The History of China - Special: A Song of Yiti & China - The History of Westeros/History of China Mash-up!

Episode Date: June 16, 2022

Aziz, Ashaya, Sean, and myself have a ball discussing all the things GRRM took - and didn't - from Chinese history when he "created" the mysterious empire of Yi-Ti! I had an absolute ball, and I hope you will, too!! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. 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. Hey all, just as a very, very, very brief introduction, I had the pleasure last month of having a very long, as you can probably see already, a very long but very enjoyable and productive conversation with Aziz and Ashaya of the History of Westeros podcast in which we discuss the ins and the outs of E.T., which is sort of the Westerosi or the Planetos analog of China. And we kind of compared and contrasted how George R.R. Martin took historical parallels and also invented his own thing based on those. And just sort of the overall scenario of the land that nobody really quite knows about, far to the east.

So I hope you really enjoy it. I certainly did. And here we go. Hello! Hello and welcome back, my fellow Westorians, checking out our unusual start time. It is officially 10 p.m. on Saturday. We usually do these at 3 on Sunday, Eastern, that is. But we have a great reason for that. It's kind of fun to do it at an unusual time, but it's not just randomly chosen to be fun. It's because our guest is in China, and that's a long way away. The time difference is substantial. So for him, it would have been three o'clock in the morning, but we're not trying to get people to come at three o'clock

in the morning. So welcome. It's my fault. It's completely on me. How dare you live in China? But of course, that makes you an excellent guest for this discussion today, not only because you live in China and have a deep connection to it, because you are also the host of the History of China podcast. And that is extremely relevant to our topic of ET today.

So welcome to the show, Chris Stewart. Well, thank you very much. Guilty as charged on all accounts. And right on. So we're both in the Agora podcast network. It's great to be in that collection of excellent podcasters. And we've been in there for a while, a few years together there. And it's been a lot of fun. I've listened to a lot of new shows that I wouldn't have found that way. And it's good stuff. Check it out. We're an eclectic group, but worthwhile, I think. Yeah, yeah. So as I've said many times, it's likely true for a lot of you listening, certainly not everyone. I know European history better than I know other types of history, including Southeast

Asian history. So we have an easier time catching parallels and catching the influences of George. And George, frankly, knows European history more than he knows Asian history, too. So these things overlap. We're all a lot of us are in the same boat with that regard. So Chris is going to help us when we go through Yiti and find some of these Chinese influences, also get some anecdotes from China that are really interesting. Just to help us kind of understand what's influence versus what's imagination.

Not that one's necessarily better than the other, but they're both fun. It's fun to know the difference and to parse it out and just to know where we're standing with all this. So it should be a lot of fun. Well, you're talking me up a lot, and I hope I can live up to the reputation that you provide. We'll see. We'll see. And Sean, what are you drinking tonight? Anything on theme for Saturday night? Some sort of strange Saturday beverage? Or are you still in Sunday beverage mode?

That's right. No, no alcohol. I don't know. It's a policy. I don't drink alcohol. But this is, I think I did mix more than normal in here this is like the green machine they could drink with regular mountain dew and water mountain do watermelon mountain dew and the raspberry bang drink and raspberry sparkling ice yeah this yeah i there's a lot of precious the red doesn't show up at all it's just green it looks like um yeah the green pretty much took a kind of brownish greenish brown that sounds so appetizing it tastes good i'm telling you so i want to say by the way it's not really how it looks

just thinking about that much like you aziz and probably most people in our circles, I know a lot. I probably know a lot about American history, I'd say. Decent amount about European history. Minimal amount about Chinese history. I think I know more about Westory history than China or even European history. I probably know Westerosi history even better than you. Definitely true for me. Um, yeah, that's, uh, that's one of the reasons I started doing my, my show is because I was kind of just like, well, maybe I should learn about

the place that I'm living in. Oh, that's cool. Well, how long have you lived in China? Is it Shanghai you live in, right? Yep. We are locked down and proud here in Shanghai right now. Plenty of time for podcasting. Plenty of time. Oh, yeah. No, my schedule is wide open. But no, I've lived in Shanghai for about, gosh, 12 or 13 years at this point.

That's nice. Kind of for a year longer than that. And, it never gets not weird. Well, I actually found your podcast and listened to it before we were in Agora together. So that's, that's neat.

I mean, I did learn, yeah, I learned a lot about the early stuff that I hadn't heard. And there's a question I have later about one of the weirdest Chinese emperors you can think of. And I've got to guess what it might be based on some of those early episodes. So we'll see when we get there. But I'm curious to hear what you have to say on that.

So that's a little buildup, folks. We're going to hear about the weirdest, strangest Chinese emperor we can think of here. Well, E.T. certainly rivals even actual Chinese history because George really took the brakes off when he started talking about the empire of the vast east that nobody knows anything about other than legends from 40,000

years ago. Right. So let's, let's give a couple of shout outs and get started. Let's first of all, we want to say, um, do you all must check out Queens,

the musical and the best way to find it. Uh, there's a link in the, uh, in the comments. You can go to, um, on YouTube.

If you look up Westeros musicals at the YouTube channel, but also in the chat right now, I've put a link to, um, the tweet because if y'all have Twitter, you can support them and signal boost it. Yeah, so as a basic description of it, it's a musical that's a play off of the Queens musical that's on Broadway right now. Six, the musical. Sorry, Six Queens. Six, the musical. Six, not Queens.

It's about the six wives of Henry VIII, and that is a musical on Broadway. And this is a Westeros version that was performed at Ice and Fire Con, and it's about an hour long, and it's really, really funny. We'll star a bunch of familiar faces, so please check it out if you haven't already. Yeah, we've watched it twice. More like two and a half times, actually.

And my shirt. Let's give a shout out to that. Michael Klarfeld designed these skulls for our Golden Company episode long ago and A'shea had it printed with Arts Cow. It looks really good. I'm happy to wear it. I think this is the first time I've ever worn a collared shirt on a live stream before.

So I'm fancy today. We're streaming after 10 p.m. at night. You've got to look fancy. That's right. History of Westeros after fancy. That's right. Also, history of Westeros after hours. That's right. And shout out to goodqueenalley.tumblr.com. One L in Alley.

That's Nina's blog. She provided some excellent notes again today. And right now there's an excellent discussion over there. She answered a question regarding why didn't Aegon add the Riverlands to the Crownlands or at least more of it? Because after all, the Riverlands was not independent when he conquered Westeros, so he could have taken more of it, but why not? So that's a good question. You'll want to check that out for the full answer. As of this recording, we've gotten our first full trailer of House of the Dragon. Today is Sunday or Saturday, May 7th, Sunday, May 8th for Chris. And that's pretty cool. So let's

start off with a little anecdote about a dragon-like dinosaur because everybody likes dinosaurs and they are kind of dragon-y. There's been two bat-winged dinosaurs discovered that I know of or that I read about. The first was 2015. And the second one was very recent and they look like little dragons. That's part of why this is cool. Right. But, but both of these dragons, these dragon dinosaur things were discovered in China. So it's kind of relevant here. And the first one is called Yi Qi, like Yi Ti, but with a Q. So it's almost the same name. Well, sort of, I don't know. It looks close And that's pretty cool. So, you know, a little bit of a science for y'all to get started here. That's pretty neat.

There's a large number of dinosaurs that are getting found all the time in China. And I had no idea about these bat wing little creatures. But I'm looking at the photo of the painting I guess now and actual footage yeah and no that looks really quite amazing it's got little leathery wings and yeah it's kind of holding one out it does really look like a dragon as he isn't exaggerating I did put the link to this article in the chat as well. I wonder if that's the artist is like,

what else could they think of but a dragon? So that's why they painted it looked like a dragon or is it really just that's kind of how it came out? I don't know. Yeah, we're kind of in the cultural bubble right now where it's like you'd probably immediately mentally go to a dragon if you thought lizard creature flying. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So I thought that was pretty cool. It's only a little relevant, but it's very cool. So let's move on. The trivia question for this episode, which city on the map is farthest east? Now, given curvature of the globe, we don't know what the curvature of the globe is. So let's say which city on the map is the farthest on the right, given curvature of the globe, we don't know what the curvature of the globe is. So let's say, which city on the map is the farthest on the right, if you're facing it? So we'll say it that way.

It's probably the farthest east, but with respect to, we don't know how the globe curves and all that. Yeah, so we'll say that. So if you get close, I'm going to say the ones that are almost as close. So we'll get a little brief discussion at the end. So we're talking about Earth?

No, we're talking about planetos, Teros, Martin World. Okay, got it. All right, just making sure I'm... Yeah. So I'll give you a clue. It's not Ashi. So it's something,

there's stuff east of that on the map. It doesn't go much farther than that, but there you go. There's a little clue. Now, all the way on the other side of the world, Westeros isn't the only, the farthest known continent to the west. It's more than that because when George named it Westeros, he hadn't drawn the rest of the world yet. He had given names. He had created Asshai. He had created E.T. He created Valyria and all that, but he hadn't, it was more of an imaginary,

like where they were in the world were in his head. They weren't drawn yet. So it wasn't exactly settled. But when he named it Westeros, he kind of made it pretty clear that it's to the west, right? It's pretty straightforward. And then Essos and Sothoryos is like, hmm, east, south. I think there's a pattern here. There is no Northos that we know of.

But maybe if we go far enough, we'll find a Northos, Northaros. He's a creative guy, but his naming conventions are a little bit pedestrian. Yeah. He doesn't get the highest score for those ones. It's like in the cartoons when you're trying to think of your name, you're like, Westeros, I guess.

To be fair, in the real world, we have North America, South America, North Carolina, I guess. To be fair, in the real world, we have North America, South America, North Carolina, South Carolina, New York. China. Wait, no, never mind. Sometimes we didn't even bother putting New or South or anything on it.

And we named the place just Mountain. That's what Montana means? It just means mountain? Oh, that makes sense. What does China mean? Named the place just mountain. That's what Montana means? It just means mountain? Oh, that makes sense. Oh, my goodness. What does China mean? That is a question with a fairly long answer, but it is probably derived from the Greek word for silk. No kidding.

Wow. I still remember I read that it was out in 1600s-ish. It was something Europeans were using to refer to China, but people of China didn't call themselves that, but I guess it stuck eventually. Using the term China to self-refer, yeah, that's a really modern thing. I'm bobbing my head out of frame.

Like in 100, in the year 100, what would someone who lived in what we think of as in Shanghai, what would someone have called himself? Would they have called himself Chinese? Would they have called himself? No, they. they've called themselves no uh they i i i really don't have a wonderful answer to that because i i don't know uh exactly what somebody would would self-refer to as but they would have been a a subject of in geez in the uh year 100 probably a subject of the state of Wu, or maybe Yue. And so the self-referential would be often the term of the dynasty in power, rather than what we refer to as a nation state today.

I noticed something like that, maybe that's a little relevant, that's going to come up a little more later, is that the capital moves more in Yi Ti than we've seen in other places. And I think that I was wondering if that's a Chinese thing. And George is pretty on the money with that. That's consistent. Good job, George. All right.

Well, more on that later. Let's make our way through this other stuff. So, yeah, George had some things in his head. And, you know, it makes sense to name a influence continent, Western Westeros, like that's the influence and the Asian centric stuff is the Eastern. So it's kind of frames it for what his average reader is going to be like. That's what we're talking about today. ET is to Southeast Asia, especially China, what Westeros is to Europe. Obviously, it's a there's plenty of differences. It's not obviously no one to one relationships, you know, on a only on the highest scale. But there's plenty of differences. It's not obviously no one to one relationships, you know, only on the highest scale. But there's plenty of details they have in common. So it's heavily influenced by real world cultures, names, traditions.

But with George's world building skills mixed in, let's start off with George actually commenting on this himself. This is a 2014 blog post that Nina found for us. And Sean and Ashea will read the question and answer for us. Dear George, I'm a huge fan of ASOIAF and the TV show, and I'm pretty sure there are lots of Asian fans just like me.

A Song of Ice and Fire has become a serious project attracting people of all countries and all races. There is a white race, a black race in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire and many other races. Why is there no Asian race? Chinese-like, Japanese-like,

and the Game of Thrones show, and A Song of Ice and Fire books. I know this can sound offensive, but I just wish to know the fact. That would be awesome to meet a character who would inspire Asians as much as Daenerys or Jon Snow. I heard there are many dragons and other wonderful creatures over the Jade Sea. Well, Westeros is the fantasy analog of the British Isles in its world, so it is a long, long way from the Asia analog. There weren't a lot of Asians in Yorkish England either. That is not to suggest that such places don't exist, however. You will want to get The World of Ice and Fire when it comes out in October. In the Other Places section, you will find a lot of material about Yi Ti, the island of Leng, and the plains of the Jogos Nhai, which you may find of interest. Yeah, yes. Well, we do, George. We do find that of interest. Yeah, so it's not the, probably not

the best answer that person wanted to hear, but it was something. And things have only gotten better since then. The horizon has expanded, so to speak, especially with the expansion of the TV show possibilities. But that said, George did a compelling enough job with the world building that, of course, your mileage may vary kind of situation, as it does with all things. But our episode on The Great Empire of the Dawn is our most watched video on YouTube. For podcast downloads, it wouldn't be number one. But still, you know, that's not real.

That's not important. Let that sink in, though. Even though it has very compelling parallels like the Amethyst Emperor stuff, Blood Emperor, Bloodstone Emperor stuff, it doesn't have a lot directly to do with the Song of Ice and Fire. So putting that all together, one of our most successful longest episodes is on a topic that is 99% world building. And no, that 1% of plot relevance is particularly juicy. It's really subtle and under the radar. Most people don't even catch it.

Most people don't even know it's there. You have to be like someone who listens to podcasts to have even probably thought about it at all, let alone heard the particular episode where it gets discussed. So that 1% nugget, of course, is so cool because it delves into the origins of dragons. Dragon bonding via magical bloodlines passed down over long periods of time and connects to some parts in A Song of Ice and Fire, notably the House of the Undying scene.

Dany may have seen visions of her ancestors that predate Valyria, which speaks to the origins of Valyrian dragon writing. Maybe. Either way, it isn't told to us directly who or what nation they belong to, but, you know, it's a very compelling possibility. And Valyria will come up a lot today as well, along with these even farther ancient connections, because it's a really close comparison. Vast, magical, wealthy, old, but much older than Valyria. There's a debate as to which human culture is the oldest on Planetos. Yi Ti says it's them. The Ghiscari, the Asshai,

and the Sarnori are kind of in the conversation. But, you know, Yi Ti maybe has the best argument. And that's the scale of how ancient this culture is. It's arguably held power as great or close to the levels of Valyria, but it declines more steadily rather than just vanishing after some great epic doom. And that's really important because the Ghiscari are pretty much gone. The people are around,

but they don't really have a big nation. The Sarnori, as we discussed very recently, there's only 20,000 or so of them left and Valyria is gone, obviously. So of all these ancient civilizations, Yi Ti might be the oldest and it's the only one there for sure. So that's a huge deal.

And it may have managed continuity through the Long Night, which is another astonishing feat if that's what happened. Maesters say it didn't or argue about a lot of it. But if we had a perspective in Yi Ti, which we may get someday, not in A Song of Ice and Fire, but in some other story, it might be any lot of it. But if we had a perspective in Yeet, which we may get someday,

not in A Song of Ice and Fire, but in some other story, it might be any number of things. We get that perspective that Sean was asking you about, Chris, of what would they self-identify as? Well, these questions would have to be answered if this was ever put on TV or in another sort of story. And it wouldn't be the maester perspectives of Westeros that would be, you know, our perspective. So is that is that a somewhat relevant or accurate to how China would be described? Like it's super, super old and super documented. And is that kind of a loose parallel or just speak to us on that? Yeah, no, it's it's a really, I would say it's a really, George is getting as close to a one-to-one ratio as really can be.

Because for China, I think it was up until the mid-19th century, basically the academic consensus was that humanity probably started in China. And then it was only the, the finding of the pre human hominid bones in places like Ethiopia that, that kind of said, Oh no, we came out of Africa, not out of Asia. But certainly China has a lot of, um,

history and, uh, their own tellings of the, their own, uh, beginnings are, yeah, it's kind of it it stems out of the very making of the firmament and the earth itself and pardon me and uh it's it's hard to say when uh mythology stops and and history sort of, and actually it's only in the last few decades that there have been more archaeological finds that have sort of firmed up of like, oh, the Shang dynasty is probably inaccurate. But we at least have written records that were carved into pig scapulas that actually exist. Why pig scapulas? That seems... Well, you can't fit as many

letters on the femur. Yeah, you gotta pick your bones carefully. We've had a lot of discussions about bones lately on this show. That's interesting. But it's... As I was reading back through the chronicles of E.T.,

I also was kind of noting to myself what the letter writer wrote, and I don't immediately see a name, but... Yeah, they didn't leave a name, I don't think. Ah, well, okay. So it's not my fault. It is a way of writing and a way of telling that is ignorant of that place. But that makes it feel more real in a lot of ways because we don't know about everywhere.

Even as informed as we are today, we have very limited knowledge about the places we don't know about. And I've always kind of appreciated how that comes across in the style of the writing of it's these maesters writing who are like learned and intelligent individuals, but they only know what they know. And they'll sometimes stop what their story is and tell you directly of like, well, I don't really know much about that but maybe um maybe somebody else will write about that someday yeah um and it

it's it's really true to history of i think literally like the very first actual chinese person that we know about in in historical arrived in Britain in the 1700s. Whoa. Yeah, that's pretty late, huh? You wouldn't think it'd be that late in time, but it's right there. Wow. Yeah. Wow. That is, I would have guessed way, way earlier. Yeah. Jeez. Wow. Yeah. And that's another thing that i think that comes up a lot this thing when it maybe sets the stage for here is that also in the real world

there are people that when they hear things about china including marco polo is a quote from him later or a reference to him later where he didn't write down certain things because he didn't think people would believe it he's like i'm not going to write this down no one's going to believe me anyway and that's exactly what she was some of these maesters are discounting things specifically because they seem too far-fetched and they're not discarding it based on evidence they're discarding it because it sounds too far it doesn't sound possible to them but it's let's not be absurd yeah but like what's absurd you know what seems absurd to us may not seem absurd to someone on the other side of the world if they're used to it, especially in a world with magic. I mean, come on.

That's like a recurring theme covering this Song of Ice and Fire book is that there's a skewed perspective of the author. You know, we have to consider the source here. And in general, it's true, but we get extra irony because sometimes we know the truth from what we've read. Otherwise, we know characters have seen certain things and the maester has an opinion that we know is incorrect. So it makes us suspicious of other things. And like, not only are sometimes they might disregard something because it seems too wild to them or whatever,

but sometimes they might do it for maybe political reasons. You know, like they might want to downplay some other kingdom's accomplishment or whatever. There's other biases. I wonder if that's less true and is this far away or maybe not. They don't want to seem weaker than anyone in the world. No matter what. I think America does that a lot with China.

We just don't understand how big things are over there. I think that's funny. People joke about everything's bigger in Texas, but there's a saying in Texas. Everything's bigger in Texas. They love to say that. It's true to a certain extent, but it's a saying in Texas, everything's bigger in Texas. They love to say that. It's true to a certain extent, but it's more true of China. But it

goes both ways, and I think that that's correct both in in its own kind of way in the world itself. Sometimes things are downplayed, but sometimes they're really upplayed and made more bigger and more larger

than life than they might actually be in reality. Yeah. I mean, for example, we talk about army sizes in ancient Greece versus army size in the medieval period, and they get smaller. And then you go to like England and the army sizes are really small. You got like 300 guys fighting 300 guys, whereas before you're talking about 40,000 and 40,000. And then you go to ancient China or not quite so ancient, and these army sizes are insane. And that's a perfect example of when the maesters would go, nah, there couldn't have been that many

men. There couldn't have been that many people in the army. And they're like, they added a zero and they take a zero off. I don't think so. That doesn't sound like that would happen. Certainly not here in Yorkshire. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard people to imagine that many people when they live around so few people. But, you know, it's place certain places are different to have more people. So how like how much is that exaggerated? Like the ancient armies of China when you hear about like half a million size armies is like how historically accurate is that? Or that because even if that's a little exaggerated that's still ridiculously huge compared to european even if it's doubled that's still ridiculously huge that's like unbelievable so i can understand why

the maesters are like but uh no the obviously i think it's a general rule in history the further back in time you go the more you kind of have to squint your eyes at any numbers that are given um and when we get back to guys like um uh sima qin and and sun tzu and and all those numbers that are given in like the art of war and stuff you're just like let's just go ahead and knock off a zero to be safe it's still huge but yeah once once we get to the the period of time that my show's in which is you know uh the the middle ming period which is in the the 1500s um you you kind of take the numbers as given because you figured that mostly people had learned how to count by then. And so when they're writing that, oh, yeah, the emperor took his 500,000-man army up into Mongolia and was so militarily stupid that they were totally annihilated by 20,000

horse riders. You're like, okay, yeah, that's probably what happened because China has a lot of people and it all was passed. Wow. That is so hard to imagine. Just because we talk about the logistics of feeding an even much smaller army and it's and it's it's hard to do and you're like well how the heck do they feed that many people like the more people you have in one place the harder it gets that the the physical a lot more people the physical logistics don't like multiply in difficulty you know it's not just the well there's also a lot more villages around well that's true but still you have ah this the man of it boggles the mind yeah i can't even finish one perspective i've gotten the toe that i've dipped into looking at chinese history one perspective i've gotten is

that china is like europe like the the the physical size and population is very similar if europe had ever been united which china has, they might have had a 500,000 person army, right? But they were constantly in all these little city states and feudal kingdoms and such. Even Rome. I feel like a motif of Chinese history is emperors uniting everyone. And when you do that, suddenly you have a massive amount of power and population to work with for better or worse. Well, you look at Rome or Napoleon's Grand Army and you do see exactly what you're talking about, which is, yeah, you could put a really sizable force together

as long as they don't stay in the same place for too terribly long and they can march under the same banner for long enough. Yeah, and they have ways to get places like Rome, of course, had its famous roads. The E.T. has roads. George was very careful about that. He's like, okay, there's a really impressive road system here

that's perhaps only beaten by Valerian's road system, which doesn't exist anymore. Well, some parts of it do. So it's probably the best road system in the world in Planetos, and that is part of how they were able to manage moving armies quickly from place to place. And, of course, those roads are also very helpful for trade, things like that. But it would also create just an enormous amount of upkeep having to clean, keep these roads clear.

Because most of them run through deep, dense jungles and forests. And that alone would cause all sorts of wear and tear. And, I mean, we had a minor rainstorm here a few days ago. And there were trees all over the place just covering roads. And that's that's nothing compared to like if it was a jungle, you know, if it was something like that. So, yeah, just the amount of upkeep and resources. This is a rich land we're talking about. Yeah, China, China, in reality, actually kind of went one step further, which is a lot of roads, sure. But the major thoroughfares, they decided there was going to be canals,

which is good for moving large numbers of people. But you really got to upkeep and keep those puppies. It's a lot more of an engineering challenge than a road. And a road is nothing. Water is a really tough uh cell that's another like understanding that i have china is it it's almost like it's very central to its history and to its government is managing the water that like there are multiple floods that have killed millions of people that it's like a constant part of the history of china is managing the water didn't the mongols do that it's like a constant part of the history of China is managing the

water. Didn't the Mongols do that? They were like, they blew up a giant. Oh no, that was a, it was a common, um,

war tactic was to divert a river and make it flood your enemy's city. Some range of Castamere stuff right there. Wow. But on a much bigger scale, not just a single castle, but a whole city. Wow. Yikes. And, uh Genghis Khan very famously tried to do that in uh far western China over near where uh it's you know the Taklamakan desert and it was a country at that point called

western Xia which was was ruled by the... Oh, I don't think it was the Uyghurs. I think it was the Jershens who had been kicked out of eastern China. But yeah, he tried to flood a city, and the Mongols just did not have the know-how to be able to do that. So they accidentally flooded themselves. And there's stories of them standing in chest-high water, just going like, how did this happen? This is fine. Everything's normal here.

So that kingdom was actually one of the very, very few places that Genghis Khan did not completely destroy at the time. Eventually, he comes back and is like, I didn't forget about you. They're very thorough. But they get a little retreat because, well, the Mongols, they had to figure out that we're garbage at this siege fair. So we will capture Chinese and Koreans and make them do it for us. Captured like engineers and stuff, right? Wow, that's clever, I guess. So there's another question here that George sort of answered another question from someone quite a

while back. Let's have that. Sean? Hold on one second. Sorry. Okay. Will POV see any of the places to the east like E.T., Asshai, etc.? Some, perhaps. I do not

subscribe to the theory put forth in The Rough Guide to Fantasyland, a swell book, by the way, that eventually the characters must visit every place shown on the map. And he continues in 2012, There do exist many other cultures and civilizations in my world, to be sure. The peoples of Yi Ti have been mentioned, as have the Jogos Nhai. I am not sure to what extent those peoples will ever enter this present story, however.

Their lands are very far away. What a crazy concept in this rough guide to Fantasyland, by the way. You have to visit every place on the map? Yeah, that seems odd. Yeah, just like it's a very- It's a rough guide. It's a rough guide, yeah.

I would say I disagree with that strongly. I would say that every map should have places your characters don't visit. Yeah. That way you kind of keeps you guessing. It gives away too much of the story. I think, yeah, modern readers are a little more,

a lot of times more, you know, figure things out a little more easily. We've all read more stories or whatever. I wonder if maybe, I don't know. I've heard that, that,

you know, if you try to make your world too broad, it's only ever an inch deep and you really don't build a whole lot of development. If you are trying to get everywhere in. Yeah. I guess that could be true to some extent. I don't know the nature of that book, but I wonder if it's maybe advice to writers everywhere in. Yeah, I guess that could be true to some extent. I don't know the nature of that book,

but I wonder if it's maybe advice to writers. Yeah, I guess so. And maybe the advice is like, don't spend so much time developing this map if your characters aren't going to go there. But George is going to take his time, no matter what. So, you know, he's going to, yeah,

not a factor for him. And of course, at the time when he answered these questions, it's interesting to note, but fast forward to the at the time when he answered these questions. It's interesting to know. But fast forward to now, I think he would answer these questions differently, not as they pertain to A Song of Ice and Fire. He would just say more. He would say, yeah, probably not A Song of Ice and Fire, but he would say something along the lines of there's the future of the franchise to keep in mind. We know now that HBO is developing an animated E.T. show, which is literally all we know about it to this point, an animated E.T. show.

So we can't say more than that, not because we aren't allowed to, but because we literally don't know. But it's a promising sign that the execs at HBO and the very powerful, creative people who run all this stuff are even considering it, have taken this step to give the project the description to this point. And on TV as well besides the the idea of an animated show the sea snake corliss valarian they're developing a show for him potentially especially if his character is a big hit for house of the dragon he goes there his first of famous of his famous nine voyages go is through the jade sea he hits ut so you'd be able to they'd be able to put it on screen in in uh in live action and that could be amazing it wouldn't be it wouldn't be a season one thing so

it's probably a long way out but it would be incredible i mean it made him it made his family super rich it helped them ascend to the point that we see them at house of the dragon and during the dance of the dragon so i mean that's incredible so chris and during the Dance of the Dragons. So, I mean, that's incredible. So, Chris, what about the I think the equivalent is a trip on the Silk Road, perhaps there and back. And to like two parts questions, I guess, is it said that it's said in A Song of Ice and Fire that you could sail the JDC, do one circuit of the JDC. And as long as you have enough investment capital to start with, you can make enough money to retire. Would that have been true in the real world for a European going to the Silk Road and back with a similar amount of trade capital or vice versa maybe? Or is that something you could even answer?

I'm curious just in general those kind of voyages that you would be able to set up, especially if you could put together and command enough of a sizable fleet to really make it worthwhile. I'm not sure if you could retire forever off of a single avoidance, but it was certainly worth the months and months at sea to sail around the horn of Africa once they eventually figured out that that was a thing that you could do. do and go all the way to India. And most of what they were interested in was the trade of spices and ceramics. And, and, and, and actual China. Oh yeah. Right. yeah right actual china right of course of course

how did i not catch that that's pretty obvious actually that's really neat of course george mentions silks and spices he doesn't mention ceramics i don't think but he does mention like jade as a big one which i'm sure that was irrelevant too yeah j is big as well, but that was less of an export so much as it was and is a really precious item here.

for instance, there are burial suits, which are just entire body tilings of green jade that are burial suits, which are just entire body, um, um, tilings of green jade that the richest people in all time were just buried in. Wow.

Jeez. That is amazing. All that wealth. You might get jaded. Oh, yeah. So that's pretty cool. Just to think think about that like you can see why some some people might like back in the day would be like all i gotta do is do this one journey and if i

make it back yeah but uh you were asking about the silk road and the silk road is this um very convoluted network of just sort of trade routes. Yeah, it's not a monolith. It's not a thing. There's actually this entire giant desert just sort of hanging out next to Kazakhstan where you couldn't go through it. You had to, it's one of two ways around it because otherwise you would die. Okay, seems like a convincing argument. of two ways around it because otherwise you could die. Okay. Yeah.

Seems like a convincing argument. But the thing with a lot of Central Asia especially is unless you have a really firm control over that uh ridiculously huge territory there are some uh some dangers in trying to traverse it and uh so eventually they kind of figure out of well maybe we should just use the ocean instead and that becomes sizably more uh lucrativerative because even though it's more expensive to make a fleet and sail around, the return on investment is more guaranteed, I guess. And that's similar here because let's be honest. Well, I don't know why I need to say let's be honest. It's pretty straightforward. The there is a land route to E.T. all the way from like Pentos or the farthest coast from Tyrosh and all that.

Well, Tyrosh is an island. Maybe not that. But, you know, the. It's just all those Dundaki in the way. Yeah. You got a lot of stuff in the way. You got big mountains. It's a long, long road.

You could get there by land. You get the doomed Valyria is in the way. You got a lot of stuff you have way. You got big mountains. It's a long, long road. You could get there by land. You get the doomed Valyrias in the way. You got a lot of stuff you'd have to get through. It is possible. But yeah, when we hear about people going there, it's sailing. We see people sailing the Jade Sea Circle. You follow the prevailing winds and it ends up going along the coast there and then through the bottom and then back.

So yeah, that's all pretty straightforward in that sense. That's pretty neat. I like to think about that, the huge wealth over there, and not just the huge wealth, but the concept of rarity. You get a whole bunch of stuff that no one has. We're in your part of the world, and the markup is pretty ridiculously high. And, well, hey, you spent two years going back. And you can bring stuff. Yeah.

You can bring stuff from your part of the world that is relatively mundane that over there will seem exotic. So you get like increased value on both sides. And there is a bigger initial startup cost to sailing. But there's so, you know, the average person can't just go do it. But if you can get someone with the wealth for the fleet to go, there's less risk along the way. Like when you're carrying all these valuable goods, you're in the middle of the water, it's less likely. There's less pirates than there are bandits and all that. Than are bandits, exactly.

All right, well, let's move on. You can at least put guns on your ship. That's true. Let's talk about the first time Yi Ti is mentioned in A Song of Ice and Fire. It's Dany III, A Game of Thrones. Viserys had told her that the last Targaryen dragons had died no more than a century and a half ago during the reign of Aegon III, who is called the Dragonbane. That did not seem so long ago to Dany.

Everywhere, she said, disappointed, even in the east? Magic had died in the west when the doom fell on Valyria and the lands of the long summer, and neither spell-forged steel nor storm-singers nor dragons could hold it back. But Dany had always heard that the east was different. It was said that manticores prowled the islands of the Jade Sea, that basilisks infested the jungles of Yi Ti, that spell singers, warlocks, and aromancers practiced their arts openly in Asshai, while shadowbinders and bloodmages worked terrible sorceries in the black of night. Why shouldn't there be dragons too? Now that's a lot of world building in one passage, but Yeetee is pretty prominent there. And some of the stuff that Dany has heard, just as a perspective of a fairly young person

who has only been told these things by her brother and maybe a few other people she's heard from here and there. But it turns out to be pretty accurate. It's vague, which is, you know, reasonable for the situation. There are basilisks in E.T. There are warlocks and spell singers and aromancers in Asshai. So basically

Avatar the Last Airbender is in Asshai? Apparently, yes. You heard it here first, folks. But it's a good question. And you wonder if, being so early in the story george is setting up the history and origins and relevance plot relevance for dragons i think that's the thing that's most important here for for the plot is the part about dragons and she refers well where else could dragons be where could they be alive still where could they have

existed before where could we have originated from things Things like that. And Yi Ti is right on that list. It belongs as an option or possible answer for all those questions. It's possibly a place where dragons are or were. It's connected to places that they definitely were. And there's bloodlines that may connect to Yi Ti as well. We've even got an example later of an emperor who had, who married a Valyrian nobleman and had a dragon at his court. So if that's a story, then there's got to be other possibilities, especially if we go back even farther in time. So that's pretty cool. Ashi, Aegon III, Yee Tee, all mentioned in this early chapter. So you know George was thinking about these things really early on. It's not one of these things that he added later. He filled it out later, but it was there from the beginning. Sean? I noticed doing a search of Ice and Fire that there were, I'm not going to marry exact numbers,

but maybe 15 or 20 total mentions of E.T. through the main books. And half of them or more were in the first book. They were almost all like in Dany chapters from A Game of Thrones. And like one or two more in each of the other books. He definitely, I think we've seen that in some other areas too, that he was kind of doing some very broad world building and it kind of zeroed in on certain characters or plots or locations. Yeah, I think that's how I would say it too, pretty much, Sean. Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

Well, point. Now, Eerie says, no dragon, brave men kill them all. That's kind of how she responds to this, this question, this quote that ashea read uh but there have been dragons in yeet as we'll see so stick with me it'll be easy oh nina says like hey saturday night we get a little loopier here i like this quote nina says i like this quote for the way in which it frames yeet as well as the other places danny thinks of as supernatural but also accessible there really are basilisks frames Yeetee as well as the other places Danny thinks of as supernatural, but also accessible.

There really are basilisks in Yeetee, just as there are manticores and shadowbinders elsewhere in the world. Danny even goes on to see a basilisk fight in Qarth in the Clash of Kings. So Yeetee isn't just steeped in legend and myth. It's real, but its magical and supernatural elements are and at least at some

point were real, or if they aren't anymore. Now here's the first mention of the world of ice and fire in the world of ice and fire of UT in the world of ice and fire. And it's dirt. It's a, during the discussion of the variations on Azor Ahai, like the different forms that he or she may have taken if there were multiple Azor Ahai.

So this is the Yitish version, Sean. Real, sorry, real quick before I read this, I wanted to add another thing I perceived about Jorah's presentation of E.T. In addition to what Nina said, which I think is good,

but also that it's far away. She's already far away from home, and E.T. is even farther away. I think that was also... You're right. I think a couple times Jorah brought it up as a place we could go. Like when things are falling apart,

we're called Drogo or whatever. We could go to E.T. I'll take care of you. Yeah, Jorah does. up as a place we could go. Like when things are falling apart, we're called Drogo. We could go to E.T. I'll take care of you. Yeah, Jorah does. He's all about that. He mentions it a few times. Yeah, because I think Jorah, you're right. It's interesting to consider that in the light of the phrase

to go forward, you must go back. Whether that's both literal and metaphorical, which is I think how a lot of people land that it's both literal and metaphorical. Literally, she has to go farther east to understand her own origins. The Azor Ahai prophecy emanates farther east than she ever goes. She never goes

farther than Qarth. But George did seem to originally plan to have her go to Esh-Shai, then he changed his mind, so maybe he's hinted that maybe we'll see it in flashbacks through Melisandre instead. But that opens the pause. Melisandre couldn't have gone straight from Asshai to somewhere else without passing by E.T.,

you would think. So maybe there's other opportunities for it to be seen in memory. Don't underestimate Melisandre. I never would. Okay, yeah, let's have this quote, Sean. All right, let's do the quote. In the Jade Compendium,

Colloquial Votar recounts a curious legend from E.T., which states that the sun hit its face from the earth for a lifetime, ashamed at something none could discover. And that disaster was averted only by the deeds of a woman with a monkey's tail. A woman, you say? The monkey-tailed hats come up several times in Game of Thrones when she's at the Western Market at Vastothrak. We see the E.T. people with that. It's like a fashion thing there. But it's more than fashion because it relates to this important deed in their history. It's not just, so it's something that clearly has lingered for a very long time because that would have been a hugely long time ago. Um, there are, uh, what are, are, are there a lot of, uh, monkeys in China, like kept as pets

or in zoos or I'm not really clear on that well yeah i'm glad you guys uh put this quote in uh especially because there's there's actually just a couple things that stuck out to me whenever i uh i read through this which is okay so number one the the monkey's tail um immediately it pops out to me it's probably probably a reference to the Monkey King, Sun Wukong. And the idea of this heroic, godlike, semi-human creature named Sun Wukong who has fantastical magic powers. And basically his whole story is about a thousand chapters of him saving the day over and over again. And so I think that the inclusion of it being a woman with a monkey's tail is a conscious inclusion of that legend. And maybe to people, maybe you don't know him as Sun Wukong.

Maybe you know him as Goku from Dragon Ball Z. Oh, really? I did not know that. Interesting. That's cool. Y'all didn't expect to learn something about Dragon Ball Z today, did you? He is a master and becomes a living Buddha.

He just goes around having adventures all the time. The other thing is the idea of the climate being a reference to what we do as individuals and as society, as in the sun hit its face for a lifetime and it was ashamed of something that none could discover. And a big part of the idea of what we'd call the mandate of heaven, which is the Imperial right to rule in Imperial China was associated with divination of the seasons and of being able to properly predict

and forecast when's the right time to plant, when's the right time to harvest. And if you mess that up, or if there were major natural disasters that could sometimes seem to last for generations. Um, you very quickly had several hundreds of thousands of people saying, I don't think you should wear the fancy hat anymore. You don't have the mandate of heaven anymore, right? That was basically the idea. Yep. Oh, wow. Okay. That's really neat. Yeah. We really, that, that's definitely something I wasn't aware of. That's very informative and super relevant here for sure. I'll bring something up from the chat here where Tommy and Scott W point out that our own Amy Blackfire,

Amy Landtrip has written an essay about monkey King parallels to Tyrion. So if anyone's looking for a little more about this subject, I'd check out Amy Blackfire. Right on, yeah. A-E-M-Y. Amy, friend of the show, for sure. Check her out. Yeah, and expanding on the idea of Tyrion just real quickly, I had some notes here on that myself. Because, of course, if you think of Dany as a woman, the woman who is with the monkey's tail, the equivalent for this story, why would Tyrion be relevant here?

Well, the monkey's tail, we've mentioned a few times, but I added a few extra details to this. Tyrion is referred to as a monkey demon very early on in his role acting as a hand of the king, and it sticks with him. He's kind of like, he laughs it off, but it clearly bothers him because he repeats it to himself many times throughout the story, like internally. And Tywin also says you were born a lion, not a monkey to him when he does his, when he'd like did that acrobatic thing on the table that one day when he was really young and the widow of the waterfront says he looks like a monkey. So there's, he's referred to as a monkey by himself, by this weird random person, this writer by Tywin, by the way to the waterfront. And if he ends up as Dany's tail,

you know, like her hand to the king, it's like tail instead of hand. I don't know if any of that, maybe that's a reach, but still, one of her advisors. So in any case, so that seems to fit, whether that's what George had in mind or not, it does fit. I'll also just point out one other thing that's kind of just popped in my head as you were mentioning Tyrion and bringing up his story arc,

which is that one of the major aspects of his character development is that he is physically changed. Yeah, true. And one of the major powers of the Monkey King is that he is first and foremost a shapeshifter and he can change his aspect at will. And of course, with a sense, he does those things. It's different. It's not straight shape changing, but you're right. It is a little more metaphorical, but you're right. That's totally present. That's really cool. Nice.

So we have next a little section called, well, actually, sorry, I missed something here. Nina's note on the myth of the long night here. She says, interestingly, I think this is the only myth of the long night that specifically identifies a woman as the apocalyptic hero. Even the Rhoynar legend refers to the children of mother royn coming together to save the day not mother royn herself this also is probably the hero we know the least about we don't even know we don't know what the deeds are you're not right what did she do it's pretty vague but i think that's part of george leaving it open and this again what you said before chris it wouldn't necessarily make a lot of sense for the maesters this far away

to have such strong detail on these specific, especially these really ancient deep cuts like this would be. This would be serious scholar business right here. Even like the even like a regular Yitish peasant would know a lot of this stuff. They would know some of it, but

so this next section is called lots of people lots of people want her to go there. So this is talking about Dany. Early on, we already talked about how Jorah tries to bring up Yeetee as a place they can run away to. Right up to the moment before she jumps on the pyre, he's still talking about, let's go to Yeetee. Just don't jump in the fire. Early on, he's just like, run away with me. Then he's like, also don't jump in the fire.

Like, run away with me, but also don't do that. But she's like, look. Please don't emulate yourself. Yeah, but it's not the first of many times. It's the first of, not the first, or maybe the first, but one of the more outstanding moments where it seems like Danny is doing something wrong and it works out really well. And George is like, well, you, dang, I don't know.

And that went most of all though because most of us would have probably felt like jorah like no this is not gonna why would you don't do that all right never mind you you birth dragons okay what do i know but the more flowery uh eloquent example comes from Zaro Zoandaxos when he tries to convince her. And this quote is just bonkers. Come on, Sean, hit us with it. Napoleon Bonaparte rose from obscurity to become the most powerful and significant figure in modern history. Over 200 years after his death, people are still debating his legacy. He was a man of contradictions, a tyrant and a reformer, a liberator and an oppressor, a revolutionary and a reactionary. His biography reads like a novel, and his influence is almost beyond measure. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast, and every month I delve into the turbulent life and times of one of the greatest characters in

history and explore the world that shaped him in all its glory and tragedy. It's a story of great battles and campaigns, political intrigue, and massive social and economic change, but it's also a story about people populated with remarkable characters. I hope you'll join me as I examine this fascinating era of history. Find The Age of Napoleon wherever you get your podcasts. Let this be your kingdom, most exquisite of queens, and let me be your king. I will give you a throne of gold, if you like. When Karth begins to pall, we can journey to Yeetee and search for the dreaming city of the poets, to sip wine of wisdom from a dead man's skull.

What the heck does that mean? Sean is intimately acquainted with the idea of sipping wine from skulls. I've seen him drink out of a skull many times, I have to say. That was a Thanksgiving tradition for 10 years or so. Yeah, we had a Thanksgiving tradition here, Chris, where we had a skull. It wasn't a human skull. It was, well, maybe it's a human skull. Okay, it's a human skull. It was a human skull. It wasn't a human skull. Well, maybe it's a human skull. Okay, it's a human skull. It was a human

skull! People would pour wine into it and drink it out and pass it around. We definitely have photos of this. That's fantastic. But I don't think anyone got wisdom from it. It certainly wasn't the wine of wisdom.

I mean, you probably felt wiser at the time. Wine does make you feel you you aren't wiser but you feel wiser yeah dreaming dreaming city of excuse me dreaming city of the poets what is that is that a reference to something or is that just something sounds cool i don't know or is that any i think uh yeah well i have an idea i don't know if it's accurate um so this sounds to me similar enough to um uh the poem by yates i think about um shangdu or xanadu um which was the city built by Kublai Khan, which was, I mean, he was in a complete opium haze the entire time he wrote that thing. So it's totally bizarre.

And it has very little to do with reality. Zenity was just kind of a largest trading post that was mostly made out of felt tents but um and i mean not to give felt tents a bad name they're comfortable places to live don't get me wrong um but in in xanadu did kublai khan a stately pleasure dome decree, and it goes on from there. But it sounds very poetic, like the dreaming city. And the idea of drinking from a dead man's skull, that's not really a Mongol thing, and it's not a Chinese thing, mostly. But it is more of a Scythian thing, and I think that there's a lot of conflation there.

There's the very famous queen of the Scythians. Tamyris. Yes, that's her. And she wound the king's head in some bag of wine or something and then turned his head into a cup. Yeah, and George borrowed that anecdote or something like it because there was a Yitish emperor who led, the 42nd Scarlet Emperor led a big expedition into the Jogos Nhai, who are a combination of Scythians and Mongols and Huns and all these other steppe peoples. And he wasn't very successful. And then his son tried even harder.

Wipe killed a lot of Jogos N and then his son tried even harder wipe killed a lot of jogos nai but ultimately failed even harder than his father because he was killed and to this day when a new uh jot is named which is like a chief they drink from this guy's skull yeah it's basically a con they drink from this guy's skull as part of the commemoration so they keep his skull and it's gilded so it's kind of also a little bit like um crass well that's you know it's for really special purposes is that you dip it in gold and uh you know it's that's what that's i would drink out of a golden skull a regular one no i'm but i also think come on we have i wonder if there's a little metaphor to like sipping the wine of wisdom from a

dead man's skull, like learning, like reading the writing, like a skull, the right, like, you know, like there are things that they wrote when they were alive and you're taking

kind of taking it in with, I don't know, a little, maybe a little metaphor from ancient wisdom in there, but that's just my imagination. Perhaps Nina says, interesting that Zorro also says they can search for the city. The implication perhaps being that it's

not known or easy to find. It adds to the mystery and mystique of Yi Ti, the idea of a fabled land within a fabled land. A place considered almost mythical even within the content of this semi-storied place. Yeah, it is like kind of right, like what you're saying with Xanadu.

It is kind of like this far away, China's this far away place that Samuel Coleridge Taylor's audience is not going to know much about. Most of they've heard is going to be fanciful. And so he's, and he's just fancifying it even more. Or there's the Rush version, which is just as fancy.

I was dead wrong. Thank you for the correcting you there. For which one? That was, that it was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. You just happened not Yates oh you said yeah I didn't even remember I didn't even realize you said that okay well that's cool yeah all right nice um so Nina says also this description sounds a bit of like a romanticized version of the house of the undying the the dreaming of poets the wine of the warlocks rather than the ones like ah that's a pretty good idea yeah i

kind of like that idea okay let's get um into yeetee a little more properly some of the like geography and things like that here's another quote only the broadest outlines of the histories of the further east are known to the citadel and even in those tales that have come west to us over long leagues of mountains and deserts, there are many omissions, gaps, and contradictions, making it all but impossible to say with any certainty what portion is true and what portion has arisen from the fevered imaginings of singers, storytellers, and wet nurses. Yet, the oldest and greatest of the Eastern civilizations endures to our present day, the ancient, glorious, golden Empire of Yee-Tee. Fancy. But seems like it's a deserved set of titles there.

Nina says it reminds her of that bit from Marco Polo that I mentioned at the beginning, playing down what he saw because he didn't think people would believe it. Interesting to compare to, say, Herodotus, who's a lot of things in Herodotus, who was one of the first historians, if not the first historian, at least in the West. And people, for a long time, things that he wrote, people were like, nah, that's not right. But over time, several things he said that people were like, nah, that's not right, have come back around. Like, actually, he was right about that.

Or at least that's what people believed at the time, so it gives it a certain sort of accuracy. And like Nina's example of a fabled land within a fabled land, that's the effect we have here. We have rumors going through rumors, like the telephone game. The farther it stretches, the more inaccurate it gets the more wild because people tend to storytellers you tend to exaggerate rather than downplay that's just the general rule of things most people would rather yeah what come on so let's uh the next quote will set us up really well because this is this gets into a little more detail and it's just a bombshell of an idea idea in terms of showing the

scale of this place it also has some big name drops sean hit us the cities of vt are far famed as well for no other land can boast so many if lomas longstrider can be believed none of the cities of the west compare to those of vt in size and splendor. Even their runes put ours to shame, the long strider said, and runes are everywhere in E.T. In his J. Compendium, Holocuo Votar, the best source available in Westeros on the lands of the J.H.C.,

wrote that beneath every E.T. city, three older cities lie buried. Jeez. I mean, we talk about Old Town as like the oldest city in Westeros, but it doesn't really have multiple versions. Older Town. Older Town. Yeah, these are older towns. This seems a lot older.

Is this roughly said about China as well, or something like this said about China, or is this more George is just kind of making it... Only three ruins underneath the current city? That seems a little... Light? Come on. Is your city only 800 years old? So it should be more. Well, they don't have archaeology in Lomas Longstrider's time, so he's just guessing. When you start looking at some of the major cities in China, and so for instance, like Beijing or Nanjing

and they've been there forever. And you start looking through the list of names and it goes into the dozens of the things they've been called in the past. Three, not three. Three dozen. So we're

in Nanjing right now, but at the time it was called this other thing. But that was after it was called this third thing. So there's whether it's a different city or not, or whether it's name changed, or whether it's like all these figuring out of different like, which is which. You kind of have to check your sources. You're like, am I i are we where i think we are chinese archaeology sounds hard wow so it's another example of just everything's bigger in china even the archaeology is bigger by these scales i mean because we obviously don't have like there are there's only one like i live in me and ashea live in atlanta here there's like

one prior atlanta it was burned in the Civil War and then it was rebuilt. And that's pretty much it, I think. So we got one prior version. And there's still some buildings from that previous version here. There's like a church or two that weren't burned down. So we've even got some of the originals still. So much smaller. And those are 150 years old.

Wow. That's old, but not complicated. That. Wow. That's old, but not going to come out of this. That's nothing. That's like a day. Sometimes I have to kind of pause and remember that, that Shanghai where I live is sort of a relatively newish city in China. It's,

it's not that storied or ancient. I mean, it's humongous, but there, there, there are places that are older. And it's like, oh, so how old are we talking about? How new is it? You're like, oh, it's like 800. Yeah.

No big deal. So let's talk a little more about what's the layout of YeeT. There's lots, like we said before, there's lots of jungles and farms. We talked about the roads as sort of a core feature of its connectivity. Lots of farms as well. Must be got to feed all those people somehow. But there's a few

interesting ideas of animals and other features. Like there's some sort of strange horse-like creature that they bred with horses to make zorses. So sounds like a zebra, really, if you go from horse to zorse. I guess that's, it's probably the idea. Roughly.

Nina writes. Quaggas is another possibility. I've never heard of a quagga, but she, she says zebra or quagga. So it must be a zebra like creature. Oh, I got to look this up.

I feel like I might've heard of that, but I can't. It's I can't, I don't know. Quagga. It sounds, it sounds made up. It looks like a, it looks like a small zebra. I don't know that it is that sounds made up it looks like a small

zebra to me I don't know that it is small it just kind of looks like that I don't know that it actually is small but it just looks like a less zebra like zebra that's one of the things that I found very unbelievable about the description

of ET is the idea of using Zorses as mounts because I've been in close enough contact with zebras. They're really jerks. And they don't like you. Really? I guess that's why.

If you breed them with horses, then you get a Zorse and that's like the best of both worlds. You get the... You get all the jerkiness of the zebra and all the... And the rideability of a horse. All the personality of a really ornery donkey.

It depends on how it comes out. If it's more zebra, they call it a zebrorse. And if it's more of a, yeah, never mind. Now, we mentioned basilisks and monkeys. There's got to be a lot of other interesting creatures that just haven't been named yet. Some of the things that we'll see, the maesters don't know about this.

Leng has tigers and huge apes. Leng is an Island nearby and it's more like maybe Korea ish, Japan ish vaguely. Uh, we'll talk, it deserves its own episode. We'll talk about this another time. It's not clear if tigers and huge apes are on the mainland.

Also, you'd think they probably would be. Um, but again, we'll make that assumption, but it seems pretty likely, especially the tigers part. It's not clear if tigers and huge apes are on the mainland. Also, you'd think they probably would be. But again, won't make that assumption, but it seems pretty likely, especially the tigers part. I'm less sure about the apes. But the farthest east we've gone, of course, like I said, is Karth. And that sits on the west side of the Bone Mountains. Yi Ti is almost everything in between the Bone Mountains all the way to the Shadowlands, with the exception of the northern zone there.

The plains of the Xogos Nai is above them or north of them, and that occupies a similar stretch of land, but again, in the north. So if you're traveling east through the Bone Mountains, let's say you're Dany, and instead of going west, let's say she goes east instead, she'd cross the Bone Mountains immediately after that she'd be in the area that contains Asabad and the cities that used to be the patrimony of her coons, Samiriana by Asabad and Kaya Kaya Naya. And then you get to ET. So it's pretty big, but I think relative to earth, it's smaller than China. Like China's, I guess the second largest country in the world in terms of land area, I think.

I think it's Russia's the only one bigger. And then the world in terms of land area, I think. I think Russia is the only one bigger. And then the largest in terms of population. Obviously, we don't know how big E.T. is in terms of population. It sounds pretty big. But in terms of size, I think it's probably only 40% the size of Westeros, roughly. But I'm just guesstimating. And of course, the borders have changed over time, like Chris said, with the cities. It's not a monolith.

It's not the same size at all times, given their lack of control over neighboring regions or neighboring regions maybe controlling them a little bit. I would love to highlight the thing Nina put in the document, Aziz. What's that? Nina put a Simpsons reference in the document. Aziz references Leng has huge apes, but it's not clear if those are on the mainland. And Nina put as a comment that I really almost made me laugh out loud here. We're going to Ape Island. Yeah.

To capture a giant ape. I wish we were going to Candy Apple Island. Candy Apple Island. What have they got there? Apes. But they're not so big. I just, it's really good nina you got me surprise simpsons the simpsons have had a lot of good ape related jokes haven't they

i hate every ape i see from chimpan a to chimpanzee. But you'll never make a monkey out of me. Okay, back to Yi Ti. I've done that twice this episode. So yeah, pretty big, but maybe not as big as China is relative to the real world. But it's got a lot of structural similarities. You think of China and look at what's to the north. A great plains full of nomadic step horse riders. That's exactly what YeeTee has with the Chogos Nye.

And then immediately to the west, you have a sort of Arabian Middle Eastern-y land, Ayasabad, Bayasabad, Samiriana. Those sound very Arabic-ish or Middle Eastern, and that's the same. That's what's directly east or west of China, maybe a little farther west. You got like India, which is maybe kind of skipped over here.

There's no, maybe there isn't an India analog here. But still, the Silk Road would be passing through there. And instead, you have the Sand Road, but also the Steel Road and the Stone Road, because George, you know, likes to go bigger. But it's pretty similar there. And Leng is very closed, which is sort of like Japan in certain parts of its history. Certain parts of history, very like Japan was very closed

and just off the coast with a back and forth history with the mainland, which is stuff we'll get in more into Leng because there's more to say about Yi Ti than Leng. So we'll save that stuff for Leng.

Another interesting geographical feature is the shrinking sea to the north. That sounds a lot like the Silver Sea because it was a huge lake that's now just a few small ones. There's a big dust bowl in northern China, right? Was there a sea there in ancient time, prehistoric times? Is there an equivalent here, an analog? um the the the big dust bowl you're talking about that is uh the desertification moving south out of the uh the gobi uh so there's not a giant lake there it is having to do largely with um bad industrialization practices and not really taking adequate care of the environment and it just being an arid place in general okay as uh earth's climate continues to shift uh and so that really does uh mean that cities in the north like beijing get um sandstorms with seasonal regularity.

The closest thing I'm thinking of to the... I'm sorry, what was the name of the sea again? It was the Silver Sea? The Shrinking Sea here, and the Silver Sea was in... used to be the Dothraki Sea. But here in the U.T., north of the U.T., is the Shrinking Sea.

But similar. The biggest inland body of water in China is called a Qinghai, which means like the, the turquoise sea. And it is a fresh, fresh body of water. Um, and it is, it's not shrinking, uh, but it's, it's kind of right smack dab in the middle of China and quite the tourist attraction that really is quite lovely. And fortunately, it's not being evaporated. So that's referred to as the Turquoise Sea for looks and not because of any sort of turquoise trade that went on? Yeah, it's just the color of the water

is just kind of this nice blue-green, teal-ish color, and that's just what they call it. I wonder if George got the idea for the Jade Sea from that, which is an ocean, more properly. But still, it could be the inspiration. Other than that, or maybe the

Yellow Sea. Oh, okay, sure. That would fit. Yeah, that sounds better. There's also, north of Yeti, the Great Sand Sea. It's a gigantic desert canyon of sorts, and that might be more like the desertification thing that you were talking about. Michael Klarfeld's rendition of it on the map is pretty spectacular in fact you can see it over my shoulder there we go mirror image hard to point it's like right there this is the

oh that's the sand sea and that's the great uh this is the shrinking sea here and then great sinking great sand sea right there yeah so yeah the the sand sea is probably most analogous to um the taklamakan which is in xinjiang so it's in the very far west of china it's right on the Sahara. Oh, okay. Nice. Right on. Looks like a correction was thrown at us here.

China is third largest by size. Canada is technically larger by size, but of course, nowhere near in population. Yeah. Blame Canada. Those Canadians sneaking in there with their large country. Yes. Thank you, Aria saxina for the correction appreciate that aria always like the corrections we want to be accurate here uh so that sounds pretty cool um so if we see future projects in this land the great sand sea or the shrinking sea would be pretty spectacular things to put on TV or to just to give us a visual of. So maybe we'll get to see that.

I would say moving on, but wait, this next quote says we're not done with this part yet. No discussion of VT would be complete without a mention of the five forts, a line of hulking ancient citadels that stand along the far northeastern frontiers of the Golden Empire between the Bleeding Sea, named for the characteristic hue of its deep waters, supposedly a result of a plant that grows only there, and the Mountains of Morn.

The five forts are very old, older than the Golden Empire itself. Some claim they were raised by the Pearl Emperor during the mourning of the Great Empire to keep the Lion of Night and his demons from the realms of men. And indeed, there is something godlike or demonic about the monstrous size of the forts, for each of the five is large enough to house 10,000 men, and their massive walls stand almost 1,000 feet high. You know, there's also something hyperbolic about those but is but are they is this the china is this the everything is too big in china exaggeration or no it really is that big it's this is like a he's georgia sort of towing that line whether it is could it really be that big well maybe but it sounds kind of too big i think this is very polkianish in this of like that was the

great watchtower yeah that once existed i think this has got to be either exaggeration through the tales you know uh and or just some mystical aliens or something or or maybe george doesn't understand how tall a thousand feet is so one of those he really likes tall he does he does like tall because that's like the two biggest pyramids stacked on top of each other and there's five of them and they're one solid black stone right they're not a picture brick so like uh it's pretty impossible what um so chris is this supposed this is an analog for the great wall i suppose right something like that like this is i think right it feels like it's it's pretty there's a lot of substantial differences here but there's like a big fort that blocks the people from the north

or some ancient enemy from the north oh yeah i mean a great pole uh nobody would ever think about the great wall when they think of China. Totally obscure reference there. Like the Great what? Very few people know about this. No one's ever heard of it. No, no, no. It's completely an analog.

And the thing with the Great Wall is, of course, the wall gets all the credit but what did it actually do it was just sort of a a way to link together uh watch towers and forts to just sort of look out north and say that throat singing sounds pretty threatening the great it's almost as much a road as a wall, right? This is, it's, it gives the ability to travel along pretty swiftly. Yeah. Yeah. You, you can do that. I've, I've done a little, a little part of it and it's, uh, it's not easy.

Um, it, it is really going up over the tops of mountains and stuff. And sometimes you're sort of going up this staircase and then the staircase just sort of turns into a cliff and the tower's up there and you're just like so you you just we're just climbing the cliff now that's a nope it's nuts um but its maiden purpose as the idea of a watchtower presupposes is that they would have these braziers ready to go and if the mongols come riding down to be uh raiding as they are want to do uh you light the fire and uh let everybody know that um it's it's time to get the spears ready. Wow. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I like it.

Let's move on to myths and religion. Here's another quote from Acheia. In the beginning, the priestly scribes of Yin declare all the land between the bones and the freezing desert called the Gray Waste, from the Shivering Sea to the Jade Sea, including even the Great and Holy Isle of Leng, formed a single realm ruled by the god on earth, the only begotten son of the Lion of Night and Maiden Maid of Light, who traveled about his domains in a palanquin carved from a single pearl and carried by a hundred queens, his wives.

For 10,000 years, the great empire of the dawn flourished in peace and plenty under the god on earth until at last he ascended to the stars to join his forebears. He made his wives carry him around like geez this guy but i guess it probably wasn't much work of the hundred of them yeah this is somewhat akin to the stories regarding the silver sea and the fisher queens or to a lesser extent some of the age of heroes tales but it's even more epic even more supernatural i suppose does this have any sort of resonance with chinese founding myths or beliefs or anything? Does this strike any? Or is this just kind of...

Well, definitely not the palanquin carved out of a single pearl. That's new. That's a big-ass pearl. There's at least four or five pearls in real China. Imagine the clam. You need a five-fort sized clam for a pearl

epic. So, yeah yeah in terms of beginning stories or the idea of the writ of rule the terminology for the emperor of China was the son of heaven or appointee. So this literal appointee from the gods who is there to mostly keep calendars but also rule over everybody. But it's mostly the calendars. And so the iteration of the Lion of Night and the Maiden

Maid of Light, that's, I think, in just, that's a fun story, but that's not really There aren't many lions or anything like that. I mean, we hear more about tigers, in my understanding. That was actually going to be a question I have later, so let's talk about that now.

Okay, so let me set this up briefly. Lions don't exist in China. Lions also don't exist in England. And lions are all over England in terms of sigils. And Nina did a little research on that. It's mostly because lions were a big deal in ancient Greece and in Rome and in the Bible. So they're just, that was carried forward in European history and Western history. So it's interesting to think about that as like a consideration where lion is the most

real of a lot of these fanciful sigils that you'll see in say ancient England, where there would also be griffins and of course dragons, but China also uses dragons and lions, but to them, the lion is similar-ish to the dragon or to the same, to the lion in England in that it's real, but it's not something they would ever see. So it's quasi-mythical because you only – and they might think dragons existed somewhere else too. They might think they were real even if they weren't. So that's kind of a neat comparison like opposite ends of the earth, similar belief, similar animal use in the same kind of way, mythically. So Lion of Night here is kind of an interesting idea because... Anyway, Chris, I'm here to get your thoughts on this. I'm starting to ramble.

Well, yeah, the thing with lions and their importation into East Asia is really kind of an interesting story and probably similarly interesting to how lions came to be existing in the cultural mythos of England. But it actually came about in the Tang Dynasty, so from about the 7th to 10th centuries. And the imperial family of the Tang Dynasty was actually these sort of, it's hard to say half, but semi-Chinese, semi-Turks who'd kind of come in from the north and from the west. And some of them very famously would just refuse to learn Chinese and refuse to speak to the common people, and they would only speak their own language. And some of them, there's one prince in particular who made all of the

ministers at court very mad because he wouldn't play along with the sort of the fake family history that, oh no, the Lees have always been Chinese and they've always been here and don't even listen to that Turkish rabble because he would only wear Central European style clothing. He would only live in a yurt and he would never speak Chinese. Wow. And just refused to even deign to try. And you can see how successful that strategy was.

His family still rules today. Oh, no. Oh, it didn't work out. It didn't. Oh, okay.

Turns out you don't really want to make those people super angry. Yep. Hmm. So, so in youtube the lions came as an import from like persia and central asia and then became such a part of from persia sort of cultural ideology that every year on uh this holiday we eat this little dumpling filled with sesame um paste and lions, guys in a lion suit dance and, and do really acrobatic maneuvers.

Interesting. And you're like, why are they lions in China? And that's why. So we'll have to do a deeper dive on the maiden made of light and the lion of night some other time. But I just thought it was interesting to bring it up in this context with the lion as an idea that's not semi-mythical to people of China. And it's similar here as well.

Because as far as we know, there's no lions in Yi Ti either. So this god, Lion of Night, is an interesting personification of a beast that to us seems real, but to them would be a lot more mythical. And, and as the quote says, the, whether the maiden made of light and the line of night were like friends or whether they had a relationship or not as unclear as sort of, you know,

it's just like he made her pregnant. It was like, well, how willing was she in this? But they did seem to work together, at least in terms of the long night where she turned her back on humanity. And that that turning of her back unleashed her partner or just enabled the Lion of Night to do his thing. And so that's where we get stories about the demons coming from even farther east that the five forts were possibly designed to fight back against.

Nina says, it's curious that the Lion of Night seems to have both god and demon to the Yichish people, sort of like a Satan thing, where it is a... or the storm god, maybe. Yeah. That's kind of neat. With a lot of Eastern mythology,

the deities or spirits are... they're not necessarily benevolent or, or evil. They're kind of deeply apathetic towards human morality in general. And so they just do what they do. They're, they're forces of nature that you can try to appease. You can try to give offerings to, and try to, you know, get them on your side, but they're not your buddy and they never will be. Yeah. So, but isn't that, it's fascinating that the emperors of Yi Ti and the golden empire,

they and the great empire supposedly draw their descent from the line of night, which you usually don't see that. Usually you see like in Greek mythology, like they're drawing descent from Zeus, Aphrodite, Hera, you know, the so-called good gods. That's true.

That's true. I should say Zeus is a good guy, but they think of him as kind of a good guy, right? They thought of him as maybe a tough guy to be subordinate to, but mostly a good person. We know we would say otherwise given modern sensibility. They want to think of powerful.

Yeah. Powerful. No one calls Zeus a demon, you know, like powerful beyond reckoning. And that, that just affords you a, a completely different sense of morality and right and wrong.

Then we puny mortals can fathom. Yeah, that's probably a better way to put it. Like Zeus, they probably didn't even think of Zeus as good or bad. They just thought of him as powerful and powerful people can do what they want. And that's just the way of the world. That's the way it is, right? There is no good or bad. It's like forest of nature. You don't say the wind is good or bad in terms of morality. It might help or hurt you, but it's nothing personal when the wind knocks over your house apparently it's the same with some of these other deities yeah to your point the lion of night is thought of as a demon yeah so the emperors just

say this is our great great great grandfather this grandfather, this lion of night. It's like, we descend from this demon, which is, that's a little unusual to claim descent from a demon. Like the, these other examples where we had like a dark sort of analog, like Satan or the, or the storm God, I said,

no one claims descent from them. Part of me thinks that that might be a, maybe an on purpose translational quirk of the stories in Yiddish being translated into Westerosi and how that, as we see in, in reality, sometimes the gods of a culture are retranslated into demons and evilness when they are culturally retold. That's a great point.

We shouldn't just assume that the Westerosi perspective on what the Nietzsche perspective is, is correct on these people. I thought of them as two sides of the same coin i think it's like the lord of light yeah i kind of see that as well if you're descended from one you're from the other one is demonic but one is good i guess you know that makes sense although again no one no one enough declares descent from the lord of light either but that's a super old deity too but but the the concept of duality and of light and darkness existing in co-equal relationship with each other i mean that's that's a core set of taoism and confucian philosophy and so it would make a lot of sense that uh if you're basing a culture on this paradigm, then it would have that central idea of light and darkness both existing together.

That's a great call. Yeah, I think that does really fit really well when you lay it out like that. You're right. There's more of an acceptance that these things are real. You're not fighting against them. Maybe you are, but you're not denying that they are just as much a part of existence as the stuff you might call good or see as positive.

That's really neat. That's a great take. Can I point out real quick? Yeah, go ahead. The Christian religion is kind of based on descent from Adam, the original sinner, right? Like Adam and Eve sinned, and we all came from them.

Oh, that's a good point. Out of it? I don't know. But it's worth noting. Okay. Yeah, that's a good call. What about Chinese? Go ahead.

The duality exists there as well of in Christianity, you have God the creator, and then there's also Lucifer or Satan who exists in kind of perpetual opposition there. And that stems down from, oh, what is that? The Manichaeism. i forgot uh never mind someone in the comments will help us out here i bet so what two last short points about lions here one is does this would any of this relate to the concept of the guardian lion which i guess is a thing from like a statue kind of thing you see around china like a symbolic thing i don't know much about those, but Nina included in the notes, I thought we'd ask you about that. So yeah, the guardian lion, some of them are honest to goodness lions. But a lot of what are seen as lions is if you look at them closely, some of them have cloven hoofs and some of them have sort of the

unicorn spikes on their on their faces and those are actually a cryptid that's called pisho and pisho is a minor god a minor deity who is a ferocious protector who guards the home and the family, but most of all, he guards your money. And that stems from the beginning of time when Pisho being the naughty little dragon puppy thing that he is, um, ate,

ate the, the food off of the Jade Emperor of Heaven's dining table when he wasn't supposed to. And so as a punishment, the Jade Emperor decided to seal up his anus for all eternity and make him only able to eat gold, silver, and precious things like that so that he would only ever be able

to accumulate wealth. But never spend it. Oh, my goodness. That's a metaphor. It took a turn there, but for a minute, I thought that sounded kind of like Eve eating the apple, but yeah. Definitely went another direction. Yeah, it took a turn.

One way to put it. It's a weird monetary turn, yeah. So with the lions we've talked about a good bit here. What about tigers? Tigers are actually native to the area, or at least some regions, maybe not all of China, everywhere. I guess I wouldn't know. Is that sort of a pretty major symbol? Is it maybe an equivalent to lions in the West in a lot of ways, or is that maybe a misuse of the the idea here i don't think it's a it's a misuse at all i think tigers are um in some ways they're more prevalent so for instance there's like the year of the tiger in the chinese zodiac and that's one of the

really good years to be born it's like dragon and then tiger and then after that it's like horse you're screwed if you're on those yeah yeah i don't know i'm rabbit uh geez um but uh lions are more common as symbols in a lot of places so like the statues outside of buildings, there's no, there's no tiger dance festival or anything like that. It is lions. And you're, you're right that you'd think it'd be the other way around. But since the lions became associated with royalty, that became the more. Just kind of stuck, huh? Yeah, it's stuck.

How about that? That's interesting. Yeah, that's's that's very informative i i'm curious because certainly george uses both tigers and lions for et and i wanted to kind of get a wanted us to all get a sense of of where that influence is coming from that definitely helps uh let's take a few uh mid notes here and then get right back to it and my uh tk okay podcast networks in the super chat says that that Klarfeld shirt is everything. Well, yes, of course. It is really good. Michael Klarfeld and Ashea teamed up here.

Good job, y'all. Aria Saxena says, the Chinese also probably saw lines while traveling to India because they were found there. Okay, yeah, good point. That makes sense, yeah. So there would be more opportunity to see them, probably as compared to people in England, maybe.

I'm not sure. The Afriking Jasiki says, Zoroaster, duality guardian angel and halos. Ah, good call, which is a part of the origin or the influence for R'hllorism, too. That's a very good catch.

And Aria Saxena again says... I knew your listeners would help me out with my... They're good. The point of the value of doing a live stream is they get to catch our mistakes for us and add additional content like this one. Arya says, yeah, the red religion worship of fire seems to be inspired by Zoran Astrid.

Yeah, there we go. More confirmation from the chat. Okay. I just had a little thought, kind of following up what we were talking about. Sure. Horses are incredibly valuable. Yeah. But also very prevalent. thought kind of falling out what we're talking about horses are incredibly valuable yeah but

also very prevalent and we don't see them as a sigil very often right it's too common to be noteworthy so we use something more exotic or fantastic like sources yeah so i love that you organically brought up the Jade Emperor of China because of course people buy now and you already know that that's also what these gemstone emperors in Yi Ti are called. Let's talk about them. We have these god emperors. Here's a quick quote, Sean. In ancient days, the god emperors of Yi Ti were as powerful as any ruler on earth with wealth that exceeded even that of Valeria at its height, and armies of almost unimaginable size.

We kind of talked about the unimaginable size of armies before. That's just come back again like, yeah, woo. But it says as wealthy, and the armies are big, but it doesn't say more powerful because of course they didn't,

if they had dragons, and it's not nearly a sure thing that they did, certainly not recently, that would be the difference for Valyria being more powerful. But Nina says, Yeetee seems to be associated, maybe even exclusively associated with the trade in saffron, which is considered precious and extremely expensive, quote, more costly than gold, as it's usually referred to. That would be a real world thing, too, in as recently as a few hundred years ago.

So we talked about sailing the jade sea to make a ton of money saffron would be one of the things you do that for in the real world it would have been similar of course you don't get do you get saffron in china or is that more of a a uh one of the things from some of these islands that magellan talked about but i think that's more of a southeast ind thing. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So it would have been easier to find, but maybe it's not native there. I'm not sure. So spice in general though.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Like I, I wish I knew a little better, but I feel like at one point pepper might've been as valuable as gold. You know, you gotta think how it's,

it's really hard to understand how different the world used to be. Like we can have like sushi for lunch and spaghetti for dinner nowadays but oregano would have been like relatively rare and that would have been relatively local to europe but all the different flavors and spices we have it's important we have to eat all the time just think how we constantly have to eat and how bored people would get with food how luxurious it would be to have some exotic flavor how valuable it would be yeah so people coming over and paying huge amounts for this and that's that show is a part of why ut gets so rich yeah no definitely um people sailors tradesmen who would come to china either by land or by sea they weren't coming for silver or gold

or bronze or yeah they had that back home, yeah. They were coming to get yummy stuff to put on their food. That's amazing. You're like, can we just grow that? They give us tons of money for it. Like, this is great. I love it. What a deal. So, yeah, Fire and Blood

calls spices like saffron, cloves, and cinnamon, quote, the rare seasonings from beyond the Jade Gates, which is most likely yeety. Some of them probably come from other spots. There's probably a few, you know, there's, it's a wide circle of, of sailing there. There's gotta be some, some obscure spots that only certain places, certain things grow, but most of it sounds like yeety. It's fertile. It's big. There's more people growing things. And, um, that money, the fact that they're so wealthy is in part because of this trade,

which implies a lot of that, a huge percentage of that trade is coming from there. And Nina wonders if silk was invented in Yi Ti like it was in China. It would make sense. We don't hear of silk being made anywhere else in Planet planet's house so it would certainly fit um well the the thing with silk is that for a period of uh of centuries it was a death penalty level state secret of you better not ever allow that to uh go past our borders because it is so incredibly valuable. So China would export silk like nothing you could even believe. But the idea of carrying a live silkworm out of China was something that would get your head chopped off.

Wow. That reminds us of the analogs to that in Martin's world, I guess would be like the secret of Valyrianrian steel that Maester was trying to smuggle out. He didn't know all. He hadn't figured it all out. He was just trying to understand parts of it. But yeah, a state or the Murex snails from the Carthaginians, the Punic people, the secret of purple, secret of making purple. Yeah, things like that.

Secret of purple. I know. isn't that such a strange thing it's like the secret of making purple was worth millions back in the day or billions

it's like cool band name I called it and once again we encounter the giant armies thing so that's been I think we've talked

about that enough probably so here's another quote about the early earlyishness of things and the scale of history whatever the truth et was beyond question one of the places where men first climbed from the pit of savagery to civilization and literacy for the wise men of the east have been reading and writing for many thousands of years. Their most ancient records are cherished, almost venerated, but are also jealously guarded by their scholars.

Such accounts as we have are pieced together from hearsay, from travelers, and scattered texts that have escaped E.T. to find their way across the seas to the citadel. So this definitely sounds like China, and Chris, I want to hear your thoughts on this for sure, but this is a really particularly favorite passage of mine, something that I'm really glad George included, because some people will complain and say George is borrowing too much from the real world. I strongly disagree because look at what we're doing here. We're using this as a springboard

to learn about real history, learning about real culture, things like that, while also having fun with our made up world here. And if it was entirely all made up in the world, that would be fun too. But we wouldn't get this opportunity to springboard into railroad parallels. And that's one of the things about China that I think is so cool, so fascinating. It does seem to be the most recorded country or culture of all time, even with respect to the fact that China is a catch-all phrase in this context. It's still just... Especially for how old it is. Yeah, it's super like so many other places in the world,

like it was all destroyed. Like the Library of Alexandria, like a lot of stuff that was there wasn't saved or whatever. So talk to us about that for a minute, about how this applies to China and how... Well, in terms of records and of destruction, there's been a lot of that in China as well the the records that we have are

pretty sparse and pretty few and far between and actually some of the oldest records that we actually know of today were only rediscovered in the last uh few few decades because uh they just they'd been buried with somebody and every other extant copy had been destroyed a thousand years ago or something in a fire somewhere. So it really is incredible just when we think of almost regardless of what we're talking about, the stuff that we know is so minuscule compared to the stuff we don't know and probably never will. Yeah. I hope more is discovered though. We talked about recently we had cause to briefly bring up the terracotta

warriors just as, as an idea to in part, just cause it's amazing. But also just to point out how recently they were discovered, like relative history was like 1975 or something. I was digging a well in the 1970s. That's how Gobekli Tepe was found too, or Tepe was found too, like these unbelievable

like ultra epic historic finds that were just like, oops. When's the next big oops going to come? I hope soon because these oopses are awesome. What's that really triangular hill over there? I don't know.

It's probably not. Don't worry about it. One day they might just find Genghis Khan's tomb. It seems kind of unlikely, but maybe they will. You know, maybe they'll find it or, you know. Because they did apparently find Philip of Macedon's tomb and Alexander's tomb is still gone. The Mongolians really would rather you didn't.

Yeah, they don't want... Wasn't the story that everyone who... He was buried, and then they killed everyone who buried him, and then they killed the people that killed the people who buried him? That is definitely the story. Might be exaggerated, but whoa. It might be... But, I mean,

you read much about the Mongols, and you're like, maybe not exaggerated. You couldn't put it past them, which is like, chilling. They might have also killed all their families so and and to this very day the there's this region around where it's thought his tomb might be and it's known as the great taboo and you are just that's illegal to go there whoa so even now wow that's wild yeah they take it seriously geez well speaking of people who are hallowed in memory and whose effects are still in play long after their death oh in this case death is maybe a misnomer i'm referring to the house of the undying so are

they dead are they not i don't know this is probably one of the most quoted passages in all of A Song of Ice and Fire, certainly in A Clash of Kings, which I can only assume is because it's so cool and mysterious and stirring. Shaya, take us away. Ghosts lined the hallway, dressed in the faded raiment of kings. In their hands were swords of pale fire. They had hair of silver and hair of gold and hair of platinum white, and their eyes were opal and amethyst, tourmaline and jade. Faster, they cried, faster, faster.

She raced, her feet melting the stone wherever they touched. Faster, the ghosts cried as one and she screamed and threw herself forward a great knife of pain ripped down her back and she felt her skin tear open and smelled the stench of burning blood and saw the shadow of wings and daenerys targaryen flew gets me every time that quote's so good and those are very specific gemstones. That's not sapphire. That's not ruby. That's not emerald. These aren't like Western gems. These are ones we associate with the East more so, especially given that her eyes are amethyst, and that's associated with the Valyrians. But nowhere else do we see opal-eyed folks. Nowhere are there tourmaline-eyed folks. Nowhere else do we see jade eyed people. Maybe the Lannisters have

but they're more described as emerald and emerald and jade are distinctly different shades of green. Oh yeah. But these are specific gems so they correspond to nothing better in that we know of in this world than the gemstone emperors and there's really no other fit that we know of. So that is the core

of why this connection exists in theory and conceptually it's similar to the that is the core of why this connection is exists in, in theory. And conceptually it's similar to the magic of the legends of the age of heroes. You know, we, a lot of them had children that had some of their magical characteristics that were passed down to their descendants, but would die out over time. There's eye colors seem to persist though. The genetic marker, like the Danes, the Lannisters, maybe to a lesser extent, the Starks have eye colors, even the Baratheons of the blue, they just have these eye colors that persist over a long period of time. Think of it kind of like the Dragonrider bloodlines of Valyria, but

without the incest. The Valyrians did that with the incest to keep it going, but in this case, these eyes are still persisting without any sort of incest. So a much deeper dive into this is in the Great Empire of the Dawn and Ashi episode. So I recommend checking those out if you haven't already, but or rechecking them out if you check them out long ago. But that's where we're at with this.

And it's super neat to reflect on in a different context. The weakening of the bloodlines is also reflected in this quote that Sean will read. Yet every reign was shorter and more troubled than the one preceding it.

For wild men and baleful beasts pressed at the borders of the great empire. Lesser kings grew prideful and rebellious, and the common people gave themselves over to avarice, envy, lust, murder,

incest, gluttony, and sloth. So that is the seven deadly sins, but without wrath and incest added in its place. Because incest makes us mad. No, just kidding. So Nina says, Compare the street preacher Tyrion notices in a clash of kings,

taking advantage of the political uncertainty of the times, as well as the natural phenomenon of the Red Comet, to denounce what he sees as the moral corruption of Westeros. If this was already a time of political instability for Yeeti, as claims became more numerous and challengeable, then it might be easy to conflate that political unrest

with the supposed moral decay of the Yeetish. And yes, this is the same preacher, I believe, that calls Tyrion the twisted little monkey demon. So that's another little mini connection here that thickens this whole thing.

And I do wonder, what did the current people of Yeeti think of the comet? If they're big on signs like the Chinese are big on symbols from mandates from heaven and what this says about the current reign. Things in Yi Ti right now, as we'll say at the end, are not great. There's a lot of strife and chaos, which might be setting up future stories. But the comet may have inflamed matters, pun intended. We're talking about the fixed-mill place, right? Not the real place?

Right, right, right, right, right. But I guess I'd be curious, yeah, were comets hold any special relevance for China anymore? I mean, they do everywhere, but I mean... Oh, yeah, well, exactly as you say. Anytime things move in the heavens that are unexpected, that is, well, it's literally disastrous, isn't it? the major symbol, probably the most important symbol of a sovereign in terms of having the authority to continue their rule and dynastic power was the ability to correctly interpret the signs of the heavens and to be able to adequately

predict when people would be able to farm uh and this is core astrology is this astrology or related to astrology yes okay you definitely call it astrology but but the chinese just call it making a calendar um but it's it's one in the same okay and the idea was, is that as the appointed child of the gods, the emperor and only the emperor was allowed to make and approve calendars. And one of the surest signs that someone was about to usurp you or rebel against you was they start publishing their own calendar. Oh, neat. That's not a thing that we're familiar with in the West so much, your own calendar. You're like, what? It doesn't seem like a big deal.

They're changing time. This is how time works. We decide. That's a power move. That's cool. It is a threat to a power that the established authority has. They would burn you with a stick if you printed the Bible. Recreating the Bible was- For quite a long time, you're right.

A threat to the power of the church. Interesting. Also, I want to point out earlier, I mentioned, I'm sure you know better than me, Chris, but that several moments in Chinese history, millions of people died to a flood. Also several moments in Chinese history, millions of people died to starvation.

Like the ability for someone to properly plan the food for all those people that's going to make you king or make you not king it's not just a prestige thing yeah all people lives depend on it yeah exactly when you start reading about it you're like wow that seems really harsh but you're like oh no that's how people lived and died. And it's super important. And no wonder they took it really, really seriously. Yeah, it's a job you can't mess up. We take food for granted now, but it was the efforts of people 100-ish years ago figuring out fertilizer and seeds and stuff like that.

There literally wouldn't be enough food on Earth for all the people if we hadn't had some certain scientific developments. And when you go farther back in time, the calendar was a thing. It was letting people produce enough food to support the population. And the need would be greater. The intensity because of the,

the, the failure of a system in China would cause more deaths than a failure in a place with fewer people. Like there's more people die when you run out of food versus a place where it's obviously a tragedy when one person starves, but a thousand people starving is, is less than 10,000 people starving. The total amount of suffering, even relative to the population, is greater.

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Definitely. You can kind of roughly track how okay a dynasty is doing by whether or not they keep their grain silos full for emergencies. And when the emperors start getting a bit too lazy and they just start selling all the grain instead of keeping some squirreled away, you're like, okay, the downhill slope has arrived and we're about to really start in tough times.

Yikes. And recall, folks, how this ties very well into a major plot in a clash of kings which is right in our vicinity with this monkey demon quote in the comet the bread riots in king's landing they're starving and they turn on the rulers because they're like we don't have food someone else needs to be in charge damn it we gotta eat it's like i don't care what else you're doing you're not you're failing in your most basic duty here to not let us starve. And you are not. So get the hell out of here. I think there's an old saying that basically goes, even the most polite society is about

three missed meals from anarchy. I mean, being hangry is a thing. Well, I think most of us have felt it. I certainly get hangry. So imagine your children starving. You know what I mean? Yeah, that would make me more hangry. You're much more willing to put it all on the line against the authority when you're in that scenario.

If the authority is not doing the basic minimum to ensure that you can do what you must to provide for your family, All bets are off. Yeah. Yeah. It's the basic agreement, the tacit agreement that's in place. Look, you can get away with a lot, but not letting us starve. That's too far. Hopefully it doesn't get to that point, but it does. You can handle it, but no food?

We can't handle that. this this discussion of gradual moral decay political instability we got to figure there's some famines involved in some of these examples that would have been or other natural disasters disease other things like that but another thing that would happen that would happen in valeria we keep comparing these to valeria maybe the targaryens are a good example even right away the Targaryens had stability during Aegon's reign, which was long, but it was the first king. But almost immediately, historically speaking, there was a civil war. Maegor, basically Visenya's branch versus Rhaenys' branch, the two original queens. And then the Dance of the Dragons rolls around, not super long later, a hundred years later, roughly. And one of the things is you have this escalation of families that have claims.

Over time, more and more families can connect themselves to that original first dynasty or that original, whatever claim within your society gives you the right to rule, whether it's connection to Garth Greenhand, connection to the maiden maid of light and the lion of night, or what have you, gray King, whoever that there's more and more people that can claim that the farther in time you go. And that seems to have happened in ET and it almost certainly happened in China, but it's for maybe for some different reasons, right? Um, this is where we'll need you to fill in. What was it generally just people stepping in when there was instability or what were a lot of the political upheavals caused by in terms of the royals starting it in terms of like what Cassus Belli would they were common in China?

I guess I'm asking. It looks like Sean has to wants to interject. Yeah, I know Chris is going to be way more expert than me, but a vague understanding i have is there was a i mean again china's history is so long you have a lot of different things that played out but a pattern i detected was that someone would would unite and they would be have these ambitions like usually like infrastructure sort of ambitions but they'd be very draconian and how they went about it just basically enslaved the population to build these canals or roads or whatever. And people would be like, that's too much. And they would overthrow them. And then some new person

would come along. And a lot of times those rains would last like maybe 20 years. But then other times you would get rains that lasted hundreds of years. I'm not sure what the ones that lasted hundreds of years were doing differently though. Don't want to steal your thunder, Chris, but is that a good starting point from how to look at it yeah yeah no i'm immediately thinking of some of the uh

shorter uh candlelit both ends uh rains that occurred and one of them is the the sway which is as you said it's about 20 or so years long i'm a little fuzzy. Maybe it's like 21 or 19 or something. But you basically get three very rapid fire emperors who all decide that the thing to do is number one, we're gonna expand the Grand Canal, this giant man-made river project.'re going to expand it all the way up past beijing into the very northern regions of china because uh we are we're just going to invade korea now that's going to be a thing that we do and they try it three times and it's just an epic failure every single time and by the end of this third emperor's reign, everyone is like, okay, that's enough. The taxes are way too high.

We are being made to work for free in this awful, deadly work condition. And we can't even, we go back, we can't even, we don't even have time to grow our food because the corvy labor is eating up all the harvest time. And so we're done with you. And one of the, I think the truly interesting things with almost all of Chinese history is that there's no's there's almost never been a political claim toward divinity even though the title is the son of heaven and you kind of have this connection to the supernatural there's no it's not like in japan where the emperor is supposedly a direct descendant of the goddess of the sun instead it's just always a regular person who comes from regular peasant stock, usually.

And in a time of, of crisis and rebellion gets enough people into his cause and is able to overthrow the whole system. Would you say that? And can make a good calendar. Yeah. Would you say then that bloodlines matter less for those kind of examples then?

Well, it's... Or do they matter in a different way? Maybe. They matter in a different way. And once you're established as the authority, then your bloodline... Yeah, okay. Maybe it's easier to catapult your bloodline into greater heights than the

first place. Maybe that would be a. For as authoritarian and top down of a system as it's largely been, there's, there's a lot of people who started from the bottom and really worked their way up and just sort of a. Interesting. An interesting living in interesting times as the saying goes. And it comes back to, again,

political legitimacy derives from the idea of you're doing the bare minimum, at least, to provide for these millions of people who otherwise have pitchforks. That's really cool. So that's really well explained. That was very informative. Now, coming a little bit back to the topic of dragons, since we were talking about early expansion, we've danced around, danced around the dragon topic quite a bit. It's come in and out. strong for dragons being in yeetee is that to the west of yeetee is valeria where they had dragons to the east of yeetee is ashi where they had dragons are we supposed to believe they didn't exist between that seems kind of unlikely doesn't it just as a general range of animals i mean we

can say well they don't like the climate in yeetee it's like ah i don't know it's pretty hot there that's tends to be what they like i mean maybe there aren't many mountains, but still it seems like the climate's fine for them. It's a huge land. It would have a range of climates too. True. Yeah, yeah. That's very true. But they're on the same meridian as Valyria and a little bit north of Astri. They're basically like parallel

east-west there. Valyria's a little more equatorial, I think. But still. You would definitely expect there to be a dragon there. Yeah, it seems to, it stands to reason just on basic migration and animal ranging and things like that.

Nina says, I definitely think the Yichish slash the pre Yichish inhabitants of the great empire. The Dawn had dragons prior to the long night. Also piece of evidence she gives here is the similarity of construction between Valerian architecture and the Five Forts. Valyria could not have built the Five Forts to get the fused stone, but the same technology used via the intense heat that dragons can generate, which is greater than any other known heat other than the fires of the earth, as we're told. I doubt they were harnessing that. So dragons would make more sense. So that

could explain why it looks like one big fused stone because there's some sort of dragon. And there's also sorcery. There's lots of mentions of yeechish people using sorcery, but it's never given any concrete description, whether it's elemental

or any other type of magic. We don't know it just there's sorcerers like some of the emperors have been sorcerers some of the people have been sorcerers but it's that's as far as it goes sorcery and whenever you don't understand it's definitely so yeah that's right that's right and some of them might pump themselves up that way like oh the emperor is a sorcerer because that makes people think he's more powerful maybe he doesn't he just knows a few sleight of hand tricks just to make it look real. I was like,

Whoa, that flower came from nowhere. He pulled a quarter from my ear. Whoa. He's a sorcerer. Yeah. That's some emperor. Where did the pencil go?

So, yeah. So I feel pretty strongly about that. It seems pretty likely activity. So what about dragons in Chinese mythology? They're a big deal in Chinese mythology. It's another reason why if George is comparing Yi Ti to China, there's even more connections in the real world influence.

I think that's a significant oversight on George's part of, it's like, why do there appear to be no direct references to dragons? Because dragons, and as you say, they are a tremendous part of East Asian mythology in general. A lot of that stems out of China. But they occupy a different sort of mythological space than they do in Europe or Western Asia, or as we conceive of them, where dragons are largely considered, if not necessarily evil entities,

although that's how they kind of were initially portrayed in sword and sorcery stories, then at least engines of destruction um you know danny's dragons are marvelous creatures but they're really good at burning yeah it's true i read one time uh i wish i knew who to give this credit to i don't remember where i read it but it was now this was a little more uh eurocentric i guess but the dragons often were symbolic of internal demons, like something that the individual person needed to conquer was represented by the dragon. So to win the princess, if you will, you had to kill the dragon. But really, that meant you had to get over your narcissism or your father's expectations or whatever else it was.

Some of us are still working on that last part. We've all got some big dragons, yeah. Beasts are largely symbolic of metaphorical internal conflict. Yeah, absolutely. In much of East Asian mythology, though, dragons, again, they occupy this different role. Whereas their aspects of fire in a lot of European mythology, the element of dragons in East Asia is water. Water. They most live under the sea.

They don't have that winged manticore structure. Instead, they are very serpentine and almost eel-like. And instead of being engines of destruction, like basically living B-52 bombers, instead they are life givers and sort of boons, and you'd be really, really lucky to see one or that's very different it's almost opposite they get a lot into this in um the series um the book uh the priory of the orange tree um which deals a lot with um asian dragons um anyways aziz and i both

read it and i highly recommend to any fan of song of ice and fire but it gave me a lot of vibes like that but with this um as Asian water dragon counterpart to it, for sure, it was well represented in that. Can you say the name of that again? The Priory of the Orange Tree. It has the Eastern dragons and the Western dragons. Yeah, it has both represented. It has a European culture, but it also has an Asian culture.

It's really well done. They both merge quite a lot. Yeah, it's a pretty solid story. So maybe the dragons in E.T., maybe we don't hear about them so much because they're more secretive they keep to themselves as well like they could actually also be physically different beyond being like different like what you're saying which is they might they might have different behavior but they might also be um physically different to to fire dragons yeah you know east asian dragons they don't have wings they have these little weird like tiny t-rex arms which kind of checks out honestly within in the novels the the concept that dragons were created from wyverns and were were created the

idea that perhaps you know the valyrian dragons were created from the ytish or the great empire of the dawn wyvern dragons wyvern are the source of the wings on the yeah isn't it isn't it that wyverns are like almost identical to dragons except what is it they don't breathe fire they don't breathe fire and they're smaller they're considerably smaller small yeah um and a lot of times they and their behavior is a little different like a lot of some of them hunt in packs which we don't see with dragons um but that's it's like they're like velociraptor like flying velociraptors it's like yikes but uh but there's a there's a theory that they were engineered that the wyverns weren't engineered

that dragons were engineered and wyverns and uh and fireworms were spliced to create dragons. Um, that's one, one deep cut theory. Uh, cause those are both, those are both things. And if you combine their characteristics, you would have a dragon. It does kind of fit. Uh, so yeah. So that's really cool. That's really, that's really informative about Chinese dragons. I, I thought, you know, I honestly thought when you were going to say, I almost thought you were going to say air when you said, when you were going to say which element, I kind of thought that's where it was going. But water, that does really fit. It's really cool to think about, too.

Yeah, because they would be perceived differently. I mean, George is given ice dragons, which is, I mean, that's frozen water. So there is sort of an analog. Okay, so moving on a little bit, we have the dragons have returned, obviously, because of Dany and other factors. And like many great epic events from A Song of Ice and Fire, history repeats itself. George sets up a lot of the history entirely for that purpose, in addition to expand the story. So I shouldn't say entirely, but largely to set up the main story. Likewise, likewise, likewise, we expect a second long night, which brings us to another important connection.

You've all heard of the Bloodstone Emperor. Let's restate a little bit about him and apply it to this discussion. He practiced dark arts, torture and necromancy, enslaved his people, took a tiger woman for his bride, This was called the blood betrayal. He overthrew the Amethyst Empress, and this is given. Daenerys is such a great analog for the Amethyst Empress. This bloodstone emperor is an analog for Euron. Dark arts, check. Torture, check.

Necromancy, maybe. We'll see, especially if he's connected to the others or helps free them or anything like that. Enslaved his people, pretty much. Took a tiger womb for his bride. Okay, that one's a little curious.

Let's come back to that. Feasted on human flesh, maybe not directly, but he's made other people feast on human flesh, some of his own prisoners. Cast down the true gods to worship a black stone

that had fallen from the sky. Cast down the true gods, absolutely, Euron had fallen from the sky. Cast down the true gods. Absolutely. Euron's all over that. He's casting down all the gods. That's all. He's all about that. The black stone that fallen from the sky, that part's a little.

He called them the untrue gods. Yeah, the untrue gods. So it's said that the Bloodstone Emperor is the founder of the Church of Starry Wisdom, which is a reference to H.P. Lovecraft, but it sounds like astrology. The starry wisdom, right? That sounds like it's a very close reference there. I think there's a couple of there's a couple of other real world analogs. Let me get out this real quick and then I'll turn it over to Chris for some comparisons. Elagabulous, who was born Antoninus, was possibly the worst emperor of Rome ever. There's a lot of

historians who say that, and that's really saying something considering like Caligula, Nero, these guys. He renamed himself Elagabulus after being called Antoninus. There was a peculiar Eastern god, Syrian god called Elagabal, and he put Elagabal on a altar, on a chariot,

and drove it around, and it was represented by a black meteorite. So he really did make all Romans worship a black stone that fell from the sky. And you can see what, you know, when you make everyone worship a weird religion and he's also like dressing up as a prostitute and doing all sorts of insane things. He put Elagabal above Jupiter. That's like some new president, like we don't worship God anymore. Now we worship something he made up. It's not even

like an existing. It's not like, no, now we're all Muslim. No, it would be't worship god anymore now we worship something he made up it's not even like an existing it's not it's not like no now we're all muslim no it would be like no now we all worship that spaghetti saturn yeah the spaghetti mile like something completely made up that no one had ever heard of before maybe a few people had because apparently this cult did exist but it was really obscure he named himself high priest of this cult too so there you go high priest of starry wisdom he was killed by his own grandmother and the praetorian guard like they did the killing but it was her idea so that your own grandmother has you killed you've you messed up but i can see why so trying to change the whole world trying to change everyone's religion and making them worship this other thing what's funny is some of it actually stuck. As bad

as it was, he also wanted people to worship the sun. And that actually kind of stuck. Some of that stuck. Despite how crazy he was, the Roman legions continued to do a little bit of sun worship, which brings us to a second anecdote to set up what I hope we have some familiar anecdotes from China. Nina points out Akhenaten, the Egyptian pharaoh who was King Tut's dad, he tried to get everyone to stop worshiping the Egyptian pantheon to only worship the sun. Aten. Tutankhamen. Akhenaten.

Shut up about the sun. Shut up about the sun. Shut up about the sun. So he was also made really popular. After his death, they just smashed all his statues and tried to erase his name. So that's really bad. They didn't call him by his name anymore. they just called him the criminal or the enemy that was his name which you know it's like the usurper or something yeah so so what's there's got to be some

similar stories in all of chinese history what do you suppose are like the top two or three or just one if there's one that really stands out like bizarre crazy chinese emperors the one i thought of was the mercury rivers guy mercury rivers guy yeah talk tell us about that one and then maybe give us yours unless that happens to be the guy you would pick but i okay i've got two then so uh the first emperor uh tinso hong or as his mom called him ying zhang and um he managed to unite uh the the warring states which no prizes for why they were called that uh seven of them which had been basically at odds with each other for a good four centuries or so. And they were nominally ruled by the King of Zhou, but he had absolutely no power at all.

And so out in the hinterlands of the far west of what was China at the time, this family comes to power in this state called chin and it is just the most yokel backwards farmer peasant people imaginable but they managed to transform it through these series of completely insanely draconian laws into being this phenomenal military powerhouse that just completely crushes everybody else at once in a single battle. Whoa.

And so then Yingzhang comes to the throne. He says, no, I'm not the king. I'm in fact something much beyond that. You can call me the divine sovereign, which is where we get the Chinese term for emperor, Huang Yi. I'm going to take these two old terms that we used to apply to demigods,

and now they're mine. And so he is one of the reasons why China is called China, the Qin dynasty. He unifies the written language. He largely unifies the spoken language. He unifies the system of weights and measures and the width of roads and stuff like that. And then he decides that he wants to live forever. So he sends 10,000 people on ships over to what he thinks is the island of the immortal sages, which turns out to probably have been Japan. And they never come back because they're like, it's cooler here. Let's not go back to him. Don't want to be ruled by that guy. That's a good reason too reason it doesn't work out and then he

his his alchemists say my lord we have this amazing substance that is silver but you can drink it and it will definitely make you live forever because of course um silver and precious metals are eternal elements and so if you make them a part of your body, you will become an eternal element too. And it turns out you actually just go insane and die. See, I thought he was going to be right when you set that up with the silver thing. I was like, oh, that's a good theory.

Well, you should have known because he's not still alive. Ah, allegedly. This was like right around the same time as jesus this was about 220 or so years before uh jesus so it was a couple centuries before um that whole situation and that whole situation that's one way to put that. That whole debacle. That whole thing. You know, there were critics and there were proponents, but there's been lasting ramifications.

Hey, Jesus tried to change the religion and he practiced necromancy of a sort. He came back from the dead. That's kind of necromancy. Hey, Jesus was a witch. What are you doing? Yeah. But that's where the terracotta warriors come from. Oh, okay.

He had thousands of his officials built into these life-sized statues so that they could just be on his team forever. An individual. That's something that blows my mind. They're all individuals.

Like all those statues, every one is unique. It's insane. Yeah, and that's, it's really mind-blowing. And I read about it. It was just this really sober analysis of like, well, they're all individuals

because they were made by hundreds of people over a period of like 15 years. So, of course, they don't look the same. Different artists, different sculptors. Yeah. Wow. Different wear and tear. The clay changed over time.

Yeah. brother, who was a wannabe scholar in the late Qing dynasty, which was the last imperial dynasty before the Republican Revolution and the 20th century. And this fellow really wanted to be part of the imperial court. And to be be part of the imperial court. And to be a part of the imperial court, you had to take the civil service examination, which is like the SAT and the ACT and the AP test all put together. But it only happens once every about three years or so back in the day. And he was not good at that. And he failed it about three times. And then he started having fever dreams that God was talking to him and that he was actually the younger brother of Jesus. And Confucius was a lying bastard and he must be totally overthrown.

And so he goes and declares himself the king of heavenly peace or Taiping Guowang. And he takes over the large majority of Southeast China for a period of about 12 years. And about 30 million people get killed as a result. Oh, my God. 30 million. Did he take over milit. Oh my God. 30 million. How did he, did he take over militarily or was it like a cult? Both.

Yes. And it was a military cult. And, um, nice. I mean, not nice, but yeah,

I meant nice. Like answer Sean, not nice. So it's going on at literally the same time as both the opium war and the American Civil War. Whoa. And it's just this thing that's just happening for the entire 1860s. Jeez. Wow.

That was a bad decade around the world, huh? Yeah. Wow. And eventually they defeat him, but for a while he's in control of this humongous piece of southern China, almost right up to the city limits of Shanghai, but never quite actually takes Shanghai. And it's just this, it's so weird because people are just going around cutting each other's heads off and putting them on sticks because they believe in the wrong version of who the king is supposed

to be wow geez that's something else wow i knew there'd be good stories we weren't disappointed i wasn't disappointed that's awesome glad to put that question in circling it back a little bit to Song of Ice and Fire, the fate of the Bloodstone Emperor and his tiger bride is left unknown, which is also fitting for a parallel to Euron, given his story is yet to play out. And that's also why I tried to make the tiger lion comparison earlier, because I wonder if this is a parallel. If the Bloodstone Emperor has a lion bride, well, that would fit with what we saw on TV with Euron and Cersei. The way that story played out doesn't seem likely to have a lot of relevance to the books, but the general idea that possibility is, well, the possibility exists. Let's put it that way. It may not be a strong possibility. I think it's a decent possibility, but it's an idea and it could

play out some other way. Some other way, like we may realize later, like, oh, that's what the tiger bride meant or was suggesting we just haven't figured it out yet or maybe not all the clues have been delivered to us but something to keep an eye on for sure it's a compelling idea um after the long night let's talk about what happens after the long night for sure because of course the blood betrayal the bloodsend emperor kicked off the long night supposedly but after that as we've said yee t or the region that is now Yi Ti managed to stay somewhat cohesive as compared to other regions. And here's a quote that describes that ensuing period. Sean.

Since the further east emerged from the Long Night and the centuries of chaos that followed, 11 dynasties have helped sway over the lands we now call Yeetee. Some lasted no more than a half century, the longest endured for 700 years. Some dynasties gave way to others peacefully, others with blood and steel. On four occasions, the end of a dynasty was followed by a period of anarchy and lawlessness

when the warlords and petty kings warred with one another for supremacy. The longest of these, intergnums, lasted more than a century. So 11 dynasties, that's a lot. 700 years, that means there's been several dynasties that lasted longer than King's Landing is old. King's Landing is only 300 years old. It's kind of like they had their own century of blood there, isn't it?

Right? Like this interanum of a century or more. But it's longer than a century. So, of course, it's bigger. You know, they got to stay consistent with it. Everything's bigger. But it's longer than a century, so of course it's bigger. They've got to stay consistent with it. Everything's bigger. But this just goes to show, I mean, the scale of this place in terms of how long it's existed compared

to Westeros and King's Landing and this current scenario that exists in Westeros, that's what makes it a really interesting setting for future story development in this world because it's such a different dynamic, such a different culture, such an older place. It would really be very distinct from Westeros in so many ways, even though we're able to make some pretty strong

comparisons, there'd be so much that is just ripe and different that would make it fun, especially if there were some connections to make the dynamic elements stand out even more and to highlight those differences. And I don't have a whole lot to say about that other than that, just like thinking ahead and kind of imagining and just kind of expecting coolness down the line. Now, as... There's so much to draw from. What's that? You can really just... What I'm saying is there's so much to draw from. There's so many possibilities

and it's really fun to think about. Absolutely. Next quote we have is going to refer to a couple other elements that we've briefly discussed. We'll get a little deeper into the moving around of the capitals and a couple a score of times as rival warlords contended and dynasties rose and fell the gray emperors indigo emperors and pearl white emperors ruled from yin on the shores of the jade sea first and most glorious of the yitish cities but the scarlet emperors raised up a new city in the heart of the jungle and named it Si Ko the Glorious, long fallen and overgrown. Its glory lives now only in legend. and the maroon emperors kept their martial court in jinky the better to guard the frontiers of the empire against reavers from the shadowlands reavers from the shadowlands talk about another cool idea from for story purposes or set up for world building for other things i mean that that was jinkies yeah jinkies yeah that. That's a little Scooby-Doo reference there.

That was two sentences that Ashea just read. That whole thing was two sentences. Some of the people joke about a two-sentence story, or this is two-sentence world-building, and that is a ton of world-building in two sentences. There's some long sentences. What's that? There's some long sentences.

Yeah, well, one of them is short. The other is really short. It's really one short sentence and one massive sentence. But I would love to see that. Just reavers from the Shadowlands fighting. That just sounds really cool. I don't know. Maybe I'm just easy to please, but that sounds awesome. Yen is the greatest city of the Yutu cities that we're told. It's the one that it says the capital has moved here and there and back again a score of times.

It sounds vaguely like The Hobbit. But there's... Yen has apparently been the capital most often of those places. It's a wealthy port city. Different dynasties have ruled in different places, but... It's always Yenning. Yes, that's a good one.

So we don't have that in Westeros. King's Landing has been the first ever capital of all Westeros. No problem. Okay. So I'll say that again. King's Landing is the first time it's been a capital of Westeros, and that was 300 years ago. So we don't have this shifting of capitals thing. We don't have the scale of time for that to even happen.

It may happen by the end of this story. We may see that King's Landing is gone or a new division has created political divisions within Westeros, who knows. But YeeT is like a model for what could happen in Westeros, which is where we're going. So I like that. I like that idea.

But even with that said king's landing has been discussed as a as a thing that could be moved by people like cersei and aries for example they've talked about moving it uh cersei talked about moving it like all the way to to the west and maybe some other ideas aries talked about just moving it to the other side of the blackwater because he didn't like how it smelled. So his logic was a little thinner, I guess you could say. But it's another one of those parallels between those two characters. And of course, maybe Harren the Black was thinking of making Harrenhal the capital of Westeros at some point. That may have been the intent, although he didn't get to that point.

And the U.S. isn't really old enough for multiple capitals. There was an attempt to start a new country in Texas or whatever, but that didn't work. But it is an example. The capital didn't start off in Washington, D.C. We have had multiple capitals. That's a good point. I kind of forgot about that. It's true.

I guess it's been pretty stable, but you're right. It didn't actually start there. Good point. I forgot. And we talked earlier how there aren't that many European analogs either. What's that? DC was the political compromise to get the

US bank started. They had to make the Virginians happy. Right there on the Potomac. A little bit of the Hamilton music was the Oh yeah! Burr not being in the room where it happened A little bit of the Hamilton music was the... Oh, yeah.

Burr not being in the room where it happened between Hamilton and Jefferson to make that deal. Yeah, Nina points out that there have been eight cities prior to Washington that were national capitals or seats of our national government. That's more than I thought. A lot, yeah. But it's stated...

Come on, Marissa. Pick up your mind. So the comparatively, thinking of like the borders and who some of these other enemies are, we just mentioned the Reavers from the Shadowlands. The Jogos Nair are the real enemy of the time that isn't supernatural. Of course, leaving out the Lion of Night or non-human elements.

There's lots of raids from there. That's why it's a good parallel to Mongolia and China. Compare it to Sarnori who came into conflict with Dothraki. Dothraki destroyed the Sarnori, but the Golden Empire is a little tougher, I guess.

They got it where it counts. I think it's interesting the uh the the the good comparison that martin draws between the um the dothraki and the jagos nahai who are they have such cultural similarities and and overl. And you can kind of really see how it's kind of comparing the Mongols or the pre-Mongol people in the eastern part of Asia and Siberia to the Huns of Attila. And how they're a little bit more comprehensible they have habits which you know we can at least sort of put our own understanding touchstones on whereas these these other guys are just totally out there and completely wild they drink blood even Genghis Khan, as much land

and as many people as he conquered, he didn't get all of China. Like, he got a hunk of it, but... Yeah, that took him to a grandson, grandson Kublai. That's still pretty fast. That's true. That's still pretty fast.

This is impressive. It's awful, but impressive. So, a couple of examples of of different emperors who ruled in yee t and we'll we'll try to do a quick comparison with a few of these and and do real real world touchdowns here so a series of short shortest quotes that will springboard for brief reference starting with this business of the eunuch emperors, which is a pretty compelling and interesting little bit. The nine eunuchs,

the pearl white emperors who gave ET 130 years of peace and prosperity as young men and princes, they lived as other men taking wives and concubines and siring heirs, but upon their ascent, each surrendered his manhood root and stem so that he might devote himself entirely to the empire whoa okay so we know eunuch powerful eunuchs were a thing in like ancient persia akamined persia and maybe other eras and i know there are some eunuchs in imperial china isn't that a thing or but not like ruler like outright rulers right or what

well just just tell talk to us about eunuchs in china their role so they were definitely a thing of a big part of um the the culture and of the ruling class um they were rarely almost never actually rulers but oftentimes they could be the the power behind the throne that is really controlling because the emperor is about 12 um various situations yeah yeah and where they tended to come from was early on they would be um criminals and the punishment would be getting chopped um and then they would be sort of enslaved into service into the court and for some reason they were like oh that will make them super trustworthy we should totally trust we cut your parts off and and hire you in a trusted position.

I can hear it down there. Logic is lacking. I'm a little curious. And then later on, there were sometimes captives that were taken from South China and Southeast Asia. But oftentimes, much as a lot of the castrati were in medieval Europe, a lot of times this would be a voluntary process because it would afford that person and their family a very high and powerful and provided for position in life. And even though they had to lose a part of themselves in the process,

they could still marry. They could still have families. They would often adopt sons to carry on their family lines in that method. What about this whole having kids first thing is that was that and then was that a thing okay so yeah this is where it goes it kind of gets off his own thing here what we know is that uh there was never a line of emperors in china who became eunuchs because they thought that was a thing to do that sounded made up but i didn't know for sure so yeah no um

there might have been one or two that kind of briefly ruled in their own name but usually that was okay just kind of not acceptable because the whole idea of being the ruler is that you're able to carry on that family line via blood descendancy. Yeah. And that's an interesting point here is because that's why I brought up whether it happened as a thing where they'd have kids first and then do that, because that's what the example gives us. And you can see that being a neat idea. But apparently, at least not in china there's no analog there maybe there is somewhere else in the world i've never heard of such a thing

but most of them they became emperors they didn't get more moral yeah or more so and apparently this was a relatively short time was 130 years it's a very specific number but yeah given the thousands and thousands of years of et this isn't it's a kind of a blip historically speaking an important i'm shocked it didn't last that long because i mean honestly it's it's kind of a one and done situation yeah yeah respect yeah so yeah i wonder about that and now on the opposite end of self-sacrifice to rule we have this guy quote loath though called low long spoon and lo the terrible the 22nd scarlet emperor a reputed sorcerer and cannibal who is said to have supped upon the living brains of his enemies with a long pearl handled spoon after the tops of their skulls had been removed well that just makes sense yeah i mean you have to remove the top of their skulls had been removed. Well, that just makes sense.

You have to remove the top of their skulls before you sup on the living brains of your enemy. And you would, of course, use a spoon, a long spoon for that. What other implement would you use? What other handle would you get? Are you going to reach in there with your hands? That's gross. That's totally gross.

That makes no sense. It's just, it apart it just is just come on come on yeah there's a bit more cannibalism for you and another mention of very vague mention of sorcery maybe he just like pops the top off with his sorcery he's got some sort of head removing trick yeah so it's it's like i said george ever gets specific he He leaves it open like a skull with the top of the head. Yeah, it's perfect. It's the perfect animal. But like with this character, perhaps there's maybe no better time to bring up an awful person. Is there what's the deal with slavery in China?

Maybe it's a broad question. Maybe it exists in some areas and not others. But just maybe give us an overview. We talked about it with Sarnor and Persia recently, so I'd be curious what it looks like here. It's not explicitly mentioned in A Song of Ice and Fire whether it exists in Yi Ti, but I imagine it's probably similar to China. Maybe not, but what do you think? What is the deal with involuntary servicing? Yeah, Seinfeld is weighing in on the question um slavery is a an interesting question in china because it like legally was formally abolished pretty early on and yet you're you're not a slave technically but you still have to do what i say for free

and that uh that existed uh right through the the very end that we were just talking about the the unit cast even though that would in some cases be a a voluntary process that people would choose to have their children undergo in other other cases, those are war captives who had no say in the matter at all. And usually they were taken as pre-adolescent children and subjected to the surgery without any say so at all. And then you are a servant of the court for the rest of your life. How do you think they raised such big armies? Like even in modern United States, the slavery is illegal,

but what do you think the draft is? Like how is that? Yeah. It's that whole semantic conversation we've had a few different times in the show about what really counts as slavery and how there's many regimes that just don't call it slavery. But like you said, Chris, like you have to do what I say for free. Isn't that kind of pretty much slavery? Like, yeah, pretty much. Yeah. And, uh, with, with, with China,

one of the things that was a very popular process in terms of armies, as you just asked is, uh, well make the, make the foreigners do do it make the border people do it rome did that a lot he uh in in the in internal part of the empire we are scholar officials and poets and artists and why would we waste our our masculine efforts on something so crass as warfare. No, make the foreigners do it. Figures. That sounds about right. Yeah, it does sound about right.

Now, we've had an example of a cannibal sorcerer. We've talked about slavery. We've talked about self-sacrifice to rule the empire. Here's something in between, something that doesn't really talk about how well good of a ruler they were, but it talks about the extreme opulence of this land. Sean. Mingokun, the glittering god, third of the J green emperors who ruled from a palace where the floors and walls and columns

were covered in gold leaf and all the furnishings were made of gold even the chamber pots the gold toilet that ancient symbol of true wealth when you can have gold toilets george was clear to throw that one in there so he's a golden god one of the best examples we have to describe just how wealthy this country is i mean this guy is like, what? And this is another one where you're like, maybe this is exaggerated, but I couldn't believe it. It's not one you can just dismiss entirely. All that concentration of wealth in one place, again, sounds a bit like Valeria with their endless quest for precious metals. Also sounds a little bit like the Sarenori Palace of a Thousand Rooms. And Nina mentions as well, the rumors of the Lannisters from the perspective of Asshai,

which is that they say the Lion Lord lives in a palace of solid gold and that the crofters collected a wealth of gold simply by plowing their fields. So if you reverse that, you're like, well, if they believe that about the Lannisters, which is not true,

then this is probably also exaggerated. But frankly... There may have been a chamber pot made of gold. One gold toilet, yeah. The rest are just gold colored. It's just gold paint, yeah. But frankly, there may have been a chamber pot made of gold. The rest are just gold colored. It's just gold paint. But yeah, I mean, plowing gold coming out of the fields, the farmers are even getting gold. That sounds more even more crazy than or unlikely than just a fancy palace, you know, but still similar type. A lot of the farmers are like, well, what am I going to do with this? Hey, and we just discussed

how a farmer found the terracotta warriors and the gobleckly teppas, so maybe sometimes they do find pretty amazing things. Let's not... Those farmers doing important things, not just feeding us, but they're archaeologists

on their fair time without even meaning to be. That's right. What would we do without them? But they're archaeologists on their fair time without even meaning to be. They can have all the statues. That's right. What would we do without them? All right. Our last section is connections to the West and current affairs in YeeT. So let's do that real quick.

And we'll begin to wrap up. So it's mentioned as a trade partner for Lees, Muir, and Tyrosh. Surely other unnamed places as well. I mean, if you're going to go to Lee, Smear, and Tyrosh, you may as well go to King's Landing or Pentos maybe. Because as we said, it takes like two years to go from Pentos to the Jade Sea and back. So you're going to probably hit all the major spots if you're going to travel that far. And of course, maybe it wouldn't take you so long if you didn't stop everywhere on the way as usual

many people have tried to bring sources back but they always end up sinking the ship with their jerkiness it's always important to keep perspective in mind. I love that about A Song of Ice and Fire that really drives that point home. It has a real world effect on all of us when we think about it. The Dothraki Sea is west of Yi Ti, even though to the perspective of pretty much everything in A Song of Ice and Fire, it's the extreme east

because it's on the other side of the Bone Mountains. So bringing back the Dothraki, this was one of the places we started this episode with, with Daenerys going there with Khal Drogo. Here is a related quote for Shaea. Khal Drogo finally called a halt near the Eastern Market where the caravans from Yi Ti and Asshai and the Shadowlands came to trade, with the Mother of Mountains looming overhead. Danny smiled as she recalled Magister Illyrio's slave girl and her talk of a palace with 200 rooms and doors of solid silver.

It's really similar energy from this palace of solid silver doors. Maybe not quite as fancy as the gold toilet place, but really similar. It's like make new friends but keep the old. One is silver, the other gold. The silver place would be more clean because

you know that's that natural disinfectant that's that's the healthy but that's the hospital palace yeah that's a good point so uh another little weird trade quirk is the yitish people travel to the markets of the dothraki to buy stuff. Now, of course, everything for sale just about in the Dothraki market is stolen, but the Bone Mountains protect the Yitish from the Dothraki stealing from them. So they're just like, this is a great black market, good spot for them. It's a one-way street. Because the calls are all about, for the most part, giving these caravans safe passage because to them, it's like an exception. It's like, no, don't mess with that. It's like the same reason they don, for the most part, giving these caravans safe passage. Because to them, it's like an exception.

It's like, no, don't mess with that. It's like the same reason they don't raid the slave cities, because they got to have someone to sell stuff to. And apparently, a big market for all their stolen goods is Yeetee, which makes sense. It's a huge place. Lots of cities, big cities, lots of people. There you go. Big markets. And they don't care where it's coming from.

All these goods are stolen. We call them at a great price. Discounted. No one's going to know. I mean, people are buying them in E.T. It's not like they know where it was stolen by the Dothraki. They're just like, hey, I want that. It's the victimless crown if you don't know the victim. Yeah. It's Santa

Claus. Santa Call. Yeah. The Santa Call brought it. Nina says, Yandel mentions that the Dothraki have an ancient cultural memory of crossing the mountains and speculates that they might have been fleeing from some savage foe. If the Dothraki's ancestors came out of desperation or fear, then maybe they would be afraid of going back across from an ancestral memory thing, which kind of helps protect Yi Ti. What would that be?

We could speculate maybe on what scared them. Maybe it was a split between them and the Jogos. No, maybe E.T. was too powerful. Maybe it was the Lion of Night, these ancient demon, demonic forces that chased them away. I don't know. Maybe it was dragons. Oh, you never know.

Hey, that's true. That's a good call. Well, there was, gosh, it was the giant massive campaign that the one Yiddish emperor did. And eventually all of the Jugos Nahai had to band together with this woman leader who finally divided up the armies and sort of picked them off one by one. But the idea of a large-scale migration out of the Far East and westward, I mean, you're talking about the Xiongnu, you're talking about the Huns, you're talking about a lot of movement in pre-modern Central Asia, which is what gave Rome so much of a headache in the third century and thereafter. Right. Yeah. Like a domino effect. Like one culture pushes, tries to move in a direction and takes territory from some other culture.

And that culture in turn moves somewhere else and displaces someone else and yeah that's where for a lot of those so-called barbarian invasions of rome happened by these things some of them were a little more just straight aggression like like the huns but others were just like ah we're we're fleeing someone even more nasty and we're coming into where we need to take your territory because no well we're coming so here's our last section the current state of affairs sean tell us what's happening in yee t according to the maesters this is the current situation in yee t today yin is once more the capital of yee t there the 17th azure emperor bugai sits in splendor in a palace larger than all King's Landing.

What? Yet, far to the east, well beyond the borders of the Golden Empire proper, past the legendary Mountains of Morn in the city of Carcosa on the Hidden Sea, dwells in exile a sorcerer lord who claims to be the 69th

nice, yellow emperor from a dynasty fallen for a thousand nice, yellow emperor from a dynasty fallen for a thousand years. And more recently, a general named Polko, hammerer of Jogos Nhai, has given himself imperial honors, naming himself the first of the Orange Emperors, with the rude, sprawling garrison city called Traitor Town as his capital. Which of these three emperors will prevail

is a question best left for the historians of years to come. This vaguely sounds like the situation in the north we described in the Barrowtown episode or Barrow King's episode where you had a situation where there's a bunch of regional powers that aren't strong enough to overcome each other. So they exist in the state where they're just like, we're strong enough to defend our land, but not strong enough to take territory from their enemies. They're all weakened by infighting and perhaps other things. Nina points out that there's a report during Arianne's chapters that she hears there's a slave revolt in Astapor, which isn't relevant,

dragons in Qarth, which refers to Dany, and gray plague in Yi Ti, which that's a big problem, right? Even if it's only confined to a city or two which that's a big problem, right? Maybe even if it's only confined to a city or two, that's one of the nastiest diseases we know of in the world. So that would be a big problem. And it could be a reason why none of these powers have the ability to overcome each other because they're all depopulated. Their armies are small. They can't worry about invading.

They're too busy trying to feed themselves and all the peasants are dying, something like that. Or maybe they want to stay in their own territory so they don't expose themselves okay it's out there true that would be that would make some kind of sense yeah like a sort of loose quarantine type thing yeah yeah it just got me thinking this quote got me thinking of a quote from the romance of the three kingdoms. And it's actually how the book begins, which is, it just starts with this sort of all time saying the empire when long united must divide. And when long divided must reunite. That's really cool.

Cyclical nature of the, the way these stories happen and the way you know it kind of breaks apart and comes back together it's uh it's almost proverbial actually give us a minute or two on the uh the romance of the three kingdoms that's a really like epic sort of some people have compared it to game of thrones like the chinese game of thrones right is that kind of uh accurate or would you describe it similarly china has like trying to have like four key pieces of literature. Is that right? And that's one of them. And that's cornerstones or whatever. Oh, it's one of the classic stories and the romance, as the name would imply, it is a fictionalized telling. So it's got magic and sorcery and all kinds of high drama and people making oaths of brotherhood in a peach garden and things like that. But it is a very fun retelling of a very real period of history, which was the Twilight Era and then the fall of the Han

Dynasty after 400 years, and how China them could really win over the entire territory, even though they all felt like they had to. And it took more than a few years to reunify, and then almost the instant it reunifies, then it reshatters again into 16 kingdoms. Oh, no. So, yeah, so with George making this reference to three powers in E.T. right now? That does sound like a hint, a clue, and he's probably read it.

He's probably read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I would guess. At least in the TV show. Okay, yeah. I think I need to read it now. I'm kind of inspired to go read it. Is there a TV show about it? Oh, yeah. Are there multiple TV show about it? Oh, yeah. Are there multiple TV shows about it?

I think there are probably multiple iterations of it. Is it called Romance of the Three Kingdoms? Yeah, or sometimes it's just Three Kingdoms. Okay. But I think there's an anime, there's a comic book, there's a live-action TV series. Okay. It's big nice you can also see

in this example um another capital another example of a capital being shifted or declared or started there and just just that's something that works there if you have enough power and declare yourself emperor or powerful then that's the way it goes there that That's a valid play in E.T. That 400-year Han Dynasty, is that the longest dynasty? What's the longest dynasty that maintained control over China? Han is one of the longest. Almost as long is Tang, which is probably the real cultural high point.

And that's in the 9 ninth to about 11th centuries. And that's when China is kind of at its most swaggering and really feeling like it's on top of the world. The Mongols come along not too long after that, right? Sorry, say again? Don't the Mongols come along not long after that? Aren't they 12th or 13th century? The Song is in between them, and they last for a few hundred years, but they're really, really rich, but they're not really good at war

fighting and they're surrounded by um neighbors who are better at that than they are so they just wind up paying their neighbors off for a few centuries until the neighbors are like but we could just have the whole thing yeah it was under then that there were a lot of like science and culture flourished though right yeah yep um excellent monetary policy i mean fantastic expansive trading with their uh neighbors and uh very good at defensive warfare very good at um making uh jengis khan making Genghis Khan and his sons take much longer than they thought it was going to, to take control of the Riverlands. But just Barney Fife at Offensive Warfare, a real embarrassment at the time. Like the example from this episode where the guy got his is now the drinking cup. Yeah. Sounds like I wonder if not for Genghis Khan, if they would have developed enough experience and wealth to have eventually fought off the next Genghis Khan that might have come along. You know, there would have been more value in trade with them rather than trying to get past their defenses.

Let's just be their ally. You know, I wonder if that would have gotten to that point the comedy of errors that is the later half of the sung dynasty when it comes to military misadventures and just total total shooting yourself in your own foot is you could write books on it it's it's well i'm the chancellor, um, in charge of everything in politics right now. And we have this one general whose name is Yifei and he is this fantastic battlefield general. And he is just taking the fight to the barbarians and he is winning. And so I'm going to have him arrested and murdered because i don't like him whoa that's some serious foot shooting right there that is some major foot shooting like he's our most important

warrior kill him our important leader can't have that one difference in china though is that there was a lot more back and forth between long and short reigns. Whereas in E.T. it seemed to like be this gradual diminishment, right? Yeah, maybe. Like there were long reigns that when there was the more the supernatural elements, maybe holding it together, the connection to these original deities, I suppose. Or the history is just wrong about that. But I tend to believe to a certain extent that it's true. The longest period in Chinese historiography that's generally considered to

be a a single period is the joe and it's one of the really earliest ones and technically it lasts about 700 years or so but the last half of it is 400 years of civil war that there's technically still a joe king for but he doesn't really okay but that was like more than 2 000 years ago yes that was in the second millennia and into the first millennia bc and then uh the end of the world years ago was the reunification into the very short-lived qin dynasty all right i think that's mostly it we've got a few questions to handle we'll answer those questions and then uh we'll call it a night really we're only at three hours i know we, we're only at three hours. Only at three hours. Well, we're trying to cover the entire history of China and Yi Ti. No, not really.

One super minor point here that I thought was just worth mentioning because it's fun. There's two times where we see jade monkeys. One, we talked about monkeys earlier and we talked about jade a lot. Now here they come together. One is Illyio's ship um he has like a whole shipment of jade monkeys that danny absconds with is one of the many things she gives to the slavers to trade for the unsullied so presumably she takes that back given she took all that back after after pulling her great maneuver on the slavers there and pretending to trade them drogon but also solid or something we see a brass monkey that funky monkey yeah uh but also illyria or solid or son rather has a shirt he's wearing

when davos comes in and he's got jade monkey buttons which i can i gotta assume those come from yeet you know he may he may have stolen them off a ship like uh one that like illyrio's perhaps i imagine solid or son has stolen from illyrio and i think that's probably i bet he has a brass monkey too there's a few funky monkeys out there and you call it pirates call it aggressive negotiation okay a of questions here. Maura Lee says, just a show of love and support. Sending a super chat.

Appreciate that. And she also sends another one. It says, thank you, Chris, Aziz, Shay, and Sean for this great live stream.

Appreciate that Maura. I know you've got some Chinese connections in your family, so I hope this was extra fun for you. Yeah. She was talking about her family that lives in China in the chat. Oh, cool. She appreciated that.

She also says, I think that is what Littlefinger is currently doing regarding saving the chat. Oh, cool. She appreciated that. She also says, I think that is what Littlefinger is currently doing regarding saving the grain. Yeah, he has a grain sort of manipulation thing he's doing that's sort of brought up

mostly in the Elaine Winds of Winter chapter. He's telling all the other lords like what to do to maximize profit and while also maximizing suffering. But those two things go together for him.

So, you know, people are starving. You can charge more for food. What we were just talking about, you know, but those two things go together for him. So, you know, people are starving. You can charge more for food. What we were just talking about, you know, but in a different scenario, but same basic thing in this case, he's smart enough to not be the guy they'll come for.

So he can make his profit without worrying about being killed. Other people will want to kill him. Being the guy behind the guy is a pretty good position to be in most of the time. Yeah, the dude's pretty evil. No one's going to say he's dumb, though. He is very smart. Emily S. says, you the great is an interesting character in Chinese. Oh, thank you.

I am the great? No, you the great. No, you the great. Yeah, you. Who's on first? We the great. We the great. But no, seriously, you the great is an interesting character in Chinese legends.

He built canals to control the floods. There are many references to meteorites in his stories too, I believe. Oh, is that, what do you know about Yu the Great, Chris? Yu the Great is one of the earliest figures. He's known as both one of the three sovereigns and one of the five initial dynasts. And he is considered to perhaps be the earliest actual human and non-demigod figure. And nevertheless, he does all kinds of demigod things so uh emily mentioned uh building canals to control the floods this is we're talking about a uh diluvian level flood where like the entire world just goes underwater and you is forced to spend decades dredging out these canals and river structures to, to fix it.

And, uh, he uses, uh, dragons and, uh, giant, uh,

black dragon turtles, which like to eat the mud. And, uh, interesting. He misses his, he misses his son's entire childhood and he passes by, uh,

three times. And every time his son has gotten significantly older and it's just that's how devoted he was to the cause oh interesting wow that's so man i'm impressed every time we brought someone brought something up about chinese history you knew like you had an answer for everything you were never stumped that's really impressive yeah because again chinese history is so damn big and And you just, you were like, I know that. I know that one. I know that one.

That's awesome. Arya Saxena says, in the case of India, the capital changed depending on the time period. For most of the empires in the ancient period, the capital was Pataliputra. In the medieval period, most of the empires had Delhi as their capital. For a while, the Mughal Empire in the beginning had it as Agra. Then the British came and changed it to Calcutta and then back to Delhi. That's a good example of moving

capitals. India's got one of the real world cultures that is as old as any. It really goes far back. It's such a huge, vast land. I wish I was more versed in Indian history. That's largely

mysterious to me, so I would be easily stumped about all that. I wonder if we could draw any parallels between India and China. None whatsoever. Totally separate. I put a comment here. It's weird that as geologically close as they are, there's relatively limited,

there's been relatively little cultural interaction. And it's largely because the Himalayas are right there and really blocking a whole lot of transit. It seems like Thailand is one of the real estuaries that has a lot of cultural combinations. Because Thailand, the names sound very Indian. They don't sound as... Yeah.

There's a lot of Indian merchants there. That's where the Indians loved to send their boats to go trade for all the time. We used to call it Indochina because it was this cultural mix

of indochina of course of course that term yeah i haven't heard that term in a while but yeah that is that's a thing it's it's a it's an out-of-date term that's probably not best used very often but that's where it comes right on yeah yeah so yeah shay you reminded us of one that i'm i referred to this quote or this mentioned earlier but but we didn't get any farther. It's worth a. Yeah, I just wanted to mention as we were bringing up whether there were dragons in Yeet. There's this line, Chai Duck, the fourth of the Yellow Emperors, married a noble woman of Valyria and kept a dragon at his court. It does indicate that, you know, what we were talking about, that after a certain point, they weren't common in Yeet.

It doesn't mean that, again, pre-Long Night, pre-other things, that they weren't there. But it does make it seem like that was an anomaly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You're right. It does make it sound like this is an exception rather than, but this is a more recent. But he's a more recent emperor, relatively recent because it's concurrent with V valeria but uh post long night so we would have to presuppose or guess maybe that during the long night they lost the bloodlines that that that they had that were dragon rider oriented were died off during the long night so yeet continued but the dragon rider bloodlines were lost. That's kind of where my head is at with this.

That's where my head's at with it, too. I do feel strongly that at one point they had dragons, but later they didn't. Yeah, I get what you're saying. We've given a lot of reasons why it makes sense and how it would kind of not make sense if they didn't, at least at some point. David Zalewski says, I feel like the Yee-Tish emperors that ruled hundreds of years probably would just give their name to their heir and never really revealed themselves to the public and just said it was the same person

we've guessed that same thing about the Grey King's descendants about other descendants in Westeros so they were just naming that we've made a similar point about this yeah all the Brandons perfect example yeah that's a great analog for this.

And it does make sense. Like you have the Scarlet Emperors. Maybe early on they just didn't number them. They lost the numbering. But we hear examples of specifics. The 42nd Scarlet Emperor, the 20th Scarlet Emperor. Maybe back in super ancient times they lost track or they just – it was a way to make them sound more powerful.

Is there any – can I do anything like in in real china or is this yeah were there any like were there any emperors that were said to have ruled longer that were really just multiple or like hid the continuity or did they like yeah like anything like that or so there was never any trying to hide the continuity but what you have is is a lot of repeat of of uh names and uh they would actually have multiple different names just so you'd have like uh era names that's that's the period the calendar is named after and sometimes they're called that and then there's the their their temple names which they only get after they're dead uh and it's supposed to denote like how good or bad of a ruler they were a lot of the time and so like name 25 chinese emperors

woo got it there's an agon woo is the agon i really like that joke i want to use that like name name five targaryen kings agon yeah that's amazing love it love it yeah we all have our common names yeah it's like muhammad or something yeah they're just there's every place where they're in france yeah louis there were a lot of right there were a lot of damn louis in france king louis yeah that's great okay so the trivia question let's have the answer to our trivia question what city is farthest east on the map that we know of if you said the city of wingless men, you're not quite there. It's the second farthest. If you said bone town, that's third farthest. The answer is Carcosa. We even mentioned Carcosa in this episode, but didn't without the geography

attached to it. So that is the farthest east on the map. This is just off screen here. It's right here. And next will be Kadath, then Stigai, and then Nefer and Asshai are kind of lined up. They're kind of tied for next. So there you go. Those are the farthest east cities. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Next up for us next week is the Stepstones. That was the result of yet another Patreon vote. So that's what y'all

picked for next time. We'll be talking about that. That'd be she. This is kind of timely with Damon Targaryen on the rise right now with the House of the Dragon coming in.

He was king of the Stepstones for a while, so that'll be part of that episode. We also mentioned our Ashi episode, our Great Empire of the Dawn episode.

But Chris, what is, tell us where History of China is right now, what you're working on um and we'll try to get you some people interested in checking out the history of china if they haven't already well we are uh smack dab in the middle of the ming dynasty which is uh

china being absolutely brilliant um that's what Ming means. Bright or brilliant. And it is where this is the period of time after China's great voyages where you had the Admiral Zheng He constructing huge, I mean, gargantuan boats and sailing around the ocean and going to Africa and bringing back giraffes to China. So we're after that. We're done with that. Giraffes are cool and everything, but no more. And so now China has really sort of, it's not exactly Tokugawa Japan. It's not exactly totally shut, but it's really less interested in the outside world and it's very interested in making sure that the mongols don't come back uh because that's a very worrisome thing i mentioned two and a half hours ago there's the emperor who took 500 000 people up into mongolia to have a fun time and they all got annihilated there's so there, uh,

this is when we get the, the great wall being constructed and it's going to be fantastic and cool. And it turns out it really does nothing. Um, but, uh, just recently we had the Portuguese arrive and the Chinese are like, what in the heck are these weird looking people? And the Portuguese are like,

no, we got stuff to trade, but we also have other things we want to do. That's awesome. All right. Uh, thank you to everyone who came live and we had an unusual start time. Hopefully a lot of y'all knew,

and we tried to spread the word and if we have another late episode we'll let y'all know thanks to Nina for her great notes this time as usual thanks to all our supporters on Patreon for keeping this whole thing going this time as usual this time as usual all times

as usual yes I'm getting a little imprecise with my speech as it gets later at night well uh thank you for for making the exception uh to allow me to join you guys it's been really fun it was so fun yeah thank you and it was honestly great to do a stream at a different time like to have that excuse has been fun for us as well i have to say um i feel like i learned more on this episode than maybe any other episode,

which we set up at the beginning as kind of an expectation. We know less about Chinese history, so this will be more new stuff here. And that's great. It really worked out. It went as expected. And the reason it went so long

is that we had so much fun things to talk about. We got someone in the chat. David Zaleski says, starting history of China now before bed. We got someone in the chat. David Zaleski says, starting history of China now before bed. So we got one new listener. Heck yeah. One other point here.

Jay is bored, requested a poll on this. There's a debate as to which human culture is the oldest, and Yeetee is among those along with Kaskari, the Asshai, and the Sarnor. That was a note for us at the end to do a Twitter poll. Oh, a Twitter poll. We just wanted a poll. Oh, okay. I was like, we should totally have a poll on what people think.

You're right. Yeah, I guess that's what you know. But sure, say it out loud. Everyone can know that we'll all run this poll. We'll all be posting that poll then. So stay tuned for that. Look out for that one on Twitter. I'll post it to Facebook as well.

Yeah, we'll do it in the Facebook group. That's a good idea. You're right. We can get that idea. I'll have to think about it. I don't have a ready answer. I think I have my guess. I think I would say ET personally. Yeah, that's where I lean. But I We can get that idea. I'll have to think about it. I don't have a ready answer. I think I would say Yeetee, personally.

Yeah, that's where I lean, but I might say Asshai. It's close. Yeah, it's close. I wouldn't say Sarnor or Ghiscari, I don't think. Okay. I'd have to think about it more.

I would say Ghiscari. Oh, interesting. Would you? Okay. Well, there are many points to consider. Yeah, okay. All right.

Thanks as well to Joey, Jesse, Kevin for the music. Your contributions are recurring because we play the music every time. Thanks to Michael Klarfeld not only for the maps that I often point out, but also for the skulls. For the shirt. The skulls. And the intro-outro.

Yeah, yeah. So until next time, everyone, you know what to do. Valar Rereadis Thank you. Have you ever gazed in wonder at the Great Pyramid? Have you marvelled at the golden face of Tutankhamun? Or admired the delicate features of Queen Nefertiti? If you have, you'll probably like the History of Egypt podcast. Every week, we explore tales of this ancient culture.

The History of Egypt is available wherever you get your podcasting fix. Come, let me introduce you to the world of Ancient Egypt.