The History of China - Intelligent Speech 2026 - Nemesis, Mine

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

TheKangxi Emperor’s Obsessive Pursuit ofGaldan Khanto the Endsof the EarthPresented: 02/28/2026audio-only cut (this is from my mic pick-up, so the host's audio is low... apologies... I'll replace it with a better final version once it's released!)~20:00 - presentation ~20:00 - audience Q&A Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Please play responsibly. Okay, I'm going to kick it off. So I'm Rick and I'm the admin for this talk. I don't vote for Discord, but any problems, put them in the chat or one of the other channels that are trying to help you the best we can. To aim up the chats when you are watching one of the presentations, there's a little speech bubble in the top right-hand corner.

You can click on that and aim up your chat panel. Then there's going to be about 20 minutes of presentation and a 20 minute Q&A session. So you chuck your questions in the chat as it's going or save them until the end and I'll ask you. If you've got any questions then, please try and keep them family friendly if you can. Otherwise you shall be removed. So this talk, it's Chris Stewart from the History of China podcast. And this has lived, work. and taught in China for 17 years, 13 of which he's been doing his History of China podcast.

And I think you've probably got many, many more years left, as it's not many bigger topics in the history of China. It keeps, they keep going. It doesn't seem to be stopping anytime soon. So, yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. And right, I'll hand it over to you. All right.

Thank you for that marvelous introduction. Oops. All right, hello everybody and welcome to the history of China Intelligence Beach, 2026 edition. We're about relationships in this convention, and so I decided to pick one of my favorite relationships types, that of the nemesis, specifically that between the Kangshi Emperor of Great Qing and Galdan Khan of the Jiangghar Khanate. just to start out, I note that this began as about 10 episodes of my show, which is about seven hours long.

It means it needed a lot of cuts, which I think most writers in the audience will agree, is a lot like trying to chop off your own fingers. Nevertheless, I think I got it down pretty close to 20 minutes, and that was through the rigorous drawing of boundaries. Now, to draw a boundary around something is to define it. It's beginning, its end, and what lies beyond. And as of the 1690s, the Kangxi Emperor of Great Qing was a man very much obsessed with such boundaries. He spent decades consolidating his personal rule over China, crushing all rivals and binding the people of his realm to the dragon throne. By most measures, he secured anything that an emperor could possibly seek.

And yet, as he continued to study his maps that his court produced, he noticed that the edges still leaked. Far to the northwest, past the great wall, and out into the vast steps of Central Asia, another boundary was being carved out by what would be the last of a dying breed. The step conqueror, Galdan Bogshutukhan, of the Jungar Mongols. Goddan was no mere nomadic chieftain, but in fact a holy man, a warrior monk who had studied in Tibet under the Dalai Lama before returning home to reclaim his inheritance. He was charismatic, ambitious, and brutal, and sought nothing less than to achieve his birthright as the scion of the mighty Jenghisid legacy, securing an empire of his own for his own people.

from the forbidden city in Beijing though Galdan seemed nothing nearly so noble he was a destabilizer threatening the order of the realm refugees fled his raids through the passes that the Qing claimed secure

carrying violence into lands that the dynasty claimed able to protect to Kangxi this was no mere rival state it was in fact chaos pressing up against the divine order that he was sworn to uphold The word nemesis itself is divine in origin, the Greek god of retribution, the force that restores balance to an imbalanced world. Our modern usage keeps its more personal core, that of the arch rival, or one's own reflection in a darkened mirror.

What emerged between the Kangxi Emperor and Galdan Khan was just such a relationship in that deepest sense. History often frames wars as impersonal movements of states, but Kangxi's practice. private memorials reveal something sharper. To him, Gaudan was no mere rival ruler. He was an affront to the very world order that Kangshi upheld. And so today, we will look at the decade when these two figures finally collided, a war that ranged from the great bend of the Yellow River all the way out to the sands of the Tarim basin.

Kangshi would later describe this struggle that would fulfill his very life. It is also a story that ends in the utter destruction of the deep. Jungar nation and people, a clash of civilizations that would stretch on, ultimately for more than a century, and a tragedy across three generations. But before all that, it was just the emperor and the Khan. Reflecting back later in his life, Kangshi would write, I would never have done such a thing had it not been for Galvan. To understand why this Galdan Khan proved to be such a persistent nightmare, we need to look at the

at the literal lay of the land. The highlands of Central Asia, open country, thin grass, and a sky that seemed to run on into infinity. It's a landscape that's often able said to devour entire armies. As of 1695, the Kangtian emperor had long quit his palatial capital

for this hunting ground. His Mongol nemesis had slipped his grasp once too often. It had become something more than state level. It had become personal. Galdan still lived somewhere beyond the imperial reach, defying by his very continued breath the order that Kangshi claimed to uphold. The Qing military machine was immense, but once out past the passes and out into the

steps themselves, it behaved less like a juggernaut than a creeping amoeba, a central mass that was forced to extend along a distant, fragile tendril, a supply line, as it were, across deserts and grasslands, all striving to reach its ultimate prey. The farther it stretched, the more tenuous that line became. Travelers west from Gunsu also all faced the same calculation. Not so much how they'd ever get there, but how they might ever hope to return again. Across the trackless barrens, every mouth had to be supplied both out and back. To solve this, Kangxi's planters built strings of small depots placed along the marching route,

As the enemy advanced, it cached provisions at each, creating a chain of survival across this expanse. These were often little more than storehouses, supplies left in trust for the army's eventual return. If a single link in that chain were to fail, be it looted or destroyed by the elements, all might be lost. An even deeper problem, how to guide those tens of thousands of soldiers through a landscape with almost no fixed reference points at all. Kyrkongshi deployed a rather unexpected advantage. Europeans. Alongside Allied Mongol scouts, there also rode two Jesuit scholars, Jean-François Grébion and Thomas Pereira.

In an East Asian imperial drama such as this, they seem very unlikely figures. European court astronomers carried into a nomad war at the very edges of the earth. And yet their role would prove decisive. As the Qing armies trekked on, they took calculations, of the North Star in order to find their latitude, in effect, giving the Qing army a mobile coordinate system. Thus, European astronomy became instruments of a Chinese step conquest. Kangxi was no longer forced to blindly grasp about, but can now close a circle around his ever-shifting target. The Qing were constricting Galdan, compressing the operational space in which a nomad

empire could survive. Each campaign season, the Qing advanced further and mapped more precisely. Each year, Galdan's room to maneuver shrank evermore. What had begun as a wild hunt across the trackless expanses was quickly becoming a noose tightening around the Khan's neck. By the spring of 1696, this tendril of Qing power had fully extended. Kangshi himself was near the front lines, sleeping himself in felt tense, riding with the banners, and ever impatiently waiting for word from his pursuing columns,

that capturing his enemy was close. And it was out here at this point that the long chase nearly ended, a climactic conflict only narrowly avoided, leaving ashes still smoldering in their fire pits. For five days prior, the Qing forces had pressed hard on the retreating Jungar host. When they finally overran Galdan's main encampment, they found no army waiting nor defensive line, only a camp abandoned in what was clear panic. Kangshi recorded what he saw in a letter to his mother, empty tents, Buddhist scriptures scattered to the winds, armor and even drinking skins cast aside in haste.

Ching troops also found bodies, those of the elderly, the sick, old, and small children. People likely killed by their own before flight. Under both step and imperial law, captured by a conqueror often meant enslavement or worse, a swift death among family could be judged a mercy. In that sense, this ghost camp marks a bruce. breaking point for the Jungar people. Gaudan's followers were no longer just retreating from chain pressure. They were beginning to unmake themselves rather than submit to it. If this gave the Emperor pause, it didn't stay his hand.

That same letter also notes him pressing ever further west, this tragedy seeming to only hone his obsession. Along the Carolyn River, the Emperor finally closed his tightening fists. Reports converging on his camp told that his quarter, was near. Godin's movement had narrowed and his host fragmented. The step, once an ocean of maneuver, had shrunk to a drying puddle. Kangshi pressed in, orders to converge and scouts driven ever closer. Meanwhile, Gaudan's position deteriorated just as quickly. A nomad army lives on movement and seasonal routes. Disrupt those cycles and the system quickly fails. Herds thin,

allies hedge their bets, followers vanish. Galdan still rode free with a hardened core of loyalists, but the ghost camp that Kangshi had walked through showed a portent of things to come, a people running out of space and out of time. After years of pursuit, this long war of flight and attrition finally converged into combat. Zawmodo, the hundred pines,

little more than a shallow valley broken by low ridges and sparse woodland, yet rare enough on the step to earn its name. For the first time, Galdon could not dissolve into the trackless beyond. Behind him lay only impassable mountains and box canyons. Before him, the approaching chain columns. Galdon's forces were depleted, but still dangerous. Hardened cavalry, the survivors of more than a decade of maneuvering war. But against them stood Kangxi's elite infantry and artillery,

the most sophisticated army that the Qing had yet deployed. The battle that followed was short and very much asymmetrical. Mongol military strategy depended on feigned retreats, flanking arcs, dispersal, and regrouping, and the space to do all of that. At Jaumoto, those options collapsed all at once. In place, ching gunners sealed off the valley approaches. Jungar riders, trying to break through or wheel around the flanks,

were shattered by concentrated volleys of artillery and musket fire before they could gain any momentum. The maneuvering space that step warfare had always assumed, Kangxi had taken away. Qing battle records emphasized the shock that this produced in the Mongol ranks. The charges stalled, cohesion broke, and the routes of retreat cut off with the dead and the dying. It was in this moment of collapse that the battle's most remembered episode occurred. Galdan's consort wife, Anu, described in both Mongol and Qing sources, rode forward to lead a countercharge aimed at opening up one last escape corridor.

For Stap Queens, also known as Katun's, politics and military leadership often overlapped, and Anu had long served as both Galdan's partner and military ally. Her attempt at once valorous and desperate only partly succeeded. Under concentrated Qing fire, her attacking group was cut down. Anu Katun fell on the field for all to see. her death spreading immediate disarray throughout the Jungar ranks. The fall of a ruling consort in battle was not just a tactical loss, but a political rupture. Her kin and their followers could no longer be expected to maintain their allegiance

to what had clearly become a lost cause. Yet, Anu's sacrifice was not wholly in vain. Galan himself escaped with a remnant force into the hills. But what he was forced to leave behind, proved irrecoverable. His baggage, followers, and the stilled heart of his very regime. Within days, Qing scouts reported even worse news for the Jungar, a capture that the later-thrown memorials would call a gift from heaven itself.

They'd taken Galdan's own teenage son, Seb Tang Balger, prisoner. A con without an heir is not merely weakened. He's unmoored. Authority rested not just on his personal charisma, but on the promise of dynastic continuity. Followers bound themselves not just to a leader, but to his lineage. With Balger now in Qing hands, all was lost. The Kangxi Emperor's court well understood this.

Orders went out to publicize the capture across Mongol networks. Galdon's line was finished, and Qing rule divinely reaffirmed. Later reports described Jungar forces dissolving into small bands, a few hundred here and there, drifting through the Altai Mountains, like phantoms. The Confederation that had once threatened empires now dissolved into mere fugitives. Oh, not there yet.

Galdon himself became a ghost in these hills. All was moving, no longer commanding, and only rarely even glimpsed by his own people. His authority withering with every crowing declaration out of Beijing. His one-time allies had deserted him. The oasis city of Hami had shut its gate, to him, Russia, too, preferred stability with a great fellow power to a dying alliance with a defeated nomad warlord. For the Kangxi Emperor, the outcome confirmed the strategy that he'd pursued for

years, a mastery of both the geography and the political legitimacy of his neighbors and tributaries. Somewhere in those far-off mountains, Galdon's body still drew breath, but his world had already ended. The valley of the Hundred Pines had done what a decade of pursuit hadn't. It had broken the Jungar spirit. By early 1697, Galdan Khan's world had contracted to the Altai, a fugitive court of a few hundred starving followers moving between frigid valleys. Even those closest to Galdan had begun to abandon him. A Khan without lineage, army, or pasturage was nothing more than a shadow moving through the snow. That's bring the final message would arrive. Galdan Baksutu Khan was dead.

Ching Memorial's recorded illness, which was a conveniently sympathetic end to a once great ruler. Rumor spoke instead of poison, perhaps, maybe self-ministered in despair, or maybe by his followers who had finally just had enough running. For Kangxi,

such distinctions mattered little. At last, the last independent center of step authority was finally no more. Yet for the emperor, disappearance in the mountains was not enough. Conquest, in Qing terms, had to be demonstrated, inscribed into the empire's very consciousness. Geography thus transformed into theater. In Beijing, captured members of Galdan's inner circle were publicly executed. To great pomp,

spectators in the imperial capital bore witness to this bloody restoration of divine order. The condemned not so much punished as exhibited as what rightly came of those who rebelled against legitimate imperial authority, a stage of ritual death upon which Kangshi reasserted himself as the sole and unquestionable arbiter of justice and life. The state's official version of events quickly followed. In 1699, the court commissioned the imperial campaign record of the Jungar pacification, presenting the war as orderly, necessary, and just. Five stone stele were erected across the empire, including remote Joumert. Moldo itself, carved with the official version of what had transpired.

Alternate perspectives, those of Mongol grief or devastation, had no place in this new imperial history literally carved into stone. Empires seek to conquer not just land, but times vary narrative. The human cost beneath that narrative is always immense and often intentionally invisible. By the early 1700s, the Jhungar Empire that had dominated. dominated Central Asia just a generation before was shattered, its population scattered, resettled, and drawn inevitably under Qing authority. Later catastrophes would only deepen that loss, but the shatter point had come in 1696

at the hundred pines of Jaumoto. For decades, the fate of that vast stretch of the world that could devour whole armies and had turned on an almost personal duel. The Kangxi Emperor versus Galdan Khan. Each had come to define the life of the other. Each pursued the contest to the edge of their authority and the limits of their endurance. When Galdan died in the Western wastes, abandoned and defeated, Kangshi believed that the struggle was complete.

His nemesis was gone. The frontier secured. His map finally filled in. But the end of the men was not the end of the question that they had fought over. Qing power could destroy a rival, but it could not yet come. command the Western step permanently. By the close of Kangxi's reign, Qing expansion had reached its operational limits.

But to the imperial logic, any such limitation was simply unacceptable. In the generations that would follow, first his son, and then his grandson, the Qianlong emperor, would take up this question of unresolved frontier. In time, what Kangxi had broken, Qianlong would finish.

The jungars would lose not merely their independence, but would in time face total extermination. Thank you. I'm just about on time. Yeah, really good. Thank you very much. That was fascinating. Let's see if we've got some questions coming in for you. Looks like there's some of the chats. Okay. So there was one. Let me find it. So Kevin, Achievin, he asked,

Did the Jesuit priests require moves towards conversions to Christianity in exchange for Australian navigation? No, they certainly wanted it. That's one of their major points of having traveled all the way to China was to try to convince one, such as the Kangxi Emperor, who was considered the kind of most civilized and powerful person in Asia at that point, they hope that by showing him that everything that Europeans could do and had accomplished, like astro navigational techniques and things like that, they could kind of convince him that he should adopt more European and, yes, Christian characteristics. And for a time, it did kind of work.

He got, conchie got friendly toward it. Then Pereira and Gerbion, they were actually doing a pretty good job, but if I'm getting the story right, they got told. off by the Pope eventually for basically trying to convert the Chinese wrong and kind of making too many concessions to the way that things were done in China and were threatened with either towing the hard line of the church or facing excommunication themselves. And so they had really no choice in the matter after that, which angered the Kangxi Emperor enough to begin rolling out a series of restrictions on

priests and missionaries being able to interact with and do their conversion efforts in the country. So they were doing a good job, these two, of soft power, kind of like, here's what we got, but in the end it was their bosses who kind of messed that whole situation up for the entire church, really. One thing I always find fascinating is how people would communicate. for such fast distances. It's just saying like the bosses mess it up there. I have to even know what's going on or this conversion process or what their embassies

are kind of doing when they've traveled that far. Yeah, it's, I'm going through it in my current narrative right now, which is a couple centuries after this in the opium war. And the transit times, the information delay, it's amazing to look at that. And just you're talking about. you know, a half a year to a year just to receive a message and then the same thing to reply. So these people are really operating all in the dark and then reporting back and waiting and doing whatever and then getting a message back a year or so later being like, no, you're doing it all wrong.

So how does one operate? I guess as best as one can. Yeah, the whole political landscape could change in that time. Absolutely. you've really got to trust the people you send out there. Absolutely. So it looks like Roberta is type in question maybe in the chat at the moment. Let's see what it's got to say.

Just watch there, Ty think. Yeah. The thing that I think about is that it's really a tale of two very different ways of fighting war. We've got the nomads there. But then the logistics are so different between them and what I guess would be more of a standing army for Kungshu. Yeah. It's really the last, the last kind of large-scale demonstration of what had terrorized Eurasia for 800 years at that point, which a little bit less than 800 years. But ever since the time of Jenghis Khan and the great Mongol hordes of how do you deal with this army that can move faster than you and ride circles around you?

all while pounding your conscripted soldiers into oblivion. And the only real method that worked in the end was the march of time and modernization and being able to, you know, ring them off and encircle them so that they had nowhere left to run. Yeah. Okay, we've got a question from Roberto here. How difficult did you find that to get Chinese history sources and passing through some of the stories, especially during the early parts of their history? and do you find the need to use your knowledge of Chinese in getting the source materials?

Good questions. It's been an ongoing process of finding whatever sources that I could get my hands on, certainly. Unfortunately, I've been able to get some very good ones. But it has to do with not only what is published, but what's been published online. As you mentioned at the beginning of this, I spent. most of this shows run very much out of the country in the Western world in China itself, which meant that I was confined largely to online resources. Being in China wasn't super helpful in terms of getting sources either

because they're pretty locked up about the kind of primary sources that they have and getting access to them in any physical sense. It's not quite like going to the public library, as we would expect. Here it's a little more involved. certainly not impossible. In terms of my knowledge of Chinese to get the source materials, most of my source materials are in English. My primary source is still largely the Cambridge history of China series, but also for the step wars, I mean all across Mongol history, there's some great English language sources, including the primary source.

the secret history of the Mongols, which is about the life in times of Jenghis Khan, which has been translated into English, a multitude of different ways. But it's, it wasn't always quick or easy to find sources, but I've been able to get by. Do you think there's anything maybe that's misrepresented in the West, where the Chinese few, obviously there's politics and things that play here, but do you think there's Any history that we get wrong in lots of Western sources? I think what I'd say is that like the, probably one of the most difficult aspects to get around

in terms of understanding where these people are coming from is kind of what I was trying to address in this talk here, which is just the difference in worldview and the difference of expectation, the difference of what even does, does, does one's society or civilization see the world as operating by in terms of base principles? And when those two don't, are not sympathico and they come into contact, you know, fireworks tend to happen pretty quickly. And for one side or another, it's usually not a happy story. But it's not

seeing the world the same way as the other in such a way that you both think that you understand each other, but neither of you really do. If that makes sense. Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, it does. It's interesting. Robert is put in the chance that he lived in Beijing for two years. He definitely misses the food apps and the transportation. Is it anything you missed from living there?

Oh, gosh. Yeah. I agree with you. The amount of automation and delivery services was hard to get past. And I don't know if I ever rode the Beijing metro system, but I always loved the Shanghai Metro system where I lived. The lovely city metro system that just goes right into the high-speed rail system, which I really wish would be much more effectively rolled out in the United States and elsewhere,

because it really is a shining gem of a system of very rapid and convenient transit. Both of, yeah. And the food. itself is excellent. It says Beijing was great as well. I see you. I guess he says he's in the middle of secret wars of the Mongols right now.

Oh yeah. The translation of that that I used quite a bit of was written by a Mongolian historian. I don't go by Mongols anymore. By Urgung Onon, I believe is his name. Orgunga Onon. And it's very poetic.

It's keeping a lot of the same kind of meter and linguistic symbolism. And it doesn't make it a super easy read, but it is really, it helps you, at least it helped me get into the kind of mindset of what their early worldview looked like and why they sort of thought that they were in a place to do what they eventually did to much of the rest of the world. in the chat he's asked what kind of base world view differences are the starkest between medieval and Europe yeah um worldview wise in terms of of uh medieval uh medieval europe and kind of high imperial china i'd say i'd say first off the the terminology kind of gives a a view into the the differing worldviews a little bit as well of Europe Europe in the Middle Ages looks at a place like China and with the very little information that it has knows that it's a place that has all the cool stuff and they really want to go and like interact with and trade with China is is I mean Europe

in the Middle Ages I think it's no real stretch to say it's kind of Europe and its flop era China is riding high at this point though it's it's kind of at the height of its majesty and power and expansion. And it's, and it thinks of itself as not needing anybody else. It's kind of the center of where all the cool stuff happens. And if, and if you're not there,

you're not anybody to really consider it all. Um, so I think in the, in the middle ages, that would be kind of the primary, the, the Eurocentrism, obviously being in Europe versus the Sinocentrism being in Sinai,

in China, in China. and how that, you know, there's some kind of egotistical balloons that get deflated in the meeting. As we get into kind of more early modern periods, like, again, I'm in the 1800s now. So then it becomes much more when we get into the post-Fesphalian ideology in Europe of the nation-state and of treaties between equals and of, you know, respect for laws and treaties and things like that then it gets a lot more

chaotic because the Chinese in their high imperial sort of ideology they don't recognize any of that to them it's a tributary relationship it's we're the civilized guys and you all are the barbarians and you need to come and bow down to us and then we'll give

you gifts which kind of makes a lot of especially Europe Europeans who think that they are, you know, definitely on the up and up. And now it's the age of empire. And they've got steamships and guns and things of significantly higher quality than the Chinese had by the 1800s.

Think that, oh, no, we sit on at least as equal footing with you guys. So you need to treat us with respect now. And the Chinese are kind of like, but do we, though? And, you know, it doesn't work out. well for the Chinese ultimately. Do you think there's maybe a sense of history there that the Chinese have a very long, continuous time scale which maybe the Europeans didn't have just a younger kind of societies? I mean, in a way you could say that, that's certainly kind of the way that it's often presented

as this, you know, five thousand years of uninterrupted, contiguous. civilization. And that's a nice story and everything, but it's not really the case. China's been broken into pieces as often as it's been united in any realistic sense. You can get kudos points if you can list off, you know, all the different dynasties in correct order at dinner parties, which just goes to show you how chaotic times have been. I mean, the warring states is an entire 700 year-long era. But there are elements, of course, that carry over legalistic, social, religious elements that certainly do endure.

But the same is true for Europe, you know, the elements of Roman, Greek, you know, Germanic, Celtic societies infuse all modern European states as well, and many more besides. I'm just listing a few. but yeah it's it's just that it's a different story but there's a lot of similar beats in that yeah it's been broken apart but it also maintains a shared sense of elements and and story

across those break aparts anybody else have any other questions a few minutes left it looks like Kevin's type at the moment all right I say he's written but as your talk shows the story is dictated by the winners Absolutely. And that's one of the, I think one of the points that I was certainly trying to demonstrate in what I was talking about here. But I also got to give credit to a lot of modern historians and a lot of the way that we read and look at history in our modern sense today of a lot of historians' job is to not just take the story that's written by the victors in stone, but instead to go try to find. the lesser told stories,

those of the people who didn't get to carve their names into giant rocks across the realm. And sometimes, for the first time, shine a little bit of light on those stories that those who are rich and powerful at the time, which would never be told. And I think that that gives us a lot more

of a fuller and more complete view. of those of those times and places and people yeah as you're saying before it seems particularly difficult to get sources in China as well they they are pretty tight-lipped about things that they are not 100% sure they want to share you ever see that suffering or not do you think there will come a time where maybe they become more aimpins to that or are they going to I think it's right now things have shifted kind of back into a much more insular and buttoned up model under the current era. There was some opening kind of between the the 1990s up to about 2010 or 2012 or so. It's impossible to say what will happen in the future.

I can say this, you know, what they've done throughout time back since Sima Qian was to wait until a dynasty was over and then write the whole history or compile it all together and put it out as one great big, you know, the book of Song or the book of Han. And that's the official history. Well, there is an official draft history of the Qing dynasty. They've got it all compiled. They've put it all together. Unfortunately, China broke apart again in the meantime. and ever since then, they've not been able to get the kind of consensus. So there's a draft history of the Qing that exists in the Beijing academies.

But there's a different, slightly different draft history that exists in the, you know, Taipei. And so are those ever going to be reconciled? I don't know. Will there ever be an official history of the Qing in that kind of long traditional sense? Probably eventually. But I think it's less relevant. Also, because having one official book no longer means quite as much as it used to now that we have better sourcing. Yeah.

Cool. I think that's time for today. Love one. Thank you very much. Anything you want to plug in the last few minutes? A minute. Oh, no. Well, if anyone's watching this and wants to hear more of me and the show, then please check out the History of China podcast.

Brilliant. Thanks very much. Thank you. It's really fascinating. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, I'm Neil. And I'm Ken.

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