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The Master of Demon Gorge: A Chinese History Podcast
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The Master of Demon Gorge: A Chinese History Podcast
William Han
Stories from ancient China, and whatever else comes to mind.
Chinese Revolutions is a podcast showing how China came to be the way it is today. We are looking at modern Chinese history through the lens of revolutionary movements from the Opium Wars to the present. The Communist Party of China inherits quite a lot from previous revolutionary movements, and the Chinese nationalism it brings forward all come from somewhere. Here, we’re going to find out. Your host, Nathan Bennett, lived in China for seven years. This podcast is a love letter and a farewe ...
Put down that lengthy history book spanning thousands of years and instead follow the “Makers and Shakers of Chinese History” podcast, which presents the biographies of 20 historic figures who shaped the course of ancient China. Meet the most renowned ancient Chinese rulers, ministers, thinkers, scientists, poets, and rebels, and find out how they continue to influence the Chinese to this day. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Untold stories from Chinese New Zealanders
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Old Chang CHATS - Chinese History And Tech Startups
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Old Chang CHATS - Chinese History And Tech Startups
Chang Zi Qian
There is a difference in business culture between Asia and the West. Much of the startup related literature are western dominated and there is a vacuum for Asian business strategies related discussions in English. On each episode of CHATS, Old Chang will pick a topic which will interest English speaking founders and professionals by seeking out relevant lessons from Chinese history.
Did you know that a heavy rain was responsible for the demise of a Dynasty, during which the Great Wall was built? Did you know that Italian merchant and explorer Marco Polo finished his master piece about China in prison? And an Emperor proclaimed African giraffes as magical Chinese unicorns Qilin. Follow the podcast, ‘Stuff you missed in Chinese history,’ to learn more fun facts during the past few thousand years in this country. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit ...
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 ende…
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Chinese Revolutions: A History Podcast
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S01E39 Taiping Rebellion: Siege of Anqing, On the Edge of a Knife
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S01E39 Taiping Rebellion: Siege of Anqing, On the Edge of a Knife Some points of review on where we left the Taiping Rebellion story. We're getting back into the Taiping Rebellion. We'll be following the story of Zeng Guofan most closely. For Zeng Guofan, dogged determination and luck keep him in the game. If You'd Like to Support the Podcast Subsc…
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.Av William Han
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.Av William Han
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 …
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Chinese Revolutions: A History Podcast
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S01E38 We’re Back! Thoughts on the Future of the Podcast
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S01E38 We're Back! Thoughts on the Future of the Podcast We're back from break! While I've been away, I've still been doing reading on China and thinking about the podcast, thinking about how to keep moving it forward. I'll probably move to a more modular approach: 2-3 episodes on a topic, a person, an event. Episodes to tie the narrative together.…
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 pea…
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 …
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 ev…
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 Empir…
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 …
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 …
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 t…
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Chinese Revolutions: A History Podcast
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S01E37 Taiping Rebellion: Taiping Propaganda Under Hong Rengan
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S01E37 Taiping Rebellion: Taiping Propaganda Under Hong Rengan Here we go, grinding back into gear with this year's episodes. This episode's title addresses one of the main actual insights in the episode, not quite what it's about. Hong Rengan is working on planning the modern government structure of the future of the Taiping government apparatus. …
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...Av William Han
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…
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The Master of Demon Gorge: A Chinese History Podcast
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Uncle v. Nephew: Emperor Chengzu of the Ming
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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 Jian…
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?Av William Han
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Chinese Revolutions: A History Podcast
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S01E36 Taiping Rebellion: Other Foreign Visitors to the Taiping
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S01E36 Taiping Rebellion: Other Foreign Visitors to the Taiping In this episode, we look at more of the visitors to Hong Rengan, effective foreign minister for the Taiping. First is Griffith John, a Welsh missionary. He came on a factfinding mission to see what Nanjing was like under the Taiping. He thought the Taiping were very wrong, religiously …
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…
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Chinese Revolutions: A History Podcast
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S01E35 Taiping Rebellion: Issachar Roberts
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S01E35 Taiping Rebellion: Issachar Roberts In the present look at Hong Rengan in the Taiping hierarchy, we are looking at some of the foreigners who drifted over to the Taiping side. This episode focuses on eccentric loose cannon missionary Issachar Roberts. In this episode, we see an example of how the Taiping were a little "too Chinese" to make a…
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 manufactu…
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Chinese Revolutions: A History Podcast
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S01E34 Taiping Rebellion: Foreigners and Revolutions
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S01E34 Taiping Rebellion: Foreigners and Revolutions In this episode we're shifting back to look at the Taiping side of the Taiping Rebellion. We look at how the Taiping Rebellion works out to be a failed, an incomplete revolution. It brings out certain problems that future revolutions will resolve, but it fails in certain critical ways. We further…
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 Ba…
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S01E33 Taiping Rebellion: Siege of Anqing Begins
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S01E33 Taiping Rebellion: Siege of Anqing Begins In this episode, we wrap up a bunch of episodes on Zeng Guofan. We talk about the human element in war, how Zeng Guofan is conserving his troops' morale and will to fight, and how he's taking on much larger numbers through careful strategy and tactics. The American Civil War (1861-1865) was contempor…
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The Master of Demon Gorge: A Chinese History Podcast
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The Philosopher, the Carpenter, and Wargames
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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 histo…
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...Av William Han
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 …
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 th…
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S01E32 Taiping Rebellion: Zeng Guofan Perfects His Strategy
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S01E32 Taiping Rebellion: Zeng Guofan Perfects His Strategy In this episode, we see Zeng Guofan start to get a grip on the task of fighting the Taiping Rebellion. He has to balance between the political necessities of showing his troops that fighting far from home is a way to protect home and achieving strategic results for the emperor. Zeng Guofan…
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.Av William Han
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S01E31 Taiping Rebellion: Zeng Guofan Starts Attacking
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S01E31 Taiping Rebellion: Zeng Guofan Starts Attacking In this episode, we go over the organization of Zeng Guofan's army and the first few years of his campaigns against the Taiping rebels. We are following the book Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War by Stephen R. Platt for this episode. Mo…
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 sec…
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Chinese Revolutions: A History Podcast
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S01E30 Taiping Rebellion: Zeng Guofan Builds His Army
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S01E30 Taiping Rebellion: Zeng Guofan Builds His Army In this episode, we look at the process that Zeng Guofan went through to build his army. When he was in Hunan to mourn the death of his mother, in 1853 he accepted the mission from the emperor to take charge of military affairs in the province. Ordinarily, the Han elements of the Qing army had a…
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.Av William Han
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Chinese Revolutions: A History Podcast
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S01E29 Taiping Rebellion: Introducing Zeng Guofan
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S01E29 Taiping Rebellion: Introducing Zeng Guofan This week we regroup and look at the big picture of what the Taiping Rebellion is showing about the theme of our podcast, and we introduce Zeng Guofan, a guy we here at Chinese Revolutions (we as in the "more fun to say 'we' than 'I' because it makes it seem like I've got a whole department") have b…
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 advan…
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 hist…
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S01E28 Taiping Rebellion: Unequal Treaties and Modernizing China
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S01E28 Taiping Rebellion: Unequal Treaties and Modernizing China This week, we're talking about how the unequal treaties forced on China during the Second Opium War further clarified anti-imperialism as a driver in later Chinese revolutions. Foreign powers readily turned to force to push things along in China whenever dialogue got stuck. Force had …
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…
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S01E27 Taiping Rebellion: Second Opium War-Storming the Dagu Forts
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S01E27 Taiping Rebellion: Second Opium War-Storming the Dagu Forts As part of the ongoing series on the Taiping Rebellion, we're taking a look at the storming of the Dagu Forts, which guarded the waterway approaching Beijing. While the civil war between official Qing forces and Taiping rebels was going on, the foreign powers decided to push their o…
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The Master of Demon Gorge: A Chinese History Podcast
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Plagues in Ancient Rome and the Han Dynasty
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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…
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S01E26 Taiping Rebellion: Hong Rengan in Nanjing
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S01E26 Taiping Rebellion: Hong Rengan in Nanjing In this episode, we go over Hong Rengan's journey from Hong Kong to Nanjing, what it was like when he got there, and his prospects for changing the Taiping movement. Today's episode substantially based on Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War by …
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Climate in Ancient Rome and the Han Dynasty
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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 …
S01E25 Taiping Rebellion: Hong Rengan Today we're looking at the re-emergence of Hong Rengan, younger cousin of Taiping leader Hong Xiuquan. Hong Rengan was one of the earliest converts, but he was cut off from the main Taiping group early and he had to run away to British Hong Kong to survive the Qing purges of Taiping supporters and sympathizers.…
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…
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S01E24 Foreigners in China: The Customs Department
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S01E24 Foreigners in China: The Customs Department Today we're talking about the customs department instituted for China by foreign powers intervening in China. The customs department did much more than collect import-export taxes: foreigners working with the Chinese government sent scientific and sociological studies back to Europe, lighthouses es…
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,…
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S01E23 Foreigners in China: Foreign Settlements
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S01E23 Foreigners in China: Foreign Settlements This week we're starting a 2-3 episode series on what foreigners have been building in China since the Opium War blew open the Treaty Ports to foreign use. Because foreign influence will make or break Chinese revolutions, we need to see how foreign powers set themselves up in China. Treaty Port Settle…
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 invent…
