The Master of Demon Gorge: A Chinese History Podcast

A few weeks ago, then out-going Taiwanese Premier Su Tseng-chang (or Su Zhenchang in standard Pinyin) said something that caused quite a stir:  "Had Yuan Chonghuan not died, how could the Manchu army have breached the Great Wall?" To understand why this rather curious rhetorical question caused the controversy it did, you obviously have to know who Yuan Chonghuan was. Here, then, is the...

Completing our series on the other, lesser-known regimes that coexisted with the Song Dynasty, we look at the Kingdom of Dali located in picturesque Yunnan in China's southwest. Led by the Duan family for most of its history, Dali was a minor player in East Asian international relations at the time, and the Song was happy to have a harmless and peaceful kingdom to its rear so that it could fo...

Continuing our series on the lesser known regimes contemporaneous with the Song Dynasty, today we look at the Kingdom of Xixia, or "Western Xia," founded and run by the Tangut people. Smaller than the Liao and the Jin Empires discussed in our recent episodes as well as the Han Chinese regime of the Song, the Xia was nonetheless at one point a true power to be reckoned with. But, sadly, h...

Continuing our series on the "other" dynasties and kingdoms and co-existed with the Song Dynasty, which we typically think of as the mainline Chinese regime of this period, we look at the Jin Empire. The Jurchen people rose up against the Khitan Liao Empire in the early 12th century and established their own empire and called it the Jin. But, at every turn, they seemed destined (doomed?)...

The period in Chinese history we typically think of as the Song Dynasty was much more complicated than that single dynastic name makes it sound. Multiple regimes co-existed and came upon the stage and exited, fighting each other repeatedly but also engaging in diplomacy and cultural exchanges. Today, we look at one of them: the Liao or Khitan Empire, which gave the Russian language its word for &q...

Some time in 76 A.D., a band of Chinese soldiers, the last survivors of a garrison, their clothes torn to ribbons and their bodies emaciated so that they barely seemed like living men, stumbled into Yumen Guan or "the Jade Gate Pass," the western terminus of the Han Dynasty Great Wall. We may consider their story in light of episodes from the same period in Roman history. And we may ask:...

In 499 A.D., a Buddhist monk named Hui Shen walked into the city of Jingzhou and regaled the people there with tales from his recent adventure to a distant country called Fusang. Fusang, according to a number of scholars, was in modern-day Mexico. Was it? What does "The Book of Liang," the original Chinese source for this account, really say about it? Why did some scholars come to this s...

A nation under attack by a superior foe. A desperate people suffering through a long season of privation, a time that tries men’s souls, and yet they remain resilient and determined. In their struggle for survival, they rely on that so-called “Arsenal of Democracy,” the United States of America. And, at a critical juncture in the war, a leader of their nation travels to Washington to address a joi...

In my travels around Mainland China, I often heard a saying: "In the sky there is the Nine-Headed Bird, so on earth there is the man from Hubei." What does this saying mean, and where does it come from? It all has to do with the Ming Dynasty statesman Zhang Juzheng... Support the show

A century ago, in December 1922, a New York Times front page article confidently predicted that the next leader of China would be a military officer named Wu Peifu. The Times was wrong about this: General Wu turned out to be little more than a footnote in the great trends of modern Chinese history. But who was he? And how did he get into a position where such a prediction might have seemed plausib...

It was the Mongols who chose Beijing as the Chinese capital. After the Ming Dynasty overthrow the Mongols, though, the Chinese relocated their capital south to Nanjing. And yet just a few decades later, they moved it back to Beijing. Why? This is a "Game of Thrones" kind of story about fathers and sons and uncles and nephews, in particular the Jianwen Emperor, the nephew, and his uncle t...

Of all the uncertainties and mysterious surrounding China's mythical founder, the Yellow Emperor, one is the name of his father's tribe. Ancient sources tell us it was called "youxiong," literally "have bears." Bears? What bears? What does it mean? Support the show

In 1728, Emperor Yongzheng complained that he couldn't understand officials hailing from the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, where they spoke, respectively, Cantonese and Hokkien. Three hundred years later, we continue to struggle with the question of how dominant the lingua franca of Mandarin should be over more local languages. In the PRC, the current conflict is between Mandarin and Can...

How did Taiwan, a small island off the Chinese coast, become by far the most dominant player in the global semiconductor industry? How did a place that as of the mid-20th century was emphatically an economic backwater gain such a position? Much has been written about Morris Chang, the founder of TSMC, the largest of Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturers. But Chang had moved from China to the U...

Deterrence theory is well known in political science and particularly popular during the Cold War. In the annals of Chinese history, we find examples of a specific type of deterrence: making your enemy refrain from attacking by being clever and displaying your intellect for your enemy to see. Let's look at the famous cases of the Su Brothers, Li Bai, and Lin Xiangru. Support the show

During the Warring States era, when the genius inventor Lu Ban designs a new siege weapon for the Kingdom of Chu, the king decides to attack the much weaker Kingdom of Song. Hearing this, the pacifist philosopher Mozi rushes to the scene to try to persuade the king otherwise. What follows is possibly the earliest recorded table-top wargame in history... Support the show

Everyone has heard of Sunzi's "The Art of War." But did you know that it is only one of many treatises on warfare from ancient China? In fact, Sunzi's book has long been considered only the first of a list of seven texts considered required reading for students of warfare... Support the show

In the middle of the 20th century, one Chinese writer began publishing books in English. It was a truly unusual thing, given that proportionally a lot fewer Chinese at the time even could speak English with much competence. But Lin Yutang was no ordinary man. Through his bestselling books that often sought to explain Chinese history and culture to Westerners, in many ways he became the voice of al...

Ban Chao, "the Marquis Who Pacified Faraway Lands," remains a household name today among the Chinese. And he endowed the Chinese language with more than one common expression. What made him into a legend was his military and diplomatic career in the late-first century A.D. dealing with the many states of the "Western Lands" (modern Xinjiang) and the fearsome Xiongnu or Hun peop...

In 751 A.D., the forces of Tang China, led by a Korean general, met a distant foe on a battlefield in what is now Kyrgyzstan: the Muslims of the Abbasid Caliphate. What resulted was a key turning point in human history, though one seldom appreciated in the Western world. Support the show

The first Chinese national to graduate from a U.S. university lived a life that was full of disappointments. At the time, Yung Wing was perhaps simply too much of a rarity. As the Chinese proverb says: "It is difficult to clap with only one palm." But he was a kind of Forrest Gump of Chinese history, turning up at many of the key moments in the second half of the 19th century and into th...

The story of the "Thousand-Character Essay," composed in the early 6th century with 1,000 distinct Chinese characters, never repeating a single one.  And it rhymes. Support the show

The recent passing of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom brings to mind a fascinating moment in Chinese history. In the early-20th century, during the final years of empire, the Qing Dynasty attempted to transform itself into a constitutional monarchy not unlike the model in the UK, in Japan, and in a number of other countries. With the advantage of hindsight, we know that the effort was doo...

Zhang Xueliang, known as "the Young Marshal," lived one of the most interesting lives of 20th century China.  After inheriting Manchuria from his father in his 20s, the young warlord went on to play in a pivotal role in the Xi'an Incident of December 1936. The event, for better or worse, would forever alter the course of Chinese and hence world history. And Zhang would pay for it wi...

Historian Michael McCormick has nominated 536 A.D. as the worst year in history to be alive. It was a "year without a summer," and around the globe strange weather phenomena led to crop failures and famines. Around the globe, including in China. What do the Chinese records from the time say about the strange and terrible events that, modern science has shown, were the results of volcanic...