The History of China - #32 - Xin 1: Han, Interrupted

Episode Date: July 27, 2014

Confucian Wang Mang overthrows Han and sets up his Xin Dynasty to renew the Golden Age of Zhou through land nationalization, wealth redistribution, and currency reform. It seemed like a great idea on paper, but in practice things begin to horribly wrong almost immediately. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. It was October 7th, year 23 CE, and China convulsed with rebellion against the imperial throne in Chang'an. The imperial army, which less than a week prior had numbered more than 420,000 troops, had been utterly crushed, and those who had survived, made up mostly by this point of criminals released from prison on the condition that they fight, have fled into the countryside to avoid death.

Three days prior, the rebel armies had breached the capital city's defensive walls resulting in door-to-door combat as they cut their way to the heart of the imperial quarter dynasty waits for his inevitable death, surrounded by his nine wives, 27 consorts, and a thousand of his hardened loyalists making final preparations on what would be their doomed last stand. As the rebels closed in around him on the top floor and prepared to execute him, Emperor Wang must have wondered how it had come to this. Today, we ask the same question, looking back over the 20-year reign of the usurper Emperor Wang Meng, and what he had hoped to accomplish and improve from the sputtering Han he had replaced, and how it had all gone so horribly wrong. No, you didn't miss an episode. You're in the right place. This is Episode 30, Han Interrupted. this is episode thirty han interrupted last time we left off with the death of emperor ai in one b Xian. Dong was summarily stripped of his command,

after which he and his wife committed suicide to avoid the high probability of further punishment against him and his clan. In the days that followed, the Empress Dowager summoned her nephew Wang Meng to take up the post. This, you may recall, hadn't been Wang Meng's first stint as commander. He had briefly held the position between 7 and 6 BCE, but had been forced to resign following an incident insulting the then-Empress Dowager Fu, and had only narrowly avoided being demoted to commoner status as a result. He had spent the interceding half-decade doing his level best to stay off the radar and out of any of the imperial court's target lists. But now, the 44-year-old was back at the helm of Han,

and just in time to watch it scrape up against the existential iceberg it had been barreling toward for more than a decade. Since Emperor Ai had died airless, the Grand Empress Dowager and Wang Meng were forced to scour the family tree for a suitable surviving relative. They came up with the last surviving son of Emperor Yuan, the nine-year-old Prince Liu Jizi of Zhongshan. He would be enthroned as Emperor Ping, with Wang Meng as his regent, and the first thing Regent Wang decided to do with his reinstated power was to perform a bit of housecleaning in the imperial court. As was hopefully made apparent in episode 29, Han court politics had become an absolute nightmare by

the time of Ai's death. The imperial Liu clan was always there of course, but they had been joined by not only the Wangs of the Empress Dowager and Wang Meng himself, but the Ding and Fu clans who had been swept into power by Ai's unexpected ascension to the throne. It had been the matriarch of the Fu clan, she who had demanded the title of Empress, who had swept Wang Meng out of power in the first place, and he wasn't about to let that happen again. Wang ordered the Dings and Fus demoted back to their pre-Ai positions, and in the case of Grand Empress Dowager Fu, posthumously, and exiled them from the capital back to their ancestral lands. Some years later, Huang Meng would add the final post-mortem insult to Fu by ordering her and Consort Ding's bodies disinterred and all jade burial shells, which were symbols of imperial royalty, stripped from their corpses before returning them to Dingtao, where he had their graves flattened and covered with thorns. The young Emperor Ping had, from birth, been a sickly and infirm child. He was periodically

afflicted with an ailment of the heart which, when it hit him, resulted in circulation problems so severe that his lips, hands, and feet would turn blue from oxygen deprivation. Throughout his young life, his grandmother had hired physicians and spiritualists to attempt to cure the boy, but with limited success. He remained a weak and sickly child even upon his accession to the throne in 1 BCE, and his regent Wang Meng would be in effectual control of the government throughout Ping's reign. Wang Meng was noted for his strict adherence to Confucian principles, and in his personal life for his stringent asceticism. He had long been a supporter of the late Emperor Yuan's goal

of revitalizing the policies and culture of the ancient Zhou dynasty, and in fact went even further, glorifying the Shang and Xia as well. Now in the driver's seat, he immediately set about implementing policies to bring back those utopian days of yesteryear. In a callback to both one of the founders of the Zhou dynasty and the hero of Wang Meng's own hero, Confucius, the revered Duke of Zhou, who had codified the mandate of heaven and suppressed the Shang remnant, as discussed in Episode 8, Wang Meng managed to convince his aunt, the Grand Empress Dowager, to name him Duke An Han, meaning, literally, the Duke who made Han secure. This, in spite of the fact that the Han Dynasty had conspicuously never used the title or position of duke. Soon thereafter, Duke Wang was entrusted with the

power to make major state decisions on the emperor's behalf from the Empress Dowager, as at age 69, she was no longer very capable of effectually managing state affairs, or at least that's what he managed to convince her of. Just like that, Wang Meng became the most powerful man in China. Historians remain unclear on Wang's motivations. Early historians were undoubtedly biased against him, and more modern interpretations have tried with some success to undo the anti-usurper spin. But the relative dearth of surviving first-hand accounts makes getting inside the mind of Wang Meng, well, impossible. So was Wang actively trying to isolate and politically weaken his adolescent emperor by barring much of his family from visiting him in the capital and then marrying his own

daughter to Ping in 4 CE? Or was he attempting to do what was best for the dynasty by keeping the more subversive and destructive elements of the Liu clan that had been in a downward spiral for generations away from the suggestible monarch, and especially preventing yet another whirlwind Empress Dowager from sweeping in and throwing everything out of order once more. What is not in doubt is that at the time, the people thought that he was just the best. And even the most overtly hostile of accounts of Wang Meng's rise to power, that of the historian Ban Gu of the late 1st century CE, grudgingly acknowledged that the peasantry unequivocally adored the man. And in the year

four alone, the imperial court received more than half a million petitions from across the empire to grant him even higher honors, which he, true to his ascetic form, of course refused. Less ambiguously, the following year Wang Meng revived a supposedly ancient tradition from the early Zhou period, as detailed in the Classic of Rites. Though curiously, there doesn't appear to have been any record of anyone receiving them until Wang Meng himself. Called the Jiou Ci, or the Nine Bestowments,

it was a ceremony to award the most loyal and extraordinary imperial officials. The Nine Bestowments were, according to the Classic of Rites, 1. The gift of the wagon and horses, for when the official is appropriate in his modesty so that he does not need to walk anymore. 2. The gift of the wagon and horses, for when the official is appropriate in his modesty so that he does not need to walk anymore. Two, the gift of clothing, when the official writes well and appropriately to show his good deeds. Three, the gift of armed guards, when the official is brave and willing to speak the truth so that he can be protected. Four, the gift of written music, when the official has love in his heart so that he can teach the music to the people.

5. The gift of a ramp, when the official is appropriate in his acts so that he can walk on the ramp and maintain his strength. 6. The gift of a red door, when the official maintains his household well, so that his household can be shown to be different. Seven. The gift of arms, bows, and arrows. When the official has good conscience and follows what is right,

so that he can represent the central government and stamp out treason. Eight. The gift of an axe. When the official is strong, wise, and loyal to the imperial household so that he can execute the wicked. And finally, nine, the gift of wine, for when the official is filially pious so that he can sacrifice the wine to his ancestors. From this point on, the nine bestowments would become almost inherently bound to the idea of usurpation, and typically only sought by powerful officials wanting to display their complete control over the Empire in the run-up to their officially overthrowing their puppet monarch.

It would indeed be rare for a usurpation to occur without first having conducted the Nine Bestowments, and equally rare to have granted the Nine Bestowments without there subsequently being a usurpation. Emperor Ping died in the winter of the year 5, at 13 years of age, and by all accounts it seems to have been the result of stone-cold murder by his regent, Wang Meng. Having seemed to have outgrown the heart condition, Wang was likely counting on to do the job for him. Ping was becoming a thorn in his regent's side, and moreover dangerously close to coming of age and taking up power for himself.

What's more, Ping seems to have held a grudge against his regent for purges against his uncles, and the insistence that his beloved sisters and mother never visit the capital. And so, Wang presented his charge with peppered wine, which was at the time thought to keep evil spirits away. But this wine was spiked with poison. Once the toxin began to take effect, Wang Meng busied himself in covering his tracks by writing out a plea to the gods, begging them to take his life in the young emperor's stead and locking the heavenly petition away this was doubly useful as if ping had somehow recovered he could be shown evidence that his loyal regent wang mong had nothing to do with the poisoning and had b faithful to the last. In an especially cruel twist, Ping would writhe in agony for days as the poison burned its way through him before finally succumbing to death. Once again, the Han Empire was faced with yet another succession crisis. Worse, the late Emperor Yuan was officially out of progeny, and so the imperial court was forced to fall back to cadet branches of

the Liu clan, specifically the progeny of Yuan's father and Ping's great-grandfather, Emperor Xuan. Though there were 53 surviving great-grandsons of Xuan, Wang Meng managed to successfully argue that it was not appropriate for members of the same generation to succeed each other, in spite of the fact that literally just six years ago, he had approved of exactly that when Ping succeeded his cousin, Ai. So they would turn to Xuan's great-great-grandsons, of which there were 23. And here we finally see why Wang Meng had basically argued against his own previous succession policy. All of the candidates were either infants or toddlers. You know, the kind of potential emperors who would

need a regent for a good long time. Especially one as trustworthy and totally not regicidal as Wang Meng. But the interviews and examinations of the genealogies of these would-be monarchs dragged on. And in southern Chang'an, a mysterious stone with mysterious red markings mysteriously turned up. Upon it etched the words, quote, Wang Meng, the Duke of Anhan, should be emperor, end quote. Hmm, where might that have come from? In the aftermath of the enigma wrapped in a riddle that was the marked stone, Wang Meng convinced his aunt Empress Dowager that he ought to be granted the title of Jia Huangdi, meaning Acting Emperor, until the heir of Emperor Xuan could be selected and raised.

He then did a little creative editing with his own genealogy to make it appear that he was a direct descendant of the legendary Yellow Emperor. And yeah, you see where this is going. At last, in the spring of 6 CE, the heir of Han was selected, the one-year-old Prince Liu Ying, whom acting Emperor Wang Meng had proclaimed favored by the gods. The toddler, however, was not enthroned, but merely received the title of crowned prince. He was given the subruquet ruzi, meaning infant, another callback to the time of the Duke of Zhou, who had similarly nicknamed the eventual King Wu of Zhou when he was in his charge. Even today, Liu Ying is commonly known as Emperor Ru Zi, that is, Emperor Baby. Now acting emperor, Wang Meng began to remake the

dynasty in the way he'd spent his entire adult life thinking it ought to be run, and which he was further inspired by what was called the Old Texts, writings in an ancient script that had been found about 150 years before, during renovations at Confucius' ancestral home. If genuine, as Wang Meng certainly believed them to be, these texts were significantly older than the other Confucian classics. Among other things, they described the institutions of an era of perfect government

under the ancient Duke of Zhou, taking those instructions as the goal to strive towards. While acknowledging that perfect recovery was probably not going to happen, he sought to renew the golden age of old, and it was a doozy of a change. First, of course, was bringing back the surface features of the ancient Zhou dynasty beginning with its five grades of nobility duke marquis earl viscount and baron on its head. He began ordering the recall of gold-based currency that had become the standard of the Han, and had been pressed into a single easy-to-remembered denomination. In its stead, Wang began issuing a far more complicated series of bronze-based denominations. The intention was to have two sets of round coins, denoting 1 and 50 denominations, respectively, and a further two sets of knife coins, directly evocative of the Zhou dynasty, valued at 500 and 5000,

respectively. But that wasn't even the major shift. It was bad enough that bronze was a far more common element than gold, and as such far easier to counterfeit, but the 50 denomination coins had only 1 20th of the copper found in the 1 denominations, and the 500 and 5 thousand with proportionally even less. What this means is that rather than the value of the coin being tied to the value of the ore contained in it, the value was now determined simply by the number that happened to be on the coin. The result was an abrupt shift from a gold standard economy to a fiduciary, or fiat system of currency, in which the value of coins in circulation was in name only. Now, fiat currency is all well and good when it has the backing of an established system or government. But to a government deep in the throes of flux or revolution, it really tends to fall flat.

You might think of the Roman denarii post Nero, or revolutionary French assignats, or early American continental dollars. And so it was with Wang Meng's Neo-Zhou coinage. But with the simultaneous recall of the entirety of China's gold reserves to be stored away in the imperial treasury, the economy would quickly grind to an alarming halt. Even as far away as the Roman Empire, the effects of this monumental shift in economic policy were felt.

The first real emperor of Rome, Augustus, was forced to ban the purchase of imported silks with gold coins that had suddenly, and to him inexplicably, become irreplaceable. Within China, the shift began to backfire almost immediately. The people lacked any faith in the nominal value of the new currency, and the relative abundance of copper compared to gold led to widespread price inflation and a steep increase to counterfeiting operations. Which means that insofar as China yet operated on a cash system, it was back to barter for everyone. Though to be fair, the large majority of its 60 million citizens had always been on the

barter system and had probably never seen one of these coins in their life. The economic chaos, combined with a creeping suspicion within the Liu clan that acting Emperor Wang Meng might not actually have their best interests at heart, led to a series of revolts, breaking out under the Marquis of Anzhong, the Governor of Zhai, and the Marquis of Yanxiang, all of which are in modern Henan and Shandong provinces. Each of them justified their rebellions, claiming they were attempting to replace the puppet-crowned prince Ru Ziyin. All of these attempts, however, were repulsed by the imperial army, which further cemented the idea in Wang Meng's mind that he evidently held the mandate of heaven and the

right to rule in his own name. Heck, they'd practically gift-wrapped it for him. Thus, on January 10th of 9 CE, Wang Meng officially laid claim to the imperial throne and deposed both the four-year-old Han placeholder and the Han dynasty itself. The bloodless Ku would see Ru Ziying simply demoted from crowned prince to the nominal duke of ding an but wang mung never intended the child to rule anything even as a mere duke or even the most basic of education. Though Liu Ying would survive his usurper's reign, as an adult, he couldn't even recognize common animals like cows, pigs, or dogs. Emperor Wang Meng dubbed his new dynasty, well, exactly that, the Xin Dynasty, which is literally the new or renewed.

His goal? To make manifest once again the legendary golden age of the early Zhou dynasty, as depicted by Confucius. He crowned his wife, Lady Wang, Empress, and his youngest surviving son was named his heir, since the elder son was deemed lacking sufficient talent. As a mark of how committed the Qin Dynasty was to reviving the practices and therefore success of the Zhou, Emperor Wang decreed that all locations and geographical features were from then on to be reverted to their ancient names. Even the capital city wasn't safe from renaming, and he

decreed that it would no longer be Chang'an, but instead, henceforth, it would be Chang'an. In one of those terribly confounding instances of Chinese homophones, the word for eternal and constant sound the same. So it went from being called eternal peace to constant peace, though in all likelihood, nobody really noticed or cared. This renaming policy, however, would prove to be a rather embarrassing boondoggle, as it understandably generated a large degree of confusion about what anyone was talking about even official imperial edicts were forced to include what was essentially a cipher to decode the unfamiliar place names so that their recipients would be able to understand which locations they were actually talking about. As the empire's gold continued to pour into the treasury and out of circulation, Emperor Wang Meng instituted yet another set of economic reforms, this time even more revolutionary than his venture into fiat currency.

In what frankly sounds like it could have been pulled straight out of the Communist Manifesto, Emperor Wang wrote, quote, The strong possess the lands, but the thousands of Mu, while the weak have nowhere to place a needle, end quote. But in his own mind, there was nothing revolutionary about it. He was simply reinstating what had, his own Confucian texts told him, worked so very well before. Each man would have his share of land to till, though it would in principle be owned by the state itself. That's right, Wang's solution was land nationalization, in the style of the Zhou kings of old. He called the system Wang Tian, meaning king's land, but it was heavily based on the Zhou land distribution system called Jingtian Zidu, or the Wellfield System.

It worked like this. All lands held by estates with more than 600 mu, or about 100 acres, was confiscated and redistributed. If a family had less than 8 members, but more than 15 acres of land, the excess would likewise be redistributed. A given parcel of land would be divided into nine five-acre components. You might think of a number or hash sign. The eight pieces along the edges would be privately worked by their tenants, while the central component would be held in common to be worked by the surrounding serfs, with the lord taking his profit from there, in addition to the 10% tax levied against the peasants' personal holdings. Once implemented, all further land transactions were prohibited, and criticism of the redistribution

punishable by exile. Landless peasantry, who were the obvious beneficiaries of the land reallocation, already constituted the vast majority of China's populace. But Wang Meng expected them to grow even larger, since he was also prohibiting the practice of slavery. In the following year, 10 CE, Wang's government empowered a state-controlled economic adjustment agency to control price fluctuations on food and textiles, with offices in Chang'an, Luoyang, Handan, Linzi, Wangcheng, and Chengdu. It was charged with buying up excess production and setting fixed prices in three-month increments. That same agency would also become responsible for state-sponsored lending to the poor and to entrepreneurs, setting its interest rates between 3% and 10% annually,

as contrasted to the private loan market where upwards of 30% interest was the norm. That same year, Huangmeng implemented two brand new taxes. You'll remember that historically, the only taxes collected by dynastic governments had been on property or a head tax. The first new tax was called a sloth tax, which imposed financial penalties on landowners who left their fields uncultivated, as well as on urbanites whose properties were left without trees, and on citizens who refused to do labor. It was payable in textile tributes,

or, should those not be forthcoming from the offender, forced labor for the state. The second new tax was truly unprecedented, income tax. It was set at a rate of all profits for professionals and skilled laborers. Emperor Wang Meng, never the confusion, believed that his subjects would carry his decrees out to the letter. After all, for the vast majority of them, the reforms were in their direct self-interest. Lower taxes, free land, low interest loans? What's not to like?

But what he clearly hadn't taken into consideration, or was just too naively Confucian to really realize, was that those in his administration whom he was stripping the most from, you know, the elites, were the same contingent his government had to rely on to promulgate and enforce those decrees. Lo and behold, the gentry bureaucrats, large landowners, and wealthy merchants were none too thrilled with the prospect of losing their property, their free labor, and their income sources in the name of Confucian principles. In fact, they quite simply refused to carry them out, and loudly, repeatedly, angrily demanded that the Xin emperor rescind the changes that so threatened their lifestyles. No counter-voice of support would be forthcoming from the masses

who actually stood to benefit either, as without any way of informing the populace, save through transmission via his feudal elites, which they obviously refused to do, the average Chinese peasant had absolutely no idea that there had been a legal change at all in their status or rights. Wang Meng had bit the bureaucratic hand that fed him, and then expected it to pass the message on. As truly groundbreaking as his reforms were, faced with such universal opposition within his own bureaucracy, less than two years after their enactment, Wang Meng would embarrassingly be forced to roll back both the property allocation and anti-slave measures. Things were likewise off to a rocky start for the Xin Dynasty on the foreign relations front.

In 10CE, Emperor Wang Meng sent his ambassadors to the Xiongnu Khanate, now ruled by the descendant of Hu Hanyue Chanyu, known as Zhi Chanyu. They informed the vassal king that Xin had replaced Han, and requested that the Xiongnu Chanyu Xi, or the Great Seal of the Xiongnu Chanyu, which denoted the Xiongnu Chanyu Xi, or the Great Seal of the Xiongnu Chanyu, which denoted the Xiongnu status as Han ally and elevated semi-vassal nominally equal to the Son of Heaven, be returned to be replaced by a new Great Seal reflecting the change in government. In keeping with the policy of returning as much as possible to the Zhou system of titles, though, the new Great Seal issued had significantly altered language. The Xin Seal read 秦公女山友章, or The Badge of the Shan Yu of Gong Nu.

So here's why this was a big deal. First, seals were issued to foreign partners and allies, while badges were issued to vassals. Second, the title Shanyu failed to acknowledge the Xiongnu leader as the child of the open sky and nominal equivalent to their own son of heaven. And third, dude, you got my name wrong. Xiongnu, translated, means ferocious slave, emphasis on the ferocious, while gongnu means the significantly less terrifying, respectful slave. Not cool. As an aside, it's clear that offering the shengnu the token of nominal parity with Han hadn't been a huge deal for the Han dynasty's emperors. The real politic of the era had prioritized peace over

pomp, and the de facto military supremacy of the united Han over the broken and factionalized Xiongnu, regardless of the on-paper equivalence of the son of heaven and the child of the open sky, it simply hadn't been an issue. Until, that is, the Confucian fundamentalism of Wang Meng had undone all those decades of work, war, and sacrifice with this single ham-fisted attempt to revoke the title. Zhitan Yu initially accepted the new Xin seal, or badge, without giving it a close look. That night, the Xin ambassadors carried out their secondary orders to destroy the old seal of Han for the precise reason that they knew they duped the Xiongnu Chanyu

into accepting a much lower station in this new regime. The following day, realizing the switcheroo, Zhichanyu demanded his old seal back, to which the Xin ambassadors said no can do, and proceeded to lie their tongues off, claiming the seal's destruction had been an act of the gods. To the Chinese ambassador's faces, Zhe Chanyu accepted the patently lame excuse, but as soon as they left, he began planning for confrontation with this Xin dynasty by building defensive bulwarks within the Ordos Loop and beginning to encourage vassal kingdoms of the Shi Yu western regions to come back into the Xiongnu fold and pledge allegiance to him.

When word reached Wang Meng that the Chanyu, I mean, Shanyu, was so openly defying him, he declared war, intent on breaking up the regional power of the steppe confederacy once and for all wang's endgame was to divide and conquer the shangnu territories using twelve armies when he finished that he would then split their holdings into fifteen small easily manageable vassal kingdoms ruled by descendants of the late huuanye Chanyu. Under this strategy, he planned to crush the northern tribes with a force of more than 300,000 soldiers, and to that end began massing them along the northern border. And there they stayed, for months, which turned into years, fruitlessly waiting for the full strength that Wangmeng demanded, but would never arrive to engage the assault, and all the while straining the northern prefectures and far western vassal kingdoms to and beyond their breaking point, attempting to provision such a huge number of troops for such an inordinately long period of time. Several kingdoms of the far west would ultimately defect to the Xiongnu in 10 CE in response.

This same blunder occurred over and over with each of what had been Han's outlying tributary kingdoms. To the southwest, the Yue tribes of Guizhou, Sichuan, and Yunnan, whose chieftains the Han government had wisely granted titles of princes to just get them to shut up and stop rebelling already, found themselves suddenly and unceremoniously demoted to mere Marquis with the ascent of the sheen, likewise using the transparently lame cover of issuing new seals and then immediately destroying the old ones. Given the tremendous headache the Yue tribes had been to Han before they'd finally reached that aforementioned point of agreement, well, you can imagine just how well Wang Meng's insult went down. But Emperor Wang was unfazed.

This was supposed to be Confucius' utopian state, dammit, and Confucius didn't go around buying off his rivals with titles and awards. That was something for the likes of the Han, and Wang wasn't about to stoop to that, no matter how much of a tremendously bloody headache they gave him. Korea was little better. Wang had requisitioned a large number of the ethnic Joseon warriors to bolster that expeditionary force against Seongnu, that was still just sitting on the border waiting for enough soldiers to attack. But remember, Joseon had long been a fence-rider when it came to Sino-Seong new relations,

and few, if any of them, were in a huge hurry to jump to one side or the other. En masse, the Korean tribes refused the Shin requisition and fled imperial territory. When Wangmang sent a force to defeat and subdue them, it was soundly beaten back and forced to retreat. All of this was compounded when Wang had the Marquis of Gaozhu Li killed, and followed this up by remaining the mark Xiazhu Li, which was a huge insult since Gao means high or tall, while Xia means low or small. Enraged, the Koreans redoubled their attack along the Xin northeastern borders, further straining the already overtaxed imperial armies, who had expected the Koreans to help them,

not turn on them. We'll leave off here, with the Xin dynasty facing enemies to the north, northeast, south, and west. No, things don't look good, but China had been in this kind of position before, worse even, and survived and even pulled out a victory. In year 10, in spite of the huge challenges Emperor Wang Meng's Xin dynasty faced, all was not lost. Had things gone differently in the years that followed, it is possible that he might have pulled his utopian vision out of its nosedive and turned things around for his upstart reign. But all that would change the following year when the perennial boogeyman of ancient China once again reared its head, called both the cradle and sorrow of Chinese civilization, as well as the scourge of the sons of Han. I speak of the wild, untamable Yellow River, who in 11 CE will once again breach its wandering banks

with devastating results for the people who depended on her, and drown the Xin dynasty's already floundering prospects. Thank you for listening. Hey everyone, hope you enjoyed the show today. Personally, this has been one of the most interesting and fun to put together so far. And so I'd love to get your feedback, comments, questions, or anything else you might want to say regarding this podcast, China, or history in general. We're on Facebook at the History of China Podcast Community page, on Twitter under the handle at THOCpodcast,

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