The History of China - Special: Barbarians At the Gates - A Conversation with Jeremiah Jenne

Episode Date: April 9, 2025

Original publication: 03/21/2025 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Army. And the head of Oliver Cromwell. The same head they kept on a pike for three years? Yep, all here on History Dispatches. New episodes every weekday. Find out more at HistoryDispatches.com or wherever you get your podcast app. Hello and welcome to another edition of Barbarians at the Gate. This is Jeremiah Jenne, broadcasting a couple of stories above rainy Geneva, Switzerland. My co-host David is off at a conference meeting. So joining me today, Chris Stewart, who you may know better as the man of the voice, the legend behind the History of China podcast and one of the funniest social media feeds transitioning between Twitter and blue sky. Chris, how you doing?

Hey there, Jeremiah. I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on. Hey Chris, where are you calling in from today? I'm in my hometown, actually, Bozeman, Montana. Now you were in Shanghai for quite some time. Yeah, I was there for going on 15 years. After 15 years in the big city,

what's it like coming home? What's it like coming back to the, to what's left of the United States? Eh, vey. Well, I mean, what an interesting time to decide to go from one Imperial enterprise to another. It's kind of feels a little bit like out of the frying pan into the fire a little bit,

but fortunately I'd been back not too long prior. So it wasn't a total culture reshock or anything. A lot more space, a lot, a lot more spread out. Oh yeah, absolutely. I think one of the first things you get, you have to get used to going to China is just the sharing your airspace with so many other people. And then there's the reverse feeling when you leave China and you go somewhere where the population density isn't quite that high.

Recall a time, it could have been a couple of Christmases ago, I was home and it was Christmas Eve and I told my mom, I'm pulling to Walmart, I gotta pick up some things. She's like, oh my god, that's gonna be a complete madhouse. It's like Christmas Eve, it's gonna be packed with people. And I walked in and it felt like one of those post-apocalyptic scenes to me, like, you know, like four or five people, feral children in the aisle, but certainly not the crazy, like, packed, it's not nothing like a temple fair or something or the Beijing or Beijing subway at rush hour. Well, it'd be both that, absolutely. Same thing going to Target or Costco or whatever. My mom will say exactly that and I'm thinking it's no big deal at all. But also just in terms of physical scale as well

of the town I'm in is 40, 50,000 people. A long drive across to the side of town is 10 minutes. I mean, I was going an hour to work via the metro in Shanghai every day. Before we get to talk about your podcast, I was hoping you could tell me a little bit more about what's your China story? What brought you to China? What were you doing there? And then let's get into what inspired

you to do the history of China. Sure. Initially got interested in China just sort of as an idea in my freshman year of university, I decided I didn't want to take French anymore because I was just tired of it after years of high school French. And so I decided I was going to take it was either going to be Japanese or Chinese because the school that I went to offered them and they seemed interesting. And just by a dent of luck, I chose Mandarin. I'd been a musician all through high school and prior so I had a bit of an ear to be able to hear the tonality of the language better than a lot of my fellow students could. So my teacher encouraged me, Ms. Wu, she encouraged me to continue on even as I was tripping over the syllables and all that

stuff. That turned into an interest in the overall culture and country itself, which translated by my senior year into me doing my capstone project on the Nanjing Massacre, which is a fun topic. But my capstone advisor had a contact in Wenzhou in Zhejiang and the medical college there had an English program. So I decided I was going to go check it out for a year and just, you know, walk the walk as I was trying to talk the talk. And that was about 2008 when I went over there after I graduated. And that was right when the first financial collapse of the 2000s happened, which I guess

we now have to start calling it. So I decided I was going to be okay where I was for the moment. And I met the woman who had eventually become my wife and wound up moving to Shanghai, where I taught English there for a number of years before graduating up to getting my master's in education and teaching at an international high school there for like 11 years. You taught history at this at the international high school, is that right? Yeah, primarily US history, but also world history. Yeah, I get that sense. One of the things about listening to your podcast,

and having also taught Chinese history, one of the great challenges as a teacher is you have all this amazing information, and you want to share it with your students. And it's really hard to find a way to take a narrative, talk about all the interesting things you wanna say, and without going so far into the weeds that you lose people, but at the same time, not dumbing it down in any way.

And it's one of the things when I listen to your podcast, and it helps when you're doing, you know, multiple episodes on a dynasty, but still, you're talking like a whole dynasty or the span of a couple of centuries in some cases and the ability to try to get the information out in 45 minutes, 50 minutes. That's a real skill. And I was wondering, is that something that does come from being a teacher? That ability to say, okay, I have to lesson plan here. I would say to some extent

that that certainly helps the kind of already thinking of things in terms of digestible chunks, how long can I expect someone to actually pay attention to a given topic before their mind is just going to inevitably start to wander. And then I think interacting, especially with like middle schoolers, high schoolers who are very culture savvy, very aware and very much into what's they'll they'll hook into what's cool and they will cast aside what is not cool, whatever that may be to them. So I think, yeah, being effective in a classroom deals with meeting students where they are in terms of what they're going to be willing to latch into and understand.

So it does, it does mean trying to relate things in more of an approachable or a bite sized sense sometimes, but it also, as you say, without trying to dumb it down or be overly simplistic about it. What did you decide to do a podcast about Chinese history? Well, it was as I was a very young English teacher, and I was going to and from Minhong District of Shanghai every day by train and bus. And I started listening to podcasts and I got into some of the the history programs like Mike Duncan, Dan Carlin and I thought well honestly I didn't really look that hard at the time but I thought I don't see one about Chinese history that I just happened to know about at the time and this was the

early days of podcasts there was barely I think a functional listing and so I thought well it doesn't seem like it's that hard how hard could it really be I can probably just do this and just to keep myself busy and knock it out in 10 And so I thought, well, it doesn't seem like it's that hard. How hard could it really be? I can probably just do this and just to keep myself busy and knock it out in 10, 20 episodes. And that'll be that. Here I am, I think 13 years in and 300 plus episodes and not even close to being done. So I messed up. Well, you're messing up with everybody else's game.

Walk us through the process a little bit. When you do an episode, how do you start? I mean, where do you even begin when you're thinking about, say, something like, I'm going to do a multi-part series on the Ming dynasty. What kind of references do you start with? How do you get from all that to something that people can listen to on their way to work?

I'd say it's trying to plan, trying to know at least the major points that I want to hit that will get the story across and how long, how much I think I can do that in per part. I want to get one major narrative event beginning to end in the course of an episode. And that's how I kind of try to block it. I want someone to walk away feeling like that thing happened and I feel like I get it. And so that's, that's kind of of the fundamental how I try to block it. And then oftentimes, especially with the more long-lived or more eventful rain periods or

individuals, I go in knowing that it's going to be multiple parts on a single person, you know, like the Hongwu Emperor or Kangxi, who I'm still on, and he just, he will not die. Eventually I'll get there. I have long had a hate. My students have told me an unhealthy man crush on the Kong Shi Emperor so I can totally appreciate that. Man he's just I did a major thing on his war against Galdan Khan of the Jungars and I've never wanted both sides to win so much in my life. It's just like they're both so awesome

and cool. So it was it was a bit of a bittersweet goodbye to Gal Don. The other bit is sometimes I don't quite know going in that is going to wind up requiring more than one part. So I find myself hitting some midpoint and saying, uh-oh, I'm already at, you know, an hour and 15 minutes of raw recording in, and I'm gonna have to edit that down to something that's an episode length,

which is in the 30 to 40 minute mark for me. And then I have to find a way to wind down and continue on from there. So it's a balancing act for me at least. And it's constantly trying to feel out whatever seems to work best that week. Yeah. And it can be a challenge too, because you're doing a narrative podcast. So where you're trying to keep that flow going, because it's usually just a single voice. If you think of someone like Dan Carlin who could do seven hours or whatever it is on the Mongols and that takes a real talent. Do you write out the script or do you just have notes like, opium war, mention this and go, or do you actually write it out relatively word for word

script? I wish that I could do what I do believe like Dan Carlin does and basically just riff off of a series of notes, but I don't have the kind of natural flow state of that. I end up going back and doing a ton of edit work on my own just to even it out and make it sound better. So no, I have to write out my scripts, but I try to write it in a way that I would normally speak or is in a conversational, not sounding like a term paper way. So hopefully it doesn't come across like I'm just reading out off of like that. As I've gone along, I've gotten a little bit better of getting off of that totally all the time, but I still mostly am writing the whole thing out and then reading it usually in a

single take or so and then a few corrections or going back and putting stuff together. All right, so a couple of quick questions, one nerd to another, okay? And I know there's maybe some recency bias in terms of what you're working on. What's been your favorite dynasty so far to cover? Yeah, that is the eternal question.

And it does kind of shift around, and you're absolutely right, the recency bias. I'm thinking all about Great Qing right now. And so that's all in my head. And so nothing wrong with that from my perspective, not a one. But I would still say my favorites that I did was still going to be the yen and the Mongol Empire leading up to that and the ramifications of Genghis Khan and his sons and grandsons on the world of East Asia at the time and how that all played out and how relatively quickly it was all over. And then that leads us right into the Ming, which is a fantastic to talk about as well.

It's fantastic to talk about. As dynasties go, I think it leaves, I mean, misplacing emperors is not exactly what you call professional dynastic move. You know, they coined a phrase not too long back called the cool zone of history, where you'd want to read about it, but you definitely wouldn't want to live there. And I think the Ming definitely qualifies as one of those. I think that's a very good way to put it. Back in the days when the bookworm used to actually be a thing in Beijing, I think one of the last events that was there was we had a debate and I can't remember exactly the teams. I know I was on team Ching and I remember that Ian Johnson, the journalist

was on team Ming because he dressed up in a robe and everything. And the debate was Ching versus Ming. And I couldn't even believe it was as close as it was. Ching won naturally as you know, history of dates itself. One of the other reasons why I'm so excited to have you on the podcast is for those people who are in the Chinese social media, I don't know what you would call it, universe these days, and everything's Balkanized a bit between Twitter and Blue Sky and whatnot,

but you've had a very long running and very active social media presence, let's just say a very long running and very active social media presence, let's just say. You're putting it very benignly. And you have a courage as a social media warrior, which I lack completely. You get into some debates, let's just say, that I admire your perseverance. It's great that you're out there. I'm glad somebody's fighting the fight, but what keeps you in the fight?

That's a good question. I think it is a naturally hardheaded nature and what I've found to be kind of a almost a personality flaw in myself of a real repugnance towards hypocrisy and of feeling a real sense of bone deep disgust by it. And I just have problems keeping that to myself. I'll be right there, honey. Somebody is wrong on the internet. Yes. I think that might be what's written on my gravestone eventually. As non-Chinese who study Chinese history, we attract a certain kind of, let's just say, attention. Yes.

Not always criticism, but certainly some attention. I'm curious, from your perspective, since this podcast talks about Chinese history, how many people do you, how much response have you gotten? And I imagine you've gotten some from a Chinese audience, or people who come from a Chinese cultural background. And what has some of the feedback been about what you're doing?

Yeah, well, first and foremost, my show is not aimed at the Chinese audience, which is not to say they're not welcome, but it is primarily a show that is targeting somebody who's interested and wants to know more about China in general, but doesn't come with sort of an inbuilt pre-amount of knowledge. I'm kind of basing it off of what I started as, which was someone who didn't really know much about it, hadn't gotten it from school, or at least not very much of it outside of a paragraph here and there in a history book. So most of my audience is non-Chinese and that's kind of how I frame it as. The response

from Chinese people, be it abroad or even from within China, has been positive largely. There's always going to be a mix of response from, I think, any audience on the internet after all, where everybody has to have a take. But one of the things that I've really tried to do, and I won't pretend to be anywhere near perfect at it, but I've tried to keep the work itself, the show, the episodes, the content, I've tried to keep them very historically grounded, factually based. I'll throw in little side references here and there that might do something about pop culture or maybe some little side phrase or whatever, but I'm not throwing in, you know, modernity for the sake of argument there. My online Twitter presence, that's another beast entirely. That's a very different story. I do like the pop culture references. I think also we perhaps share a certain amount of pop culture interest that could help. 400 years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of Europe.

Within three short centuries, these islands would become the center of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast, Pax Britannica, follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Listen to season one to hear about England's first attempts at empire building, in Ireland, in North America, and in the Caribbean, the first steps of the East India Company, and the political battles between king and parliament.

Listen to season two to hear about the chaotic years of civil war, revolution, and regicide, which rocked the three kingdoms and the fledgling empire. In season three, we see how Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell ruled the powerful Commonwealth and challenged the Dutch and the Spanish for the wealth and power of the Americas and Asia. Learn the history of the British Empire by listening to Pax Britannica everywhere you find your podcasts or go to pod.link slash packs. I have noticed they are kind of two distinct personas between the podcast

and the, the history of China podcast, uh, Twitter feed, which is a very different, it's, it's, it's different tone than the podcast itself. I use and began using Twitter and now blue sky very much as just sort of a event, uh, an emotional outlet, just a way to scream into the void. And I didn't start this show or that account as being anything trying to be some official company function. And so it just grew out of how I felt about things because certainly when I started it, it wasn't anything that I had to worry about.

What will the reflection be on my, what people think about me? But I'm kind of in too deep now, I think. It would be awkward to try to cut that out. The feed itself actually was of great comfort, I guess. Comfort may be the wrong word, but we're coming up on the five-year anniversary. So New York Times and everyone else

keeps reminding me of COVID. And of course, you were in Shanghai, I was in Beijing. You guys were dealing with it on a much different level than we were in the Capitol. Keep the Capitol happy, being always an important role of the emperors and the people who have followed them. But I have to say, reading some of your tweets at the time, it was very comforting to me that somebody else was feeling that kind of frustration. Yeah. I think certainly the COVID period was, I think for many of us, certainly me, something of a radicalizing incident in a lot of ways. Seeing and living very firsthand the amount of just naked doublespeak and hypocrisy and do as I say, not as I do. And just getting

caught, and I'm talking about the Chinese government here, in case it's not obvious, getting caught with their pants down constantly while demanding total obedience and control. And not that much of the rest of the world did a whole lot better. But yeah, and then the constant scrubbing of the internet of any kind of complaint or bad news or anything. It just really turned my sense of, man, what's happening here is really double plus un-good. I took to that feed and to a few episodes of my show even to try to preserve,

to try to broadcast some of the things that were getting deleted during the Shanghai lockdown in 2022. My time sense gets a little fuzzy at that period, but I just, yeah. And I likewise, the other, uh, Twitter heads across China at the time who were likewise kind of living their own versions of that, that time were very helpful to me as well. Was that part of the, was that part of the thinking and, and finally deciding to, to go back home or to relocate? It was, it was part of it.

I think I, I'd reached a points that I could look out over this decade long plus experience of trying to just getting to my mind more authoritarian, less, less fun is how I would put it in a sense, a lot more crackdowns, a lot more strictures on where you could go, what you could do, what kind of even music shows were available and it didn't seem, and it still doesn't seem like it's on any trajectory on where you could go, what you could do, what kind of even music shows were available. And it didn't seem, and it still doesn't seem like it's on any trajectory to improve itself out of that to just something more, I don't know, something that I'd want to live in. Yeah. I mean, I have to say that just from my own perspective, it wasn't what made us

decide to leave, but it was the thing that when we had an opportunity to leave, suddenly it was made it easier to say yes to those opportunities than it would have before then. You know, that before it would have been like, well, it'd have to be a really good deal to leave. But after the lockdowns, after COVID, it was like, well, what do you got? Sounds pretty good.

Let's try that for a while. But now you're back in the United States. So fortunately, you are someplace where there aren't cowbells running the government censorship, wannabe authoritarian leaders with staggering daddy issues. So we're all good, right? Somehow sounds so familiar. I wonder if I heard that before. It's been interesting from a Chinese history perspective because the New York Times, among

others, have been running articles, and I've seen a lot of takes online too. This is America's cultural revolution moment. And to be fair, there seems to be some chatter like that on the Chinese internet as well. People are kind of using that as a frame of reference. But I'm gonna ask you, because you're not only somebody who has recorded hundreds of episodes about Chinese history, but also somebody who spends, I would say, a decent amount of their waking time absorbing

the various hot takes in the social media world. Far, far too much time. Is this cultural revolution, is this just being lazy, or is this the most apt reference we can find in the annals of Chinese history to compare what's happening in America today. You sent me a message and you mentioned this and it got me thinking about it because I hadn't really been thinking about it or framing it in terms of the Cultural Revolution. At first I'm like, oh, meh, I don't know about that. But then I got to thinking about it and maybe there's something to build off of there.

I don't think it's a bad one. I don't think it's necessarily that bad. I think like any analogy that one could make and that we may, it's imperfect. It's not one to one. It's happening for a very different set of reasons. It's occurring among a very different segment of the population. But there are certain elements that do overlap with kind of the fervor and the knee-jerk destructive quality that was going on by the red guard and elements in the cultural revolution to what's going on with like Doge and the mass federal firings so far, it's a whole lot less violent.

That's good. You have the aggrieved leader who has been sidelined for a period of time, finally comes back to power riding a wave of populism or whatever you want to call it, and then turns his attention on those elites he thought had sidelined him. I could see that there are some parallels there, perhaps. I think your last point, though, is an important one.

And that's why I get a little bit cautious about these kinds of analogies, because the Cultural Revolution was not just, it was political, but it wasn't just political. It was something that involved the deaths of we don't even know and may not ever know how many people and almost anyone who was alive and you lived in China and you talk to people, they've got the stories and obviously anything's possible. But we really hope that the Cultural Revolution metaphor ends with the politics and doesn't

actually go into the kind of mass violence that characterized, especially the first three or four years of that movement in the 1960s. It's what I do try to be careful with and what I do roll my eyes a little bit at a lot of the left, especially in the West. And when they try to draw from those kinds of things, they'll say, it's like this, it's like that. And it's, they almost never really grasp just how absolutely and utterly horrifyingly violent those kinds of periods were. And when we're talking about disappearing people, they're just never found

again. They're just gone. There's no record. There's no trace of them. We have no way of even verifying that they were killed. They're just effectively gone. And as you say, it's just, we have to guess. I was wondering, I was thinking about this too, as I was getting ready for this conversation. I was also thinking about the Cultural Revolution, but I wonder if maybe the what's going on right now is more akin to what preceded the Cultural Revolution. That is to say, is this a little bit like the anti-rightist campaigns of the 1950s in which you had an elite that was somewhat entrenched in the 1950s? A lot of these people were communists. A lot of these people had been certainly on the left side of the political spectrum, but also a lot of them were holdovers from the old society.

Many of them were returnees who had studied abroad and when or had received education in the old days. And as a result, when the communists took over in 1949, they were kept around because they had the skills. They knew about agriculture and science and all these things that China desperately needed. But then the politics got in the way and they purged so many of these people.

And the anti-Rice movement had its casualties, Then the politics got in the way and they purged so many of these people. The anti-Rez movement had its casualties, but it was a lot more about people losing their jobs or being cowed into silence or imprisoned. But then what happens next, right? The great leap forward. Part of that is because once you get rid of all the people who know shit and then you start trying to do stuff, the people that you replace them may not actually be the most capable at running a government. And I, you know, it's all-

You're saying we shouldn't let big balls fire the rockets? I don't know. I mean, I'm just saying at this point, like, we're only in month three here, people, of this administration. And the first three months have been, let's get rid of everybody who knows how to do stuff. I'm really worried about the next two or three years, because whatever we feel about the size of government just seems like having people who know how to do stuff is key when

you're dealing with complex issues. I was, and I believe you were, active on Twitter when Elon moved in and took it over. And basically one of the first things he did was rip every wire effectively out of the wall to see what broke it and then started plugging stuff back in until it sort of worked again. And that's a state it's kind of existed in ever since. And it's really scary to see that happening almost exactly the same way to things where it's not just about whether or not I get my means, it's about whether people get money to live.

And that's really scary to see the same management styles. Absolutely. And I think it makes me think about what the meaning of the term elite, which obviously is in some ways is a pejorative. And I can understand that because the idea of entrenched elite who have privileges based upon their status and then use those privileges to create or pull up the drawbridge, right? That happens, obviously. But at the same time, if I'm a passenger on a plane, right? I'm not sitting there going, I could do this. Like, I could land this plane. Like, who is this pilot because he has that fancy wing

on his pin on his chest and some kind of certificate and is clearly sober? What makes him qualified to actually continue to fly this plane? And I feel like there's people who kind of miss that point, is clearly sober. What makes him qualified to actually continue to fly this plane? And I feel like there's people who kind of miss that point, that in attacking whatever entrenched privileges there are, you're getting rid of people that worked very hard to get where they are, and they know stuff I don't know how to do. Or frankly, I don't think many

of the people in the Trump administration know how to do. As you were talking about the anti-elitism though, I think that that's something that you could also sort of relate to not only the cultural revolution aspect of it, but you could actually relate it to multiple incidences across Chinese history. And when I say incident, that's using a very sort of East Asian terminology set, aren't I? It's usually, I'm talking about massive massacres and revolutions on the scale that would just dwarf anything that America or Europe really comprehends. I know that you had that episode on the Ming especially and that got me thinking of the Ming as well. Its first emperor, the Hongwu

emperor who manages to kick the Mongols out of China or at least their ruling body. He was very famously one of the great autocrats of Chinese history. He just wanted to have his hands in everything. Hated bureaucracy, which strikes a similar beat as well, took something of a chainsaw to his own bureaucracy. Got rid of the prime minister. I think he cycled through a few of them, if I'm remembering right, then turned it into a rotating position and then just ignored it completely and let it rot in the backyard. He also famously loved to ruthlessly beat his imperial ministers for even slight infractions. It was almost impossible to work for the guy without just getting flogged almost to

death at some point or another. It became a real problem for his government as his reign went on because nobody wanted to work for him. They didn't want to get their butts kicked. But there's one particular thing that happened that's collectively called an incident, but it's not a single thing. It's the case of the stamped documents. So it says relatively early on in his reign and he's coming in and he's encountering a very similar problem set to say what the Trump administration and Doge and Musk are saying is their focus and their problem, which is that they have this entrenched elites official class from the previous regime and Hongwu automatically doesn't trust them because he has the commoners'

sense of us and them when it comes to the elite versus himself and where he came from. He comes from very low class peasantry. And then of course they were working for the bad guys. They were working for the Mongols. So how could we trust them? But on the other hand, we also kind of need them to run this whole imperial apparatus. But he's looking for basically any way

that he can to dig his nails into them. And he finds that as a matter of smoothing things out and kind of greasing the wheels of government and just making it operate at all, what they've done is for hundreds of years, they've had these stacks of official documents that allowed the transports of trade goods to and from different regions across China, but they've just been stamping them ahead of time, pre approving them so that they can just get it done because otherwise it would take forever and everything would grind to a halt and it would be terrible.

But he doesn't like this. He wants to say, no, I'm in control. I have command. And so he says, no, they've all got to be done as it happens in the moments. Do it my way or the highway. And several hundred of his own officials wind up getting executed. But I think from all across the empire, because they just happened to get caught at the time when noticed that it was happening, but it had always been happening

So they get they get rounded up and they get the huge Chinese punishment Which is the execution of them and their families and their uncles and their cousins and all that stuff and this expands onward And I think winds up being more than a thousand people either get executed or purged because of these and people either get executed or purged because of these stamped documents. And the whole system immediately grinds to a halt and nothing functions. And it was a terrible idea. And only a few thousand people had to die. Once you start combing the stories from the imperial era, there's a, I think there are some really good examples, like the one you just mentioned of either an emperor trying

to root out corruption, which also sometimes has the effect of paralyzing the bureaucracy or reformers that go in and they want to overturn everything. The one I was thinking of, I know it's not a perfect analogy, but I think of like Wang Meng during the Han dynasty, right around the turn of the first millennium. It's been a minute since I thought about him. Yeah, but the idea is you have this kind of idea of reform, if you will, to try to overturn the power of some of the elites.

It had the ultimate effect of essentially bringing down the Han dynasty for a period until finally he declares himself an emperor and then, well, that doesn't work out too well for Wang Bang. So now that you are back in the States, you're still doing the podcast. Are you doing anything else relating to China? At current, I'm just doing my podcast right now. I'm in a place where that can be, I mean, blessedly sustainable for now. So that's pretty cool, just to be able to kind of have that option.

But otherwise, I'm trying to get myself a little bit more ahead of my own release schedule. Yeah, what's coming up? Let's see. As I said before, I am still neck deep in the Kangxi emperor's reign period, which is 60 years long. And if I'm remembering right, it's the longest or second longest in Chinese history. It's like between him and his grandson, Qianlong.

But yeah, Qianlong retires just so he won't overtake his grandfather. Yeah. But then hangs around in the back of the palace for a few years, making life miserable for his kid. Being the Tai Hong... The very succession kind of thing going on. That's a very good reference. Yeah. I've been playing with some, using some quotes from succession from time to time to describe these very long reign periods and especially the succession question that happens because Kong Chi winds up never really choosing a successor. It's his great mistake, right? The one thing he always says, the stain on his reign, if you will.

He had an heir that he designated, and then it turned out that the guy was a massive sex criminal. I mean, it was really egregious stuff. Which by the standards of the Qing imperial family, like, I'm not making light, but you got to be pretty bad. The stuff that's even hinted at is beyond the pale. It's, I mean, and you're absolutely right. To even have it come up is incredible.

I think that's probably why you have every, almost every TV show for a few years took place right in that period, right in that time between the Kangxi Emperor and the rise of the Yongzheng Emperor. It's everybody's favorite genre, I think, in that it's it's very much like one of those shows that you can watch. That's the The Real Housewives or where it's just drama and it's so dramatic and everything is for the ultimate stake all the time and it's knife in the back.

And how could you not love it? Not to live it, but to read about it. I'm looking forward to as you make your march through the Qing Empire, the Great Qing is certainly, it's my favorite dynasty so it'd be good to catch up on all of that as well. I know there's a few people who are especially looking forward to how I will treat the the Taiping rebellion when I get to it. That's, that'll be interesting. One of my favorite, I should say, my current kind of favorite Chinese history author right now is Steven Platt. I think he's, uh, he's, he's really very talented.

He, I think he's, he fills a niche that, with and Spence, the late Jonathan Spence left, somebody who can write very compellingly about complicated periods in Chinese history and do so in a way that places it in a global context, not as if China's a universe unto itself, but also do so in a way that brings serious academic heft, but still very readable. And his Tai Ping book, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, especially, is highly recommended for anyone who's looking for a good read, nonfiction read on Chinese history. Absolutely.

I really want to thank you for taking time out of your weekend to join us to talk about Chinese history. I've been wanting to talk to you for a long time. Glad we were able to do it in the podcast. I wish you the best of luck with the pod and with the readjustment back to life in the United States. Hopefully, things don't go as they did in 20th century Chinese history. And they take a turn for the at least less crazy.

Well thanks so much for having me on. It's been a real pleasure. And yes, fingers crossed. May it all work out okay. And also for the two or three of our listeners that don't already listen to your podcast, I suspect there is a huge overlap, but could you let them know where they could find the podcast and how they could find you on social media?

I have the much less creatively named show than Jeremiah's. I'm just the History of China podcast. I just picked the first name that seemed relevant. Much more searchable. It's true. It's worked out. So that's the the history of China dot wordpress.com is the website, but the podcast itself is of course where every podcast is listed all the time forever. On social media, I'm mostly on blue sky.

You can find me there. THOC at B sky dot social, I think is what it is. You can probably just search THOC. I maintain a presence over on X, I guess, but don't find me there. Don't do anything there. That's basically it. That's my search abilities.

That's great. Well, yeah, so THOC on Blue Sky, not THC on Blue Sky. It's a very different feed. That's a different feed. Very, very different feed. Well, thank you very much, and thank you all for listening. This has been another edition of Barbarians at the Gate. We'll be back in two weeks, and you can find us wherever fine podcasts are given away for free.

Thank you all very much and Cue the Drums. 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.