The History of China - #228 - Special: 8th Anniversary Q&A

Episode Date: December 20, 2021

What the only thing better than 8 years on the podwaves? 8 years & 10,000,000 downloads, THAT'S WHAT!! In this episode we talk about what the definition of "is" is, Zen masters, *yet more farming history!,* when I plan to shut up, me reading poetry in Mandarin... & then the same poem in *reconstructed Old Chinese from 2k+ yrs ago*, and divination, which includes Nazis, Princess Mononoke, pigs & fish, and fictions within fictions with fictions at the heart of the truth! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. 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. Hello and welcome to the History of China. Episode 228, 8th Anniversary Q&A Special. Wow, it really is that time of year again when the show's anniversary creeps up on me and I completely forget about it until someone jogs my memory by asking if there's going to be a Q&A this year. Well, obviously, the answer is yes. Not only has the show been luxuriating in the celebration of eight years on the podwaves, but it also, you ready for this, recently surpassed the 10 million download mark.

And if that's not a reason to break out the casks of sorghum wine and roast entire oxen on a spit in celebration, then I don't know what is. Heck, we'll get Zheng He out there to get one of those huge birds from Africa and see if we can't make the world's biggest Peking duck. So, as such things tend to go, you asked, and now I answer. There were some, and this is pretty typical, double-ups in some of the questions, so I've opted to condense that into a single answer where those cases happened, so please be aware that if you don't hear the exact phrasing of what you asked,

I've nevertheless tried to be as thorough as possible. And what a list of awesome questions it was. Some of them took some real digging, but it was totally worth it, and I hope that you will find that you agree. Alright, without further ado, and in no particular order, let's launch right in. Tim starts us off with a question, are there any funny stories from history that I really like, but couldn't fit into an episode? Actually, that's one of the nice things about these Q&A episodes, as well as the bonus feed. They give me the opportunity to delve into topics and asides that maybe I didn't feel like I'd be able to adequately address in the flow of the main show. Of course, many of you will well know by now that I've hardly been one to ever let that get in my way before. That's one of the beauties of this particular medium. I really do get to include what I want to include, so long as I can shoehorn in a way to make it fit. Because ultimately, there's no one telling me I can't.

Don't get me wrong, I value the integrity of this show above all else, and it'll be a cold day in hell before I compromise that. But it does mean that I can, say, stop the show and talk about rice for half an hour. Or do a biopic on an ancient mathematician, or the city of Hangzhou, or heck, throw in a couple of random Lovecraftian stories every once in a while. On the bonus feed, it means that I can include modern-day weird tales from contemporary China that I probably couldn't get away with publishing on the main feed for reasons. It means that I can include Qing-era stories about turning sex toys into dinner for party guests. It also means that I can do Q&A episodes for you all at my own discretion. It's a wonderful creative freedom to have, and I very much cherish it.

So whenever I seem to veer off the well-beaten path and down some tertiary rabbit hole, that's almost always because I personally found it so interesting that I just couldn't help myself, and have no one except myself saying, no, you can't do that. It's an extremely imperfect system, to be fair, and the reason why, for instance, that if I ever went the route of publishing any of this, I think any editor of mine would go gray and bald very, very quickly. But it does lead to some very interesting asides. Our next question comes from Michael, who asks, Why does China still exist?

While every other empire in the world collapsed under its own size, China is still going after so long, and this despite splitting into multiple pieces and fighting civil wars for hundreds of years, being conquered by foreigners, and yet it's managed to piece itself back together again. How and why? Well, I immediately think of that old beginning of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The empire, when long united, must divide, and when long divided, must unite. The thing that we must first get out of the way is, what does it mean to exist? This quickly gets pretty esoterically philosophical, kind of down the path of the question of the ship of Theseus. What makes a thing the thing? What makes China, China?

Has it existed since time immemorial? Or is that more of a convenient way of grouping together a multitude of different cultures, political orders, and languages into an easily marketable boxed set? If you know me at all by now, you probably already can hear the answer ringing in your ears that I'm going to give, that it's some of both. Chinese culture, as we generally understand it, does trace its roots. Heck, that's very written language, back to the very precipices of recorded time. There are deep and strong ties linking era to era, and binding them together into a narratively feasible and usually satisfying story. Heck, that's the baseline premise of this very

show, right? But on the other hand, we must be careful in taking that idea too far. To think of China or its civilization as being unique in terms of its longevity is giving it a lot of leeway while refusing to extend the same courtesy onto anyone else. It's an unlevel playing field. Let me explain. If we were to, say, look at the history of France, where do we mark its start date? Is it Celtic Gaul? Roman Gaul? Francia? The Ancien Régime? The French Republic? The French Empire? The same would apply to most other places that have had some sort of continuous human settlement for thousands or tens of thousands of years. Absent some distinct demarcation point that we can distinctively point to and say that a civilization began or ended there,

such as in the case of the New World, for instance, there inevitably are significant bleed-overs from one period to the next, even as we attempt to break it down into more easily digestible chapters or pieces. More to the heart of your question, though, is why does it always seem to piece itself back together? And that is of your question, though, is why does it always seem to piece itself back together? And that is a significant question, though I would say it is at least as much of an ex-post-facto narrative device as it is anything approaching historical fact. If we look at the sweep of Chinese history, it's impossible not to notice that a lot of it, by which I mean roughly half of it, are periods of disunion, which is a rather nice way of saying a divided multitude of nations. These have lasted at times for centuries, the longest sustained run of that lasting significantly longer than the entire history of the United States.

Moreover, as it has reunited, that has been a markedly different meaning depending on each iteration. Some have been larger, some smaller, some southwardly focused, some northern, some expansionistics, others highly insular. That said, there has definitely been a longstanding drive to reunify Tiansha when it's broken apart. Does it have to do more with an enduring semblance of national pride during whichever era we're talking about? Or is it more about the leaders not wanting to abide any rivals to the title of emperor, or of seeking to retain and then exceed the terminus boundaries of the prior regime, lest they be seen as not its equal? That's more a matter of interpretation. I'm left thinking of the story of the Zen master and the boy. It goes like this. A villager got

his son a horse for his birthday. Oh, how wonderful, said all the villagers Master and the Boy. It goes like this. A villager got his son a horse for his birthday. Oh, how wonderful, said all the villagers. But the Zen Master only said, we'll see. Only a couple of years later, the boy fell from the horse while riding and badly broke his leg. Oh, how terrible, said all the villagers. The Zen Master only said, we'll see. A little time thereafter, the nation went to war, and all the young men were conscripted to fight. But since his leg hadn't healed, the boy was exempted. Oh, how wonderful, said all the villagers. But the Zen master only said,

We'll see. Looking back, we can clearly see that China has not always been one unified singular nation or empire. As to whether or not it will remain unified now, or for how long, or as to whether it will always cobble itself back together again, well, we'll see. Earl asks about the history of farming in China. How did it change over the dynasties, and how did agricultural innovations affect Chinese history and the class hierarchy? Earl, you sly fox, you're trying to get me monologuing on agriculture again. Are you looking for just a question answered or a dissertation and then multi-part book series? Well, let's at least start with the first. So obviously this is going to be rather extremely

abbreviated, and there's probably a hundred things I'm missing or not paying enough attention to, but here we go anyways. So agriculturally, China can be roughly divided in half, typically marking the Yangtze River as a boundary. Northern agriculture has, by virtue of its climate, long focused on types of grain that are hardier and more easily grown in arid, colder climates. Wheat, millet, sorghum, and the like. Meanwhile, the South is largely focused on rice as its grain of choice, which loves warmer, wetter climates, and tends to be far more labor-intensive. For most of Chinese history, the major innovations in agriculture have stemmed largely from either large-scale construction

projects, such as the building and maintenance of canals, especially in the north, and in the south, the famous terraced hills that allowed cultivation on slopes that would otherwise have been far too steep to be useful. The other major historical innovations have been in specific introductions of new forms of crops that vastly improved yields and caloric intake. The first of these big shifts was at the dawn of the 11th century, with the introduction of a varietal of rice from Southeast Asia known as Champa rice, which ripened at a significantly faster rate than the rice varieties that had been typically grown up until then. This meant that the farmers could plant multiple varieties of rice and in effect double crop their fields, which meant more food overall, as well as at least a degree

of additional protection against bad harvests or disasters. You can hear me go off on this for a full half hour back in episode 137, if you so choose. As for the results, well, they speak for themselves. Over the course of the 11th century, China's population, previously pretty stabilized at about 50 to 60 million, grew to and then stabilized at about 110 million. There it would stay, with admittedly significant dips during conquests and civil wars, right up to the 16th century, when we get yet another injection of new crop types, the bounty of the new world, potatoes, corn, sweet potatoes, and beans being the most significant. Once again, we see a rapid increase in population, from about 110 million in 1500 to nearly 200 million by 1600,

and continually climbing beyond that after 1750. As it turns out, the Ming-Qing transition in the mid-1600s is one heck of a kick in the teeth. When the Jesuits arrived and wrote of what they saw in China during the Ming Dynasty, they repeatedly marveled that, quote, the Chinese expertise in agriculture, as in many other branches of knowledge, rivaled and surpassed that known in the West. The high productivity of Chinese farming, its ingenious crop rotation, sophisticated water raising devices and other equipment, and the rationality and industry of the Chinese peasant farmer, end quote. In terms of class hierarchy, the farming class, or nong, sat atop the four professions, as understood by Confucians. What more necessary and noble profession could one have, after all, than growing and cultivating the very sustenance that fed everyone, peasant and lord

alike? It no doubt helped many toward this opinion that right up until the 20th century, upwards of 90% of the Chinese population were themselves farmers. This position, as the noblest and most honest of professions, did not, of course, entitle them to any special treatment. Constantly on the very precipice of hard times or even starvation, the better instances of imperial government would do its best to build and then maintain a nationwide network of granaries that could be used in the event of an emergency, while also serving as a stopgap in the price floor during bumper years. Unfortunately, this network, like so much else, was destroyed in the course of the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s, but that is a story for a later date. The latest big revolution for Chinese farmers has been,

what else, the modernizations of the 20th century and beyond. These were slow to non-existent and arriving during the first half of the century, with farming prices much as they had been for centuries, and then kicked into cloud cuckoo land starting with the land reform movements of post 1949, and quickly kicking into out-and-out devastation of the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s. Communes were implemented and then tweaked and played around with for some 25 years until they were finally blessedly deemed unworkable. And with the death of Mao Zedong, they were reformatted into locally controlled and operated townships and villages. By the 1980s, about 60% of the population was still primarily agricultural,

while the sector's economic output in terms of its overall economy had shrunk from about 50% in 1949 to only 33% in 1985. Now that doesn't mean that the agriculture as a whole had stopped growing. It just means that other sectors of the economy were expanding and taking up more of the total pie. Though mechanization began to take wider hold throughout the economy were expanding and taking up more of the total pie. Though mechanization began to take wider hold throughout the late 70s and 80s, by 1985, it still amounted to less than one horsepower per person nationwide. Obviously, that ratio has dramatically improved since then. From the 1980s onward, the market reforms of Deng Xiaoping brought a welcome infusion of cash and profit to rural farmers. And as of 1985, only 4.9% of farms nationwide were listed as state-owned, with the remainder being more or less privately held.

Our next question comes from Caleb H., who asks, do you have an end date in mind for the show? Any point in time where history gets too close to the modern day and it would become a daily newspaper rather than a retrospective. As opposed to some other history podcasts, such as the History of Rome or Byzantium, that clearly did exist and do not now, even if the ending did drag out over centuries. So that has ever remained something of an up-in-the-air question for me. I agree, there is a point past which history just becomes yesterday's newspaper. That said, I have a few possible quote-unquote endpoints that I bobble around with in my head. The first possibility is to end off with the Shanghai Revolution of 1911,

and essentially cap the project off at the end of the Imperial Era. A second possible endpoint would be October 1st, 1949, with the establishment of the People's Republic. The third could even be the death of Mao in 1976, though I think if I went that far, I'd probably want the PRC pretty well in my rearview by then. You'd start entering pretty touchy territory there. I mean, another possibility would be to cap this particular show off at the end of the Imperial era, and then start some spinoff show that goes into the Warlord and Republican and People's Republic eras. Obviously, I've not made up my mind. There are certainly upsides and downsides to any of those possibilities, and who knows, it might just come down to whenever I just don't feel like doing this anymore. I certainly didn't start this expecting that I'd be eight years in and still with a dynasty and a half and about 600

years left in front of me. So I guess time will tell. I'm not quitting anytime soon, that's for sure. Chris F. writes, I'm very interested in languages and Chinese has always held a special status in my mind. I don't know much Chinese, but I would like to hear more about how and when the different dialects emerged, and or more about the evolution of the writing system. Cool. So as a brief rundown, the Chinese languages are grouped into a family that's commonly known as Sino-Tibetan, and it phonogenetically links all forms of modern spoken Chinese and, yeah, also Tibetan. This is a language family much like, for instance, Italian, Spanish, French, and Portuguese, all being romantic languages, or Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish, and Czech, all being Slavic languages. So the oldest

known form, both spoken and written, is called, appropriately enough, Old Chinese, and it is the writing found on the oracle bones and used probably until the dissolution of the Han dynasty in the 3rd century CE. It was actually reconstructed beginning in the late Qing dynasty, and it turns out it's a toneless language that is quite distinct from all forms of spoken Chinese. You can look up YouTube videos of people speaking it, and it's quite something. In fact, I'll go ahead and insert a little clip of it right about here. So this is number 129 from the Shiqing, or the Book of Songs, or the Book of Poetry. And in modern Mandarin, it goes like this.白鹿未霜所谓伊人在谁依方

素回从之 道足且长 素有从之 玩在睡中央 间加七七 白鹿未熄 所谓伊人 在谁之眉

素回从之道足�素毁从之 道足且经 素有从之 完在谁中持 兼加才才 百路未移 所谓一人在谁之事 素毁从之

道足且用素有从之 And then the reconstructed old Chinese version goes like this. The The So as you can hear, maybe, it sounds kind of similar to elements of both several southern Chinese dialects and even Vietnamese. And as to why that might be the case, well, we'll get to that momentarily. So, as of the Sui, Tang, and Song periods, that is the 7th through the 13th centuries, the language used is called Middle Chinese, and is itself broken into the early, middle, and late subcategories. This, we know the pronunciation of largely through the efforts of scholar officials like Liu Faoyan in trying to assert the correct pronunciation of the classics from among bickering regional dialects by constructing a rhyme dictionary of words called the qieyun. And in terms of scholars trying to assert the correctness of their own regional dialects

over all others, some things never change, just go on to academic Chinese Twitter at any point to see it played out in real time. In terms of spoken Chinese, broadly speaking, Mandarin is used as the default home language in the majority of northern China. That includes from the northeast of Manchuria, and then arcing down in a broad inland crescent through Sichuan and even down into Yunnan in the southwest. This reflects the north's geographic and historical interconnectedness, largely as a result of the relative ease of overland travel via the North China Plains. Today, upwards of 920 million people use Mandarin as their default language all across China, with even more using it outside of China

worldwide. In contrast, in the southeast, you might say there's almost as many regional dialects as there are towns themselves. This is largely due to the difficulty of travel, historically, across the region's many mountains, forests, and rivers, lending to an increased isolation between communities, and thus increased linguistic diversity. Apart from Mandarin itself, there are five other Chinese languages, or dialects as you'll commonly hear them called, that boast more than 40 million speakers each. They are, in order of commonness, Yue, Wu, Min, Hakka, and Jin. Yue, commonly known as Cantonese due to its prestige dialect being centered around Guangdong and Hong Kong variants, is spoken by some 85 million people around the world. China's southernmost coast was conquered and colonized as early as the Qin

dynasty in the 3rd century BCE, and over the course of the centuries to follow, successive waves of Han Chinese intermixed with the indigenous groups there, known as the Yue peoples. Naturally, the languages intermixed as well, and Cantonese retains some elements of the Thai languages still spoken by autonomous peoples across the region, such as the Zhuang and Dong. The second language is Wu Chinese, spoken by about 82 million people, and it's the language of the central coast area, centered around Suzhou and later Shanghai, and is used throughout most of Zhejiang and parts of Jiangsu provinces. It boasts to being the most ancient of the six major dialects, tracing itself back more than 3,000 years to the establishment of the state of Wu

by the itinerant princes of Zhou, Taibo, and Zhongyong when they migrated from Shanxi. Other accounts press that it was actually a far more recent history, developing in the post-Tong period after the court dialect had washed away most of the pre-Tongue elements from the languages. But you didn't hear that from me. I live in Shanghai, and as such, my neighbors largely speak Wu Chinese, and I don't want to get ganked. So for me, it's the Princess of Zhou all the way. Our third language is Min, which is the language of coastal and mountainous Fujian, where it's spoken by about 30 million people.

That said, it has ranged quite widely thanks to that province's long seafaring history. As such, it's common to Hainan Island in the far south, Taiwan, southern Zhejiang, and many overseas Chinese communities around the world, pumping the total number of native speakers up to more than 74 million. Given the rough, nigh-impassable terrain of Fujian, it's of little surprise that Min retains not only high levels of variance from more quote-unquote standard versions of Chinese, but many older elements that were washed out of most of the other forms, even their regional dialects, over time. The oldest elements of the language are thought to actually not be

Sinitic at all, but Austroasiatic, the family of languages of Southeast Asia, such as Vietnamese, Camer, and Mon. This basis infused the first wave of Han Chinese settlers from neighboring Zhejiang during the Han Dynasty, with later migrations occurring during the Northern and Southern Period and the Tang Dynasty layering each atop those in turn. Our fourth language is Hakka, and it's spoken by more than 47 million people, primarily centered in the southeast, including northern Guangdong, southern Fujian, Jiangxi, Hong Kong, as well as serving as one of the official languages of Taiwan. It is traced back as far as the southern migrations that took place during the unrest of the western

Jin dynasty of the 4th century from afflicted regions of Henan and Shanxi, and with later infusions from the Song period, along with possible interaction and mixing with indigenous language groups such as the Hmong and Mian people. Finally, for our purposes at least, is Jin Chinese. By far the newest of the major Chinese language groups, Jin boasts some 63 million native speakers and is centered around Shanxi, with significant groups of speakers in Inner Mongolia, Hebei, Henan, and Shanxi as well. Up until the 1980s, Jin, also known as Shanxi Hua or Shanxi Speech, was considered to be a type of

Mandarin. But as of 1985, it was proposed and widely adopted that it should be considered a closely related but distinct top-level dialect, mostly due to its preservation of the voiceless glottal stops, known somewhat confusingly as the entering tone, from Middle Chinese, that has since been lost to modern Mandarin. An example of this would be pronouncing the word for unusual, said in Mandarin as ge, while in Middle Chinese, with the glottal stop, it was kak. And the word for pigeon, in Mandarin ge, is in Middle Chinese kop. Nevertheless, the debate about whether Jin should be considered a variety of Mandarin or its own dialect does remain unsettled. From Fort Sumter to the Battle of Gettysburg. does remain unsettled. and Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. To Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee

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There are, of course, dozens, hundreds more Chinese dialects spoken by millions unto themselves, and that's in addition to the multitudinous non-Synetic languages spoken by groups within China, from Mongolian, to Catan, to Miao, to Zhuang, to Uyghur, and many beside that. But we don't have the time to get into them all here today, so that's where we will leave that discussion. Long-time listener and epic question asker Yuan L wrote in, into the post-Zhenghe era, it's still not clear what the motivation to destroy documents of the travels were. Also, Qing is generally considered as the pinnacle of the closed-door policy and a return to classic feudalism. Ming, on the other hand, is regarded as exemplarily advanced to commerce. Maybe not as open as Song, but commerce and industry were

highly encouraged. This is how I was told, anyway. Why the closed down? Which hurts commerce and industry. Ming is a strange beast, and I've read a number of different theories regarding the why of the large-scale destruction of the records of the Treasure Fleet. One of those I believed that I mentioned in the show itself before was that there was a motivation by the Unit Corps itself to minimize the amount of documentation it created so that their dealings would be harder to track and perhaps prosecute by their competitors and opponents within the court. And while there is certainly some level of truth to this, that's not a particularly satisfying answer. Especially in this case where the head guy himself, Zheng He, went out of his way to make sure that records of his achievements were literally carved into stone stales for the ages.

Obviously, he wasn't trying to be all hush-hush about it. The Ming, especially in its early eras, tended to have a very hot-cold relationship with commerce, and especially foreign commerce. Its founder, Hongwu, famously put the entire empire into what he envisioned as a more or less permanent lockdown, on par with the Tokugawa-era rules regarding near-zero tolerance for foreign trade in Japan in the near same period. Yet his son, the Yongle Emperor, then totally unmade those policies and oversaw the treasure fleet's expeditions, only to have them permanently mothballed by his successor's successor, the Shenda Emperor. It's enough back and forth to make you seasick, isn't it? The decision to end the voyages is probably tricky enough in terms of why, but there are several factors at work,

because after all, when are there not? For one, the sheer cost of it all. It's impossible to truly guess just what the upkeep on a fleet as massive and labor-intensive as the treasure fleet must have been, but it was surely titanic. Tack onto that payment for the crews, the gifts and receptions for the foreign guests and embassies, and all the associated costs such pageantry necessarily entailed, and you're looking at an enterprise that one could easily imagine far outstripped any value that the import such missions brought back could hope to achieve. Of course, at the time, that was kind of the point, wasn't it? Look at us, we're the Great Ming, we're the biggest, bestest, richest, most

powerful nation ever, and there's nothing that we cannot do. Which totally works, at least for a while. That was until you started pairing it with other hugely expensive projects, like, oh, I don't know, building an entire new capital city from scratch in the north. A related point there is that with the shift back northward, that brought the Ming's attention far more back to the constantly looming border threat of the steppe nomads. And then there's Yongle's constant need to seek them out and engage them in prohibitively costly campaigns. Let's also remember that this is the early 1400s, which, as far as centuries go, pretty much sucked for everyone. Climate catastrophes abounded, meaning that the state needed to cut taxes and dole out disaster relief expenses,

often year after year after year, to the same formerly lucrative areas, usually. Taken all together, it's easy to see how these compounding and ever-mounting costs could have really begun digging into the imperial piggy bank and arouse a lot of worry and consternation from who else those eternal killjoys the confucian ministers oh yes the confusions it always seems to come back to their sourpuss hatred of fun doesn't it well at least in this case their age-old hatred and distrust of the eunuchs in court combined with their own viewpoints on the nature of economy and trade. The Confucians, you may recall, had a markedly different idea of how the empire's economy should function than the

mercantile and freewheeling Yongle, Zhenghe, or the Mongolian rulers before them. They viewed the key to political stability as being economic stability, as in very little in and as little as possible out. If the realm was a body politic, then it made no sense to consume unnecessary foreign delicacies at the expense of draining off the body's very lifeblood. Sure, a few very wealthy elites got all kinds of gizmos and goodies, but what of the populace at large? What did they receive from the exploits of these fantastically expensive voyages, other than empty bellies when the imperial granaries were not refilled, and sorrow when disaster swept away their farms and families? Tales of long-necked Qilin were not going to cut it for them, in terms of their day-to-day needs.

To Confucian sensibilities, the Chinese economy was, and ought to be, a fundamentally closed system, with government revenue directly related to the taxation of a finite amount of land, rather than some pie-in-the-sky pursuit of amoral, filthy profit. Such had been their driving motivation, for instance, in seeking to destroy and erase the new policies of Wang Anshu back in the mid-11th century during Northern Song. And it seems feasible enough a reason to me that it would be enough of a reason to try to, whoops, lose, as much of the documentation of the treasure fleet's successes as they could manage. Better to just forget about it, lest anyone strive to repeat it in the future. And in terms of it hurting commerce and industry, well, as a certain resident of Gotham once said, it's not about the money, it's about sending a message. Raymond S. asked, do some or most modern Chinese have some sense of their family heritage

in regard to the ancient stories of China? I know ancestor veneration is important, but how much do they know or think about the history of their people witnessed not just in the last 1-200 years, but many generations ago? Like everywhere, most people come from peasants or maybe slaves, so not a lot is known, most likely. But the DNA, the family history, what do you think the average Han Chinese person in Shanghai would have in their own family's history, or know where their ancestors came from originally or descended from. Does anyone think or care about this? The Chinese populace at large has had a dalliance with family names certainly considerably longer than most other East Asian cultures and its

neighbors, such as Japan and Korea, where such contrivances only really left the aristocracy for the peasantry as of the late 19th century as a result of family registration reforms. That defutilization of China millennia ago, in the aftermath of the Zhou dynasty, meant that just about everyone has been carrying around family names there since the latter half of about the Han dynasty, which completed the process that had begun in the spring and autumn period about 500 years before that. Surnames can and have been used to assert some ancient connection to a legendary or even mythical figure from the ancient era. Cao Pi, for instance, rather infamously used his family's name to assert a lineage connection to the Yellow Emperor from the dawn of time.

Likewise, the Liu's of the Imperial Tang asserted that they had somehow linked their genetic line back to Lao Tzu, though evidence really heavily suggests that they had just concocted that wholesale. They were much more Turkic than they were the progeny of Lao Tzu. Regardless, unlike the European tradition where certain houses or clans were distinctly noble, such as the Holullerzollerns, the Bourbons, the Romanovs, the Stuarts, just to name a few, all Chinese dynastic surnames are common in origin. The imperial clan of the Tang Dynasty, for instance, the Lys, which I may have just missaid as the Liyos, but they were the Lys, was one of the most common

names in China today, and the Han dynasty was founded and ruled by the Liu's. In particular, its founder Liu Bang, who was of distinctly peasant stock, as were the Zhu clan of the Ming. As a consequence, all of the quote-unquote royal names have always been shared by many other non-royal family lines, with the exception, of course, of the royal houses of non-Chinese origin, such as the Mongol Bojigins and the Manchu Isangyoros. It's with no small degree of irony that the name that you might think of most immediately of as being royal in meaning, Wang, literally meaning king, has never headed a dynastic order. In fact, it was the Tang period that saw the last official use of the truly ancient noble house names from the Zhou period and before. Tang also saw one of the

widest periods of the imperial clan bestowing their name as a reward upon particularly valued subjects. In the Song and beyond, many family names, even those without any nobility or heritage attached to them, began to organize into sort of corporatized units and start keeping track of their own genealogical records. So that is where the widespread practice of ancestral veneration and clan solidarity and keeping track of your bloodline beyond the royalty itself ultimately stemmed from, that widening out of the idea of family ties in a formalized sense. Even so, it was exceptionally tough to keep track of just who was related to who and how, with so many people sharing so relatively few names it could prove to be a real pickle, a problem that continually raised its ugly head when it came to, for instance, potential marriage prospects. Markedly unlike many of the noble and royal houses of Europe, the Chinese have long wished to avoid accidentally incestuous relationships,

and some regions of China have long held, either in an unofficial or sometimes even official capacity, a prohibition or taboo on two people who shared the same surname to be wed. In the modern age, most ties to clan or surname solidarity have been effectively severed, as has most people's interest in determining their specific genealogical background. I liken it to the way that we usually thought about our own family names in the U.S. prior to the advent of services like 23andMe. That really revitalized that whole sort of looking back into our genetic DNA history and determining family origins hundreds of years back. Before that, a family name was just a family name. It just didn't carry much meaning beyond that.

And it had been that way for quite a while. Anyways, back to China. It's relatively even harder than that to really be sure of where your specific line of the family came from. People and even entire clans have been known to change their surnames entirely in order to avoid persecution, or as a reward from a monarch, like I said before, or even just to adopt names that were more Chinese or more common to the aesthetics of the time. An example of that last is the once rather common surname Sima, which was a name of near nobility, essentially meaning master of horses. It's one of the four big names of the Han era. And yet, as its usage

declined, and as Chinese surnames more and more came to uniformly fit into that monosyllabic form that we understand them to be today, many of the Sima's opted to abbreviate their name just to Ma in order to better fit in. Now, the Sima name still totally exists in China, but it is extremely uncommon today. The only two-character surname that's even in the top 400 is Ouyang, sitting at 169. In the end, in a nation where the top 10 surnames account for more than half of the total population, it's not particularly meaningful to try to backtrace your own origins too far or to take them too terribly seriously. Now, that is not to say that there are not groups that do take these things very, very seriously and do keep very meticulous records of their families. For instance,

the descendants of Confucius are well known in China for very assiduously keeping track of their lineage and line. And I'm sure that there are many, many, many other examples of that as well. But for the average Joe, it's not really much that they think about in their day-to-day lives. Eric M. asks about things that he saw on Chinese dramas. He noticed that in the course of trials and judgments, that the officials there would draw a lot from a jar or a container and then throw it as a sentence is passed. And he asked, what are those? What are some, is one of them a random, oops, you guess you go free sort of thing? Is there some sort of symbolism? And he adds that this is most common in Chinese shows,

but he's also seen it in Vietnam and Korean shows as well, so there's obviously some Chinese influence there. Do not say that King One's hexagrams are ineffective. Fear only that the diviner's reading is untrue. So I'm pretty sure that the lots you're referring to are yarrow sticks, or in Chinese, lingtian. And what they are is a particular form of divination tied directly to that classic of classics, the yi ting, the book of changes. So in terms of this ritual, what the most common way of doing this

is that they're bunched together in groups of 50 sticks, and they're all pre-marked, and one is removed prior to the consultation. And then a specific question is asked. And then the remaining 49 are cast. Four are removed. The remainder recast. Another four taken out. And it's just repeated and repeated again until it's determined somehow through a esoteric process that is way above my pay grade, to be frank, that a particular hexagram has been cast. So what in the world is a hexagram? I hear you

asking. Why, it is a group of six parallel horizontal lines, any or all of which may or may not have a center point break in them. In all, there are 64 possible combinations, each according to certain elemental slash physicalash-physical-slash-spiritual properties of the universe. Note here, if you're familiar with the flag of South Korea, you can remember that surrounding the central red and blue yin-yang emblem, there are four sets of non-repeating three lines. Now, those are actually trigrams, or half of a full hexagram, and their meaning is earth, air, fire, and water, respectively. But they come from the same source, the I Ching. So once the hexagram has been cast from the lots,

it can be looked up in the Book of Changes and its meaning then interpreted, according to the will of fate or the universe or whatever you want to call it. The closest analog in the West that immediately comes to mind is reading a tarot deck, or asking a question to the Oracle of Delphi. There's not going to be a particularly direct answer given, and it's as much up to the interpretation of the practitioner to intuit or understand the meaning implied as it will, by its very nature, be vague enough to broker any number of interpretations, possibly. Now, in the West, one of the most famous uses of the hexagrams of the I Ching is Philip K. Dick's dystopian alternate history novel, The Man in the High Castle. It's now, many of you probably know, also a major HBO show,

but if you're unfamiliar with that still, the central premise is that it's an alternate reality in which the Axis powers won the Second World War, leading to the division of North America, and it's heavily implied the rest of the world, between the greater German Third Reich and the Japanese Empire. As a brief aside, it's actually rather fascinating that Philip K. Dick, in the course of his writing the story, actually used the I Ching divination of this very sort whenever the plot brought him to a crossroads in his writing, and then he'd take it from there. Anyways, back to the story. Several of the characters throughout the book routinely consult the I Ching, or as they most frequently refer to

it, the Oracle, for major decisions in their lives. Trade Minister Tagomi's consultation of the Oracle, for instance, not only reveals one of the central mind-bending plot points, but is also the basis of the book's very name, as well as the name of the alternate history novel within the book, depicting an alternate history fiction of the Allies winning the war, but not quite in the way that we know it. Yeah, you should totally go see it and or read it more correctly. Go read the book. It's great. So how he does this is basically what I said before, casting his sticks and then deriving the hexagram piece by piece. He winds up casting hexagram number 61, which is the trigram of wind over the trigram of

lake with the meaning of inner truth. And it reads as follows. Pigs and fishes, good fortune. It furthers one to cross the great water. Perseverance furthers. So you got all that? Of course you do. But just in case, here is the symbolic interpretation. Wind over lake, the image of inner truth. Thus, the superior man discusses criminal cases in order to delay executions. Alright, then here's one of several interpretations from the book's characters. In dealing with other people, there are invisible forces which manifest themselves as visible effects. The cat's paws on a lake are the result of an unseen wind.

But when one seeks to influence someone, one must seek the invisible forces which stir them. By intuiting them, and by placing your goal on the path of those forces, one establishes a bond which can help you achieve your goal. The castle is an illusion. No matter how high its walls, the wind whistles Or, put yet one more way, must remember that they exist. Our inner worlds are shaped by the stories that we tell ourselves, and our sense of justice must be based on a profound understanding of this. There are fictions within fictions within fictions that lie at the heart of the truth. All right, crystal clear, right? You know exactly what that means. But keep in mind that that is just one of the 64 possible answers to any question you might ask. Such methods of consulting the spirits and asking them for guidance has been a part of Chinese civilization virtually since its inception,

and was taken very seriously by the populace at large. As for the government, even though Confucian scholars and even many modern mainlanders somewhat sneer down their noses at such mysticism, even they have largely had to bow to the real effects of such things, both practical and political, even if they claim not to believe in the metaphysical aspects. For Confucians, especially Neo-Confucians of the Song period, the I Ching divinations served as a cultural touchstone to the masses that could guide the populace back into their fold and away from the negative, world-denying, philosophical mumbo-jumbo of Taoism and Buddhism. It had all the trappings of spiritual consultation and served very much the same effect, but was in fact, according to many of their arguments at least, actually, quote,

a rich repository of indigenous concepts, concepts that could be used to provide a vision of pre-Chin rationalism and a celebration of life that contrasted starkly with Confucianism's chief rivals, end quote. One of the big debates among Confucians of the 11th century, for instance, was not about whether fate was a real thing—it certainly was—but whether it was an inevitability. Or whether it was, quote, something to be realized through moral exertion, not simply accepted passively as a given, end quote. As put by the Emishi village wise woman in one of my favorite movies of all time, Princess Mononoke, when revealing to the Prince Ashitaka that he'd been mortally cursed by a demonic spirit, quote, you cannot alter your fate, my prince, but you can rise to meet it if

you so choose, end quote. Personally, I find such philosophies extremely compelling and could probably talk about it for at least another hour or more until I'd lost absolutely everyone in an incomprehensible stew of arcana and pop cultural references. Instead, let's briefly move on to the non-arcane, real-world effects such beliefs hold sway over. In terms of the political realm, the Chinese throne, and those of other kingdoms likewise to the same concept of framework, were justified in their power to the mandate of heaven, which stipulated that the ruler and the government derived its legitimacy from pleasing Now, whether you the individual took that literally, or even seriously, was rather immaterial. The government's mandate to rule rested on that concept, and the populace at large believed in it.

Thus, whether a product of spiritual turbulence or just angry peasants with pitchforks, a dynastic regime that had fallen out of balance with the necessary qualities of good and just rule was liable to feel the very, very real effects of such negligence. How's this for a callback? The invisible forces which guide us may do so for better or for ill, but we must remember that they exist. Our inner worlds are shaped by the stories we tell ourselves, and our sense of justice must be based on a profound understanding of this. There are fictions within fictions within fictions that lie at the heart of truth.

Thus, if we say that the Chinese peasantry at large was very interested in such rituals and ceremonies, the imperial governments were positively obsessed with ritual propriety and demonstrating, constantly, that they were doing all the things that they were supposed to do to ensure good harvests, nice weather, and peaceful borders. Because otherwise, it was their necks. So that's largely why you'd see such ceremonies and pageantry happening in the course of official functions, such as trials and court cases. To some extent, yeah, it is there to offer counsel of a sort to the overseeing magistrate. Yeah, albeit in a very oracle-huffing-cave-fume sort of way. But at least as much as that, it was the appearance of having what amounted to divine

sanction for the judgment being handed down, whatever that might be, whether the officials actually consulting them believed in it or not. It still conferred a degree of supernatural legitimacy on such decisions, and thereby to the dynastic order as a whole. Okay, well that will just about wrap things up for this year's Q&A. I'd once again like to thank each of you who sent in your queries. I had a great time digging into them and answering them, and I hope that you found it enjoyable and illuminating to hear what I found. And of course, a huge thanks to everyone else, all of you out there who've chosen to be a part of this pretty incredible milestone for this ongoing journey

through the history of China. It has been and continues to be an extremely rewarding and pleasurable experience on my part, and hopefully yours as well. Next time, and I'm really crossing my fingers to get this out before year's end now that my work has come to its holiday break point, and I'm certainly still not traveling anywhere, we'll be launching right back into the mid-Ming of the 15th century. So here's to the next 10 million. Happy holidays to all of you. Here's to a better 2022, we hope. And as always, thanks for listening. dedicated to exploring the ambiguities and nuances of the past. From a revolution of hope and liberty, to the infamous reign of terror, you can't understand the modern world without understanding the French Revolution.

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