The Master of Demon Gorge: A Chinese History Podcast

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.Support the show

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.Support the show

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 the first years of the 20th.Support the show

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

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...Support the show

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?Support the show

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...Support the show

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...Support the show