta be it you guys like that and you go to the next one. You're like, how, how, how are you doing this? But they do. If you go there, be prepared to walk. It is big.

It is just expansive. And you're going anything. Okay. It's going to be a big palace. And you don't realize when they say forbidden city, they mean city. It's a city it's palaces right yeah i went in the summer the heat of summer beating down upon you as you just try to make it from one side of one chamber in that city to the next gate can be overwhelming. Fortunately, they have, of course,

vending stands and stuff. So it's not, you know, abandon all hope or anything like that. But certainly don't go in heels. Definitely not. Another bit is that you may often find that portions of the palace are closed off, sometimes for renovation. As we mentioned earlier, you know, these wooden palaces, they got to get up kept. But even more often than that, it's for filming. Because what better place to film than an actual honest-to-God imperial palace? So a lot of period pieces, including, I'm going to just go ahead and assume that ming dynasty tv show that i mentioned earlier i would assume a lot of that was filmed in the real actual

locations i know they take a lot of care to um make that as realistic and as true to form as possible that's pretty exciting because you don't often i don't think get that level of versamilitude when you talk think about those sort of things right it's often like we'll just build it on a set somewhere in pinewood studios yeah it's not like it's oh yeah no it's the real thing yeah it's the real thing at the real place and we can go there because it's not like a governmental palace anymore so it's totally okay outside of the city on the northern side so you'd actually exit the back gate because the north is the back because that's how the imperial city operates so the emperor is in the north and faces south which means that all

under heaven is correct right at the back of the city there's actually a hill or a small it's a hill it's not a small mountain it's a hill but in chinese hill and mountain are largely synonymous and what that was constructed from was from all of the excavated dirt when they built the city so they built this they just piled it all up it became this hill and you can go up there and you can actually see this wonderful expense. It's, it's a bit of a hike fair, fair warning. But once you get to the top, there's lovely scenics areas and you can look out over the entire forbidden city and it is really worth doing.

I actually really enjoyed going to Genshon park. It's got a big hill and you climb to the top of it, and there's a temple at the top, and you can actually then see down into the Forbidden City and maybe kind of sort of get your head around the enormity of what you've just been through, which is impossible. The other thing that I would recommend is, and this is inside the city.

Okay. It's not the original tree, sadly. I think that thing died, but they replanted it. They replaced it. Recreated, as best they could, the tree. And this is also in the northern part of the city, where the final Ming emperor hanged himself rather than be captured. You will not be able to go through the city without knowing where that tree is.

But it's definitely kind of a cool historical moment of like oh huh that's dark it is it is and a lot of chinese history is so if you listen to my podcast strap in oh my god i mean there's probably more moments of like oh oh dear in your podcast than pretty much any other one I listen to. Oh, they went there, did they? I'm doing a good job of it then. For Beijing to be the successful imperial capital Yongle so wanted it to be, it needed a consistent trade route south. And that meant renovating the Grand Canal. The Grand Canal of China is the longest man-made canal system in the world, running from Beijing all the way down

to the Yangtze Delta and past to Hangzhou, the former capital under the Southern Song Dynasty. The first portion of the canal was started in 486 BCE, and over time canals connected China's big rivers to create an economic superhighway, bringing rice and other goods from the south to the north. The Yuan dynasty had let the canal fall into disrepair, and as the Hongwu emperor lived in Nanjing, already in the south with all the food, he didn't care quite so much. His son, the Yongle emperor, cared. Beijing needed all the resources it could get. So he, quote, volunteered, unquote, over 160,000 men to renovate the canal, and that's just in Shandong province alone. It was a massive undertaking, and the fruits of all that labor allowed the canal to

continue to serve China until the 19th century, you know, with regular maintenance. After another set of restoration work in the mid-20th century, the segment south of the Yellow River still carries a massive amount of traffic today. But besides all that infrastructure, the Yongle Emperor is fascinating for one key thing. We often have a perception of the Chinese being notoriously isolationist. This isn't true, of course. Even in this podcast, we talked about explorers like John Chien, who traversed what would become the Silk Road and how concepts like Buddhism and Manichaeism found welcome homes in China. Song Dynasty-era China traded extensively with its neighbors in Korea and Southeast Asia. But generally speaking, China had taken the view that China was all that mattered. It was the middle kingdom. Everything else was just barbarians. The Yongle Emperor absolutely

agreed with that, for sure, but he wanted bigger. Whether he was still bruised from the accusations of being a usurper, or he was eager to escape his father's long shadow, Yongle needed the whole world to acknowledge his greatness, even his centrality. Shouldn't the other kingdoms of the world have the opportunity to kowtow before the dragon throne of the son of heaven? Why yes, they should. So he sent massive caravans and diplomatic missions along the Silk Road to the Timurid continent in Samarkand, as well as other missions to Tibet and Korea. But you can only go so far overland. To spread the word more effectively, you needed to sail. His father, during the time when he was just a southern warlord, had built a tremendous river fleet along the Yangtze River.

So Yongle restarted the Nanjing shipyards. And they were busy. Yongle needed someone he could trust to lead his effort. And this is where personal relationships mattered. His father, the Hongwu Emperor, had notoriously distrusted everyone. But he distrusted eunuchs the most. So the important posts in his administration and the administration of his grandson were held by traditional Confucian bureaucrats, assuming they lived that long. Thanks to his rebellion, the Yongle Emperor had learned that these guys did not like him, and he did not like them, not after that whole Fang Xiaorou fiasco.

So he generally preferred the eunuchs his father had disdained. And the eunuch he trusted most for this was Zheng He. In 1403, Grand Admiral Zheng He set off with his fleet. And what a fleet it was. More than 27,000 sailors on more than 250 ships. 50 of those ships were treasure ships, which were freaking gigantic. Five times bigger than the largest ship that anyone in Europe or the Middle East was building at that time. Some historians think the biggest ones were 130 meters long and 50 meters wide. That's 425 feet long and 164 feet wide. Roughly, what, eight football fields? They had four decks with luxurious cabins for emissaries and merchants. And they had accompanying vessels as well. Warships, tankers for water, troop transports carrying horses, there were gardens for fresh fruit and vegetables,

pork on the hoof, you name it, and they were loaded up with cargo. The first voyage of the fleet sailed to Calicut in India, modern-day Kolakota in Kerala, near the backwaters we talked about in episode, what, 37? They stopped at several points en route. Champa, a Ming ally kingdom in what's now southern Vietnam. Java, where they paid a visit to our old friends in Majapahit. Sumatra, where they crushed a gang of pirates, and other ports along the way. The entire voyage, fueled by the monsoon winds, took two years, and they came back loaded with spices, rare animals, gems, unique trade goods, and foreign dignitaries. Zheng He would offer silk and porcelain, the finest luxury items, in exchange for the foreign leaders agreeing to become vassals

to the Yongle Emperor, and offering gifts of their own. Eventually, Zheng He undertook six voyages for the emperor, expanding their reach to include Sri Lanka, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Somali coast as far south as Kenya. As they went, the fleet would divide to cover more territory. It's important to note, none of this was exploration. The Chinese knew about all these places this was about acting like a superpower zhonghe and his giant ass voyages are such a bizarre moment in chinese history why after all of those millennia, did they decide to do it? And then why did they stop?

Well, yeah, I wish I had a better answer. To be entirely crystal clear, we still don't quite know exactly why they stopped, at least. As for why they began, it's a little more clear. It goes for almost 30 years, six or seven voyages. It goes from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean, Calcutta, Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Peninsula and on to the East African coast. They wind up even bringing a live giraffe back to China, which is awesome. That is awesome. Yeah, there's even a silk painting of this giraffe, just like it's a Chinese silk painting, but it's a giraffe.

And even in the painting, nobody seems to know what to do with it. Somehow they were able to keep it alive on the ships, though. I don't I don't know. Anyways, why do this? Well, why does any nation go on some giant world-spanning tour of great expense? It's this giant billboard, isn't it? It's propaganda. Hey, hey, here we are.

We're back. We're better than ever. Come on, China. Ming, let's go. It's not only intercourse economically with the rest of the world but it also has to do with militaristic expansionism and be on alert everybody because we're here and we are here to play ball young law had inherited from his father this giant fleet and i should say from the outset that a lot of these giant ships, the ones that could, you know, run over the Nina and Santa Maria and not even notice. The biggest ones were probably too big to have ever been ocean worthy since they were totally wood constructed wood bins.

And you eventually lose the water seal in the hull. And I've been told this at many points. so it's better if I just say it outright. The giant super ships that we see were probably not the ones actually going on these voyages. Which is not to say they weren't sending giant ships on the voyages. They absolutely were. Just not the biggest possible ones. Right. Those were river ships. we know it by the name

the ming treasure fleet right the baochuan yeah but it initially had a different name the xiafan guanjun which is translated as the foreign expeditionary armada which has a little bit of a different ring to it. Yes, it does. Yes, it does. You know, it's just a little bit less friendly. So I think that's worth stating, at least, in terms of like, what did the Ming want to project from this? Which is, yeah, we want to trade with you, but we also kind of just want to expand. And that's the big difference between Yongle and Hongwu,

which is while Yongle did sort of honor the spirit of what his father was about, he sort of said, well, why do I have to stay in China? Why do I have to be non-aggressive and non-expansionistic? Why can't I just have more? And that's kind of how he, I'd almost say he kind of has this sort of inferiority complex. He has his whole life in the shadow of dad. And like, how do you become better than Zhu Yuan Zhang, who went from rags to riches to the emperor of an entire empire and then ruled for 30 years.

How do you outdo that? Well, he's going to try in any way that he can, and this is one of them. So here's the remarkable thing. Zheng He did six of these voyages, and then that's it. No more. All done. You see, these voyages were fantastic for spreading the appearance of Chinese power throughout Asia and Africa. Their troops caused a ruckus in Sri Lanka and did a little regime change. You know, superpower stuff.

But as Americans and Russians will tell you, and the British before that, and the French before that, being a superpower is hella expensive. The Yongle Emperor had put his eunuchs in charge of this operation, but that meant that the Confucian bureaucrats were steadfastly against the scheme. As they would tell you, everything was fine with their system until the power was shut off by dickless He. You might ask, is this true? Yes, it's true. Zheng He had no dick. That's a Ghostbusters joke? I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.

So when, after 20 years on the throne, the Yongle Emperor died on a fruitless campaign against the Mongols, the bureaucrats spared zero time in convincing his son, the Hongxi Emperor, to pull the plug, close the shipyards, and mothball the ships. That ought to have been the end, but Hongxi died after a whopping six months, probably from a heart attack, and if you've seen pictures of the guy, you understand. A portly gentleman. His son, the Zhuande Emperor, was delighted to follow in his grandfather's footsteps, and he sent Zheng He out one last time. It was on that trip, in 1433, that the old eunuch admiral died at sea.

Two years later, the young Zhuande emperor, who was a lovely artist of genuine skill, died as well, leaving an eight-year-old son as his successor. And that basically sealed the fate of the Ming. It's possible that if Zhuanda had lived, things might have been very different. But he didn't. And they didn't. The bureaucrats wasted no time in taking over for good. This sailing the seven seas fantasy was going to end right freaking now. In 1435, all ocean-going travel was banned. China would never again rule the waves. 62 years later, as we'll discuss once we get there,

Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope. They knew about Europe, for sure. But I would say they knew about Europe about the same amount as Europe knew about them. Which is, like, it's a place. That's somewhere. And, like, there are traders who come and go but i will say that the chinese mindset at the time and long thereafter was basically oh who cares yeah who cares man oh there's distant people on some place all right i mean that's cool whatever you know if they want to come and bow down before me then they can become our tributaries too but i was like who cares this really speaks to the central economic premise of the imperial chinese whole system which is like we are self-sufficient we don't require foreign trade yeah we can do it there's some cool things i guess but for the most part

we have the best stuff like we make yeah stuff so whatever if the foreigners want to come here and barter with us and do a trade mission and we get to call it a tributary mission because that makes us feel good. Then sure, I guess, but they're not going to go like seek it out for the most part because they don't care. They don't need it. And this is not me just, you know, talking out of the side of my mouth. This is if we flash forward into the Qing dynasty to literally the Qianlong emperor in the 1790s writing his response to King George III.

Yeah, that King George, who was trying to get a more permanent English trade post set up in China and wanted further rights to be able to trade with China. Qianlong responds with just like, who the hell do you think you are you little prick i don't need i don't need you at all oh you take my gifts i've given you many gifts you take them you cherish them you love them and enjoy them and then you just go back to whatever little spit of mud that you come from i don don't care. That's sort of the ideology. The Ming and later Qing bureaucrats wiped out all records of the shameful Zheng He voyages, ordering his logbooks burned, and no copies had been made. So we've had to piece together what we know of his voyages,

from the records of the places he went to, the monuments he left behind, and the notes from people who went with him. The paucity of detail has led some to imagine, frankly, some pretty crazy things. Like the Chinese made it to Australia, the Arctic, the Caribbean, Antarctica, Oregon. This is poppycock. These voyages were not about boldly going where no eunuch had gone before. They were about impressing people China already knew and cared about. It would have been far more likely that they would have sailed to Europe than to venture off into the unknown. And as Chris said, they weren't going to Europe. Instead, we have this strange moment where China at its superpower peak says, you know what? Forget about it. Shut it off. Shut it all off. So while on the one hand,

we look at first the Hongwu and then the Yongle emperors and consider how massive and influential they were in Chinese history. But ultimately, on the other, their successors and the bureaucrats in Beijing would leave the greatest imprint on China's future. There's a lot of the Ming to come and the Qing after that, and the 20th century and the modern PRC that do reflect a lot of those ideas and those sorts of prerogatives. I'd say a lot of them aren't great because the Ming, for all of its tremendous beginnings, becomes not one of the better periods of China. And then the Qing take over and it becomes kind of even less awesome. And it's this turn inward.

China's never been super outgoing, as it were. Right. outgoing, as it were. But Yongle aside, and even he, he's going to do it on his own terms, for his own reasons, in his own way. But otherwise, China and the rest of the world, they kind of drop a curtain down. They're very wary of foreignness. They're very wary of allowing anything from other cultures into their country. Trade is conducted in a very specified, very contained manner. Foreigners are not allowed in the country.

Chinese are not allowed out of the country, except on special expeditions like Zhenghe. What this results in, unfortunately for China, certainly, is they managed to sort of whoopsie-daisy, eventually skip over the Industrial Revolution until it's too late. They didn't want to recognize that anyone else might be doing anything better than them. We always think about it that that's just Chinese society, but it hadn't necessarily been. Obviously, there have been periods of that right but the song engaged in a significant amount of trade throughout southeast asia they were the richest most prosperous trading empire of all time they dwarf anybody else it's insane they own a quarter of the world gdp at one point generally when you think about me you think oh the great wall and it's Generally, when you think about Ming, you think, oh, the Great Wall, and it's so pretty. And you think about Ming vases, right?

Pottery, and they had these beautiful monuments, and they did these beautiful things. But it is that beginning of the slide away from international relevance. Yeah. I think only now has it been reversed. I would also hasten to say that it's not like they were stupid. It's not like they were making a bad call. No one could have possibly known in the 1400s or the 1500s what was going to happen in the 1800s. Right.

It's just sort of bad luck on their part that they began the path down that the Qing would then pick up and continue this isolationism and insularity that would coincide with the Western world going gangbusters on things like coal and oil. That's bad luck. It's not stupidity. It's not ignorance. It's just, listen, we've never needed you foreigners before. Why would we need you now? And oh, crap, what's going on? As Chris said, it's easy to play what if and imagine a world where China had met Europe while the foreign expeditionary armada was under sail. And you can imagine how different things might have been, but that just wasn't to be. I'm not going to wrap up the Yongle Emperor yet. We'll do that next time.

For now, let's go back to Beijing, where we have learned it is hot in the summer. So honestly, I feel like the biggest takeaway from all of this is do not go to Beijing in the summertime. I feel like that's the big thing I'm learning. Well, no. So the other thing we know about Beijing in the summertime is south of Beijing is where a surprising percentage of the world's watermelons come from. Oh. And so watermelmen are everywhere. Napoleon Bonaparte rose from obscurity to become the most powerful and significant figure in modern history. Over 200 years after his death, people are still debating his legacy.

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Find The Age of Napoleon wherever you get your podcasts. And I love watermelon. All right. And everywhere you go, they're like, oh, hey, have some watermelon. Like, here you go. Like, welcome to the restaurant. Here's watermelon to get you started. So when you're walking around the Forbidden City, it's an incredibly different experience. But Beijing in the summer, I'm told I'm far from the only person that's had this experience,

but it's like all watermelon all the time. And that's like so much watermelon. Awesome. That's what it's like. Okay. Okay, cool. Cool, cool. So, okay.

Aside from watermelon, what should we eat? Jesse will now wax poetic about congee, which is really just really gooey, creamy, overcooked rice. Even in the summer, it is great. And as a guy living in the South, it made a lot of sense when I was like, oh, this is grits, y'all. Yes, yes, it is. It works. Super inexpensive, and you get it, and then you're not hungry again until, like, really dinner. Like, you might get a snack along the way, but rice porridge with some stuff in it? Fill you up. Oh, yeah. That gets to your bones.

Super filling, for sure. Good for a day of walking what feels like 30 miles around the Forbidden City. But what if you want something a little more interesting than rice porridge? In our pre-show conversations, Jesse had mentioned red braised pork belly, a staple originally from Hunan province, but found all over. Chairman Mao particularly loved it. The reason I brought it up to you is that it's actually achievable. Yeah. So nobody's making Peking duck.

They can't. It's impossible to make at home. A pork is an achievable goal. Right, right. If you can get yourself to an Asian grocery, you can get a lot of the ingredients that you need. You know, the light and the dark soy sauce. But even if you can't, even if you don't have an Asian grocery around you and you end up just using regular soy sauce. And at this point, I feel like most supermarkets carry five spice. Yeah.

Yeah. Something that's pretty good. That's the reason I recommended it to you for this. That's the beauty of it, right? Something that is redolent of the local flavor that's still achievable at home that you can make on a weeknight and feel like, oh, this is something really that's unique and Beijing-y, right? And that's the mission of all these things, right? I always want to talk about things that people can cook at home because I want them to be cooked by Cody, who is the listener in upstate New York. Hello. Who tries every dish.

God bless him. And he has to drive to Albany to get the stuff. But, you know, I want to find something that he could do. If he can do it, then we're golden. Well, hey, Cody. I'm going to give you a second one. And to the extent you haven't heard us talk about it already, I brought up congee.

Yeah. Which is at its purest form, it's overcooked rice with stuff in it. Basically, that's a very oversimplified but accurate way of talking about it. And if you are in upstate New York and don't have an Asian grocer near you, you can still get your hands on some rice, still get your hands on some soy sauce and some ginger and maybe even some scallions. And so you boil the rice overnight, like toss it in a slow cooker or put it on a real low boil overnight. Just let it sit forever. You want to make it extra cool use chicken stock to boil the rice extra points if you even throw in like leftover chicken bones and let it sit which is what i just did preparation for this my wife and i made congee with chicken stock and just let it all boil out turned into bone broth

and then take some scallions chop them them up, put them right on top, mix in some soy sauce, a little bit of ginger, and that's a very authentic Beijing flavor. And it's super easy. Okay. I still think I'm going to use that for my Hong Kong episode, but it's fine.

Okay, so Jesse pretty much covered how to make congee, so there you go. Let's talk about the dish he mentioned that Mao particularly loved, the red braised pork belly. You do need a couple of specialty ingredients, but you can get them all in an Asian grocery. And they keep forever, so it'll be fine. Start by blanching a two-pound slab of pork belly. And I think you want the skin on on this one, so you may have to talk to the butcher. Basically, you put it in a pot, you cover it with water, you put the lid on, and you bring it to a

boil. Simmer for a minute, rinse, and then slice it into inch-sized cubes. You do the blanching because that gets out some of the impurities that might still be left in the belly. It's a good thing. Okay, in your wok or heavy skillet, over low heat, melt sugar in some sesame oil or vegetable oil. If you have rock sugar, that's the best. Again, you have to get that at a Chinese grocery store. Regular granulated sugar will work too. You could use brown sugar. Once the sugar is melted and starts to caramelize a little bit, put the pork in with the white part of some green onions and ginger. Coat the pork in the melted caramel sugar. Next comes the specialty stuff. You need two different types of soy sauce. There's light soy sauce and there's dark soy sauce. Light soy sauce is the salt

substitute. It's generally the one you're most familiar with. Dark soy sauce is much richer and sweeter. Basically, it's fermented longer and reduced more, so it's a little thicker. It really makes a difference to the flavor. Add a cinnamon stick star anise, which is not my favorite thing, but it does help in this dish. Chinese Shaoxing rice cooking wine. You can substitute mirin, which is the Japanese substitute often available at regular grocery stores. But mirin is sweeter, so you might have to cut back on the sugar or else expect a sweeter dish. Bay leaves and dried chili peppers, the Thai ones work fine. Make sure you have enough water to ensure that the pork is covered

because you're braising the pork, you're not roasting it. Simmer on medium low for an hour. When the pork is done and perfectly tender, turn up the heat to reduce the sauce into a red, glistening caramel coating that turns the pork belly into pork belly candy. Sweet, salty, savory, spicy. Just so good. Serve with rice and bok choy, or like baby bok choy, or broccoli, or some other veggie. I think you'll really enjoy it. I had a Szechuanese version about a week ago that I really liked, but I felt had a little too much of the star anise note for my liking. I don't know, kind of a hint of a vinegary-ness too, which I thought was odd.

So I can't wait to try this again, kind of doing it in a more Hunanese style. But I think this recipe will work. I will eventually put it on the website, maybe someday, possibly. While our time in Beijing is done for the moment, we aren't done with the Yongle Emperor yet. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Next time, we'll hang out with the Yongle Emperor for one more adventure. Ultimately, perhaps the main reason the bureaucrats said shut it all down to foreign escapades was how god-awful the Yongle Emperor performed on foreign escapades. He had five expensive and unsuccessful forays into Mongolia, just spending so much money to get no return. But where he really met his Vietnam was Vietnam. Ah, yeah. So we'll talk about that next time as he does his best Lyndon Johnson impression.

Yeah. How long, bae, Vietnam? Next time on Wonders of the World. Thank you so much to both Jesse and Chris. I would like to say that doing back-to-back episodes is efficient for interviewing, but between the two of them, I had more than five hours of conversation to plow through in the editing room,

which is a fancy way of saying my living room. Please check out my website at wonderspodcast.com for the first 50 or so recipes I've done so far. I'm just, I'm just, it's just hard to update. I'm sorry. It's hard. It's work. It's serious work, and I hate it. Anyway, you can contact me there, find my social networking connections. I'd love to hear from you. Please do check out my Patreon page there as well. I can always use the support. If I get enough people, maybe I can hire someone to fix my website. And again, thank you 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. My friends and I went to a national park that was about an hour and a half by bus from Beijing, where they wanted to tell you so many times, we've got the world's biggest escalator. This is the world's biggest escalator right here. You should know that. Go home and tell your American friends that you've seen the world's biggest escalator and it was here. Like, okay, guys. Yep, I get it. It's a real big escalator.

That's super cool. And the 10 years since, how often has that come up in conversation? Because honestly, that's a pretty exciting thing at dinner parties. Just, you know, whenever I can, I have seen the world's biggest escalator. It's about an hour and a half outside of Beijing in a national park that you should check out. It's very cool. They've shaped it like a dragon. They've got a whole canopy over it.

Yeah, really cool. That does sound exciting. Once again, great big thanks go out to Caroline Berenkamp for that wonderful conversation about a topic that we all hopefully learn something new and cool about. I encourage you once again to please check out her show, The Wonders of the World Podcast, because it's all at least as great as what you heard here today. Next time, we're going to get back into the central narrative of our Ming series, beginning with the construction of the Ming treasure fleet

and the appointment of one Zheng He to become its admiral and commander-in-chief. And as always, thanks for listening. marveled at the golden face of Tutankhamun, or admired the delicate features of Queen Nefertiti. If you have, you'll probably like the History of Egypt podcast. Every week, we explore tales of this ancient culture. The History of Egypt is available wherever you get your podcasting fix. Come, let me introduce you to the world of Ancient Egypt.