The History of China - #76 - S&N 20: Taking Stock

Episode Date: September 29, 2015

So what does it all mean? Before stepping boldly into the Sui Dynasty, we take this episode to pan out to low-Earth orbit and watch the macro-developments of the past 300-plus years of Disunity, revie...wing the dramatic sweep of a period of time often left out of many Western historical understandings of Chinese history due to is sheer complexity and confusing nature.Time Period Covered:220-589 CE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 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
Starting point is 00:00:28 characters in modern history. Look for the Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts. Today's episode is made possible by you, the listeners. I'd love to see more of you beautiful people on Twitter, since we are under the handle at THOCpodcast, or on Facebook at facebook.com slash the history of China. And of course, you are always welcome at the website, the history of China dot wordpress dot com. I'm currently finishing up the latest series of maps to showcase this final phase of the age of disunion. So please check them out once I get them posted. Thanks again, and enjoy the show.
Starting point is 00:01:12 Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 76, Taking Stock And so we come at long last to the conclusion of what is probably one of the most daunting periods of Chinese history there is, at least in terms of sheer complexity and number of moving parts. The dreadful period of disunity has finally come to its end point. Emperor Wen of Sui has put the last of his competitors out to pasture and rendered their dynasties and capital cities alike little more than broken stones and rotting bones. It is his will, and his alone, that will guide the totality of China forward into the 7th century. Yet before pushing ahead, I feel compelled to look back, to take stock of the immense drama and tragedy that we've been waiting through, oh, now for some 13 months.
Starting point is 00:02:04 Looking at my feed records, I released episode 37, Things Fall Apart, on August 31st, 2014. And as of recording this, it is now September 29th, 2015. Out of the 75 episodes released prior to this, well, 76 if you count the biopic on Zhu Chongzhi, as of this point, half of them, 38 specifically, are solely covering the three-century period between the fall of the Eastern Han Dynasty in 220 and the establishment and supremacy of the Sui in 581. In all, it's totaled more than 210,500 words, give or take, and has more than 25 hours of finished recordings and who knows how many additional hours of mistakes and retakes on the proverbial cutting room floor. Seriously, if you've made it this far, and has more than 25 hours of finished recordings, and who knows how many additional hours of
Starting point is 00:02:45 mistakes and retakes on the proverbial cutting room floor. Seriously, if you've made it this far, you've been listening to me talk about this time period alone for more than an entire day at this point. It does boggle the mind. And I would have it no other way. I can think of no better output for my drive to research and relate this fascinating topic, and will continue to do so until, well, I guess I run out of material. Which is to say, for a long time to come. Given, then, that this 300-plus year period has been distilled down to bite-sized chunks by myself over the course of the last year and change, it seems only right that I take a moment to sort of stop and distill everything we've just been through. What does it all mean, really? What actually happened? Why have we been bothering to spend more than a year dredging through a section of time that many high school history
Starting point is 00:03:33 books simply gloss over in a paragraph or two? Seriously, I've taught it, and had to grit my teeth through this very section. Standard American middle school history books say of this era of massive social change, military conquest, and social upheaval, quote, when the Han dynasty collapsed, China split into several rival kingdoms, each ruled by military leaders. It lasted from 220 to 589. Although war was common, peaceful developments also took place at the same time. During this period, nomadic people settled in China. Some Chinese people adopted these nomads' culture, while the invaders adopted some Chinese practices. For example, one former nomadic ruler ordered his people to adopt Chinese names, speak Chinese, and dress like the Chinese. Thus, the cultures of the invaders
Starting point is 00:04:20 and traditional Chinese mixed. A similar cultural blending took place in Southern China. As a result of this mixing, Chinese culture changed. New types of art and music developed. New foods and clothing styles became popular. The new culture spread over a wider geographic area than ever before, and more people became Chinese." End quote. Yeah, that's it.
Starting point is 00:04:43 That was all there was. I hope that by this point, that makes you just as frustrated as it does me, because it's taking a time period that is literally longer than the respective lifetime of the United States, or the Western Roman Empire for that matter, and condensing it down into a stale, antiseptic, and most damningly boring two-and-a-half-paragraph blurb. On fell. Some nomads came. They mixed. Stuff changed. There was some art. Okay, on to the sui and tang. It's just insulting. And yet, having, again, now recorded some 25 hours on the topic and really just felt like I'm scratching the surface here, I also get it. It's a point in history that you either have to gloss over so
Starting point is 00:05:23 completely as to render it some boring intro paragraph, or you have to devote a year or more of your life to unraveling it just to get the basic details in enough order to effectively narrate. There's not a whole lot of middle ground there between the two extremes. After all, the Chinese don't call it the Period of Disunion, they call it the Six Dynasties. But even that doesn't even remotely do it justice, since the name comes from later historians only counting the dynastic lines they deemed legitimately Chinese and then discarded the rest. By my count, over the past three centuries, though, we've had not six powerful dynastic lines claiming the mantle of heaven in pretense,
Starting point is 00:06:01 but something just shy of three dozen, depending on how you want to count it. And so many of them were here and gone so quickly that it's almost like trying to count the individual sparks of a firework as it explodes. For anyone other than someone particularly focused on the period, it really can be summarized up in a paragraph or two, and that certainly saves on confusion, if nothing else. Because make no mistake, it is confusing. And if you've been confused as we've gone through it, well, join the party. Multiple places with the same names. Emperors with the same names.
Starting point is 00:06:34 Yes, I'm looking at you, Emperor Woos, all three dozen of you. The place names, which change and then change again and then are razed to the ground and then rebuilt as something completely different. And of course, all of the alien motivations, thoughts, and worldview from the figures involved. It really is a world apart and extremely difficult to get inside these people's heads, if indeed that's possible at all. But at the same time, in the midst of all these bewildering difficult details, there are, world-shaping stories and changes that would ripple across China, East Asia, and the world for centuries, and even millennia to come. China is still feeling the lasting ramifications of this period. You can still
Starting point is 00:07:16 very effectively identify the differing worldviews and cultures that stop on either bank of the Yangtze River. You might even say that really, the Northern and Southern period is at least culturally ongoing. I've found it immensely interesting to plumb the whys and the hows of the events that brought that about. And I hope, and have to assume if you've stuck it out this long, that you have too. So what I'd like to do today is essentially
Starting point is 00:07:41 give us one last look back at the macro perspective of the past 300 years. We won't be delving into the details, that's what the past 38 episodes have been for, but more just zooming out to a low Earth orbit and then hitting fast forward to summarize. And given what we've already learned and the nitty gritty, hopefully the macro view will help us see the greater picture all those individual pieces have been creating. The forest for the trees, as it were. Plus this will be the 20th episode in the Northern and Southern Suite, and I hope that you'll agree that 20 is a much nicer, rounder number than 19.
Starting point is 00:08:16 So let's get started. Part 1, The Three Kingdoms. The first phase of the period of disunity, and undoubtedly its most famous and romanticized, though relatively short when compared to the slog that was the 16 kingdoms period that would follow it, the six-decade struggle over the dying corpse of the once-mighty Han Empire would wind up setting the tone for much of the entire conflict, most particularly first dividing the empire into competing northern and southern states, with the relatively weaker Sun Wu and Shu Han states forced to grudgingly band together on the southern banks of the Yangtze, while the dominant military force of Cao Cao's state, Wei, was
Starting point is 00:08:55 critically stopped from crossing it in 208 at the Battle of Red Cliffs, preventing him from continuing his to-that-point unstoppable conquest in the South. And from that point, try as they might, the conflict grounded into what would be a 60 year stalemated meat grinder, producing a scale of carnage the likes of which had never been seen in China and possibly the world. By far the bloodiest overall period of the Age of Disunity, between combat, famine, disease, and populations simply leaving China altogether just to get away from all that, by the period's end, more than half the population recorded by the Han era census, a high point of more than 56 million, had been reduced to as little as 16 million.
Starting point is 00:09:39 Taking those figures as they stand, that would render the Three Kingdoms period the second deadliest conflict in all human history, only behind the Second World War, and something like 6 million more than the Mongolian hordes under Genghis Khan and his successors would ever kill in all of their conquests across Eurasia. As is the case in most conflicts, the tripartite states would by necessity and drive to outmaneuver their respective foes create some of the most rapid and radical advances in technology China had yet seen, with many of the greatest inventions of the age produced by none other than Zhuge Liang, a man you might reasonably suggest was akin to being the Leonardo da Vinci of 3rd century China. He would develop an early form of the wheelbarrow, called the wooden ox, that allowed men to vastly expand their capacity to lift and
Starting point is 00:10:20 carry just about anything. He also greatly advanced the already formidable repeating crossbow by adding a mechanism that would automatically reload and redraw the weapon once a coral had been fired with a single simple hand motion and still being able to maintain their aim with a capacity for as many as 10 bolts in a clip. In the north, the likewise brilliant engineer Ma Jun would construct a water-powered mechanical puppet theater for his emperor's amusement and further his studies of mechanical engineering by designing and constructing a chain pump system to irrigate the imperial gardens in the capital. But his crowning jewel would be the mechanical non-magnetic compass known as the Southern
Starting point is 00:10:58 Pointing Chariot, a technology so famous and useful that following the device's loss in the Jin Dynasty that followed, later engineers would spend more than two centuries trying to recreate it. Following the initial phase of conquest and attacks, the next and final major period of the Three Kingdoms would come about starting in 263, when the military commander of Shu Han committed the bulk of his forces in a three-pronged strike against Wei to the north, aimed at breaking through and securing a victory while Xu Han still possessed the strength to even do so. The gambit, however, would prove disastrous, and rather than achieving a breakthrough into the north, Xu rapidly crumbled under a counterattack, and by that winter its capital at Chengdu had fallen.
Starting point is 00:11:41 The following year, though, the state of Wei would likewise find itself relegated to the dustbin of history, but not through conquest, but rather through what we've all come to know very well over the course of this age, the trail from within. The ranking member of the powerful Sima family overthrew the last of the Cao emperors in 264 and established himself at the helm of his new Jin dynasty. With a beachhead in the south at last firmly established, the Wei-Kam-Jin state was able to pivot and drive directly eastward, using the Yangtze River itself that had so long stood as an impassable barrier to conquest, but now proved to be a superhighway. When hostilities recommenced in 279, the Jin's new and massive armada sailed all the way down the length of the Yangtze, sweeping aside all opposition and capturing the Wu capital in
Starting point is 00:12:29 the third month of 280. It seemed, for the moment, that China's awful period of tripartition was at last over. Part 2. Jin and the Sixteen Kingdoms. But this state of reunification would prove to be painfully fleeting, a mere decade in fact. Beginning in 291, a series of rebellions between eight of the powerful imperial princes over control of the developmentally disabled Jin emperor would plunge the empire back into bloody civil war. Worse still, it would result in five powerful tribes of resettled barbarian peoples, led at first by the Xiongnu, tasting the weakness that gripped the fractious Chinese state and themselves rising in a brutal war of conquest
Starting point is 00:13:09 over the north. Divided and hostile to one another, the factions of the Han people were unable to rally together to fend off the invasion from within. And by 317, the majority of the native Han people had fled with their government in exile southward, once again to the protective barrier of the Yangtze River. There, the critically weakened Jin Dynasty would reform itself at Jiankang, or Nanjing, and attempt futilely to retake the north once more. In the devastated heartlands of the north, the Xiongnu would at first take the lead of its new coalition, with its chieftain claiming lineage to the Han emperors and establishing himself as the new emperor of China, first calling his dynastic line Han, but then later changing it to Zhao. That kingdom would itself split into two hostile halves in 319, and by 328 the breakaway state had conquered the remainder of its parent. Later, Zhao would once again plunge into
Starting point is 00:14:02 internecine violence until it was ended altogether via conquest in 350. But 351 would see the meteoric rise of the state known historically as Former Qin, which would under its strong line of leaders reconquer the three other extant northern states and reunite the north in 376. Former Qin would turn its united forces southward, aiming to finish off the cowering Jin and reunite the empire for themselves. In 383, they launched their invasion of the south, but were shocked by the unexpected ferocity of the southern Chinese, who not only held their own against the vastly more numerous steppe confederation, but proved able to utterly rout the Qin army at the Battle of Fei River. In the
Starting point is 00:14:40 aftermath of this humiliating and demoralizing defeat, former Qin lost its lock on power over the confederation, and the northern empire shattered once again, with as many as seven mutually hostile kingdoms coexisting for periods as long as nine years. One of these competing mini-states came to call itself Northern Wei, led by a clan of the Xianbei tribe called the Tuoba, from what is now Hohat Inner Mongolia. The Tuoba chieftain succeeded where his adversaries had failed, and expanded southward. In the decades to follow, the Tuoba, from what is now Hohat in Mongolia. The Tuoba chieftain succeeded where his adversaries had failed, and expanded southward. In the decades to follow, the Tuoba Xianbei would conquer and absorb its rival northern kingdoms. By 439, the emperor of northern Wei had defeated the last of his rivals, and reunited the north once again. Meanwhile, in the south, the Jin finally succumbed to the weakness that had been devouring it from within.
Starting point is 00:15:25 In 420, its final emperor ceded the throne to Liu Yi, who had founded the Liu Song dynasty. In all human history, there are few stories like that of ancient Egypt. On the banks of the Nile, these people created one of the most enduring and significant cultures. Their tale comes to life in the History of Egypt podcast. Every week, we explore the tales of this amazing culture, from the legendary days of creation and the gods, all the way to Cleopatra, and everything in between. The History of Egypt podcast is written and produced by a trained Egyptologist.
Starting point is 00:16:08 We go much deeper than your average documentary or magazine article to uncover tales of life, great endeavours, and the amazing arc of a mighty kingdom. The History of Egypt podcast is available on all podcasting platforms, apps, and websites. Come, visit ancient Egypt, and experience a legendary culture. Now, with two rival factions neatly divided by the Yangtze River, the Southern and Northern Period had officially begun. Part 3, the Southern and Northern Dynasties. Liu Song, though powerful, would have the misfortune of having a run of really bad emperors, and in little more than 50 years' time, the populace, and more importantly the government
Starting point is 00:16:54 and military, had grown deeply displeased with the madness and excesses the Liu clan was producing in its heirs, and therefore conspired to oust them. In 479, then, Liu Song's top general, Xiao Daocheng, overthrew the final Liu Song emperor and established himself at the head of southern Qi. Though his reign would be highly successful, following the founding emperor's death, Qi would likewise begin to slip into corruption, puppeteering, and capricious violent monarchs. The Qi dynasty's lock on power in the south would prove even shorter than Liu Song, and after only 23 years in power, and having burned through seven emperors in that time frame, was also militarily overthrown after its young, insane emperor casually murdered his prime minister,
Starting point is 00:17:34 prompting his brother to take up arms in rebellion that pretty much everyone agreed was well overdue. Out with the Qi, and in with the Liang. And under the first Liang emperor, who was, of course, one of our multitudinous emperor wus, the south began to actually flourish. He invested in scholarship and commissioned imperially sanctioned universities in the capital, and was known for holding grand poetry contests with sums of gold as rewards for the winners. Nevertheless, he tended towards becoming out of touch with reality, especially in the latter half of his reign, where he became surrounded by sycophants and became increasingly invested in Buddhist doctrine.
Starting point is 00:18:09 He, the famous Bodhisattva Emperor, would not only be the first Chinese monarch to openly advocate or practice Buddhism, but tried to renounce worldliness altogether and join a monastery no fewer than three times, and was only dragged back to the capital to, you know, do his job once his officials had paid huge dragged back to the capital to, you know, do his job, once his officials had paid huge donatives to the monks to encourage them to kick him back out again. He thought it would be a good idea to exempt both Taoist and Buddhist adherents from taxation, which probably sounded good on paper, but predictably, it resulted in almost half of the entire taxable population doing the math and claiming the tax exemption, whether or not they really bought into the religion that they had pledged themselves to for a write-off.
Starting point is 00:18:49 That great decrease in the number of taxable households, combined with the Liang Emperor's own overly lenient policy toward his officials, resulted in a huge drain on the state's treasury. Under Wu the Bodhisattva's lengthy reign, he also had a long-standing policy of accepting and welcoming any of the military officers who might have wished to defect from Northern Wei into his kingdom with open arms. This policy continued when rival factions in the north once again split the state into eastern and western rival halves in the early 530s, and so when the second-in-command of Eastern Wei defected to the south, Wu once again welcomed the officer into Liang, a decision that would prove disastrous. The defecting officer, Hou Jing, would rapidly continue his streak of
Starting point is 00:19:30 betraying those who trusted him by first accepting the clemency of Liang and then almost immediately taking the army he'd brought with him, raising additional forces unhappy with the corruption that Emperor Wu's lax policies had allowed to flourish, and then marched on the Liang capital before any of the governors or princes had time to react. The garrison within the capital tried to hold out, but proved to be outmatched by Hou Jing's army, and he took control of Jiankang in 548, less than a year after arriving within Liang territory at all. Hou Jing then proclaimed one of Wu's sons the new emperor and planned to rule through him. While he controlled the capital and its surrounding regions, though, the Liang nobility had no intention of allowing him to remain there
Starting point is 00:20:09 or to claim legitimacy over the entire state. The burgeoning tensions between the potential lines of succession, though, over who should be the emperor to replace Wu following his death in early 549 resulted in the Liang state fracturing and turning against itself rather than against Hou Jing's usurpation in the making. The crown prince, Xiao Yi, was finally able to unite enough of his kingdom to at last take on Hou Jing directly and killed the rebel general in 552. He then sought an ally to help him retake the Sichuan region from his younger brother, who also had pretensions to the throne, and enlisted the aid of Western Wei to help him invade. But in a move that probably surprised nobody but the crown prince himself, Western Wei agreed to the terms, invaded the western half of Liang, and then kept all of it for itself.
Starting point is 00:20:56 Relations between the two sides would further deteriorate in 554, resulting in Western Wei once again invading Liang and putting the new emperor to siege at his new capital, Jiangling, which was just ridiculously close to their own border. The emperor of Liang was assassinated and a puppet put into his place by Western Wei, establishing Western Liang. The remainder of the southern state did not accept that, however, and the military commander, Chen, wound up deposing the remainder of the imperial family and establishing himself as the leader of the Chen dynasty. Part 4. Reunification. So at this point, we've got Chen in the southeast. Eastern Wei was replaced bloodlessly by Northern Qi,
Starting point is 00:21:35 and then a few years later, the same thing happened to Western Wei, which became Northern Zhou. Their respective warlords, who had been holding the leashes of their nominal emperors, had finally tired of the pretense and simply given themselves the top jobs. Before either could think about the South, though, they had to contend with each other. In spite of initially being the weaker of the two northern states, Zhou was able to use an alliance with the emergent far northern power, the Guktuq Empire, and Qi's own internal weaknesses and poverty to claim victory over Qi in 577, reunifying the north.
Starting point is 00:22:08 But once again, the victory would be short-lived, with the erratic and costly rule of its young Emperor Xuan threatening to once again tear the empire apart, the powerful Duke of Sui, the Empress Regent's father, seized the throne, ended Northern Zhou, and claimed the mandate of heaven as Emperor One of Sui in 581. With the full power of the north at last unified in purpose, under the sure hand of one, the Sui imperial army at last came crashing down on Chen in the south, emboldened by imperial propaganda claiming that its rulers had grown decadent and indolent, and as such had surely lost the mandate of heaven. After pacifying the Guq Turks, the army of Sui took control of Jiankang, with an army
Starting point is 00:22:47 numbering as many as half a million, and using a very similar path of conquest the Jin Dynasty had used to ever so briefly reunify the empire in 280, sweeping eastward along the Yangtze River right to the Chen Emperor's doorstep, who was taken back to Chang'an as an honored but compulsory guest, while his capital city was torn down piece by piece. So yeah, great, there's the whole past 13 months in highly abbreviated form, but what does it all mean? What were the long-term consequences of what was clearly a painful, change-filled period? Well, I'm glad you asked, dear listener. Just as the Three Kingdoms is renowned as being a period of
Starting point is 00:23:25 great technological leaps forward, the Southern and Northern period is, in addition to its political and military shifts, remembered as being a time of unprecedented philosophical, spiritual, and cultural revolutions as well. In both the South and the North, what had been Confucianism's virtually uncontested dominance over Chinese thought rapidly declined following Jin's short reunification of the empire. Confucianism, with its sunny disposition that all men are inherently good and only need good governance to be their best selves, seemed unrealistic, silly, and outdated in the face of a conflict that by 280 had already claimed the lives of some 60 million people and wouldn't ultimately stop for a further three centuries. No, Master Kong, they must have thought. Men were obviously not all fundamentally
Starting point is 00:24:10 good or moral, and thus basing a system of government and society on such pie-in-the-sky naivete was surely a recipe for just the sort of disaster they'd all been living through. Power. Naked political and military power and the will to use it seemed to be what ruled the day. And so, many began to look for systems of thought, philosophy, or belief that would go beyond the mundane and material, and give their lives, losses, and seemingly endless suffering a greater meaning. Surely, there must be a meaning to such senseless depravity. Enter Neo-Taoism and Buddhism. Well, that's not technically right. They didn't enter.
Starting point is 00:24:46 They had already been present in China since virtually its inception, in the case of the former, and since the Eastern Han Dynasty, in the case of the latter. But they came into such prominence at this point precisely because they filled the philosophical void that Confucianism had so utterly failed to do, which was to explain the chaos of the world in a manner that both gave it meaning
Starting point is 00:25:04 and lessened the impact of the suffering all Chinese faced. Neo-daoism had revitalized itself from obscurity and irrelevance in Northern Wei, in large part because it insisted that the one absolute truth of everything, the Dao itself, was the source of and force behind everything and every action in the universe. In essence, that there was a force and a meaning behind everything that was happening all around the people of China, and as such, everything that was happening was happening exactly as it was meant to. Thus, no matter how out of balance the world might seem, the overall order of the universe was, had always been, and
Starting point is 00:25:40 always would remain precisely in balance in the grand scale of things. There is a great deal of comfort in that line of thought, even for many of us today. It likewise encouraged its practitioners to remove themselves from the material world, and from the societies that were busy tearing themselves apart. Taoists under the northern celestial masters, for instance, sought to hide themselves away in caves to meditate on the nature of everything. And in the south as well, many sought out mountain retreats in places far from the dangers and tragedies of the cities to properly focus on the way. In spite of being a foreign import, Buddhism, too, was able to find its place in the hearts of many Chinese, in spite of the occasional setbacks and purges it would face being an
Starting point is 00:26:22 alien system of belief and all. Similar to Taoism, Buddhism allowed people to place their own lives in terms of a much larger, more universal perspective. Surely, an outlook that would minimize the suffering and hardships unfurling around the populace. In Buddhist thought, though, suffering could not be avoided by seeking out a cave, because suffering itself was as much a part of life as breathing. Buddhism simultaneously allowed people to accept suffering and death.
Starting point is 00:26:47 After all, the infinite cycle of death and reincarnation takes a lot of the punch out of dying. And it also offered them an out. Give it all up. Give up the world. Give up your possessions, your attachment to everything in the world. Give up your desires, your pains, and your regrets. And if you can do that,
Starting point is 00:27:05 then you will have become unto a god itself. You will have achieved nirvana and want for nothing ever again. You will at last be removed from all the sufferings of the wheel of karma and be as a candle that has been blown out. It really puts the whole situation on its head. Rather than fearing death and wanting to live, Buddhist thought teaches that while all life is sacred, the ultimate goal is to escape it entirely. To break out of the infinite loop of death and rebirth and pain and wanting and suffering. To just reach an end to desire of anything and to be finally at peace. It's easy to see why so many came to adamantly hold onto these tenets during this time period
Starting point is 00:27:45 as well. With the chaos of the wars, it's also not difficult to understand why things like the arts would have been taken up, as a mean to generate beauty in times of ugliness and a way to preserve one's own culture in the midst of such destruction. Poetry, calligraphy, painting, and musical works more complex than any that had previously been created. Poetry sought to harken back to earlier golden ages by formalizing the rhyme structures into those in vogue during the Zhou and Han eras.
Starting point is 00:28:15 Painters established the now famous landscape style that would be practiced for thousands of years after this era. And of course, the sciences got their golden goose in the form of Zhu Zongzi, whom we discussed at length in the supplementary biopic four episodes back, but in brief discovered such things as the incredibly accurate lengths of days and years, the overlaps between the sun and the moon, and the value of pi to the sixth decimal place. And he also proved to be the first engineer in more than two centuries to be able to replicate the southern pointing chariot that Ma Jun had perfected. Conflict begets change, and the longer the conflict rages, or the more hotly it burns,
Starting point is 00:28:52 the more pronounced and profound the alterations it wreaks upon the civilization or civilizations it affects. China went into the period of disunity, a nation of bronze and iron. It went in as an ethnically, culturally, religiously, and of courseunity, a nation of bronze and iron. It went in as an ethnically, culturally, religiously, and of course, politically unified derivation of the Yellow River Valley civilization from which it had sprung. But the heat and pressure of 300 years in a violent crucible fundamentally altered the very essence of what being Chinese was. The moniker was now claimed by Han, Xianbei, and even Xiongnu alike. Culture, both in the north and the south, was now a blend of these multiple peoples, and with an extra-large dash of Indian
Starting point is 00:29:33 religion thrown in to boot. The very center of Chinese population had likewise shifted irrevocably southward, a trend that would endure, in spite of political unification, far into the future, into the 20th century, and arguably beyond. To circle back around to one of my early points in this episode, we've just gone through one of the existential turning points of not just the imperial dynasties nor China itself, but of the entire world in the 3rd through 6th centuries, a fundamental shift in power and civilization that quite frankly dwarfs the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, or the trials and tribulations of its eastern iteration. Han China in the late 3rd century was the preeminent civilization on earth. Full stop.
Starting point is 00:30:18 Its fall plunged the greater proportion of humanity into a period of chaos and decline so great and so terrible that it would take almost another 1700 years to equal its tragedy or intensity. And yet, here we are, and it has arisen anew, the feng huang, the phoenix that arises from its own ashes. Chinese civilization endured, and it would emerge in the 7th century as once more the civilization to dwarf all others. Its works, its construction projects, and of course its sheer size and influence will once again make themselves known as the very foundations upon which Asia itself rests. And next time, we will be delving into the man who finally achieved that long-held aspiration,
Starting point is 00:31:02 the man who had done what so many others could not, and reunified China into the global force it was meant to be. Yang Jian, the Duke of Sui, the Emperor of China. Thank you for listening. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. 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. I'm Tracy. And I'm Rich. And we want to invite you to join us as we take an in-depth look at this pivotal era in American history. Look for The Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts.

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