The Master of Demon Gorge: A Chinese History Podcast

The next emperor in our series on the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.

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Regarding Zhuanxu, the second of the so-called "Five Emperors" of China's deep past.

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Continuing our series on the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms: the founder of the Latter Jin Dynasty, Shi Jingtang.

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On "The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties," by Professor Timothy Brook, of the imperial China series by Harvard University Press.

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On the great Ming Dynasty fantasy-historical novel, "Investiture of the Gods."

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In 281 A.D., a tomb raider discovered a lost ancient text, which came to be known as the "Bamboo Annals." It had an explosive effect on the understanding of the Chinese of their own history...

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Continuing with the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms: the story of Li Siyuan, emperor of the Latter Tang.

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The story of General Hao Bocun.

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Li Keyong and Li Cunxu, father and son, were responsible for building the second of the Five Dynasties.

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The story of Zhu Wen, the man who formally ended the Tang Dynasty and began the period in Chinese history known as the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.

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About the Song Dynasty official, scholar, and philosopher Zhou Dunyi.

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Yan Jiagan is the forgotten president of the Republic of China or Taiwan. He served between 1975 and 1978 but was largely considered a transitional figure. 

However, before he was president, in 1949, he first rescued Taiwan from economic catastrophe, paving the way for all future developments. For that reason alone, the man deserves to be remembered.

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"The man from Qi worries about the sky" is a Chinese idiom meaning to worry unnecessarily about things that won't happen. It comes from a story found in Liezi, an ancient tract of philosophy.

But what was this place called Qi? What does the original fable say? Have we misunderstood it this whole time?

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The story of the Ming Dynasty secret police led by eunuchs, the most infamous eunuch among them, and the faction of mandarins who opposed them.

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Regarding Gu Yanwu, the 17th century intellectual who has recently been the subject of controversy in Taiwanese politics.

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The remarkable Dujiangyan irrigation system in Sichuan was constructed in the 250s B.C. but remains in use today and remains crucial to the Chinese economy.

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Regarding Zizhi Tongjian, or "General Mirror on Good Governance," and the man who wrote it during the 11th century.

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Taiping Guangji or "Extensive Records of the Taiping Era" is an anthology of stories compiled during the early Song Dynasty. Its editors chose to collect the stories under a series of clearly unworkable categories. In so doing, they made Taiping Guangji a perfect illustration of the point made in an essay by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.

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In 1615, the Tokugawa Shogunate made a rule that all Japanese emperors must study "Policy Digests of the Zhen'guan Era," written 900 years earlier in Tang Dynasty China. What is this book and what's important about it?

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The Ming Dynasty novel "Journey to the West" ranks among the great classics of Chinese literature. I recently reread it, and I have thoughts.

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The story of the somewhat mysterious Tocharian people of Kuche in today's Xinjiang, confusingly named after the Tokharoi of Bactria in modern Afghanistan, from whose language Chinese gets its word for "honey."

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The story of the "Door Gods" and how a pair of Tang Dynasty generals came to serve in that role.

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The tale of another short (not to mention poor) man who achieved greatness. Chunyu Kun was a famed "wit" from Warring States era State of Qi. Besides services as a diplomat and political advisor, he was famous for being the sort of party guest you may not allow to leave by evening's end...

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A fascinating minority group in the former USSR, chiefly Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, is the people known as the Dungan. Originally Hui Muslims from northwestern China, they migrated into Central Asia in the 19th century. This story is about them, their Chinese-derived language, and one of their most significant cultural figures, Iasyr Shivaza.

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The Confucian philosopher Zengzi and some of his ideas that became deeply influential in Chinese culture.

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Even as I want to finish telling you the story of Wu Zixu, the fact is that his life so intersected with the lives and careers of other major figures that in this second part of his story I must shift the spotlight onto someone else. King Goujian of Yue, initially defeated and kept by his enemy as a hostage, would rise to the status of a hegemon of the Spring and Autumn period. During his career he would duel against his nemesis, King Fuchai of Wu. And his triumph would also be the time for Wu Zixu's downfall. Other major figures like Xishi the beauty and none other than Confucius himself would also play their respective roles.

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One of the most famous personalities from the late-Spring and Autumn period, Wu Zixu was someone I grew up learning about as a commendable character. But, upon revisiting his story, I find him closer to being the hero of a Greek tragedy than a role model. Here we tell the first half of his story and how his life intersected with other major figures like King Helü of Wu and Sunzi, the author of "The Art of War."

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Yan Ying, the statesman of the State of Qi during the Spring and Autumn era, was famously diminutive. But his short stature was only cover for a brilliant intellect. And he went down in Chinese history as a great man.

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"History is written by the victors," so goes the common saying. But Chinese court historians actually usually provided us with honest accounts of events, even if they made the rulers of their times look bad. Why? Why gave them the right, as well as the sense of responsibility, to speak truth to power?

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The legend of the "James Bond" of Republican China and how his fictional codename became a household name.

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Continuing our series on the hegemons of the Spring and Autumn era: Duke Wen of Jin, who as a prince lived in exile for 19 years.

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Continuing our discussion of the hegemons of the Spring and Autumn period, we look at Duke Xiang of Song, whom some consider a hegemon but perhaps shouldn't.

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Duke Huan of Qi dominated the politics of Spring and Autumn China from the 680s B.C. until the 640s under the slogan of "respecting the king and suppressing the barbarians." Here is why the role he played was similar to that being played by the United States in the modern international state system.

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In 413 A.D., the self-proclaimed king of Daxia or Great Xia, one of the Sixteen "Barbarian" Kingdoms of the age, ordered the construction of a new capital city to be named Tong'wan. The only trouble was, the spot King Helian Bobo chose was in the middle of nowhere...

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In 1222, a Daoist priest from eastern China went to Afghanistan to sit down with a man who had already shaken the world to its core: Genghis Khan. This is the story of that priest, whose name, perhaps serendipitously, is widely remembered even today.

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"The Chronicles of the Eastern Zhou Kingdoms," written in the Ming Dynasty, recounts the history of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States eras. It is considered a novel but is basically nonfiction, so closely as it hews to actual historical records. We discuss the novel, the nature of what a novel is in Chinese tradition, and a key work of history that formed the basis of the "Chronicles": "The Commentary of Zuo."

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You're read about them in the news and read about the area they call home, what the Chinese call Xinjiang. But what do we talk about when we talk about Uyghurs? Where did this people come from?

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Western writers like Kipling produced literature depicting imperial peripheries during the height of the British Empire. Similarly, Chinese poets during the height of the Tang Empire wrote many poems about life and scenery and war on the frontiers. These form a genre in its own right in Chinese literature known as "frontiers poetry." And, as so often happens with imperial writings, they by turns celebrate the glories of empire and question its morality and costs.

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On November 27, 1542, shortly after 5 in the morning, a group of palace girls in the Forbidden City gathered at the bedroom of their would-be victim: Emperor Jiajing of Ming China. At a sign, they jumped on him, ready to strangle the life out of him.

What transpired was one of the oddest and most notable episodes in history of Chinese imperial harems.

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Thoughts on friendship from Montaigne, Aristotle, and the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi, who advises us all not to be too eager to hang out.

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Inspired by recent discussions elsewhere of the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail, we take a look at some of the most sought after objects in Chinese tradition: the Nine Cauldrons and the Jade Imperial Seal, both symbols of royal or imperial authority on earth.

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On that great leader of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, Xie An, who saved his country in the late-4th century and came to be remembered for his preternatural sangfroid.

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The parallel lives of two great physicians who were contemporaries of each other, one in Han Dynasty China and one in the Roman Empire. By extension, a comparison between traditional Chinese medicine and traditional Western medicine.

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The Sui Dynasty (581-619) doesn't get much respect, largely because it was short-lived. Even so, and perhaps paradoxically, its founder implemented a number of measures that far out-lasted the dynasty itself. This is the story of that man, Yang Jian, Emperor Wendi of Sui.

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Two of the most infamous tyrants from ancient Chinese history, the women who enabled them, and why it all might be the worst libel.

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Hu Qubing was one of the most remarkable and meteoric military figures in Han Dynasty China during the second century B.C. Meteoric because he rose fast (thanks to nepotism), burned bright, and died young. A kind of soldierly James Dean. But in his brief but brilliant career, he left an indelible mark on Chinese and world history.

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Xiwangmu or the Mother Goddess of the West is one of the most important and familiar deities in the Daoist pantheon. "The Biography of King Mu of Zhou," dug up in 281 A.D. from a royal tomb, gives a euhemerist account of her as the queen or princess of a distant nation, and tells of how King Mu of Zhou visited her in the 10th century B.C.

Much more besides, including King Mu's appearance in what amounts to an ancient work of science fiction...

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In part 2 of our mini-series on the Chinese underworld, we look at the Green Gang, an alleged offshoot of the Heaven and Earth Society, and one of its most notorious members who came to be called "the Emperor of Shanghai."

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The Heaven and Earth Society, a.k.a. the Hong Society, is one of the most famous underground organizations in Chinese tradition. But its origin is shrouded in legends and myths, many of which connect it to Taiwan.

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The story of the curious and arguably proto-Socialist figure who founded a dynasty so brief that it's often left out when we enumerate Chinese imperial dynasties.

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The story of an expression, from its origin in the 7th century B.C. to the reason it's associated with so many places today in Taiwan.

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The bloody tale of the salt merchant, failed scholar, and reasonably good poet who very nearly destroyed the Tang Dynasty. 

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It is often said that Taiwan came into the Chinese orbit as far back as the 3rd century. Is that true? How? The story of the Three Kingdoms era exploration of (maybe) Taiwan.

Fast forward a few hundred years to the early 7th century, and records show that the Sui Dynasty fought a war against an indigenous kingdom that the chroniclers called "Liuqiu." Today, that name refers to Ryukyu, also known as Okinawa. But could it have meant Taiwan at the time?

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Of all the recent feverish discussions on the prospect of war in the Taiwan Strait, no alleged expert that I've come across has talked about the obvious historical precedent: Emperor Kangxi's invasion and conquest of Taiwan in 1683.

Let's remedy that.

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The late-Ming and early-Qing literary critic Jin Shengtan was quite a character. He never advanced beyond the rank of xiucai, the lowest-level degree in the imperial civil service exam system, but his legacy became far greater than most men who achieved more conventional success.

That legacy was in teaching the Chinese how to read and why, in showing them why the great works of Chinese fiction and drama were great. His influence continues to this day.

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Chinese culture is stereotypically perceived as authoritarian. Although there is obviously a lot of truth to the cliche, it is by no means the full picture. Indeed, ancient Chinese philosophy already introduced certain ideas that might been called democratic, through the figure of Mencius, the second most important personality in Confucianism...

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It's come to my attention in recent years that a certain portion of Westerners, including people who ought to know better such as academics, believe that the concept of "China" is a modern invention dating only to the early 20th century. Their argument is that the Chinese historically never referred to their country by its modern name, "Zhongguo," in ancient times.

For avoidance of doubt, here's an episode setting forth the voluminous evidence as to why they're wrong: the Chinese have been using the term "Zhongguo" since at least around 1,000 B.C.

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By tradition, a man named Cangjie invented the Chinese system of writing that is the bane of so many foreign students trying to acquire the language.

Trouble is, Cangjie is supposed to have lived some 26 centuries ago, in the time of the Yellow Emperor, but the earliest texts attesting to his creation of Chinese writing date to the Warring States period over 2,000 years later...

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Though largely forgotten in the West, during the First World War, some 140,000 Chinese went to the Western Front to support Britain, France, and the United States. They were not meant to play a combat role but instead to help with logistics and support so that the Allies could free up more soldiers for fighting. Nonetheless, some 2,000 of them ended up buried in northern France and Belgium.

This is the story of how they went and why, and how their story and its aftermath indirectly but crucially shaped the course of modern Chinese history.

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Bucephalus, the beloved horse belonging to Alexander the Great, brings to mind two famous horses from Chinese history: the Chitu or "Crimson Hare" Horse of Guan Yu from the Three Kingdoms era and the Wuzhui Horse of Xiang Yu from the time of the founding of the Han Dynasty.

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The Tang Dynasty poet Liu Yuxi led a largely disappointing political career, but he left us with some of the most memorable expressions of individualism and humanism in Chinese literature. Even today, his most famous work remains required reading and is often quoted even by average people.

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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 story of the Cantonese man who, in the waning years of the Ming Dynasty, did perhaps more than anyone else to defend his country against northern invaders.

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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 focus on threats coming from the north.

In the Chinese imagination, though, and for a literary reason, the Duan family of Dali looms larger than you'd expect.

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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, history destined the Xixia to obscurity. In the wake of 20th century excavations and the rediscovery of the Tangut language, scholars have regained a measure of understanding, but even now this fascinating civilization remains largely cloaked in mystery.

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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?) to repeat the drama that the Liao already played out.

And yet another nomadic people waited in the wings, almost ready for their moment in the sun...

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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 "China"...

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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: what can it teach us about contemporary Chinese nationalism? What does it mean that many modern Chinese call this story "the ancient Chinese version of 'Saving Private Ryan'"?

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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 seemingly outlandish conclusion?

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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 joint session of Congress...

I am, of course, talking about the visit by Madame Chiang Kai-shek (better known to the Chinese by her own name, Soong Mei-ling) to Capitol Hill in February 1943.

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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...

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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 plausible in the 1920s?

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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 the Chengzu Emperor.

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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?

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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 Cantonese, and in Taiwan, Mandarin and Taiwanese Hokkien are spoken side by side.

So what is Mandarin? How did it come about? How much does it actually resemble the language of ancient China? To what extent was the modern standardization process artificial? Would it matter if it was?

And, finally, can the southern dialects actually claim greater antiquity and prestige?

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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 US in 1949 and enjoyed a life as a high-flying American businessman. How was it that he was persuaded to go to Taiwan to set up TSMC? And who convinced him?

The answer is Sun Yunxuan, one of the key architects of Taiwan's economic miracle. This is his story.

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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.

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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...

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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...

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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 all that was Chinese in the Western world.

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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 people behind them.

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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.

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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 the first years of the 20th.

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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.

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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 doomed to fail, and maybe it never had much chance of success. But what might have been...

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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 with the next half century of his life...

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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 activities?

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In the previous episode we looked at how climate change in the Roman Empire paralleled climate change in Han Dynasty China and contributed to the rise and fall of both empires.

Today, let's examine how pandemic diseases in both ends of Eurasia also coincided to help to bring down both empires. In Rome, the Antonine Plague came in the second century, the Plague of Cyprian in the third, and Plague of Justinian in the sixth. Meanwhile in China, the late-second century pandemic coinciding with the Antonine Plague gave rise to the Yellow Turban Rebellion, which kicked off the age of chaos known as Three Kingdoms...

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In his book, "The Fate of Rome," Prof. Kyle Harper argues that much of the history of the Roman Empire can be attributed to climate: the period known as the "Roman Climate Optimum," around 200 B.C. to 150 A.D., neatly encapsulates the rise of the Roman Republic through its transition into Empire until the beginning of its decline during the age of the Antonines.

The Han Dynasty in China follows almost exactly the same timeline from its founding in 202 B.C. to its final collapse in 220 A.D. If climate was a leading cause of Rome's rise to imperium as well as its eventually humbling, and if many of the causal factors of climate change are global, then can it be that similar patterns of climate change led to the rise and fall of the Han Dynasty?

To answer this question, we turn to Prof. Zhu Kezhen and his seminal 1972 paper...

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Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, Marshal of the Soviet Union, is chiefly remembered in Russia as the iron-willed commander who successfully defended Stalingrad against Nazi assault during WWII.

What has been largely forgotten is that Chuikov learned to speak Chinese and spent years in China. Before Stalingrad, he served as a military advisor to none other than Chiang Kai-shek...

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The tea plant, Camellia sinensis, originated in borderlands of southwestern China and what is now Burma. For many centuries, though, people didn't consume tea the way we do it today.

Drawing on work by Prof. Miranda Brown, this is the story of Lu Yu, the Tang Dynasty comic actor and author who taught the Chinese literati, and later the whole world, how to drink tea.

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Ni Kuang, the hyper-prolific leading light of Hong Kong science fiction, died in early July.

This is his improbable legend, from his beginnings as a boy communist in Mainland China to his days as a refugee smuggling himself across the border to his ultimate success and achievements in Hong Kong.

It's almost as improbable as the adventures he invented for his protagonists.

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Henri Cernuschi, an Italian revolutionary who became a French banker, came to collect East Asian and particularly Chinese artifacts later in life.

Today, a walk through the Cernuschi Museum in Paris is amounts to a stroll through Chinese history.

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As discussed in the previous episode, the rediscovery of the Mogao Caves at the beginning of the 20th century has immeasurably enriched our understanding of Silk Road history.

The story of that discovery itself is full of drama and involves some incredibly fascinating scholar-explorers. Sven Hedin, Aurel Stein, Paul Pelliot, Langdon Warner, Kozui Otani, and Sergey Oldenburg all helped to bring the treasures of Dunhuang to global attention.

But at the same time, what they did--buying priceless artifacts from men who didn't understand their value and carting them off mostly to Europe and America--was controversial even then and certainly can seem problematic today. Many Chinese believe their actions were little better than theft. And yet...

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If you ever get a chance, make sure to visit the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang.

In today's Gansu Province, the town of Dunhuang, situated on the historic Silk Road, witnessed a thousand years' worth of travelers: merchants and pilgrims, holy men and knaves, and not only Chinese but members of many races speaking many languages. And, starting in 366 A.D., they began to leave in these caves spectacular murals and statues as well as priceless documents. The rediscovery of the Mogao Caves in the early 20th century has since then reshaped and immeasurably enriched our understanding of the past.

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Quite likely the greatest female poet in Chinese history, Li Qingzhao might be deemed a Sappho of the East or the Emily Dickinson of China.

Living during the Song Dynasty, Li Qingzhao came from an extraordinary family background and received the best possible education in imperial China. As a teenager, she already wrote better verses than most of the men who attained the jinshi degree in the civil service examination: the highest level of distinction. She then had the good fortune of a loving marriage.

But then tragedies both national and personal struck. The Jurchen invasion in 1127 forced millions of refugees to move from northern China to the south, including Li and her husband. Shortly afterward, he died.

In spite of her personal tribulations, or because of them, Li Qingzhao left us with a unique body of work, poems with a distinctly feminine voice that soars above a literary pantheon otherwise full of men.

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Two of the longest-reigning emperors in Chinese history ruled during the Qing Dynasty: Kangxi, who sat on the throne from 1662 until 1722, and his grandson Qianlong, who ruled from 1735 until 1799.

The figure sandwiched between them was Emperor Yongzheng. Son of Kangxi and father of Qianlong and to some extent eclipsed by both, Yongzheng was in fact an important and highly competent ruler.

His competence, though, was substantially dedicated to centralizing imperial authority around his own person. And the Yongzheng era came to be strongly associated with "wenziyu" or "language prison": the practice of imprisoning or executing individuals for writings that angered the emperor. The notorious "Lü Liuliang Case" was particularly egregious.

In time, a number of myths grew up around Yongzheng reflecting popular discomfort with his role as the competent totalitarian. 

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A handful of women are remembered in Chinese history and popular imagination as the epitome of feminine beauty. One of them is Xishi.

Living in the 5th century B.C., Xishi played a key role in the longstanding rivalry between the Kingdoms of Wu and Yue. In the centuries since, though, she has endowed the Chinese language with a number of expressions that we cannot do without.

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Sure, we've already done an episode on Three Kingdoms. But so many interesting characters and gripping tales come from that era, both as history and in fictionalized form from "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms," that we can easily do a dozen episodes or more.

This time, let's focus on the trio of men whose friendship opens the novel and serves as the through line for much of the rest of the book: Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei.

Not only that, but the relationship among these three goes on to help define Chinese civilization, its values and its foibles. The peach garden in which the three swear allegiance to one another remains today a symbol of undying friendship.

Not to mention their respective individual impacts on Chinese culture: Guan Yu, for one, comes to be deified as the god of war.

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Certain literary figures loom so large in Chinese culture that they substantial define the nature of that culture for all posterity, not to mention live in eternal acclaim.

One such figure is Su Shi, also know by his nom de plume Su Dongpo, "Dongpo" meaning "Eastern Slope."

Su Shi lived during the Northern Song Dynasty in the 11th century. Though he came from arguably the most distinguished literary family of his time, he suffered disappointment after disappointment in his career as a mandarin.

And, in the end, he earned immortality not through his political career but through literature and art, as a poet and an essayist, and (maybe) even through contributions to Chinese cuisine.

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