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This episode we will discuss various embassies to and from Yamato during the reign of Takara Hime, with a particular focus on the embassy of 659, which occured at a particularly eventful time and happened to be extremely well-recorded fro the period by Iki no Hakatoko, who was apparently on the mission to the Tang court itself. For more, check out our blog post at: https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-123 Rough Transcript Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua, and this is episode 123: Embassy Interrupted.   Iki no Hakatoko sat in his room, gazing out at the city.   It was truly an amazing place, filled with all kinds of people from around the world.  And yet, still, after 9 months of confinement, the place felt small.  Sure, there he hadwere visits from ranking nobles and dignitaries, but even the most lenient of house arrests was still house arrest. But that didn't mean that he had nothing to do.  There were books and more that he had access to—many that had not yet made it to the archipelago, and some of which he no doubt hoped he could bring back with him.  And of course, there was paper, brush, and ink. And then there were the experiences he and others had acquired on this mission to the Great Tang.  From the very beginning the missionit washad been plagued with disaster when they lost half of their ships and company mission to rogue winds on the open seas.  Now they were trapped because the Emperor himself wouldn't let them return home.  They had experienced and seen so much, and that provided ample material for one to catalogue. As the seasons changed, and rumors arrived that perhaps his situation would also something would change soon, Iki no Hakatoko spread out the paper on the desk in front of him, dipped his brush in the ink, and began to write.  He wrote down notes about his experiences, and what had befallen him and the others.  He had no idea who It is unclear whom he thought might read it, and if he was intending this to be an official or personal record, but he wrote it down anyway. Hakatoko He couldn't have known then that his words would eventually be captured in a much larger work, chronicling the entire history of Yamato from its very creation, nor that his would be one of the oldest such personal accounts records to be handed down.  His Itwords  wwould only survive in fragments—or perhaps his writing was simply that terse—but his words they would be preserved, in a format that was still being read over a thousand years later.     Last episode we finished up the story of Xuanzang and his Journey to the West—which is to say the Western Regions -- , and thence on to India, or Tianzhu, where he walked in the footsteps of the historical Buddha, studied the scriptures at the feet of venerable teachers, such as Silabadhra at the Great Monastery of Nalanda, and eventually wound up bringingbrought back hundreds of manuscripts to Chang'an to , which he and others be translated and disseminated, impacting Buddhist thought across East Asia.  HisXuanzang's travels lasted from around 629 to 645, and he was still teaching in Chang'an in the 650s when various student-monks from Yamato  arrived to study and learn from him, eventually bringing back his teachings to the archipelago as part of the Faxiang, or Hossou, school of Buddhism. Before that we talked about the visitors from “Tukhara” and “Sha'e” recorded in the Chronicles.  As we noted, these peopley were morest likely from the Ryukyuan islands, and the names may have been conflated with distant lands overseas – but regardless, .  Whether or not it was a mistake, this it does seem to indicated that Yamato had at least an inkling of the wider world, introduced through the continental literature that they had been importing, if not the direct interactions with individuals from the Korean peninsula and the Tang court. This episode, we're going to talk about some of the relations between Yamato and the continent, including the various embassies sent back and forth, as well as one especially detailed embassy from Yamato to the Tang Court that found itself in a bit of a pickle.  After all, what did you do, back in those days, when you were and ambassador, and your country suddenly went to war?  We'll talk about that and what happened. To reorient ourselves in time, we're in the reign of Takara Hime, called aka Kyogoku Tennou during her first reign, who had reascended to the throne in 655, following the death of her brother, Prince Karu.  The Chroniclers would dub her Saimei Tennou in her second run on the throne. From the very beginning of her second reign, Takara Hime was entertaining foreign envoys.  In 654, the Three Han of the Korean Peninsula—Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla—all sent ambassadors to express their condolence on the death of her brother, and presumably to witness her ascension.  And in the 8th month of her reign, Kawabe no Maro no Omi, along with others, returned from Chang'an.  He Kawabe no Maro no Omi had been the Chief Ambassador to the Tang on an embassy sent , traveling there in the 2nd month of the previous year.  Originally he had been He was under the command of the controlling envoy, Takamuku no Obito no Kuromaro, but Kuromaro who unfortunately died in Chang'an and so Kawabe no Mari no Omi took over his role. That same year, 655, we know that there were about 100 persons recorded in Yamato from Baekje, along with envoys of Goguryeo and Silla.  These are likely the same ones we mentioned back in episode 117 when 150 Baekje envoys were present at court along with multiple members of the Emishi. Silla, for their part, had sent to Yamato a special hostage , whom we know as something like “Mimu”, along with skilled workmen.  Unfortunately, we are told that Mimu fell ill and died.  The Chronicles are pretty sparse on what this meant, but I can't imagine it was great.  After all, the whole idea of sending a hostage to another nation was as a pledge of good behavior – the idea being that the hostage was the idea that they werewas valuable enough that the sending nation wouldn't do anything too rash.  The flip side of that is if the hostage died, Of course, if they perished, the hosting country lost any leverage—and presumably the sending nation would be none too pleased.  That said, people getting sick and passing away was hardly a hostile action, and likely just considered an unfortunate situation. The following year, in 656, we see that Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla again all sent ambassadords were all sent to offer “tribute”.  The Chronicles mention that dark purple curtains were drawn around the palace site to entertain the ambassadors—likely referring to the new palace site at Asuka no Wokamoto, which probably was not yet fully built out, yet.   We are given the name of the Goguryeo ambassador, Talsa, and associate ambassador, Ilchi,  in the 8th month, Talsa and Ilichi, with 81 total members in the Goguryeo retinueof the embassy.  In seeming response, Yamato sent an embassy was sent to Goguryeo with the likes of Kashiwade no Omi no Hatsumi as the Chief Ambassador and Sakahibe no Muraji no Iwasuki as the Associate Ambassador.  Other names mentioned include We also see the likes of Inugami no Shiromaro, Kawachi no Fumi no Obito—no personal name is given—and Ohokura no Maro.  We also see thea note in the Chronicles that Yamato ambassadors to the quote-unquote “Western Sea”—which seems to refer to the Tang court, but could possibly refer to anything from the Korean Peninsula west—returned in that same year.  The two are named as Saheki no Muraji no Takunaha and Oyamashita no Naniha no Kishi no Kunikatsu.  These are both families that were clearly involved in cross-strait relations , based on how they are frequently referenced in the Chronicles as being associated with various overseas missions.  but  However, we don't seem to have clear evidence of them when these particular individualsy leavingft on this mission.  “Kunikatsu” mightay refer to an earlier ambassador to Baekje, but the names are different, so that is largely just speculation.  In any case, Uupon their return, they are said to have brought with them a parrot.  This wasn't the first parrot the court had seen—that feathery traveler had arrived in 647, or at least that is the first parrotinstance  we have in the written record -- .  Aand that one came from Silla as part of that embassy's gifts. Continuing on, in 657, The following year there was another group of ambassadors returned coming  from the “Western Seas”, in this case coming back from—or through—Baekje.  Thisese wasere Adzumi no Muraji no Tsuratari and Tsu no Omi no Kutsuma.  The presents they brought back were, of all things:  one camel and two donkeys.  And can you imagine bringing a camel back across the sea at this point?  Even if they were using the larger ships based on continental designs, it still must have been something else to put up with a camel and donkeys onboard, animals that are not exactly known for their easy-going and compliant nature. Speaking of boats, we should probably touch on what we *think* they were usinghas been going on here.  I say *think* because we only get glimpses  of the various boats being used in the archipelago, whether from mentions in or around Yamato, archaeology, or artistic depictions, many of which came from later periods., and wSo while it is generally assumed that they the Yamato were using Tang style vessels by the 8th and 9th century, there does not appear to be clear evidence of exactly what kind of boats were being used during the early earlier periods of contact. A quick note on boat technology and navigation: while travel between the Japanese archipelago and the Korean Peninsula, and up the Yellow Sea, wasn't safe, it would have been possible with the vessels of the time.  Japan sits on the continental shelf, meaning that to the east where the shelf gives way to the Pacific Ocean with the Phillippine Sea to the south, the waters are much, much deeper than they are to the west.  In deep waters, waves are not necessarily affected by the ocean floor, meaning they can build up much more energy and require different kinds of technology to sail.  In shallower areas, such as the Sea of Japan, the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea or the Korean Straits to the west of the archipelago, there's more drag that dampens out the wave effect – it's not that these areas are uniformly shallow and calm, but they are calmer and easier to navigate in general.  Our oldest example of boats in the archipelago of any kind are dugout canoes, .  These are logs that are hollowed out  and shaped. , and tThese appear to be what Jomon era populations used to cross to the archipelago and travel between the various islands.  Though they may be considered primitive, without many of the later innovations that would increase stability and seaworthiness—something I'll touch on more a bit later—, they were clearly effective enough to populate the islands of the Ryukyuan chain and even get people and livestock, in the form of pigs, down to the Hachijo islands south of modern Tokyo.    So they weren't ineffective. Deep waters mean that the waves are not necessarily affected by the ocean floor.  Once it hits shallower water, there is more drag that affects larger waves.  This means that there can be more energy in these ocean waves.  That usually means that shallower areas tend to be more calm and easier to navigate—though there are other things that can affect that as well. We probably should note, however, that Japan sits on the edge of the continental shelf.  To the west, the seas are deep, but not nearly as deep as they are to the east, where continental shelf gives way to the Pacific ocean, with the Philippine Sea to the south.  These are much deeper waters than those of the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea, or the Korean Straits.  The Sea of Japan does have some depth to it, but even then it doesn't compare in both size and depth. Deep waters mean that the waves are not necessarily affected by the ocean floor.  Once it hits shallower water, there is more drag that affects larger waves.  This means that there can be more energy in these ocean waves.  That usually means that shallower areas tend to be more calm and easier to navigate—though there are other things that can affect that as well. All this to say that travel between the Japanese archipelago and the Korean Peninsula, and up the Yellow Sea, were all things that were likely much easier to navigate with the vessels available at the time, but that doesn't mean that it was safe. Later, we see a different type of vessel appear: .  This is a built vessel, made of multiple hewn pieces of wood.  The examples that we see show a rather square front and back that rise up, sometimes dramatically, .  There are with various protrusions on either side. We see examples of this shape , and we've seen examples in haniwa from about the 6th century, and we have some corresponding wooden pieces found around the Korean peninsula that pretty closely match the haniwa boat shapesuggest similar boats were in use there as well, .  Nnot surprising given the cultural connections.  These boats do not show examples of sails, and were likely crewed by rowers.  Descriptions of some suggest that they might be adorned with branches, jewels, mirrors, and other such things for formal occasions to identify some boats as special -- , and we even have one record of the rowers in ceremonial garb with deer antlers.  But none of this suggests more than one basic boat typevery different types of boats. In the areas of the Yellow and Yangzi rivers, area of modern China, particularly in the modern PRC, the boats we see are a little different.  They tend to be flat bottomed boats, possible evolved from  which appear to have been designed from rafts or similar .   These vessels would have evolved out of those used to transport goods and people up and down the Yellow and Yangzi rivers and their tributaries.  These boats y had developed sails, but still the boats wwere n'ot necessarily the most stable on the open ocean.  Larger boats could perhaps make their way through some of the waves, and were no doubt used throughout the Yellow Sea and similar regions.  However, for going farther abroad, we are told thatcourt chronicles note that there were other boats that were preferred: . These are sometimes called  the Kun'lun-po, or Boats of the Kunlun, or the Boats of the Dark-skinned people.  A quick dive here into how this name came to be. Originally, “Kunlun” appears to refer to a mythical mountain range, the Kunlun-shan, which may have originated in the Shan-hai-jing, the Classic of Mountains and Seas, and so may not have referred to anything specific terrestrial mountain range, ally.  Italthough the term would later attach be used to describe to the mountain chain that forms the northern edge of the Tibetan plateau, on the southern edge of the Tarim Basin. However, at some point, it seems that “Kunlun” came to refer to people -- .  Sspecifically, it came to refer to people of dark complexion, with curly hair.  There are Tang era depictions of such people, but their origin is not exactly known: it might .  It is thought that it may have have equally referred to dark-skinned individuals of African descent, or possibly referring to some of the dark-skinned people who lived in the southern seas—people like the Andamanese living on the islands west of modern Thailand or some of the people of the Malay peninsula, for example. It is these latter groups that likely were the origin, then, of the “Kun'lun-po”, referring to the ships of the south, such as those of Malay and AsutronesianAustronesian origin.  We know that from the period of at least the Northern and Southern Dynasties, and even into the early Tang, these foreign ships often , which were often plyingied the waters from trade port to trade port, and were the preferred sailing vessels for voyages to the south, where the waters could be more treacherous.  Indeed, the Malay language eventually gives us the term of their vessels as “Djong”, a term that eventually made its way into Portuguese as “Junco” and thus into English as “junk”, though this terms has since been rather broadly applied to different “Asian” style sailing vessels. So that leaves us with three ship types that the Yamato court could have been using to send these embassies back and forth to the continent: .  Were they still using their own style of native boat as seen on haniwa,, or were they adopting continental boats to their needs?   If so, were they using the flat-bottomed boats of the Tang dynasty, or the more seaworthy vessels of the foreign merchants?. Which were they using?  The general thinking is that IMost depictions I have seen of the kentoushi, the Japanese embassies to the Tang court, depict them as t is generally thought that they were probably using the more continental-style flat-bottomed, riverine vessels.  After all, they were copying so much of what the Sui and Tang courts were doing, why would they not consider these ships to likewise be superior to their own?  At least for diplomatic purposes.  I suspect that local fishermen did their own were keeping their own counsel as far as ships are concernedthing, and I also have to wonder about what got used they were using from a military standpoint for military purposes.  Certainly we see the Tang style boats used in later centuries, suggesting that these had been adopted at some earlier point, possibly by the 650s or earlier. Whatever they used, and while long-distance sailing vessels could Sailing vessels could be larger than short-distance riverine craft, this was not a luxury cruise.  , but conditions on board were not necessarily a luxury cruise.  From later accounts we know that they would really pack people into these shipspeople could be packed in.  It should be noted that individual beds and bedrooms were a luxury in much of the world, and many people probably had little more than a mat to sleep on.  Furthermore, people could be packed in tight.   Think of the size of some of these embassies, which are said to be 80 to 150 people in size.  A long, overseas journey likely meant getting quite cozy with your neighbors on the voyage.  So how much more so with a camel and two donkeys on board a vessel that was likely never meant to carry them?  Not exactly the most pleasant experience, I imagine – and this is not really any different than European sailing vessels during the later age of exploration.. So, from the records for just the first few years of Takara-hime's second reign, we see that there are lots of people going back and forth, and we have a sense of how they might be getting to and from the continent and peninsula.  Let's dive into Next, we are going to talk about one of the most heavily documented embassies to the Tang court, which set out in the 7th month of the year 659.  Not only do we get a pretty detailed account of this embassy, but we even know who wrote the account: as in our imagined intro, , as this is one of the accounts by the famous Iki no Muraji no Hakatoko, transcribed by Aston as “Yuki” no Muraji. Iki no Hakatoko's name first appears in an entry for 654, where he is quoted as giving information about the status of some of the previous embassies to the Tang court.  Thereafter, various entries are labeled as “Iki no Muraji no Hakatoko says:”, which   This would seem to indicate that these particular entries came are taken directly from another work written by Iki no Hakatoko and referred to as the “Iki Hakatoko Sho”.  Based on the quoted fragments found in the Nihon Shoki, itthis appears to be one of ourthis oldest Japanese travelogues.  It , and spends considerable time on the mission of 659, of which it would appear that Iki no Hakatoko was himself a member, though not a ranking one.  Later, Iki no Hakatoko would find himself mentioned in the Nihon Shoki directly, and he would even be an ambassador, himself. The embassy of 659 itself, as we shall see, was rather momentous.  Although it started easily enough, the embassy would be caught up in some of the most impactful events that would take place between the Tang, Yamato, and the states of the Korean peninsula. This embassy was formally under the command of Sakahibe no Muraji no Iwashiki and Tsumori no Muraji no Kiza.  It's possible In the first instance it is not clear to me if this isthat he is the same person as the previously mentioned associate envoy, Sakahibe no Iwasuki—but the kanji are different enough, and there is another Sakahibe no Kusuri who shows up between the two in the record.  However, they are both listed as envoys during the reign of Takara Hime, aka Saimei Tennou, and as we've abundantly seen, and it wouldn't be the first time that scribal error crept in. has taken place, especially if the Chroniclers were pulling from different sources. The ambassadors took a retinue with them, including members of the northern Emishi, whom they were bringing along with them to show to the Tang court.  TheThey also  embassy ttook two ships—perhaps because of the size of the retinue, but I suspect that this was also because if anything happened to the one, you still had the other.  A kind of backup plan due to the likelihood something went wrong.  And wouldn't you know it, something did go wrong.  You see, things started out fine, departing Mitsu Bay, in Naniwa, on the 3rd day of the 7th month.  They sailed through the Seto Inland Sea and stopped at Tsukushi, likely for one last resupply and to check in with the Dazai, located near modern Fukuoka, who would have been in charge of overseeing ships coming and going to the archipelago.  They departed from Ohotsu bay in Tsukushi on the 11th day of the 8th month. A quick note: Sspeedboats these were not.  Today, one can cross from Fukuoka to Busan, on the southeast corner of the Korean peninsula, in less than a day.  The envoys, however, were taking their time.  They may have even stopped at the islands of Iki and Tsushima on their way.  By the 13th day of the 9th month—over a month from leaving Kyushu behind -- , the  ships finally came to an island along the southern border of Yamato's ally, Baekje.  Hakatoko does not recall the name of the island, but o On the following morning, around 4 AM, so just before sunrise, the two ships put out to sea together to cross the ocean, heading south, towards the mouth of the Yangzi river.  Unfortunately, the following day, the ship Iwashiki was on met with a contrary wind, and was driven away from the other ship – with nothing known of its fate until some time afterwards.  Meanwhile, the other ship, under the command of Tsumori no Muraji no Kiza, continued on and by midnight on the 16th day, it arrived at Mt. Xuan near Kuaiji Commandary in the Yue district, in modern Zhejiang.  Suddenly a violent northeast wind blew up, and p.  Tthey were saileding another 7 days before they finally arrived at Yuyao.  Today, this is part of the city of Ningbo, at the mouth of the Qiantang river, south of Shanghai and considered a part of the Yangzi Delta Region.  This area has been inhabited since at least 6300 years ago, and it has long been a trade port, especially with the creation of the Grand Canal connecting between the Yangzi and the Yellow River, which would have allowed transshipment of goods to both regions. The now half-size Yamato contingenty  left their ship at Yuyao and disembarked, and made their way to Yuezhou, the capital of the Kuaiji Commandary.  This took them a bit of time—a little over a month.  Presumably this was because of paperwork and logistics: they probably because they had to send word ahead, and I suspect they had to inventory everything they brought and negotiate carts and transportationfigure out transportation., since   Tthey didn't exactly have bags of holding to stuff it all in, so they probably needed to negotiate carts and transportation.  The finally made it to Yuezhou on the first day of the 11th intercalary month.  An “intercalary” month refers to an extra month in a year.  It was determined by various calculations and was added to keep the lunar and solar years in relative synch. From Yuezhou, things went a bit more quickly, as they were placed on post-horses up to the Eastern Capital, or Luoyang, where the Emperor Tang Gaozong was in residence.   The Tang kept a capital at Luoyang and another to the west, in Chang'an.  The trip to Luoyang was long—over 1,000 kilometers, or 1 megameter, as it were.  The trip first took them through the Southern Capital, meaning the area of modern Nanjing, which they entered on the 15th day of the month.  They then continued onwards, reaching Luoyang on the 29th day of the 11th month.  The following day, on the 30th day of the 11th intercalary month of the year 659, the Yamato envoys were granted an audience with Emperor Tang Gaozong.  As was proper, he inquired about the health of their sovereign, Takara Hime, and the envoys reported that she was doing well.  He asked other questions about how the officials were doing and whether there was peace in Yamato.  The envoys all responded affirmatively, assuring him that Yamato was at peace. Tang Gaozong also asked about the Emishi they had brought with them.  We mentioned this event previously, back in Episode XXX117 , how the Emishi had been shown to the Tang Emperor, and how they had described them for him.  This is actually one of the earliest accounts that we have describing the Emishi from the Yamato point of view, rather than just naming them—presumably because everyone in Yamato already knew who they were.  From a diplomatic perspective, of course, this was no doubt Yamato demonstrating how they were, in many ways, an Empire, similar to the Tang, with their own subordinate ethnicities and “barbarians”. After answering all of the emperor's questions, the audience was concluded.  The following day, however, was something of its own. This was the first day of the regular 11th lunar month, and it also was the celebration of the Winter Solstice—so though it was the 11th month, it may have been about 22 December according to our modern western calendars.  The envoys once again met with the emperor, and they were treated as distinguished guests—at least according to their own records of it.  Unfortunately, during the festivities, it seems that a fire broke out, creating some confusion, and .  Tthe matters of the diplomatic mission were put on hold while all of that went on. We don't know exactly what happened in the ensuing month.  Presumably the envoys took in the sites of the city, may have visited various monasteries, and likely got to know the movers and shakers in the court, who likely would have wined and dined them, inviting them to various gatherings, as since they brought their own exotic culture and experiences to the Tang court. Unfortunately, things apparently turned sour.  First off, it seems clear that the members of this embassyy weren't the only Japanese in the court.  There may have been various merchants, of course, but and we definitely know that there were students who had come on other missions and were still there likely still studying, such as those who had been learning from studying with Master Xuanzang, whose journeys we mentioned in the last several episodes.  But Wwe are given a very specific name of a troublemaker, however:  Kawachi no Aya no Ohomaro, and we are told that he was aa servant of Han Chihung, who .  Han Chihung, himself, is thought to have possiblymay have been of mixed ethnicity—both Japanese and ethnic Han, and may .  Hhe may have traveled to the Tang court on or around 653. , based on some of the records, but it isn't entirely clear. For whatever reason, on the 3rd day of the 12th month of the year 659, Kawachi no Aya no Ohomaro slandered the envoys, and although .  Wwe don't know exactly what he said, but the Tang court caught wind of the accusations and found the envoys guilty.  They were condemned to banishment, until the author of our tale, none other than Iki no Hakatoko himself, stepped up, .  He made representation to the Emperor, pleading against the slander.  , and tThe punishment was remitted, .  Sso they were no longer banished.  However, they were also then told that they could no't return home.  You see, the Tang court was in the middle of some sensitive military operations in the lands east of the sea—in other words they were working with Silla to and invadeing the Kingdom of Baekje.  Since Yamato was an ally of Baekje, it would be inconvenient if the envoys were to return home and rally Yamato to Baekje's defense. And so the entire Yamato embassy was moved to the Western Capital, Chang'an, where they were placed under individual house arrest.  They no doubt were treated well, but they were not allowed to leave, and .  Tthey ended up spending the next year in this state. of house arrest. Unfortunately, we don't have a record of just how they passed their time in Chang'an.  They likely studied, and were probably visited by nobles and others.  They weren't allowed to leave, but they weren't exactly thrown in jail, either.  After all, they were foreign emissaries, and though the Tang might be at war with their ally, there was no formal declaration of war with Yamato, as far as I can make out.  And so the embassy just sat there, for about 9 months. Finally, in the 7th month of 660, the records tell us we are told thatthat tThe Tang and Silla forces had been successful: .  Baekje was destroyed..  The Tang and Silla forces had been successful.   News must have reached Chang'an a month later, as Iki Hakatoko writes that this occurred in the 8th month of the year 660.  With the Tang special military operation on the Korean peninsula concluded, they released the envoys and allowed them to return to their own countries.  They envoys began their preparations as of the 12th day of the 9th month, no doubt eager to return home, and left were leaving Chang'an a week later, on the 19th day of the 9th month.  From there, it took them almost a month to reach Luoyang, arriving on the 16th day of the 10th month, and here they were greeted with more good news, for here it was that they met up once again with those members of their delegation who had been blown off course. As you may remember, the ship carrying Iwashiki was blown off-course on the 15th day of the 9th month in the year 659, shortly after setting out from the Korean peninsula.  The two ships had lost contact and Tsumori no Muraji no Kiza and his ship had been the one that had continued on.   Iwashiki and those with him, however, found themselves at the mercy of the contrary winds and eventually came ashore at an island in the Southern Sea, which Aston translates as “Erh-kia-wei”.   There appears to be at least some suggestion that this was an island in the Ryukyuan chain, possibly the island of Kikai.  There, local islanders, none too happy about these foreigners crashing into their beach, destroyed the ship, and presumably attacked the embassy.  Several members, including Yamato no Aya no Wosa no Atahe no Arima (yeah, that *is* a mouthful), Sakahibe no Muraji no Inadzumi (perhaps a relative of Iwashiki) and others all stole a local ship and made their way off the island.  They eventually made landfall at a Kuazhou, southeast of Lishui City in modern Zhejiang province, where they met with local officials of the Tang government, who then sent them under escort to the capital at Luoyang.  Once there, they were probably held in a similar state of house arrest, due to the invasion of Baekje, but they met back up with Kiza and Hakatoko's party. The envoys, now reunited, hung out in Luoyang for a bit longer, and thus .  Thus it was on the first day of the 11th month of 660 that they witnessed war captives being brought to the capital.  This included 13 royal persons of Baekje, from the King on down to the Crown Prince and various nobles, including the PRimiePrime Minister, as well as 37 other persons of lower rank—50 people all told.  TheThese captives y were delivered up to the Tang government and led before the emperor.  Of course, with the war concluded, and Baekje no longer a functioning state, while he could have had them executed, Tang Gaozong instead released them, demonstrating a certain amount of magnanimity.  The Yamato envoys remained in Luoyang for most of the month.  On the 19th, they had another audience with the emperor, who bestowed on them various gifts and presents, and then five days later they departed the Luoyang, and began the trek back to the archipelago in earnest. By the 25th day of the first month of 661, the envoys arrived back at Yuezhou, head of the Kuaiji Commandery.  They stayed there for another couple of months, possibly waiting for the right time, as crossing the sea at in the wrong season could be disastrous.  They finally departed east from Yuezhou on the first day of the fourth month, coming to .  They came to Mt. Cheng-an 6 days later, on the 7th, and set out to sea first thing in the morning on the 8th.  They had a southwest wind initially in their favor, but they lost their way in the open ocean, an all too commonall-too-common problem without modern navigational aids.  Fortunately, the favorable winds had carried them far enough that only a day later they made landfall on the island of Tamna, aka Jeju island. Jeju island was, at this point, its own independent kingdom, situated off the southern coast of the Korean peninsula.  Dr. Alexander Vovin suggested that the name “Tamna” may have been a corruption of a Japonic or proto-Japonic name: Tanimura.  The island was apparently quite strange to the Yamato embassy, and they met with various residents natives of Jeju island.  They, even convincinged Prince Aphaki and eight other men of the island to come with them to be presented at the Yamato court. The rest of their journey took a little over a month.  They finally arrived back in Yamato on the 23rd day of the fifth month of 661.  They had been gone for approximately two years, and a lot had changed, especially with the destruction of Baekje.  The Yamato court had already learned of what had happened and was in the process of drawing up plans for an expedition back to the Korean peninsula to restore the Baekje kingdom, and pPrince Naka no Oe himself was set to lead the troops. The icing on the cake was: Tthe reception that the envoys received upon their return was rather cold.  Apparently they were had been slandered to the Yamato court by another follower of Han Chihung—Yamato no Aya no Atahe no Tarushima—and so they weren't met with any fanfare.  We still don't know what it was that Tarsuhima was saying—possibly he had gotten letters from Chihung or Ohomaro and was simply repeating what they had said. Either way, the envoys were sick of it.  They had traveled all the way to the Tang capitals, they had been placed under house arrest for a year, and now they had returned.  They not only had gifts from the Tang emperor, but they were also bringing the first ever embassy from the Kingdom of Tamna along with them.  The slander would not stand.  And so they did what anyone would do at the time:  They apparently appealed to the Kami.  We are told that their anger reached to the Gods of the High Heaven, which is to say the kami of Takamanohara, who killed Tarushima with a thunderbolt.  Which I guess was one way to shut him up. From what we can tell, the embassy was eventually considered a success.  Iki no Hakatoko's star would rise—and fall—and rise again in the court circles.  As I noted, his account of this embassy is really one of the best and most in depth that we have from this time.  It lets us see the relative route that the envoys were taking—the Chronicles in particular note that they traveled to the Great Tang of Wu, and, sure enough, they had set out along the southern route to the old Wu capital, rather than trying to cross the Bohai Sea and make landfall by the Shandong peninsula or at the mouth of the Yellow River.  From there they traveled through Nanjing—the southern “capital” likely referring, in this instance, to the old Wu capital—and then to Luoyang.  Though they stayed there much longer than they had anticipated, they ended up living there through some of the most impactful events that occurred during this point in Northeast Asia.  they And that is something we will touch on next episode.  Until then, thank you once again for listening and for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, please tell your friends and feel free to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts.  If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website,  SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Also, feel free to reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.  You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com.  Thank you, also, to Ellen for their work editing the podcast. And that's all for now.  Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan

This episode we will finish up the travels of Xuanzang, who circumnavigated the Indian subcontinent while he was there, spending over a decade and a half travelings, visiting important Buddhist pilgrimage sites, and studying at the feet of learned monks of India, and in particular at Nalanda monastery--a true center of learning from this period. For more, check out our blogpost page:  https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-122 Rough Transcript Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua and this is episode 122:  Journey to the West, Part 3 The courtyard at Nalanda was quiet.  Although hundreds of people were crowded in, trying to hear what was being said, they were all doing their best to be silent and still.  Only the wind or an errant bird dared speak up.  The master's voice may not have been what it once was—he was definitely getting on in years—but Silabhadra's mind was as sharp as ever. At the front of the crowd was a relatively young face from a far off land.  Xuanzang had made it to the greatest center of learning in the world, and he had been accepted as a student of perhaps the greatest sage of his era.  Here he was, receiving lessons on some of the deepest teachings of the Mahayana Buddhist sect, the very thing he had come to learn and bring home. As he watched and listened with rapt attention, the ancient teacher began to speak….   For the last two episodes, and continuing with this one, we have been covering the travels of the monk Xuanzang in the early 7th century, starting around 629 and concluding in 645.  Born during the Sui dynasty, Xuanzang felt that the translations of the Buddhist sutras available in China were insufficient—many of them had been made long ago, and often were translations of translations.  Xuanzang decided to travel to India in the hopes of getting copies in the original language to provide more accurate translations of the sutras, particularly the Mahayana sutras.  His own accounts of his journeys, even if drawn from his memory years afterwards, provide some of our most detailed contemporary evidence of the Silk Road and the people and places along the way.  After he returned, he got to work on his translations, and became quite famous.  Several of the Japanese students of Buddhism who traveled to the Tang dynasty in the 650s studied under him directly and brought his teachings back to Japan with them.  His school of “Faxiang” Buddhism became known in Japan as the Hosso sect, and was quite popular during the 7th and 8th centuries.  Xuanzang himself, known as Genjou in Japan, would continue to be venerated as an important monk in the history of Buddhism, and his travels would eventually be popularized in fantastic ways across East Asia. Over the last couple of episodes we talked about Xuanzang's illegal and harrowing departure from the Tang empire, where he had to sneak across the border into the deserts of the Western Regions.  We then covered his time traveling from Gaochang, to Suyab, and down to Balkh, in modern Afghanistan.  This was all territory under the at least nominal control of the Gokturk empire.  From Balkh he traveled to Bamyan, and then on to Kapisa, north of modern Kabul, Afghanistan.  However, after Kapisa, Xuanzang was finally entering into the northern territories of what he knew as “India”, or “Tianzhu”. Here I would note that I'm using “India” to refer not to a single country, but to the entirety of the Indian subcontinent, and all of the various kingdoms there -- including areas now part of the modern countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.  The Sinitic characters used to denote this region are pronounced, today, as “Tianzhu”, with a rough meaning of “Center of Heaven”, but it is likely that these characters were originally pronounced in such a way that the name likely came from terms like “Sindhu” or “Induka”.  This is related to the name of the Sindh or Indus river, from which India gets its name.  Xuanzang's “Record of the Western Regions” notes that the proper pronunciation of the land should be “Indu”.  In Japan, this term was transmitted through the Sinitic characters, or kanji, and pronounced as “Tenjiku”.  Since it featured so prominently in the stories of the life of the Buddha and many of the Buddhist sutras, Tenjiku was known to the people of the Japanese archipelago as a far off place that was both real and fantastical. In the 12th century, over a thousand stories were captured for the “Konjaku Monogatarishu”, or the “Collection of Tales Old and New”, which is divided up into tales from Japan, China, and India.  In the famous 9th or 10th century story, “Taketori Monogatari”, or the “Bamboo-Cutter's Tale”, about princess Kaguya hime, one of the tasks the princess sets to her suitors is to go to India to find the begging bowl of the Buddha.  Records like those produced by Xuanzang and his fellow monks, along with the stories in the sutras, likely provided the majority of what people in the Japanese archipelago knew about India, at least to begin with. Xuanzang talks about the land of India as being divided into five distinct parts—roughly the north, south, east, west, and center.  He notes that three sides face the sea and that the Snow Mountains—aka the Himalayas—are in the north.  It is, he says, “Wide in the north and narrow in the south, in the shape of a crescent moon”.  Certainly the “Wide in the north and narrow in the south” fit the subcontinent accurately enough, and it is largely surrounded by the waters of what we know as the Indian Ocean to the west, the east, and the south.  The note about the Crescent Moon might be driven by Xuanzang's understanding of a false etymology for the term “Indus”, which he claims comes from the word for “moon”.  Rather, this term appears to refer to the Indus River, also known as the Sindh or Sindhus, which comes from an ancient word meaning something like “River” or “Stream”. Xuanzang also notes that the people of the land were divided into castes, with the Brahman caste at the top of the social hierarchy.    The land was further divided into approximately 70 different countries, according to his accounts.  This is known broadly as the Early Medieval period, in India, in which the region was divided into different kingdoms and empires that rose and fell across the subcontinent, with a total size roughly equivalent to that covered by the countries of the modern European Union.  Just like Europe, there were many different polities and different languages spoken across the land – but just as Latin was the common language in Europe, due to its use in Christianity, Sanskrit was the scholarly and religious language in much of India, and could also be used as a bridge language.  Presumably, Xuanzang understood Sanskrit to some extent as a Buddhist monk.  And, just a quick note, all of this was before the introduction of Islam, though there were other religions also practiced throughout the subcontinent, but Xuanzang was primarily focused on his Buddhist studies. Xuanzang describes India as having three distinct seasons—The hot season, the rainy season, and the cold season, in that order.  Each of these were four month long periods.  Even today, the cycle of the monsoon rains is a major impact on the life of people in South Asia.  During the rainy season, the monks themselves would retreat back to their monasteries and cease their wanderings about the countryside. This tradition, called “Vassa”, is still a central practice in many Theravada Buddhist societies such as Thailand and Laos today, where they likewise experience this kind of intensely wet monsoon season. Xuanzang goes on to give an in depth analysis of the people and customs of the Indian subcontinent, as he traveled from country to country. So, as we've done before, we'll follow his lead in describing the different locations he visited. The first country of India that Xuanzang came to was the country of Lampa, or Lamapaka, thought to be modern Laghman province in Afghanistan.  At the time it was a dependency of Kapisa.  The Snow Mountains, likely meaning the Hindu Kush, the western edge of the Himalayas, lay at its north, while the “Black Mountains” surrounded it on the other three sides.  Xuanzang mentions how the people of Lampa grow non-glutinous rice—likely something similar to basmati rice, which is more prevalent in South Asian cuisine, as compared to glutinous rice like more often used in East Asia. From Lampa he headed to Nagarahara, likely referring to a site near the Kabul River associated with the ruins of a stupa called Nagara Gundi, about 4 kilometers west of modern Jalalabad, Afghanistan.  This was another vassal city-state of Kapisa.  They were still Mahayana Buddhists, but there were other religions as well, which Xuanzang refers to as “heretical”, though I'm not entirely sure how that is meant in this context.  He does say that many of the stupas were dilapidated and in poor condition. Xuanzang was now entering areas where he likely believed the historical Buddha had once walked.  In fact, Lampa was perhaps the extent of historical Buddha's travels, according to the stories and the sutras, though this seems unlikely to have been true.  The most plausible locations for the Historical Buddha's pilgrimages were along the Ganges river, which was on the other side of the subcontinent, flowing east towards modern Kolkatta and the Bengal Bay.  However, as Buddhism spread, so, too, did stories of the Buddha's travels.  And so, as far as Xuanzang was concerned, he was following in the footsteps of the Buddha. Speaking of which, at Nagarahara, Xuanzang mentions “footprints” of the Buddha.  This is a Buddhist tradition found in many places.  Xuanzang claims that the Tathagatha, the Englightened One, or the Buddha, would fly, because when he walked the land itself shook.  Footprint shapes in rock could be said to be evidence of the Buddha's travels.  Today, in many Buddhist areas you can find footprints carved into rock conforming to stories about the Buddha, such as all the toes being of the same length, or other various signs.  These may have started out as natural depressions in the rock, or pieces of artwork, but they were believed by many to be the actual point at which the Buddha himself touched down.  There are famous examples of these footprints in Sri Lanka, Thailand, and China.  Of course there are also traditions of creating images of the footprint as an object of worship.  Images of footprints, similar to images of the Great Wheel of the Law, may have been some of the earliest images for veneration, as images of the Buddha himself did not appear until much later in the tradition.  One of the oldest such footprints in Japan is at Yakushiji temple, and dated to 753.  It was created based on a rubbing brought back by an envoy to the Tang court, while they were in Chang'an. Like Buddha footprints, there are many other images and stories that show up multiple times in different places, even in Xuanzang's own narrative.  For example, in Nagarahara Xuanzang also shares a story of a cave, where an image of the Buddha could be just barely made out on the wall – maybe maybe an old carving that had just worn away, or maybe an image that was deliberately placed in the darkness as a metaphor for finding the Buddha—finding enlightenment.  This is not an uncommon theme in Buddhism as a whole.  In any case, the story around this image was that it had been placed there to subdue a naga. Now a naga is a mythical snake-like being, and  we are told that this particular naga was the reincarnation of a man who had invoked a curse on the nearby kingdom, then threw himself from a cliff in order to become a naga and sow destruction.  As the story went, the man was indeed reborn, but before he could bring destruction, the Buddha showed up and subdued him, convincing him that this was not right.  And so the naga agreed to stay in the cave, where the Buddha left an image—a shadow—to remind the naga any time that its thoughts might turn to destruction. Later in his travels, at a place name Kausambi, Xuanzang mentions another cave where the Buddha had subdued a venomous dragon and left his shadow on the cave wall.  Allowing for the possibility that the Buddha just had a particular M.O. when dealing with destructive beings, we should also consider the possibility that the story developed in one region—probably closer to the early center of Buddhism, and then traveled outward, such that it was later adopted and adapted to local traditions.  From Nagarahara, Xuanzang continued to the country of Gandhara and its capital city of Purushapura, aka modern Peshwar.  This kingdom was also under vassalage to the Kapisan king.  Here and elsewhere in the journey, Xuanzang notes not only evidence of the historical Buddha, but also monasteries and stupas purported to have been built by King Kanishka and King Asoka.  These were important figures who were held in high regard for spreading Buddhism during their reign.  Continuing through the region of Gandhara, he also passed through Udakhand and the city of Salatura, known as the birthplace of the ancient Sanskrit grammarian, Daksiputra Panini, author of the Astadhyayi [Aestudjayi].  This work is the oldest surviving description of classical Sanskrit, and used grammatical and other concepts that wouldn't be introduced into Western linguistics for eons.  Daksiputra Panini thrived around the 5th or 4th century BCE, but was likely one of the reasons that Sanskrit continued to be used as a language of scholarship and learning even as it died out of usage as the day to day language of the common people.  His works and legacy would have been invaluable to translators like Xuanzang in understanding and translating from Sanskrit. Xuanzang continued on his journey to Kashmira, situated in the Kashmir Valley.  This valley sits between the modern states of Pakistan and India, and its ownership is actively disputed by each.  It is the namesake of the famous cashmere wool—wool from the winter coats of a type of goat that was bred in the mountainous regions.  The winter coat would be made of soft, downy fibers and would naturally fall out in the spring, which the goatherds harvested and made into an extremely fine wool.  In the 7th century and earlier, however, the region was known not as much for its wool, but as a center for Hindu and Buddhist studies.  Xuanzang ended up spending two years in Kashmira studying with teachers there.  Eventually, though, he continued on, passing through the country of Rajpura, and continuing on to Takka and the city of Sakala—modern day Sialkot in the Punjab region of modern Pakistan.  Leaving Sakala, he was traveling with a group when suddenly disaster struck and they were accosted by a group of bandits.  They took the clothes and money of Xuanzang and those with him and then they drove the group into a dry pond in an attempt to corral them while they figured out what they would do—presumably meaning kill them all.  Fortunately for the group, there was a water drain at the southern edge of the pond large enough for one man to pass through.  Xuanzang and one other went through the gap and they were able to escape to a nearby village.  Once they got there, they told the people what had happened, and the villagers quickly gathered weapons and ran out to confront the brigands, who saw a large group coming and ran away.  Thus they were able to rescue the rest of Xuanzang's traveling companions.  Xuanzang's companions were devastated, having lost all of their possessions.  However, Xuanzang comforted them.  After all, they still had their lives.  By this time, Xuanzang had certainly seen his fair share of life and death problems along the road.  They continued on, still in the country of Takka, to the next great city.  There they met a Brahman, and once they told him what had happened, he started marshalling the forces of the city on their behalf.  During Xuanzang's stay in Kashmira, he had built a reputation, and people knew of the quote-unquote “Chinese monk”.  And even though the people in this region were not necessarily Buddhist—many were “heretics” likely referring to those of Hindu faith—the people responded to this pre-Internet “GoFundMe” request with incredible generosity.  They brought Xuanzang food and cloth to make into suits of clothes.  Xuanzang distributed this to his travel companions, and ended up still having enough cloth for 50 suits of clothes himself.  He then stayed at that city a month. It is odd that they don't seem to mention the name of this location.  Perhaps there is something unspeakable about it?  Still, it seems that they were quite generous, even if they were “heretics” according to Xuanzang. From the country of Takka, he next proceeded to the kingdom of Cinabhukti, where he spent 14 months—just over a year—studying with the monks there.  Once he had learned what he could, he proceeded onwards, passing through several countries in northern India until he came to the headwaters of the sacred Ganges rivers.  The Indus and the Ganges rivers are in many ways similar to the Yellow River and Yangzi, at least in regards to their importance to the people of India.  However, whereas the Yellow River and Yangzi both flow east towards the Pacific Ocean, the Indus and Ganges flow in opposite directions.  The Indus flows southwest, from the Himalayas down through modern India into modern Pakistan, emptying into the western Indian Ocean.  The Ganges flows east along the base of the Himalayas and enters the eastern Indian Ocean at Kolkatta.   At the headwaters of the Ganges, Xuanzang found a Buddhist monk named Jayagupta and chose to spend the winter and half of the following spring listening to his sermons and learning at his feet. From there he continued his travels, and ended up being summoned by King Harshavardhana of Kanyakubja, known today as the modern city of Kannauj.  Harshavardhana ruled an immense state that covered much of the territory around the sacred Ganges river.  As word of this strange monk from a far off land reached him, the King wanted to see him for himself.  Xuanzang stayed in Kannauj for three months, completing his studies of the Vibhasha Shastra, aka the Abhidarmma Mahavibhasha Shastra, known in Japanese as the Abidatsuma Daibibasharon, or just as the Daibibasharon or the Basharon, with the latter two terms referring to the translations that Xuanzang performed.   This work is not a sutra, per se, but rather an encyclopedic work that attempted to speak on all of the various doctrinal issues of its day.  It is thought to have been authored around 150 CE, and was influential in the Buddhist teachings of Kashmira, when that was a center of Orthodoxy at the time.  This is what Xuanzang had started studying, and it seems that in Kannauj he was finally able to grasp everything he felt he needed to know about it in order to effectively translate it and teach it when he returned.  That said, his quest was not over.  And after his time in Kannauj, he decided to continue on. His next stop was at the city of Ayodhya.  This was—and is—a city of particular importance in Hindu traditions.  It is said to be the city mentioned in the epic tale known as the Ramayana, though many argue that it was simply named that later in honor of that ancient city.  It does appear to be a city that the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, visited and where he preached.  It was also the home of a famous monk from Gandhara who authored a number of Buddhist tomes and was considered, at least by Xuanzang, a proper Boddhisatva.  And so Xuanzang spent some time paying homage to the places where the Buddha and other holy figures had once walked. “Ayodhya” appears in many forms across Asia.  It is a major pilgrimage center, and the city of “Ayutthaya” in Thailand was named for it, evoking the Ramayana—known in Thai as the Ramakien—which they would adopt as their own national story.  In Silla, there is a story that queen Boju, aka Heo Hwang-ok, wife to the 2nd century King Suro of Geumgwan Gaya, traveled to the peninsula all the way from the foreign country of “Ayuta”, thought to mean Ayodhya.  Her story was written down in the Gaya histories and survives as a fragment found in the Samguk Yusa.  Members of the Gimhae Kim, Gimhae Heo, and Incheon Yi clans all trace their lineage back to her and King Suro. From Ayodhya, Xuanzang took a trip down the Ganges river.  The boat was packed to bursting with some 80 other travelers, and as they traveled towards a particularly heavily forested area, they were set upon by bandits, who rowed their ships out from hiding in the trees and forced the travelers to the shore.  There the bandits made all the travelers strip down and take off their clothing so that the bandits could search for gold or valuables.  According to Xuanzang's biography, these bandits were followers of Durga, a Hindu warrior-goddess, and it is said that each year they would look for someone of particularly handsome features to sacrifice to her.  With Xuanzang's foreign features, they chose him.  And so they took him to be killed.  Xuanzang mentioned that he was on a pilgrimage, and that by interrupting him before they finished he was worried it might be inauspicious for them, but he didn't put up a fight and merely asked to be given time to meditate and calm his mind and that they perform the execution quickly so that he wouldn't even notice. From there, according to the story, a series of miracles occurred that ended up with Xuanzang being released and the bandits worshipping at his feet.  It is times like this we must remember that this biography was being written by Xuanzang's students based on stories he told them about his travels.  While being accosted by bandits on the river strikes me as perfectly plausible, we don't necessarily have the most reliable narrators, so I'm going to have to wonder about the rest.  Speaking of unreliable narration, the exact route that Xuanzang traveled from here on is unclear to me, based on his stated goals and where he was going.  It is possible that he was wandering as opportunities presented themselves —I don't know that he had any kind of map or GPS, like we've said in the past.  And it may be that the routes from one place to another were not always straightforward.  Regardless, he seems to wander southeast for a period before turning again to the north and eventually reaching the city of Shravasti. Shravasti appeared in our discussion of the men of Tukhara in Episode 119.  With the men of Tukhara there was also mentioned a woman from Shravasti.  While it is unlikely that was actually the case—the names were probably about individuals from the Ryukyuan island chain rather than from India—it is probably worth nothing that Shravasti was a thriving place in ancient times.  It was at one time the capital city of the kingdom of Kosala, sharing that distinction with the city of Ayodhya, back in the 7th to 5th centuries BCE.  It is also where the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, was said to have spend many years of his life.  This latter fact would have no doubt made it a place of particular importance to Xuanzang on his journeys. From there he traveled east, ending up following the foothills of the Himalayas, and finally came to some of the most central pilgrimages sites for followers of the historical Buddha.  First, he reached Lumbini wood, in modern Nepal, said to have been the birthplace of Prince Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha.  And then he visited Kushinagara, the site where the Buddha ascended to nirvana—in other words, the place where he passed away.  From there, he traveled to Varanasi, and the deer park monastery, at the place where the Buddha is said to have given one of his most famous sermons.  He even visited the Bodhi tree, the tree under which Siddhartha Gautama is said to have attained enlightenment.  He spent eight or nine days there at Bodhgaya, and word must have spread about his arrival, because several monks from the eminent Nalanda Monastery called upon him and asked him to come to the monastery with them. Nalanda Monastery was about 80 km from Bodhgaya.  This was a grand monastery and center of learning—some say that it was, for a time, the greatest in the world.  It had been founded in the 5th century by the Gupta dynasty, and many of the Gupta rulers and others donated to support the monastery, which also acted as a university.  After the fall of the Gupta dynasty, the monastery was supported by King Harsha of Kannauj, whom Xuanzang had visited earlier.  It ultimately thrived for some 750 years, and is considered by some to be the oldest residential university—meaning that students would come to the temple complex and stay in residence for years at a time to study.  According to Xuanzang, Nalanda hosted some 10,000 monks. Including hosts and guests.  They didn't only study Buddhist teachings, but also logic, grammar, medicine, and divination.  Lectures were given at more than 100 separate places—or classrooms—every day.  It was at Nalanda, that Xuanzang would meet the teacher Silabhadra, who was known as the Right Dharma Store.  Xuanzang requested that he be allowed to study the Yogacharabhumi Shastra—the Yugashijiron, in Japanese.  This is the work that Xuanzang is said to have been most interested in, and one of the works that he is credited with bringing back in one of the first full translations to the Tang dynasty and then to others in East Asia.  It is an encyclopedic work dedicated to the various forms of Yogacara practice, which focuses on the mental disciplines, and includes yoga and meditation practices.  It has a huge influence on nearly all Mahayana schools, including things like the famous Zen and Pure Land schools of Buddhism.  The Yogacharabhumi Shastra is the earliest such encyclopedic work, compiled between the 3rd and 5th centuries—so even if the monk Faxian had brought portions of it back, it was probably not in the final form that Xuanzang was able to access. Silabhadra, for his part, was an ancient teacher—some put his age at 106 years, and his son was in his 70s.  He was one of the few at Nalandra who supposedly knew all of the various texts that they had at the monastery, including the Yogacarabhumi Shastra.  Xuanzang seems to have been quite pleased to study under him.  Xuanzang stayed at the house of Silabhadra's son, Buddhabhadra, and they welcomed him with entertainment that lasted seven days.  We are told that he was then given his own lodgings, a stipend of spices, incense, rice, oil, butter, and milk, along with a servant and a Brahman.  As a visiting monk, he was not responsible for the normal monastic duties, instead being expected to spend the time in study.  Going out, he was carried around by an elephant.   This was certainly the royal treatment. Xuanzang's life at Nalandra wasn't all books: south of the monastery was the city of Rajagrha, the old capital of the kingdom of Magadha, where the ancient Gupta kings had once lived, and on occasional breaks from his studies, Xuanzang would venture out to see the various holy sites.  This included the famous Mt. Grdhrakuta, or Vulture Peak, a location said to be favored by the historical Buddha and central to the Lotus Sutra, arguably the founding document of Mahayana Buddhist tradition. After all, “Mahayana” means “Greater Vehicle” and it is in the Lotus Sutra that we see the metaphor of using different vehicles to escape a burning house.   We've already talked a bit about how the image of Vulture Peak had already become important in Japanese Buddhism: In Episode 112 we talked about how in 648, Abe no Oho-omi had drums piled up at Shitennoji in the shape of Vulture Peak. But although the sightseeing definitely enhanced his experience, Xuanzang was first and foremost there to study.  He spent 15 months just listening to his teacher expound on the Yogacarabhumi Shastra, but he also heard expositions on various other teachings as well.  He ended up studying at Nalandra Monastery for 5 years, gaining a much better understanding of Sanskrit and the various texts, which would be critically important when it came to translating them, later. But, Xuanzang was not one to stay in any one place forever, and so after 5 years—some 8 years or more into his journey, he continued on, following the Ganges east, to modern Bangladesh.  Here he heard about various other lands, such as Dvarapati—possibly referring to Dvaravati, in modern Thailand, as well as Kamalanka and Isanapura.  The latter was in modern Cambodia, the capital of the ancient Chenla kingdom.  Then Mahacampa—possibly referring to the Champa region of Vietnam—and the country of Yamanadvipa.  But there was still more of India for Xuanzang to discover, and more teachings to uncover, and so Xuanzang decided instead to head southwest, following the coast.  He heard of the country of Sinhala, referring to the island of Sri Lanka, but he was urged not to go by ship, as the long journey was perilous.  Instead he could stay on relatively dry land and head down to the southern tip of the subcontinent and then make a quick hop from there across to the island.  He traveled a long distance, all the way down to Kancipuram, the seat of the Pallava dynasty, near modern day Chennai.  From the seaport near Kancipuram, it was only three days to Sinhala—that is to say Sri Lanka—but before he could set out, he met a group of monks who had just arrived.  They told him that the king of Sinhala had died , and there was a great famine and civil disturbances.  So they had fled with some 300 other monks. Xuanzang eventually decided not to make the journey, but he did talk with the monks and gathered information on the lands to the south, on Sri Lanka, and on the islands south of that, by which I suspect he may have meant the Maldives.  While Sri Lanka is an area important to Buddhist scholarship, particularly to the Theravada schools, this likely did not impress Xuanzang, and indeed he seemed to feel that his studies in Nalanda had more than provided him what he needed.  Sri Lanka, however, is the source of the Pali canon, one of the most complete early canons of Buddhism, which had a huge influence on Theravada Buddhism in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. So Xuanzang took plenty of notes but decided to forego the ocean voyage and headed northwest, instead.  He traveled across the breadth of India to Gujarat, and then turned back east, returning to pay respects once more to his teacher in Nalanda.  While there he heard of another virtuous monk named Prajnabhadra at a nearby monastery.  And so he went to spend several months with him, as well.  He also studied with a layman, Sastrin Jayasena, at Stickwood Hill.  Jayasena was a ksatriya, or nobleman, by birth, and studied both Buddhist and non-Buddhist texts.  He was courted by kings, but had left to continue his studies.  Xuanzang studied with him for another couple of years. Xuanzang remained at Nalanda, learning and teaching, expounding on what he had learned and gathering many copies of the various documents that he wished to take back with him, though he wondered how he might do it.  In the meantime, he also acquired quite the reputation.  We are told that King Siladitya had asked Nalanda for monks who could refute Theravada teachings, and Xuanzang agreed to go.  It isn't clear, but it seems that “Siladitya” was a title, and likely referred to King Harsha of Kannauj, whom we mentioned earlier.  Since he was a foreigner, then there could be no trouble that was brought on Nalanda and the other monks if he did poorly.  While he was waiting to hear back from Siladitya's court, which was apparently taking time to arrange things, the king of Kamarupta reached out to Nalanda with a request that Xuanzang come visit them.  While Xuanzang was reluctant to be gone too long, he was eventually encouraged to go and assuage the king. Kamarupta was a kingdom around the modern Assam region, ruled by King Bhaskaravarman, also known as King Kumara, a royal title.  This kingdom included parts of Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Nepal.  Bhaskaravarman, like so many other regents, seems to have been intrigued by the presence of this foreign monk, who had traveled all this way and who had studied at the famous Nalanda Monastery in Magadha. He invited Xuanzang to come to him.  Xuanzang's teacher, Silabhadra, had exhorted him to spread the right Dharma, and to even go to those non-Buddhists in hopes that they might be converted, or at least partially swayed. King Bhaskaravarman was quite taken with Xuanzang, wining and dining him while listening to him preach.  While there, Xuanzang learned about the country of Kamarupta.  He also learned about a path north, by which it was said it was a two month journey to arrive at the land of Shu, in the Sichuan Basin, on the upper reaches of the Yangzi – a kind of shortcut back to the Tang court.  However, the journey was treacherous—possibly even more treacherous than the journey to India had been. Eventually word reached the ears of King Siladitya that Xuanzang was at the court of King Bhaskaravarman, and Siladitya got quite upset.  Xuanzang had not yet come to *his* court, so Siladitya demanded that Bhaskaravarman send the monk to him immediately.  Bhaskaravarman refused, saying he'd rather give Siladitya his own head, which Siladitya said he would gladly accept.  Bhaskaravarman realized he may have miscalculated, and so he sailed up the Ganges with a host of men and Xuanzang to meet with Siladitya.  After a bit of posturing, Siladitya met with Xuanzang, who went with him, and eventually confronted the members of the Theravada sect in debate.  Apparently it almost got ugly, but for the King's intervention.  After a particularly devastating critique of the Theravada position, the Theravada monks are blamed for trying to use violence against Xuanzang and his fellow Mahayana monks from Nalanda, who were prepared to defend themselves.  The King had to step in and break it up before it went too far. Ultimately, Xuanzang was a celebrity at this point and both kings seem to have supported him, especially as he was realizing it was about time to head back to his own country.  Both kings was offered ships, should Xuanzang wish to sail south and then up the coast.  However, Xuanzang elected to take the northern route, hoping to go back through Gaochang, and see that city and its ruler again.  And so the Kings gave him money and valuables , along with wagons for all of the texts.  They also sent an army to protect all of the treasures, and even an elephant and more – sending him back in style with a huge send-off. So Xuanzang retraced his earlier steps, this time on an elephant.  He traveled back to Taxila, to Kashmir, and beyond.  He was invited to stay in Kashmira, but because of his retinue, he wasn't quite at leisure to just go where he wanted.  At one point, near Kapisa—modern Bagram, north of Kabul—they had to cross a river, and about 50 of the almost 700 documents were lost.  The King of Kapisa heard of this and had his own monks make copies to replace them based on their own schools.  The King of Kasmira, hearing that he was in Kapisa, also came to pay his respects. Xuanzang traveled with the King of Kapisa northwest for over a month and reached Lampaka, where he did take some time to visit the various holy sites before continuing northwest.  They had to cross the Snow Mountains—the outskirts of the Himalayas, and even though it wasn't the highest part of the range it was still challenging.  He had to dismount his elephant and travel on foot.  Finally, after going over the high mountains and coming down, he arrived back in the region of Tukhara, in the country of Khowst.  He then came to Kunduz, and paid his respects to the grandson of Yehu Khan.  He was given more guards to escort him eastward, traveling with some merchants.  This was back in Gokturk controlled lands, over a decade later than when he had last visited.  He continued east to Badakshan, stopping there for a month because of the cold weather and snow.  He eventually traveled through the regions of Tukhara and over the Pamir range.  He came down on the side of the Tarim Basin, and noted how the rivers on one side flowed west, while on the other side they flowed east.  The goings were treacherous, and at one point they were beset by bandits.  Though he and the documents were safe, his elephant panicked and fled into the river and drowned.  He eventually ended up in the country of Kashgar, in modern Xinjiang province, at the western edge of the Taklamakan desert. From there he had two options.  He could go north and hug the southern edge of the Tianshan mountains, or he could stay to the south, along the northern edge of the Himalayan range and the Tibetan plateau.  He chose to go south.  He traveled through Khotan, a land of wool and carpets.  This was a major trade kingdom, and they also grew mulberry trees for silkworms, and were known for their jade.  The king himself heard of Xuanzang and welcomed him, as many others had done.  While he was staying at the Khotanese capital, Xuanzang penned a letter to the Tang court, letting them know of his journey, and that he was returning.  He sent it with some merchants and a man of Gaochang to deliver it to the court. Remember, Xuanzang had left the Tang empire illegally.  Unless he wanted to sneak back in his best hope was that the court was willing to forgive and forget all of that, given everything that he was bringing back with him.  The wait was no doubt agonizing, but he did get a letter back.  It assured him that he was welcome back, and that all of the kingdoms from Khotan back to the governor of Dunhuang had been made aware and were ready to receive him. With such assurances, Xuanzang packed up and headed out.  The king of Khotan granted him more gifts to help see him on his way.  Nonetheless, there was still a perilous journey ahead.  Even knowing the way, the road went through miles and miles of desert, such that in some places you could only tell the trail by the bleached bones of horses and travelers who had not been so fortunate.  Eventually, however, Xuanzang made it to the Jumo River and then on to Dunhuang, from whence he was eventually escorted back to the capital city. It was now the year 645, the year of the Isshi Incident in Yamato and the death of Soga.  Xuanzang had been gone for approximately 16 years.  In that time, the Tang had defeated the Gokturks and taken Gaochang, expanding their control over the trade routes in the desert.  Xuanzang, for his part, was bringing back 657 scriptures, bound in 520 bundles carried by a train of some 20 horses.  He was given a hero's welcome, and eventually he would be set up in a monastery where he could begin the next part of his journey:  Translating all of these books. This was the work of a lifetime, but it is one that would have a profound impact on Buddhism across East Asia.  Xuanzang's translations would revolutionize the understanding of Mahayana Buddhist teachings, and students would come from as far away as the Yamato court to study under him and learn from the teacher who studied and taught at none other than Nalanda monastery itself.  His school would become popular in the Yamato capital, and the main school of several temples, at least for a time.  In addition, his accounts and his biography would introduce many people to the wider world of central and south Asia.  While I could go on, this has already been a story in three parts, and this is, after all, the Chronicles of Japan, so we should probably tune back into what is going on with Yamato.  Next episode, we'll look at one of the most detailed accounts we have of a mission to Chang'an. Until then, I hope that this has been enjoyable.  Xuanzang's story is one of those that isn't just about him, but about the interconnected nature of the entire world at the time.  While his journey is quite epic, there were many people traveling the roads, though most of them didn't write about it afterwards.  People, artifacts, and ideas traveled much greater distances than we often consider at this time, well before any kind of modern travel.  It was dangerous, but often lucrative, and it meant that various regions could have influence well beyond what one might expect. And so, thank you once again for listening and for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, please tell your friends and feel free to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts.  If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website,  SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Also, feel free to reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.  You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com.  Thank you, also, to Ellen for their work editing the podcast. And that's all for now.  Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan

This episode we continue to follow the monk Xuanzang on his path along the silk road.  From Gaochang, he traveled through the Tarim Basin, up over the Tianshan Mountains, to the heart of the Western Gokturk Qaghanate.  From there, he traveled south, through the region of Transoxania to Bactria and the land of Tukhara.  He pushed on into the Hindu Kush, witnessing the stone Buddha statues of Bamiyan, and eventually made his way to the land of Kapisa, near modern Kabul, Afghanistan.  From there he would prepare to enter the Indian subcontinent: the home of the historical Buddha. For more discussion and some photos of the areas along this journey, check out our podcast blog at https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-121   Rough Transcript Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua, and this is Episode 121: Journey to the West, Part 2   The cold winds blew through the travelers' doubled up clothing and thick furs.  Cold, wet ground meant that even two sets of boots were not necessarily enough after several days.  The frozen mist would often obscure everything except for the path immediately in front, hiding the peaks and making the sky a uniform white. In many places, the path would be blocked by rock, ice, or snow—the remnants of an avalanche, which could easily take an unsuspecting traveler.  And there was the elevation.  Hiking through the mountains, it was easy enough to reach heights of a mile or higher, and for those not accustomed to that elevation the thin air could take a surprising toll, especially if you were pushing yourself.  And the road was no less kind to the animals that would be hauling said travelers and their gear. And yet, this was the path that Xuanzang had agreed to.  He would continue to push through, despite the various deprivations that he would be subjected to.  No doubt he often wondered if it was worth it.  Then again, returning was just as dangerous a trip, so why not push on?   Last episode we introduced the monk Xuanzang, who traveled the Silk Road to India in the 7th century and returned to China.  He brought back numerous sutras to translate, and ended up founding a new school, known as the Faxian school—or the Hossou school in Japan.   As we mentioned last time, Xuanzang during his lifetime met with students from the archipelago when they visited the continent.  The records of his travels—including his biography and travelogue—are some of the best information we have on what life was like on the silk road around this time. In the last episode, we talked about Xuanzang: how he set out on his travels, his illegal departure from the Tang empire, and his perilous journey across the desert, ending up in Gaochang.  There, King Qu Wentai had tried to get him to stay, but he was determined to head out.  This episode we are going to cover his trip to Agni, Kucha, and Baluka—modern Aksu—and up to the Western Gokturk Qaghanate's capital of Suyab.  From there, we'll follow his footsteps through the Turkic controlled regions of Transoxania and into Tukhara, in modern Afghanistan.  Finally, we'll cover the last parts of his journey before he reached the start of his goal:  India. From Gaochang, Xuanzang continued on, through the towns he names as Wuban and Dujin, and into the country of Agni—known today as the area of Yanqi—which may also have been known as Wuqi.  The route was well-enough known, but it wasn't necessarily safe.  At one point, Xuanzang's caravan met with bandits, whom they were fortunately able to pay off.  The following night they encamped on a river bank with some merchants who also happened to be traveling the road.  The merchants, though, got up at midnight and headed out, hoping to get to the city early so that they could be the first ones to the market.  They only made it a few miles down the road, however, before they encountered more bandits, who slaughtered them and took their goods.  The following day, Xuanzang and his retinue came upon the merchants' remains lying in the road and saw the aftermath of the massacre. This was an unforgiving land, and the road was truly dangerous, even for those who traveled it regularly.  And yet Xuanzang was planning to travel its entire length until he reached India. So with little alternative, they carried on to the royal city of Agni. Agni, or Yanqi, sits on the southwestern edge of the basin, west of Bositeng lake, on the border between the Turfan basin and the larger Tarim Basin.  The name is thought to be a Tocharian—or Turfanian—name for the city, which is also known as Karashr. According to the biography by Huili, Xuanzang and his party didn't stay long in Agni.  Apparently Agni and Gaochang were not exactly on friendly terms, and even though the King of Agni and his ministers reportedly came out to greet Xuanzang and welcome him to their city, they refused to provide any horses.  They spent a single night and moved on. That said, Agni still made an impression on Xuanzang.  He noted how the capital was surrounded by hills on four sides, making it naturally defensible.  As for the people, he praises them as honest and straightforward.  They wore clothing of felt and hemp cloth, and cut their hair short, without hats or any kind of headwear.  Even the climate was pleasant, at least for the short time he was there.  He also notes that they used a script based on India—likely referring to the Brahmic script, which we find in the Tarim basin. However, as for the local lord, the King of Agni, he is a little less charitable.  Xuanzang claimed he was brave but “lacked resourcefulness” and he was a bit of a braggart.  Furthermore, the country had “no guiding principles or discipline and government orders are imperfect and not seriously implemented.”  He also mentioned the state of Buddhism in the country, noting that they were followers of Sarvastivada school, a Theravada sect popular along the Silk Road at the time.  Xuanzang was apparently not too pleased with the fact that they were not strict vegetarians, including the “three kinds of pure meat”.  From Agni, Xuanzang continued southwest, heading for the kingdom of Kucha.  He seems to have bypassed the nearby kingdom of Korla, south of Agni, and headed some 60 or 70 miles, climbing over a ridge and crossing two large rivers, and then proceeding another 200 miles or so to the land of Kucha. Kucha was a kingdom with over one hundred monasteries and five thousand monks following a form of Theravada Buddhism.  Here, Xuanzang was welcomed in by the king, Suvarnadeva, described as having red hair and blue eyes.  While Xuanzang was staying in Kucha, it is suspected that he probably visited the nearby Kizil grotto and the Buddhist caves, there, which include a painting of King Suvarnadeva's father, King Suvarnapuspa, and his three sons. You can still visit Kucha and the Kizil grottos today, although getting there is quite a trek, to be sure.  The ancient Kuchean capital is mostly ruins, but in the Kizil caves, protected from the outside elements, you can find vivid paintings ranging from roughly the 4th to the 8th century, when the site was abandoned.  Hundreds of caves were painted, and many still demonstrate vibrant colors.  The arid conditions protect them from mold and mildew, while the cave itself reduces the natural bleaching effect of sunlight.  The paintings are in numerous styles, and were commissioned by various individuals and groups over the years.  They also give us some inkling of how vibrant the city and similar structures must have been, back when the Kuchean kingdom was in its heyday. The people of Kucha are still something of a mystery.  We know that at least some of them spoke an Indo-European language, related to a language found in Agni, and both of these languages are often called Tocharian, which we discussed last episode.  Xuanzang himself noted that they used Indian writing, possibly referring to the Brahmi script, or perhaps the fact that they seem to have used Sanskrit for official purposes, such as the inscription on the cave painting at Kizil giving the name of King Suvarnapuspa.  The Kucheans also were clothed in ornamental garments of silk and embroidery.  They kept their hair cut, wearing a flowing covering over their heads—and we see some of that in the paintings. Xuanzang also notes that though we may think of this area as a desert, it was a place where rice and grains, as well as fruit like grapes, pomegranates, plums, pears, peaches, and almonds were grown.  Even today, modern Xinjiang grows some absolutely fantastic fruit, including grapes, which are often dried into raisins. Another point of interest for Xuanzang may have been that Kucha is known as the hometown of none other than Kumarajiva.  We first mentioned Kumarajiva back in episode 84.  Kumarajiva was one of the first people we know of who translated many of the sutras from India that were then more widely disseminated throughout the Yellow River and Yangzi river basins.  His father was from India and his mother was a Kuchean princess.  In the middle of the 4th century, when he was still quite young, he traveled to India and back with his mother on a Buddhist pilgrimage.  Later he would start a massive translation project in Chang'an.  His translations are credited with revolutionizing Chinese Buddhism. Xuanzang was initially welcomed by the king, his ministers, and the revered monk, Moksagupta.  They were accompanied by several thousand monks who set up tents outside the eastern gate, with portable Buddha images, which they worshipped, and then Xuanzang was taken to monastery after monastery until sunset.  At one of the monasteries, in the southeast of the city, there were several tens of monks who originally came from Gaochang, and since Xuanzang had come from there, they invited him to stay with them. The next day he met and feasted with the King, politely declining any meat, and then went to the monastery in the northwest to meet with the famous monk: Moksagupta.  Moksagupta himself had made the journey to India, and had spent 20 years there himself.  It seems like this would have been the perfect person for Xuanzang to talk to about his plans, but instead, the two butted heads.  Moksagupta seems to have seen Xuanzang's Mahayana faith as heretical.  He saw no reason for Xuanzang to travel all the way to India when he had all the sutras that anyone needed there in Kucha, along with Moksagupta himself.   Xuanzang's response seems to have been the Tang dynasty Buddhist version of “Okay, Boomer”, and then he went ahead and tore apart Moksagupta's understanding of his own sutras—or so Xuanzang relayed to his biographers.  We don't exactly have Moksagupta's side, and, let's face it, Xuanzang and his biographers are not necessarily reliable narrators.  After all, they followed Mahayana teachings, which they considered the “Greater Vehicle”, and they referred to the Theravada teachings as the “Hinayana” or “Lesser Vehicle”.  Meanwhile, Theravada Buddhists likely saw many of the Mahayana texts as extraneous, even heretical, not believing them to actually be the teachings of the Buddha. It must have been winter time, as the passes through the mountains on the road ahead were still closed, and so Xuanzang stayed in Kucha, spending his time sightseeing and meeting with various people.  He even went back to see Moksagupta, but the older monk shunned him, and would get up and exit the room rather than engaging with him, so they had no more conversations. Eventually, Xuanzang continued on his way west, following along the northern rim of the Tarim basin.  Two days out from Kucha, disaster struck.  Some two thousand or so Turkish bandits suddenly appeared—I doubt Xuanzang was counting, so it may have been more or less.  I imagine that memories of what had happened to the merchants near Agni must have gone through Xuanzang's mind.   Fortunately, for him, they were fighting over loot that they had pillaged from various travelers, and since they couldn't share it equally, they fell to fighting each other and eventually dispersed. He travelled for almost 200 miles after that, stopping only for a night at the Kingdom of Baluka, aka Gumo—the modern city of Aksu.  This was another Theravada Buddhist kingdom.  Xuanzang noted tens of Buddhist temples, and over 1000 Buddhist monks.  The country was not large—about 200 miles east to west and 100 miles north to south.  For reference that means it was probably comparable in size with Kyushu, in terms of overall area, or maybe the size of Denmark—excluding Greenland—or maybe the US state of Maryland.  Xuanzang described the country as similar to Kucha in just about every way, including the written language and law, but the spoken language was different, though we don't get many more details. From Baluka, he crossed northward through the Tianshan mountains, which are classified as an extension of the Pamirs known as the Ice Mountains.  Had he continued southwest, he would have hit Kashgar and crossed over between the Pamir and Tian Shan ranges into the Ferghana valley, but instead he turned north. We don't know exactly why he took this perilous option, but the route that may have been popular at the time as it was one of the most direct routes to the seat of the Western Gokturk Empire, which he was currently traveling through. The Tian Shan mountains were a dangerous journey.  Avalanches could block the road—or worse.  Xuanzang describes the permanent ice fields—indeed, it is the ice fields and glaciers of the Tian Shan that melt in the summer and provide the oasis towns of the Tarim Basin with water, even to this day.  In Xuanzang's day, those glaciers were likely even more prevalent than today, especially as they have been recorded as rapidly disappearing since 1961.  And where you weren't on snow and ice, the ground was probably wet and damp from the melt.  To keep warm, you would wear shoes over your shoes, along with heavy fur coats, all designed to reduce exposure. Xuanzang claims that 3 or 4 of every 10 people didn't survive the crossing—and that horses and oxen fared even worse.  Even if these numbers are an exaggeration, the message is clear:  This was a dangerous journey. After about seven days, Xuanzang came out of the mountains to the “Great Pure Lake”, the “Da Qing Hai”, also known as the Hot Sea or the Salt Sea, which likely refers to Issyk Kul.  The salt content, along with the great volume of water it possesses, means that the lake rarely freezes over, which is likely why it is seen as “hot” since it doesn't freeze when the fresh water nearby does.  This lake is the second largest mountain lake in the world, and the second deepest saltwater lake.  Traveling past the lake, he continued to Suyab, near modern Tokmok, in Kyrgyzstan, just west of the modern capital of Bishkek.  This was an old Sogdian settlement, and had since become the capital of the Western Gokturks.  Sogdians—like Xuanzang's guide, Vandak—were integral to the Gokturk kingdom. Their language was the lingua franca of the Silk Road, and at the time of the Gokturk Khaganate, it was also the official court language, and so when Xuanzang appeared at the court of the Great Khagan of the Western Gokturks, it was likely the language of diplomacy. When we think of Turkic people, many in the English speaking world think of Turkiye, and perhaps of the mighty Ottoman empire.  Some may think of Turkmenistan, Kazhakstan, Kyrgyzstan, or Uzbekistan, among others.  And of course, there are the Uyghur people in Xinjiang.  All of these people claim roots in the ancestral Turkic homeland in the Altai mountains, which sit largely in western Mongolia, north of China's Xinjiang region.  Much like the Xiongnu and the Mongols, they were pastoral nomads, moving their herds across the steppes, often covering great distances.  They would regularly move through different regions, perhaps returning each season, though sometimes not returning for years at a time.  They were often seen as barbarians by settled people living in cities, and yet their goods and horses were highly prized. Nomad and sedentary lifestyles would often collide.  Farmers would turn pastureland into fields, and when the nomadic people returned on their circuits, they would find walls and fences where there was once open land, and the people there would claim to “own” the land, a concept often foreign to people who were always on the move.  Nomadic people, such as the Gokturks, were not necessarily keeping vast libraries of records about themselves and their histories, and so much of what we get comes from external sources, which do not always have incredibly reliable narrators.  To many of the settled agriculturalists, groups like the Turks were marauders who raided their villages and farms.  They were a great bogeyman of the steppes, which required the firm hand of strong defenses to keep out—or so their opponents would want people to think. While they were known for their warfare, which incorporated their mobility, but they were keenly interested in trade, as well.  They understood the value of the trade routes and the various cities and states that they included in their empire.  Thus, the Sogdians and the Gokturks seem a natural fit: the Sogdians were more settled, but not entirely so, as demonstrated by their vast trade networks.  And the Sogdians also were part of the greater central Eurasian steppe culture, so the two cultures understood each other, to a degree.  They are even depicted similarly in art, with slight differences, such as long hair that was often associated with Turks over the Sogdians.  In some areas of the Gokturk empire, Sogdians would run the cities, while the Gokturks provided military aid and protection. Xuanzang's description of the people of Suyab, or the “City of Suye River”, doesn't pick out anyone in particular, and he even says that it was a place where traders of the Hu, or foreign, tribes from different countries mingle their abodes.  He mentions the people here as being called Suli, which is also the name given to the language—this may refer to “Sogdian” in general.  They write with an alphabet that is written vertically rather than horizontally—this may refer to a few scripts that were written this way, possibly based off Syriac or Aramaic alphabets that were adapted to Sogdian and other Iranian languages, but it isn't clear. We are told that the people dressed in felt and hemp clothing, with fur and “cotton” garments.  Their clothes fit tightly, and they kept their hair cut short, exposing the top of their heads—though sometimes they shaved it completely, tying a colored silk band around the forehead. He goes on to describe these people as greedy liars, possibly a reference to the mercantile nature of many of the people at the time. Something to note: The Turks of this time had not yet encountered Islam, which was just now starting to rise up in the Middle East.  The Prophet Muhammad is said to have been born around the end of the 6th century CE and was preaching in the early 7th century, though his teachings would begin to spread outward soon enough.  But that means that the Gokturks were not an Islamic empire.  Rather, their own traditions seem to have focused on the worship of Tengri, an Altaic personification of the universe, often simplified as a “sky god”.  Tengrism can be found amongst the Xiongnu, Mongols, and others, and it was the national religion of the Gokturks themselves, but there were many who also adopted other religions that they encountered, including Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Manichaeism, and Buddhism.  In fact, Xuanzang notes that the Turks he met in Suyab would not sleep or sit on beds made of wood because wood was thought to contain the spirit of fire, which he says they worshipped.  That sounds similar to Zoroastrian beliefs, where fire is associated with Ahura Mazda, who is also worshipped as a sky god.  These may have been beliefs inherited from their Eastern Iranian Sogdian partners. In Xuanzang's biography, we are given more details about his visit to Suyab.  Apparently, as he was headed to the city, he met a hunting party, which we are told was the retinue of Yehu Khan.  Hunting was an important part of life on the steppes, and it continued to be a favorite sport of the Gokturk nobility. Yehu Khan—possibly Yagbhu Khan, though that is up for some debate—is described as being dressed in a green silk robe, with his hair exposed, and wearing  a turban of white silk about ten feet long that wrapped his forehead and hung behind his back.  His “hunting” expedition wasn't just a couple of the guys.  It included about 200 officials, all with plaited hair and dressed in brocade robes—they weren't exactly out there roughing it.  He also had his soldiers, dressed in furs, felt, or fine woolen clothes, and there were so many cavalry that they stretched out of sight.  The Khan seemed pleased to meet Xuanzang, but his hunt was expected to last another couple of days, at least, so he sent an attendant named Dharmaja to take Xuanzang back to wait for the Khan to return. Three days later, Xuanzang was given an audience.  The khan was seated in a large yurt.  Xuanzang noted the seeming incongruity between the khan, sitting there in the tent, decorated with golden flowers, with the officials dressed in magnificent brocade garments sitting in two long rows in front of him and the armed guards behind him, compared to the simple felt walls of the tent. A ”yurt” is a common feature of nomadic life on the steppes.  It wasn't exactly a single person operation to haul them around, but they can be taken down and put up with relative ease.  And while yurts could be relatively simple, there are examples of much more elaborate structures.  There is little reason they couldn't be made larger, perhaps with some extra support.  In later centuries, there are examples of giant yurts that seem like real construction projects.  Use of tents, even in a city, where they had permanent palace buildings, was likely a means of retaining the nomadic steppe traditions, even while enjoying the benefits of city life. Whom exactly Xuanzang met with is a matter of debate.  His records seem to indicate that it was Tong Yabghu Qaghan of the Western Gokturk Khaganate, but other sources say that Tong Yabghu Qaghan died in 628, and the earliest Xuanzang could have been meeting with him was 630, two years later, so if that is the case, he must have met with Tong Yabghu's son, Si Yabghu Qaghan.  It is likely that Xuanzang, who was dictating his accounts years after, mentioned the Qaghan and then, when they looked up who it was, they simply made a mistake.  Remember, Xuanzang would have had everything translated through one or two languages.  He did know what he saw, however, and he recounted what he remembered. Tong Yabghu Qaghan oversaw the height of the Gokturk Qaghanate, and appears to have favored the Buddhist religion, though there were many different religions active in their territories at the time.  They oversaw an extremely cosmopolitan empire covering huge swaths of central Eurasia, including the lucrative silk road.  Xuanzang notes that at the court there were individuals from Gaochang and even a messenger from the Han—which is to say the Tang Empire.  One wonders if Xuanzang—or anyone at that time—realized just how tenuous the Khan'sposition was.  After Tong Yabghu's death, the Qaghanate would decline, and less than a decade later it would fall to the Tang dynasty, who took Suyab and made it their western outpost.  In fact, Suyab is thought to have been the birthplace, over a century later, of a young boy who would find a love of poetry.  That boy's name was Li Bai, or Ri Haku, in Japanese. He would become one of the most famous poets in Chinese history, and his poems were even known and studied in Japan.  And it was largely through Japanese study of Li Bai's poems that his works came to the English speaking world: first through Ernest Fenollosa, who had studied in Japan, and then by the celebrated Ezra Pound, who had used Ernest's notes to help with his own translations of the poems. This was, though, as I said, over a century after Xuanzang's journey.  At the time of our story, the Qaghan was throwing a feast, including Xuanzang and all of the foreign envoys.  Xuanzang comments on the food and drink—his hosts provided grape juice in lieu of wine, and cooked a special vegetarian feast just for him, while the other guests ate a feast of meat, such as veal, lamb, fish, and the like.  There was also the music of various regions along the Silk Road, which Xuanzang found to be catchy, but of course not as refined as the music he was used to, of course.  After dinner Xuanzang was asked to expound upon the Darma, largely about the basic principle that you should be kind to one another—I doubt he was getting into the deep mysteries of Buddhist philosophy. Xuanzang stuck around the court for three more days, during which time the Qaghan tried to get him to stay, but Xuanzang insisted that he had to make it to India.  And so the Qaghan relented.  He found men in his army who could translate for Xuanzang along his journey, and had letters of introduction written to at least as far as the state of Kapisa, in modern Afghanistan. And so, armed with the Qaghan's blessing and a fresh translator, Xuanzang struck out again.  They headed westward for over one hundred miles, eventually reaching Bingyul, aka the Thousand Springs.  This is the area where the Qaghan and his court would spend his summers, and the deer in the area were protected under his orders, so that they were not afraid of humans—which sounds similar to the situation with the deer in Nara.  Continuing on another fifty miles or so—the distances are approximate as Xuanzang's primary duty was not exactly to map all of this out—Xuanzang arrived at the city of Taras, in modern Kazakhstan, another place where the cultures of the Silk Road mixed and mingled.  Xuanzang didn't have much to say about Taraz, apparently, though it is one of the oldest cities in Transoxania, founded near the beginning of the Common Era.  A few miles south of there, Xuanzang reportedly found a village of re-settled ethnic Han that had been captured by the Gokturks and settled here.  They had adopted the dress and customs of the Turkic people, but continued to speak a version of Chinese. Southwest of that he reached the City of White Water, likely referring to Aksukent.  This is the same “Aksu” as the city in Xinjiang, both of which mean “White Water” in Turkic, but this one is in the south of Kazakhstan.  Xuanzang found the climate and products an improvement over what he had experienced in Taras.  Beyond that, he next arrived at the city of Gongyu, and then south again to Nujkend, and then traveling westward to the country of Chach, aka Tashkent.  Both Nujkend and Chach were large cities in nations of smaller, mostly autonomous city-states, which made up a lot of the political geography of Transoxania. I would note that Xuanzang's notes here are much more sparse than previously.  This may be because these were outside of the Tarim basin and therefore of less interest to individuals in the Tang empire.  Or perhaps he was just making his way more quickly and not stopping at every kingdom along the way. From Tashkent, he continued southeast to the Ferghana valley—the country of Feihan.  Oddly, this country doesn't appear in Xuanzang's biography, even though the Ferghana Valley seems to have been fairly well known back in the Tang Empire—it was known as the home of some of the best horses, which were one of its first major exports.  In fact, the Han dynasty even mounted a military expedition to travel to Ferghana just to obtain horses.  Xuanzang is oddly silent on this; however, he does talk about the fertile nature of the land.  He mentions that their language here is different from the lands he had been traveling through up to this point, and also points out that the people of the Ferghana valley were also visibly different from others in the area. From the Ferghana valley, Xuanzang headed west for about 300 miles or more to the land of Sutrushana—perhaps referring to the area of Ushrusana, with its capital of Bunjikat.  This country was also largely Sogdian, and described as similar to Tashkent.  From there, he traveled west through a great desert, passing skeletons, which were the only marker of the trail other than a view of the far off mountains.  Finally, they reached Samarkand, known as the country of “Kang” in Chinese, which was also the term used to mark Sogdians who claimed descent from the people of Samarkand. Samarkand is another of the ancient cities of Central Asia, and even today is the third largest city in modern Uzbekistan.  Human activity in the region goes back to the paleolithic era, and the city was probably founded between the 8th and 7th centuries BCE.  Samarkand was conquered by Alexander the Great, and during the Achaemenid Empire it was the capital of Sogdiana.  During Xuanzang's visit, Samarkand was described as an impenetrable fortress with a large population. For all of his travel, Samarkand was the first place Xuanzang notes as specifically not a Buddhist land.  In fact, there were two monasteries, suggesting that there had been Buddhists, but if any monks tried to stay there then the locals would chase them out with fire.  Instead, they worshipped fire—likely meaning Ahura Mazda and Zoroastrianism.  This leads to a story that I have to wonder about, given the reliability of our narrators. It is said that Xuanzang was met by the King with arrogance, but after staying the night Xuanzang was able to tell the King about Buddhism and its merits.  The king was intrigued, and asked to observe the Precepts, and treated Xuanzang with hospitality and respect.  So when two of Xuanzang's attendants went to the monasteries to worship, they were chased out with fire.  When the king heard about this, he had the people arrested and ordered their hands to be cut off.  Xuanzang could not bear to witness such suffering, however, and he intervened to have them spared.  So instead the king had them flogged and banished from the city.  Ever since then, all the people believed in Buddhism. Some parts of this strike true.  It was likely that the king would entertain this strange wanderer who had arrived with letters from the great Qaghan—that may have even explained why Xuanzang had been encouraged to make the dangerous journey to Suyab in the first place, so that he could obtain such permission.  And it would not be strange for the king to listen to his teachings.  If Xuanzang's attendants were attacked, that would have been a huge breach of hospitality, and however the King felt about it, he no doubt had to do something about it.  And so all of that sounds somewhat believable.  Does that mean everyone suddenly converted to Buddhism?  I don't know that I'm quite willing to go that far.  It is also likely that there were Buddhists there already, even if the majority religion was Zoroastrianism. From Samarkand, Xuanzang traveled farther southwest, to the country of Kasanna, which seems to have been the edge of what we might call Sogdiana.   According to his biographers, however, there was a little more to all of this.  Rather, he headed west to Kusanika.  Then he traveled to  Khargan, and further on to the country of Bukhara, and then to Vadi.  All of these were “An” in Chinese, which was the name element used for Sogdians from this region.  He then continued west to the country of Horismika, on the other side of the Amu Darya, aka the Oxus River of Transoxanian fame. From there he traveled further southwest, entering into the mountains.  The path here was often such that they had to travel single-file, and there was no food or water other than what you brought with you.  Eventually they came to a set of doors, known as the Iron Gate.  This was a Turkic fortress.  It was no doubt fortuitous that he had come from his meeting with the Qaghan, and likely had permission to pass through.  From there, they entered the country of Tukhara. As we noted in Episode 119, Tukhara was in the region of Bactria.  It was bordered by the Pamir range in the east, and the Persian empire in the west.  There were also the Great Snow Mountains in the south, likely referencing the Hindu Kush. Tukhara had been conquered by the Gokturks just within the past couple of decades, and Xuanzang notes that the country had been split into largely autonomous city-states as the local royalty had died without an heir many years before.  With the Gokturk conquest, it was now administered by Tardu Shad, the son of Tong Yabghu Qaghan.  “Shad” in this case was a local title. Here, Xuanzang's narrative gets a little dicey, especially between his biography and his records.  The records of the Western Regions denotes various countries in this area.  It is unclear if he traveled to all of them or is just recounting them from records he obtained.  He does give us at least an overview of the people and the region.  I would also note that this is one of the regions he visited, again, on his return trip, and so may have been more familiar with the region than those areas he had passed through from Suyab on down. For one thing, he notes that the language of the region was different from that of the “Suli”, which appears to refer to the Sogdians.  This was the old territory of the Kushan empire, and they largely spoke Bactrian.  Like Sogdian, it was another Eastern Iranian language, and they used an alphabet based largely on Greek, and written horizontally rather than vertically.  They also had their own coins. This region had plenty of Buddhist communities, and Xuanzang describes the cities and how many monasteries they had, though, again, it isn't clear if he actually visited all of them or not.  These are countries that Li Rongji translates as “Tirmidh”, “Sahaaniyan”, “Kharuun”, “Shuumaan”, etc. It does seem that Xuanzang made it to the capital city, the modern city Kunduz, Afghanistan. Xuanzang actually had something specific for the local Gokturk ruler, Tardu Shad.  Tardu Shad's wife was the younger sister of King Qu Wentai of Gaochang, whom we met last episode.  Qu Wentai had provided Xuanzang a letter for his younger sister and her husband.  Unfortunately, Xuanzang arrived to learn that the princess of Gaochang had passed away, and Tardu Shad's health was failing.  It does seem that Tardu Shad was aware of Xuanzang, however—a letter had already come from Qu Wentai to let them know that Xuanzang was on his way.  As I mentioned last episode, letters were an important part of how communities stayed tied together.  Of course, given the perils of the road, one assumes that multiple letters likely had to be sent just in case they didn't make it.  The US Postal Service this was not. Tardu Shad, though not feeling well, granted an interview with Xuanzang.  He suggested that Xuanzang should stick around.  Then, once the Shad had recovered from his illness, he would accompany Xuanzang personally on his trip to India.  Unfortunately, that was not to be.  While Xuanzang was staying there, he was witness to deadly drama.  Tardu Shad was recovering, which was attributed to the recitations by an Indian monk who was also there.  This outcome was not exactly what some in the court had wanted.  One of the Shad's own sons, known as the Tagin prince, plotted with the Shad's current wife, the young Khatun, and she poisoned her husband.  With the Shad dead, the throne might have gone to the son of the Gaochang princess, but he was still too young.  As such, the Tagin Prince was able to usurp the throne himself, and he married his stepmother, the young Khatun.  The funeral services for the late Tardu Shad meant that Xuanzang was obliged to stay at Ghor for over a month. During that time, Xuanzang had a seemingly pleasant interaction with an Indian monk.  And when he finally got ready to go, he asked the new Shad for a guide and horses.  He agreed, but also made the suggestion that Xuanzang should then head to Balkh.  This may have meant a bit of backtracking, but the Shad suggested that it would be worth it, as Balkh had a flourishing Buddhist community. Fortunately, there was a group of Buddhist monks from Balkh who happened to be in Kunduz to express their condolences at the passing of Tardu Shad, and they agreed to accompany Xuanzang back to their hometown, lest he end up getting lost and taking the long way there. The city of Balkh is also known as “Baktra”, as in “Bactria”, another name of this region.  A settlement has been there since at least 500 BCE , and it was already an important city when it was captured by Alexander the Great.  It sits at the confluence of several major trade routes, which no doubt were a big part of its success.  Xuanzang's biography notes that it was a massive city, though it was relatively sparsely populated—probably due to the relatively recent conquest by the Gokturks, which had occurred in the last couple of decades.  That said, there were still thousands of monks residing at a hundred monasteries in and around the city.  They are all characterized as monks of Theravada schools.  Southwest of the city was a monastery known as Navasamgharama, aka Nava Vihara, or “New Monastery”.  Despite its name, the monastery may have actually been much older, going back to the Kushan emperor Kaniska, in the 2nd century CE.  Ruins identified as this “New Monastery” are still visible south of Balkh, today. The monastery is described as being beautifully decorated, and it seems that it had a relic—one of the Buddha's teeth.  There are also various utensils that the Buddha is said to have used, as well.  The objects would be displayed on festival days.  North of the monastery there was a stupa more than 200 feet in height.  South of the monastery was a hermitage.  Each monk who studied there and passed away would have a stupa erected for them, as well.  Xuanzang notes that there were at around 700 memorial stupas, such that they had to be crammed together, base to base. It was here that Xuanzang met a young monk named Prajnaakara, who was already somewhat famous in India, and well-studied.  When questioned about certain aspects of Buddhism, Xuanzang was impressed by the monk's answers, and so stayed there a month studying with the young monk. Eventually, Xuanzang was ready to continue on his journey.  He departed Balkh towards the south, accompanying the teacher Prajnakara, and together they entered the Great Snow Mountains, aka the Hindu Kush.  This path was even more dangerous than the trip through the Tian Shan mountains to Suyab.   They eventually left the territory of Tukhara and arrived at Bamiyan.  Bamiyan was a kingdom in the Hindu Kush, themselves an extension of the Himalayan Mountain range.  It Is largely based around valley, home to the modern city of Bamyan, Afghanistan, which sits along the divide between Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent.  Today it is a major center for individuals of the Hazara ethnic group, one of the main ethnic groups in Afghanistan, which is a multi-ethnic state that includes, today, the Pashtun, Hazara, Tajik, and Uzbek people, along with a number of smaller ethnic groups.  Today they largely reside in the mountainous areas of the Hindu Kush. Bamiyan made an impact on our protagonist.   Their language was slightly different from that in Tukhara, but using the same—or similar enough—writing system.  Buddhism was thriving in the capital, and we are told of a rock statue of the standing Buddha, over a hundred feet in height, along with a copper statue of the standing Buddha nearby.    There was also another reclining Buddha a mile or two down the road.  There were multiple monasteries with thousands of monks, and the ruler of that kingdom received Xuanzang well. Xuanzang wasn't the first monk to travel to Bamiyan from the Middle Kingdom—in this he was, perhaps unwittingly, on the trail of the monk Faxian.  Faxian likely did not see these statues, though, as we believe they were built in the 6th and early 7th century—at least the stone Buddha statues.  They were a famous worship site until February 2001, when the Taliban gave an order to destroy all of the statues in Afghanistan.  Despite this, they were inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003. Fortunately, we have images from before their destruction.  These statues were a blend of Greco-Buddhist and Gandharan art styles—appropriate as it stands between the Hellenistic area of Tukhara and the ancient region of Gandhara—including the modern city of Kandahar and into the Indus Valley region of Pakistan. Continuing east through the mountains, Xuanzang eventually came out at the kingdom of Kapisa.  This may have had its capital around modern-day Bagram, north of modern Kabul, but the country seems to have been quite large.  Kapisa over saw some tens of other countries, and it is thought that at one time its influence extended from Bamyan and Kandahar to the area of modern Jalalabad.  Their language was even more different than that of Tukhara, but they were still using the same writing system.  The king of Kapisa is said to have been of Suli ethnicity—which would seem to indicate that he was Sogdian, or at least descended from people of the Transoxanian region.    Xuanzang notes that the ruler, as rough and fiery as he is described—as a true warlord or similar—he nonetheless made a silver image of the Buddha, eighteen feet in height, every year.  He also gave charity to the poor and needy in an assembly that was called every five years.  There were over one hundred monasteries and some 6000 monks, per Xuanzang's recollection, and notably, they were largely following Mahayana teachings. For the most part the monks that Xuanzang had encountered on this journey were Theravada—Xuanzang refers to them as “Hinayana”, referring to the “Lesser Vehicle” in contrast to Xuanzang's own “Mahayana”, or “Greater Vehicle”.  “Theravada” refers to the “way of the elders” and while Mahayana Buddhism largely accepts the sutras of Theravada Buddhism, there are many Mahayana texts that Theravada Buddhists do not believe are canonical.  We discussed this back in Episode 84. There was apparently a story of another individual from the Yellow River being sent as a hostage to Kapisa when it was part of the Kushan Empire, under Kanishka or similar.  Xuanzang recounts various places that the hostage, described as a prince, lived or visited while in the region.  Xuanzang's arrival likely stirred the imagination of people who likely knew that the Tang were out there, but it was such a seemingly impossible distance for most people.  And yet here was someone who had traveled across all of that distance.  One of the monasteries that claimed to have been founded because of that ancient Han prince invited Xuanzang to stay with them.  Although it was a Theravada monastery, Xuanzang took them up on the offer, both because of the connection to someone who may have been his countryman, but also because of his traveling companion, Prajnakara, who was also a Theravada monk, and may not be comfortable staying at a Mahayana monastery. Xuanzang spends a good deal of ink on the stories of how various monasteries and other sites were founded in Kapisa and the surrounding areas.  He must have spent some time there to accumulate all of this information.  It is also one of the places where he seems to have hit at least twice—once on the way to India, and once during his return journey. The King of Kapisa is said to have been a devotee of Mahayana Buddhism.  He invited Xuanzang and Prajnakara to come to a Mahayana monastery to hold a Dharma gathering.  There they met with several leading figures in the monastery, and they discussed different theories.  This gathering lasted five days, and at the end, the king offered Xuanzang and the other monks five bolts of pure brocade and various other gifts.  Soon thereafter, the monk Prajnakara was invited back to Tukhara, and so he and Xuanzang parted ways. And it was about time for Xuanzang to continue onwards as well.  From Kapisa, he would travel across the “Black Range” and into Lampaka.  This may refer to the area of Laghman or Jalalabad.  Today, this is in modern Afghanistan, but for Xuanzang, this would have been the northwestern edge of India.  He was almost there. And so are we, but we'll save his trip into India for next episode. Until then thank you for listening and for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, please tell your friends and feel free to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts.  If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website,  SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Also, feel free to reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.  You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com.  Thank you, also, to Ellen for their work editing the podcast. And that's all for now.  Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.

Happy New Year!  This is our 2025 recap episode.  In this case, we actually are recapping a fair bit more than just the year, going over the previous evolution of the Yamato state up to the period of the Great Change, or Taika, which we covered this past year.  There's a lot more that we expect to get into this next year, and this will hopefully tee us up for what is to come. For more, including a full list of our previous references, check out: https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-newyear2025   Rough Transcript Shinnen Akemashite!  Happy New Year and Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua, and this is the New Year's Recap episode for 2025! It's that time again:  we are going to look back at what happened in the episodes this year.  That was only episodes 101 to 117—we'll skip the travelogue episodes for the time being.  This covered the years of the early to mid-7th century, from roughly 613 to 659.  That is easily within the lifetime of a single individual, and yet a lot was going on. At the start of this year, we were at the height of Soga power. In 2023, we covered how back in 587, Soga no Umako had wrested power away from the powerful Mononobe clan, defeating Mononobe no Moriya.  As you may recall, the sovereign known to posterity as Jimmu Tennou was the descendant of the Heavenly Grandchild known as Ninigi no Mikoto, at least according to the Nihon Shoki.  The Mononobe clan claimed descent from none other than Nigi Hayahi, the Other Heavenly Grandchild, whose offspring were said to have been defeated by Jimmu. You may recall that scholars generally consider the story of Jimmu, and the nine sovereigns that immediately followed him, as almost certainly a later addition to the story of the royal lineage. So when did the story of Nigi no Hayahi's defeat enter the picture? And was its inclusion perhaps related to the defeat of the Mononobe by the Soga family?  A family that successfully intermarried with the Royal House, themselves, such that all later sovereigns would trace their ancestry back to the Soga house? Of course, under Soga dominance we saw the rise of figures like the Soga descended Kashikiya Hime, aka Suiko Tenno.  During her reign, major reforms were carried out, Buddhism became fully established by the State, and ties with the continent were strengthened.  Politics would continue to be dominated by Soga, even after the death of Soga no Umako and Kashikiya Hime, with Soga no Emishi taking up the mantle of Prime Minister, working closely with his son, Soga no Iruka.  The Soga family was so entwined with the politics of rulership that the main rivals of the Soga were… the Soga.  That is to say different Soga-descended lineages, like that of the Prince Umayado, aka Prince Shotoku. Rather than supporting Umayado's son, Prince Yamashiro no Oe, Soga no Emishi backed another candidate to the throne, Prince Tamura.  , of the royal Okinaga lineage. Tamura came to power as Jomei Tenno, but there is little doubt that Soga no Emishi was the one in control. Later, when Tamura passed away in 641, Yamashiro no Oe continued to be passed over.  In fact, Soga no Emishi supported the ascension of Tamura's wife, Takara hime, over Yamashiro no Oe, and there is evidence that he supported a prince known as Furubito no Oe as the Crown Prince and eventual successor.  All of the evidence—which, to be honest, is rather biased—suggests that the Soga family were setting up a series of puppet rulers who would do their bidding, or at least be pliable to their suggestions. There must have been some pushback, though, especially when one considers how strong the cult of Prince Shotoku, aka Umayado, would eventually become.  One imagines that Prince Yamashiro was another pole around which those who opposed the Soga family could rally.  After all, he was the son of Crown Prince Umayado, and likely had just as much of a claim as Tamura and his children.  And so, to counter this threat, Soga no Emishi's son and successor, Soga no Iruka, took matters into his own hands. In a brazen display of the violence of court politics, Soga no Iruka had Yamashiro no Oe accused of plotting against the throne and took an army to arrest him—no doubt in the hope that the prince would resist.  Eventually they cornered Yamashiro and his family, who committed suicide rather than submit. This attack was likely targeted to take out the rival to the Soga family's preferred Crown Prince, Prince Furubito no Oe, but rather than quell any dissent, the move seems to have enflamed the passions of those who wanted to see an end to the Soga house.  Those passions took particular root in none other than Furubito no Oe's younger brother, Prince Naka no Oe.  Together with the support of his uncle, Prince Karu; the head of the Nakatomi house, Nakatomi no Kamatari; as well as another scion of the Soga house, Soga no Kuroyamada, Prince Naka no Oe staged a coup d'etat.  Using the death of Prince Yamashiro no Oe as an excuse, they engineered a plot to assassinate Soga no Iruka in court, in front of Naka no Oe's own mother, Takara Hime no Oho-kimi.  After Iruka's death, Naka no Oe and his supporters then took the fight to Soga no Emishi, who committed suicide and set his own house on fire in what came to be known as the Isshi Incident. This shocking assassination caused Takara hime to step down.  The Soga-backed Prince Furubito no Oe, rather than stepping up and taking the throne, retreated to a Buddhist temple and took holy orders, effectively retiring and theoretically taking himself out of court politics.  That left Prince Naka no Oe and his uncle, Prince Karu, as possible candidates. We are told that Prince Naka no Oe declined to take the throne himself, instead supporting his uncle, Prince Karu.  Prince Karu took the throne, and is known to us as Kotoku Tenno, today.  Prince Naka no Oe stepped up as the Crown Prince, and with the help of his co-conspirators, such as Nakatomi no Kamatari, Soga no Kurayamada, and others, they began a project to remake the Yamato government, using continental models—specifically the Sui and Tang courts, which were also influencing the governments of the Korean peninsula, such as those of Baekje and Silla. This is known as the Taika, or Great Change, era.    There had been previous movements to adopt some of the continental trends, but nothing to this extent, which culminated in a tremendous palace complex built in Naniwa—modern Ohosaka.  Governors were sent out to the east of the country. The old, decentralized system was being replaced by a centralized bureaucracy. And yet this wasn't entirely a smooth transition.  Early on there was a threat by supporters of the previous Crown Prince, Furubito no Oe.  He was killed to put down any possible revolt.  Later, Naka no Oe was hoodwinked into going after his own co-conspirator, Soga no Kurayamada, resulting in Kurayamada's death and the punishment of his entire family.  A few years later, Naka no Oe moved back to Asuka, taking most of the royal family and the court with him, abandoning the grand government complex that they had built in Naniwa for reasons that remain unclear. Shortly thereafter, Karu, aka Kotoku Tenno, passed away.  But rather than Naka no Oe taking the throne—or even Karu's son, Prince Arima—the throne went back to Naka no Oe's mother, Takara Hime.  This is the only case we have of a single sovereign reigning twice, and the Chroniclers gave her two separate regnal names—Kogyoku Tenno to refer to her first reign and Saimei Tenno to refer to her second. And this is the reign that we are going to start the new year with. Beyond what was going on on the archipelago, there was also plenty that we covered on the continent.  We started the year with the Sui dynasty having consolidated control and working to continue to expand their territory north, south, and west, while also connecting the economic areas of the Yangzi and Yellow rivers. Unfortunately, through their wars and public works projects they overextended themselves, and the dynasty fell, replaced, in 619, with the Tang dynasty.  The Tang continued to expand, taking control of important points on the Silk Road and becoming a hub of trade and commerce.  At the same time, they were contesting their borders with the Goguryeo, who, themselves, had come under the control of Yeon Gaesomun, an infamous noble and anti-Tang hard-liner, who had staged a coup, murdered the Goguryeo king and any who stood against him, and who had installed a puppet king on the throne.  It is little wonder that the Tang dynasty was courting Goguryeo's enemy, Silla, to pressure them from the other side.  This eventually kicked off the Tang-Goguryeo war, with the loosely allied Tang and Silla fighting on and off with Goguryeo and their ally, Baekje, who was also invested in stifling Silla's ambitions on the peninsula. So that's where we are:  The Korean peninsula is currently embroiled in conflict between the three kingdoms on the peninsula and the nearby superpower, the Tang Dynasty.  Meanwhile, Yamato, on the archipelago, is going through a whole… thing.  What that is, we'll try to get into over the next year. Given all of this, let's go over some of the themes from the past year.  To start with, let's talk about expanding Yamato influence. From what we can tell, Yamato's influence in the archipelago had peaked around the 5th century, between the creation of giant Daisen Ryo kofun and the reign of Wakatake no Ohokimi, aka Yuryaku Tenno.  Wakatake no Ohokimi had courtiers from as far away as Kyushu and the Kanto plain.  However, from what I can tell, Yamato's influence appears to have temporarily waned, possibly coinciding with the end of Wakatake's own dynasty, with a new dynasty coming to power in the 6th century. It is possible that Wakatake was simply never quite as powerful as the Chronicles make out, but there are a few other things that make me think that the end of the 5th and early half of the 6th century were a low point in Yamato's power.  For one thing, we see a drop off in interactions with the continent after 479—or at least anything beyond the tip of the Korean peninsula.  In addition, we see smaller rooms built in the region of the Nara Basin and the Kawachi plain, while more “royal” tombs continue to appear elsewhere in the archipelago.  It isn't that they stopped, but the size decreased, suggesting that Yamato didn't have the same labor pool it used to. On top of that, we have the dynastic change.  We are told that the line related to Wakatake died out and they had to bring in someone from Afumi and Koshi, who traced their lineage back to the legendary Homuda-wake, aka Ōjin tennō, some five generations back.  Many scholars suggest that this connection was a later merging of the lineages, suggesting that, in reality, an entirely new branch of sovereigns had come to power. Finally, we can see the Chronicles focusing more and more on the areas near to Yamato, the area known as the Home Provinces, possibly because Yamato only held direct control over these areas, while control beyond that was only nominal.  Local elites in those regions had a lot of autonomy, and if Yamato did not have anything in particular to offer them, they would not have a reason to necessarily go along with Yamato's requests. This may have even been part of the impetus for the so-called “rebellion” by Iwai, in Kyushu.  As you may recall, in the early 6th century Iwai attempted to ally with Silla against Yamato and Baekje, with the idea of cutting off Yamato's access to the continent.  This ultimately failed, and Yamato ended up creating what would become the Dazaifu near modern Fukuoka, but the fact that Iwai could contemplate it and gather such support would suggest that Yamato was at least perceived as vulnerable. Now up to this point, we see several different policies that were used for increasing the court's control.  Early on, this was done by doling out various elite goods.  We also see Yamato soft power in the form of spiritual authority and the expansion of local Yamato cultic practices out into the other lands of the archipelago.  There was also the tradition of monumental tombs, and especially the royal keyhole style tombs, which spread out from Yamato and was likely as much an indication that those regions saw Yamato practices as worthy of emulation, at the least, and perhaps saw Yamato as a cultural nexus on the archipelago. To all of this, they eventually added the “Be” system.  This appears to have been copied from systems being used on the Korean peninsula, and it focused on creating familial units to organize various industries, with family heads responsible for reporting and funneling necessary goods up to the court.  This eventually included the noble “uji” clans, with their power bases in various geographic regions. Yamato extended its influence through a variety of methods, including various public works projects.  These included things like the building of ponds, or reservoirs, which would have been critical to the wet-rice paddy agriculture that was the economic backbone of the Yamato government.  Another means of extending government control was the “miyake”, or Royal Granaries.  Originally we see these set up in the Nara basin, but during the current dynasty they had been extended all the way out to Kyushu. Ostensibly, they were there to collect rice for taxes, but they appear to have acted as government offices, providing a presence for Yamato even out in the hinterlands.  Eventually they would turn the area in Kyushu, the Dazai, into its own, semi-autonomous extension of the Yamato government, as well. In the past year of the podcast, we've seen many of those older forms of government control replaced with a new bureaucratic system.  This included an upgrade to the rank system, which was a way for the government to both organize the bureaucracy while also creating a means to award individuals.  Early rank systems had initially been granted at the family level, but following a continental model meant that the new system was based solely on the individual.  Thus they could hand out rank to various kings and chieftains across the archipelago and entice them into the Yamato orbit, a trick they had been doing previously as well with various types of recognition.  Those that took the titles and rank that Yamato handed out gained a certain amount of legitimacy, locally, but since that legitimacy was tied to the Yamato court, it also helped solidify Yamato's own influence on those areas. That doesn't mean that all expansion was peaceful.  Yamato contested on their eastern and northern border with the people referred to as the Emishi, which eventually included contests as far north as the island of Hokkaido with the Mishihase people. There was another form of soft power used by the court in the way that it supported Buddhism, which was still a new religion at this point, having arrived in the early part of the 6th century.  Patronage of Buddhism would lead to the building of temples and otherwise claiming some authority in the spiritual realm, beyond simply the court's control of the Mt. Miwa site.  Furthermore, the state itself took particular interest in Buddhist institutions, and cracked down heavily on the clergy, ensuring that they reported up to the court, formally solidifying the connection between temples and the State. But then they went a bit further and instituted actual governors.  They were appointed by the Yamato government, and they were particularly installed in the Eastern lands—referred to as provinces.  These governors reported to the court, and appear to have initially been separate from locally recognized elites, who were known as the Kuni no Miyatsuko.  The governors were to take stock of the areas under their authority and report up information such as a summary of the lands and local census information.  This meant that Yamato did not need to rely on local elites to administer an area, they would have greater insight into what was actually going on. This was all combined with the institution of new laws on taxes, corvee labor, and more, while eliminating traditional practices such as the Miyake and even royal tomb-building.  The latter was likely affected by the various public works projects, but also the fact that more work was going into the building of things like Buddhist temples. As we noted back in the previous year, Buddhist temple building appears to have had a hand in the end of the prolific kofun building, at least in Yamato proper.  Kofun were memorials—meant to carry on the memory of an individuals well after their death.  They were ritual sites, and families were set up to care for them. Temples, likewise, were erected with certain memorial qualities.  Donating to build a temple was thought to increase one's karma, and thus do wonders for your next life.  Temple patrons would be remembered, and services were carried out, but temples also had a certain public aspect to them, as well.  On top of that, they were new, and no doubt exotic, with their tiled rooves, intricate carvings, and colorful buildings.  Much of the labor that would have built tombs appears to have been co-opted, instead, to build temples. Some of the temples founded in this period include Asuka dera, aka Hokoji, built on or near the Soga family compound, as well as other Asuka temples, such as Yamadadera, Kawaradera, Toyouradera, and Kudaradera.  There was also Houryuji, erected by Prince Umayado near his house, and the ancient temple of Shitennouji, erected in Naniwa.  Of these, both Horyuji and Shitennoji continue, today, at or near their original with some of the oldest extant buildings in Japan.  Asukadera was moved to its modern site of Gangoji, in Nara city proper, but there is still a smaller Asukadera on the original site, with what may be one of the original images, though the buildings have been rebuilt after numerous fires and disasters over the years. Of course, a big part of all of these foreign ideas, such as Buddhism but also Confucian thought as well, was the growing influence of the continent, whether in the form of Baekje, Silla, Goguryeo, or beyond.  While there had been influence ever since the Yayoi period—and arguably even during the Jomon, in some instances—there seems to have been an acceleration once Yamato began to import Buddhism, which was likely connected with all of the learning and texts that were also being imported around that time.  Then, during the Sui and Tang dynasties—both of which the Chronicles simply label as the “Great Tang”—the court sent several embassies to the Sui and Tang emperors, bringing back individuals with actual experience in the way things were happening outside of the archipelago. And we should not discount the various embassies to and from the Korean peninsula.  Yamato was increasing its involvement in peninsular affairs.  They continued to be concerned with the state of Nimna, also known as Imna or Mimana, which had been assimilated by Silla, along with the rest of Gaya, or Kara, by the early to mid-6th century, with many accounts dealing with attempts to reinstate Nimna as a separate and sovereign entity. Along with this, Yamato continued their relationship with Baekje, who sent Prince Pung to reside at the Yamato court.  This continued a long-standing tradition that is portrayed as a type of diplomatic hostage, though there have been several times that princes at the Yamato court came back to Baekje to rule after the king died or was killed.  All of this to say that not only did ambassadors from Yamato go to these countries, but ambassadors also traveled to Yamato, while various immigrants from these areas of Baekje, Silla, and even Goguryeo occasionally settled in Yamato.  This further increased the number of individuals with knowledge and experience of continental concepts and technology, and we can see their influence in numerous different ways. This was all part of what led to the Yamato government's adoption of Tang style law codes, though it should be noted that the law codes were not taken wholecloth.  Rather, they were adapted specifically to the issues of the archipelago.  This was the beginning of what came to be known as the Ritsuryo system, literally the system of laws and punishments. Under this system, the government went from a single Oho-omi, or great minister, to two Great ministers, one of the left and one of the right.  These would come to be known as the Sadaijin and the Udaijin.  Nakatomi no Kamatari was afforded a special place as the third minister, the minister of the center, or Naidaijin, possibly referring to his responsibilities with the interior of the royal household, while the ministers of the left and right would have had particular ministries beneath them - eight ministries in total, with various departments underneath them.  They would be assigned to report either to the Minister of the Left or the Minister of the Right, each one overseeing, effectively, half of the government portfolio. This system, combined with the governors and the Tomo no Miyatsuko in the provinces, meant that Yamato had much more granular control over the workers and the means of production.  They organized households into villages, and villages into districts.  There were lower level officials who reported up the chain all the way to the great ministers, the Daijin, or Oho-omi.  This meant that they effectively abolished the Be and Uji system, at least as it had been set up.  These familial groups continued to operate as families, or perhaps more appropriately as “clans”, given how the groups had come to be. These officials were granted rank and, more importantly, stipends from the government.  A portion of taxes, which were paid in rice, went to various officials.  This meant that officials not only relied on the government for their status, but for their incomes as well. This went along with an attempt to implement something known as the “equal field system”, imported, again, from the continent.  This determined who would work what fields, and was another way that the government was involved down to the actual labor producing the rice that was the economic engine of the State. And that covers most of what we've been up to this past year.  There have been individual accomplishments that we didn't get into, but there is plenty there if you want to listen to it. So that covers the past year in the podcast—a little over half of the 7th century.  It really was a time of dramatic change—whether or not “Taika” was the name given to part of it, it certainly feels appropriate.  Even though the court eventually moved to Naniwa, this is the height of the Asuka period, and the start of the Ritsuryo state.  It would form the foundations for what was to come, and themes from this period will continue to show up again and again. In this next year, we are going to continue to look at Takara Hime's reign and beyond.  We'll see the resolution of the Tang-Goguryeo war, and the impact of all the continental fighting on the archipelago.  We'll also see continued developments within the archipelago itself, hopefully getting through to the end of the 7th century. We are actually reaching the end of the material in the Nihon Shoki.  This does not mean that we are running out of material, though.  The Chronicles end in 697—less than 40 years out from our current place in the Chronicles.  From there, we have the Shoku Nihongi, which covers 95 years, until 797 CE.  Translation of much of the Shoku Nihongi is available through the work of Dr. Ross Bender, and you can find his work online if you want to get a leg up on the reading, though that is a ways out.  For now, we can still comfortably continue with the Nihon Shoki, at least through the reign of Temmu Tennou. Until then, Happy New Year!  As usual, thank you for listening and for all of your support.  Thanks also to my lovely wife, Ellen, for her continued work at helping to edit these episodes! Remember, if you like what we are doing, please tell your friends and feel free to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts.  If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Also, feel free to Tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.  You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com.  And that's all for now.  Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  

This episode we go back to the continent for a bit to see how things are going.  Hint:  not well.  While Yamato was building its new bureaucratic state, Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla were battling it out while the Tang empire and their ambitions loomed over them all.  Yamato is about to get pulled into the conflicts, but before that, let's look at what was happening from the point of view of the various penninsular polities. This episode goes back over some of the information in Episodes 107 and 109, but mainly to place it in context of what was happening in Goguryeo, Baekje and Silla as opposed to simply viewing it from the rise of the Tang Empire or the occasional mentions in the Nihon Shoki.  Much of it relies on what we have in the Samguk Sagi, the Korean annals of the Three Kingdoms. For more, check out our blogpost: https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-115 Rough Transcript Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua and this is Episode 115: Red Banquets, Fashion Disasters, and Other Continental Adventures It was the year 642, and the hall was decked out in the finest, with banners hung and tables set.  The scene was awash in gold and silk and silver.  The guests were no less opulently adorned: The crème de la crème of Burana, aka Pyongyang, capital of the state of Goguryeo.  The tables were piled high with food, and there was a low murmur as the assembled guests talked quietly as they waited for their host. These guests were among the highest nobles in the land.  180 members of the most powerful families.  As they mingled, they talked.  Much of it was gossip, the currency of court politicians everywhere. They discussed who was up and down in the constant fight for favor.  Who had made a misstep, or was seen talking to the wrong person?  Or how about that time that someone wore the wrong clothes, or misspoke in court? Other conversations focused outward, on the threats from beyond the border.  But the majority of conversation had to do with their host, a striking individual. The murmurs continued as they waited for him to arrive..  Yeon Gaesomun was a hard-liner, pushing his agenda for stronger defenses against Tang encroachment.  That might be understandable for someone stationed out east, as he had been, but the King himself and his supporters felt that relations needed a more diplomatic touch.  Now that Gaesomun was back in the capital of Pyongyang, would he change his approach? The conversation continued apace as people ate and drank.  The whole time they remained blissfully unaware of what was happening just outside.  Drowned out by the sound of the banquet, troops were quietly assembling just outside, girding themselves for what would soon be an irrevocable step forward.  As orders came down the line, they drew their weapons, and then they burst through the doors… Last episode we talked through much of the Hakuchi era, from 650 to 654.  This episode I want to finish out the era, in order to do so we're once again going to touch on what was happening over on the continent. Some of these events we've talked about already: Last time we did a deep dive into this subject, back in Episode 104, we focused primarily on the Tang dynasty and its rise.  We also talked somewhat about Yamato's conflicts with Tang, Goguryeo, and others in Episode 107.  But at this point it's useful to go back and put that Continental narrative together a little bit more clearly, to set the stage for what will be happening in Yamato in the next reign after Karu. This episode we are going to go back over some of that info, but I want to center the narrative a bit more on the peninsula, rather than on the Tang dynasty. As you may recall, the Tang dynasty started in approximately 618, taking over from the Sui.  By 628, the Tang had defeated the Gökturks, and they continued to expand.  They conquered Turpan and Gaochang, in the Western Regions, and their control over the Silk Road was substantial, opening up tremendous trade routes that brought in wealth and more.  The capital of Chang'an became a true center of learning, and the government instituted a national university that was attended by elites from both in and outside the empire. This episode, though, we are going to focus more on the area of the Korean and Liaodong peninsulas, where the countries of Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla contended with each other.  Goguryeo was the largest and perhaps even the most powerful of the three, but it was also on the border with the Tang empire, who were nothing to sneeze at given their own string of military victories.  So Goguryeo was beset from all sides, and needed a sizeable force on their western border.  Everything was in a tenuous balance, of sorts. When it came to the Tang empire, Goguryeo walked a delicate line.  On the one hand, they wanted access to the trade goods and the knowledge that was accumulating in the Tang empire and making it the envy of most other nations in the region.  On the other hand, they had to be constantly on the lookout for a possible invasion, and so needed to show their strength.  This wasn't without some confidence.  After all, Goguryeo had defeated attempts by the Sui dynasty to invade, and so they had proved up to the challenge—at least so far. In 619, on the eve of the Tang dynasty's founding, King Yeongnyu of Goguryeo, whose personal name was Geonmu, sent a tribute mission to the Tang, to encourage good relations.  By 622, Goguryeo was responding to the Tang dynasty's request to return soldiers captured during the attempted invasions by the Sui.  They kept sending missions on an annual basis, playing the part of a friendly tributary. Further on the peninsula, Baekje and Silla were likewise reaching out to the Tang dynasty, similarly hungry for the trade goods available in the markets of Chang'an.  Baekje, sitting on the coast of the Bohai sea, had direct routes to the mainland; to both the Yellow river and Yangzi river deltas.  They may not have had an overland border, but the sea was open to them. Silla, on the other hand, was not so quite so fortunate.  They were mainly situated on the east side of the peninsula, and though they had some access through the Han river, near modern Seoul, their access was constantly threatened by both Baekje and Goguryeo.  In 626, a Silla mission to the Tang complained about this very thing, claiming that Goguryeo was attacking them.  In response, the Tang requested peace, and Goguryeo apologized and backed down.  That said, it is unclear if the Tang would have taken much action.  They were, at that point, more focused on the Gökturks and others.  That military action ended with the defeat of the Gökturks in 628, however, a victory for which Goguryeo sent congratulations.  One has to imagine, however, that the congratulations were a bit mixed.  After all, without the Gökturks to hold their attention, what was to keep the Tang dynasty from looking at further conquest? The question of how to react to the Tang Empire seems to be one that split the Goguryeo court.  Some members of the court wanted to appease the giant on their doorstep, with offers of tribute and nominal submission, with the goal of making it clear that they were not a threat and that military conquest was unnecessary.  They could all live in harmony, one with the other.  To that end, they would not want to be too blatant about building up their forces or defenses in an act that could be seen as a prelude to military action.  On the other side were the hard-liners: members of the court that felt that they had to maintain a strong military defense against the likely possibility of a Tang offensive.  To these hawks, military strength was the deterrent, as power only truly respected power.  To be seen as weak and submissive would be to seem vulnerable, and an easy target. Still, there seems to have been relative, if uneasy, peace for a time.  Goguryeo continued to build their relation as a tributary state, and most of the action seems to have actually been taking place in the peninsula.  For Silla, 632 was a banner year, as Queen Seondeok came to the throne.  She was the eldest daughter of her father, who had no sons to inherit, and so she came to the throne.  She is said to have been quite intelligent, and the Samguk Sagi gives various accounts of her Holmsian powers of deduction.  For example, upon seeing a picture of flowers, she immediately concluded that, though they were beautiful, they had no fragrance.  She noted the lack of bees and butterflies around the flowers, and based on that observation she deduced that the flowers must have no scent to attract them. Queen Seondeok would oversee Silla in a time when they were growing closer to the Tang and also seeing increased pressure from Baekje and Goguryeo.  We mentioned how, in 626, Goguryeo had blocked Silla's mission to the Tang court.  Then, in 636, a Baekje general led 500 troops to Mt. Doksan, to attack the Silla position there.  Two years later, Silla defeated Goguryeo troops outside Jiljung Fortress. This wasn't constant warfare, but it did mean that the armies had to be on a constant wartime footing.  You never knew when your neighbor might sense a moment of weakness and try to take advantage of it.  Of course, as the old adage goes, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.  Baekje and Goguryeo were more directly on the Tang Empire's borders.  And so we see Silla cultivating a special relationship with the Tang. This is nothing new, by the way.  Various dynasties in the Yellow River basin had used similar tactics for generations.  Immediate border countries were often treated more severely, with threats of punitive expeditions if they did not fall in line or give themselves over completely to become a direct vassal of the empire.  Countries just beyond the border were often treated with a lighter touch, luring them into complacency and even friendship with access to elite trade goods, and more.  As borders shifted, so too did the relationship between the empire and those on its borders. Goguryeo and Baekje fell into the former category, while Silla seems to have been in the latter—at least for now.  And yet all three were still trying to get what they could.   In 640, Seondeok sent her sons to enroll in the Guoxue, or National University, that Tang Taizong had set up in Chang'an.  This university had gathered Confucian scholars from all corners of the world.  The school is described as having some 1200 bays, with 3,260 students.  Besides Silla, Goguryeo and Baekje also sent their princes, who mingled with elites from Gaochang, Turpan, and elsewhere.  It was opportunities like this that made Chang'an so attractive: a place where the elites of Silla, Goguryeo, and Baekje, could mingle with the members of the Tang Court and the western regions, beyond, sharing ideas and learning about the wider world. The following year, in 641, there are two items of note.  One is the inspection by Chen Dade of the Tang-Goguryeo border.  We talked about this back in episode XXX.  Under the pretense of a diplomatic mission, Dade arrived at the border with numerous gifts of silk, presenting them to the various fortress commanders and then asking to be shown around.  The Commanders were more than happy to show Dade their impressive fortifications, and they were exceedingly polite, but little did they know that Dade's true purpose was to scout for weaknesses in Goguryeo's defensive line.  His report back to Tang Taizong would be critical in what was to come. Also in this year, King Uija of Baekje came to the throne.  We talked about how Uija had sent his son, Prince Pung, to Yamato, and we've touched on him a few times here and there.  Uija was clearly a proponent of the alliance with Yamato, and, as we'll see, he was no friend to Silla.  The following year, in 642, Ujia's forces attacked Silla, capturing 40 strongholds, and pushing Silla's expanding borders back to the Nakdong river, retaking much of the area that had been under the control of the various Kara, or Gaya, confederacy.  This likely included places like Nimna and Ara, though we can't know for certain.  We do know that Baekje forces took Taeya fortress in the south of the peninsula, which gives us an idea of the extent of Baekje's victories. In response to Baekje's brazen attacks, Silla went  to a seemingly unlikely ally.  They reached out to Goguryeo.  In fact, they sent none other than Kim Ch'unch'u. Kim Ch'unch'u was the grandson of the 25th king of Silla, King Jinji.  Though his father, Kim Yonsu, had lost any claim to the throne when King Jinji was overthrown, he was still of “seonggol”, or “Sacred” bone rank, a concept somewhat similar to the kabane of Yamato, though in this case the “Sacred bone rank” indicated nobles specifically descended from the royal family.  These would have likely been the various Royal Princes and their families in the Yamato hierarchy.  Kim Ch'unch'u, in particular, seems to have been well regarded by the Silla court of his day, and since his own daughter had been killed by Baekje, he had a personal stake in the matter.  And so he led the embassy to Goguryeo's capital at Pyongyang to request that they send troops to aid Silla. There was only one problem.  Goguryeo was still fuming about territory that they had lost to Silla many years ago.  They agreed to send troops, but only if Silla would agree to a little quid pro quo.  Silla would need to return the Chungnyung pass and cede everything northwest of it back to Goguryeo.  This would return much of Goguryeo's territory north of the Han river and modern Seoul. Kim Ch'unch'u  rebuked their offer, calling it a threat against Silla.  This angered King Yeongnyu, and Kim Ch'unch'u was jailed for his disrespect.  Ch'unch'u was able to get word out of his imprisonment, however, and Queen Seondeok sent what the Samguk Sagi calls a “Death Squad” of 10,000 soldiers with the aim of breaking him out of prison.  As soon as Goguryeo heard that these troops were on the move, they decided that holding onto Ch'unch'u wouldn't be worth it, and they released him rather than fight.  Kim Ch'unch'u was returned safely, but without the support that he wanted. That said, there may have been other things going on in Goguryeo. The pro-appeasement camp and the hard-liners were fuming, and things in the court were coming to a head.  The two sides pulled against each other in the way that they shaped policy.  For the most part, King Yeongnyu was pro-appeasement, but there were powerful figures in the hard-liner camp, such as Yeon Gaesomun.  At 46 years old, he was a descendant of at least two previous “Magniji” court officials—a title roughly equivalent to that of a Prime Minister, and one of the most powerful roles a non-royal court noble could aspire to.  Gaesomun himself was the Western Governor, directly responsible for the fortresses that defended the border with the territory of the Tang Empire.  As such, it is little wonder that he may have been a bit more focused on the threat that they posed, and he likely held the loyalty of not a few troops. And perhaps this is why King Yeongnyu started to suspect him of being a problem, and why he plotted to have him killed.  Word of the King's plot reached Gaesomun, however, and he decided to take matters into his own hands. Returning to Pyongyang in 642, Gaesomun let it be known that he was throwing a lavish banquet to celebrate his rise to the position of Eastern governor.  He invited over one hundred of the opposing court nobles under this pretence.  But that is all it was. When the nobles had gathered at the banquet site, Gaesomun struck.  He had loyal forces rush in and kill all of his opponents, and then, before an alarm could sound, he rushed his troops over to the palace and murdered King Yeongnyu.  It was the Goguryeo's own Red Wedding, and it would hold a particular place of infamy in Korean history, which said  that the troops dismembered the corpse and discarded it without ceremony. In place of King Yeongnyu, Gaesomun propped up Yeongnyu's nephew, King Bojang.  Gaesomun then appointed himself the Dae Magniji, the Great Prime Minister, or perhaps more fittingly “Generalissimo”.  Though King Bojang sat upon the throne there was no question that it was Gaesomun who now ruled Goguryeo. Gaesomun's legacy is complicated.  Under the Confucian values of the time, many early historians vilified him for murdering the king, and blamed him and his harsh policies for the eventual downfall of the kingdom.  He is portrayed as a man lusting after power. We are given examples of his harsh demeanor, and the Annals state that when he got off of his horse he had high ranking nobles and military officials lie on the ground so that he could step on them, rather than touching the ground.  Of course, some of this we should likely take with a grain of salt, given the Chroniclers' generally dim view of him in general.   On the other hand, some modern histories believe that he wanted Goguryeo to take a tougher stance against the Tang.  Early Korean nationalists rehabilitated him, exalting him for taking such a hard stance against the Tang, or, in their eyes, China.  I suspect that he was a little of both.  A tyrant and a despot—as many rulers of the time were—but also dedicated to the defense of his nation. We mentioned this briefly back in Episode 107, but I wanted to touch on it here in more detail as it really leads to where we want to discuss.  A very brief mention of this lies in the Nihon Shoki, where it says that “Irikasumi” the “Prime Minister” of Goguryeo slew the king and over 180 others.  For the most part it tracks, though it does say that it happened in 641, which may easily just be a simple scribal error. The general narrative from here is that the Tang dynasty used Gaesomun's usurpation as a pretext for war against Goguryeo, but the narrative seems a bit more complex, and when we are reading we should keep in mind that none of the players in this drama knew the outcome beforehand.  And so, as is often the case, things are quite as straightforward as they may seem when we zoom out and take a look at the macro level of historical events, where we've already decide what events we believe to be important and which were less so, often based on knowing the outcomes.  Of course, the Chroniclers would have had similar narratives, but they were still trying to catalogue the events of each year as best they could. And that brings us to the year 643.  In this year, Silla went to the Tang dynasty to ask them for assistance against both Baekje and Goguryeo, who were planning to cut off Silla's access to the Tang court.  Tang Taizong agreed to help, but only if Silla would accept a Tang official who would come and oversee Silla.  Taizong's reasoning is given, which follows a typically misogynistic logic:  “Because your country has a woman as a ruler, neighboring states belittle it.  As you have lost the authority of the ruler, thus inviting the enemy to attack, no year will enjoy peace.”  He basically said that Silla needed a big strong man to help out, and he was willing to send someone—along with troops—to do just that.  Of course, I think we can all see how that was likely to end up, and any thoughts Silla had of being an equal partner in such an arrangement were nothing more than fantasies.  Tang Taizong was agreeing to assist, if Silla became a protectorate of the Tang court. The Silla envoy, for his part, took a very political stance.  No doubt knowing just how bad this was for Silla, but not wanting to disrespect the Tang emperor, whose assistance they still needed, he acknowledged the emperor's words without accepting the terms, returning without the promised help, but also without completely subordinating his country to the Tang empire. Although the troops were not forthcoming, the envoy's mission still had a positive impact.  Having heard that the envoy was traveling to the Tang court, King Uija of Baekje proactively withdrew the troops he had that were planning to attack with Goguryeo and cut off Silla's access to Chang'an.  Thus, Silla's corridor was maintained. Goguryeo, for their part, continued to attack Silla's border, but even though Gaesomun was one of the hard-liners when it came to Goguryeo-Tang relations, his initial envoys to the Tang court took a conciliatory stance towards the Tang empire.  Gaesomun promoted Daoism over Buddhism, and had his emissaries request and bring back 8 Daoist sages from the Tang court. Many historians feel that this was actually something of a show.  Sure, they would get knowledge and learning from the sages, but more importantly was to put the Tang at ease and hopefully allow Goguryeo a chance to annex Silla before the Tang war machine got up and running.  For their part, the Tang were already considering their next moves against Goguryeo, with some suggesting that they use proxies, like the Khitan and the Malgal, to make an attack.  Emperor Taizong's advisors suggested that the best course of action would be to lull Goguryeo into a false sense of security prior to a massive assault.  And so there were no major attacks that year. In 644, however, the Tang sent a message to Baekje and Goguryeo that they would need to stop invading Silla, and that if they didn't do so, the Tang would attack.  Gaesomun was actually leading troops in an attack on Silla when news of the messenger arrived at Goguryeo's court in Pyongyang.  Gaesomun's response was that he was simply trying to reclaim the territory that Silla had previously stolen from them many years earlier.  Along with their excuses, they sent along gold and 50 hostages from the Goguryeo court, but they were refused by the Tang.  It was probably pretty clear at this point that things were coming to a head—and diplomatic relations finally broke down in 645. That year the Tang dynasty—in conjunction with Silla, the Samguk Sagi tells us—launched a massive invasion of Goguryeo.  The pretext of which was, as I mentioned, Gaesomun's usurpation of the throne, but let's not kid ourselves:  The Tang dynasty were not shy about pushing out their borders. The Tang troops, who had been preparing for the past year, invaded in a two prong attack.  An overland attack struck at Gaemo—modern Shenyang—while naval forces landed on the Liaodong peninsula.  These forces initially swept through the border fortresses along the Liaodong penninsula with seeming ease.  Remember Chen Dade and his little factfinding mission?  No doubt all of his work came in quite handy.   Things were going well, and Tang Taizong himself joined the campaign. Still, each fortress took time, so that even though the invasion started in April, they reached Ansi by June. We are told that Goguryeo had amassed over 150,000 forces at Mt. Jipul, near Ansi, a walled fortress town with an estimated population of around 100,000.  Those numbers may be exaggerations, but the context is clear:  This was not just a small fortress and Goguryeo sent a lot of troops to reinforce the area. On the other side, Goguryeo was facing odds that were probably more like 3 to 1, with a massive Tang invasion force, which, since they had split, were attacking from two different directions.  Sure enough, the Tang were able to catch the defenders out of position, with the troops that had crossed the sea assaulting from the front while the overland forces attacked Goguryeo's rear.  It is estimated that over 50,000 Goguryeo troops were killed or captured in the battle. And that left only the fortress of Ansi, with a garrison of maybe 5,000 troops, to face the Tang, who had otherwise swept through previous defenses in relatively short order.  It would have been understandable had they capitulated.  There were still other fortresses between the Tang armies and the capital of Goguryeo at Pyongyang, not to mention the extremely mountainous terrain between the Liaodong and Korean peninsulas.  And yet, the Ansi garrison refused to give in.  The Tang forces, for their part, knew they could not leave an enemy to their rear, and so rather than continuing on, they set a siege to the fortress town. Although we are told that the Tang forces brought siege engines with them, the garrison at Ansi held out.  In fact, they held out for three months, and fall was beginning to turn to winter.  Winter in northeast Asia would bring snow and mud.  Furthermore, the Tang supply lines themselves were fairly long at this point.  Eventually, the defenders won out, and the Tang forces turned back.  On the march back towards Chang'an, Tang Taizong and his troops were caught in an early winter blizzard, which killed more of the soldiers.  Emperor Taizong founded Minzhong Temple—known today as Fayuan Temple, in modern Beijing—to commemorate his fallen soldiers. Although the Tang forces retreated, it is hard to say that Goguryeo was truly victorious in the outcome of the war.  Many Gogouryeo troops perished in the fighting, while Tang could now regroup.  Goguryeo was unlikely to be a major and immediate threat to Silla, as they would need to continue to maintain troops and rebuild the fortresses taken by the Tang, but that didn't mean that Silla was off the hook, either. Through this all, Baekje had taken the opportunity to harass Silla's western border.  They sent wave after wave against Silla, whose forces in that area were under the command of general Kim Yusin.  The Samguk Sagi mentions that his forces would turn back one attack, and he'd be almost back home, when another attack would come and he would have to go back out.  In one particularly poignant moment, he even got so close as to see his house, but he could not stop, and so he marched straight past the gates as he prepared to repel yet another invasion from Baekje. Winter brought a pause to the fighting, and in 646, things seem to have been relatively calm, if still quite tense, as all sides recovered from the events of the previous year.  Nonetheless, this is seen as the start of what is known as the Goguyreo-Tang war, a series of conflicts that would continue for approximately the next 20 years.  Goguryeo, for their part, attempted to normalize relations with the Tang, even sending two women—specifically the Annals state that they were two beautiful women—as a peace offering.  Tang Taizong politely refused them, however, claiming he wouldn't dare to separate them from their families.  In reality, he was rebuilding his forces, preparing for another assault, but that would take time.  In the meantime, diplomatic channels remained open, which really demonstrates the political situation in general, at the time.  Even if two sides were attacking one another, diplomatic envoys were still being exchanged.  Furthermore, though the trade routes may have been slightly less stable, trade continued, regardless.  The following year, 647, Emperor Taizong launched fresh assaults against Goguryeo.  This time, rather than a larger army, he instead had them focus on small-scale attacks that would weaken the kingdom of Goguryeo, forcing them to constantly be on guard and to pour resources into supporting their borders.  At the same time, Silla suffered tragedy as Queen Seondeok died, and Queen Chindeok took the throne.  Later in that year, Baekje troops attacked three Silla fortresses.  They were pushed back, but the Silla troops took heavy casualties.  As we can see, the fighting continued throughout the peninsula. Meanwhile, over on the Japanese archipelago, they were busy incorporating the new reforms.  Envoys from Silla, Baekje, and Goguryeo would continue to travel to the Yamato court, which one imagines made for some rather tense State dinners. The year after that, in 648, while Tang forces continued to harass Goguryeo, Baekje attacked and took ten Silla fortresses.  Upon hearing this, Silla general Kim Yusin rallied the troops, counterattacked, and destroyed the invading forces.  Silla's Prince Ch'unch'u himself, the one who had previously gone to Goguryeo to ask for support against Baekje, traveled to the Tang court in Chang'an.  There he requested assistance against Baekje's continual harassment of Silla's borders. It is unclear how firmly Baekje and Goguryeo were allied together and coordinating attacks, but  it does seem clear that they were aligned in their goals.  Baekje may not have been in direct conflict with the Tang, but their attacks on Silla likely kept Silla from further harassing Goguryeo, who was actively involved in defending against Tang attacks.  So whether there were formal treaties or not, lines were drawn, but these were still independent states with their own goals and aspirations. And so, when Ch'unch'u's ship was returning from Chang'an and ran into a Goguryeo patrol, one can understand their apprehension.  Ch'unch'u was known to Goguryeo, and if we was captured it is unlikely that he would live long enough to be rescued by an elite Silla death squad once again.  And so, his men devised a plan, and a man named On Kunhae put on the clothes of a high official—possibly Ch'unch'u's own.  When the Goguryeo patrol captured the ship, they killed him, believing he was a Silla noble or at least an important envoy.  Unbeknownst to them, Ch'unch'u himself had been transferred to a smaller, less assuming ship, which quietly made its way past the patrol and back to Silla controlled territory. And so, once again, we see us how dangerous things were getting at this point.  Travel was risky at the best of times, but now, with the possibility of being intercepted by a hostile country's forces, who knew what might happen. Hostilities continued until 649.  That year, Tang Taizong passed away, and shortly before he did, he pulled back the troops.  His death only brought a brief pause, however, as his son and heir, Tang Gaozong, took the throne and would launch his own series of wars against both Goguryeo and Baekje.  In 650, Gaozong received Prince Kim Ch'unch'u once again as an ambassador from Silla, this time with a poem penned by Queen Chindeok herself.  In the form of poetic verse, she asked for help against Baekje, who had continued their attacks.  Throughout the previous year attacks had continued back and forth.  Silla general Kim Yusin again managed to push back and defeat the Baekje forces, but one can only imagine the toll this was taking on Silla's ability to defend itself over time.  This was the content of the note.  Prior to this, Silla really had gone all in on strengthening their ties with the Tang dynasty, going so far as to institute Tang court dress—both in their robes and caps.  This point had been specifically negotiated by Prince Ch'unch'u with the previous emperor, Tang Taizong.  It sounds as if Silla was trying to have the Tang court recognize their own court nobles and put themselves in a place to receive Tang court rank, though how, exactly, they received said rank is unclear—did it come from the Tang or was it granted by the Queen of Silla. Either way, it was clearly seen by other nations—or at least Yamato—as an unwelcome statement.  In 651, Silla envoys arrived at Tsukushi—modern day Kyushu—wearing their new Tang style clothing and they were turned away.  Specifically the Dazaifu sent them back claiming that they weren't dressed as envoys from Silla should be.  On top of this, we are told that Kose no Omi then suggested that *rather than go to war* over this, they should just make a show of force when the envoys came back.  And let me reiterate that: according to the Nihon Shoki this was such an affront that Yamato was considering whether they should launch a punitive military strike against Silla for sporting the wrong fit.  Talk about a fashion disaster! In the end, they took Kose no Omi's advice, which was that the next time Silla arrived they would have ships lined up all along the Seto Inland Sea as the envoys made their way to Yamato so that there was no doubt in the envoys' minds about just what Yamato could do. This is a great demonstration of how something we might consider innocuous was clearly a Big Deal for the people at the time.  I suspect that there were at least two possible reasons for why this was, besides just considering themselves the arbiters of fashion.  For one, remember that Yamato considered Silla to be subordinate to them, at least in their worldview.  Just like they had been concerned about at least maintaining the fiction that Nimna was still an active and independent entity, this broke the illusion that Silla was a tributary of Yamato. At the same time, it may have just been that they were putting on airs and it was seen as impersonating and even speaking for the Tang court.  After all, if a Tang envoy showed up, I doubt that Yamato would turn them away. In either instance, we can see the lines being drawn, with Silla taking a clear stance in connecting themselves with the Tang court while Goguryeo, Baekje, and even Yamato were still in contact with them, but from a more independent capacity.  In 652, for instance, we know that Goguryeo again sent tribute to the Tang court, no doubt in an attempt to normalize relations.  Still, the alliances were firming up. In 653 we have two items of interest:  one from the Samguk Sagi and one from the Nihon Shoki.  In the Samguk Sagi it explicitly mentions that Baekje and Wa formed an alliance.  This is significant in that the Samguk Sagi really doesn't mention Wa nearly as often as we would expect it to, while the Nihon Shoki is constantly discussing Baekje and Yamato relations.  I imagine that there must have been a significant escalation of Wa involvement around this time for the Samguk Sagi to mention it. On the other hand, the Nihon Shoki doesn't really mention it.  Sure, there are annual tributes mentioned from Baekje and Silla—and occasionally Goguryeo—but they were more focused on another event: an embassy that the Yamato court sent to the Tang dynasty.  This was the first embassy to be sent in some time—at least according to the Nihon Shoki—but it was quite the affair.  Two ships were prepared.  The first ship was led by Kishi no Nagani and his assistant, Kishi no Koma, along with the envoy, Nunobara no Mita.  They were accompanied by numerous students and student priesets, all sons of court nobility, including Jou'e, the son of none other than Nakatomi no Kamatari the “Naidaijin” or central prime minister.  In total, there were 121 people on board the ship. The other ship was led by Takada no Nemaro and his assistant, Kamori no Womaro, as well as their accompanying envoy, Hashi no Yatsute.  Along with various students, they had 120 on board the ship.  Two ships, each with an individual in charge of the particular embassy, meant that even if they met with an accident along the way, they would have someone to carry on the mission.  And that foresight proved unfortunately necessary when the ship carrying Takada no Nemaro sank in the straits of Takashima off the coast of Satsuma.  The ship went down and only five men survived, largely by lashing themselves to a plank and drifting ashore at Takashima island.  There, one of the survivors, Kadobe no Kogane, gathered bamboo and made a raft, by which they made it to Shitojishima.  They surived six days and nights without any food, but they made it.  When he heard about it, the sovereign congratulated Kogane and rewarded him with rank and various presents for his work to bring people back home. Another mission, launched the following year, shows that being lost at sea wasn't the only danger for international travelers back in the day.  In the 2nd month of 654, Takamuku no Kuromaro led another embassy to the Tang court.  He was the Controlling Envoy, though the Chief Ambassador was Kahabe no Maro, assisted by Yenichi no Kusushi, a name that Aston suggests translates to something like “Doctor Yenishi”.  A list of other names are given as well of those who were also on the mission.  More sobering is the outcome of the mission, where we are told what happened to everyone.  Though they reached the Tang court, not everyone would make it back.  According to the author Yuki no Hakatoko—an interesting tidbit in that they seem to be giving us the author of one of the accounts that they used in the compilation of the Nihon Shoki, and we'll come back to him in a later episode—according to Hakatoko, the student priest Enmyou died in Tang, while the student priests Chisou and Chikoku both died at sea.  Another person named Chisou, but using different characters, returned in a Silla ship in 690.  Gakusho died in Tang and Gitsu died at sea.  Joye returned in 665 in the ship of Liu Tekao.  And then others—about 12 total—along with two individuals who were considered Japanese born abroad, came back in 654 with returning envoys.  We are even told that Takamuku no Kuromaro, one of the figures who helped set up the government and played a major role in diplomatic relations with the continent, passed away on this mission as well. So going on one of these missions may have given you some awesome opportunities to see the world like nobody else, but they were anything but guaranteed.  For many people, it was a one way ticket, and we should keep that in mind when we hear about the people going on them. There were other intricacies to deal with as well—including navigating the pathways to the Tang court.  You may remember that Yamato was allied with Baekje in some way.  And yet the 654 mission we are told went by way of Silla and then anchored in Laichou, on the Shandong peninsula.  Later that same year, the previous mission, with Kishi no Nagani and others, returned to Yamato escoted by envoys from both Silla and Baekje.  While the narrative largely focuses on what they obtained, one imagines there were probably some tensions in all of that.  After all, just a year before we are told that Baekje and allied with Wa—which is to say Yamato—against Silla.  So had Silla not yet heard about the alliance?  Or was that just considered par for the course at the time? The year 654 would have more direct considerations for all concerned, however.  In that year, Queen Chindeok of Silla died, as did Karu of Yamato.  In Silla, the new King was none other than Prince Kim Ch'unch'u, known to history as King Muyeol.  As we touched on, earlier, Ch'unch'u was intimately familiar with the Tang court and had spoken directly with the Tang emperor, so this likely only further cemented ties between the Tang and Silla.  Meanwhile, in Yamato, Queen Takara Hime, aka Kyougyoku Tennou -slash- Saimei Tennou, was re-ascending the throne, rather than making way for Prince Naka no Oe, a truly interesting state of affairs. Moving forward, the alliances would continue to solidify, though diplomatic missions would continue to travel between the various countries.  After all, they didn't exactly have many other means of communicating with each other—no email or telephones back then. Tang Gaozong would continue to attack and harass Goguryeo, though Yeon Gaesomun would continue to fend off attacks, while Baekje and Silla would continue their struggles as well.  Both Goguryeo and Baekje would ally against Silla, who in turn would call upon the might of the Tang empire.  All in all, it was a time of great conflict, generally known as the Tang-Goguryeo War, and it was a long-term conflict punctuated with times of peace in betwetween the various offensives.   Yamato was less directly involved, but still affected.  After all, they were closely aligned with Baekje, and they had to wonder what would happen if Silla came out victorious.  Would they be cut off from the continent entirely?  Or would they be forced into a new state of having to send tribute to Silla as an inferior country if they wanted access to continental goods and knowledge?  While we know how it played out, today, at the time the outcomes were far from certain. All of that will continue to provide a backdrop for the second reign of Takara Hime, aka Saimei Tennou.  A part of me wonders if this wasn't also part of the reason to move the capital back into Asuka, in the Nara Basin.  I imagine that a capital sitting on the edge of the water, relatively speaking, while good for trade and foreign relations, also felt rather exposed if anyone were to sail a fleet down the Seto Inland Sea.  Or it may have just been a return to the more familiar lands of Asuka. As conflict on the continent continued to escalate, Yamato would not be able to stay unaffected.  The question is whether or not they would be ready when and if anything came their way.  It was a tense period, certainly. And we'll get more into that as we move forward in the next episode with the second reign of Takara-hime, aka Saimei Tennou. Until then thank you for listening and for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, please tell your friends and feel free to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts.  If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Also, feel free to reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.  You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com.   Thank you, also, to Ellen for their work editing the podcast. And that's all for now.  Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.

Last time we spoke about the first Encirclement Campaign against the CCP. Amidst ongoing attacks, the communist movement thrived in rural Jiangxi, even as urban support dwindled. Li Lisan championed urban uprisings, opposing Mao Zedong's focus on rural encirclement. Failed assaults on Nanchang and Changsha highlighted their discord. The Red Army's strategy shifted after capturing Ji'an, bolstered by peasant support. As the NRA prepared an encirclement, Mao proposed luring them deep before striking. Internal strife peaked with the Futian Incident, leading to a purge that solidified Mao's power but weakened the Red Army's defenses. Amidst internal strife, the NRA launched attacks on the Reds but faced fierce resistance. Lu Diping's forces encircled Donggu, leading to heavy losses as artillery mistakenly struck their own troops. The Reds capitalized on local support and guerrilla tactics, inflicting significant defeats on the NRA in Longgang and Dongshao. Despite Chiang Kai-Shek's attempts to reclaim territory, the Reds successfully executed a series of ambushes and strategic retreats. By the end of the campaign, the Jiangxi Soviet expanded significantly, validating Mao's strategies and shifting public favor towards the communists.   #124 Sino-Tibetan War of 1930–1932 Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. For those who know their Sino history, we are drawing close to the year of 1931. This is arguably the year WW2 actually began, some of you might be confused by that statement, but I assure you mainland Chinese would argue this point very much. Once we breach that door its going to be a very long time before we can talk about the multiple other things going on in China. For example, a lot happens in China's northwest. So I thought it would be best to tackle some of that before we jump into the 15 year China War. Do forgive me for being a tease. So the first thing I wanted to talk about is the Second Sino-Tibetan War of 1930-1932. Now this is a huge can of worms as they say and to truly understand it we need to cover a lot of history. There has always been conflict between whatever we consider historically China and Tibet. Historians have often broken things down into three major conflicts during the early 20th century that led directly to the second Sino-Tibetan War. After the outbreak of the Xinhai Revolution, the 13th Dalai Lama closely monitored the political changes in mainland China and the situation of the central government's officials and military stationed in Tibet, preparing to organize Tibetan forces and initiate an anti-Han Incident movement. In March 1912, the Dalai Lama issued a "Public Letter" through the Ganden Palace via the Kashag. The Kashag was the governing council of Tibet during the rule of the Qing  all the way to the 1950s. Following the release of this letter, the 13th Dalai Lama immediately formed a "Tibetan People's Army" of over ten thousand troops, deciding to use force to expel the Sichuanese army. The Tibetan forces first dealt with the Sichuan troops stationed in Yadong, Jiangzi, and Shigatse, and then besieged the Sichuan troops in Lhasa. Fearing being attacked from both within and outside, the Tibetan forces hastened to eliminate the Sichuan troops already within Tibet. The local Tibetan authorities also initiated an offensive against the region known as the Kham in the west of Sichuan. After 1939 this would be called Xikang, so to make things easier I will refer to it as such. The extensive eastward expansion of the Tibetan army shocked the entire nation, prompting military and political figures from Sichuan, Yunnan, and other areas to issue telegrams or contact the central government, demanding military action to quell the unrest and stabilize Tibet. In response to the chaotic situation in Tibet and Xikang, the Yuan Shikai government adopted a strategy of sending troops to suppress it. On May 25, 1912, Yuan Shikai issued an order for a westward expedition, and on June 14, the Beiyang government directed Governor of Sichuan,Yin Changheng to lead the troops westward. On July 10  Yin Changheng led 2,500 Sichuan troops westward from Chengdu. At the same time, Cai E also dispatched Yunnanese troops northward to meet the Sichuan army in Tibet. In August, the Sichuan army split into two routes: the southern route led by Zhu Senlin attacked Hekou, modern day Yajiang and Litang, defeating the Tibetan troops and capturing the key strongholds of Maguizong, Jianzibay, and Xie Luoluo, subsequently laying siege to Litang; the northern route was led by Liu Ruilin, who provided assistance to Chengdu and Batang. Meanwhile, the Yunnanese troops entered Tibet via the Nu River, capturing the gateway of Yanjing in northern Yunnan. At the end of August, Liu Ruilin attacked the eastern Tibetan stronghold of Chengdu. On September 3, Zhu Senlin's forces captured Litang and recaptured Gongjue, Sanyan, and Tongpu; shortly thereafter, the areas of Zhanhua, Baiyu, Daocheng, Xiangcheng, and Zha Ya also surrendered. On September 16, the western expeditionary army advanced westward from Chengdu, attacking Jiangda. By the end of September, the western expeditionary army had recovered all territories belonging to the late Qing dynasty's Sichuan-Yunnan border affairs department, except for the counties of Kema and Chayu in the southern route, and Dingqing represented by roughly 39 clans, Shobanduo, Lari, and Jiangda in the northern route.  On September 12, the Beijing government ordered the change of Jiangda in Tibet to Taizhou Prefecture, Lari to Jiali Prefecture, and Shobanduo to Shodu Prefecture. On the 25th, Yin Changheng was appointed as the pacification envoy at the Sichuan border, overseeing the Xikang region, which was divided into the eastern and western border areas, governing the six prefectures of Kangding, Lihua, Ba'an, Dengke, Chengdu, and Jiahe, as well as the two states of Dehua and Ganzi. Just as the western expeditionary army was achieving victory and preparing to enter Tibet from Kangding, the British colonial authorities publicly intervened, trying to prevent the expeditionary army from entering Tibet. Under British pressure, Yuan Shikai was forced to order the Sichuan and Yunnan armies to delay their advance, effectively halting their progress at the Nu River line. At the same time, the Beiyang government's policy towards Tibet shifted from suppression to pacification. Although the Sichuan and Yunnan armies ceased their military actions against Tibet, the significance of the western expedition was profound, as it enabled the central government to basically recover Xikang and played a significant role in curbing the British colonizers and Tibetan separatist forces, preventing Tibet from repeating the fate of Outer Mongolia. Thus ended the first period of conflict. What proceeded was known as the Simla Convention, we actually covered that event in some detail a long time ago in this series. More or less the convention divided Tibet into Outer and Inner Tibet, which also were referred to as U-Tsang and western Kham, ie: Xikang. With the support and assistance of Britain, the Tibetan local government gathered troops in Eastern Tibet to confront the Sichuan army, aiming to use military force to advance the control area of the Tibetan government to Dajianlu. In September 1917, two Tibetan soldiers from the Lhoka area invaded the Sichuan army's defense zone and were captured and sent to Chengdu by the border troops. After questioning by Commander Peng Risheng, it was made clear that the captured Tibetans would have to be detained. Tibet sent a letter to negotiate, requesting the return of the captured Tibetans, to be handled by Tibetan officials. Peng, without assessing the situation, executed the captured individuals and sent their heads back, which obviously infuriated the Tibetans, leading them to mobilize a large force to attack En and Lhoka. The British immediately supplied the Tibetan army with 5,000 quick-firing rifles and 5 million rounds of ammunition to support a large-scale offensive against Enda County and Lhoka. By January 1918, Enda County had fallen, and the counties of Chaya, Ningjing, and Changdu were all under attack from the well-armed Tibetan army. In March, Ningjing County was lost, and the Chengdu garrison, who were quote “surrounded on all sides, though there was plenty of food in the city, had run out of ammunition.” In June, the Tibetan army captured Chengdu, and after accepting Peng Risheng's surrender, advanced rapidly eastward across the Ningjing Mountains and the Jinsha River, capturing the counties of Dege, Dengke, Shiqu, Baiyu, Gongxian, Wucheng, and Ningjing, until they were stopped by fierce fighting from the border troops at Ganzi.  On August 8, 1918, the Dalai Lama expressed his unwillingness to oppose what he called “the Chinese benefactor” but agreed to ceasefire negotiations. On August 21, a ceasefire agreement consisting of thirteen articles was reached in Chengdu among Liu Zanting, a representative of the Sichuan border troops, Jiangbadan, a representative of the Tibetan side, and a representative of the British government. They agreed that the Tibetan army would withdraw from the recently occupied counties of Zhanhua and Ganzi and return them to the Sichuan border, while the remaining occupied counties would be managed by Tibetan officials. They also agreed to a ceasefire for one year starting from October 17, 1918, awaiting a resolution to the Tibetan issue from the central government and the Dalai Lama. This “Thirteen-Article Agreement” effectively recognized the Tibetan army's occupation of the border areas in legal terms. After this, Chengdu and the aforementioned seven counties west of the Jinsha River came under the control of the Tibetan local government. Thus ended the second period of conflict.  Here we come to the year of 1930. Now a lot had occurred during the 1920's. The Beiyang government had tried to maintain the indirect administrative structures of the former Qing Dynasty. In the absence of effective Chinese political control over Tibet, implementation of national policy fell onto regional actors, in this case Fu Zuoyi in Suiyuan and Liu Wenhui in Xikang. Along the Qinghai/Amdo frontier, Sino-Muslim leaders like Ma Bufang projected military authority from the provincial capital of Xining. Now a lot of what we are about to talk about revolves around a place called Yushu. Yushu is a mountainous region of the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau. The Tanggula Mountains form the southwestern boundary of Yushu, bordering Tibet. In the largely uninhabitable northwestern region of Yushu, you'll find the renowned Kekexili nature reserve and the railway connecting Xining to Lhasa. The main branch of the Kunlun Mountains, which splits Qinghai province into northern and southern regions, forms Yushu's northern boundary, while a branch of the Kunlun range, the Bayanhar Mountains, defines its northeastern edge. Yushu is the source of three of Asia's major rivers. The northeasternmost section of Yushu drains into the Yellow River as it flows towards Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu. Central and southeastern Yushu give rise to the headwaters of the Mekong and Yangzi, known locally as the Zhaqu and Tongtian rivers. The Qinghai provincial government emphasized the region's prominent topographical features—mountain ranges and river systems. Provincial reports meticulously described the mountain passes that link Yushu to key areas such as Lhasa, Chengdu in Xikang, Sichuan, Xinjiang, and Xining, along with the challenging passes within Yushu. Yushu is a very difficult terrain for communication and transportation, quite the obstacle for governance. The journey between the provincial capital and Yushu totaled over 1620 li, a highway connecting such a path would not be built until 1944. A strong local governance was found in the form of Tibetan tribes known as the 25 peoples of Yushu. Yet the Qinghai provincial government sought to govern the land and those in Xining viewed Yushu as a barbarian region, where pastoral nomadism reigned. They would speak of Yushu as being an endless steppe inhabited by barbaric people who wandered aimlessly. Yushu had a complicated economic geography with monasteries occupying the richest land and concentrating monetary, spiritual, and political power on the local scale and pastoral tribes migrating in the areas in between. The monasteries acted as sites for periodic markets of trade, throughout Yushu. As much as they were Tibetan Buddhist monasteries for religious devotion, they were also landowners with powers of taxation. The hereditary tribal ladders of the 25 peoples of Yushu were thus a secondary network of political and economic authority in Yushu. The pastoral tribes who traversed the borderless region of Yushu, Xikang and Kham confused outsiders. The Beiyang government, as I have said, tried to simply adopt the former Qing policies. For Yushu they were ruling through an indirect system of local headmen. Each tribe determined their title, either company commander or battalion commander and were responsible for bi-annual taxes and periodic military conscription to the government in Xining. One of these tribal leaders, Cai Zuozhen, the leader of the Buqing tribe came from Huangyuan, lying between Xining and the Riyue mountains. His father worked as a translator for the Xining tribute tax collection missions. The 1920's were continuous years of strife, especially between the tribes. No governing body really understood or had any real control over the region. In 1929 Yusuhu became an official county and on August 6th of that year, Ma Qi advocated an 8 point plan for calming her border problems. The plan included reconstructing a civilian government, promoting Tibetan Buddhism, opening more land for agriculture, training troops, establishing factories and mills, improving transportation and securing borders. He sought to implement all of this through the Yushu county government. However in the same year the Civil Affairs Bureau recommended adding 7 new counties some of which would carve chunks out of Yushu. The plan never materialized due to ongoing government difficulties, but remained on the table. In the meantime the government began a provincial level training program for self-government regions within Qinghai. 50 graduates came out of this program, none came from or were sent to Yushu. By the late 1920's the region was being fought over by multiple parties for multiple reasons. There were 3 overarching reasons for why war would break out. Number 1 was because of the border disputes between Tibet and China. The Tibetans claimed areas inhabited by their people in the neighboring provinces of Qinghai and Sichuan were being ruled by warlords with loose connections to the Nanjing government. 2) There was a dispute between the 13th Dalai Lama and 9th Panchen Lama. To clarify the Panchen Lama is second to the Dalai Lama, to be more specific “the Panchen Lama is the reincarnation of Amithaba, the Buddha of Boundless Light, while the Dalai Lama is the reincarnation of Avalokiteshvara (Chenrezig in Tibetan), the Buddha of Compassion. Traditionally, each acts as mentor to the other, and plays a key role in identifying the other's reincarnation”. Anyways the 9th Panchen Lama had been exiled and seen to be quite pro Chinese. 3) was the complex disputes of the people in regions like Yushu. Now the catalyst for the war was a chieftain from the town of Beri, which is in Yushu but is in an area claimed by Tibet, but under control of Sichuan. This chieftain whose name I cannot for the life of me find, seized items from the Targye Monastery. It is alleged the 9th Panchen Lama incited this action. The monks of the monastery rallied forces and took back the properties. The chieftain then asked for help from the governor of Sichuan, Liu Wenhui. Liu Wenhui unleashed forces into the area, forcing the Targye monks to ask for help from the Tibetan government who drove his men out. Thus began a series of clashes. The KMT Muslim official Tang Kesan was dispatched to negotiate an end to the conflict. Muslim General Ma Fuxiang, as head of the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission, sent a telegram instructing Tang Kesan to break the agreement with Tibet, fearing political rivals in Nanjing were exploiting the situation. In the following years, Tibetan forces launched repeated attacks on Liu Wenhui's troops but were defeated multiple times. In 1932, the Tibetans rallied 6000 troops along the Jinsha river, an area that acted as the boundary between Yushu and Xikang. In response to the Tibetan threat, in March the Qing government established the Qinghai Southern Border Region garrison under Ma Bufang. Two brigades deployed in Yushu; the first brigade was led by Ma Xun and the 2nd by Ma Biao. The Tibetans invaded, but only Ma Biao's men were ready at the border as Ma Xun's were still enroute from the provincial capital. At the time of the attack Ma Biao had one camp of cavalry, alongside some headquarters personnel for a combined total of 400 men. He dispatched his secretary Wang Jiamei to Tibet to try and negotiate a peaceful settlement. It is believe he did this simply to delay the enemy as he immediately telegrammed Ma Bufang for reinforcements, but they would not arrive until mid-june. On March 24th the Tibetans attacked Lesser Surmang, gradually forcing their way into southern Qinghai. After 8 hours of battle, both sides suffered tremendous casualties. During that night within the county seat of Jiegu, Ma Biao convened a conference attended by chieftains, merchants and important town leaders. At the meeting, Ma Biao asserted “our strength is sufficient to protect the lives and property of Yushu's residents. Not only will we resist Tibetan incursions, but in the future we will tie our war horses at the gate of the Tibetan government compound!” However Ma Biao would find it quite difficult to make due on these promises. On March 26th, the Greater Surmang contingent of his forces met 500 Tibetans on the battlefield just southeast of Jiegu. As told to us by Cai Zuozhen “the Tibetans simply overwhelmed the undermanned provincial forces by at least five to one”. They retreated to a camp near Duolongduo where they quickly became surrounded by Tibetan forces. At the same time a detachment of other provincial forces at Lesser Surman, just 30 men were encircled by 100 Tibetans. The provincial forces continuously retreated in the face of an enemy 5-10 times larger than them. The Tibetans methodically seized territory heading north to encircle the county seat of Jiegu. At the same time a contingent of 300 troops from Xikang forded the Tongtian river to attack the monasteries at Labu and Xiewu situated on the two vital thoroughfares heading north to Jiegu. The Tibetans held a strong military position and in one incredible move sweeped and occupied all the areas surrounding Jiegu's southern portion, severing the county seats communication with Xining. Jiegu was the site of Yushu's county government and nominally held the headquarters of the southern Qinghai garrison, thus it was the key holding Xining's position in the southern borderlands. Now outnumbered 10 to 1 by the Tibetans and with their communications severed, the situation for Xining and the Qinghai forces was quite dire. It seemed likely the Tibetans would shut the door, locking Xining out. The Southern Qinghai border region garrison, a mouthful to be sure, under Ma Biao were digging in for a long drawn out defense of the Yushu county seat while Xining went into a frenzy of actions. On April 19th, Ma Lin and Ma Bufang telegrammed the Military affairs commission in Nanjing with strong recommendations for improving the situation. They wanted to move the Southern Qinghai garrison roughly 20 li west of Jiegu and station a regiment between Jiegu and Xining at Daheba to protect the lines of communication. They also requested 2000 rifles, 20,000 rounds of ammunition, 40,000 yuan and 5 wireless telegraphs. While this sounds like peanuts, but do remember Japan is currently full blown invading Manchuria. On the last day of april, Ma Bufang requested Ma Lin dispatch the Southern Qing Border Region garrison's 1st brigade commander Ma Xun, cause everyone's a Ma in this episode, to the southern front as Yushu's Pacification Commissioner. He also again stated he wanted a peaceful settlement to the conflict. 4 days later, Ma Bufang and Ma Lin telegrammed Xi'an announcing Ma Xun's appointment as “Yushu xuanwei shi”, the Yushu Pacification Commissioner. Yet it was not until May 24th, that Nanjing's response reached Xining via Xi'an. Within the communique, Chiang Kai-Shek approved their suggestions and would meet their requests for military aid although at lower levels than requested. Only one wireless telegraph set was sent by Nanjing, but it dramatically improved communications.  On May 26th, Ma Xun departed Xining for Yushu with others stating “regardless of whether peace can be maintained, the communications route between the provincial capital and Jiegu must be protected at all costs”. Ma Xun departed with roughly a regiment of 100 troops, some provincial officials with Mongolian and Tibetan language skills, and a surveyor. Meanwhile Ma Bufang led another expeditionary force as far as Daheba, the site of a proposed garrison between Xining and Jiegu. Ma Xun's Mongolian and Tibetan specialists had orders from Nanjing to visit Qinghai and awe the “barbarians” into loyalty to the new government by offering them doctors, dentists, botanists and anyone who could dazzle the “backward superstitious locals”.  For two months, Ma Biao and his men struggled to maintain Jiegu's defenses, till finally on June 18th, Ma Xun's group arrived. He would soon be followed up by 2 waves of reinforcements on August 20th and September 20th. Despite efforts made by Cai Zuozhen and other small contingents of Qinghai troops, the Tibetans simply have overwhelming numbers. The Qinghai troops however inflicted much more casualties upon them when they fought. A battle broke out on June 27th at the Changu Monastery, 5 li south of the county seat, where Qinghai forces led by Ma Biao defeated a Tibetan force twice their side who also enjoyed high ground advantage. The same forces also fought again near the Tongtian River due north of Jiegu where the Tibetans were forced to withdraw. It also seemed the Tibetans lacked adequate artillery, as was evident with their inability to take Jiegu. Many of the civilians within Jiegu noted the Tibetans fired over forty cannon rounds into the city, but none of the rounds exploded. On July 23rd, Ma Bufang dispatched a regiment led by La Pingfu to Yushu. Despite the combined forces of Ma Biao and Ma Xun engaging the Tibetans three times, they had still not seen the full strength of the Tibetans. There was a great concern on the Chinese side that the Tibetans were trying to lure as many in as possible before overwhelming them with numbers. Ma Bufang also dispatched reinforcements led by Ma Lu to the southern borderlands. On August 20th, La Pingfu arrived at Jiegu and freed the city of a Tibetan encirclement. La Pingfu's troops were exhausted from the incredible 20 day march through insane terrain, they quickly took up defensive positions. This allowed the forces of Ma Biao and Ma Xun to depart south with 800 local militiamen to attack the Tibetans. They found Tibetans in the dead of night. The Qinghai forces used Dadao dui swords to hack them during hand to hand combat. The Tibetans dispersed, but reorganized themselves the next morning. The Qinghai forces took some high ground and met the counter attack, this time decisively defeating the Tibetans who suffered tremendous casualties. After four months, the Jiegu encirclement seemed to finally be broken. Afterwards the Qinghai forces formed three groups to advance south to retake lost territory. Ma Biao and Ma Xun led route armies while La Pingfu followed behind. Ma Bufang ordered a punitive mission against the local Tibetans, hoping they would simply withdraw from Yushu peacefully. He also ordered law and order to be brought back to the region. Military commanders were to gather local religious and political elites who could deal with the inevitable issues like refugee waves. To further push the Tibetans to pull out orders were mandated that medical care be given to wounded Tibetan soldiers with promises of funding for their return journey to Tibet as POW's. Me Bufang also issued communiques to all the inhabitants of Yushu asking them to get their local leaders and militia to expel Tibetan soldiers, promising rewards. Cai Zuozhen's reports differed greatly from Ma Bufang's orders. Cai Zuozhen received reports for example that Ma Biao's men routinely killed POW's, attacked Tibetan civilians and robbed Tibetan merchants. Cai Zuozhen would go on the record to accuse Qinghai forces of burning entire villages, looting monasteries, raping women and even nuns. During this time folk songs emerged in Qinghai talking about bitter lives under the oppression of Xining overlords who conscripted soldiers, stole horses and property to feed themselves on “human soup” while the common people ate husks and chafe. It was often sung “the sun doesn't rise in the Ma Family's Qinghai” As the Qinghai troops continued advancing south they punished locals for helping Tibetans. One local headman in Nangqian who had helped Tibetans had 10,000 jin of Tsampa, 20,000 jin of barley, 3000 jin of yak butter, 200 head of cattle and 40 sheep commandeered by Ma Biao. Many headmen would be forced to give goods to Ma Xun, Ma Biao and La Pingfu, such things as pelts, antlers, horses and money. It was said Ma Biao took enough to be worth 2000 silver dollars from the nomads of Laxiu. During late August and early September, the Qinghai forces fought the Tibetans for the Surman region and the southeastern part of Yushu. They unleashed artillery on their enemy, trapping 2000 Tibetans soldiers into a confined area. They encircled them and systematically annihilated them, massacring 200. Little Surmang quickly came back under Xining's control as the Tibetans fled to Greater Surmang. On September 2nd, La Pingfu led 300 men to occupy the rear exit of Greater Surmang. Despite a valiant defense led by two of Tibet's best generals, they suffered a string of defeats and were forced to relinquish Greater Surmang.  Then the third wave of reinforcements arrived from Xining, Ma Lu's brigade who came to Jiegu on September 20th. This effectively solidified the Qinghai position. Ma Lu, Ma Xun, Ma Biao and Ma Biao all met south of Jiegu at Batang where they agreed they would set out for the Jinsha River which marked the border between Yushu and Xikang. There they would decisively defeat the enemy upon the western shore at Xidengke. At the Qingke monastery, facing the Dengke river, a major connecting point to Changde was the Tibetan powerbase in the region. The monastery's defenses were very solid, 3 lines of over 5000 troops. On October 15th, the Qinghai artillery began raining hell upon the monastery as the infantry encircled the area. The Qinghai forces split their approaches attacking and moving while encircling. They were aided by Xikang troops who also bombarded the monastery from across the Jinsha river. The Tibetans could not withstand the joint attacks and gradually gave up their positions. The Qinghai and Xikang armies then connected across the river. Liu Wenhui led the Xikang forces and was communicating with Ma Bufang who ordered his forces to accept orders from the Xikang army.  Many historians believed Liu Wenhui had coordinated this joint military campaign against the Tibetans, taking advantage of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. It seems Liu Wenhui thought it was an opportune time to “solve the Tibet problem once and for all”, this would have been a hell of an escalation. Liu Wenhui sent word to Ma Bufang who notified Chiang Kai-Shek of their joint operation. However Chiang Kai-Shek demanded they halt hostilities and try negotiations with the Dalai Lama. Meanwhile the Dalai Lama received reports of their string of defeats and the loss of territory east of the Jinsha river, so he agreed to begin negotiations. What came from this was the Qinghai-Tibetan Peace Treaty, which more or less just set everything back to pre-war status quo. The Tibetans would never again pose a serious threat to Qinghai's domination of Yushu. Yushu's strategic passes would remain in Qinghais control well into the founding of the Peoples Republic of China. I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. While it would appear as a major side quest in the greater scheme of things, the small war between Tibet and Sichuan was just another example of how not unified China still was. Despite all the grand claims, the new Nanjing government was still overseeing quite a fractured nation, who were about to face the full might of the Empire of the rising sun.   

Moving on with our third part of the Gishiwajinden Tour, we head to the old area of Matsuro, which, for us, means modern Karatsu.  Here we have some of the oldest rice paddies in all of Japan, but Karatsu is so much more.  It was part of Matsura, where the Matsura family (aka league, factions, or pirates, depending on how you saw it) arose.  It is also a short hop from Nagoya, which briefly became the capital of Japan; Nagaoka-kyo gets a mention in the histories, but Nagoya rarely merits it, since it was just the Taiko and every actually important person minus the Tenno. For more photos and others such things, check out: https://www.sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/matsuro-koku/   Rough Transcript: Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua and this is Gishiwajinden Tour, Part Four:  Matsuro-koku So far on this tour through the locations listed in the Weizhi's Wa Record, the Gishiwajinden, following the route to Queen Himiko of Wa, we've hit the area of Gaya, or Gara; Tsushima—or Tuma-koku; Iki, aka Iki-koku; and now we are arriving at Karatsu, thought to be the location of Maturo-koku. Now before we go any further, let's talk about the name.  After all, up to this point in the account, the names haven't been too far off.  Well, Tsushima was recorded as something like Tuma in the Chinese record, which seems reasonable, and “Iki” was actually recorded as something like “I-dai”, though we are pretty sure that was a transcription error based on other evidence. But Karatsu and Maturo, really don't seem related.  Also, didn't we earlier equate Matsuro with Matsuura, Matsura?  But if you look for Matsuura on a map it is quite some distance away from Karatsu—in fact, it is in modern Nagasaki prefecture as opposed to Karatsu, which is in modern Saga prefecture. First off, Karatsu is a later name for the city, not the area.  It literally means “Tang Port”, and that name seems to appear in the 15th century in the form of Karatsu Jinja, or Karatsu Shrine.  So no, the names Karatsu and Matsuro are not related.  Prior to being called Karatsu, though, it was part of a larger area called Matsura.  It sits at the head of the Matsura River, which spills out into what is now called Karatsu Bay.  In ancient times this seems to have been the heart of the area known as Matsura or Matsuro.  Over time it was incorporated into the larger area known as Hi no Kuni, and when Hi no Kuni was divided up by the Ritsuryo state into Hizen and Higo, we see the Matsura district, or Matsura-gun, is a part, along the coast.  The fact that it is spelled as “Matsu” and “Ura”, meaning “pine beach”, might hint at the original name of the place or could be a false etymology, imposed by the need to record the location in kanji, the Sinitic characters used at the time.  Fun fact time:  Hizen refers to the area of the land of Hi that was closer to Yamato, while Higo refers to the area of the land of Hi that was further away.  If you look at a modern map of where these two ancient provinces were, however, you'll notice that by a slight technicality, Higo is actually closer, as the crow flies.  But remember, people are not crows, at least not in this life, and in all likelihood, most of the travel to and from Yamato would have been via sea routes.  So Hizen is closer to Yamato from that perspective, as you would have to sail from Higo, around Hizen, or take the long way south around Kagoshima. But where were we? So Matsura district in Hizen started at Matsura-gawa and the area around Karatsu bay, and included modern areas of Hirado all the way out to the Goto islands.  That was a pretty large area.  It later got further subdivided into East, West, North, and South Matsura subdistricts, with Karatsu in the Eastern subdistrict, and some portion of the west.  Eventually, Karatsu city became its own administrative district, in modern Saga prefecture, and so did Hirado city, in what was the old Northern Matsura sub-district, joining Nagasaki prefecture.  The western sub-district went to Karatsu or incorporated as Imari, known for their Imari-ware pottery.  And that left a small portion of the northern sub-district. The incorporated villages and islands eventually came together as Matsuura city, in Nagasaki prefecture, which is what you'll see, today.  And that is why, looking at a modern map, “Matsura” and modern “Matsuura” are not precisely in the same place. That history also helps demonstrate the historical connections between Karatsu, Hirado, Iki, and Tsushima—as well as the Goto islands.  This region was where the Matsura clan arose, which controlled at least out to Iki, Hirado, and the Goto archipelago, and it was known for its strong navy, among other things. For our trip, heading to Karatsu was originally borne out of convenience:  Our goal was to take the ferry so that we could travel along the ocean routes.  We had traveled the route from Izuhara, on Tsushima, to Ashibe port, on Iki island.  During that trip it was interesting to watch as Tsushima disappeared and then eventually Iki appeared on the horizon, but it wasn't immediate, and I suspect you would have wanted an experienced crew who knew the route and knew what to look for.  Conversely, from Indoji port, on Iki, to Karatsu I felt like we were constantly in sight of one island or another, or at least could see the mountains of Kyushu to get our bearings.  There wasn't really a time that felt like we were that far out from land.  Even so, it would still have been a treacherous crossing back in the day. Coming in to Karatsu from the ferry, the first thing you will notice is the castle.  Karatsu castle, also known as Maizuru Castle, is a reconstructed castle, but it really does provide a clear view of what one would have seen.  The original was abandoned in the Meiji period and sold off in 1871.  The main keep was later demolished and made into a park.  In 1966 they built a new, 5-storey keep on the original base, and from 1989 onward have continued to make improvements to various parts of the castle moats and walls.  You can still see the layout of the Ninomaru and honmaru sections of the castle, encompassing the old samurai districts of the jokamachi, or castle town, of Karatsu during the Edo period. Our primary goal in Karatsu, however, was not castle focused.  We wanted to go back to an earlier time – the Yayoi period, to be precise - and Karatsu and the Matsuro-kan did not disappoint.  While not quite as extensive as the reconstruction at other Yayoi sites like Harunotsuji or Yoshinogari, the site at the Matsuro-kan is still impressive in its own right. What is the Matsuro-kan, you might ask?  It is the building and grounds of what is also known as the Nabatake site.  In 1980, construction workers were excavating for a road through the Nabatake section of Karatsu when they noticed they were pulling up artifacts.  An investigation between 1980 to 1981 determined that the artifacts were from the late Jomon to middle Yayoi period.  Further investigation discovered the presence of old rice paddies.  In 1983 the site was designated as a national historic site, further excavations were carried out, and the Matsurokan was built to house the artifacts and also provide some reconstructions of what the rice paddies would have looked like.  For context these are some of the oldest rice paddies found in Japan, along with the nearby Itazuke rice paddies, in neighboring Fukuoka prefecture, and are key for giving us insights into what we know about early rice field cultivation. Here I should point out that these fields were in use through the middle Yayoi period, while the mission to Yamato—or Yamatai—recorded in the Weizhi would have been in the late Yayoi or early Kofun period, so likely several hundred years later.  There are other Yayoi settlement remains found up and around the peninsula, and there are Kofun in the area, especially along the banks of the Matsura river.  Given how built up much of the area is, it is possible that any large scale settlement may have been destroyed by subsequent settlements, or is somewhere that there just hasn't been a good reason for a full excavation.  Still, who knows what we might eventually find.    The Matsurokan appears to stick with the dating of the Yayoi period from about 300 BCE.  This is based largely on assumptions regarding the development of different pottery styles.  Recent research has suggested that this should be pushed back to about 800 or even 1000 BCE, suggesting a more gradual development.  For our purposes, it is enough to note that this site appears to cover from the final Jomon era in Kyushu to the coming of wet rice agriculture with the advancing Yayoi culture. Based on what was found at the site, the wet rice paddies were created in what at least one scholar has suggested as a “primitive” wet rice paddy.  The paddies themselves appear to have been placed in a naturally swampy area, irrigated by a natural stream.  This would have made flooding the fields relatively simple, without the large ponds or waterworks required to cover a more extensive area.  This may have sufficed for a small village, possibly only a handful of families living together and working the land. Besides the impressions of the paddies themselves, various tools, pottery, and more were also found at the site.  Stone harvesting knives were plentiful—a semicircular stone knife that was held in the fingers of one hand, allowing a harvester to grasp the stalks and cut them quickly.  This was the standard method of harvesting prior to the arrival of the sickle, or kama, and is still in use in some parts of China and Southeast Asia.  It is more labor intensive than the sickle, but provides some benefits in the consistency and lack of waste product. The Matsurokan demonstrates how a lot of the Yayoi tools are, in fact, still in use in one form or another in different cultures that also absorbed rice cultivation, showing how widespread it became. In addition, there are artifacts such as shards of pottery showing what looks to be the imprint of a woven fabric, and various equipment for weaving and sewing.  We have some beams and posts from buildings, which give us something at least try to guess at how things were put together. There are bones of various animals as well as stone arrowheads.  There are also fish and even dugong bones, suggesting they also made a living from the nearby sea.  And there are various bits of jewelry, including magatama, and what appears to be a shark's tooth with holes drilled in so it could be worn on a cord.    There are also carbonized rice grains found at the site, likely grown there. We don't have any ancient strains of rice that can be proven to come from these fields, but in their reconstruction, outside the museum, they have rebuilt some of the rice fields and grow old rice variants in them.  This is used, in part, to teach local schoolchildren about rice cultivation – in fact, local schools are allocated individual paddies each growing season. Besides the rice paddies, the Matsurokan also boasts several reconstructed dwellings.  These are similar to ones you might find elsewhere depicting what life was like back in the Yayoi period. As the Yayoi period gave way to the kofun, we do see some mounded tombs in the area, though not quite as many as in others.  Matsura appears to be rather rural. Around the Heian period, we see the rise of a local group that comes to be known as the Matsura group, or Matsura-tou, which eventually consolidated into the Matsura family.  There are several lineages claiming that the Matsura family descended from the Minamoto or Abe clans or through branch families thereof.  Matsura-to itself is sometimes called the 48 factions of Matsura.  It wasn't as much a family as an alliance of local warriors, each with their own base of operations.  I can't quite tell if the lineage of the later Matsura clan, as they were known, were meant to represent a single lineage or the various lineages that came together.  For all we know, they may have married into official families or otherwise concocted lineages to help legitimize them as much as anything else—this far out from the center, in the 11th century, there wasn't necessarily as much oversight. Early in the 11th century they also had a chance to prove themselves with the Toi invasion – that was the Jurchen invasion we mentioned last couple episodes.  After the Toi invaders attacked Tsushima and Iki, they set their sites on Hakata Bay, which was the closest landing to the Dazaifu, the Yamato government in Kyushu.  They were chased off and headed down the coast.  Minamoto Tomo is said to have led the forces that repelled the Toi invaders, who finally departed altogether, striking one more time on Tsushima before heading back to wherever they came from. Minamoto Tomo is said, at least in some stories, to have been the founder of the Matsura clan, or at least the leader of the 48 factions, which then coalesced into the Matsura clan, which eventually would run the Hirado domain. Over two hundred and fifty years after the Toi Invasion would come the Mongols.  If the Toi were bad, the Mongols were much worse.  The Toi were a band of marauders, who caused a lot of havoc, but do not appear to have had state backing.  The Mongols were perhaps more appropriately the Yuan empire, who had already conquered the Yellow river valley and were working on the Song dynasty along the Yangzi.  While the Toi had brought with them Goryeo warriors as well—who may or may not have joined up willingly—the Mongols had huge armies from all over that they could throw at a problem. As we talked about in the past two episodes, the Mongols swept through Tsushima and Iki and then headed straight for Hakata, the closest landing zone to the Dazaifu, the government outpost in Kyushu.  Even during the height of the Kamakura shogunate, this was still an important administrative center, and would have given the Mongols a huge advantage on holding territory and eventually sweeping up the archipelago. Fortunately, they were stopped.  Whether it was the gumption, skill, and downright stubbornness of their samurai foes or the divine wind that swept up from the ocean, the Mongols were turned back, twice. During each of these invasions, the Matsura clan and others rushed to the defense of the nation, but unlike with the Toi invasions, there do not appear to have been any serious battles along the Matsuura coastline—not that I can make out, anyway. After the Mongol invasion, Kyushu was not left out of the troubles that would follow, including the downfall of the Hojo, the rise of the Ashikaga, and the eventual breakdown of the shogunal system into the period known as the Warring States period.  Through it all the Matsura continued to ply the seas and encourage the trade from which they and others, like the Sou of Tsushima, came to depend on.  They also allied with other entrepreneurial seafarers, known to others as pirates, and they started trading with a group of weird looking people with hairy beards and pale skin, who came to be known as the Nanban, the southern barbarians—known to us, primarily, as the Portuguese. One faction of the Matsura were the Hata—no relation to the Hata that set up in what would become the Kyoto region in the early periods of Yamato state formation.  The Hata ruled the area that would become Karatsu, but eventually they were taken over by the Ryuzoji, who were allied with Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Hideyoshi's interest in the Karatsu and Matsura area had to do with its easy access to the continent.  And so Hideyoshi began to pay attention to Nagoya, at the end of the peninsula down from Karatsu.  And no, not *that* Nagoya.  If you hear Nagoya, today, you are probably talking about the bustling metropolis in Aichi, which was where Toyotomi himself got his start, growing up and going to work for the local warlord, named Oda Nobunaga.  Due to a quirk of Japanese names and how they read particular characters, this is a different Nagoya. The Kyushu Nagoya had been one of the Matsura trading posts, run by a sub-branch of the Hata family, who had built a castle on the site.  Hideyoshi had much grander plans for the area.  In 1591 he began work on a massive castle and associated castle town.  This castle was to be his new headquarters, and he moved his entire retinue there from Osaka, with an expectation that all of the daimyo would follow him.  Sure enough, they showed up with their own vassals, setting up camps around the peninsula and in the new city-to-be. The castle was the base of operations from which Hideyoshi coordinated the invasions of Korea.  It was a massive undertaking, and extremely impressive.  The city itself sprung up, and although the wood was still new, and the buildings somewhat hastily put together, it was soon a bustling metropolis and briefly became the center of art and culture in the entire archipelago. Hideyoshi himself had a teahouse built within the confines of the castle, where he apparently spent most of his days, even when receiving reports on how things were going across the sea on the archipelago.  The city had a Noh theater, as well.  It must have been a sight to see. As for the castle itself, based on the remains, it was massive.  It appears to use the contours of the hill upon which it sits.  It seems there was a previous castle there of some kind, and it is unclear how much this was merely expanded, but Hideyoshi's new castle was truly monumental, with a labyrinth of gates to get in -- similar  to Himeji Castle, for anyone who has been there, but with a serious vertical incline as well.  Nagoya Castle was second only to Osaka castle, and yet it was erected quickly—only 8 months.  I guess that's what you can do when you can mobilize all of the daimyo across Japan.  Even today, ruined as it is, the walls tower over you, and you can spend hours wandering the grounds. For all that it was impressive, the good times at Nagoya Castle lasted only for a brief seven years—when Hideyoshi passed away, the council of regents moved back to Osaka, and Nagoya castle was deliberately destroyed, stones removed from the walls such that it could never survive a true siege. This was a sign to the Korean peninsula – the Joseon court - that, with the death of the taiko, Japan had given up any pretext of conquering the peninsula. Today, only the stones and earthworks remain of the briefly thriving city, but on the grounds is a wonderful museum that catalogs this particular slice of Medieval life.  The Nagoya Castle Museum of Saga prefecture is off the beaten path—there is no train, so you'll need to take a bus or private car to get there—but it is well worth it. The museum itself is dedicated to Japanese and Korean cross-strait relations, which feels a bit like atonement given that the castle was built with conquest in mind. Of course, the centerpiece of the Museum is the castle, but it also does a good job telling the story of relations between the peninsula and the archipelago.  It starts in the ancient times, talking about how, even during the Jomon period, there were commonalities in fishhooks and similar equipment found from Kyushu up through the Korean peninsula.  From there, of course, trade continued, as we've seen in our journey through the Chronicles.  It talks about some of the shared cultural items found from the Yayoi through the Kofun, and also demonstrates how some of the earliest Buddhist statues have clear similarities to those found in Silla.  It goes over the various missions back and forth, and even gives a map of the Toi Invasion that we talked about hitting Tsushima and Iki. The Mongol invasion is also heavily talked about, but not nearly so much as the invasion of Korea.  There is another reproduction of the letter of King Sejeong, with the faked seal from the Sou clan in Tsushima.  This of course, was the period when they built Nagoya-jo into a castle and city of at least 100,000 people, almost overnight.  Even the Nanban were there, trading in the city while supplies from across the country were gathered and shipped off to keep troops fed on the invasion of Korea. There are plenty of images from this time—from a Ming envoy to Nagoya castle to images of the invasion from the Korean perspective, with Koreanized samurai manning the walls of the castles they had taken.  They don't exactly lionize the samurai, but they don't accentuate some of the more horrific things, either, like the piles of ears taken from those killed because taking their heads, as was standard practice in older days, was too cumbersome. There is also some discussion of relations afterwards—of the Joseon embassies, though those went through Hakata, Nagoya-jo having long been abandoned at that point.  For reasons one can probably understand, it doesn't go into the post-Edo relations, as that is much more modern history. After the destruction of Nagoya castle, the area was largely abandoned, but the city of Karatsu proper really thrived during the Edo period.  Karatsu was also a castle town, as we've mentioned, but a bit out of the way.  As sailing ships were now more sturdy and able to handle longer sea crossings, it was now often Hakata, in Fukuoka, that received much of the trade, and the Dutch traders who had replaced the Portuguese, were limited to Dejima, in Nagasaki. When Hideyoshi swept through, the Hata were not exactly considered trustworthy, and were placed under the Nabeshima, a branch of their rivals, the Ryuzouji.  During the invasion of Korea, the Hata rebelled, and were destroyed for it in 1593.  Their territory was given to Terazawa Hirotaka, who had been put in charge of the construction of Nagoya castle and later put in charge of the logistics for the invasion effort from the Kyushu side.  As a result, he was granted the lands formerly controlled by the Hata, including Karatsu, and what would become the Karatsu domain. Hirotaka could see which way the wind blew—in more ways than one.  After Hideyoshi's death, he supported Tokugawa Ieyasu, allowing him to keep and even expand his fief.  He redirected the Matsura river—then known as the Hata river—to its present course, and he built a pine grove along the northern beach that is the third largest such grove in all of Japan.  Known as the “Niji no Matsubara”, or the ”Rainbow Pine Forest” for its shape, it was erected as a windbreak to protect the precious farmland just on the other side.  It is still there today, still managed, and quite famous.  You can drive through the pine trees or stop and walk through them, even out to the beach.   And there is even a fantastic burger truck that parks along the main road through the pine grove, so you can enjoy a lovely picnic among the trees. The Terazawa would not remain in place for very long.  During the Shimabara rebellion of the early 17th century—a rebellion based on either taxes or Christianity, depending on whom you ask—the Terazawa line was extinguished.  Terazawa Katataka, then ruler of the Karatsu domain, was held liable for mismanagement of the domain and loss of a castle to the rebels.  He had land confiscated and he felt publicly humiliated, and so he took his own life while he was in Edo.  As he had no heir, the Terazawa line died out. Karatsu domain went through a variety of hands after that.  Its value fluctuated, but it is generally thought that the real value of the domain, thanks to the ability to trade, was well beyond what it was assessed to produce.  As such it was a lucrative position, and also held sway as a check against Nagasaki, watching the trade there with the Dutch merchants.  Because of all of this, the lord of Karatsu was also banned from holding certain government positions, so as not to distract from their duties, making the position something of a blessing and a curse. Through the years, Karatsu thrived.  They were and are still known for a type of traditional pottery, known as Karatsumono, or Karatsuware, and they maintain elaborate festivals.  One of the festivals, the Karatsu Kunchi, is considered a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage.The Karatsu Kunchi is an annual parade where neighborhood associations carry giant floats through the city from Karatsu Shrine down to the shore.  It was inspired, in the early 19th century, by the famous Gion Matsuri of Kyoto—a wealthy merchant saw that and donated the first lion-head float to Karatsu Shrine.  Later, others would create their own floats. These floats, known as “Hikiyama” or “pulled mountains” can be five or six meters high and weigh anywhere from two to five tons.  There appear to be 14 hikiyama, currently, though there used to be 15—a black lion is currently missing.  The floats have gone through a few iterations, but are largely the same, and often have some relationship to the neighborhoods sponsoring them. From Matsura, aka Matsuro-koku, we went north along the coast of Kyushu to Itoshima, thought to the be old country of Ito-koku, and beyond that, the Na-koku of Fukuoka.  We'll cover both of those in our next and final installment of our Gishiwajinden tour. If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts.  If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Also, feel free to reach out to us at our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.  You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com.  Thank you, also, to Ellen for their work editing the podcast. And that's all for now.  Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.

Apologies for any degradation of the sound quality.  This was recorded while we were traveling, and the room setup was not ideal, so if sounds like I'm in a cave, you know why ;) This episode we head over to the continent to kick off the Tang dynasty.  The Tang dynasty was extremely influential on Yamato and later Japan, as well as the rest of East Asia.  And so we'll take a look at how it got its start and how it expanded along the silk road, while at the same time talking about the literally cutthroat politics of the period.  Especially in the royal house.  Nobody fights like family. For more information, check out the podcast webpage:  https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-104   Rough Transcript Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua, and this is episode 104: A Bloody Start to a Golden Age It was early in the morning on the fourth day of the sixth month of the ninth year of Wu De.    Brothers Li Jiancheng, Crown Prince, and his younger brother, Li Yuanji, were more than a bit annoyed--Their brother had apparently slandered them to their father, the Emperor, claiming that they had had illicit relationships with his concubines.  Although the accusations were false, they still had to come to the palace to clear their names.  So they left the crown prince's residence at the Eastern Palace and were traveling on horseback with a retinue of men through the private, forested royal park north of the city towards the Xuanwu Gate—the northern gate to the palace and to the great city of Chang'an. As they approached Linhu Hall, they noticed something was afoot: there were soldiers in the park, headed their way. It was immediately apparent that the accusations had been a ruse, and their brother meant for more than just to tarnish their honor.  As they fled eastward, back towards the Eastern palace, their brother, Li Shimin, came galloping towards them and called out to them.  Li Yuanji tried to draw his bow, but couldn't get to it in time, and Li Shimin shot and killed Li Jiancheng, their older brother and the crown prince. Li Yuanji himself fell from his horse as he dodged arrows from the attacking troops, but Li Shimin also became entangled in the brush of the park and had to dismount.  Li Yuanji ran up to his brother and tried to strangle him with his bow string, but soon he was chased off by reinforcements.  Li Yuanji fled on foot to Wude Hall, where he was finally caught and struck down with arrows.  Li Shimin's forces struck off the heads of the two murdered princes, and took them to the Xuanwu gate, where opposing forces were still fighting.  Seeing the heads of the two princes, it was clear that Li Shimin's ambush was victorious, and the princes' forces quickly dispersed. Three days later, the victorious Li Shimin was instated as the new crown prince.  Two months later, his father, Li Yuan, known to history as emperor Tang Gaozu, abdicated in favor of his son, who came to power as Emperor Taizong.  This was the start of the Zhenguan era, which would come to be seen as a golden age in the history of the various Chinese empires. --------------- Alright, so as may be apparent, we are deviating a bit from our discussion of Yamato to look at some of the events on the continent.  This is because the rise of the Tang dynasty would have an incredible impact on the Japanese archipelago.  For one, it was the alliance between the Tang and Silla that would eventually mean the removal of Yamato and its allies from the Korean peninsula.  In addition, however, the Tang dynasty's access to the silk road and its grandiose government would become an exemplar for Yamato and many other polities who wished to demonstrate their political and cultural sophistication.  Many of the laws and even court dress would mimic that of the Tang court—with a local flare, of course.  In addition, the Tang dynasty brought a relative stability to the continent that would last for over two hundred years.  Of course, none of that was known at the outset, and like many previous kingdoms, the Tang dynasty was born out of bloodshed. We've mentioned several times how the Sui Dynasty was growing increasingly unpopular in the late 6th and early 7th centuries.  Wars continued to cost money and lives, as did the giant public works projects of the periods - though the Grand Canal would be one of the greatest constructions of any age, uniting the Yangzi and Yellow River basins in myriad ways, powering the regions' economies for centuries to come. Into this Sui period came a man of the Li family named Yuan.  We mentioned him back in episode 102, but I figured he could do with a little more backstory.  Li Yuan's family originated in the frontier regions.  Official biographies had connected him to the founder of the Western Liang dynasty, and his family had served in various roles as the different northern kingdoms rose and fell.  The Li family had been providing military service since the time of Yuan's great-grandfather, and Li Yuan himself had been serving since the early 600s.  He was made a general and placed in charge of the Dongguang pass  in the Taihang mountains.  There, he largely stayed out of the limelight.  At one point, he was summoned to the palace and rather than going he feigned illness, instead. You see, around this time there was a prophecy flying around that someone with the surname of Li would try to take the throne from Sui Emperor, Emperor Yang, so it may have been in Li Yuan's best interest to avoid the court and anything that could draw Emperor Yang's suspicions.  He continued to do everything in his power to make himself seem unthreatening, even as rebellions were breaking out across the Empire. In 614, the Sui army was defeated by Goguryeo, and the Sui court was plagued by numerous uprisings.  Li Yuan may have sat it out if it weren't for his son, Li Shimin.  Like many youthful individuals, Li Shimin was less than invested in the current administration.  He and several of his close acquaintances began to scheme behind his father's back, with plans to join the other uprisings and hope to take a piece of the pie.  Eventually, they blackmailed Li Yuan into marching on the capital of Daxingcheng in 617, threatening to expose several illicit relationships from his time at the court—relationships that would have surely put him at odds with the Emperor.  At the same time, Emperor Yang had fled to the southern capital along the banks of the Yangzi River, but his son and heir, Yang You, was still in the capital.  Li Yuan marched on imperial city of Daxingcheng, near the ancient capital of Chang'an, claiming that he was coming to protect the young heir. Taking control of the capital city put Li Yuan at odds with imperial forces, who did not necessarily accept Li Yuan's altruistic claims.  Li Yuan and his sons, including Li Shimin and Li Jiangcheng, were drawn into fighting.  Even Li Yuan's daughter, Pingyang, the wife of general Chai Shao, contributed to the war effort.  She personally raised an army and led it into battle, becoming the first female general of what would be known as the Tang dynasty. In 618, Emperor Yang of Sui was assassinated by another general, Yuwen Huaji, and the throne passed to his son, Yang You, known as Emperor Gong of Sui.  However, Li Yuan pressured the newly made Emperor Gong to yield the throne to him.  Since Li Yuan had inherited the title “Duke of Tang” from his paternal line, he used that as the name of his new dynasty, and became known as Tang Gaozu—the High Founder of Tang. It wasn't enough to simply take the throne, though.  There were still many other warlords looking to take his place.  After all, unification had only come about some thirty or forty years prior.  Up to that point, there had been numerous, often competing kingdoms, especially in the north.  It was quite possible that the Sui dynasty was just a fluke, and most people no doubt expected the empire to fall once more into chaos. Still, although he definitely had to back it up with military might, often led by his sons and close confidants, Li Yuan went about the process of enacting his sovereignty.  This included various state rituals, as well as a reform of the administration.  For one thing, they renamed the capital.  Daxingcheng had been built nearby the ancient capital of Chang'an, and so they renamed Daxingcheng to the ancient name of Chang'an. In addition, he sought out various supernatural portents.  He also enjoyed the support of various Daoists, who believed that the founder of Daoism, Laozi, was from the Li family.  There was a belief at the time that a messianic ruler from the Li family would bring about the Daoist millennium.  And to better understand that, it may be useful to understand a little bit about Daoism. Daoism, first and foremost, is one of the more well known religions to come out of China, and often is found side by side what would seem to be its polar opposite, Confucianism.  However, the two have more in common than one might at first assume. The believed founder of Daoism is known as Laozi, though some later sources, including the Qin dynasty “Records of the Grand Historian”, by Sima Chen, would claim for him the name Li Er.  Laozi was said to have been a scholar who abandoned the world, and as he was leaving the empire for parts unknown, an astute guard recognized him and requested that before he left that he write down his accumulated wisdom before he would let the old sage leave.  That became the work known as the Dao De Jing, or the Classic of the Way and Virtue. The opening of the Dao De Jing is rather famous: Dao ke Dao, feichang Dao. Or, according to one translation:  The Dao that can be known is not the eternal Dao. However, no English translation truly does the original justice. Traditionally, Laozi is said to have been a contemporary of Confucius, and some of the earliest writings on him, in the Warring States period writings of Zhuangzi, often show Confucius in awe of Laozi.  That said, most tend to agree that Laozi himself likely never existed, and that the Dao De Jing was assembled over the years from various poems and sayings that fit with the general theme of formlessness and a general concept of following the Way, a rather ill defined concept of natural order, one which humans are constantly pushing against, often to our detriment. Truth is that both Confucius and Laozi—or whomever compiled the Dao De Jing—wrote about a thing called the “Dao” or “Way”.  Confucius was often talking about the “Way of Heaven”, describing an ordered universe where balance was kept by everyone remaining in their proper place, creating a series of rules around strict, hierarchical relationships, such as those between a father and son, or the ruler and subject.  According to Confucian thought, as long as things on Earth were properly ordered, that order would be reflected in the Heavens, and all of creation would be ordered as well. In Daoism, it is much less about attempting to order the universe, but rather about giving in to your natural place in the universe.  This is a much simplified version of both religions, but in general, where Confucianism tended to see serving at court as a virtue, Daoism tended to reject official life.  For many court officials, they would embrace Confucian ideals in their official lives, but often seek out Daoist pleasures in their free time. Religious Daoism, where it became more than simply a philosophical ideal, appears to have coalesced around the Han dynasty.  There are Daoist temples, though in this instance it is often intertwined with many other Sinitic philosophies and beliefs.  Thus things like the Queen Mother of the West and the Peaches of Immortality could be included in Daoist practice.  Things like the Yijing, the Book of Changes, and various divination methods could also be included. In many cases, “Daoist” seems to be used less to refer to a strict adherent to the philosophy of the supposed Laozi, and more as a general catchall for various folk beliefs.  Thus many people see the images of the Queen Mother of the West on Han Dynasty mirrors imported to Japan as evidence of a Daoist influence on the archipelago, while others note the lack of the further panoply of religious accoutrements that we would expect if it was truly a “Daoist” influence, and not just a few folk beliefs that made their way across the straits. However, by the time that Li Yuan was coming to the throne there was a thriving Daoist community in the Sui and burgeoning Tang dynasties, and if they believed that Li Yuan was an incarnation of Laozi—or at least a messianic descendant—who was he to dissuade them of such a notion? Li Yuan reached back into the past in other ways as well.  For one, he would reinstitute the Northern Wei “equal-field” system of state granted land, along with a system of prefectures and districts to help administer it.  This was largely an effort to help fill up the coffers, which had been emptied by the Sui and constant warfare, while also emphasizing state ownership of land, with individuals being mere tenants.  It also helped bring back into cultivation lands that had long lain fallow, often due to the constant fighting of the previous centuries. In 621, Li Yuan ordered the minting of new copper coins to help stabilize the currency.  Later Sui currency had been devalued by numerous forgeries as well as official debasement—mixing in less valuable metals to make the coins, while attempting to maintain the same denominations as before.  These new coins were meant to restore faith in the currency, but shortages would continue to plague the dynasty throughout its history, leading to the use of cloth as a common medium of exchange and tax payment, something that was also common on the archipelago, along with other goods, in lieu of rice or money. By 624, Li Yuan also announced a new legal code based on the old Han era code, although this was quickly expanded, since the needs of the code from the 3rd century Now initially, for all of their claims to the entire geographic area of the Sui dynasty, the newly established Tang dynasty really only had effective control over a small are of Guanzhou—the area around Chang'an itself.  Li Yuan hadn't been the only one to rise up, and just because he had declared himself the new emperor didn't mean that the other warlords were just giving up.  It wasn't like they had reached the end of a football match and everyone was now just going to go home. And so he and his sons found themselves campaigning for at least the next five years, and that was against the active threats.  Plenty of local elites, especially along the Yellow River basin, simply opted to hole up in their fortified settlements.  After all, they had no guarantees that this new Tang dynasty would last longer than any of the others in the past several centuries.  Often these local elites came under nominal vassalage of the Tang—and probably any other warlord that showed up—but in reality, based on how we see the Tang administration at work, it seems they were primarily left to their own devices, at least early on.  After all, Li Yuan and his sons had plenty of active threats to worry about. And it was definitely his sons who bore the brunt of the work.  Li Jiancheng, the eldest son, who would eventually be named Crown Prince, and Li Shimin each took charge of various troops against  the threats to the new Tang empire.  And they were, for the most part, successful.  They eventually brought a majority of the former Sui territory under their control, such that by 623 internal resistance had begun to wane, and by 624 the situation was largely under control. At least internally.  To the north and west there was another threat:  The khaganate of the Göktürks. Now for many people, if you hear “Turks” you might immediately think of the Ottomans in the region of modern Turkiye.  However, that is not where the Turkish people originated from.  In fact, the first mention of Turkic people appears to be out of the Altai mountains, in modern Mongolia, from around 545.  They appear to have been a nomadic group, as were many of the people of the steppes of central Eurasia.  By 551, only a short time after they were first documented by outside groups, they had established the Göktürk, or Celestial Turk, Khaganate, based in the Mongolian plateau.  From there they expanded in the 6th century, at one point spanning from the Byzantine and Sassanid Persian empires in the west all the way to the kingdoms and empires of the Yellow River basin in the east. Many of the ethnic Han kingdoms that clashed with the Göktürks instituted practices of basically paying them off to prevent raids and invasions of their territory.  Shortly after the founding of the Sui dynasty, the Turkic Khaganate split in two, after the death of the khagan, and so the Sui and Tang were actually dealing with what we know as the Eastern Turkic Khaganate.  They were known to the ethnic Han people as the Thuk-kyat people, a term that today is often transcribed as Tujue, due to the shift in Sinic pronunciation over time.  “Tujue” is often how you'll see it rendered in sources referencing Chinese documents. The Eastern Turkic Khaganate remained an issue for the Sui and Tang dynasties.  Initially, when the uprisings against the Sui began, the Göktürks actually pulled back for a bit, hoping to allow the internal conflicts to weaken their eastern neighbors, but as they saw the direction things were taking, with the Tang dynasty solidifying their power, they began to launch invasions and harass the border, forcing the Tang dynasty to send troops.  Initially Li Yuan attempted to by off the Eastern Turks, as previous dynasties had done, but while they were happy to take his money, the invasions did not stop. Eventually, things got so bad—and the internal conflicts were in a stable enough state—that Li Yuan, decided to send a force against them.  A fairly straightforward decision, supposedly, except, well… Throughout all of this conflict, Li Jiancheng and Li Shimin had been building up their own influence.  Li Jiancheng, as the eldest son of Li Yuan, was the Crown Prince, but Li Shimin had built up his own power and influence, to the point that Li Jiancheng and his other brother, Li Yuanji, were starting to look at how they could take care of him before he got so powerful and popular that Li Yuan was tempted to make him Crown Prince instead of Jiancheng.  At one point, Li Yuanji proposed inviting Li Shimin over and just having him killed, but Li Jiancheng balked at such direct and obvious fratricide. Instead, Li Jiancheng reportedly pushed his younger brother into positions that would possibly get him killed, but Li Shimin continued to succeed, thwarting his brother's plans and growing his own fame and power in the process. Finally, Li Jiancheng decided to take a different approach, and he suggested to his father that the army to defend the empire against the Turks should be led by none other than Li Yuanji.  This would mean moving a large portion of the army out from under Li Shimin's command to his brother, Li Yuanji, who would also accrue much of the fame and respect if he proved successful.  This was a huge blow to Li Shimin, who had heard rumors that his brothers were out to get him. Before setting out on such a campaign, it would have been expected that Li Shimin and his other brothers turn out to wish Li Yuanji success in his campaign.  That would have put Li Shimin in an extremely vulnerable position, where he could be arrested or even killed, without the usual protection of his own forces.  And so Li Shimin decided to be proactive. Before the campaign could set out, Li Shimin submitted accusations against Li Jiancheng and Li Yuanji that they were having illicit relations with the concubines of their father, the emperor.  This got Li Yuan's attention, and he called both of his sons back to the palace to investigate what was going on.  This is what led to that fateful incident known as the Xuanwu Gate Incident.  Unbeknownst to Li Yuan or his other sons, Li Shimin had forces loyal to him take over the Xuanwu gate the night before Li Jiancheng and Li Yuanji were to have their audience.  Ideally, at least from Li Shimin's position, they would have both been assassinated at Xuanwu gate, but as I noted at the start of the episode, things did not go exactly to plan.   There were several moments where a single stray arrow could have completely changed the course of things, but in the end, Li Shimin was triumphant. As the fighting was going on, Li Yuan heard the commotion.  Apparently he had been out in a boat on the lake in the palace enclosure—and yes, you heard that right, the palace included a lake, or at least a very large pond, such that the emperor could partake in a lazy morning upon the water.  When he heard the commotion, he guessed that the tensions between his sons must be at the heart of it, and even surmised that Li Shimin was likely behind it.  He got to shore and surrounded himself with courtiers, including known comrades and acquaintances of his son, Li Shimin. Eventually, a representative of Li Shimin arrived, and he told the court that Li Jiancheng and Li Yuanji had risen up in rebellion, but that Li Shimin had had them both put to death.  With Li Shimin's troops literally at the gates of the palace, and Li Jiancheng and Li Yuanji not exactly able to defend themselves, the accusation stood.  Several days later, no doubt under pressure from Li Shimin, Emperor Tang Gaozu, aka Li Yuan, officially made Li Shimin the Crown Prince.  Two months later, he abdicated in favor of Li Shimin, who came to power as Tang Taizong in 626 CE.  Li Yuan himself took on the title of Retired Emperor, and continued to live life in the palace, but with a much reduced impact on the political affairs of the empire. Li Shimin himself took the reins of power immediately, and set about cementing his rule in several different ways.  First off, to offset his particularly unfilial method of coming to the throne, Li Shimin engaged in performative Confucian virtue signaling.  He played the part of the dutiful son, at least in public, providing for his retired father and attempting to act the part of the sage ruler.  This was somewhat impeded by the cold relationship he and his father appear to have maintained after that point—apparently killing your siblings and forcing your father to abdicate are not exactly the kinds of bonding experiences that bring a father and son closer together.  Still, that was mostly kept in the confines of the private areas of the palace.  Publicly, he gathered accomplished military and civilian officials, and made sure to seek out their opinion.  The era of emperor Tang Taizong is known as the Zhenguan era, lasting from roughly 627 to 649, and it was considered to be synonymous with good governance by later historians and philosophers.  Granted, most of the examples of good governance only lasted long enough for Li Shimin to establish himself in his position as emperor.  Once he had solidified his power, and felt secure in his position, his rule changed to a more traditional and authoritarian model. Regarding the threat of invasion from the Eastern Turkic Khaganate, Li Shimin met the Turks at the Wei River, where he accused them of invading Tang territory and demanded restitution.  The Turks were impressed enough by his forces that they agreed to settle, offering thousands of horses and other goods, but Li Shimin declined their attempts to make it good.  Eventually, Li Shimin supported some of the more disaffected members of the Turkic Khaganate in a coup, and by 630 the Eastern Turkic Khaganate and their gateway to the Silk Road was under Tang dynasty control.  The Turks granted Li Shimin the title of Heavenly Khagan, placing him over both the Tang dynasty and the Eastern Turkic Khaganate. He then went about resettling surrendered Eastern Turks while sending agents to foment rebellions and civil wars in the Western Turkic Khaganate, which controlled the area from Yumenguan, the Jade Gate, west of Dunhuang, all the way to Sassanid Persia.  Dunhuang is an oasis city at the western end of the Gansu corridor, and the Jade Gate was considered to be the entry way to the Western Regions. As Emperor Taizong, Li Shimin placed a puppet Khagan on the throne of the Western Turkic Khaganate in 642, and then sent numerous campaigns against the Western Turks in a series of wars against those who hadn't simply given in to his will—first against the kingdom of Gaochang, a city cut from the rock of a giant plateau, and then on to the cities Karashr—known today by the Chinese name of Yanqi—and on to Kuqa.  The campaigns would outlive Emperor Taizong himself, and the khaganate was completely annexed by 657, giving the Tang dynasty complete mastery over at least one part of the silk road out to Sassanid Persia and the west. This would be huge, not only for the Tang dynasty, but for all of the cultures on the far eastern end of that silk road.  There would be an increase in material and cultural items that traversed the routes.  Chinese court dress even came to incorporate Turkic and Sogdian dress and clothing styles, which would eventually make their way to the Japanese archipelago, where they would take the tailored, round-necked collar designs for their own, eventually changing them, by the late Heian era, into their own distinctive garments. It also opened a route to India for those Buddhist scholars who wished to go and study at the source, such as it was.  As for Emperor Taizong, by the 630s, with his title as Heavenly Khagan, Li Shimin seems to have stopped worrying about performative Confucian virtues.  He took more direct control, and more often would quarrel with his ministers on various issues.  In 637 he also reworked the Tang legal code, further refining the law. At the same time, there were family matters he also had to attend to.  It seems like father, like son—while Li Shimin's eldest son, Li Chengqian was the Crown Prince, Shimin appeared to favor another son, Li Tai.  As such, these two brothers became bitter rivals.  Li Chengqian started to worry about his position as Crown Prince, and he consulted with some of his close advisors and confidants.  Their solution was not to take his brother out of the picture, but rather to take his own father out of the picture.  And so Li Chengqian reportedly entertained the idea of overthrowing his father, Emperor Taizong, at least as a thought experiment. And really, at this point, I have some suspicions that Li Shimin might very well have been a bit of an absentee father, because does Chengqian even know whom he is talking about trying to coup? Sure enough, Li Shimin learned about his sons extracurricular activities in 643 and he was less than happy with all of this.  Li Chengqian's defense, appears to have been that they only discussed it, they never went through with anything.  As such, some of Chengqian's conspirators were put to death, but Chengqian himself was simply reduced in rank to commoner status, stripped of his titles.  When he died a few years later, though, Li Shimin had him buried as a Duke, and a later emperor would even posthumously restore his rank as an imperial prince. Of course, the question came up as to just what to do about the Crown Prince.  Li Tai seemed the obvious choice, as he had clearly impressed his father with his apparent talent and skill.  However, it was pointed out that Li Tai's competition with his brother is what had led to Chengqian's fear and thoughts of rebellion in the first place.  He hadn't exactly been the model of filial virtue. In fact, if he hadn't been scheming, none of this would have taken place.  And so it was decided to pass him over and to create Li Zhi, a younger brother, as Crown Prince.  Li Tai himself was demoted, though only down to a minor princely state, and exiled from Chang'an, making it extremely difficult for him to influence politics.  Records of the time suggest this was an extremely difficult decision by his father, but one that he considered necessary for the responsible administration of government. All of this was taking place in the early 640s, but it wasn't the only thing that Li Shimin had on his mind.  With the Turkic threat being handled in the west, the emperor let his ambitions get the better of him, and he turned his eyes towards Goguryeo, to his northeast.  Previously, Emperor Yang of Sui had failed in his campaigns against Goguryeo, and that was one of the things that had led to the popular uprisings and rebellion that had taken down the dynasty.  Now, Emperor Taizong seemed determined to succeed where the prior dynasty failed. And so the Tang dynasty allied with the kingdom of Silla, hoping to force Goguryeo into a war on two fronts.  Silla was already expanding on the Korean peninsula, and a natural ally for the Tang dynasty.  Furthermore, they were far enough away that they weren't an immediate threat if they decided to go back on their part of the deal. Unfortunately for the Tang, these campaigns in 645 were not exactly a cake walk, and they handed Li Shimin his first defeat since the attempts to unify everyone under the Tang dynasty.  Not exactly a great look.  Relations with Goguryeo were normalized for a brief time, but then Emperor Taizong decided to give it another try.  They started gathering ships and men for another invasion, no doubt having played out why they had lost the previous go round and hoping that it would be better in round two. The invasions, however, would come to naught.  As it was being prepared, Tang Taizong grew ill.  He called off the invasion, and then, in 649, he passed away.  His youngest son, the Crown Prince Li Zhi, came to the throne as Emperor Gaozong.  The reign of him and his wife, Empress Wu Zetian, would have an enormous impact on the rest of the 7th century. Through all of this fighting, bloodshed, and politics, this set the stage for the future of the Tang dynasty, which would once again place the area of modern China in the center of what many considered to be the civilized world.  Besides being a center for Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist religion, Chang'an became an extremely cosmopolitan city, with Sogdian and Turkic traders visiting the markets and establishing themselves in the city.  Many foreign families would adapt over time, integrating into the culture of their new home. These foreigners brought other ideas with them as well.  Zoroastrianism, a Persian religion, may have come eastward much earlier, but in the 6th and 7th centuries, both Manichaeism and Christianity—at least an eastern version of Christianity—had made inroads into the capital of Chang'an.  Manichaeism would have its ups and downs, especially in conflict with Buddhism.  Christianity, on the other hand, was not necessarily the Christianity of Rome, but typically connected with the Syriac church that existed in the Persian empire, where it was a decidedly minority religion.  Later proponents of Rome and the Latin rite would connect it with the supposed heresies of Nestorius, referring to the Church of the East as Nestorian Christianity, but this is not a term they would have used for themselves.  These religions kept some of their traditions, but also incorporated some aspects of the culture of their new home, such as the use of rice in place of bread in some rituals. This was an exciting time, and the court at Chang'an was fascinated with various customs of the Western Regions.  Music, clothing, and even pasttimes were influenced by contact with the western lands.  This would, in time, be passed on even to the archipelago.  For instance, the pipa was an instrument that had origins in the Western regions.  It is found in the area of modern China in at least the Northern Wei dynasty, but no doubt it grew more popular over time.  A version of this same instrument traveled west to Persia, where it became the oud, and further on to Europe, where it became the famous lute.  In the archipelago, the pipa became the Biwa, and while we can never be one hundred percent certain about early music, we have instructions from the Tang dynasty on music for the pipa, and Tang dynasty and early music, along with music from Goguryeo, came over to the Japanese courts in the form of gagaku, traditional Japanese court music, in the early 8th century. Moving forward in our story about the Japanese archipelago, we are going to see more and more about the kentoushi, the Japanese embassies to the Tang dynasty, and just what they would bring back.  At the same time, we will also see the reaction of the court to the alliance between the Tang and Yamato's largest competitor on the Korean peninsula, Silla.  That alliance, which outlived emperor Taizong and even the king of Silla, would dramatically shift the balance of power on the peninsula and in all of northeast Asia. But we need to get there, first.  For now, let's move our gaze back across the waters to the archipelago, where Prince Tamura was about to take the throne, later becoming known as Jomei Tennou.  Of course, he was dealing with his own politics, especially regarding the Soga house and the powerful hold they had over government.  Next episode we will get back to just what was happening over there. Until then, thank you for listening and for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts.  If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Also, feel free to Tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.  You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com.  Thank you, also, to Ellen for her work editing the podcast. And that's all for now.  Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.

Yangzi Jin grew up in Wuhan, China, and after joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the United States as an exchange student, served a mission on Temple Square in Salt Lake City. One day, she received an assignment to give a Mandarin tour to a blind teenage boy, Conner Green, who had recently been adopted by a Utah family. Conner and Yangzi's connection to their hometown and language fueled their friendship, and the seeds of testimony for Conner as he heard the gospel of Jesus Christ read to him one verse at a time. Yangzi first read the Book of Mormon in October 2005 and was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on December 31, 2005. Conner was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on September 13, 2014 and listened to Yangzi read the Book of Mormon to him through audio recordings in 2016.  Alma 32:42-43 Mosiah 14:5  

Here we are, almost at the end of the reign of Kashikiya Hime, with a couple of items, today. First is the reform going on with Buddhism, and, in particular, the state's involvement in selecting a "Head" of Buddhism to make sure that the religion is accountable to the State.  Then there are the dealings with the growing power of Silla, amidst the backdrop of a change on the continent from the Sui to the Tang dynasty. For more, check out our podcast website:  https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-102 Rough Transcript   Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua, and this is episode 102: Temples and Tribute Iwakane and Kuranoshita stood on the deck of their ship, looking out over the waves and back towards their Yamato home.  Travel across the sea was always risky, but it was worth it.  Locals at the port on the southern tip of the peninsula were loading all sorts of goods into the hold of their ships, and when the two envoys returned home, they could only imagine how they would be greeted as heroes.  It had been a long journey, but they'd made it across the strait and upheld the interests of the Yamato court, and now they had a deal that could bring some measure of peace.  Not bad for a treacherous trek across the sea.  Next they just had to wait for fair winds and they could start the journey back to the archipelago. Looking out at the ocean, hoping to see some signs of the winds turning back from whence they came, it was then that they spied them—small dots that seemed to disappear and reappear on the horizon.  First just a handful, and then more and more.  As they came more into focus, their hearts no doubt sank.  It was an armada, fitted for war, and it was headed their way. ---- As we finish up the reign of Kashikiya Hime, aka Suiko Tenno, I want to deal with several events from about 614 to the year 624.  During this decade a lot happened.  Last episode we dealt with some of the smaller things, but two major things from this period were the further development of the Buddhist clergy—including bringing the institution under state control—and the reported invasions of Silla.  I say “reported”, because only the Japanese sources talk about them, but we'll talk about just why that might be.  Meanwhile, there were plenty of changes happening as the Sui dynasty transitioned into the Tang dynasty, and more. We're actually going to start with the changes to the Buddhist clergy.  This actually happened some time later than the rest of our narrative, but it makes sense to start here and finish up some of the things happening in Yamato, before expanding our view to the wider world. As we've seen, Buddhism officially arrived in Yamato by 538 according to our earliest record, though possibly it had been around in some form in the immigrant communities before then.  By the start of the 7th century, Buddhist temples were being built by some of the noble families of the court, including Soga no Umako, Prince Umayado, and others.  Originally, the Buddha was worshipped much as any other kami, but as nuns and monks were sent abroad to learn more about the religion, and as foreign monks were consulted on how things should be, they began to develop their own sangha, their own community, in the archipelago.  Those with interest or who took vows to enter the religion studied the sutras and other texts that had been brought over, and with the building of full-scale, continental style temples there would have been little doubt that this was something new and different. The tenets of Buddhism were those of non-materialism.  Adherents were supposed to work on loosening the bonds that kept them tethered to this mortal plane, including concepts of the self.  Monks were expected to be the ultimate examples of these teachings, especially seeing as how they dedicated themselves to learning the Buddhist Law.  Above all, Buddhist monks were expected to rise above base emotions such as anger, hatred, and lust. However, let's remember that these Buddhsit monks were only human, and it is also unclear how many had joined the monkhood entirely of their own volition.  For instance, back in 614, when Soga no Umako fell ill, we are told that a thousand persons entered religion for his sake.  Now besides the fact that the number of individuals is likely way off base—at most we see maybe 1400 monks and nuns across all of the temples only nine years later—this was not an uncommon thing to see in records of the time.  In Baekje, we similarly see large numbers of people taking orders on the behalf of a monarch or other person of importance.  The implication is that by having people enter religion—to take orders as a monk or nun—on your behalf would accrue to that person some measure of good karma.  This was seen as particularly important for the elite because they, of course, couldn't just become monks themselves—after all, if they did, who would be left to rule the country?  And so, they would have people do it for them, kind of like a version of “karma offsets”, where you get to continue to enjoy all the benefits of your worldly position by offsetting it with other people's devotion to religion. But one has to wonder how many people were just waiting around for some special royal or noble person to need some karma before taking orders.  After all, if someone was truly interested in taking orders, no doubt they could find a monastery and ask to join.  More likely, these were individuals who were impressed -slash- strongly encouraged to take orders on behalf of someone else.  This isn't to say that there were no true converts, nor that those who took orders in such a way never came to appreciate the Buddha's teachings.  However, it does, perhaps, make it a little more understandable when we learn that in 623 there was a major scandal in the Buddhist sangha when an ordained Buddhist monk apparently took an axe and struck his paternal grandfather. Murder was, of course, generally frowned upon—unless, of course, you were a member of the aristocracy and able to convict the person of something like rebelling against the court.  However, it was especially frowned upon by Buddhist monks, as it really didn't go well with the whole vibe that the Buddhist religion was trying to establish in the archipelago.  Anyone who entered Buddhism was supposed to be devoting themselves to the Three Treasures, not geriatricide. And we don't know why this monk did it, either.  Maybe he just chanted too many sutras and finally snapped, or maybe his paternal grandfather did something heinous and he thought it was his only solution.  Either way, this event sparked a major investigation of the Buddhist religion as a whole.  The court assembled all of the various monks and nuns and investigated just what had been going on in those temples, anyway.  Where they found wrong-doing, the courts decided to issue punishments. And apparently they found quite a bit of wrong-doing.  It isn't clear exactly what was going on, but there was enough that the Baekje monk Kanroku, or Gwalleuk in modern Korean, issued a memorial to the throne before the punishments were carried out.  In his memorial he detailed the history of Buddhism:  how it came from the West to the Han, and then 300 years after that to Baekje, and then how it had been transmitted to Yamato only 100 years after that—less than a century ago, really.  He noted how young Buddhism was in Yamato, and how the monks and nuns hadn't fully learned the Teachings of the Buddha.  As such, he begged for leniency for all of the monks other than the man who had killed his own grandfather—that was a punishment even Kanroku could not argue against. By the way, if the name Kanroku is familiar, we talked about him back in episode 94.  He was said to have been one of the teachers of Shotoku Taishi, and when he first arrived in Yamato we are told that he brought numerous books on various sciences with him, helping to kickstart a number of studies in Yamato.  He was clearly well respected by the court. And so the court heard this petition, and Kashikiya Hime granted Kanroku's request for leniency.  The monks and nuns were spared, except for the one, but that was not the end of the court's involvement.  Ten days later, they issued another ruling.  The court set up two official positions:  The Soujou and the Soudzu.  These two positions were created to oversee the monks and nuns.  Kanroku was made Soujou, or High Priest, and Kurabe no Tokuseki was appointed as Soudzu.  We are also told of another position, possibly one that already existed, as a member of the Adzumi no Muraji family was appointed as Houzu, the Head of the Law. These positions would help tie the practice of Buddhism to the court.  The temples were no longer simply autonomous units that could operate on their own.  Neither were they solely bound to the wealthy families that patronized them and helped pay for their upkeep.  The court positions provided a means of state accountability and oversight concerning the activities of Buddhism in the country.  After all, Buddhism, at this time, was largely seen as serving the state and the state elites.  While Buddhist doctrine might encourage the salvation of all sentient beings, to many of those sponsoring and setting up these temples, it was still a very transactional relationship.  The power of Buddhism was not simply in the siren's call of possibly throwing off the shackles of the material world, but also in the belief that Buddhist gods and Boddhisatvas could actively provide protection—both tangible and intangible—to the state and to the members of the court.  It is unlikely that farmers, living in their pit houses and working in the rice paddies, were thinking so much about going to the temple and what the Buddhist Law meant for them.  The nature of religion at the time was still one where the elites controlled the mysteries, and thus used that to justify their rarified positions. The idea of the position of High Priest may have been transmitted from the Buddhist traditions of the Yangzi river region and the southern courts.  Originally, in Yamato, it seems to have been intended as the chief priest of the country, as there was only one official sect of Buddhism.  This would change in later years as the position—and the Buddhist temples' relationship with the government—changed over time. Kanroku's time in this position seems to have been limited.  Less than a year later, in the first month of 624, a new priest arrived from Goguryeo, named Ekan, or Hyegwan in modern Korean, and he was made Sojo, or high priest.  Does this mean that Kanroku retired from the position?  Or perhaps he passed away.  Unfortunately, we aren't quite sure. Tradition holds that both Kanroku and his successor, Ekan, both were installed at Houkouji, aka Gangouji or Asukadera, the temple of Soga no Umako, demonstrating the power and influence that Soga no Umako's temple had at the time.  Ekan is also said to have been the founding patriarch of the Japanese Sanron school of Buddhism.  The Sanron sect comes from the Sanlun school of the mainland, also known as East Asian Madhyamaka, and was based on three texts—the “Sanron”—said to have been translated by Kumarajiva in the 4th and early 5th centuries. That both of these High Priests were installed at Houkouji definitely says something at the time.  It is possible that their dominion was simply over Houkouji, but an earlier entry suggests that was not the case, as in the ninth month of 623, some five months after the whole axe-monk incident, the Court ordered an inspection of temples of monks and nuns.  We are told that they made an accurate record of the circumstances of the building of the temples, and also the circumstances under which the various ordained individuals had embraced—forcefully or otherwise—the Buddhist religion.  They recorded information down to the year, month, and day that they took orders.  Based on that record we are told that there were forty-six temples in 623, and 815 monks and 569 nuns, for a total of one thousand three hundred and eighty five persons altogether.  That doesn't count the individuals working the rice land and otherwise helping provide for the upkeep of the temples themselves. As far as I'm aware, we don't have this actual record of the temple inspection, other than its summary here in the Nihon Shoki, but assuming it is true, it tells us some rather incredible things.  First, if we assume that Asukadera and Shitennouji were really the first two permanent temples to be built in Yamato, then all of this- the building of 46 temples, and the ordination of so many people- happened in the span of about thirty years.  That's an average of three temples being built every two years, and it probably wasn't that steady a pace.  It is entirely possible, of course, that many of the temples mentioned were still under construction.  After all, we saw how long it took to build Houkouji temple, or Asukadera, which we discussed back in episode 97.  Regardless, it goes back to what we mentioned about the temple building boom that took off, which also removed much of the labor force that would have otherwise been put to work building things like massive kofun. Also, assuming an even distribution, we are looking at an average of thirty monks or nuns per temple.  It was likely not quite so even, and with temples like Asukadera, or even Toyouradera, having many more monks and nuns  given their importance.  Furthermore, when Soga no Umako grew ill and supposedly had a thousand persons enter religion—which, as we've mentioned, likely wasn't quite that many—I suspect that many of those would have gone to Soga temples, such as Houkouji. By the way, on that one thousand people:  I would note that it is possible that some people only entered Buddhist orders temporarily, for a time, and that is why the numbers aren't larger.  Still, I think that Occam's razor suggests the simpler answer is that the numbers were simply exaggerated for effect by the Chroniclers, assuming that it even happened in the first place. So that was the story of Yamato expanding its state administration over the spiritual realm.  However, there was plenty of expansion they were doing in the physical realm as well.  They had expanded control to the island of Tsukushi, modern Kyushu, and were even dealing with the inhabitants of Yakushima, but they knew there was a much larger world out there. And so we see that in 613, two new ambassadors were sent to the Sui court.  They were Inugami no Kimi no Mitasuki and Yatabe no Miyatsuko.  We don't know much about the embassy that went though we know that they came back through Baekje the following year, bringing a Baekje envoy with them, because why not?  Baekje records talk about the Wa—that is the people of the Japanese archipelago—traversing their country on their way to the Sui court at various times, so this is all within the realm of what has been pretty standard, so far. The following year, we see that Silla sent a Buddha image to the Yamato court.  As per usual, our ever so faithful Chroniclers note that this is an item of “tribute” from Silla, as though they were some kind of vassal state of Yamato.  Which brings me to a point I've made before and I'll probably make again:  All history is political. The writing of history is an inherently political act, in that it attempts to capture some form of truth as the authors of history believe it to be.  What they choose to include—and what they choose to ignore—is all a choice. This should not be confused with facts: what actually happened and was observed.  But even the facts of the past  are all experienced through human senses and interpreted by human brains.  We can often only see them through what others have written or created, and what physical evidence remains, today, whether that is archaeological evidence, or even things like DNA or linguistic clues, passed down through the generations.  Keep this in mind the next time you hear someone talk about “historical revisionism”.  The stories we tell ourselves change as we better understand the world and the past from which we came.  To get upset about people providing a new vision of that past assumes that our previous understanding was somehow complete.  We might not agree with someone's take on it, but as long as we can agree on the facts, it isn't as if they are changing what actually happened, just providing a different understanding.  This of course gets much more difficult and convoluted when we realize that what we think of as facts might instead be suppositions, inferred from how we believe the world works. I mention this because looking across our various records we can see just how incomplete our understanding is of this time in Silla-Yamato relations.  We have to “pick sides” as it were, if we want to tell a story, or we could just throw our hands up in the air and say “who knows?”So let's talk about just what is missing from both the Nihon Shoki and the Samguk Sagi, two of our better historical sources from this time.  Clearly the Nihon Shoki has a pro-Yamato and pro-royal lineage bias, such that it is going to elevate the status of Yamato and the sovereign, almost completely ignoring any other powerful polities that may have once existed in the archipelago and placing Yamato on equal footing with the Sui dynasty, and above the countries of Silla and their ally, Baekje.  It is not exactly nuanced in its depiction. On the other side we have the Samguk Sagi.  Here we have a huge period in the 6th and 7th centuries with little to no mention of Wa or the Japanese archipelago.  This is especially true in the Silla annals, which only mention their interactions with Baekje, for the most part, and leave talk of Wa to the earlier years, before Silla grew into one of the three most powerful kingdoms on the peninsula.  Where we do find mention is in the Baekje annals, but even that is often sparse. This is likely for several reasons.  First off is the fact that the Samguk Sagi was written in the 12th century, over four hundred years after the Nihon Shoki was published.  This was the Goryeo period on the Korean peninsula, and so one might expect to see a greater focus on the former Goryeo, known to us as Goguryeo.  However, its author was Kim Busik, and the Kim family traced their roots to the royal lineage of Silla.  So he likely was plenty incentivized to prop up the Silla kingdom. Furthermore, it seems that the Samguk Sagi was pulled together from a variety of sources, often with second or thirdhand accounts.  For instance, they writers appear to have used Sui and Tang records to reconstruct what happened at various periods, especially in Baekje.   The “Record of Baekje” that the Nihon Shoki often cites appears to have no longer been extant for Kim Busik to peruse.  And so it is hard to tell what was left out for political reasons and what simply wasn't mentioned at all.  However, there is a note in the late 7th century, where the Silla kingdom complains about the constant raids and invasions by the Wa—raids and invasions that are otherwise not mentioned—that makes me think that perhaps there is something more to the records of Yamato and Baekje then might first appear.  It would be easy, perhaps, to dismiss what we see in the Nihon Shoki, but we are now only a century from when it was compiled.  So while the Chroniclers may have been biased in the way they recorded things, there is likely something there, even if they give themselves a larger role in the production. Alright, so enough caveats:  What does the Nihon Shoki have to say about all of this? We previously talked about the relationship between Yamato and the continent in Episodes 94 and 96, including prior attempts by Yamato to re-establish Nimna, which had been controlled by Silla since at least the 6th century, and Yamato's early contact with the Sui court.  And as mentioned above Inugami no Mitasuki and Yatabe were sent back from the Sui, returning with an envoy from Baekje in 615.  Then, in 616, a year after that, Silla sent a Buddha image as tribute.  In typical pro-Buddhist fashion, it is said that the image sent out rays of light and worked miracles.  Aston claims this was the gold image eventually installed at Houkouji—aka Asukadera. There is a bit of a respite in the record, like a show that took a season off during the pandemic.  We don't really have much mention of Silla or Baekje for about four to five years, just as it looked like we were starting to get regular communication.   That isn't to say the record is entirely blank, we just don't have records of regular contact with Silla and Baekje.  There is one record, which Aston dates to 618, though that may be a year off based on other sources, where a Goguryeo envoy arrives with gifts: flutes, cross-bows, and even catapults, we are told, 10 in all.  They also brought a camel, which must have been quite the sight, though I wonder how well it was doing after that voyage.  Finally, they brought some local products and two captives that had been taken during fighting with the Sui. This mention of Goguryeo fighting the Sui dynasty is rather significant, and it is part of the reason that many believe the Sui dynasty would fall in or around that same year.  Besides spending money on all sorts of public works projects—things like the Grand Canal, that would definitely be a wonder, but was also insanely expensive—the Sui dynasty was also fighting campaigns on their northern and southern borders, as well as facing raids by the Tujue, a group of eastern Turkic people.    The Sui had been pushing against Goguryeo, with whom they shared a border, and for the most part, Goguryeo had been pushing back.  At the same time, Goguryeo had some ambitious neighbors of their own on the peninsula—their sometime ally Silla being chief among them—so they had to also ensure that they weren't attacked from the rear as they were marshaling troops against the Sui. Fortunately for them, the Sui dynasty would eventually collapse, being replaced by the Tang.  Unfortunately, the Tang dynasty was not necessarily going to give up the push that the Sui had started. We'll probably need to do an entire episode on the Tang dynasty and Tang culture, as it would have a huge impact on all of East Asian culture, but for now, that can wait.  The death of the last Sui emperor set up a power struggle on the continent.  Li Yuan, Duke of Tang, took advantage of this and had himself proclaimed as the new Tang emperor, but he wasn't the only one contending for power.  Though he ruled from the capital at Chang'an, modern Xi'an, there were plenty of others trying to set themselves up as warlords and emperors in their own right, and Li Yuan would spend the entirety of his reign trying to quell these various threats and re-unify the empire under his rule.  Needless to say, there was a lot going on over there. As that was happening, around 621, Silla sent an ambassador to Yamato named, at least in Aston's translation, Imime, with the rank of “Nama”—a rank in the lower half of the Silla system.  Imime brought a diplomatic gift—that is to say “tribute” in the words of the Nihon Shoki—and a memorial for the Yamato court.  Apparently they hadn't brought memorials before, and this was the first time.  Memorials here are formal letters, typically referring to the type of letter from a subordinate to a superior.  I doubt that Silla was actually making themselves out to be a vassal to Yamato any more than Baekje, who is recorded as submitting numerous memorials, did the same.  However, the way diplomacy works, it would be understandable if the letter to a foreign ruler was presented in a flattering light.  Also, let's not forget that it was entirely possible that there was a bit of interpretation going on from one language, into the diplomatic language of Sinitic characters, and then into the native language of the court. So I think we can say that this is when Silla and Yamato started formal, written diplomatic correspondence.   These exchanges continued the following year.  Silla sent more envoys, and this time they brought a golden Buddha image, a golden pagoda, relics, and a large Buddhist baptismal flag, along with twelve smaller ones.  This was the Buddha image placed in the Hata temple at Kadono—which is to say, Hachiwoka Temple, known today as Kouryuuji, in modern Kyouto.  Other relics went to Shitennouji.  In addition, they brought the monks Esai and Ekou, as well as the physicians Ejitsu and Fukuin, bringing continental or “Tang” learning.  AT the same time, the envoys suggested that Yamato should send for the students that they had sent abroad to the Sui court, previously, as they had finished their studies.  They then launched into praise for the Tang court. And here we can say it would have likely been the Tang court.  As we discussed, the Sui dynasty had collapsed and a new dynasty, the Tang, had stood up in its place.  One wonders, then, about the students who had lived through those tumultuous times, and there may have been other reasons to reach out to the Tang court and restart their relationship.  It is also interesting that Silla appears to have close ties to the Tang—something that they would certainly work to strengthen in later years.  Silla's location on the other side of Goguryeo made them an ideal strategic ally to help put pressure on Goguryeo and force them to protect multiple fronts at the same time.  Besides the advice on bringing back students from the Sui—now Tang—court, I'd also like to take a moment and point out the gifts and the temples that were mentioned.  Shitennouji and Kouryuuji are both temples associated with Shotoku Taishi, but are also thought to have been closely related to individuals of Silla ethnicity in Yamato.  That they received the tribute coming from Silla is interesting. It looks like things were going well, but then, later in that same year, things took a turn.  We are told that Silla invaded Nimna, making Nimna fully a dependency of Silla. As we had discussed, before, Silla had long since taken Nimna and the other small polities around it.  It may be that they had retained some notional independence, as many of the kingdoms of this time were not necessarily fully established as we might think of a state, today.  However, any “invasion” was likely seen by Silla as simply quelling an internal dispute, assuming it happened at all.  What actually happened wasn't as important to us, however, as was Yamato's response. We are told that Kashikiya Hime considered an invasion, but Tanaka no Omi suggested caution, suggesting that someone be sent to the peninsula to figure out just what was going on.  Nakatomi no Muraji no Kuni, on the other hand, pressed for war.  He continued to beat that old drum claiming that Nimna originally belonged to Yamato, and that Silla shouldn't be allowed to have it.  Tanaka no Omi countered that it was better that Silla have it than Baekje, claiming that Baekje, Yamato's on-again off-again ally on the peninsula, could not be trusted to hold it—something of a strange stance.  Ultimately, Kashikiya Hime listened to Tanaka no Omi's advice, and she sent Kishi no Iwakane to Silla and Kishi no Kuranoshita to Nimna to see how things were going.  When they arrived at the peninsula, they were greeted by a single, brightly decorated ship.  When they asked whose ship it was, they were told it belonged to Silla, at which point they called into question why there wasn't a ship from Nimna.  And so the Silla sailors sent someone to bring out another ship, claiming that was the ship from Nimna.  The Nihon Shoki claims that this tradition of Silla greeting Yamato envoys with two boats dates from this time. To say I'm a bit skeptical is an understatement.  It sounds like Silla was just trying to appease the Yamato envoys so that they would deliver their message and go back home.  Perhaps they were putting on a show of Nimna's independence—who knows.  The Lord of Silla—an interesting flex by the Chroniclers, who have otherwise referred to the ruler of Silla as a “king”—sent eight high ministers, or Daibu, to provide Iwakane and Kuranoshita an update on the status of Nimna.  In response, the Yamato envoys apparently insisted that Nimna belonged to them and, at least according to the Nihon Shoki, Silla agreed.  Here I think we have to take the Chronicles with a bit of salt, and I really wish that we had better records for Silla, but unfortunately the sources we have from that side are silent about any interaction. Iwakane and Kuranoshita then began to plan the return trip with envoys from Silla along with more diplomatic gifts from Silla and Nimna.  With their work completed, they began the trek back to the islands.  Even if Silla was simply putting on a show for the ambassadors, they must have felt pretty good about themselves.  They had apparently settled the matter and were now on their way back to seal the deal.  All they had to do now was wait for a favorable wind so they could cross. And so they were probably taken aback when they looked out across the waters and saw boatloads of Yamato troops heading their way.  The Silla envoys saw this and immediately noped back to the capital at Gyeongju and left a lower level flunky to handle the diplomatic gifts, which Yamato probably already had loaded on board the ship.  Iwakane and Kuranoshita resigned themselves to the fact that the agreement they had brokered was now in tatters—they had just talked about peace and suddenly an invading army shows up.  So they shoved off and headed back to the archipelago. Apparently, while Iwakane and Kuranoshita were away, the hawkish faction of the Yamato Court had swayed Soga no Umako to their side, and he had pushed for the invasion.  Specifically, the Chronicles blamed the houses of Sakahibe no Omi and Adzumi no Muraji.  Apparently these two families remembered getting quite a pay out from Silla last time, when they took armies across the strait to help re-establish Nimna, but got basically paid to leave, and so they were hoping to do the same thing again. And so Sakahibe no Omi no Womaro and Nakatomi no Muraji no Kuni were made generals of a force that included a host of names of some of the prominent families as assistant generals.  Given all of the generals and assistant generals, it must have been a sizeable force, and the Chronicles say that it was ten thousand strong, though I don't know that we can trust any of the numbers, exactly. They made landfall and headed to Nimna, to prepare their attack and when the King of Silla heard they were there, Silla tendered their submission, and the generals sent back a memorial to Kashikiya Hime to proclaim their victory.  We aren't told whether or not Sakahibe no Omi or Adzumi no Muraji made any money on this venture, but they seem to have made out alright for themselves. Now, as I mentioned earlier, there isn't any really good corroborating evidence for all of this.  There is a note in 623 that Baekje sent an army to raid Silla's Neungno District, and there is the later 7th century note where Silla complains about the constant raids by the Wa, mostly referring to Yamato and the archipelago. There is one other thing about this period, however:  many scholars believe that this is the period where many of the stories of Okinaga no Tarashi Hime really became popular, and took the form that we mostly know them as, today.  As you may recall, Okinaga no Tarashi Hime is more commonly known as Jinguu Kougou or even Jinguu Tennou.  She was the wife to the sovereign known as Chuai Tennou and the mother to Homuda Wake, aka Oujin Tennou, someone who features prominently in the lineage of the current dynasty of Yamato sovereigns. We talked about Tarashi Hime and her much hyped “conquest” of the Korean peninsula back in Episode 40.  Many scholars treat Tarashi Hime as a fictional, legendary figure, possibly created specifically to mirror the reign of Kashikiya Hime, in the 7th century.  There are some who believe her story is actually based on raids and invasions by Yamato in the 7th century, especially given the scale and apparent control that she displays over the archipelago.  It is possible that in her day, assuming she did exist, that there was a much larger concern with subduing the Kumaso, which was probably more of an ethnic conflict between different cultures, with Wa forces eventually prevailing.  There was certainly commerce with the peninsula, so raids weren't out of the question.  But the scale of those raids may not have been quite as depicted. Again, though, it is hard to say.  The peninsular records are largely silent.  The Wa are depicted as almost more of a minor nuisance and they are more likely to give pride of place to Baekje forces in any allied assault, so it is really difficult to determine just what happened, when.  Regardless, we aren't finished with the peninsula.  There is still a lot more conflict yet to be seen. But, we are finished with this episode—and almost finished with this reign.  Next episode we'll cover the end of Kashikiya Hime's reign, when some of the cutthroat politics of the Yamato court will come to the fore.  The end of one reign and the beginning of another has always been a bumpy ride—has the enforcement of more continental style governance changed that at all?  We'll see. Until then, thank you for listening and for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts.  If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Also, feel free to Tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.  You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com.  Thank you, also, to Ellen for her work editing the podcast. And that's all for now.  Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.

Happy New Year! This episode we take a look back at where we've come and talk about some of the broad themes and changes that we've experienced over the episodes in the past year. For a little more, including references for the year, check out:  https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-newyear2024 Rough Transcript Shinnen Akemashite!  Happy New Year and Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua, and this is the New Year's Recap episode for 2024 Every year I try to take a moment and look back at the material we covered.  In part, this is to remind us of the journey we've been on, but it is also to help look at some of the larger themes that we might otherwise miss when we are looking at more discreet topics.  This year we have not necessarily progressed through as much of the archipelago's history as in previous years—we started in the early 530s and have probably covered about 80 or 90 years, in contrast to 2022 and before where we covered multiple centuries in a year.  But there's a good reason for that: it has been an eventful period, or at least more of the events are getting written down.  However, there is a lot of important stuff going on.  We are seeing, more than anywhere else, the rise of powerful families, not just individuals, a process that began as a way to expand the power of the state, but which then took on a life of its own under what is known as the uji-kabane system—the system of families and family rank.  This is happening alongside of a reimagining of the state and of the royal family in particular.  Many of the 8th century cultural norms are starting to be set in this period.  In many ways, the people of Yamato are revising their cultural imaginary of themselves, often in reference to new ideas, concepts, and philosophies being imported from the continent.  This includes the arrival of Buddhism and its shake up of the way that the people of the archipelago viewed the world and their place in it. And so we're going to start with a recap of the various sovereigns, then go into some of the more particular aspects of what was going on, and try to cover some of those more overarching themes.  Hopefully this gives us a good base to move on into 2024. Now over the past year we've gone through seven sovereigns.  First was the short reign of Magari no Ohine, aka Ankan Tennou, around 531 to 536, back in episode 79, when we talked about the glass bowl attributed to his tomb.  He was followed by his brother Takewo Hirokunioshi Tate, or Senka Tennou, who reigned until his death in 539.  That was Episode 80, where we also kind of kicked off the Asuka period, which many see as starting around 538.  Next, in Episodes 81 through 86, was their half-brother, Amekunioshi Hiraki Hironiwa, or Kinmei Tennou, who ruled until about 571.  Amekunioshi was followed by his son, Nunakura Futodamashiki, known as Bidatsu Tennou, who ruled until 585—Episodes 88 and 89.  Bidatsu was followed, in episode 90, by our fifth sovereign in this year's line up, Tachibana no Toyohi, or Youmei Tennou, father of Prince Umayado, aka the famous Shotoku Taishi, who we talked quite a bit about for his legendary and historical importance.  Youmei Tennou passed away in 587, and after some conflict, Hasebe no Wakasasaki came to the throne, remembered as Sushun Tennou.  He was assasinated in 592, as we covered in Episode 92, and succeeded by Toyomike Kashikiya Hime, daughter of Amekunioshi, wife to Nunakura Futodamashiki, and known to most as Suiko Tennou.  That's where we are at present. We also have seen a succession of high officials.  We started off with Ohotomo no Kanamura and Mononobe no Arakahi as the two Ohomuraji, but we quickly saw the addition of Soga no Iname as Oho-omi.  This foreshadowed the fading of the Ohotomo family appear to have lost their status with their failures in peninsular dealings,   while the Mononobe and Soga continued to help lead the country.  Mononobe no Arakahi was succeeded in the position of Ohomuraji by Mononobe no Okoshi, and then Mononobe no Yugehi no Moriya.  Soga no Iname was succeeded to the position of Oho-omi by his son, Soga no Umako. Taken together with Prince Umayado, aka Shotoku Taishi, these are perhaps some of the main names in the Chronicles.  Let's recap what was most important about each of them. We started this year talking about the reign of Magari no Ohine, aka Ankan Tennou.  The official account says that he was the son of Wohodo, aka Keitai Tenno, and one of two of Wohodo's sons that were basically just keeping the seat warm for their half-brother, Amekunioshi, aka Kinmei Tennou.  In other words, they were kind of regents.  This story quickly falls apart, however, when you look at several factors.  First, based on some of the dates given for his birth, Amekunioshi would have been around 22 years old when their father, Wohodo, passed away—young, but old enough to take the throne without requiring any kind of regent.  In addition, neither of his two brothers gave up the throne to him when he finally came of age—whatever age that might have been.  Instead, each one died in the position.  That doesn't exactly scream that they were giving up power. Why this discrepancy?  The best explanation is that the Chroniclers were trying to keep things nice and tidy, and we are told that the tradition was for sovereigns to only come from lineages where both the male and female lines were considered royal—one sovereign and one royal princess, typically, who would be raised up as the Queen, and whose offspring would be eligible for the throne.  However, that was slightly disrupted by Amekunioshi, aka Kinmei Tennou, who seems to have taken the throne despite the fact that his two half-brothers and their offspring may have had the stronger claim.  Still, he was able to point to his mother's royal status.  In fact, she was even of the previous dynasty, sister to the last sovereign from that line, Wohatsuse Wakasazaki, aka Buretsu Tennou.  Or so we are told by the Chroniclers. .  And so only Amekunioshi's mother is considered to be the truly legitimate queen, while Magari no Ohine and the other so-called “regent” brother - Takewo Hiro Kunioshi Tate, aka Senka Tennou - must have been from a consort other than the Wohodo's main wife.  Their mother, Menoko, was instead linked to a prominent family, that of the Owari no Muraji, but it is unclear if they had the royal connections on her side—though I have little doubt that they could have been invented if they didn't already exist. I would point out that even given this explanation, both of the brothers were given the posthumous honors of “Tenno”, rather than being referred to as a regent, whereas the sovereign Okinaga no Tarashi Hime, aka Jingu Kougou, also ostensibly a regent, was never granted that honor, at least by the Chroniclers.  We discussed this a bit in Episodes 41 and 42, and how that may have been due to the Chroniclers' misogynistic tendencies as much as anything.  There is a suggestion that in reality, these two brothers may have been rival claimants, and there may have even been competing courts, as different family members rallied support to their side.And all of that perfectly helps illustrate just how we think things might have looked around this time.  Succession to the royal throne hardly appears to have been cut and dry.  Even before this period, we saw times where there were multiple claimants , regents, etc.  There is no clear pattern by which we can deduce who would succeed any given sovereign: it might be a brother, or any of their sons, or even a daughter.  And without a clear system of succession, every time the sovereign passed away, there was a competition for the throne.    You might recall that the mutual father of these three sovereigns, Wohodo, was himself said to have been the first in a new dynasty-- the previous dynasty died out with Wohodo's predecessor, Wohatsuse no Wakasazaki, aka Buretsu Tennou.  There are a lot of questions around this transition, but even the Chroniclers couldn't immediately connect Wohodo to the previous lineage without having to go all the way back to Homuda Wake, aka Oujin Tennou, on his father's side, and to Ikume Iribiko, aka Suinin Tennou, on his mother's side, but there are still plenty of questions about those ties and how real they were.        When it comes to the complications of succession, one thing to factor in is that this was still in the time when every sovereign moved into a new palace.  There are various thoughts on why this was —one of them being that the move prevented spiritual pollution associated with a dead body.  I also wonder if it wasn't practical as the new sovereign may have already had their own base of power, or perhaps by building new it was a way to ensure that the buildings were always fresh and free of any problems, as I believe these early buildings were largely built of fresh, untreated wood.  Whatever the reason, moving to a new palace each time also means that there wasn't an actual, physical throne to fight over.  Rival sovereigns could set themselves up in different areas in and around the Nara basin, Kawachi, et cetera, and gather supporters to their court.  Those supporters, no doubt individuals with some power and clout in their region who saw benefit in allying themselves with an even bigger name, would eventually become the heads of various corporate families, further extending their power and influence.  There is plenty of reason to believe that the family systems we see on the archipelago were not necessarily indigenous creations.  Early on people were associated with a place, perhaps, and of course you would know your line of descent, possibly even going back into myth and legend.  The concept of “family” as simply a matter of descent and relationship no doubt existed—after all, everyone has a mother and a father.  However, the idea of families with wide ranging control over a particular industry, administrative function, or even court ritual were likely imported from the continent as a way to group people together.  In fact, these are often referred to more as “clans”—groups of individuals who claimed shared descent, whether real or imagined, often from some legendary figure.  The new concept of these families not only grouped people based on things like their occupation or common ethnicity, if they came from the peninsula, but it also added a layer of administration that was then tied into the concept of the Yamato court, making it an extension of the government.  In turn, the government classified these families through a system of rank and titles—the kabane.   This system had people being known as much or even more by their family name as they were by the common name they went by as individuals.  Originally we see individuals working in similar professions organized into groups that used the term “-Be” in the name, but later we get the “uji”, or familial clans, that were more like administrators and extensions of the court.  Of note, there would continue to be many people who were not formally part of a particular -Be or Uji or even Ie, or “house”.  These were mostly individuals of the common agricultural class or similar, and long lineages might have no actual family name until the Meiji period, when everyone was expected to take on a family name as part of the efforts to modernize the country.  Until then, having a family name meant that you actually were already a part of the upper crust of society, even if you were only on the bottommost rung of that particular social ladder. In addition, a family name allowed someone to take on the family kabane, or title.  While there were some titles that appear to be given to the individual, these kabane titles, such as Suguri, Kishi, Atahe, Kimi, Muraji, and Omi, designated entire families.  These terms themselves appear to come from earlier job positions, indicating different types of leadership, from a local headmaster up to rulers of countries, and high ministers of the court.  For example, the title of “Omi” was originally a job description, indicating one of the many functionaries that made the court run, but as a kabane, any member of a given family would be able to use the term, whether they were actually in a ministerial position or not.   At this point, these important families were essentially an extension of the state—a way to decentralize control so that the Yamato state could function at an expanded level.  Some families appear to have been set up around local administration, including making local chieftains and the like part of their own family unit that was then granted control of the area by the court.  During the period we've covered this past year, we see that approach of absorbing regional families mature and grow, and those families taking on greater roles: initially with stories of the Ohotomo and Mononobe families, culminating in the powerful Soga family.  For the Ohotomo and the Mononobe, the family name likely tells us part of what and who they were.  The Ohotomo were the Great Tomo, or the Great Tomo no Miyatsuko.  These Tomo no Miyatsuko are some of the earliest court nobles, and it would make sense that the Ohotomo were at their head—which would also explain their position as the Oho-omi in the 5th and early 6th centuries.  Next to this family were the Mononobe, the Be (occupational group) of the Warriors, or Mononofu.  Together these families represented the early concepts of administration and military might.  However, as the families continued to evolve, they became independent from the roles they were originally created to hold.  The Ohotomo would eventually fall from power, and in their place would rise up the Mononobe.  However, the Mononobe would also find themselves on the outs, especially in the tumultuous period following Amekunioshi's death.  It was at this time that a new family would rise up to take their place:  the Soga, which we've heard a lot about this year.  The head of the Soga, Soga no Iname, had positioned his family in part through carefully marrying his daughters into the royal line.  While this had been done in the past, it wasn't to the extent or success that the Soga were able to achieve: In only a single generation, Iname saw Soga descended sovereigns on the throne.  This took place, of course, with not a small amount of maneuvering and the eradication of rival lineages.  It was their own Game of Thrones playing out, with the families created to serve the state and the royal family grabbing for themselves more power.  This would seem to be an unexpected consequence of a concept that had initially helped expand the royal authority, and we'll only continue to see more of it in the coming decades and centuries. At the same time that all of this was playing out on the archipelago, things on the continent were also changing.  First and foremost, in that it was closest to home for Yamato, was the rising power of Silla on the Korean peninsula. Up to this point, most of the Korean peninsula appears to have been a collection of small, regional polities, with occasional alliances between them.  There were two or three kingdoms of note.  In the north was Goryeo, a shortened version of the original name, Goguryeo, which is how we generally refer to it today to distinguish it from the 10th century state of the same name.  It was the oldest of the various kingdoms, and claimed descent from the northern Buyeo kingdom, centered in modern Manchuria. In the southwest of the peninsula was the kingdom of Baekje.  They, too, claimed descent from the nobility of Buyeo, and they were made up of many of the various polities collectively referred to as Mahan.  While Goguryeo was ruling up in the north, Baekje was one of the first kingdoms to set up shop in the southern end of the peninsula. Then there was Silla.  Originally a confederation of six polities in the area known as the Jinhan, they eventually became a kingdom and started pushing against the other polities in the region.  This includes the fledgling kingdom of Kara, mostly known as a confederation of smaller polities from the old Byeonhan region.  There are royal style tombs in the area, but before they could really get going Kara and the other polities fell under the control of the kingdom of Silla.  This included groups like Ara and the controversial polity of Nimna.  This set Baekje and Silla in direct confrontation, as Silla's land grab eliminated much of the buffer territory between the two of them. Nimna appears to have been of particular concern to Yamato, and appears to have been one of Yamato's allies, along with Baekje.  While Baekje appears to have been the stronger of the two, Nimna may have had a special place for Yamato, especially as it may have been an important port for Yamato ships traveling to trade with the rest of the continent.  Nimna being under Silla rule would have made this trade much more risky, as the Silla-Yamato relationship was often a rocky one.  Yamato attempted to move Nimna out from under Silla control, both through an alliance with Baekje, in concert with some of the other polities, as well as through attempts to take the country by force—most of which excursions were called off for one reason or another. At the same time, Baekje had been in decline, generally speaking.  They moved their capital farther south after being defeated by Goguryeo.  They were rebuilding, and still a powerful force, but not quite at the height of their power. Farther on the mainland, between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers, the period of the Northern and Southern Courts was coming to a close, and the Sui dynasty would eventually rule much of the Middle Kingdom, what is today modern China.  They would bring a stability to the region and embark on public works projects that would forever change the face of East Asia. As all of this was happening, influences were coming from the west.  We mentioned the Sassanian glass bowl and similar wares that made their way from the Middle East all the way to Japan—though whether as part of a sovereign's burial or not might still be up for debate.  Nonetheless, we know that the overland trade routes were booming, even if the occasional instability might disrupt them now and again.  The whole of Asia was more connected than we often give it credit for. Along this road came not only material goods, but new ideas.  Greek culture had reached at least as far as Gandhara, modern Pakistan and Afghanistan, and from east of the Indus came a new religion:  Buddhism.  It spread along the silk road, eventually finding a home in China, where it flourished, and continued to spread to the Korean peninsula and then, in the 6th century, to the archipelago of Japan. Buddhism came hand in hand with other mainland texts, exploring a variety of science and philosophy.  We discussed how the mainstream story of the introduction of Buddhism is likely not entirely correct.  That story sets up a conflict between the foreign religion of Buddhism and the worship of local kami—the practices that would become Shinto.  So, resistance to Buddhism is initially depicted as a resistance to foreign influence and the need to continue to support indigenous belief.  The reality, however, is much more complex. First is the role of kami worship in the expansion and exercise of State power.  The archaeological record demonstrates some expansion of Yamato ritual in the spread of various kofun styles —especially the royal keyhole shaped kofun, which were clearly adopted by others, demonstrating Yamato's influence.  More subtly, we see the spread of Yamato ritualists to various parts of the archipelago, and eventually the spread of various beliefs—though it may be somewhat difficult to say just when belief in any particular kami started at this period.  Remember, though, the way that powerful physical icons of the kami, such as mirrors and swords, had been taken by the Yamato sovereign and held by the court.  We touched on this back in Episode 20, where we discussed on Yamato took on “guardianship” for various relics, almost like they were taking sacred hostages.  Worship of the kami was intertwined with statecraft, and spiritual power and political power were both a part of the mix along with actual military power.  If you could perform a ritual that people felt was effectual, that was seen as on par with actual governance.  We also see this in the way that various families identified with different kami, such as the Mononobe and their link to the deity of Isonokami shrine, and the Royal family with the deity of Mt. Miwa.  Worship, however, was already starting to take on a continental tinge, as we see in stories about various deities, and the practice of worship.  This was no doubt influenced by immigrants from the Korean peninsula, who brought their own stories and beliefs.  Furthermore, whenever nothing else seemed to be working, bringing in new and exotic ritual practices from across the sea was likely seen as New and Shiny.  It was, after all, the latest in spiritual technology, and that foreign-ness and lack of local understanding would have led not only to its also having a somewhat mysterious quality, but also in the power that comes with being the only ones to quote-unquote “understand” the power of it and how to translate it.  If you were a 5th or 6th century ritualist family, if you could get hold of things that seemed to be ancient practices from the continent that nobody else really knew or understood, you were automatically the local subject matter expert. Furthermore, there wasn't necessarily a single, unified concept of how the kami worked, either.  Kami worship was often localized, and then later would spread as others heard about particularly powerful kami and rituals.  But there was no single concept of “Shinto”—there's no evidence that Izumo, Yamato, and Kibi all had the same origin stories, and, in fact, the many different stories that make up the Age of the Gods in the Chronicles speaks to the idea that there were many different stories, depending on who you asked.  In many ways, this is even true today.  While there are general themes that most Shinto shrines and practitioners follow, ritual practices from place to place may vary wildly.  This is less so in places that were part of more unified systems, such as the shrines connected to the royal family or those regulated by State Shinto in the Meiji period through World War II, but even today you can find a variety of differing beliefs and rituals in Shinto, even as most things appear to be the same on the outside.  A shrine's teachings may have local meaning or local rituals that are not practiced elsewhere, though many will fall into a recognizable cultural milieu that tends to make them more standardized.  As a small, but visible example, different shrines may have different omamori—protection amulets—that they offer.  While most offer amulets against sickness, disaster, or for attaining goals, some may have specific amulets for the martial arts, while others may have more specific amulets about love and marriage.  These will often be based on those things which the shrine and its kami are most associated with. In many ways, the Soga clan's acceptance of and use of Buddhism early on emphasizes this kind of spiritual borrowing, but to an extent that went well beyond what anyone else had done.  Most groups or families seem to have borrowed bits and pieces from the continent and then applied them to their local customs, but the Soga appear to have taken on Buddhism wholesale.  The benefit was that Buddhism wasn't just a few new practices—it was an entire corpus of material, with a rich written tradition.  Of course the writing was primarily in Sinic script, which was not exactly accessible to most people.  And early attempts at building temples and holding worship demonstrate a clear lack of understanding of Buddhist rites and rituals – indeed they are described much more like what one might expect to see in kami worship, with an emphasis on Buddhist “feasts”.  This may have been an attempt to make these new practices more accessible, but I believe that it is more likely that these early attempts at Buddhism were trying to treat the Buddha as another kami, through which the Soga family could control access to rites and rituals and thus gain political power through their perceived spiritual power.  It didn't hurt that, when they finally did build some temples, they were in the continental style, even further illustrating the Soga family's connection with all of these new fangled ideas coming over from across the sea. This was likely facilitated by the Soga family's connections to the immigrant community, particularly to various people from Baekje whom they sponsored and who, in turn, would be able to assist them in various ways.  These included people like Shiba Tattou and his family, who were regularly assisting Soga no Iname and Soga no Umako in their endeavors.  This may in part explain why early Buddhist images were coming over from Baekje, Yamato's ally at the time, though that may have been coincidental or even a catalyst—it isn't entirely clear. It is also intriguing to me that I have not seen a clear reference to a Soga family shrine.  Perhaps the Soga themselves were from the continent, originally—that may explain some of the earlier Soga names that appear to reference the peninsula and even Goguryeo.  Then again, it is hard to say—it may be that the Soga family shrine was never of as much import as their eventual attachment to Buddhist institutions. For those in power who could see how the Soga family was using this new religion, it is little wonder that they pushed back against it.  They had no particular reason to see Buddhism as anything particularly special, but they no doubt knew that the Soga would use it as a platform to further enhance their position.  And the powers-that-be succeeded several times, it would seem, in resisting Soga attempts to found a new ritual center. The Soga, however, had already gained considerable power outside of Buddhism.  Much of their rise is not entirely catalogued, but by the time of Soga no Iname, things were looking good.  The Ohotomo family was on the decline, which likely created something of a power vacuum that Soga no Iname was able to exploit.  By the way, there is a thought that early on the position of “Muraji” was actually superior to that of “Omi”, and it may be that the “Oho-omi” position was not quite as prestigious as that of Ohomuraji.  This is obscured by the fact that by the time of the Chronicles, the Oho-omi position clearly eclipsed the position of Ohomuraji, and that is projected back into the distant past by the Chroniclers.  This would speak to the idea that the Soga family was actually ranked behind the Ohotomo and the Mononobe, originally, but their Omi family was on the rise, and eventually their position as Oho-omi, the Great Omi, became the most influential position at court. This may go along with the fact that Soga no Iname is also given the personal kabane of Sukune in the Chronicles, which is described as the highest personal title that could be bestowed on an individual.That also speaks to his personal power and influence at court.  Of course, he is described by these terms from early on, even though he likely received them later in his career, and so it can be difficult to track just when he came to the peak of his effectiveness.  There is also the possibility that some of it is projected back on him because of his offspring, though even then he was still likely someone of consequence to be able to have those familial connections with the royal family in the first place. I suspect that much of Iname's position was likely derived from his access to Baekje and other immigrants and their access to reading, writing, and the new technologies that the court was hungering for.  Iname then parlayed that position into strategic marriages with the royal house.  Several consorts were from the Soga lineage, daughters of Soga no Iname.  Their sons and daughters, while royal princes and princesses, would also be connected to their Soga relatives.  This was a not uncommon ploy, as we've seen it in many other cases as well.  However, then something happened that would disrupt the apple cart.  Remember hwo we talked about how a sovereign was supposed to be be descended from the royal family through both their paternal and maternal lines? Amekunioshi was succeeded by his son Nunakura Futodamashiki, aka Bidatsu Tennou.  His mother had been Ishi Hime, son of Amekunioshi's half-brother, Takewo Hiro Kunioshi Tate, aka Senka Tennou.  But when he died, his son, Hikobito, was not made sovereign.  Instead, the throne passed to his half-brother, Tachibana no Toyohi, aka Youmei Tennou, a son of Amekunioshi and a daughter of Soga no Iname—so royal blood on only half of the family's side.  Following him, we see a bloody fight for the throne, largely personified by the military forces of the Mononobe v. those of the Soga.  Remember, the Mononobe had started as the Be of the warriors.  They were expected to be the armies of the court, at least in Yamato and the archipelago.  In previous reigns they had been the ones to mete out punishment and to be given charge of places like the Yamato government's outpost in Kyushu, from which point armies would be launched against the continent.    They did not, however, have a monopoly on military power.  Many families participated in raids against the peninsula, so we can assume that there were many who had their own, private forces.  While the Mononobe may have been the court's warriors, they had also branched out into other areas of administration, as well as maintaining the ritual site of Isonokami. The Soga versus Mononobe fight also saw various royal princes pitted against each other, and many would-be sovereigns were killed.  Prince Hikohito, whom one might think as the eldest son of Nunakura was the heir presumptive, was killed, and the Mononobe ended up supporting Prince Anahobe against the Soga's candidate, Prince Hasebe.  However, both of these candidates were descended from daughters of Soga no Iname—nobody was putting up a candidate that truly had royal blood on both sides. In the end, the Soga were victorious, and they destroyed the Mononobe—though not entirely.  The Mononobe were certainly out of power, but they would continue to exist in a more minor role.  The Soga candidate, Hasebe, was then placed on the throne as Sushun Tenno, while Soga no Umako enjoyed unparalleled power as Oho-omi.  However, despite his Soga lineage, and the fact that Soga no Umako had helped put him on the throne, Hasebe was not necessarily going to let himself be controlled.  And so Soga no Umako resorted, we are told, to assassination, to clear the throne for someone else.  And that someone else was none other than Toyomike Kashikiya Hime, aka Suiko Tennou.  She is something of an enigma.  She is the first woman to be granted the title of “Tennou” by the Chroniclers, and several accounts make her seem like she was a shrewd operator.  She had been the second wife of her half-brother, Nunakura Futodamashiki, and she'd been in or near the halls of power since his reign.  And yet some believe her to be little more than a puppet for Soga no Umako, while others believe she was a consensus candidate who was largely inoffensive to the majority of the court.  This is further complicated by the fact that she didn't even name her own offspring as Crown Prince, designated to succeed her.  Rather, that position went to none other than her nephew, the Prince of the Upper Palace, Kamitsumiya, aka the Prince of the Stable Door, Umayado, more popularly known today as Prince Shotoku Taishi. Shotoku Taishi is a mytho-historical figure by all accounts.  While many believe that an actual prince existed, he is given credit for almost anything good that happened.  Although the Soga family was clearly responsible for bringing in Buddhism, it is Shotoku Taishi who is credited with spreading the holy religion.  He is also said to have written the first constitution for the state, and set up a court rank system similar to the continent, though still unique to Yamato.  He is said to have ruled jointly with his aunt, and is treated in later stories as a dharma king, even though he never took on the actual mantle of sovereign.  Of course, Soga no Umako also exerted a huge influence, and in the end it is hard to say exactly who held the real power amongst the three:  Kashikiya Hime, Prince Umayado, or Soga no Umako. Umayado was the first to pass away, however—which may have also contributed to his holy status as any problems could be passed off as belonging to his aunt or, even better, to his grand-uncle, Soga no Umako, who would follow Umayado in death a few years later, and then, finally, Kashikiya Hime herself would succumb to time.  They all passed away within a decade of each other, but Kashikiya Hime would manage to outlast them all. Through this reign, for all of the fighting and politics, many of the foundations were laid for a reimagining of the Yamato state, the sovereign, and the vehicles of power.  The court had spread their control through ritual, through the familial system, and through the establishment of Miyake—government outposts designed to control rice land and send tribute back in the form of tax.  However, now they were formalizing that structure and in so doing they were putting a legal framework around it.  Built around a continental model, the throne became the source of rank for the individual, not just the family, and that rank could be given out across the archipelago.  This set up some of what was needed to start to move towards a more bureaucratic state in the continental model. Certainly, we see that Yamato power had expanded.  Further out from Yamato, we see the round, keyhole shaped tombs becoming popular, while closer to the Nara basin, they actually began to die out.  In part this can be seen as a possible sign of Yamato control, since the local elites were no longer being represented as rulers, but in a lesser capacity.  However, it then takes a real turn as even the sovereigns—or at least the Soga descended sovereigns—are no longer buried in keyhole shaped tombs, either, and these tombs become smaller.  This may be, at least in part, because resources to build tombs were being redirected into the new temple building craze.  For whatever reason, Buddhism had caught on, at least amongst the elites.  If the Soga family had hoped to control Buddhism, they appear to have failed.  Numerous temples started up, tied to different families, most of them connected, in some way, with various immigrant groups in the archipelago.  Where this would go, we'll have to see. And that largely catches us up.  I skipped over a few things, but it is worth recalling the Haruna eruptions that we covered back in episode 87, which reminds us that the Chronicles really only give us a narrow view of everything that was going on.  Much of the history of the archipelago remains unrecorded, and is only understood through the archaeological record.  While a lot was happening in Yamato, there was plenty going on elsewhere, but we only see it when it touches on Yamato and their politics. And so we learn a little more about the creation of the Dazaifu, and we hear about natural disasters, such as earthquakes and floods, but only if they affect the Nara basin.  There are some hints in the fudoki, the local gazetteers that were compiled in the 8th century to catalog the local stories and histories, but we only have so much, and even then the stories aren't always easy to place in a truly chronological context.  Still, we can see some general themes running throughout this period. As we start into 2024, we'll finish up with the reign of Kashikiya Hime.   Before her reign ends, we'll also see the rise of the Tang dynasty on the continent—a new inspiration for Yamato, but also a new threat, especially as they ally with Silla.  Also, with Prince Umayado gone, who will next take the reins of power?  And what will happen with the Soga family?  Will Umako's children prove as formidable as he was?  There is plenty more to look forward to. Until then, Happy New Year!  As usual, thank you for listening and for all of your support.  Thanks also to my lovely wife, Ellen, for her continued work at helping to edit these episodes! Remember, if you like what we are doing, please tell your friends and feel free to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts.  If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Also, feel free to Tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.  You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com.  And that's all for now.  Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  

It's the last episode of 2023, and our 100th episode!  But despite that, we keep on moving through the period, hitting a bunch of smaller stories from the Nihon Shoki about this period. We talk about Zentoku no Omi, the temple commissioner of Hokoji, as well as the trouble they went through to get the Asukadera Daibutsu in place to begin with.  We have the first instance of the Dazai--as in the Dazaifu of Kyushu--as well as the first instance of the holiday that would eventually become Children's Day, Kodomo no Hi.  There are various immigrants, bringing painting, handmills, and even a new kind of musical dance theater known as gigaku.  And that's just some of what we'll cover. For more, check out our website at https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-100 Rough Transcript   Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua, and this is episode 100: Sacred Tetris and Other Tidbits First off:  woohoo!  One hundred episodes!  Thank you to everyone who has been listening and following along on this journey so far.  When I started this I had no idea how long I would be able to keep up with it, but I appreciate everyone who has encouraged me along the way.  This all started in September of 2019, and we are now four years in and we have a ways to go.  While I'm thanking people, I'd also like to give a big thank you to my wife, Ellen, who has been helping me behind the scenes.  She's the one who typically helps read through what I'm going to say and helps edit out a lot of things, and provides reminders of things that I sometimes forget.  She really helps to keep me on track, and I always appreciate the time she puts into helping to edit the scripts and the questions she asks. Now, we are still talking about the 6th and early 7th centuries during the reign of Kashikiya Hime, aka Suiko Tenno.  We've talked about a lot of different aspects of this period—about the conflicts over Nimna on the peninsula, about the rise of the Sui dynasty on the continent, and the importation of various continental goods, including animals, immigrants, and knowledge.  That knowledge included new ideas about governance as well as religious practices such as Buddhism—and possibly other religious practices as well, as many of the stories that we saw in the Age of the Gods may have analogs on the continent and may just as easily have been coming over with the current crop of immigrants, though it is hard to say for certain.  At the heart of these changes are three individuals.  Obviously there is Kashikiya Hime, on the throne through a rather intricate and bloody series of events.  Then there is Soga no Umako, her maternal uncle, who has been helping to keep the Soga family on top.  And of course, the subject of our last couple episodes, Prince Umayado, aka Shotoku Taishi.  He, of course, is credited with the very founding of the Japanese state through the 17 article constitution and the promulgation of Buddhism. This episode, I'd like to tackle some of the little things.  Some of the stories that maybe didn't make it into other episodes up to this point.  For this, we'll mostly look at it in a chronological fashion, more or less. As you may recall, Kashikiya Hime came to the throne in about 593, ruling in the palace of Toyoura.  This was around the time that the pagoda was erected at Houkouji temple—and about the time that we are told that Shitennouji temple was erected as well.  Kashikiya Home made Umayado the Crown Prince, despite having a son of her own, as we'd mentioned previously, and then, in 594, she told Umayado and Umako to start to promulgate Buddhism, kicking off a temple building craze that would sweep the nation—or at least the areas ruled by the elites of Yamato. By 596, Houkouji was finished and, in a detail I don't think we touched on when talking about Asukadera back in episode 97, they appointed as commissioner one Zentoku no Omi—or possibly Zentoko, in one reading I found.  This is a curious name, since “Zentoku” comes across as a decidedly Buddhist name, and they really liked to use the character “Zen”, it feels like, at this time.  In fact, it is the same name that the nun, the daughter of Ohotomo no Sadehiko no Muraji, took, though the narrative is very clear about gender in both instances, despite them having the exact same Buddhist names.  This name isn't exactly unique, however, and it is also the name recorded for the Silla ruler, Queen Seondeok, whose name uses the same two characters, so it is possible that at this time it was a popular name—or perhaps people just weren't in the mood to get too creative, yet. However, what is particularly interesting to me, is that the name “Zentoku” is then followed by the kabane of “Omi”.  As you may recall from Episode XX, a kabane is a level of rank, but associated with an entire family or lineage group rather than an individual.  So while there are times where we have seen “personal name” + “kabane” in the past, there is usually a surname somewhere in there.  In this case, we aren't told the surname, but we know it because we are given the name of Zentoku's father: we are told that he was the son of none other than the “Oho-omi”, the Great Omi, aka Soga no Umako.  So, in summary, one of Soga no Umako's sons took the tonsure and became a monk. I bring this little tidbit up because there is something that seems very odd to me and, at the same time, very aristocratic, about taking vows, retiring from the world, and yet still being known by your family's title of rank. Often monks are depicted as outside of the civil rank and status system—though there were certainly ranks and titles within the priesthood.  I wonder if it read as strange to the 8th century readers, looking back on this period.  It certainly seems to illustrate quite clearly how Buddhism at this point was a tool of the elite families, and not a grass-roots movements among the common people. This also further strengthens the idea that Houkouji was the temple of the Soga—and specifically Soga no Umako.  Sure, as a Soga descendant, Prince Umayado may have had some hand in it, but in the end it was the head of the Soga family who was running the show, and so he appoints one of his own sons as the chief commissioner of the temple.  They aren't even trying to hide the connection.  In fact, having one of his sons “retire” and start making merit through Buddhist practice was probably a great PR move, overall. We don't hear much more from Zentoku after this point, and we really know very little about him.  We do know something about the Soga family, and we know that Soga no Umako has at least one other son.  While we've yet to see him in the narrative—children in the Nihon Shoki are often meant to be neither seen nor heard, it would seem—Umako's other son is known to us as Soga no Emishi.  Based on when we believe Soga no Emishi was born, however, he would have been a child, still, when all this was happening, and so Zentoku may have actually been his father's eldest son, taking the reins at Houkouji temple, likely setting him up to claim a role of spiritual leadership in the new religion of Buddhism.  Compare this to what we see later, and also in other places, such as Europe, where it is often the second son that is sent into religious life, while the eldest son—the heir—is kept at hand to succeed the father in case anything happens.  On the other hand, I am unsure if the monks of this time had any sort of celibacy that was expected of them, and I suspect that even as the temple commissioner, the tera no Tsukasa, Zentoku was keeping his hand in.  After all, the Soga family head appears to have been staying near the temple as well, so it isn't like they were packing him off to the high mountains. Moving on, in 601 we are told that Kashikiya Hime was in a temporary palace at a place called Miminashi, when heavy rains came and flooded the palace site.  This seems to be referring to flooding of Toyoura palace, which was, we believe, next to the Asuka river.  I wonder, then, if that wasn't the impetus for, two years later, in 603, moving the palace to Woharida, and leaving the old palace buildings to become a nunnery.  That Woharida palace is not thought to have been very far away—traditionally just a little ways north or possibly across the river. In 604, with the court operating out of the new Woharida palace, we see the institution of more continental style traditions.  It includes the idea of bowing when you entered or left the palace grounds—going so far as to get on your hands and knees for the bow.  Even today, it is customary to bow when entering a room—particularly a traditional room like in a dojo or similar—and it is also customary to bow when passing through a torii gate, entering into a sacred space.  Of course, that is often just a standing bow from the waist, and not a full bow from a seated position. In 605, with more continental culture being imported, we see it affecting fashion.  In fact, in this year we are told that Prince Umayado commanded all the ministers to wear the “hirami”.  The kanji simply translates to “pleats”, but in clothing terms this refers to a pleated skirt or apron.  We see examples of this in courtly clothing going back to at least the Han dynasty, if not earlier, typically tied high above the waist and falling all the way down so that only the tips of the shoes are poking out from underneath.  We have a bit more on this in the historical clothing section of the Sengoku Daimyo website, sengokudaimyo.com.   I wonder if these wrapped skirts aren't some of what we see in the embroidered Tenjukoku mandala of Chuuguuji.  Court women would continue to wear some kind of pleated skirt-like garment, which would become the mo, though for men they would largely abandon the fashion, except for some very specific ritual outfits.  That said, there is still an outfit used for some imperial ceremonies.  It is red, with many continental and what some might consider Taoist symbols, such as dragons, the sun and moon, etc..  That continuation of tradition gives us some idea of what this was and what it may have looked like back in the day.  It is also very neat that we are starting to get specific pieces of potentially identifiable clothing information, even if it is only for the court nobles. The year following that, 606, we get the giant Buddha image being installed at Houkouji, aka Asukadera.  Or at least, we think that is the one they are talking about, as we can't be one hundred percent certain.  However, it is traditionally thought to be one and the same.  The copper and gold image was commissioned a year prior, along with an embroidered image as well, but when they went to install it they ran into a slight problem:  The statue was too large to fit through the doors of the kondo, the golden image hall.  No doubt that caused some embarrassment—it is like ordering furniture that won't fit through the doorway, no matter how you and your friends try to maneuver it around.  They were thinking they would have to cut through the doors of the kondo to create more room, and then fix it afterwards.  Nobody really wanted to do that thought—whether because they thought it would damage the structural integrity of the building or they just didn't want to have to put up with an unsightly scar, it isn't clear.  Finally, before they took such extreme measures, they called on the original artist, Kuratsukuri no Tori.  He is said to be the son of the famous Shiba Tattou, and so his family was quite close with the Soga, and he seems to have had quite the eye for geometry as we are told that he, “by way of skill”, was able to get it through the doors and into the hall.  I don't know if that meant he had to some how turn it on its side and walk it through, or something else, but whatever it was, it worked.  Tori's mad Tetris skills worked, and they were able to install the giant Buddha in the hall without cutting through the doorways. For his efforts, Tori was rewarded, and he was raised up to the rank of Dainin, one of the 12 new ranks of the court.  He was also given 20 cho worth of “water fields”—likely meaning rice paddies.  With the income from those fields, we are told that he invested in a temple of his own:  Kongoji, later known as the nunnery of Sakata in Minabuchi. For all that Buddhism was on the rise, the worship of the kami was still going strong as well.  In 607 we are told that there was an edict that everyone should worship the kami of heaven and earth, and we are told that all of the noble families complied.  I would note that Aston wonders about this entry, as the phrasing looks like something you could have taken right out of continental records, but at the same time, it likely reflects reality to some extent.  It is hard to see the court just completely giving up on the traditional kami worship, which would continue to be an important part of court ritual.  In fact, it is still unclear just how the new religion of Buddhism was viewed, and how much people understood the Buddha to be anything more than just another type of kami. Later in that same year was the mission to the Sui court, which we discussed in Episode 96.  The year after, the mission returned to Yamato with Sui ambassadors, and then, in 609, those ambassadors returned to the Sui court.  These were the missions of that infamous letter, where the Yamato court addressed the Sui Emperor as an equal.  “From the child of heaven in the land where the sun rises to the child of heaven in the land where the sun sets.”  It is still one of my favorite little pieces of history, and I constantly wonder if Yamato didn't understand the difference in scale or if they just didn't care.  Either way, some really powerful vibes coming off that whole thing. That same year that the Sui ambassadors were going back to their court there was another engagement with foreigners.  In this case the official on the island of Tsukushi, aka Kyuushuu, reported to the Yamato court that 2 priests from Baekje, along with 10 other priests  and 75 laypersons had anchored in the harbor of Ashigita, in the land of Higo, which is to say the land of Hi that was farther from Yamato, on the western side of Kyuushuu.  Ashigita, you may recall, came up in Episode 89 in reference to the Baekje monk—and I use that term loosely—Nichira, aka Illa.  There, Nichira was said to descend from the lord of Ashigita, who was said to be Arisateung, a name which appears to be a Korean—possibly Baekje—title.  So now we have a Baekje ship harboring in a land that once was ruled by a family identified, at least in their names or titles, as having come from or at least having ties with Baekje.  This isn't entirely surprising, as it wouldn't have taken all that much effort for people to cross from one side to the other, and particularly during the period before there was a truly strong central government it is easy to see that there may have been lands in the archipelago that had ties to Baekje, just as we believe there were some lands on the peninsula that had ties to Yamato. One more note before get to the heart of the matter is the title of the person who reported all these Baekje goings-on.  Aston translates the title as the Viceroy of Tsukushi, and the kanji read “Dazai”, as in the “Dazaifu”, or government of the “Dazai”.  There is kana that translates the title as Oho-mikoto-Mochi—the Great August Thing Holder, per Aston, who takes this as a translation, rather than a strict transliteration.  This is the first time that this term, “Dazai” has popped up in the history, and it will appear more and more in the future.  We know that, at least later, the Dazaifu was the Yamato court's representative government in Kyuushuu.  The position wasn't new - it goes back to the various military governors sent there in previous reigns - but this is the first time that specific phrasing is used—and unfortunately we don't even know much about who it was referring to.  The position, however, would become an important part of the Yamato governing apparatus, as it provided an extension of the court's power over Kyuushuu, which could otherwise have easily fallen under the sway of others, much as Iwai tried to do when he tried to ally with Silla and take Tsukushi by force.  Given the importance of Kyuushuu as the entrypoint to the archipelago, it was in the Court's best interest to keep it under their control. Getting back to the ship with the Baekje priests on it:  the passengers claimed they were on their way to Wu, or Kure—presumably headed to the Yangzi river region.  Given the number of Buddhist monasteries in the hills around the Yangzi river, it is quite believable, though of course by this time the Wu dynasty was long gone.  What they had not prepared for was the new Sui dynasty, as they said there was a civil war of some kind going on, and so they couldn't land and were subsequently blown off course in a storm, eventually limping along to Ashigita harbor, where they presumably undertook rest and a chance to repair their vessels.  It is unclear to me exactly what civil war they were referring to, and it may have just been a local conflict.  There would be rebellions south of the Yangzi river a few years later, but no indication that it was this, just a bit out of context.  We know that the Sui dynasty suffered—it wouldn't last another decade before being dismantled and replaced by the Tang dynasty in about 618.  There were also ongoing conflicts with Goguryeo and even the area of modern Vietnam, which were draining the Sui's resources and could be related to all of these issues.  If so, though, it is hard to see an exact correlation to the “civil war” mentioned in the text. Given all this, two court nobles:  Naniwa no Kishi no Tokomaro and Fumibito no Tatsu were sent to Kyuushuu to see what had happened, and, once they learned the truth, help send the visitors on their way.  However, ten of the priests asked to stay in Yamato, and they were sent to be housed at the Soga family temple of Houkouji.  As you may recall, 10 monks was the necessary number to hold a proper ordination ceremony, funnily enough. In 610, another couple of monks showed up—this time from Goguryeo.  They were actually sent, we are told, as “tribute”.  We are told that one of them was well read—specifically that he knew the Five Classics—but also that he understood how to prepare various paints and pigments.  A lot of paint and pigments were based on available materials as well as what was known at the time, and so it is understandable, to me, why you might have that as a noted and remarkable skill.  We are also told that he made mills—likely a type of handmill.  These can be easily used for helping to crush and blend medicines, but I suspect it could just as easily be used to crush the various ingredients for different pigments.  A type of handmill, where you roll a wheel in a narrow channel, forward and back, is still in use today throughout Asia. In 611, on the 5th day of the 5th month, the court went out to gather herbs.  They assembled at the pond of Fujiwara—the pond of the wisteria field—and set out at sunrise.  We are told that their clothing matched their official cap colors, which was based on their rank, so that would seem to indicate that they were dressed in their court outfits.  In this case, though, they also had hair ornaments mad of gold, leopard's tails, or birds.  That leopard's tail, assuming the description is accurate, is particularly interesting, as it would have had to have come from the continent. This ritual gathering of herbs would be repeated on the 5th day of the 5th month of both 612 and 614.  If that date seems familiar, you might be thinking of the modern holiday of Tango no Sekku, aka Kodomo no Hi.  That is to say:  Boy's Day or the more gender neutral “Children's Day”.  It is part of a series of celebrations in Japan known today as “Golden Week”, when there are so many holidays crammed together that people get roughly a week off of work, meaning that a lot of travel tends to happen in that period.  While the idea of “Boy's Day” probably doesn't come about until the Kamakura period, Tango no Sekku has long been one of the five seasonal festivals of the court, the Gosekku.  These included New Year's day; the third day of the third month, later to become the Doll Festival, or Girl's Day; the seventh day of the seventh month, during Tanabata; and the 9th day of the 9th month.  As you can see, that is 1/1, 3/3, 5/5, 7/7, and 9/9.  Interestingly, they skipped over 11/11, possibly because that was in the winter time, based on the old calendar, and people were just trying to stay warm. Early traditions of Tango no Sekku include women gathering irises to protect the home.  That could connect to the practice, here, of “picking herbs” by the court, and indeed, many people connect the origins of Tango no Sekku back to this reign specifically because of these references, though there is very little said about what they were doing, other than picking herbs in their fancy outfits. We are given a few more glimpses into the lives of the court in a few other entries.  In 612, for instance, we have a banquet thrown for the high functionaries.  This may have been a semi-regular occasion, but this particular incident was memorable for a couple of poems that were bandied back and forth between Soga no Umako and Kashikiya Hime.  He toasted her, and she responded with a toast to the sons of Soga. Later that year, they held a more somber event, as Kitashi Hime was re-interred.  She was the sister to Soga no Umako, consort of Nunakura Futodamashiki no Ohokimi, aka Kimmei Tenno, and mother to both Tachibana no Toyohi, aka Youmei Tennou, and Kashikiya Hime, Suiko Tennou.  She was re-buried with her husband at his tomb in Hinokuma.  During this period, various nobles made speeches.  Kicking the event off was Abe no Uchi no Omi no Tori, who made offerings to her spirit, including around 15,000 utensils and garments.  Then the royal princes spoke, each according to rank, but we aren't given just what they said.  After that, Nakatomi no Miyatokoro no Muraji no Womaro gave the eulogy of the Oho-omi, presumably speaking on Umako's behalf, though it isn't exactly clear why, though Umako was certainly getting on in years.  Then, Sakahibe no Omi no Marise delivered the written eulogies of the other families. And here we get an interesting glimpse into court life as we see a report that both Nakatomi no Womaro and Sakahibe no Marise apparently delivered their speeches with great aplomb, and the people listening were quite appreciative.  However, they did not look quite so fondly on the speechifying of Abe no Tori, and they said that he was less than skillful.  And consider that—if you find public speaking to be something you dread, imagine if your entire reputation hung on ensuring that every word was executed properly.  A single misstep or a bad day and suddenly you are recorded in the national history as having been just the worst.  In fact, his political career seems to have tanked, as we don't hear much more about him after that. 612 also saw more immigrants bringing more art and culture.  The first was a man from Baekje.  He did not look well—he had white circles under his eyes, we are told, possibly indicating ringworm or some other infection.  It was so bad that the people on the ship with him were thinking about putting him off on an island to fend for himself.  He protested that his looks were not contagious, and no different that the white patches of color you might see on horses or cattle.  Moreover, he had a talent for painting figures and mountains.  He drew figures of the legendary Mt. Sumeru, and of the Bridge of Wu, during the period of the Southern Courts, and the people were so taken by it that they forestalled tossing him overboard.  He was eventually known as Michiko no Takumi, though more colloquially he was known as Shikomaro, which basically was a nickname calling him ugly, because judging people based on appearance was still totally a thing. The other notable immigrant that year was also a man of Baekje, known to us as Mimachi, or perhaps Mimashi or Mimaji.  He claimed to know the music and dancing of the Wu court—or at least some continental dynasty.  He settled in Sakurawi and took on students who were basically forced to learn from him.  As if a piano teacher appeared and all the children went to learn, but now it isn't just your parents and their high expectations, but the very state telling you to do it.  So… no pressure, I'm sure.  Eventually, Manu no Obito no Deshi—whose name literally means “student” or “disciple”—and Imaki no Ayabito no Seibun learned the teachings and passed them down to others.  This would appear to be the masked dances known as Gigaku. If you know about early Japanese music and dance you may have heard of Gagaku, Bugaku, and Noh theater.  Gagaku is the courtly music, with roots in apparently indigenous Japanese music as well as various continental sources, from the Korean peninsula all the way down to Southeast Asia.  Indeed, the musical records we have in Japan are often the only remaining records of what some of the continental music of this time might have sounded like, even though the playing style and flourishes have changed over the centuries, and many scholars have used the repertoire of the Japanese court to help work backwards to try and recreate some of the continental music. The dances that you often see with Gagaku musical accompaniment are known as Bugaku, and most of that was codified in the latter years of the Heian era—about the 12th century.  Then there is the famous masked theater known as Noh, which has its origins in a variety of traditions, going back to at least the 8th century and really brought together around the 14th century.  All of these traditions, however, are preceded by Gigaku, this form of masked dance that came over in the 7th century, and claims its roots in the area of “Wu” rather than “Tang”, implying that it goes back to traditions of the southern courts of the Yangzi river region. Gigaku spread along with the rest of continental culture, along with the spread of Buddhism and other such ideas.  From what we can tell, it was a dominant form of music and dance for the court, and many of the masks that were used are preserved in temple storehouses such as the famous Shosoin at the Todaiji in Nara.  However, as the centuries rolled by, Gigaku was eventually replaced at court by Bugaku style dances, though it continued to be practiced up through at least the 14th century.  Unfortunately, I know of no Gigaku dances that survived into the modern day, and we are left with the elaborate masks, some illustrations of dancers, and a few descriptions of what it was like, but that seems to be it. From what we can tell, Gigaku—also known as Kure-gaku, or Kure-no-utamai, meaning Music or Music and Dances of Wu—is first noted back in the reign of Nunakura Futodamashiki, aka Kimmei Tennou, but it wasn't until the reign of Kashikiya Hime that we actually see someone coming over and clearly imparting knowledge of the dances and music—Mimashi, mentioned above.  We then see the dances mentioned at various temples, including Houryuuji, Toudaiji, and others.  Of course, as with many such things, Shotoku Taishi is given credit for spreading Gigaku through the Buddhist temples, and the two do seem to have gone hand in hand. We know a little bit about the dances from the masks and various writings.  The masks are not random, and a collection of Gigaku masks will have generally the same set of characters.  These characters appear to have been organized in a traditional order.  A performance would start with a parade and a sutra reading—which I wonder if that was original or if it was added as they grew more connected to the Buddhist temple establishment.  And then there was a lion dance, where a young cub would pacify an adult lion.  Lion dances, in various forms, continue to be found throughout East Asia. Then the characters come into play and there are various stories about, for example, the Duke of Wu, and people from the “Hu” Western Regions—that is to say the non-Han people in the Western part of what is now China and central Eurasia.  Some of these performances appear to be serious, while others may have been humorous interludes, like when a demon assaults the character Rikishi using a man's genitals while calling for the “Woman of Wu”.  That brings to mind the later tradition of ai-kyougen; similarly humorous or lighthearted episodes acted out during Noh plays to help break up the dramatic tension. Many of aspects of Gigaku would go on to influence the later styles of court music and dance.  Bugaku is thought to have some of its origins in masked Gigaku dancers performing to the various styles of what became known as Gagaku music.  There are also examples of some of the characters making their way into other theatrical traditions, such as Sarugaku and, eventually, Noh and even folk theater.  These hints have been used to help artists reconstruct what Gigagku might have been like. One of the key aspects of Gigaku is that for all they were telling stories, other than things like the recitation of the sutras, the action of the story appears to have been told strictly through pantomime in the dances.  This was accompanied by the musicians, who played a variety of instruments during the performance that would provide the musical queues for the dancers-slash-actors.  There was no dialogue, however, but the names of the various characters appear to have been well known, and based on the specifics of the masks one could tell who was who and what was going on. This is similar to how, in the west, there were often stock characters in things like the English Mummers plays or the Comedia dell'arte of the Italian city-states, though in Gigaku those characters would not speak at all, and their story would be conveyed simply through pantomime, music, and masks. There have been attempts to reconstruct Gigaku.  Notably there was an attempt in the 1980s, in coordination with a celebration of the anniversary of Todaiji, in Nara, and it appears that Tenri University may continue that tradition.  There was also another revival by famed Kyougen actor Nomura Mannojo, uncle to another famous Kyougen actor turned movie star, Nomura Mansai.  Mannojo called his style “Shingigaku”, which seems to be translated as either “True Gigaku” or “New Gigagku”, and he took that on tour to various countries.  You can find an example of his performance from the Silk Road Theater at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, DC back in 2002, as well as elsewhere.  It does appear that he's changed things up just a little bit, however, based on his layout of the dances, but it is an interesting interpretation, nonetheless. We may never truly know what Gigaku looked and sounded like, but it certainly had an impact on theatrical and musical traditions of Japan, and for that alone it perhaps deserves to be mentioned. And I think we'll stop right there, for now.  There is more to get through, so we'll certainly have a part two as we continue to look at events of this rein.  There are stories of gods and omens.  There is contact with an island off the southern coast of Kyuushuu.  There are more trips to the Sui court.  Much of that is coming.  Until then, I'd like to thank you once again.  I can hardly believe we reached one hundred episodes!  And it comes just as we are about to close out the year. As usual, I'll plan for a recap episode over New Year's, and then I'll plan to get back into everything the episode after that, but this closes out the year. I hope everyone has a wonderful new year, however you celebrate and, as always, thank you for listening and for all of your support.  If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts.  If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Also, feel free to Tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.  You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com.  And that's all for now.  Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  

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This episode, we look at the rise of the Sui Dynasty and the famous interactions between Yamato and the Sui Dynasty, recorded in the histories of each state. For more, check out the podcast webpage:  https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-96 Rough Transcript Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua and this is Episode 96: From the Land Where the Sun Rises. Once again, we are still talking about the reign of Kashikiya Hime,   from the late 6th to early 7th century.  This time, though, we are going to take a quick diversion from Yamato and first look at what was going on over on the continent, in the  area of the Yellow and Yangzi River Basins—the area of the so-called “middle country”.  This is, after all, where a lot of the philosophy and other things that the archipelago was importing came from, so what was going on over there? Back in Episode 73, ee talked about the various northern and southern dynasties in the Yellow and Yangzi River Basins.  To sum up, during that period, the eastern area of modern China was split between a variety of dynasties, many of them short-lived, and many of them—especially in the north—were dynasties from outside of the main Han ethnic group. Up through the early 580's, the dynasty in charge of the Yellow River region was the Northern Zhou, one of the many dynasties in the north descended from the nomadic Xianbei ethnic groups.  Though their aristocracy was a mix of multiple ethnicities that had intermarried over the years, the Northern Zhou celebrated their Xianbei roots, often to the detriment of ethnic Han groups.  They had inherited the territory of the Western Wei, including much of the central Yangzi region down to Sichuan.  They then defeated the Northern Qi in 577 and claimed dominion over all of the Yellow River region in the north of modern China.  Their only rival was the Chen dynasty, along the eastern reaches of the Yangzi river, but the Chen themselves were relatively weak, and it was only the power struggles within the Northern Zhou court that kept them from wiping out the Chen completely. In 581, the Northern Zhou suffered a coup d'etat. Yang Jian was a Northern Zhou general, and his family, the Yang clan, had Han origins but had intermarried with the Xianbei as well, creating a truly mixed lineage. Jian also held some sway at court, and was known as the Duke of Sui—his daughter was the Empress Dowager, and her stepson was the young Emperor Jing.  In 581 Yang Jian usurped power from his step-grandson, the child emperor Jing, and placed himself on the throne, taking the name Emperor Wen of Sui, using his previous title as the name of the new dynasty. He killed off fifty-nine princes of the previous Northern Zhou, and began to consolidate his power.  By 587, he had strengthened his position, and by 588 invasion of the Chen territories began under Prince Yang Guang.  By 589, the Chen were defeated and any attempts at rebellion were put down, giving the Sui dynasty full control of northern and southern regions—from the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers down to the Sichuan basin.  Although, as I noted, the Yang family had intermarried with the Xianbei families of the Northern Zhou, they still retained some connection with their Han roots, and Emperor Wen won over the Han Confucian scholars with reforms to the rank system and at least a nod towards getting rid of nepotism and corruption that had taken hold in the Northern Zhou and previous dynasties.  He reinstituted Han dynasty titles and restored the nine rank system.  He also reinstituted a system of impartial judges to seek out talent and moved towards the idea of an examination system—something that would really take hold in later centuries. Furthermore, while he set himself up in the northern capital of Daxingcheng, aka Chang'an, he helped rebuild the southern capital, naming it Dayang.  He also supported Buddhism and Daoism.  He became a patron of southern Buddhist monasteries, and recognized major temples as state-sponsored institutions—a far cry from the suppression attempts in the north in 574 and 578. Emperor Wen also worked on repairing canals along the Yellow River.  These canals, which allowed easy transport of goods, regularly silted up without maintenance, and the dikes on either side could break, flooding the land on either side. They had been neglected during many of the short-lived reigns up to this point, with perhaps a few exceptions when things got really bad.  However, Emperor Wen began work to fix these old canals and thus improve the flow of goods and services. Given all of this - his patronage of Buddhism and Daoism, as well as his attempt to resurrect the Han dynasty and the Confucian principles that underlay its government, as well as the public works that he instituted, Yang Jian, aka Emperor Wen of Sui, is remembered as the Cultured Emperor—despite that fact the had started out as a blood-soaked general who had secured his usurpation with a not inconsiderable amount of murder.  Sima Guang, writing from the Song dynasty, centuries later, praised Emperor Wen for all he did to grow the Sui, uniting north and south, supporting the people, and helping the country to prosper as it rarely has before.  And yet, Sima Guang also says that in his personal life he was mean and stingy and paranoid—afraid that everyone was out to get him.  Given the life he'd lived, that would make some sense.  Still, he seems to have been good for his people, in the long run. But this wasn't to last.  In 604, Emperor Wen fell ill and died.  Or at least that is the official story.  Another says that he had grown angry over some event and was about to disinherit the crown prince, Yang Guang, who sent someone to kill his father.  That is a very abbreviated version of the story, and, as I said, it is not without controversy. However he died, his son, Yang Guang, succeeded him to the throne and became known as Emperor Yang.  Emperor Yang continued to expand the empire, and under his dynasty the Sui would attain their greatest extent yet.  He rebuilt parts of the Great Wall, and expanded the borders south, into modern Vietnam, as well as up to the borders with Goguryeo.  He also continued the work his father had begun on canals, eventually undertaking the creation of the Grand Canal, which would connect the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers.  No longer would the two be separate, forced to send goods out to sea or over treacherous land routes to get from one river basin to another.  Now they could sail ships straight from one river to the other—an impressive feat that you can still see today in parts of modern China.  The project would forever change the landscape of China, both literally and figuratively.  It connected the north and south, leading to greater political, economic, and cultural unity between the two regions.  It would connect the culture and economic resources of the south with the military institutions of the north.   Unfortunately, for all that this expansion may have been good for commerce, it came at a price.  The wars in Champa, in Southern Vietnam, saw thousands of Sui soldiers die from malaria.  And then, in the north, though they continuously pushed against Goguryeo, they were never quite able to overthrow them.  Finally, there was the Grand Canal.  Although it would truly be a wonder of the world, and become a part of the lifeblood of dynasties for centuries to come, it was built at a huge price both monetarily and in human lives.  We can assume a large number of people died as conscript labor working on the canals or on refurbishing the Great Wall, but also we are told that the monetary price largely bankrupted the empire, and for which later historians castigated the Sui dynasty But that was still to happen.  For our purposes, we should rewind a bit, to the very beginning of the 7th century.  As we touched on last episode, Yamato was just adopting their own twelve rank system and a seventeen article constitution shortly after Emperor Wen passed away and Yang Guang took the throne.  Now these 17 articles were almost all based on Confucian or Buddhist philosophy; clearly the Court was looking to the continent more and more for inspiration on how to govern, especially as it further expanded and solidified its grasp across the archipelago.  Up to this point, much of that innovation had come through the Korean peninsula, by way of Silla, Goguryeo, and, most prominently, their ally Baekje.  But no doubt they knew that much of what was influencing those kingdoms had, itself, come from even farther away.  And so, this reign, the Chronicles record that Yamato once again sent envoys beyond their peninsular neighbors all the way to the Middle Country itself.  This is significant as they were making direct contact with the mighty empire, the source of so many of the philosophical and scientific innovations that Yamato was trying to adopt.  This wasn't the first time this had happened, of course—we know of the cases of state of Na contacting the Han court, and then Himiko of the Wa during the Wei period, as well as several missions immediately after Himiko's death.  We also know of the five kings of Wa who reached out to the Liu Song court, though the Chronicles themselves are often silent on actual embassies, making it hard to tell exactly which reigns that occurred in, though it is generally agreed that one of those “Five Kings” was none other than Wakatakiru himself, Yuuryaku Tennou. There may have been other missions.  There seems to be some discussion amongst the Liang dynasty records that may indicate greater contact with Japan, but again, we don't necessarily see that in the records themselves.  Furthermore, with the fractured nature of the various dynasties since the Han period, and the various conflicts on the peninsula and in the archipelago, it would be understandable if there hadn't been much direct diplomatic contact since about the time of Wakatakiru. And so it is a pretty big thing that we not only have an envoy around the year 608, but that there appears to be agreement for it in the Sui history—though there is one glaring mistake: in the Nihon Shoki they clearly say that they sent envoys to the “Great Tang”, and not the Sui.  However, this is fairly easily explained.  By the 8th century, as the records were being compiled, the Tang dynasty was, indeed, in control of the Chinese court.  In fact, the Tang dynasty was so admired by the Japanese of the day that even now the term “Karafu”, or “Chinese style”, uses the character for the Tang dynasty, rather than the Han.  On the one hand it seems as though the scholars of the 8th century would surely have known of the Sui dynasty coming before the Tang, but it is also understandable that anyone would have just thought of the successive courts as a single continuity.  Either way, I'll talk about the Sui dynasty, and it is in the Sui dynasty records that we find the corresponding description of this embassy. It starts on the 3rd day of the 7th month of 607.  The Chronicles tell us that Wono no Omi no Imoko was sent to the Sui court, taking along Kuratsukuri no Fukuri as an interpreter.  You may recall that the Kuratsukuri, or saddle-makers, claimed a descent from Shiba Tattou, himself from the continent.  It would make sense to take someone on this diplomatic exhibition who could actually speak the language or, failing that, read and write it - a peculiar function of the Chinese language, since the various dialects, though often mutually unintelligible, still use the same characters. Imoko, by the way, may have also had important connections, but in this case it was to the Soga.  We are told in the Nihon Shoki that Imoko was known in the Sui Court as “So Imko”, and the “So” character is the same as the first character in the name “Soga”.  It is possible that Imoko was, indeed, a Soga family member, and the name Wono no Omi may have come later.   Or it is possible that he was forgotten for some reason. On the Sui side, we are told that in the year 607 there was an envoy sent with tribute from King Tarashihoko, which may have been another name for Kashikiya Hime, or perhaps it was simply an error caused by the problems with attempting to record foreign names in Sinitic characters. The arrival of the embassy must have been something else, especially as they came upon the capital city.  Wen's capital city, that of Daxingcheng, was a new city, built just southeast of the ancient city of Chang'an, which was in a sad state of decay, despite hosting so many rulers over the centuries, including the Northern Zhou themselves.  Wen had laid out a new plan of a permanent, rectangular city, with the royal palace taking up the northern central district.  Buddhist and Daoist temples were scattered throughout the city.  The city itself was five to six miles a side, and so it would take time to truly build it out.  However, first the walls were set up, and then the palace area, so that Wen effectively moved into an empty city when he arrived in 583.  Many people were forcibly resettled, and members of the new royal family were encouraged to set up their own palaces, but it would take time to truly fill up—by the end of the Sui dynasty, and the beginning of the Tang, the city was still being built, and it wouldn't see its ultimate heyday as a vibrant urban capital until the Tang dynasty. And so when the Yamato delegation arrived in 608, they would have seen the impressive walls and the immense palace, but in all likelihood, much of the city was still being built, and there was likely construction on every block.  Nonetheless, the sheer size would have to have made an impression on them—nothing like this existed in the archipelago in the slightest. On the other hand, the Sui had their own curiosities about Yamato.  The history of the Sui, written only twenty to thirty years afterwards, starts out its account with a description of the Land of Wa.  Some of it is taken directly from the Wei histories, recounting what was previously known about these islands across the eastern sea—we talked about that back in episodes 11 to 13.  The Sui history summarizes these previous historical accounts, including mention of envoys that came over during the Qi and Liang dynasties—between 479 and 556—though little more is said. Then the Sui history mentions an envoy that is said to have arrived in the early part of the Sui—the Kaihuang era, between 581-600.  We are told that this was for a “King” whose family name was Ame and his personal name was Tarashihiko, with the title of Ohokimi—at least, assuming we are transliterating correctly, as the characters used have slightly different pronunciations.  That could easily be attributed to just mistranslations.  Even the family and personal name are familiar, but not exactly attributed in the Chronicles—though we have seen the elements elsewhere in the royal family, and it may be that they were also titles, of a sort.  Also, they mention a King, but that could also just be due to the fact that the Ohokimi was not a gendered title, and as such the Sui simply assumed a male ruler.  There is no evidence of this in the Chronicles for this, however it is said that at that time they looked into the ways of the Wa and they were told that “The King of Wa deems heaven to be his elder brother and the sun, his younger.  Before break of dawn he attends the Court, and, sitting cross-legged, listens to appeals.  Just as soon as the sun rises, he ceases these duties, saying that he hands them over to his brother.” This is likely a misunderstanding, once again, but it rings with some truth.  Even if we discard some of the legends about Amaterasu as later additions, there is plenty of linguistic and cultural evidence that the sun held a special place in Wa culture.  There is also the article in the new constitution about starting early to work that might just be referenced here. We aren't sure when, exactly, the Sui collected this information—though given that it was written within living memory of many of the events, a lot of the information is considered to at least be plausible, if perhaps a bit misunderstood at times. The Sui history specifically mentions the twelve court ranks—in fact, it is possible that the Chronicles, compiled in the 8th century, were actually referencingthis earlier history about the ranks, though we know that ranks continued in one way or another.  It also makes the comment that there were no regulated number of officials in each rank—that would certainly be the case later, and makes sense when the ranks also dictated how much of a salary that one could expect from the court.  Then, outside of the court they mention the “kuni”—the kuni no miyatsuko—and then claimed that each kuni no miyatsuko oversaw about 10 inaki, officials in charge of the royal granaries, who each oversaw 80 families.  It is doubtful that these numbers were that precise, but it gives an interesting concept of scale. The Sui history also tells us about other things that the Chronicles tend to leave out.  We are told that the men wore both outer and inner garments, with small (likely meaning narrow) sleeves.  Their footgear was like sandals, painted with lacquer, which sounds not unlike geta, which we do have evidence for going back into the Yayoi, at least, though this was only for the upper crust—most people just went barefoot, wearing a wide piece of cloth tied on without sewing. We do get a hint at the headgear that was instituted along with the court rank system, by the way, but only a glimpse.  We are told that it was made of brocade and colored silk and decorated with gold and silver inlaid flowers, which does correspond to some of what we know from the Chronicles. As for the women of Yamato, we are told that they arrange their hair on the back of the head, and they wear outer garments and scarves with patterns.  They have decorative combs of bamboo as well.  They also wore tattoos, as did the men.  Much of this, including the tattoos, accords with what we have evidence of in the Haniwa from the 6th century and later. For sleeping arrangements we are told that they weave grass into mattresses—possibly the origin of the later tatami that would originally just be woven mats but eventually turned into a type of permanent flooring.  For covers we are told they used skins lined with colored leather—a curious blanket, and one wonders if this was for everyone or just the upper crust. We are given some discussion of their weapons and armor, including their use of lacquered leather and the fact that they made arrowheads out of bone.  We also know they used metal, but bone was likely the more prevalent material, as losing a metal arrowhead was much more costly than losing a bone one. Interestingly we are told that, though there is a standing army, wars are infrequent—which may have been accurate in relation to what the Sui themselves had gone through and seen, since it seems like they were almost constantly fighting somewhere along their borders.  But Yamato was far from peaceful, and it is telling that the court was accompanied by music and displays of military might. As for the justice system, we talked about this a little bit in previous episodes, based on various punishments we've seen in the archipelago, though the Sui history gives us a slightly more direct description.  It claims that there were some high crimes punished by death.  Others were punished with fines, often meant to make restitution to the aggrieved.  If you couldn't pay you would be enslaved to pay for it instead.  They also mention banishment and flogging.  All of this is in line with some of what we've seen in the Chronicles, though it also seems like some of this may have also depended on other factors, including the accused's social status.  After all, not everyone had rice land that they could just turn over to wipe out their misdeeds. Then there were the various judicial ordeals.  We've mentioned this idea , with the idea that somehow the righteous would be protected from injury.  These included things like pulling pebbles out of boiling water, or reaching into a pot to grab a snake and hoping he doesn't bite you.  There are also various tortures designed to get one to confess. In discussing literacy, the Sui histories mention that the Wa have no written characters—and at this point, the writing would have been some form of Sinic characters, assuming one could read and write at all.  Instead, the Sui anthropologists said that the Wa used notched sticks and knotted ropes as a means of conveying messages.  How exactly that work, I'm not sure, but there are certainly cultures that we know used things like knotted rope for various math and conveying numbers, etc. In regards to religion, the Sui noticed that Buddhism had taken hold, but it had not gotten rid of other practices.  Thus we know they practiced forms of divination and had faith in both male and female shamans. In their free time, people would enjoy themselves.  On New Year's day, they would have archery tournaments, play games, and drink—the Sui said that it was very much like how they themselves celebrated. Coromorant fishing and abalone diving—well, diving for fish—are both noted already.  Again, these are activities that continue into the modern day. At dinner we are told that the people do not eat off of dishes or plates, but instead use oak leaves.  We've seen mention of this kind of practice, and that may have just been a particular ritual or ceremony that made its way back. Finally, there are the rituals for the dead.  We are told people wear white—white is often considered the color of death in Japan, even today.  They would have singing and dancing near the corpse, and a nobleman might lay in state—in a mogari shelter or temporary interment—for three years.  Certainly, we've sometimes seen it take a while, especially if the kofun isn't ready to receive the body, yet.  Commoners apparently would place the body in a boat which was pulled along from the shore or placed in a small palanquin—though what happens after that is somewhat of a mystery. The Sui envoys writing about this also apparently experienced an active period of Mt. Aso—or another mountain so-named—as they said it was belching forth fire from the rocks.  As we've mentioned, the archipelago is particularly active, volcanically speaking, so I'm not surprised that an envoy might have had a chance to get to know a little more about that first hand. Having described the country thus, the Sui Chronicles go on to describe the embassy that came over in the year 607.  According to the history as translated by Tsunoda Ryusaku and L. Carrington Goodrich, the envoy from Yamato explained the situation as such: “The King has heard that to the west of the ocean a Boddhisattva of the Sovereign reveres and promotes Buddhism.  Accompanying the embassy are several tens of monks who have come to study Buddhism.” This is great as we see some of the things that the Japanese scholars left out—that there were Buddhists on this mission.  For many, getting to the monasteries and temples of the Middle Kingdom was almost as good as making the trip all the way to India. Over all, the embassy appears to have been largely successful in their mission.  The ambassador, Imoko, came back with an envoy from the Sui, Pei Shiqing, along with twelve other individuals.  It is thought that this may have been the same embassy that then reported back to the court all of the various details that the later Sui history  captured. According to the Sui dynasty history, the embassy first headed to Baekje, reaching the island of Chiku, and then, after seeing Tara in the south, they passed Tsushima and sailed out in to the deep ocean, eventually landing on the island of Iki.  From there they made it to Tsukushi, and on to Suwo.  They then passed through some ten countries until they came to the shore.  Now, Naniwa no Kishi no Wonari had been sent to bring them to court and they had a new official residence erected for them in Naniwa—modern Ohosaka.  When they arrived, on the 15th day of the 6th month of the year 608, Yamato sent out thirty heavily decorated boats to meet them—and no doubt to make an impression as well.  They met them at Yeguchi, the mouth of the river and they were ensconced in the newly built official residence. Official entertainers were appointed for the ambassadors—Nakatomi no Miyatoko no Muraji no Torimaro, Ohohoshi no Kawachi no Atahe no Nukade, and Fume no Fumibito no Oohei.  Meanwhile, Imoko continued on to the court proper to report on his mission. Unfortunately, for all of the goodness that came from the whole thing, the trip had not been completely flawless.  The Sui court had entrusted Imoko with a letter to pass on to the Yamato court, but the return trip through Baekje proved… problematic, to say the least.  We are told that men of Baekje stopped the party, searched them, and confiscated the letter.  It is unclear whether these were Baekje officials or just some bandits, but the important thing was that Imoko had lost the message, which was a grave offense.  The ministers suggested that, despite all of his success, Imoko should be banished for losing the letter.  After all, it was the duty of an envoy to protect the messages between the courts at all costs. In the end, it was agreed that, yes, Imoko should be punished, but that it would be a bad look in front of their guests.  After all, he had just represented them to the Sui Court, and so Kashikiya Hime pardoned Imoko of any wrongdoing. A couple months later, on the 3rd day of the 8th month, the preparations had been made and  the envoys formally approached the palace.  There were met on the Tsubaki no Ichi road by 75 well-dressed horses—the Sui history says two hundred—and there Nukada no Muraji no Hirafu welcomed them all with a speech. After finally reaching the location of the palace, it was nine more days before the Sui envoys were formally summoned to present themselves and state their reason for coming.  Abe no Tori no Omi and Mononobe no Yosami no no Muraji no Idaku acted as “introducers” for the guests, announcing who they were to the court.  Then Pei Shiqing had the various diplomatic gifts arranged in the courtyard, and then presented his credentials to the court.  Then, bowing twice, he gave his own account of why he had been sent—he announced greetings from the Sui emperor, recognized the work of Imoko, and then provided an excuse that the emperor himself could not make it due to his poor health.  That last bit I suspect was a polite fiction, or perhaps an erroneous addition by the Chroniclers.  After all, it isn't like the Sui emperors were in the habit of just gallivanting off to an unknown foreign land—especially one across the sea. After delivering some polite niceties, Shiqing also provided a detailed list of all of the diplomatic gifts that they had brought. The dance that happened next is telling.  In order to convey Pei Shiqing's letter to the sovereign, it wasn't like they could just hand it.  There were levels of protocol and procedure that had to be observed, and so Abe no Omi took the letter up and handed it to Ohotomo no Kurafu no Muraji, who in turn placed it on a table in front of the Great gate where Kashikiya Hime could then get it.  This setup is similar to the later court, where only certain individuals of rank were actually allowed up into the buildings of the palace, whereas others were restricted to the ground. After that formal introduction, there was a month or more of parties for the envoys, until finally they had to return to the Sui court.  When they departed, they were sent with eight students and Imoko, who was bringing another letter back to the Sui Court.  The students were all scheduled to study various disciplines and bring the knowledge back to the Yamato court. But that wasn't quite so special, or at least we aren't given much more on the specifics of what the students brought back..  What really stands out in the Sui histories is the contents of the formal letter that Imoko was carrying, as it had a phrase that will be familiar to many students of this period of history, and which really connects across the Japanese and Sui histories, despite other inconsistencies.  It read: “The Son of Heaven in the land where the sun rises addresses a letter to the Son of Heaven in the land where the sun sets.  We hope you are in good health.” Or at least, that is how the Sui histories record it.  In the Nihon Shoki they say something similar, “The Emperor of the East respectfully addresses the Emperor of the West.”  Here, rather than using “Child of Heaven”, the author made use of the term “Tennou” when referring to the Yamato sovereign, and then different characters were used for the Sui emperor.  At the same time, that is one of the reasons that I give more credence to the Sui history. Of course, however you slice and dice this thing, there are some major airs being taken by the Yamato sovereign.  Thus it is no wonder that, when the Sui emperor heard this, he was displeased, to say the least, and he told his minister that the letter was discourteous and should never again be brought to his attention.  So that's a whole mood. The reason for this offense may be obvious, as the letter paints the sovereign of Japan as equal to the emperor of the Sui dynasty.  That was indeed a bold claim. As we mentioned towards the top of the episode, the Sui were just about at their zenith.  They had defeated their enemies, taken control of both the northern and southern regions, expanded to their south and north, and they were using their vast reserves on massive public works.  They were a large, established and still growing empire.  Comparatively Yamato had, what, 100,000 households?  No writing system.  They were eating off of oak leaves.  And yet they were taking on airs and claiming that they were equal to the Sui.  That had to garner more than a few eyerolls, and I really wonder at the temerity of the officer who presented it up the chain, especially as they would have seen what the Sui was really like—a reality that most of envoys to the Sui court would have seen firsthand. There is also the fact that they claim to be the land where the sun rises while the Sui are the land where the sun sets, which may have just been referencing east and west in a poetic fashion, but on another level it is almost as if they were talking about the rise of Yamato and the fall, or setting, of the Sui. I would note that we still don't see the term “Land of the Rising Sun”, or “Nihon”, used for the name of the country yet—one of the reasons I continue to refer to Yamato and not just “Japan”.  However, all of this is in keeping with the traditions of the Wa people as we know them—the sun was given a special place in their worldview, as demonstrated linguistically, and not just through the legends curated in the 8th century. By the way, this  exchange is mentioned in both the Sui History and the Nihon Shoki, but they place it in slightly different contexts.  According to the Sui History, this was one of the first things that envoys said, whereas the version in the Nihon Shoki it was actually sent with the second mission.  In either case, however, the content is relatively the same.  Certainly, as Japan continued to take on more and more trappings of the continental courts, they would eventually even take on the term Tennou—also read in Japanese as Sumera no Mikoto—to refer to the sovereign.  This is basically saying that the sovereign is, indeed, a Heavenly Son, and which they would come to translate as “emperor”, in English.  There would be other terminology and trappings that would reinforce this concept, which placed the sovereign of Japan in a position that at least locally seemed to be much more prestigious. Imoko came back from this last diplomatic mission and was well beloved—some later sources even suggest that he may have been promoted for his diplomatic efforts.  Oddly, however, we don't really hear more, if anything, about Imoko, and he fades back into the past. And so that covers much of the story of what Yamato was borrowing from the Sui and others during this period.  Next episode—well, I'm honestly not sure what we'll be covering next, as there is just so much going on during Kashikiya-hime's reign.  But stick around. Until next time, then, thank you for listening and for all of your support.  If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts.  If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Also, feel free to Tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.  You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com.  And that's all for now.  Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.   

We are back looking at Buddhism in the archipelago, this time in the reign of Nunakura Futodamashiki, aka Bidatsu. For references and more, check out our blog page at: https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-88   Rough Transcript: Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua, and this is Episode 88: Let's Give This Buddhism Thing Another Try. This episode we are going to return to the story of Buddhism in the archipelago—specifically what was going on into the next reign.  And what a fortuitous episode to do it on as well.  For those who aren't aware, “8” is an auspicious number in Buddhism, so I figure for episode 88, this makes for a decent topic. Now back in Episode 86, we saw the death of Ame Kunioshi, aka Kimmei Tennou, in 576 CE, just as a delegation of envoys arrived from Goguryeo.  As we noted at the time, Nunakura Futodamashiki no Mikoto, aka Bidatsu Tennou, succeeded him to the throne.  You may recall that Nunakura was the second son of Ame Kunioshi and his Queen, Ishihime.  His older brother, Yata no Tamakatsu no Ohoye appears to have been the Crown Prince, but then he passed away, and so Nunakura was raised up in his stead. In many ways, Nunakura represents the Old Guard at this time.  The Chronicles make it clear that he is a classical heir, descended through multiple royal lineages.  His father, Ame Kunioshi, was of course the latest in the lineage descending from Wohodo no Ohokimi, aka Keitai Tennou, while his mother, Ishihime, was the daughter of Takewo Hiro Kunioshi Tate, aka Senka Tennou, Ame Kunioshi's brother by another mother—quite literally.   In fact, one wonders if the reason for Magari no Ohine and Takewo, aka Ankan and Senka Tennou, even being mentioned as sovereigns in the Chronicles may have been because of the way that they therefore legitimized Nunakura's own reign, as some scholars have suggested that they really may not have ruled at all, and that really it was all Ame Kunioshi during that entire period that their reigns covered.  After all, most of the sovereigns up to this point have been descended through multiple royal lineages, and even Magari no Ohine and Takewo's reigns were depicted as though they were simply regents, holding the seat for their younger and more legitimate brother. Nunakura held fast to the old traditions in another way, too: We are pointedly told in the Nihon Shoki that, though he was of good character, he was not a Buddhist.  This is perhaps a curious statement to make—after all, none of the previous sovereigns have really been Buddhist, either—but then this is the first sovereign to take the throne since the archipelago had been exposed to Buddhist teachings, at least according to the narrative. From our perspective today, that doesn't seem all that strange.  Buddhism had just come to the archipelago and, honestly, it hadn't made that much of a splash from what we can tell.  Back in Episode 85, Soga no Iname had set up a temple and started worshipping an image that had come from the continent, but that initial attempt was sabotaged by others, including Mononobe no Okoshi.  The old families were, of course, rather invested in the system of rituals around their local kami and the socio-political power they derived from being in charge of those same rituals. Soga no Iname had passed away towards the end of the previous reign, and his son, Umako, took up the mantle as head of the Soga family, and his father's position as Oho-omi.  Meanwhile, Mononobe no Okoshi had also passed away, and it seems that at the head of the Mononobe family as a man by the name of Yuge no Moriya, who was confirmed in his position as Ohomuraji by the new sovereign—or at least that is what the Nihon Shoki tells us, and it may be because of his prominence in the story to come.  The Sendai Kuji Hongi claims that it was Moriya's brother, Ohoichi no  Mikari, who was made Ohomuraji, but there is little else.  Regardless of whether it was Moriya or Mikari, the power dynamics between the Soga and Mononobe families were still in a similar to the previous reign, just in new hands. Now, for all that the Chronicles stress how much Nunakura was not a Buddhist, neither was he particularly nativist.  He enjoyed the Classics that were being imported from the mainland, and presumably was able to read in the continental fashion.  He was also interested in ensuring good relations with the Korean peninsula—with both Yamato's traditional ally of Baekje, but also with the growing kingdom of Silla.  Still, Buddhism was off the table for him. For the most part his reign started similar to any other.  After coming to the throne, in 572, he confirmed his wife as Queen, with his mother being hailed as the Queen Mother.  He also set up his own palace site at Ohowi in Kudara, in the land of Kawachi.  Interestingly this appears to place him outside of the Nara basin—certainly outside of the lands of the Soga.  However, the area that he settled in, Kudara, is interesting because that is the same reading given to the characters for “Baekje”.  In fact the kanji, or Sinitic characters, that they use are the same as “Baekje”, and if you didn't know otherwise you would likely read them as something like “Byakuzai”.  However, just as many characters for the Han and Tang dynasties are read as “Kara”, likely referencing the fact that things came to the archipelago through the Kara states, the name for Baekje was rendered as “Kudara”. And to be honest, I've never seen a good reason why the characters came to be read this way, or even whether or not that was the reading when the Chronicles were compiled.  Certainly it was the authoritative reading later on, and there are plenty of placenames that use that reading as “Kudara”.  Still, I'm not absolutely certain when that reading became common, but that is how these kanji are often pronounced, today, for whatever reason. Now just because Nunakura wasn't a Buddhist didn't mean that Buddhism wasn't still making inroads into the islands.  And while the Soga family would stand at the forefront of Buddhist proselytization, our first actor is actually a little different, and largely forgotten, from what I can tell.  His name was Ohowake no Miko, or the royal prince Ohowake. This name doesn't do a lot to help us identify him.  He's a royal prince, meaning he had a direct claim to the royal lineage, born to one of the sovereigns or their progeny.  “Oho” means “Big”, or “Elder”, and “Wake”, well, that's a bit more complicated.  Based on the way it is used in older names it would appear to be a title or honorific of some kind.  Traditional Japanese etymology claims that it comes from the fact that “Wake” comes from “Wakeru”, to break, cut off, or separate.  So basically they come from a line that has been “cut off” from the royal lineage, but they still have royal blood.  This seems a little suspect to me, personally.  I do wonder if it could be related to the term “Waka”, which also shows up a lot in names, but that is a stretch.  Instead, I think it may be an old title, or kabane, for a person of not insignificant rank.  Still, it isn't clear what is meant, and even then, this is a pretty generic name that doesn't tell us much about who this guy actually was.  One theory is that this is another name for someone mentioned elsewhere in the Chronicles, perhaps even one on the later sovereigns.  People at the time that the Chronicles were written knew who it referred to, but it is much harder to piece together, today.  Another suggestion is that this “Ohowake” was someone who was otherwise written out of the history for some reason—all except for here.  Of course, why they were written out one could only fathom a guess.  Finally, there is the thought that the name could be misspelled.  Back in the time of hand copying, over thousands of copies it would be easy to slip up once or twice in the thousands of characters they had written, already.  Later scribes then faithfully copied the mistake, and suddenly a new name is born.  Even then, though, I'm not sure we could make a good guess as to who this really was. What we do know is that in 577, this royal prince known only as “Ohowake” in the Chronicles went to Baekje, presumably as an ambassador for Yamato, and returned with religious books and six individuals, including monks, a nun, an architect, and a Buddhist image maker.   It is significant, that what this royal prince brought back was more than just books this time.  Now, there were artisans being imported who could actually make Buddhist statues and temples here in the islands.  They would have known how those temples were built, the significance of the layout, how the wooden beams were carved, and even how the distinctive rooftiles were made.  And this wasn't just different craft techniques - there were rules for how a temple was supposed to be constructed, the different buildings, even the relics to be buried underneath a building to help make it sacred.  Likewise the images also followed particular rules.  Whether it was the image of the Buddha, or of one of the many accompanying deities, it wasn't enough to be a stone carver or a woodworker—Buddhist imagery was its own thing.  All of this was very different from other artforms and architecture in the archipelago at the time.  It is also telling that Ohowake brought back monks and a nun.  Specifically they had brought monks who specialized in various practices, including meditation and mantra recitation.  You may recall that earlier the people of the archipelago had received images and texts, and it seems that Soga no Iname was trying to piece together what to do based on the texts—likely interpreting all of it through the eyes of the local religious practices of the time.  An ordained monk and an ordained nun, however, would have known the proper rituals and how they were to be conducted.  But almost more importantly, you needed Buddhist monks and nuns to make other Buddhist monks and nuns —although technically you typically need more than that, you should have a Sangha, a Buddhist community.  While traditions vary, it would seem that you need at least four monks to make a Sangha, and some traditions require at least ten —and I presume the same or more for women.   Whether or not they could authoritatively conduct all of the rites, the monk and the nun could, one assumes, teach how they were supposed to be done.   These newcomers appear to have been ensconced at a place called Ohowake-ji, or Ohowake temple, in Naniwa.  Some suggest that this may be in error and that “Ohowake” was a typo for “Ohogori”, an official residence for envoys traveling to and from Japan.  If this latter is true, then much like Soga no Iname had turned his house into a temple, these Buddhist teachers may have been staying at the Ohogoori-ji, and there was a scribal error of “Wake” for “Goori”.  This theory also notes that the word “Ji”, or “Tera” in the kun'yomi reading, originally meant an official government building, but gradually shifted to referring to Buddhist temples as Buddhism made its way across the desert, through Yellow River and Yangzi river valleys. By the time it made it to the Korean peninsula and across the strait to the Japanese archipelago, Buddhist temples were all using the suffix “-Ji”.  The problem with this theory is that we don't really see the character “ji” or “tera” used in the government building sense in other instances from this time, and so it seems a bit of a stretch to suggest that is what is going on here.  Personally, I envision that they did stand up a temple, though the actual location and design—let alone the artifacts within—have been lost to time.  Ohowake's import of Buddhist expertise wasn't it for Buddhism during Nunakura's reign, however, as things continued to trickle in.  In 579, for example, Silla envoys brought a Buddhist image, indicating that they, too, had taken an interest in this foreign religion, and they were using it as part of their diplomacy.  This may have been a further reason to pressure Yamato to at least look into the religion and join the larger world of Buddhist countries, but it doesn't seem to have swayed the sovereign—at least not in any obvious way. Five years after the gift from Silla, in 584, Soga no Iname's son and heir, Soga no Umako, decided to give this interesting new religion another go.  The atmosphere by this point was a little different: still not entirely hospitable, but there had clearly been more and more interest in Buddhism since its first arrival fifty years before.  In addition to the growing acceptance of this foreign religion, however, there were some key political aspects as well that may point to why Soga no Umako decided to act. You see, Nunakura, at the start of his reign, had been married to a woman named Hirohime, who was the daughter of Okinaga no Mate no Miko.  The Okinaga family doesn't get quite as much press as others, but seems to have been relatively powerful; and let's not forget that there was a sovereign, Okinaga Tarashi Hime, aka Jinguu Tennou.  They had not only supplied Hirohime as a daughter to the current sovereign, but their name is found in the lists of people who had produced wives of the sovereign going back for several generations.  Hirohime was the queen, and no doubt one of her progeny was expected to eventually come to the throne and rule as sovereign.  However, in 576, just five years into Nunakura's reign, Hirohime passed away.  This tragic event nonetheless left a bit of a political void in the form of the Queen, whose offspring would no doubt possess some serious political chops, whether or not they actually ruled.  Fortunately for the Soga, they had an answer: Toyomike Kashikiya Hime, the daughter of Amekunioshi and Kitashi Hime, which made her half-sister to Nunakura, but more than that, it made her the niece of none other than Soga no Umako, since her mother was also a child of Soga no Iname.  And without spoiling too much, put a pin in her name—we will definitely be coming back to her in later episodes.   It is unclear whether Kashikiya Hime was already one of Nunakura's  consorts or if she was instead promoted directly to queen, based on the way the Chronicle talks about it, but Queen she did become.  We are told that she was taken up at the “urging of the court”, and probably by certain prominent figures therein, and so the Soga's plan to marry their daughters into the royal lineage and thus use blood ties to more closely bind themselves to the central authority appears to have been working. This also meant that as Umako tried once again to get Buddhism off the ground, he now had a supposedly friendly figure in the royal bedchamber, who could help whisper in the sovereign's ear.  So he had, presumably, a little more clout than his father had when he had tried to set up a temple. To start things off, Soga no Umako had heard about two Buddha images in the archipelago, and he went about acquiring them.  The first was a stone image of Miroku, aka Maitreya, the future Buddha who was said to come in another four to nine thousand years to remind people of the Dharma once again.  This had been brought from Baekje by an immigrant known to us as Kafuka no Omi.  The other was an image of the Buddha, presumably Gautama, the historical Buddha, in the possession of one Saheki no Muraji. With these images in his possession, Soga no Umako went looking for someone with previous knowledge of Buddhist practices to assist.  To do this he enlisted the help of Kurabe no Sukuri no Shiba Tattou, along with others.  Tattou is traditionally thought to have come from the continent, possibly as early as 522 CE, about 63 years earlier.  The Fuso Ryakki, compiled in the eleventh century, claims he came from the “Great Tang”, even though that dynasty had yet to have been established, and that he had immigrated to the country of Yamato, where he built a grass hut and installed an image of the Buddha.  While this is likely a bit of exaggeration on the part of the ancient chroniclers, to make Tattou seem like the perfect Buddhist resource, it is likely that Tattou did come from the continent or was a descendant in the first or second generation, and that he had some knowledge about the religion.  This made him perfect for Soga no Umako, who needed someone who knew what to look for in others who might be able to assist him in once again setting up a temple of his own. Sure enough, Tattou found someone: a former monk from Goguryeo, named Ebin in Japan, now living in Harima, who had gone back to being a layperson.  This is not as unusual as it may seem, as there are many reasons that someone might leave the monkhood, and even later return back to it.  Whether or not he was currently an ordained and practicing monk, Ebin would have known the rites and how to proceed. Here I would note that it seems a bit odd that Umako would have searched high and low throughout the immigrant community if the temple of Ohowake was still there in Naniwa.  Why didn't they just ask someone from that temple to come and get things kickstarted for them?  Unfortunately, we don't know, though it is possible that the temple of Ohowake had already failed for some reason. And so the former monk, Ebin, was brought on board Umako's little project, and there are some sources that suggest there was a nun as well, known as Houmei, but I didn't notice her name in the Nihon Shoki.  Ebin—and possibly Houmei—were first told to instruct none other than Tattou's own daughter, Shima, or possibly Shimane, to become a Buddhist nun.  This may have been at least in part because Tattou's family clearly already had some familiarity with Buddhism, and there may have also been some linguistic advantages depending on the languages they knew and spoke—especially as much of what had come over was probably written in Sinic characters. Shima was given the Buddhist name of Zenshin, or more appropriately Zenshin-ni.  This was another common practice, at least in East Asia, where new initiates would take a Buddhist—or more appropriately a Dharma—name when they were ordained.  We'll see this a lot, and you have no doubt encountered such names elsewhere.  They are typically made up of two kanji, or Sinitic characters, and pronounced with the On'yomi reading.  The name is often given by a teacher and emphasizes some Buddhist virtue or teaching that is considered particularly apt.  In this case “Zenshin” would appear to mean something like “Auspicious Belief”. Two other women were taken on as students—or possibly as servants, or just junior nuns—along with Zenshin.  They were Toyome, daughter of Ayabito no Hoshi, who became Zenzou, which would seem to indicate “Meditative Storehouse”; and Ishime, daughter of Nishigori no Tsubo, who became Ezen, or something like “Blessed Fortune”. With three nuns, Soga no Umako built a Buddhist Temple onto the east side of his home where he enshrined the stone image of Miroku, or Maitreya, the future Buddha, and he had the three newly minted nuns worship there while Shiba Tattou and Hida no Atahe provided them support and sustenance. Although they were ordained and worshipping a Buddhist image, it is interesting that Umako chose women to become nuns, rather than monks.  There is some thought that, for all of the Buddhist instruction, Umako was still following a popular indigenous model of worship, where the three women were essentially acting in place of female shamans, a tradition that would appear to have been common on the archipelago all the way back to Queen Himiko, and hinted at in various places within the Chronicles, including the very stories of the kami themselves.  One also questions just how much the women knew regarding Buddhist practice, despite having a teacher who was formerly a monk.  There are some suggestions that the women themselves were rather young, with one note claiming that Zenshin was only twelve years old when she was ordained—hardly an age where one expects her to be leading, let alone teaching, about a foreign religion from another country. Furthermore, the terms used surrounding the nuns' “worship” also leads one to wonder.  The word used is “sai” or “matsuri”, which is sometimes translated as “maigre faire”, or abstinence, but here likely refers to some kind of meal or feast.  This was possibly a Buddhist vegetarian feast, though the idea of a feast as worship seems to dovetail nicely once again into the local practices surrounding kami worship as well. From this first meal, Tattou supposedly found a “relic”, by which would seem to be meant a relic of the Buddha.  Now what a relic of the Buddha was doing in the Japanese islands, so far away from the Indian subcontinent, might seem to be a pertinent question, but that is where you would be wrong.  You see, according to some traditions, the body of the Buddha had transformed through miraculous processes into hard crystal or glass stones, which themselves had made their way across the world.  This was fortunate for Buddhists, who therefore didn't need to send away for fresh relics from India every time they needed to found a new temple, they just had to find appropriate relics where they were. To test the relics—we aren't given much more of a description of what they were—Soga no Umako took a giant iron maul and brought that hammer down on the relic Tattou had found.  However, rather than the relic shattering, the iron maul broke, instead, along with the block of iron they had put underneath of it.  After testing its strength, the relic was placed in water, where it would float or sink depending on what was desired.  These supposedly proved that the relic was holy, and so it was used to inaugurate a new pagoda.  The pagoda was built on top of the Hill of Ohono, or large field, and we are told that they had the nuns conduct another ritual feast prior to placing the relic in the top of the pagoda, recalling the purpose of the pagoda as the replacement for the stupa, the repository for relics of the Buddha at a temple complex. In the background of all of this, Yamato was apparently experiencing their own epidemic.  We are told that pestilence was in the land, and Soga no Umako himself became ill.  Trying to ascertain the cause of his own illness, Umako enlisted a diviner, who told him that the pestilence was a curse sent by the Buddha worshipped by Soga no Umako's father, Soga no Iname.  Once again we see the Buddha being treated more like a kami.  After all, why would the one who came to save all sentient beings curse someone?  And yet they did seem to believe that this curse was due to the way that the previous temple that Iname had set up had been torn down and the image tossed, unceremoniously, into the Yodo river. And since the cause of the pestilence had been determined by a diviner, apparently that was enough to get Nunakura on board.  Whether or not he personally worshipped the Buddha, he allowed Umako to worship the image so that he could appease his father's gods and hopefully recover. Shortly thereafter—less than a week later, if the dates are to be believed—we start to really get a sense of déjà vu, as Mononobe no Yugehi no Moriya, son of Mononobe no Okoshi and the current Ohomuraji of the Mononobe family, remonstrated Nunakura over this whole Buddhism thing.  Just as Okoshi had done decades previously, Moriya claimed that the whole reason that there was an epidemic in the first place was because they had once again welcomed Buddhism into the land, and that they needed to put a stop to it.  Nunakura was swayed by his arguments, and he took back what he had said and issued an edict that demanded that the worship of Buddhism cease. Here we see, once again, the destruction of the Buddhist temple, but this time around we are given much greater detail.  For one thing, Moirya seems to have taken rather a lot of pride in this.  He went to the temple with his men, sat down in a chair, and from there he oversaw the destruction of the pagoda, the temple, and even the stone image.  Whatever couldn't be destroyed was taken to the Naniwa canal and thrown into the waters. As he did all of this, the Chroniclers record that there was wind and rain, but no clouds, not quite unlike the idea of a fox's wedding—an interesting phenomenon where you can have the sun, usually in the morning or late afternoon, shining at the same time that rainclouds overhead are opening up the heavens are pouring down. Moriya simply donned a raincoat, and then he upbraided Soga no Umako and all of his followers, trying to shame them.  He then had Sukune call forward the various nuns, who were stripped of their “three garments”, a term for the traditional Buddhist robes, although in East Asia this was eventually replaced with the single kesa over several lower garments, to help fend off the cold.  Here it is unclear if just a kesa is meant, or if they were dressed in an attempt at clothing from the Indian continent.  The nuns were then imprisoned and flogged at the roadside station of Tsubaki no Ichi, otherwise known as the Tsubaki Market. Despite thus cleansing the land of Buddhist influence for the second time, the pestilence didn't stop, and people continued to grow ill and die.  In fact, there was an embassy planned to talk about the Nimna situation once again, but both the sovereign, Nunakura, as well as Mononobe no Moriya himself, became ill and were afflicted with sores.  Once again, the land was plagued and people were dying.  According to the Chroniclers, who were, of course, writing after the fact in a well-established Buddhist state, the people started to privately complain that clearly Buddhism hadn't been the problem.  In fact, perhaps Soga no Umako's diviner had been correct all along and the plague was actually because they *hadn't* accepted Buddhism, rather than a punishment for neglecting the local kami. A few months later, Soga no Umako sent another message to the sovereign.  He was still ill, and hadn't recovered, even with Moriya “purging” the influences of Buddhism.  Umako claimed that the only things that would cure him were the Three Precious Things, which is to say the Sanzou, or the Three Treasures of Buddhism:  The Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.  Based on the severity of the disease, Nunakura authorized him to worship privately, and the nuns were allowed to assist him.  He rebuilt the temple and he provided for the nuns, himself.  Eventually, Umako recovered, but unfortunately, the sovereign did not.  Nunakura Futodamashiki, aka Bidatsu Tennou, died in 585, laid low by the plague that had swept through the land. At the funeral, the politics were on full display.  Soga no Umako had no love lost for Mononobe no Moriya, nor vice versa.  As Umako was delivering a speech, Moriya made a comment that with his extremely long sword at his side, Umako looked like a fat little sparrow that had been pierced through by a hunting shaft.  Meanwhile, Umako noted that Moriya was shaking as he gave his speech—whether from emotion, nerves, or something else we don't know—and so Umako suggested hanging bells on him, so that they would jingle as he shook.  From this rap battle on out, the feud between the Mononobe and the Soga would only grow. There is another account of all of this, buried amongst everything else, that claims that Mononobe no Moriya, Ohomiwa no Sakahe no Kimi, and Nakatomi no Iware no Muraji all conspired together to destroy the Buddhist religion.  They wanted to burn the temple and pagoda that Soga no Umako had built, but Umako opposed the project and would not allow it, or so we are told.  Here it is unclear if we are talking about the previous temple or the rebuilt one, but the names here are interesting.  Of course we know that the Soga and the Mononobe were going at it, and the inclusion of Nakatomi no Iware simply picks up the previous alliance between the Mononobe and Nakatomi, both of whom had been active during the assault on Soga Iname's temple.  Lastly, though, there is Ohomiwa no Sakahe no Kimi, which is interesting.  This figure would appear to be from the Ohomiwa family and region, likely drawing some amount of respect from their connection with Mt. Miwa itself, and the ancient worship that went on there.  So, in this version there really is a triple threat of “the old guard” banding together to resist this newfangled foreign faith. Incidentally, this same figure, Ohomiwa no Sakahe no Kimi, also appears just after the death of Nunakura, when Prince Anahobe figured he could just waltz in and take the throne on the assumption that he was owed it by birth.  He was a half-brother to Nunakura, son of Ame Kunioshi and his mother, Wonanegimi, who was another daughter of Soga no Iname.  Anahobe was therefore nephew to Umako, and perhaps that is one of the reasons he thought he could just waltz in and take his seat at the head of government.  But Prince Anahobe was foiled by none other than Ohomiwa no Sakahe, who posted a guard around the palace and made sure that nobody defiled it until a new sovereign had been identified by the court.  Anahobe voiced his complaint that Ohomiwa was protecting the court of a “dead king”, and that they should instead come to the court of a “living king”—presumably he meant his own. But that will take us past this point, and there are still some other details of Nunakura or Bidatsu's reign I want to touch on, such as his dealings on the continent, but here we can see how Buddhism and the feud between the Soga and the Mononobe was in full swing, and that will definitely play a large part in future episodes.  In addition, we'll see how this time, Umako wouldn't take things lying down.  He was going to get this Buddhism thing to stick one way or the other, and we'll see what happens when he finally founds the first permanent temple in Japan; a temple that, while perhaps not as grand as it once was, continues to operate into the modern day. Until then, thank you for listening and for all of your support.  If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts.  If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Also, feel free to Tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.  You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com.  And that's all for now.  Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.

This episode we look at the transmission of Buddhism through the 1st to 5th centuries from India, to the Kushan Empire, and across the Silk Road to the Han and succeeding dynasties, and even to Baekje, on the Korean peninsula. For more, especially photos, please check out https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-84   Rough Transcript:   Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua, and this is Episode 84: The Middle Way through the Middle Kingdom. First things first, thank you to Bodil, Gabe, and Lauren for donating to support the show on Ko-Fi and Patreon.  If you'd like to join them, will have information at the end of the episode. Also an apology—if my voice isn't in tip-top shape, well, it seems that COVID finally found us after 3 years or so, and I'm on the tail end of it.  So thank you for your understanding. Last episode we talked about Siddhartha Gautama, aka Shakyamuni, the Historical Buddha, and his teachings, and how they spread, at least through the Indian subcontinent, with the patronage of rulers like Ashoka the Great.  The original teachings, initially taught as an oral tradition, was eventually turned into a series of writings, called the Tripitaka. As for how those writings came about, it's worth talking about the languages involved. The native language of Shakyamuni was probably a language known as Maghadi, or something similar.  But the Indian subcontinent, including the modern countries of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Afghanistan, is over three times the size of western Europe.  There are at eight south Asian language families, with hundreds of different languages, depending on how you count them.  The modern state of India counts 22 official languages, not including English.  I mention this to point out that as the Buddha's disciples spread his teachings, they were, by necessity, translating it into different languages. There is a story that a student suggested to the Buddha that they make Sanskrit the official language of Buddhism.  Even then, Sanskrit was considered a language of learning and education, much as Greek or Latin was in medieval Europe, but the Buddha rejected this and insisted that his teachings be taught in people's own tongue.  This proved great for reaching people, but over time there was a fear that the oral teachings might be lost, and so they were written down. The oldest written Buddhist canon is generally agreed to be texts in Pali, commissioned in Sri Lanka.  These are sometimes called the southern Tripitaka—or Tipitaka in Pali—and it is the primary canon for Theravada Buddhists.  In the north, however, Sanskrit remained the prominent language of learning, and texts written down and transmitted in the north—particularly those that made it to China and on to Japan—were typically Sanskrit or translations of Sanskrit texts.  This is what some refer to as the Northern Tripitaka.  Both of these were transcriptions of the oral teachings that Buddhist monks were otherwise memorizing and presenting to the Buddhist community.  That oral tradition, in fact, never really went away, and these early texts were more like a reference so that monks could check their memory.  Chanting the sutras—and especially chanting from memory—remained a highly prized skill of Buddhist orators. Now, the split between northern and southern texts is convenient, but it isn't necessarily as simple as all that.  We have plenty of examples of texts, particularly in the northern traditions, that don't necessarily have an extant Sanskrit counterpart.  In fact, the oldest extant sutras of any tradition that we have today are known as the Gandharan sutras, and written in the Ghandari language using a Karosthi script.  Gandhara refers to a region centered north and west of the Indus river, in modern Pakistan, stretching to the Kabul river valley in modern Afghanistan and north to the Karakoram mountains, which is one of the interlocking ranges that form the boundary between modern Pakistan and India and modern China and the Tibetan plateau.  It is believed to be the namesake of the city of Kandahar, in modern Afghanistan. This area was important, and not just to Buddhism.  For thousands of years it has been a crossroads between the Indian subcontinent, the area known as the Middle East, and the inner trade routes of central Eurasia.  It was part of the conquest by Alexander the Great in the 4th century BCE, becoming part of his kingdom, but then it was lost in battle to the Mauryan empire, which Ashoka the Great ruled in the 3rd century BCE.  The area later fell to Indo-Greek rule from members of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom to the north.  The most famous ruler during this period was probably Menander I, who is also remembered as a patron of Buddhism, building more stupas and monasteries in the region. The Hellenic Greco-Bactrians were eventually displaced by tribes of the Yuezhi, who themselves were being displaced by the Xiongnu, in central Eurasia.  In this epic game of musical chairs, a branch of the Yuezhi eventually settled in the area, ruling a large territory, including Gandhara, under what is known as the Kushan empire.  They had first moved into the area of Bactria and Sogdiana probably around the 1st or 2nd century BCE, and by the 1st century CE they were exerting authority over Gandhara.   Around the time the Gandharan sutras were written down, in the 1st or 2nd centuries, Buddhism—especially Mahayana Buddhism—was flourishing in the region, and Kanishka the Great—don't you love how all of these rulers are known as “the Great”, by the way?—ruled the Kushan empire, and hence Gandhara, in the early 2nd century.  He is said to have been a great patron of Buddhism, although it was one of several religions, including Zoroastrianism, that flourished in the region at this time. The Kushan empire is believed to be the same Yuezhi that we mentioned in episode 79, when we talked about the Han diplomat Zhang Qian, who had trekked through hostile Xiongnu, or Hunna, territory across much of what is now western China in the 2nd century BCE, seeking allies against the Hunna.  At that point, the Yuezhi had had enough of war, however, and they declined to fight, preferring to settle where they were and eventually growing into the Kushan empire.  That connection with the Han dynasty, however, likely was maintained through trade routes that continued to operate across the vast expanse of central Eurasia.  The Han dynasty itself continued to send out diplomatic missions to the various states of central Eurasia, and of course there were trade routes. As the Kushan empire expanded into the Tarim basin, it met once again with the Han, who had defeated the Hunna, and then claimed routes across the oasis towns of the desert regions.  While the routes would have high and low periods, often depending on the state of various conflicts, in general it seems that Buddhist missionaries probably made it to the Han dynasty and the Yellow River region, and founded monasteries, as early as the first century CE and certainly by the second century.  And, by our best understanding, the folks in these monasteries were already doing a lot of copying and translation of texts – both as a meritorious act, and to spread the word.  Since this is around the time the Gandharan texts were written, they were likely a part of this larger tradition of copying and translating that was going on, although many of those early documents did not survive intact to the modern day. One of the earliest records of Buddhism in the Han dynasty is a record dated to 65 CE.  Liu Ying, Prince of Chu and son of Emperor Guangwu of Han, sponsored Buddhism—as well as a school of Daoism—in attempts to better understand longevity and immortality.  While he was eventually accused of treason, putting something of a damper on his patronage of the religion, it is the first mention we have in the histories of Buddhism, and in some ways it speaks to something else about the initial acceptance of Buddhism. While there were likely those well-versed in Buddhism, particularly in the community of foreigners from the Western Regions, evidence suggests that for many lay people it was just as likely about what people thought that the religion could do for them in this life as anything else.  After all, there are many stories of miraculous events, and there was the concept of reincarnation and karma—the idea that by building merit, one could improve their lot in the next life.  There was even a belief that by building merit, one could improve their lot in the current life—and apparently extend their life or even, possibly, gain immortality. Sure, there were the more intellectual and philosophical endeavors, but for many people Buddhism was just as much about what it could do for them in the here and now.  Stories of monks and other holy men fit in right alongside stories of Daoist immortals.  In Han tombs, where Buddhist imagery is found, it is often found with or in place of the Queen Mother of the West—the same image that is found on many of the bronze mirrors that traveled across to the Japanese archipelago around this time.  It was likely that many of the early stories that the laypeople heard were probably fragments as much as anything.  Even with the Tripitaka written down, much of the transmission was still done orally.  Furthermore, it was in translation—and probably a translation of a translation. The earliest stories of Buddhism's transmission—particularly the translation of texts into Sinitic characters, the lingua franca of East Asia—claim that first the Theravada canon, and then later Mahayana texts, were translated in the second century, with foreigners from Parthia and Kushan credited with the early translations.  Others would continue the work, and at first it was mostly people from the Western Regions doing the translating. One of the earliest stories of sutras making their way to the Han dynasty comes from the time of Liu Ying, when his brother, Emperor Ming, sat on the throne.  The stories claim that the emperor saw an image of a golden Buddha, and that he requested either a statue or temple be erected.  So he sent people off to Kushan, where they found two monks who would come back with them in 68 CE, bringing portraits and scripture—specifically the “Sutra of Forty-Two Chapters”, which the two monks helped translate into a Sinitic version at Baimasi, or White Horse Temple.  As such, this “Sutra of Forty-Two Chapters” has been accorded a status as the first such Buddhist work to be brought to the area that is, today, modern China, and the White Horse Temple, located in Luoyang, is counted as one of the earliest temples in the Yellow River region.  That said, there are a lot of questions as to the authenticity of this tale, though it does mirror others about the arrival of Buddhism in the East, even if we cannot verify the actual first temple or work. Although Buddhism arrived during the Han dynasty, it wouldn't really begin to fully develop until after the dynasty's fall in the 3rd century.  During the Southern and Northern Dynasties period, the metaphysical and doctrinal beliefs of Buddhism began to penetrate the elite circles in a more tangible way.  Much of the philosophical underpinnings blended well with the interest at the time in “Dark Studies” and the school of “Pure Conversation”, which we discussed back in episode 72.  While Buddhist temples, much like their Daoist brethren, found some sanctuary from the chaos that created this period in the mountains and hills—not to mention a bit of added spiritual cachet—it was really the opportunity to gain greater state patronage that also helped. Monks like Zhi Dun began to reconcile Buddhist thought and doctrine with local beliefs.  In some cases, local religious figures—including gods and other spirits—were incorporated into the Buddhist framework, often by their “conversion” to the Buddha's teachings.  This was one of the strengths of Buddhism—although it carried with it a framework of Indian religious teachings and thoughts, it was not exclusive in its cosmological outlook.  Buddhism was more focused on helping one escape the suffering of this world, which would take you beyond all such things.  As the doctrines were meant for all beings—not just humans, but for animals, spirits, gods, and even demons—there was nothing to necessarily exclude other beliefs.  This helped some of the ethnic Han dynasties to accept and even promote Buddhism.  Meanwhile, some of the non-ethnic Han dynasties patronized Buddhism for either its miraculous powers or just because it was a foreign religion, much like they were foreigners in the Yellow River Basin.  In many cases, state-sponsorship was a two way street.  Dynasts would set themselves up as holy men, claiming to be Boddhisatvas.  They would even appropriate the concept of the Cakravartin, a Buddhist “Golden-Wheel-Turning-King”, which had overtones of cosmic overlordship.  I can see how that would fit in quite well with local concepts that a sovereign might lay claim to ruling “all under heaven” and be carrying out a “Heavenly mandate”. Along the Yangzi River, Buddhist monks gained a certain amount of independence.  They were not expected to bow to the sovereign, for example; an acknowledgment of their holy nature.  In the northern Wei dynasty, however, it was a different story.  There, the ruler was said to be no less than an incarnation of the Buddha, and a Chief Monk was selected to oversee the Sangha and no doubt ensure that the various Buddhist communities were in line with official dogma. At the same time, the government provided captured men and women to work fields to help pay for Buddhist temples and their work.  Likewise, people would make merit by donating wealth and land to temples, in hopes of blessings either in this current life or in the next life.  For their part, the temples were expected to act as storehouses or granaries—the wealth that poured into them would be used to help alleviate suffering, especially in the case of droughts or floods.  It soon became clear, however, that more wealth was going into the temples than was necessarily coming out.  There were attempts to reign in this Buddhist establishment, often by limiting the number of temples or even the number of monks, as well as limiting what people could donate.  These same edicts were undercut by the elites of the country, however, and often proved less than effectual. Along with sutras and Buddhist teachings, Buddhist images and architecture spread widely.  In India and the Western Regions, a key aspect of many temples was the stupa.  This was a mound containing a relic of some sort.  Originally these relics were said to be remnants of the Buddha, after he had been cremated.  Later, it was said that the remnants of the Buddha turned hard, like crystal, and that the original remains were gathered up and distributed to even more stupas.  Later they may contain other relics, as well. The stupa was an important part of the Buddhist temple, but over time, its character changed.  Instead of a mound like we still see in Southeast Asia, we start to see a building—a tower—which became a ubiquitous symbol of Buddhist temples in East Asia.  This multi-level pagoda originally started off with simply three levels, often made of brick and stone, but over time it grew with five or seven levels.  These towers were inspired by a description in the Lotus Sutra, a Mahayana text, that described a bejeweled seven-storey tower. Speaking of the Lotus Sutra, this was one of the many teachings that made its way to East Asia, and a hugely influential one.  It purports to tell the story of a sermon by the Buddha outside of those mentioned in the Theravada texts.  The teachings expounded upon in the Lotus Sutra had a great impact on Mahayana Buddhism and how people viewed the teachings of the Buddha.  For one, it also proposed the idea that the Buddha did not actually cease to exist when he attained nirvana, but is simply no longer visible. He still remains in the world to help all life find salvation from suffering.  That goes along with the concept of the Bodhisattva, a being who attains a Buddha-like understanding but out of compassion remains in the world to assist others. The Lotus Sutra also made claims such as the idea that anyone could attain Buddhahood, if they followed the teachings—and not just one particular set of teachings.  It opened the idea that there were multiple vehicles—that is to say different practices—that would all get you to the truth, to Englightenment.  Even the term “Mahayana” means the “Great Vehicle”, while Mahayana sees Theravada as “Hinayana”, the “Lesser Vehicle”.  Both will get you where you need to be, but Mahayana offers an exapansion of teachings and texts that Theravada Buddhism does not necessarily accept as authentic.  Indeed in Mahayana belief we also see a focus on multiple Buddhas with different specialties – not only the historical Buddha, but Vairocana, aka Dainichi Nyorai, the Great Solar Buddha, Amitabha, aka Amida Nyorai or Amida Butsu, and so on. In comparison, the Theravada school tend to be more dogmatic on various points of practice and belief, claiming that they focus on the actual teachings of the Historical Buddha and not necessarily looking for extra texts and practices.  There may have been Buddhas in previous ages that attained nirvana and departed this existence, but the Buddha of the current age is the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni.  Another Buddha, Maitreya, is not expected for another five to ten thousand years—not until the teachings of the Buddha have been forgotten and are once again required.  Acquiring freedom from this existence through nirvana is not necessarily one and the same with obtaining Buddhahood—the enlightened understanding required to save all beings. There is another school, “Vajrayana”, the “Lightning” or “Diamond” vehicle.  It focuses on tantric, or esoteric teachings, which practitioners believe provide a more direct, and faster method to enlightenment.  Many secret teachings, or mikkyo in Japanese, can trace themselves in some way to these practices, though it likely didn't make it to East Asia until the Tang dynasty or so in the 8th century, so we'll come back to it when we get to things like Kuukai and Saichou, who brought Shingon and Tendai, respectively, to Japan in the early 9th century—about four centuries from our current chronological position.  Both the Mahayana and Vajrayana schools included the teachings from the Lotus Sutra, which would become one of the most important sutras, certainly by the Tang dynasty, as well as in the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese archipelago.  Its widespread dissemination is often attributed to the famous monk Kumarajiva.  Kumarajiva was a citizen of Kucha, one of the oasis towns along the northern edge of the Tarim Basin, and site of a bustling metropolis and capital of one of the largest oasis kingdoms in the Tarim basin.  Even today, you can see remnants of the ancient city in the desert, and the dry conditions have preserved a number of artifacts, including plenty of texts referencing Buddhist and other beliefs. Kumarajiva traveled from the peripheral city of Dunhuang, another site renowned for its Buddhist roots, especially the famous Mogao caves—a series of Buddhist grottoes built into a cliff face which, along with the dry conditions, have exquisitely preserved the early sculpture and painting, as well as, again, numerous documents.  He came to Chang'an around 401, and he helped translated numerous Buddhist scriptures into Sinitic characters, which could then be shared and read by people across East Asia—everywhere in the ancient Sinic sphere of influence. Besides the Lotus Sutra, another famous text told of the Buddha Amithabha, aka Amida Butsu in Japan.  Amithabha's teachings claimed that any who would call on the name of Amithabha, or just picture them in their mind with a sincere heart, would, on their death, find themselves reborn in a Western Paradise—a “Pure Land” where there were no distractions other than to meditate on the Buddha's teachings and eventually attain freedom from this existence.  Whereas many of the teachings and theological discussions of the various Buddhist schools could get quite complex—thus almost requiring any serious student to join a monastery if they wanted to truly study a particular flavor—the teachings of Amithabha were appealing to those without necessarily a lot of time or resources.  It boiled down to a few practices that just about anyone could do.  It didn't require that you donate huge sums of money or land, or that you spend all your day copying scriptures.  One could chant the name of Amithabha in the fields as you were working, or picture them in your mind as you prepared for bed. These kinds of practices—the chanting of particular mantras or other such things—became a kind of thing people could do to help protect themselves or ward off evil.  A particular example of this practice is preserved in a text from Dunhuang, which has a colophon explaining its purpose.  According to Patricia Ebrey's translation, the text, which was copied by someone named Sun Sizhong, was an incantation that, if said 7, 14, or 21 times a day, with various somatic and material components (willow twig to cleanse the mouth, scattering flowers and incense before the image of the Buddha, and kneeling and joining the palms of the hands) it would clear away the four grave sins, the five wicked acts, and other transgressions.  “The current body would not be afflicted by “untimely” calamities, and one will be reborn into the realm of immeasurably long life.  Plus, reincarnation in the female form would be escaped forever.” On that last piece—yeah, Buddhism came with a little bit of baggage.  In ordering all of life, men were seen as inherently higher on the ladder than women.  This discrimination has been walked back or even abolished in some modern interpretations, but it was definitely present in older beliefs. Besides the power of the incantation if said 7, 13, or 21 times a day, Sun Sizhong went on to explain that if someone recited it 100 times in the evening and then at noon and it will ensure rebirth in the “Western Regions”, while 200,000 recitations gets you perfect intelligence, and 300,000 recitations, one will see Amitabha Buddha face to face and be reborn in the Pure Land. As you can probably start to see, there were many different beliefs and teachings that fell under the Mahayana teachings, and many of the texts were translations.  Even those that had been translated into Sinitic, it was often done by foreigners for whom the local Sinic language was not their native tongue, so there was always a kind of awareness that important pieces might have been lost in translation along the way.  In the 5th century, this led some monks to make the particularly long and dangerous journey all the way to Kushan and on to India, to access the original primary sources for themselves.  One of these was a monk by the name of Faxian. At the age of 62, Faxian decided to go to India to try to get to the heart of what the Buddha really taught.  He set out in 399, traveled across the Tarim Basin and into the Kashmir region and the Indus Valley—Gandhara, in modern Pakistan.  From there he traveled to central India and arrived at Patna, where he stayed and studied for three years.  He traveled around, seeking out works in Sanskrit on Buddhsit ethics and teachings, studying the local languages as well.  In 410 he made his way to the mouth of the Ganges and down to Sri Lanka, where he stayed for almost two years before boarding a ship and traveling home—traveling through the straits of Malacca and around Southeast Asia to take the sea route back to his home. The journey was perilous, and at least twice the boat lost its way.  According to the stories, some of his fellow travelers, who followed more Brahmanic teachings rather than Buddhist, believed that Faxian and his quote-unquote “heretical” teachings were what were leading them astray.  Faxian was able to maintain order and he and his books eventually made it safely to the Shandong peninsula in or around 412. He made his way down to Jiankang, aka modern Nanjing on the Yangzi river.  There he spent the rest of his life translating the scriptures he had brought back.  Others would make similar journeys, all to try to find more authentic versions of the texts—which usually meant finding the Sanskrit version—and then creating translations from those. With the growth in popularity in Buddhism, it is probably little wonder that it eventually made its way over to the Korean peninsula.  It is hard to say exactly when Buddhism arrived, but the Baekje annals in the Samguk Sagi claim that it was brought there by a monk of Central Asia descent in about 384.  One year later, we are told the king of Baekje erected a temple and caused ten men to become monks. The timing of this generally accords with some of the information in the Nihon Shoki, which claims that Buddhism first came from the Western Regions to the Han dynasty, and then to Baekje 300 years later, and then to Yamato about 100 years after that.  While the dates aren't exact, this generally accords with what we know of the way that Buddhism traveled to East Asia and to Baekje, at least. Although we have textual evidence, there isn't much archaeological evidence for Buddhism on the Korean peninsula in this time outside of urban centers.   That is where we find temple rooftiles and other indications that Buddhism was practiced, but at the time it was probably something more common amongst elites than the common people, at least in the 4th and early 5th centuries.  With the invasions by Goguryeo  and the loss of northern territory in about 475, it did gain increased patronage.  Still, it wasn't until the 6th century that it really left the urban centers, which is roughly the time we are talking about with the Yamato sovereign Ame Kunioshi, aka Kimmei Tennou. Next episode we'll get into just how Buddhism came over to the islands—or at least what is recorded and what we have evidence for—in the sixth century.  We'll also talk about its reception and its patronage by the famous Soga clan.  Until then, thank you for listening and for all of your support.  If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts.  If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Also, feel free to Tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.  You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com.  And that's all for now.  Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.

Today, we have Carl Zha from the Silk and Steel Podcast joining us to discuss the Opium wars. Show Notes0:00:00 - 0:03:12 - Introductions0:03:14- 0:05:20 - Opium BeginningsOriginally, opium was ingested orally. However, ingesting it in large quantities lead to death because it stopped breathing. However, after Europeans colonized the New World, they brought back tobacco from the Americas. Particularly, the Spanish and the Portuguese, who brought it to the Philippines and Malaysia, both countries had a significant Chinese diaspora. Later, when the Dutch colonized Indonesia, they, too, brought tobacco. Now, Opium was mixed with tobacco and it could be smoked allowing for consumption in larger amounts without death.0:05:21- 0:07:08 - Damn British and OpiumOpium, itself, is not grown in china. It is grown outside of China and had to be imported. India grew Opium. In the Late 18th century when the British Colonized India, they forced the farmers in India to grow opium. Their policy of making Indian farmers grow Opium was responsible for many famines. The British East India Company (BEIC) would license the opium through their opium monopoly. They would sell the opium to individual traders who would carry them into China, because the British want plausible deniability. If someone every questioned them, they would say, “Oh, we are the venerable British East India company. We don't we don't actually believe in the opium trade.”0:07:08- 0:08:01 - Smoke and MirrorsThe BEIC ships the opium, but the individual parcels will be parceled out and sold to employees of BEIC. A famous opium smuggler is William Jardine, who started as a sergeant under the BEIC. As an employee of the BEIC, he got his own cargo space on their shops which was used to ship opium that he sold to China. 0:08:02- 0:09:48 - China's Opium EpidemicOpium was illegal in China and soon the Chinese government realized they had a crisis. Initially, opium was a luxury good because it was not grown in China. However, the innovation of the BEIC flooded the market with cheap opium. Now, laborers could afford it. It blossomed into a full-blown opium crisis.0:09:49- 0:13:42 - Limits on Foreign TradeOriginally, foreign presence in China was curtailed. It was limited to a few port ciites and the British could only stay for 6 months before having to go to the island of Macau. The British weren't happy that they could only conduct trade in the city of Canton. The British had to resort to selling opium because originally their product was not competitive. British had developed a taste for Chinese tea, and they needed silver to trade because China had gone into the Silver standard. 0:13:43 - 0:14:48 - The Magic FormulaSoon, the British hit the magic formula of selling drugs to the Chinese to drain China of it's silver. The British ran a trade deficit with China prior to the massive operation of opium smuggling. According to some estimates, 50% of the silver mined in the South America is from the 18th and 19th century, ended up in China. The British just decided to sell drugs to drain the silver. 0:14:48 - 0:18:28 Enter AmericansDuring the founding of the United States, most of the New England old money was made in the opium fortune. There was Astor who has an area in Queens named after him: Astoria. Other families who made their fortune through the Opium Trade:* The Forbes Family whose descendant John Forbes Kerry was Secretary of State under Obama.* The Delano Family - FDR's Grandfather.* HSBC bank During a famine in Guangzhau, American traders hid opium under bags of rice. All the Ivy league universities were also heavily invested in the opium trade. That's how America was founded on: Drugs and Slaves.0:19:24 - 0:25:47 China Fights BackChinese officials tried to tackle the problem by banning opium. The first few bans were ineffective because the British had paid off many officials. In the 1830s, the sends his minister Lin Tse-Hsu', who is known to be a very honest, upright official to Guangzhou, specifically put a stop to the opium trade. The British gave up the opium, but they were very indignant. William Jardine returns to London and buys up many newspapers and starts to agitate a media campaign against China in order to start a war. He hobnobs with UK politicians, especially Lord Palmerston, to urge for war with China. There was a lively debate in the British Parliament about morality of going to war with China over opium. But, in the end, they decide to wage war against China for Opium.0:25:47-0:32:12 The First Opium WarThe British sent their troops from India and landed in the port city of Guanzhou. The British had obtained Mysore rockets and their arsenal was significantly better than China's. While Britain had industrialized, they did so by destroying more advanced industries in India. Britain decided to bombard the Chinese coast and went up to the mouth of the Yangzi river. they decided they're going to apply pressure by raiding other Chinese coastal towns. So the sale of the salt from the South China Sea and bombarding the Chinese coast totally. And if they go that went up to the mouth of Yangzi River near Shanghai. They took over some islands to create big their headquarter for opium smuggling. And more importantly, they threatened to cut off the north-south traffic at the Grand Canal. At that time, most of the Chinese shipping was along the coast under the Grand Canal to sail from Nanjing to Beijing. Beijing, in 1839, had a population of more than a billion. The plains around Beijing was dry and couldn't feed the population. The British Navy blockaded the area around Nanjing, threatened to cut off the the rice shipment from from the south to Beijing to basically to starve the population. At this point, China capitulated. They paid large indemnity for the pleasure of being invaded and also recognized Hong Kong as a port.0:32:12 - 0:36:16 Treaty of Nanking * China Ceded Hong Kong in Perpetuity* Indemnity was paid to British ships* Opening up China for foreign exploitation.* Chinese law did not apply to British missionariesSoon, the french began negotiating with the British to allow a little colony in these areas. The city of Shanghai, British, France and even the US got their own concessions. The British and American concession eventually merged into the international Settlement of Shanghai. The colonialism was so bad that there needed to be a Chinatown in Shanghai. The Chinese were restricted to the Chinese city, where the Chinese law would continue to apply. But for the rest of European concessions, British, French, and American laws were applied. British imported Sikh police from British India to police the Shanghai concessions.0:36:16 -0:38:20 Modern Day Colony in OkinawaThis is eerily similar to Okinawa in modern day Japan. American soldiers can rape people in Okinawa. There is nothing that the Japanese government can do to them. The Japanese government is also a culprit because they don't want American soldiers on the Japanese mainland. So they stick them in Okinawa because, they never treated Okinawans at the same level as the Japanese citizens in Japan. Essentially Okinawa status is like it's a double colony of Japan and United States. 0:38:20 Century of HumiliationA Chinese person at this time was a second-class citizen in your own country. A very famous scene in a Bruce Lee film illustrates this:Some Western historians tried to disprove this as an urban myth. But, what they discovered was that there was that the sign actually said “This park is reserved for Europeans only, dogs not allowed.0:42:00 - 0:45:16 - Second Opium WarThe British were not very happy with the settlement for only $21 million. The opium was not fully legalized. So they waited for another opportunity to start another war. This opportunity came during the “Arrow Incident”. British authority had granted all the vessels registered in Hong Kong, British registration. So there was a cargo ship called Arrow. It was used by Chinese smugglers to smuggling opium again, which was captured by the Chinese authorities. The Chinese authorities arrested the crew and executed them for drug smuggling. Because the ship was flying a British flag, the British used this as an excuse to start another war. In another incident, proselytizing was illegal. A French priest decided to ignore this regulation and went to the interior. He got in trouble with the locals who killed him. The French used this as an excuse to align with the British to form the Anglo-French consortium. Now, the French-Anglo forces used Hong Kong as a launchpad to start another attack on China. The British just had finished fighting a war in India against the Great Sepoy Mutiny. They had shipped off mutineers to Trinidad, Guyana and other British colonies to work in bonded labor. 0:45:16 -0:49:29 Chinese Coolie TradeAround the time slavery was formally abolished in many Latin American countries, but there was still a demand for the docile labor force. British and Dutch traders set up shop in Hong Kong. They recruited Chinese peasants They will have these the British and Dutch traders, they will set up shop in Hong Kong and they will Chinese peasants with the promise of jobs overseas. When they went abroad, there conditions were terrible and slave-like. Bruce Lee's dutch great-grandfather was part of this. 0:50:13 - 0:59:07 The British Loot BeijingAfter Britain captured Guangzhou in 1856, they decided it was not enough, so they decided to bring in more pressure. They sailed up to the port of Tianjin, just outside of Beijing where they defeated the Chinese coastal defense. They send in their last remnant force led by the Mongol Prince Sengge Rinchen because they were poorly equipped. At this time, the British decided to send an envoy to negotiate with the Chinese side. But the Mongol Prince, Sengge Rinchen, was so mad at the defeat that he had the British envoy put to death. And now the British were out for revenge. They decided to sack Beijing and the Chines emperor fled the palace. The British commander Lord Elgin (the son of the famed Elgin marbles) decided to loot the Beijing summer palace and ordered the complete destruction of it. Today, the ruins stands. Everything within the summer palaces was shipped to Britain. A clause was inserted so that foreign priests could go anywhere in China to proselytize anywhere in China and British ships were allowed to carry indentured Chinese servants to the USA to work. 0:59:07 - 1:05:19 - Opium and the devastation on the Population* Foreign missionaries said nearly 40% of the adult male population were addicted to opium.* One doctor said, “There is no slavery to that compared to opium”Carl Zha tells us a personal anecdote about how opium ruined his grandfather's family.1:05:19 -1:14:12 KMT, Opium, CIA and the Cold WarAfter the communists seized power in China, the United States was sponsoring the remnant KMT troops who escape from southwestern China to northern Myanmar into this place now with nice golden triangle to start opium and heroin production over there. When the communists took power, opium was outlawed. They burned all the crops and now food such as size could be grown. Around this time, western pharmaceuticals started to develop more potent forms of opium to market it to the masses such as Heroin and Morphine which was treated as a cough remedy for Children.1:14:12-1:17:21 Heroin Crisis hits homeSoldiers who were in Vietnam became addicted to opium and it was shipped back home. 1:17:21 -1:23:20 -Getting back Hong KongWhile Hong Kong was leased in perpetuity, areas around Hong Kong was given a 100 year lease which would expire in 1997. At that time, Margaret Thatcher ran many scenarios to see if they could defend Hong Kong against Chinese forces. When she went to negotiate for Hong Kong, the Chinese government cut her off and flatly said no. They ran many scenarios and they realized they could not defend against an actual Chinese military.In the 1980s, a lot of fear was whipped up by the capitalist class. So, to assuage them, China did One Country Two Policies Get full access to Historic.ly at www.historicly.net/subscribe

This episode we look at some of the physical evidence from this period.  In particular, since we are talking about the sovereign known as Ankan Tenno, we will look at a glass bowl, said to have come from his tomb, which appears to have made its way all the way from Sassanid Persia to Japan between the 5th and 6th centuries CE.  Along the way we'll take a brief look at the route that such an item may have taken to travel across the Eurasian continent all the way to Japan. For more on this episode, check out https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-79 Rough Transcript: Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.  My name is Joshua, and this is Episode 79:  Ankan's Glass Bowl. We are currently in the early part of the 6th century.  Last episode was our New Year's wrapup, but just before that we talked about the reign of Magari no Ōye, aka Ohine, aka Ankan Tennō.   According to the Chronicles, he was the eldest son of Wohodo, aka Keitai Tennō, coming to the throne in 534.  For all of the various Miyake, or Royal Grannaries, that he granted, his reign only lasted about two years, coming to an unfortunate end in the 12th month of 535.  The Chronicles claim that Ohine was 70 years old when he died, which would seem to indicate he was born when his father, Wohodo, was only 13 years of age.  That seems rather young, but not impossibly so. It is said that Ankan Tennō was buried on the hill of Takaya, in the area of Furuichi.  And that is where my personal interest in him and his short reign might end, if not for a glass bowl that caught my eye in the Tokyo National Museum. Specifically, it was the Heiseikan, which is where the Tokyo National Museum hosts special exhibitions, but it also hosts a regular exhibition on Japanese archaeology.  In fact, if you ever get the chance, I highly recommend checking it out.  I mean, let's be honest, the Tokyo National Museum is one of my favorite places to visit when I'm in Tokyo.  I think there is always something new—or at least something old that I find I'm taking a second look at. The Japanese archaeology section of the Heiseikan covers from the earliest stone tools through the Jomon, Yayoi, Kofun, and up to about the Nara period.  They have originals or replicas of many items that we've talked about on the podcast, including the gold seal of King Na of Wa, the Suda Hachiman mirror, and the swords from Eta Funayama and Inariyama kofun, which mention Wakatakiru no Ōkimi, generally thought to be the sovereign known as Yuuryaku Tennō.  They also have one of the large iron tate, or shields, on loan from Isonokami Shrine, and lots of bronze mirrors and various types of haniwa. Amongst this treasure trove of archaeological artifacts, one thing caught my eye from early on.  It is a small, glass bowl, round in shape, impressed throughout with a series of round indentations, almost like a giant golf ball.  Dark brown streaks crisscross the bowl, where it has been broken and put back together at some point in the past.  According to the placard, this Juuyo Bunkazai, or Important Cultural Property, is dated to about the 6th century, was produced somewhere in West Asia, and it is said to have come from the tomb of none other than Ankan Tennō himself. This has always intrigued me.  First and foremost there is the question of provenance—while there are plenty of tombs that have been opened over the years, generally speaking the tombs of the imperial family, especially those identified as belonging to reigning sovereigns, have been off limits to most archaeological investigations.  So how is it that we have artifacts identified with the tomb of Ankan Tennō, if that is the case? The second question, which almost trumps the first, is just how did a glass bowl from west Asia make it all the way to Japan in the 6th century?  Of course, Japan and northeast Asia in general were not strangers to glassmaking—glass beads have a long history both on the Korean peninsula and in the archipelago, including the molds used to make them.  However, it is one thing to melt glass and pour it into molds, similar to working with cast bronze.  These bowls, however, appear to be something different.  They were definitely foreign, and, as we shall see, they had made quite the journey. So let's take a look and see if we can't answer both of these questions, and maybe learn a little bit more about the world of 6th century Japan along the way. To start with, let's look at the provenance of this glass bowl.  Provenance is important—there are numerous stories of famous “finds” that turned out to be fakes, or else items planted by someone who wanted to get their name out there.  Archaeology—and its close cousin, paleontology—can get extremely competitive, and if you don't believe me just look up the Bone Wars of the late 19th century.  Other names that come to mind:  The infamous Piltdown man, the Cardiff Giant, and someone we mentioned in one of our first episodes, Fujimura Shin'ichi, who was accused of salting digs to try to claim human habitation in Japan going back hundreds of thousands of years. This is further complicated by the fact that, in many cases, the situation behind a given find is not necessarily well documented.  There are Edo period examples of Jomon pottery, or haniwa, that were found, but whose actual origins have been lost to time.  Then there are things like the seal of King Na of Wa, which is said to have been discovered by a farmer, devoid of the context that would help to otherwise clear the questions that continue to surround such an object.  On top of this, there are plenty of tombs that have been worn down over the ages—where wind and water have eroded the soil, leaving only the giant stone bones, or perhaps washing burial goods into nearby fields or otherwise displacing them. So what is the story with the tomb of Ankan Tennō, and this glass bowl? To answer this, let's first look at the tomb attributed to Ankan Tennō.  The Nihon Shoki tells us in the 8th century that this tomb was located at Takaya, in the area of Furuichi.  This claim is later repeated by the Engi Shiki in the 10th century.  Theoretically, the compilers of both of these works had some idea of where this was, but in the hundreds of years since then, a lot has happened.  Japan has seen numerous governments, as well as war, famine, natural disaster, and more.  At one point, members of the royal household were selling off calligraphy just to pay for the upkeep of the court, and while the giant kofun no doubt continued to be prominent features for locals in the surrounding areas, the civilian and military governments of the intervening centuries had little to no budget to spare for their upkeep.  Records were lost, as were many details. Towards the end of the Edo period, and into the early Meiji, a resurgence in interest in the royal, or Imperial, family and their ancient mausoleums caused people to investigate the texts and attempt to identify mausoleums for each of the sovereigns, as well as other notable figures, in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki.  Given that many of those figures are likely fictional or legendary individuals, one can see how this may be problematic.  And yet, the list that eventually emerged has become the current list of kofun protected by the Imperial Household Agency as imperial mausolea. Based on what we know, today, some of these official associations seem obviously questionable.  Some of them, for instance, are not even keyhole shaped tombs—for instance, some are circular, or round tombs, where the claim is often made that the other parts of the tomb were eroded or washed away.  Still others engender their own controversy, such as who, exactly, is buried in Daisen-ryō, the largest kofun, claimed to be the resting place of Ōsazaki no Mikoto, aka Nintoku Tennō.  Some people, however, claim that it is actually the sovereign Woasatsuma Wakugo, aka Ingyō Tennō, who is buried there, instead.  What is the truth?  Well, without opening up the main tomb, who is to say, and even then it is possible that any evidence may have already been lost to the acidic soils of the archipelago, which are hardly kind to organic matter. By the way, quick divergence, here—if you look up information on Daisen-ryō, aka Daisen Kofun, you may notice that there are drawings of a grave, including a coffin, associated with it.  That might get you thinking, as I did at one point, that Daisen kofun had already been opened, but it turns out that was a grave on the slopes of the square end of the kofun, and not from the main, circular burial mound.  Theoretically this may have been an important consort, or perhaps offspring or close relative of the main individual interred in the kofun, but most likely it is not for the person for whom the giant mound was actually erected.  So, yes, Daisen kofun remains unopened, at least as far as we know. As for the kofun identified for Ankan Tennō, today that is the tomb known as Furuichi Tsukiyama Kofun, aka Takaya Tsukiyama Kofun.  While the connection to Ankan Tennō may be somewhat unclear, the kofun has had its own colorful history, in a way.  Now most of the reports I could find, from about '92 up to 2022, place this kofun, which is a keyhole shaped kofun, in the correct time period—about the early to mid-6th century, matching up nicely with a 534 to 535 date for the reign given to Ankan Tennō.  But what is fascinating is the history around the 15th to 16th centuries.  It was just after the Ounin War, in 1479, when Hatakeyama Yoshihiro decided to build a castle here, placing the honmaru, the main enclosure, around the kofun, apparently incorporating the kofun and its moats into the castle design.  The castle, known as Takaya Castle, would eventually fall to Oda Nobunaga's forces in 1575, and most of the surrounding area was burned down in the fighting, bringing the kofun's life as a castle to an end. Some of the old earthworks still exist, however, and excavations in the area have helped determine the shape of the old castle, though there still have not been any fulsome excavations of the mound that I have found.  This makes sense as the kofun is designated as belonging to a member of the imperial lineage. There are, however, other keyhole shaped kofun from around the early 6th century that are also found in the same area, which also could be considered royal mausolea, and would seem to fit the bill just as well as this particular tomb.  In addition, there are details in the Chronicles, such as the fact that Magari no Ohine, aka Ankan Tennō, was supposedly buried with his wife and his younger sister.  This is, however, contradicted by records like the 10th century Engi Shiki, where two tombs are identified, one for Ankan Tennō and one for his wife, Kasuga no Yamada, so either the Chronicles got it wrong, or there were already problems with tomb identification just two centuries later.  So we still aren't entirely sure that this is Ankan Tennō's tomb. But at least we know that the glass bowl came from a 6th century kingly tomb, even if that tomb was only later identified as belonging to Ankan Tennō, right? Well, not so fast. The provenance on the bowl is a bit more tricky than that.  You see, the bowl itself came to light in 1950, when a private individual in Fuse, Ōsaka invited visiting scholar Ishida Mosaku to take a look.  According to his report at the time, the bowl was in a black lacquered box and wrapped in a special cloth, with a written inscription that indicated that the bowl had been donated to a temple in Furuichi named Sairin-ji. There are documents from the late Edo period indicating that various items were donated to Sairin-ji temple between the 16th to the 18th centuries, including quote-unquote “utensils” said to have been washed out of the tomb believed to be that of Ankan Tennō.  Ishida Mosaku and other scholars immediately connected this glass bowl with one or more of those accounts.  They were encouraged by the fact that there is a similar bowl found in the Shōsōin, an 8th century repository at Tōdai-ji temple, in Nara, which houses numerous artifacts donated on behalf of Shōmu Tennō.  Despite the gulf of time between them—two hundred years between the 6th and 8th centuries—this was explained away in the same way that Han dynasty mirrors, made in about the 3rd century, continued to show up in burials for many hundreds of years afterwards, likewise passed down as familial heirlooms. Still, the method of its discovery, the paucity of direct evidence, and the lack of any direct connection with where it came from leaves us wondering—did this bowl really come from the tomb of Ankan Tennō?  Even moreso, did it come from a 6th century tomb at all?  Could it not have come from some other tomb? We could tie ourselves up in knots around this question, and I would note that if you look carefully at the Tokyo National Museum's own accounting of the object they do mention that it is quote-unquote “possibly” from the tomb of Ankan Tennō. What does seem clear, however, is that its manufacture was not in Japan.  Indeed, however it came to our small group of islands on the northeastern edge of the Eurasian continent, it had quite the journey, because it does appear to be genuinely from the Middle East—specifically from around the time of the Sassanian or Sassanid empire, the first Iranian empire, centered on the area of modern Iran. And it isn't the only one.  First off, of course, there is the 8th century bowl in the Shousoin I just mentioned, but there are also examples of broken glass found on Okinoshima, an island deep in the middle of the strait between Kyushu and the Korean peninsula, which has a long history as a sacred site, mentioned in the Nihon Shoki, and attached to the Munakata shrine in modern Fukuoka.  Both Okinoshima and the Shōsōin—at least as part of the larger Nara cultural area—are on the UNESCO register of World Heritage sites, along with the Mozu-Furuichi kofun group, of which the Takaya Tsukiyama kofun is one.. Okinoshima is a literal treasure trove for archaeologists. However, its location and status have made it difficult to fully explore.  The island is still an active sacred site, and so investigations are balanced with respect for local tradition.  The lone occupant of the island is a Shinto priest, one of about two dozen who rotate spending 10 days out at the island, tending the sacred site.  Women are still not allowed, and for centuries, one day a year they allowed up to 200 men on the island after they had purified themselves in the ocean around the island.  Since then, they have also opened up to researchers, as well as military and media, at least in some instances. The island is apparently littered with offerings.  Investigations have demonstrated that this island has been in use since at least the 4th century.  As a sacred site, guarding the strait between Kyushu and the Korean peninsula, fishermen and sailors of all kinds would make journeys to the island and leave offerings of one kind or another, and many of them are still there: clay vessels, swords, iron ingots, bronze mirrors, and more.  The island's location, which really is in the middle of the straits, and not truly convenient to any of the regular trading routes, means that it has never really been much of a strategic site, just a religious one, and one that had various religious taboos, so it hasn't undergone the centuries of farming and building that have occurred elsewhere. Offerings are scattered in various places, often scattered around or under boulders and large rocks that were perhaps seen as particularly worthy of devotion.  Since researchers have been allowed in, over 80,000 treasures have been found and catalogued.  Among those artifacts that have been brought back is glass, including glass from Sassanid Persia.  Pieces of broken glass bowls, like the one said to have come from Ankan's tomb, as well as what appear to be beads made from broken glass pieces, have been recovered over the years, once more indicating their presence in the trade routes to the mainland, although when, exactly, they came over can be a little more difficult to place. That might be helped by two other glass artifacts, also found in the archaeological exhibit of the Heiseikan in the Tokyo National Museum: a glass bowl and dish discovered at Niizawa Senzuka kofun Number 126, in Kashihara city, in Nara. This burial is believed to date to the latter half of the 5th century, and included an iron sword, numerous gold fittings and jewelry, and even an ancient clothes iron, which at the time looked like a small frying pan, where you could put hot coals or similar items in the pan and use the flat bottom to help iron out wrinkles in cloth.  Alongside all of this were also discovered two glass vessels.  One was a dark, cobalt-blue plate, with a stand and very shallow conical shape.  The other was a round glass bowl with an outwardly flared lip.  Around the smooth sides, the glass has been marked with three rows of circular dots that go all the way around, not dissimilar from the indentations in the Ankan and Shōsōin glass bowls. All of these, again, are believed to have come from Sassanid Persia, modern Iran, and regardless of the provenance of the Ankan bowl, it seems that we have clear evidence that Sassanian glassworks were making their way to Japan.  But how?  How did something like glass—hardly known for being the most robust of materials—make it all the way from Sassanid Persia to Yamato between the 5th and 8th centuries? To start with, let's look at Sassanid Persia and its glass. Sassanid Persia—aka Sassanid or Sassanian Iran—is the name given to the empire that replaced the Parthian empire, and is generally agreed to have been founded sometime in the early 3rd century.  The name “Sassanid” refers to the legendary dynastic founder, Sassan, though the first historical sovereign appears to be Ardeshir I, who helped put the empire on the map. Ardeshir I called his empire “Eran sahr”, and it is often known as an Iranian or Persian empire, based on their ties to Pars and the use of the Middle Persian, or Farsi, language.   For those not already well aware, Farsi is one of several Iranian languages, though over the years many of the various Iranian speaking peoples would often be classified as “Persian” in English literature.  That said, there is quite a diversity of Iranian languages and people who speak them, including Farsi, Pashto, Dari, Tajik, and the ancient Sogdian language, which I'm sure we'll touch on more given their importance in the ancient silk road trade.  Because of the ease with which historical “Iranian” ethnic groups can be conflated with the modern state, I am going to largely stick with the term Persian, here, but just be aware that the two words are often, though not always, interchangeable. The Sassanid dynasty claimed a link to the older Achaemenid dynasty, and over the subsequent five centuries of their rule they extended their borders, dominating the area between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, eastward to much of modern Afghanistan and Pakistan, running right up to the Hindu Kush and the Pamir mountains.  They held sway over much of Central Asia, including the area of Transoxiana.  With that they had access to both the sea routes, south of India and the overland routes through the Tianshan mountains and the northern and southern routes around the great Taklamakan desert – so, basically, any trade passing between Central and East Asia would pass through Sassanid territory. The Persian empire of the Sassanids was pre-Islamic—Islamic Arab armies would not arrive until about the 7th century, eventually bringing an end to the Sassanid dynasty.  Until that point, the Persian empire was largely Zoroastrian, an Iranian religion based around fire temples, restored after the defeat of the Parthians, where eternal flames were kept burning day and night as part of their ritual practice.  The Sassanids inherited a Persian culture in an area that had been dominated by the Parthians, and before that the Hellenistic Seleucids, and their western edge bordered with the Roman empire.  Rome's establishment in the first century BCE coincided with the invention of glassblowing techniques, and by the time of the Sassanid Empire these techniques seem to have been well established in the region. Sassanid glass decorated with patterns of ground, cut, and polished hollow facets—much like what we see in the examples known in the Japanese islands—comes from about the 5th century onward.  Prior to that, the Sassanian taste seems to have been for slightly less extravagant vessels, with straight or slightly rounded walls. Sassanid glass was dispersed in many different directions along their many trade routes across the Eurasian continent, and archaeologists have been able to identify glass from this region not just by its shape, but by the various physical properties based on the formulas and various raw materials used to make the glass. As for the trip to Japan, this was most likely through the overland routes.  And so the glass would have been sold to merchants who would take it up through Transoxiana, through passes between the Pamirs and the Tianshan mountains, and then through a series of oasis towns and city-states until it reached Dunhuang, on the edge of the ethnic Han sphere of influence. For a majority of this route, the glass was likely carried by Sogdians, another Iranian speaking people from the region of Transoxiana.  Often simply lumped in with the rest of the Iranian speaking world as “Persians”, Sogdians had their own cultural identity, and the area of Sogdia is known to have existed since at least the ancient Achaemenid dynasty.  From the 4th to the 8th century, Sogdian traders plied the sands of Central Eurasia, setting up a network of communities along what would come to be known as the Silk Road. It is along this route that the glassware, likely packed in straw or some other protective material, was carried on the backs of horses, camels, and people along a journey of several thousand kilometers, eventually coming to the fractious edge of the ethnic Han sphere.  Whether it was these same Sogdian traders that then made their way to the ocean and upon boats out to the Japanese islands is unknown, but it is not hard imagining crates being transferred from merchant to merchant, east, to the Korean Peninsula, and eventually across the sea. The overland route from Sogdia is one of the more well-known—and well-worn—routes on what we modernly know as the Silk Road, and it's very much worth taking the time here to give a brief history of how this conduit between Western Asia/Europe and Eastern Asia developed over the centuries.  One of the main crossroads of this area is the Tarim Basin, the area that, today, forms much of Western China, with the Tianshan mountains in the north and the Kunlun Mountains, on the edge of the Tibetan plateau, to the south.  In between is a large desert, the Taklamakan desert, which may have once been a vast inland sea.  Even by the Han dynasty, a vast saltwater body known as the Puchang Sea existed in its easternmost regions.  Comparable to some of the largest of the Great Lakes, and fed by glacial run-off, the lake eventually dwindled to become the salt-marshes around Lop Nur.  And yet, researchers still find prominent boat burials out in what otherwise seems to be the middle of the desert. Around the Tarim basin were various cultures, often centered on oases at the base of the mountains.  Runoff from melting ice and snow in the mountains meant a regular supply of water, and by following the mountains one could navigate from watering hole to watering hole, creating a natural roadway through the arid lands.  In the middle of the Basin, however, is the great Taklamakan desert, and even during the Han dynasty it was a formidable and almost unpassable wasteland.  One could wander the sands for days or weeks with no water and no indication of direction other than the punishing sun overhead.  It is hardly a nice place and remains largely unpopulated, even today. While there were various cultures and city-states around the oasis towns, the first major power that we know held sway, at least over the northern route, were the Xiongnu.  Based in the area of modern Mongolia, the Xiongnu swept down during the Qin and early Han dynasties, displacing or conquering various people. An early exploration of the Tarim basin and its surroundings was conducted by the Han dynasty diplomat, Zhang Qian.  Zhang Qian secretly entered Xiongnu territory with the goal of reaching the Yuezhi—a nomadic group that had been one of those displaced by the Xiongnu.  The Yuezhi had been kicked out of their lands in the Gansu region and moved all the way to the Ferghana valley, in modern Tajikistan, a part of the region known as Transoxiana.  Although Zhang Qian was captured and spent 10 years in service to the Xiongnu, he never forgot his mission and eventually made his way to the Yuezhi.  By that time, however, the Yuezhi had settled in to their new life, and they weren't looking for revenge. While Zhang Qian's news may have been somewhat disappointing for the Han court, what was perhaps more important was the intelligence he brought back concerning the routes through the Tarim basin, and the various people there, as well as lands beyond.  The Han dynasty continued to assert itself in the area they called the “Western Regions”, and General Ban Chao would eventually be sent to defeat the Xiongnu and loosen their hold in the region, opening up the area all the way to modern Kashgar.  Ban Chao would even send an emissary, Gan Ying, to try to make the journey all the way to the Roman empire, known to the Han court as “Daqin”, using the name of the former Qin dynasty as a sign of respect for what they had heard.  However, Gan Ying only made it as far as the land of Anxi—the name given to Parthia—where he was told that to make it to Rome, or Daqin, would require crossing the ocean on a voyage that could take months or even years.  Hearing this, Gan Ying decided to turn back and report on what he knew. Of course if he actually made it to the Persian Gulf—or even to the Black Sea, as some claim—Gan Ying would have been much closer to Rome than the accounts lead us to believe. It is generally thought that he was being deliberately mislead by Parthian merchants who felt they might be cut out if Rome and the Han Dynasty formed more direct relations.  Silks from East Asia, along with other products, were already a lucrative opportunity for middlemen across the trade routes, and nobody wanted to be cut out of that position if they could help it. That said, the Parthians and, following them the Sassanid Persians, continued to maintain relationships with dynasties at the other end of what we know as the Silk Road, at least when they could.  The Sassanid Persians, when they came to power, were known to the various northern and southern dynasties as Bosi—possibly pronounced something like Puasie, at the time, no doubt their attempt to render the term “Parsi”.  We know of numerous missions in both directions between various dynasties, and Sassanian coins are regularly found the south of modern China. And so we can see that even in the first and second centuries, Eurasia was much more connected than one might otherwise believe.  Goods would travel from oasis town to oasis town, and be sold in markets, where they might just be picked up by another merchant.  Starting in the fourth century, the Sogdian merchants began to really make their own presence known along these trade routes.  They would set up enclaves in various towns, and merchants would travel from Sogdian enclave to Sogdian enclave with letters of recommendation, as well as personal letters for members of the community, setting up their own early postal service.  This allowed the Sogdian traders to coordinate activities and kept them abreast of the latest news.     I'm not sure we have a clear indication how long this trip would take.  Theoretically, one could travel from Kashgar to Xi'an and back in well under a year, if one were properly motivated and provisioned—it is roughly 4,000 kilometers, and travel would have likely been broken up with long stays to rest and refresh at the various towns along the way. I've personally had the opportunity to travel from Kashgar to Turpan, though granted it was in the comfort of an air conditioned bus.  Still, having seen the modern conditions, the trip would be grueling, but not impossible back in the day, and if the profits were lucrative enough, then why not do it—it is not dissimilar to the adventurers from Europe in the 16th century who went out to sea to find their own fortunes.  And so the glass bowl likely made its way through the markets of the Tarim basin, to the markets of various capitals in the Yellow River or Yangzi regions—depending on who was in charge in any given year—and eventually made its way to the Korean peninsula and from there to a ship across the Korean strait. Of course, those ships weren't simply holding a single glass vessel.  Likely they were laden with a wide variety of goods.  Some things, such as fabric, incense, and other more biodegradable products would not be as likely to remain, and even glass breaks and oxidizes, and metal rusts away.  Furthermore, many of the goods had likely been picked over by the time any shipments arrived in the islands, making things such as these glass bowls even more rare and scarce. Still, this bowl, whether it belonged to Ankan or not, tells us a story.  It is the story of a much larger world, well beyond the Japanese archipelago, and one that will be encroaching more and more as we continue to explore this period.  Because it wasn't just physical goods that were being transported along the Silk Road.  The travelers also carried with them news and new ideas.  One of these ideas was a series of teachings that came out of India and arrived in China during the Han dynasty, known as Buddhism.  It would take until the 6th century, but Buddhism would eventually make its way to Japan, the end of the Silk Road. But that is for another episode.  For now, I think we'll close out our story of Ankan and his glass bowl.  I hope you've enjoyed this little diversion, and from here we'll continue on with our narrative as we edge closer and closer to the formal introduction of Buddhism and the era known as the Asuka Period. Until then, thank you for listening and for all of your support.  If you like what we are doing, tell your friends and feel free to rate us wherever you listen to podcasts.  If you feel the need to do more, and want to help us keep this going, we have information about how you can donate on Patreon or through our KoFi site, ko-fi.com/sengokudaimyo, or find the links over at our main website, SengokuDaimyo.com/Podcast, where we will have some more discussion on topics from this episode. Also, feel free to Tweet at us at @SengokuPodcast, or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page.  You can also email us at the.sengoku.daimyo@gmail.com.  And that's all for now.  Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.      

Thank you all for your support as we release our 20th Episode! We're so glad you've been with us on this journey, and look foreword to bringing you even more in the future! In this Episode the boys discuss evolving your training through healthy habit forming, dive deep into what it means to them to be Men in 2022 while discussing what the evolved energies of Masculinity and Femininity tie into the Yin and Yang and what it means to them, and then a cited piece from Buddha Weekly on Da Mo and his journey through China meeting Haiuke and crossing the river on a reed. https://buddhaweekly.com/bodhidharma-the-life-of-the-legendary-bodhidharma-founder-of-shaolin/ Thank you all, to support he show please follow the links and become a patron today! linktr.ee/martialmindcast --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/martial-mind/support

Last time we spoke, the Qing Dynasty faced the last real death throes of the Ming Dynasty. What is known as the Revolt of three Feudatories resulted in a war against Wu Sangui, Geng Jingzhong & Shang Zhixin. One by one each warlord fell to the Qing dynasty's vast armies and with each defeat brought more territory and populace under the Qing yolk. However one last major enemy loomed, the Kingdom of Taiwan established by Koxinga. Koxinga's descendent Zheng Keshuang would eventually be defeated and with his submission it seemed the Qing Dynasty would have eternal peace. However, the Qing' enemies remained within and outside its borders at all times. Holding the new empire together would not be easy. The Qing empire, much like the great wall of China could be destroyed, brick by brick and only time would tell how that wall would hold.    This episode is the White Lotus Rebellion   Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on the history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. The revolt of the 3 feudatories had ended, Wu Sangui, Geng Jingzhong & Shang Zhixin were all defeated. The grandson of Koxinga, Zheng Keshuang was defeated, Taiwan was conquered and brought under the fold of the Qing dynasty. The Qing also managed to defend its borders from the external threat of the Tsardom of Russia. The Russians had ventured into border skirmishes around the Amur River valley, first in 1658 with the Battle of Hutong, in which a force of Manchu and Koreans overwhelmed a force of 500 Cossacks aboard 11 ships, sending them fleeing to Albazin. Albazin was a Russian settlement on the Amur River right along the Qing Dynasty's border and it remained a point of conflict in the late 17th century. Since their defeat at the battle of Hutong, the Russians began a campaign of persuading nearby populaces to their cause rather than the Qing which became such a nuisance by 1685 that the Qing sent a force to lay siege to the settlement. In just one day the settlement garrisoned by 450 men surrendered, however a year later the Russians would return to the settlement looking to re-establish themselves. The Qing yet again besieged the settlement in 1686, however this time it was much bloodier. The Qing threw around 3000 men at Albazin which was garrisoned by 800, by the end of the ordeal it is said just 24 men survived within Albazin and the Qing lost perhaps 1500 casualties. In the greater scheme of things, it was just a small border clash, but the result was rather significant. The Russians had been acting rather boldly, because of all the strife going on between the Qing and Ming, but now that the Qing had consolidated their new empire they were more than capable of defending any encroachments, especially those in Manchuria,their native homelands. After defeating the Russians again at the Siege of Albazin, the Qing government sent letters to the Tsar suggesting they sign a peace treaty, because for quite a long time now, the Qing were dealing with an age old enemy, the Mongols, to be precise the Dzungar Mongols. Emperor Kangxi wished to rid the Russian nuisance from the Amur area which was the northern border so he could focus his army on the north-western problem that was the Dzungar Mongols. The Russians knew they could not hope to defend outposts as far as the Amur region and the idea of peace talks perked their interests as trade would be far more beneficial to them then border skirmishes. A treaty would be signed called the Treaty of Nerchinsk, which established trade between the 2 empires and relative peace for quite a long time. This was also the first treaty between the Tsardom of Russia and the Qing dynasty, so a bit of legitimizing for the new-ish regime.   The Qing would have a hell of a time with the Dzungar Mongols which accumulated into what is known as the Dzungar-Qing war which almost went on for a hundred years. By the time the Qing would effectively end the wars with the Dzungar mongols, and all culminated in what is known as the Dzungar genocide. By the end of the wars in the 1750's it is estimated that around 80% of the Dzungar population, something like 500-800 thousand people were killed. During the early 18th century, the Qianlong Emperor gave a directive stating “"Show no mercy at all to these rebels. Only the old and weak should be saved. Our previous military campaigns were too lenient. If we act as before, our troops will withdraw, and further trouble will occur. If a rebel is captured and his followers wish to surrender, he must personally come to the garrison, prostrate himself before the commander, and request surrender. If he only sends someone to request submission, it is undoubtedly a trick. Tell Tsengünjav to massacre these crafty Zunghars. Do not believe what they say."”. As you can imagine such directives led to the massacres of countless people. On Top of the killings, the remaining Dzungar peoples were forcefully relocated to places all over China. Reports from a QING scholar named Wei Yuan who lived almost 100 years after the events state that 30% of the Dzungar people were killed by the Qing military, 40% died of disease such as a smallpox epidemic, 20% fled to other places like Russia and modern day Kazakhstan. There are quite a few historians who argue the Qianlong Emperor simply engaged in a genocidal campaign. Regardless after this rather horrible and bloody ordeal, for the most part the Qing dynasty undergoes a period of relative peace, and I mean the word peace should be taken with a grain of salt, for all Chinese history I don't think there is a single year some revolt or rebellion is not occurring.    When Emperor Kangxi took the throne from 1661-1722 this began what is called the Qing Golden Age. His successor Emperor Yongzheng continued the golden age from 1723-1735 and was further succeeded by Emperor Qianlong who would rule from 1735-1796 which is seen as the peak of the Golden age. During this period China annexed most of Mongolia, northeast China, Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan, aside from Taiwan, its basically the borders of the very China we know today. China at this time amounted to over 32% of the worlds industrial output, its population soared past 100 million for the first time in history and soon grew to an enormous 300 million, hell I live in Canada and we barely have 38 million right now! Despite being such a colossus, China for the most part was quite isolated in its market. China allowed foreign trade through places like Macau, but it was quite limited in scope. Eventually it would be expanded upon.   When the Qianlong Emperor took the throne he began numerous projects including the Ten Great Campaigns, which was a series of military campaigns that enlarged the empire to the extent I had mentioned previously. He put together the largest collection of books in Chinese history to that point known as the Siku Quanshu, “complete repository of the Four branches of Literature”. The exploration of the new world also brought riches in the form of new foods to China. The potato and peanut dramatically improved food supplies allowing for China's population to boom.    Now the upcoming episodes are going to specifically look at the emergence of European powers mingling with China. But this episode is going to be directed at an internal story, and one that is not often talked about. Stating that I will be glossing over some very very important events such as the journey of James Flint and the mission of Lord George Macartney, but rest assured those stories will be the very forefront after this one.   In the spring of 1794, the HMS Lion departed from Macau for its long voyage back home to England and a rumor spread amongst its crew that in the mountainous counties of Shanxi province, that a “true master” had appeared. This so-called Master was said to be marked with the character for the sun upon his left hand and the character of the moon on his right. Together these characters formed the character “Ming”, dun dun dunnnn. According to another rumor, a giant boulder in the village of where this master was born had suddenly split open revealing a hidden scripture inside thar read:  “A black wind will blow for a day and a night. It will destroy men beyond number. White bones will be piled into mountains, and Blood will flow to become an ocean”    It was the telling of an apocalypse, and rumors sprang all through China that the only way to escape the destruction was to memorize that scripture from the boulder and to chant it. Oh and to begin stockpiling guns and other weapons and be ready to support the great master's uprising against the Qing. It was said the “black wind” would hit in the spring of 1796 and it would destroy the world and usher in a new age. Zhang Zhengmo, a peasant living in Hubei province was one of many who believed the prophecy. At 32 years of age he had heard it told to him by a sect leader named Bai who explained to Zhang and many others that the True Master's doctrine was part of the White Lotus teachings.    The White Lotus sect had been around for hundreds of years, it was something like a marriage between Buddhism and Daoism. For the most part, the White Lotus sects amounted to nothing more than harmless people practicing a faith based on healing and protection from misfortune. The founder of the Ming dynasty Zhu Yuanzhang, joined a White Lotus Revolution that took shape in 1352 in Guangzhou. The revolution saw him taking firm control over the head of a rebellious army and he would go on to conquer Nanjing and take the title of Emperor Hongwu ushering in a new age. His title also held religious sentiment of the White Lotus. This religion however like many others held a prediction of an apocalypse and its followers believed that with it would come the second coming of Buddha who would return in the form of a bodhisattva named Maitreya to rid the world of corruption and suffering. Maitreya would destroy the corrupt government and the non believers and a utopia would be formed for those who helped bring upon the apocalypse.    So put yourself in the shoes of the Manchu rulers of the new Qing dynasty. You hear these rumors going around and see the potential rebellion you might be seeing from this religious group. White Lotus groups had sprung uprisings countless times in history and hell the dynasty you just defeated was made by one of those uprisings! Back to Zhang Zhengmo, well he was a recent convert and Bai who was a traveling sect leader became his teacher who indoctrinated him in the True Master's doctrine. Zhang donated money to the cause, not much, he was a peasant after all, but enough to start hoarding weapons. He then began to recruit other followers to become his students…you can see where this is going, think of a good old fashion MLM scam of today like herbalife or scientology haha except instead of toxic shakes or alien stories its people hoarding weapons to begin an apocalypse. So you can sort of get the picture, you become a follower, in the process you pay money to hoard weapons. Then you recruit other followers, rinse and repeat, soon you got yourself a rebellion cooking.    Zhang Zhengmo lived in a part of China considered to be an internal frontier, wide mountain ranges along the points where Hubei, Shaanxi and Sichuan pressed against another, same types of places all the bandit armies would run up into when the Qing came after them. This particular region was known as the Han River Highlands, which fed into the Yangzi river, not a very hospitable area and thus less developed. It was dense with forest, hills and such, perfect for bandits to hang out in. The reason I am describing this area is to emphasize something that is going on in China. I mentioned the population boom, from 100-300 million, it was enormous. With so many people, the necessity for agricultural expansion was enormous as well. Most of the southern and eastern parts of China were being cleared out for crops, literally everywhere was getting gulped up by farms. More and more people were forced to move into areas like the Han River Highlands and all of this culminated in more and more competition between settlers over natural resources. Like with most frontier societies, this got violent very fast. The Han River Highlands were a pretty scary place to live in the late 18th century, there was just about no security because the government officials were all in other areas. Thus without much intervention, who could step in to marshall such places? The White Lotus thats who.   The White Lotus promised safety for all of its followers and were more than happy to accept any settlers. By 1794 the Qing administration warily watched as regions such as the Han River Highlands had sects such as the White Lotus grow. Provincial authorities saw the potential risk of insurrection and began to work at dismantling such cells before they could cause trouble. A crackdown came in 1794 targeting groups based out of Sichuan, Shaanxi and Hubei. Emperor Qianlong made an edict in September ordering all captured sectarians to be punished according to the nature of their guilt. So for example, spiritual leaders would be executed by being cut into pieces, wozzors. Those who spread the White Lotus teachings would be beheaded. Mere followers, would be arrested and deported to Manchuria as slaves. All in all not a very subtle edict.    So the local Qing officials set to work, first it was village headmen who organized forces to round up White Lotus members. Within a few months time they had arrested 20 teachers and over a hundred followers, and as you can imagine their methodology was brutal and would intensify the situation. There was not enough forces to get the job done so the local officials began to hire local thugs to go house to house. As you can imagine the thugs began to run amok, many began to threaten to arrest people if they didn't pay them off. So those who paid them off or somehow managed to prove they were not White Lotus members received placards that they could put on their doors marking them as “decent people”. Everyone else were open targets for abuse as they were suspected White Lotus members. When Zhang Zhengmo heard the officials going house to house he quickly abandoned his home and fled before inspectors could get him. He returned to his native county in the same province where he continued his mission to recruit more followers. By the late winter of 1796, it is estimated that Zhang had more than 1000 followers. Only 2 months before the planned date for the apocalypse or better called uprising, Zhang found out that local officials were mounting a new crackdown now in his native county. Fearing his arrest, Zhang prepared for their arrival, calling upon his followers and telling him the time had come.   Zhang's followers took to the roads where they joined up with other cells that other recruiters had grown. In only a few days more than 10,000 White Lotus members converged under the leadership of Zhang Zhengmo. They brought with them, swords, guns, gunpowder and other supplies necessary for waging a rebellion. They plundered villages for supplies and began conscripting the local populace, coercing them with food. This all mattered not to the White Lotus believers who were taught that non believers would all be destroyed when Buddha returned regardless, so who cares if they harm any of these people in the meantime. The worshipers and their indentured conscripts soon swelled to 20,000 and they began to create blockades along the roads and pathways and made their way to the hills. Zhang Zhengmo's first HQ was to be a mountain estate of a very wealthy believer, but Zhang worried it was to undefendable and thus brought his force further into the mountains where he knew they could hold up better. A campment was built with thousands of shacks, white banners were spread out and the force began to adopt white headbands to identify themselves as legitimate rebels. Their weaponry was mostly swords, knives, though they did have 300 matchlock rifles and 6 chestnut wood cannons. They also had a ton of crossbows and a lot of poison tipped bolts. The defense of the mountain was typical guerilla stuff seen to this day, booby trapped paths, watch towers, makeshift landmines and people hidden around every nook and cranny.    Despite all the preparation, Zhang Zhengmo was quite reluctant to take his newfound rebel army down the mountain side, fearing they would all be slaughtered by the Qing army who must surely be awaiting them. So they all dug in for months, only sending the occasional raiding party down to gather supplies. July came and Zhang received word the Qing were slowly closing in on the mountain. He had burned his name in the registers hoping that he might be able to make an escape and some of his followers began to see he was not the leader they thought him to be. They had  been told he had met the True master, but many found out this was a lie. They looked to him for guidance, but all he could provide were cheap parlor tricks. When Zhang had called for the uprising he thought all of the White Lotus followers from miles all around would heed the cause. Yet after the first 10,000 flocked to him none others were found, he assumed everyone had been arrested and killed. They were trapped on this mountain, there was nowhere to escape to, there was no help coming. They held out another 2 months, but then in September the Qing broke their perimeter and arrested the lot of them. Zhang was to be executed, but before the deed a Qing interrogator demanded to know why he and his followers rebelled. “You are all peasants, you receive the blessings of the emperor. He relieves you of taxes and tribute grain. He relieves your debts. When there is a flood or a drought he gives you aid. You have a human heart, and you should feel gratitude and abide by the laws. So why, under the banner of these evil teachings, did you start a rebellion? In the end, what was it you wanted?”.  Zhang replied “We have indeed received blessings from the emperor. We had warm clothes and could eat our fill. We were peasants, and we were grateful. It was at a time when I was ignorant, that I first began to practice this religion. It was only because I wanted to encourage people to do good deeds and to avoid misfortune. But then the investigations and arrests intensified, and I saw that when people who practiced our religion were captured, all of them were charged with heavy crimes. So I became afraid”. So he was nothing more than a peasant, who ignorantly was led astray and when the crackdown occurred he did what he did out of fear. It is the excuse given by countless peasant uprisings, reckless bursts of defiance towards an perceived malevolent empire, nothing too remarkable. Zhang's force of 20,000 were brushed aside….and little did they know what had occurred all over China.    The “black wind” uprising spread like wildfire. The vast range and appeal of the apocalyptic rumors that had pushed Zhang and his followers had only increased exponentially. From word of mouth through the province, uprisings began to all explode spontaneously through the hill countries of the Han River Highlands. Zhang had no idea, but it was his movement that became the spark to see the entire forest ablaze. By the time the Qing officials had dealt with Zhang Zhengmo's camp, all of Hubei was engulfed in a wave of rebellion, and soon it spread to the neighboring provinces of Sichuan and Shaanxi. On february 9th of 1796, the first day of the lunar new year and just 6 days before Zhang Zhengmo began his uprising, Emperor Qianlong gave up the throne. The abdication had been planned for a very long time, all the way back to 1735 when Qianlong had given an edict that he planned to rule as long as high grandfather had. Emperor Kangxi had reigned for 61 years and Qianlong wanted to keep his word, but not entirely. While on the surface he did quote en quote abdicate on his 60th year as emperor, giving the throne to his son Jiaqing, in reality all he did was install a puppet. The calendars record the new year as Jiaqing Year 1, but within the capital it was truly Qianlong year 61. 2 calendars were kept, 2 sets of imperial annals with one referring to the supreme retired emperor Qianlong, who would continue to rule while his son kept the throne warm.   It probably would have been better for China if Emperor Qianlong really did abdicate, for while his reign was impressive, his effectiveness was deteriorating with his age. A Korean diplomat in 1794 reported to his superiors that Emperor Qianlong had acted in a bizarre manner. He stated that the Emperor ordered breakfast immediately after eating breakfast on some occasions. Thus the implication here was that the Emperor was going senile. Later in 1797 a different Korean envoy reported that the Emperor seemed to be unable to remember what occurred during the morning of their meeting nor what they had done the day prior. With the emperor in a weakened state, factions within his court began to vie for power. One of Emperor Qianlong's closest court officials a man named Heshen began to act out in the emperors name. The more the Emperors mental health declined the more Heshen would speak on his behalf. As observed by the western George Staunton in 1790 “Heshen enjoyed, almost exclusivity, the confidence of the emperor. He might be said to possess, in fact, under the emperor, the whole power of the empire”. It just so happens, Heshen was one of the most corrupt officials in Chinese history during a particularly corrupt ridden time in Chinese history. Heshen treated large amounts of the Qing governments bureaucracy as his own personal patronage network. For example, he began to appoint officials into positions and expected them to pay him handsomely for such appointments. This led the officials to embezzle money to pay him back. In one example he appointed a man to the Yellow River Conservancy, which controlled the funding for flood control over China's second longest river and the man embezzled over 6 million tales of silver each year to pay back Heshen. That money of course was required to help prevent the Yellow River from flooding and by the end of the 18th century about 1/10th of the government funds were actually used for flood prevention. As Heshen and others sucked up the money, the peasants on the floodplain suffered tremendously as the appointed official at the Yellow River Conservancy found it was in the best interests of everyone to allow the river to breach its dikes periodically, just to make sure the government funds kept pouring in. Heshen's corruption was widely apparent to the court, but to make any accusations against him was a death sentence as he had the mouth of the emperor.    Now back to the White Lotus rebellion, it was spreading as I said with great speed and this was greatly aided by government corruption. With the rampant corruption came a huge lack of government forces to respond to the initial uprisings. Skeleton garrisons in key locations such as Hubei allowed for the uprisings to spread like wildfire. The officials were caught off guard and massively unprepared. Across Hubei overwhelmed government forces tried to resist the rebels with whatever weapons they could muster, but soon began pleading other provinces for reinforcement. With such a lack of governmental forces to protect the common people, landowners resorted to raising private militias called “Xiangyong” (means local braves) which in turn began to simply plunder areas. As one witness reported “the so called militia soldiers just continued the work of stealing everything the refugees had left behind in their houses. There wasn't an empty hand anywhere…if the White Lotus rebels are like an ordinary comb, the private militia are the fine-toothed one”. These militias killed, robbed and caused further havoc. To the government all of them were rebels and in turn this caused all the rebels to find common cause. The slogan “the officials oppress, and the people rebel” spread across multiple rebel groups, and at the forefront was the White Lotus. The Qing government began a cycle of violence, redoubled its efforts to extinguish the White Lotus sects, only to give justification to them to increase their rebellious activity.    It is interesting to note the hiring of these militia's will play a crucial role in the downfall of the Qing dynasty. Many scholars attribute the adoption of hired militia's by the Qing government to being something like cutting off your limbs and eating them during starvation. The idea being that while the Qing could raise such militia's to try and stamp out the endless rebellions that will occur during their dynasty's reign, these were short term solutions and only hurt them in the long run. Hiring civilians in war showcased how the Qing standing armies were losing their fighting capability and greatly hurt the Qing treasuries. Regardless this will all be showcased much more in the future.   Emperor Qianlong saw the uprisings as a local issue that should be dealt with by local forces. His focus was on internal unrest, not the problems of the frontier lands and so he denied requests for military aid. He kept telling provincial officials to use the resources they had to deal with the uprisings even though he held ample elite troops that could have swept in to restore the peace. What Emperor Qianlong did do however was send funds to the province to help as the government treasury was jam packed with silver during this age. Without the capitals troops to reinforce them, provincial officials began to follow the lead of the militia rebels and armed peasants to fight off the rebels. At the beginning of the uprising most frontier territories had government militias of just a few hundred, luckier ones perhaps a few thousand. But as the rebellion spread into neighboring provinces and the funds from Beijing poured in, the militia armies grew exponentially. By 1798, Hubei had nearly 400,000 militiamen registered on its books and Sichuan and Shaanxi each had comparably large militia forces. In the concert of the war against the rebels, the 3 provinces reported a total of 100,000 government soldiers and upto a possible million militiamen.    The militiamen strategy proved to be very ineffective against the rebels, in fact the militias did more harm than good. Militiamen came from all walks of life, from farmers, to unemployed city folk to ruthless criminals. If you were a bandit, it was actually far more beneficial to join the militia which paid a salary about the same as a government soldier. These militiamen had no real allegiance beyond the salary they were paid so as the White Lotus watched the government hiring all of these people they simply offered them the same salary or more. By the later years of the uprising it turned out nearly half the White Lotus armies were made up of former militiamen! And if you were wondering what else than money could persuade these militiamen to join the White Lotus hear this. The governor general of Sichuan province reported with disgust that whenever government troops went into battle they simply quote “sent the militia to charge in ahead of them as they hung back where it was safe. If the militiamen got turned back by the rebels and started to run away, the government soldiers just ran after them”. On top of this, tons of false victories over the rebel armies were being reported when in reality, the government troops would just pretend to engage the rebels and continuously move their camps around. There was even reports that government forces would murder refugees from nearby villages and set up their mutilated bodies at their camps to make it look like they had caught rebels. The fact the government forces were really not engaging the rebel armies very much was so apparent one witness said “where the rebels are, there are no government forces; and where the government forces are, there are no rebels”.    With the declining mental health of Emperor Qianlong growing worse, the campaign against the White Lotus fell into the hands of Heshen who was too busy using the opportunity to enrich himself. As emperor Qianlong obsessed over the reports of the rebel war, apparently barely sleeping while he read them day and night according to accounts from his son, well Heshen was doing his best to control which reports came to the emperor. Heshen made sure all the reports were fake victory stories making it seem that the entire campaign was going off without a hitch. Heshen had appointed his own personal goons to be in key military positions who in turn fed falsified victory reports for money or military honors in return. This went further to whitewash massacres done to the civilian population by the government armies. And of course the funds for the military were going to the goons who in turn paid tribute right back to Heshen, making sure they kept their positions regardless of how incompetent they were. For the first 3 years of the war, Heshen effectively controlled the central government's military funding. It would also turn out that the registry of over 300,000 militia soldiers recruited to fight the White Lotus did not exist and it was an embezzlement scheme. It gets even worse. Those militia soldiers who did exist and who died fighting the rebels, well the corrupt officials would embezzle their death benefits, so a ton of mourning families got nothing and this had the disgusting side effect of creating an incentive for corrupt officers to have more of their soldiers die on the battlefield. The Militia related expenses would claim at least half the war effort funding according to Jiaqing who discovered the racket. A scholar in Hubei said this of the situation    “At first they nibbled away like worms, gradually taking more and more until they were gulping like whales. In the beginning, their embezzlements could be reckoned in hundreds and thousands of taels, but presently nothing less than ten thousand would attract notice. Soon amounts ran to scores of thousands, then to hundreds of thousands, then to millions.” Emperor Qianlong expected an easy victory over the White Lotus, but the war was not ending. After reading so many countless reports of victories over the rebels, Qianlong because frustrated and confused as to why the White Lotus rebels did not submit. By 1799, the cost of the war was reaching nearly 100 million taels of silver, an unbelievable sum that had completely exhausted the treasury surplus and there still was no end in sight. Emperor Qianlong spent his last years of life losing his mind to the rebellion and died in a position of helplessness with the treasury emptied. Jiaqing did not have an enviable start to his reign. He was a broad, fat man with a talent for archery and was left with a clean up job that was simply immense. He had been forced to suffer the indemnity of being enthroned in 1796 only to find out he was a puppet and that his father was not even in charge, it was Heshen. He was in his 40's and quite powerless as long as his father remained alive. The day after Emperor Qianlong died in 1799, one of Jiaqings first major acts was to order the arrest of Heshen, boom. There was a swift and very publicized trial where the board of punishments found Heshen to be guilty of a long list of corruption related charges and the sentence would be death. Because Heshen held one of the highest ranks in the court he was allowed to strangle himself with a silk cord, a privilege considered more honorable than having your head cut off. Although the execution of Heshen was symbolically cathartic, it did little to stop the rot of corruption within the government. Heshen was blamed for just about all the sins of the time, as if he alone dragged the empire down…though one could argue he certainly provided a helping hand. All Heshens misdeeds were laid to bare and his enormous wealth was unimaginable.    Heshen had a sprawling mansion of over 730 rooms. In his secondary residence there were 620 rooms. He held landholdings of over 120,000 acres of productive farmland. All the stories you can imagine were there, he had golden chopsticks, silver place settings for banquets, entire rooms filled with jewels, jade and other riches. He owned 10 banks, 10 pawnshops and millions upon millions of taels of silver hoarded into them. Apparently one wall in his main residence turned out to be filled with 5000 pounds of gold bullion if its to be believed. One extremely overexaggerated estimate his sum worth was around 800 million taels of silver, thats around  1.5 billion at the time, around 4 times the entire gross domestic product of the United States of America. More conservative estimates are at around 80 million taels of silver, which was more than the entire treasury surplus that preceded the White Lotus war and enough to make Heshen as wealthy as the Emperor!   After dealing with Heshen, Jiaqing began a campaign against the corruption in the government. However, Jiaqing understood how an anti corruption campaign could fall into chaos and become a general purge, so he allowed it to peter out pretty quick. What did happen, was the Qing government saw a lot of old scores settled and factionalism rose amongst officials. The first order of business after dealing with Heshen was obviously the White Lotus war. The day after Qianlong's death, Jiaqing issued an edict naming the suppression of antigovernment religious sects as the dynasty's most urgent priority. Jiaqing rallied against the corrupt military officers accusing them of dragging out the war in order to fill their pockets. He laid blame for the insurrection upon the civil servants who extorted the peasants. “The peasants enjoy few fruits from their labor. So how can they possibly supply such insatiable demands? It is the local officials who provoked these rebellions”.    Emperor Jiaqing began removing corrupt and incompetent military officials to try and replace them with better men, but the reality at the time was quite thin pickings. Most of the Manchu generals of his father or grandfathers generation were dead or far too old to lead. The younger generation were not born into the same world as their parents. If you've ever listened to Dan Carlin's podcast and yes I am nothing but a mere fanboy, he often makes the analogy of how empires go soft. The old quasi proverb of old wooden shoes going up the stairs and soft silken sandals going down them. This new generation of Manchu did not live the hardened lifestyle of their ancestors, they were living in a world of luxury now. A ton of the younger generation were also tainted by the Heshen click. Yet there was a minority of great warriors and some of the old guard so to say that had won Emperor Qianlong some victories back in the day. The very best of them was a physically enduring Manchu named Eldemboo. At 51 years old in the year of 1799 he was selected to lead the White Lotus suppression. He was quite old, but experienced, ruthless and said to be incorruptible.    Elemboo's had been part of campaigns in the 1770's to bring parts of the frontiers under the Qing Yolk. He fought the Burmese in southern Yunnan. He fought during the Tibetan rebellion in the1770's, during a muslim uprising in Gansu in 1784, helped put down a rebellion in Taiwan in 1787 and served in the far west against the Gurkhas in Tibet and Nepal in the 1790s. By 1797 he was a Lt-general who had just succeeded in suppressing a Miao ethnic uprising in Hunan province. The campaign against the White Lotus faced a crucial problem, that of mobility. The rebels required little in terms of weaponry and could get pretty much anything on the go from just about any village. They did not construct elaborate camps, they were accustomed to the mountains and forests and could carry out guerilla warfare at a moments notice. The Qing military was another beast altogether. It required enormous logistical operations to move its food, matchlock muskets, ammunition, powder, bows and arrows, this all required carts and beasts of burden. Usually these logistics were not a problem, but for mountains and forest regions it was a nightmare. The rebels understood the advantage and made sure to take up positions in the worst possible places for such logistics.    Because of these logistical problems the Qing forces had been simply setting up stations in fixed positions hoping to cast a net around rebel pockets. Many commanders simply did not have the stomach to march into forests or up mountain sides to chase an enemy that would use every obstacle against them. Eldemboo unlike his predecessor commanders not only was willing to venture into the forests and mountains, but was perfectly willing to endure the hardship of such ventures alongside his men. A new approach was necessary for the campaign. Eldemboo called for “jianbi qingye” “fortify the walls and clear the countryside”. The idea was two fold, first to separate the good peasants from those who would support the White Lotus, by concentrating them in places of safety ie, behind fortified encampments known as baozhai. In these Baozhai, some peasants would be trained as militia to defend their respective camps. The second idea was to clear the countryside, by moving all the grain harvest and food stores away and into the Baozhai where all the good peasants would be taking refuge. The hope was the rebels would eventually be unable to scavenge food from the emptied countryside and would be forced to come out of their hiding and fight the government forces on their terms.   Under the command of Eldemboo, the jianbi qingye strategy was implemented throughout the war zone. Hundreds of fortified camps were in the wartorn provinces. The fortified camps held strong walls and deep moats. The militiamen would defend them and not be taken out on campaigns that earlier had caused so much havoc upon the populace. The new role of the militiamen was to protect their own families, neighbors and such and thus they were far less likely to fall into banditry. While the quote “good” population concentrated in their Baozhai, defended by their good militiamen, Eldemboo's manchu and Han troops were now free to campaign at will through any wartorn province. Soon Eldemboo began producing a string of victories over the weakened rebel forces. By early 1803, Eldemboo's campaign had moved into its final phase, a brutal mop up operation. The remnants of the broken rebels needed to be crushed and the demilitarization of all the militiamen needed to gradually begin.  Emperor Jiaqing warned his generals not to relax in their campaigns prematurely. “Though the main disease is cured, there are boils and sores that remain. If even a single rebel is left alive, it would be enough for them to keep spreading and growing”. Emperor Jiaqing's generals heeded his words and continued to ruthlessly crush the remnants of the rebels. A systematic program of pacification was enacted. The “good” populace was continuously resettled into the fortified cities, while the Qing forces pursued and exterminated the rebel guerrilla bands, though it should be noted they did give amnesty to many rebels who deserted. It was the combination of military and social policies that were winning the day. Qing administrators seized and destroyed all White Lotus scriptures they could find in the warzones.  By the late summer of 1803, some of Jiaqing's commanders reported back to him that after 8 years of extermination efforts against the White Lotus in the 3 provinces, it seemed for all intensive purposes the job was complete. In early 1804, Eldemboo traveled back to Beijing and returned his carved seal of authority to the Emperor, signifying that the war was over. It would be the last great victory of Eldemboo's very long career. The next year at the age of 57 Eldemboo died and with him the last of that hardened generation. In 1805, Emperor Jiaqing was able to address the empire without the ongoing drain of resources due to the White Lotus War.   It was a very bitter victory, most rebellions are. A chinese scholar wrote a few decades later that it was estimated that several hundred thousand rebels had been killed during the war. For the governmental forces, militiamen and countless civilians who died of war and starvation the scholar simply stated it could not be calculated. There was also no way to differentiate the White Lotus from the rebels as there were countless groups rebelling for differing reasons.   A major problem with the White Lotus Rebellion aside from the death and horror was the loss of prestige for the Qing military. There was a sort of myth of invincibility for the Manchu warriors, hell they had conquered the Ming Dynasty afterall. But the scale of damage caused by the White Lotus Rebellion was eye opening, it took the Qing 8 years to quell it! And quell it is a strong word, for the White Lotus were not truly gone or anything, there would be sporadic revolts throughout the early 19th century, just not on the same scale as the 8 year war. The Manchu army of the early 19th century was not the same generation that once conquered the Ming. The wooden shoes were being cast off and silky slippers were starting to become the norm so to say for you Dan Carlin fans. To make everything much worse, the adoption of training and hiring militia's would have a devastating effect on the Qing dynasty until its demise in the 20th century. This was not a unique problem for China, many empires fell for this same reason. Take example the Egyptian empire under the Ptolemy's. Under the reign of Ptolemy IV Philophater the military was forced to hire local native Egyptians in large numbers for the first time to deal with the 4th Syrian war of 219-217BC. Prior to this war, the Ptolemiac empire had a military consisted mostly of Greeks and for a very important reason, they did not want to train or arm the native population who did not like them very much. When their backs were against the wall they trained around 30,000 native egyptians as Phalangites and hell it paid off during the battle of Raphia when they smashed the army of Antiochus III. The Ptolemies had finally ended what was an ongoing manpower problem. Oh and then the trained and armed Egyptians rebelled and created a separate kingdom that lasted 20 years. It was an enormous turning point in Ptolemaic history and a bitter lesson.  For the Qing the hiring of militia armies will occur on countless occasions for countless reasons, but one thing is for sure it is part of a long list of reasons as to why the great dynasty will crumble.    I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me.  The once mighty Qing have proven to be not so mighty anymore. The 8 year White Lotus Rebellion was quelled, but at what cost to the empire? With the death of Eldemboo came also the deaths of a generation of strong warriors. And while this rebellion was going on, something else was afoot, this time not an internal issue, but a growing external one. 

Last time we spoke about the harrowing tale of what could be one of the most evil leaders in human history, depending of course which sources you read about him. Indeed Zhang Xianzhong, regardless if he was fully, half or less guilty of the crimes against humanity laid against his name, has gone down in Chinese history as a significant figure. The people of Sichuan underwent a horror and it would take two full centuries for Sichuan to regain its lost population. Thus with the fall of Zhang Xianzhong, Li Zicheng and countless South Ming claimants to the throne, who was left for the remnants of the former to rally around? Well one of the self proclaimed Emperors to the South Ming regime was still alive and….fleeing. Emperor Yongli now had an opportunity to harness the scattered Dashun, Daxi and other Ming loyalists to his cause.    This episode is the Flight & Fight of Emperor Yongli   Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on the history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War.   Well after a rather horrifying episode dedicated just to Zhang Xianzhong's regime in Sichuan we now come back to the South Ming regime. Now while Zhang Xianzhong was busy turning Sichuan into a cemetery, the South Ming Loyalists were engaged in a life or death struggle for central and southeast China. A series of Ming claimants to the dragon throne rose and fell. Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong are both dead leaving their Dashun and Daxi followers in a power vacuum to be swallowed up by mere Banditry, or perhaps defecting to the Qing or Ming. As for the largest victims, the common people, they were once again caught in the middle, soon to be subjugated to war, famine and general hardship. As one scholar one put it “The long conquest of central and south China required armed struggle in county after county, community after community, forcing countless people to face the grim choices on their own doorsteps.”. When the Qing took Beijing, they faced multiple enemies. Li Zicheng fled west and the South Ming Regime sprang up in the south. It meant the Qing would be forced to divide their forces, resources and attention. But their enemies were not only not cooperating, they we're all fighting another. Hell the South Ming Regime was arguably fighting another more than the Qing at many points. It made sense to take out Li Zicheng first of course, he was an easier target since the Qing smashed his army, and there was the bonus of looking like they were avenging the regicide of Emperor Chongzhen. In the meantime the South Ming Regime was killing itself allowing the Qing to kick the door to the rotting structure and soon a bunch of South Ming self proclaimed Emperors were defeated one by one. Yet when they got to Emperor Yongli…well he kept fleeing. Then they diverted their attention to Zhang Xianzhong and took him out, probably for the betterment of humanity. Now so many remnants of Dashun, Daxi, other Ming loyalist military groups and other bandit armies were roaming around. Many warlords sprang up taking control over them. What would happen if someone began to win over all these free chess pieces so to say to their side of the war?  Now we are going to go back to Emperor Yongli's situation. As I had mentioned 2 episodes ago Qu Shishi had argued with Emperor Yongli that they needed to make a stand, and one would be made at Guilin. Qu Shisi said to the Emperor ““If you want to defend Yue, you should stay in Yue. If you abandon Yue, then Yue will be imperiled. If we take one step forward, then the people will take one step forward. But if we flee far away in a single day, the people will also flee far in a day. If we run, then we cannot defend [territory]. How can we attract people to our cause?”. Well Emperor Yongli fled regardless for the 4th or 5th time I lost count at this point, Qu Shishi stayed behind at Guilin. Qu Shisi understood the necessity not to abandon cities so easily so as to rally more forces to the cause. He had seen the previous South Ming Regimes collapse because they abandoned bases too swiftly, undermining their causes.   Qu Shisi was accompanied by Jiao Lian and they would defend Guilin from multiple Qing attacks in April and June of 1647. During the first assault Jiao had led the defense of the city facing greater numbers and having lesser firearms at his disposal. Despite the deficiency in firearms Jiao's forces defended Guilin using sword and bow to great effect. Several hundred Qinq archer cavalry charged Guilin and pelted the defenders with arrows, one of them striking Jiao, but he kept fighting and held the south gate against the invaders. This inspired his troops and soon they charged out the south gate against the Qing force, smashing many troops of the Red banner. The Qing had to flee, and Jiao's men chased them killing thousands.Eventually Jiao and his men went too far and were surrounded and outnumbered by the Qing who wheeled around on them. It is said Jiao screamed and struck the invaders with his spear, raining blood and flesh all over as he and his men hacked their way out of the encirclement. They fought for some miles, just a force of 300 men against thousands but managed to make it back to Guilin.    This minor victory prompted Qu and Jiao to stress the tactical and strategic importance of Guilin and Wuzhou, urging Emperor Yongli to return and to make Guilin a base of operations. Meanwhile Emperor Yongli was being escorted by Liu Chengyin, an ambitious career military man who was nicknamed “the Iron Club” who protected him in western Huguang. For 3 months no rations were delivered to Guilin and when the Qing learnt about its supply issues they attacked again, this time at the Wenchang gate. Jiao charged out against the enemy covered by some western cannons given to him by some catholic missionary friends. The cannons cut the Qing forces to ribbons, killing hundreds as Jiao charged out to fight them in the fields. The fighting went on for 2 days with the cannons never stopping and although the Qing regrouped to attack again they were smashed so much they had to make a retreat, being pursued yet again by Jiao's forces losing thousands of men. For this victory, Jiao was made military commissioner in chief of the left, military superintendent of Guangxi, and the Earl of Xining. Liu “Iron Club” Chengyin, it seems had been holding Emperor Yongli under house arrest at Wugang the entire time and this began to look really bad. In May of 1647, the Qing captured Baoqing and in a series of battles defeated Liu Chengyin. Emperor Yongli barely was able to escape, sometimes only being just a few miles ahead of Qing scouts. Emperor Yongli made his way through the Guni Pass to Liuzhou, but soon had to reroute to Xiangzhou. By this point locals were shooting arrows at his royal barge, not a good look at all. After the constant urging of Qu Shishi, Emperor Yongli finally decided to return to Guilin by the end of 1647.    The Qing found they were having a hard time pacifying southern and western Huguang province, it held rough terrain and a large number of enemies. Bandit groups were operating by both land and water in numbers ranging from hundreds to thousands. To make matters worse the bandits had multiple spies working within the Qing giving them warning of their movements, allowing them to hide into mountains and forests when needed. Han bannerman Luo Xiujin argued that despite their victories, the enemy would always escape their clutches via mountains. The Qing like their Ming counterparts, were having the exact same problems dealing with confrontations with wandering bandits, particularly in the rugged border country between provinces. Qing officials complained repeatedly of ambushes in mountain passes and heavy casualties. There were also reports that such ambush attacks were making common cause with the Ming loyalists, and this was certainly concerning. The Qing were realizing that the Ming could offer legitimation to bandit groups and use them to ware the Qing down.   In Autumn of 1647, after the Qing attacked Yongzhou, after 10 days of combat, the Ming suddenly charged out of the city and pushed the Qing to flee near Quanzhou where they managed to defeat Qing commander Geng Zhongming forcing him to flee for miles. This was considered the first military triumph for Emperor Yongli's regime.    By early 1648, the Qing seized Quanzhou and managed to defeat some Ming forces near Guilin who routed. The forces who had routed ended up fleeing to Guilin and they quickly set about looting the city before further fleeing. Qu Shishi remained stern as some of his fellow Ming commanders looted, burned and fled Guilin as the situation deteriorated. Guilin soon fell into a mutiny as the city was engulfed in flames. Qu refused to leave his post but  was wounded and had to leave the city by river. When the Qing prince Jirgalang heard of the problems in Guilin he seized the opportunity to assault the city. This prompted, I guess the 6th flight of Emperor Yongli at this point. Qu Shishi was urging the Emperor to stay as Jiao came rushing from Pringle to help, but Qing forces blocked his route to Guilin. Qu urged the emperor “Victory or defeat is still unsure. But if your plan is to run away, then how can this place not be in danger?” Yongli replied, “Surely my minister does not want to see the Altars of State and Grain perish?”.  Qu tried to gather forces and calm things down to defend Guilin as the enemy approached, while Jiao kept fighting to get to the city. Soon Jiao found himself surrounded and fought with his spear courageously, buying enough time for the Ming commander Hu Yiqing to show up from the east joining the fight with his cavalry. It is said, Hu Yiqing had his horses manes clipped in such a way that the Qing thought they were riding bulls and proclaimed “This bull- riding monster is not easy to stand up against!”. The cavalry of Hu managed to smash the Qing force, sending them fleeing for a few miles. Despite all of this, Emperor Jongli continued to flee all the way to Nanning, much to the outrage of Qu Shishi “How can you flee every time the wind blows two hundred li away? How can the people take heart if their leader is so tremulous?”. His words had no effect on the Emperor, in only 18 months Yongli had traveled over 1800 miles across 3 provinces, spending no more than 4 months in any given place. This led to waves of defections, and the court of Yongli began to discuss where would be the best place to set up a base of operation.    Despite the flights of Yongli, in 1648 the Ming had some major successes. Ma Jinzhong took back Changde, He Tengjiao took back Quanzhou and this drove many to the Ming cause, even Yongzhou was taken back after a 3 month siege. Riding the wave of victories, the Ming took Hengzhou and they also began to capture valuable supplies, horses and other war materials. This all forced Qu Shishi to yet again urge Emperor Yongli to go back to Guilin and this time make it his capital. Qu's reasoning was quite sound, Guilin was centrally located in a resource rich area along a river. It was easy to communicate with other sectors and coordinate offensive campaigns. But time and time again Emperor Yongli refused and this had a damaging effect on morale. Soon Ming commanders recaptured Xiangyang and Yichang and this led Emperor Yongli to feel secure enough to return to Zhaoqing, which he hoped to turn into a base of operation. At this point Yongli and many in his court thought that a Ming restoration was truly possible and they now sought to push north of the Yangzi and seize Nanjing and Kaifeng. Sun Kewang had opened up negotiations with their regime and it was expected that he could be relied upon. Qu Shishi for his part argued that now they could push east from Sichuan and north cutting Qing supply lines from Hugaung. Things would all take a dramatic turn for the worse however.   One of the Ming's commanders, Li Chixin who was a former commander under Li Zicheng had been continuously stating in public that Li Zicheng was the former emperor, making quite a bit of trouble. Li then requested permission to take Changsha and Yuezhou on his own. He managed to defeat the Qing commander Xu Yong and marched north to assault Changsha where Xu Yong had retreated. He killed thousands, captured boats, horses and other war materials and word spread of his great success. However the people of Changsha, did not see Li Chixin as their liberator, in fact they threw their lot in with Xu Yong to defend their city. Let us not forget, Li Chixin like many other former commanders of the Dashun or Daxi bandit armies had a reputation of course, who knows what populaces thought of him. Thus Li Chixins command boat when approaching the city was struck by a cannon ball and he lost over 1000 men. Xu Yong was hit by an arrow, but this did not stop him from rallying the defense of the city atop the walls. Li kept up the pressure with his siege ladders, artillery and sappers. But Xu Yong fired arrows, cannons down upon the enemy and led men into the tunnels to attack the Ming sappers costing Li Chixin some thousand men. Then Xu Yong sent secret attacks with boats on the Xiang river and they hit Li's flanks forcing him to retreat.   When Li Chixin was defeated at Changsha he was order to simply move on and relieve forces at Nanchang, but he ended he only went as far as Chaling and hunkered down. In the meantime the two Ming commanders, Du Yinxi and He Tengjiao were forming plans in Xiangtan. Du decided he would head east to rescue Jiangxi while He would try to go to Nanjing linking up with other Ming loyalists there. As part of their campaigns, Li Chixin was appointed vice minister of war and supreme commander of Shandong and Henan, while other commanders received supreme commands over other areas. But nothing came of these appointments as the Qing quickly advanced and hit He Tengjiao as he was departing from Xiangtan. He tried to find allies to help him out, but none could do anything, thus Prince Jirgalang was able to defeat He and took him as a hostage. Prince Jirgalang knew He Tengjiao had quite a lot of military capability and spent many days trying to get He to defect, but it was to no avail. Eventually Prince Jirgalang ordered his execution, or He committed suicide, no report is sure of his fate. When He Tengjiao was dead, many of his men fled to join Qu Shisi at Guilin. Another issue however was the countless “Loyal and True” who were under He Tengjiao's command, since his death they were now without any semblance of order. Bandits will be bandits and soon they were looting and pillaging everyone.    The Qing soon besieged Nanchang and took it in short time, thus dramatically collapsing the Ming control in Huguang. Many Ming commanders defected to the Qing and Emperor Yongli put Qu Shishi in charge of defending the Huguang-Jiangxi Guangdong corridor, but at this point the Qing held the Fujian coast and much of Huguang. By 1649, Li Chixin's troops began to scatter and plunder the area as the Qing pursued them. Eventually Li's forces plundered their way back north earning the moniker “white felt bandits” for the way they dressed. It was hoped by the Ming that they could still coerce Li Chixin and his white felt bandits to return back into the fold, but Li Chixin would die of illness in Guangxi in the late year. The white felt bandits soon scattered off and fell into pillaging under new commanders mostly in Huguang and Sichuan provinces.     As the Ming forces collapsed at Yongzhou in late 1649, Qu Shishi said in anguish “For 2 years I've tried to create a bulwark, and in a single morning everything has collapsed. How can it be believed that Heaven if for the Ming?”. With the death of He Tengjiao and the absolute collapse of the South Ming regime's position in Huguang, Emperor Yongli, you guessed it, fled Zhaoqing for Wuzhou in early 1650. Thus the South Ming regime was barely a thing in Huguang anymore. Now Qu Shisi began begging the emperor to stay in Zhaoqing stating “Yuedong has lots of rivers alongside mountains; [even] good cavalry cannot unite in the wilderness [to attack here]. Since the time [Li] Chengdong returned to allegiance, this has been the secure area. Its resources and tax base are abundant, ten times that of Yuexi, and both competent officials and troops north and south are connected, and we can strengthen ourselves from within and defend ourselves from outside enemies. Moreover, Zhaoqing is one thousand li from Shao[xing]. With stout crossbows mounted on the walls and entrenched brigades in defense, we can wait for royal rescue troops to come from the four [directions]. Wherever we can go, the bandits can go as well. Although the realm is vast, there is only one boundary. If we retreat an inch, we lose an inch; if we retreat a foot, we lose a foot. Now if the court hears of danger and climbs aboard a boat in the middle of the night, where can you go?”.   As you probably guessed, Yongli did not listen and continued his flight. Qing commander Kong Youde, remember that guy all the way back from the very first episodes? Well he sent Qu Shisi a letter, trying to get him to surrender. Kong Youde had been battling the Loyal and True throughout the southwest smashing many of their armies. Qu allegedly burned the letter and killed the messenger. Meanwhile back in Sichuan, Sun Kewang had begun his own program of state building and was beginning to ask the South Ming Regime to install him as a Ming Prince.    Following in his former master's gruesome footsteps, Sun looted Guizhou and severed hands, ears and noses of those who resisted, apparently only 30% of the populace was left alive. Sun set to work training his troops for months, made deals with local cities to establish economic relations all while simultaneously harassing local Ming armies. His forces eventually captured the provincial capital of Guiyang and its surrounding area and he soon began to set up a new entire new regime. But just as Sun was settling down he received word of an extraordinary opportunity unfolding in Yunnan. Thus he and his Da Xi commanders marched southwest entering Yunnan, entering a new dawn for them all.    The collapse of the Ming dynasty at Beijing and that of the Hongguang South Ming regime in Nanjing had led the people of Yunnan to revolt against their former Ming leaders. Yunnan was one of the very last places conquered by the Ming Dynasty in the late 14th century and it remained relatively the same it had been prior. It had a huge aboriginal population governed by chieftains in a system called the Tulsi system. Yunnan thus was always a bit of a quasi-feudal state controlled by the strongest chieftains. Once the Ming Dynasty fell, the chieftains began to fight another for dominance. The Chieftain family that had the largest influence historically because of their relationship with the Ming royal family was known as the Mu clan. The Mu clan was pretty oppressive to the people and even more so when the Ming collapsed. When Hongguang's regime fell, most in Yunnan began to view the Mu clan as being weak and many other clans began to attack them. One clan, the Wu clan to make this all sound more confusing, was rising to prominence at the time and challenged the Mu clan. The Wu had limited military power and the Mu quelled their challenge fairly easily. But the challenge simply encouraged more and more clans to rise up and a leader named Sha Dingzhou used the opportunity. Sha was a military officer for a chieftain who died and Sha managed to get a stronghold of the clan. While the Mu's and Wu's fought, Sha began a campaign that extended to the Vietnamese border. Then Sha tried a coup against the Mu after they quelled the Wu. Sha's force stormed the Mu palace and burnt it down, killing many in the capital of Yunnanfu. This began a war between Sha and the Mu clan for several months with Sha gaining control of the east of Yunnan. However Mu's forces and other chieftains were fighting a war of attrition and likely would win, thus Sha sought external help.    Sha Dingzhou sent a letter to Sun Kewang “inviting” him to come to the rescue of Yunnan in 1647. Unfortunately, this would be a very very big mistake. Sun Kewang claimed to be the brother in law to Mu Tianbo and declared he would avenge his sister's family. Sun Kewang showed up with 100,000 battled hardened veterans who saw a force of just a few thousand disorganized local units under Sha's command. Sun Kewang defeated Sha's army easily and piled corpses in the streets of the first city they took, immersing the city in 3 to 4 inches of blood so it is said.    Sun then took Quijing, a city he expected to simply open up the gates and submit to him as he had just massacred a previous city sending fear throughout the region. They chose to not submit and fired cannons upon the invaders. Soon Sun's men tossed up a cloud of ladders and swarming over the walls of Quijing like ants. Sun's men rounded up all those in the city and severed hands   Sun then ordered his fellow adopted brothers Liu Wenxiu to the west and Li Dingguo to the east to kill all those who would not submit. Sha Dingzhou tried to send armies to attack the invaders where he could, but every army was defeated with ease. Sha would proclaim to all his confidence with his army, but secretly he was pulling his hair out knowing soon Sun would take the province.  Sun eventually marched on Yannanfu and smashed the Sha army defending it, but rather than immediately occupying the city, Sun Kewang instead announced he was going to restore the Jiao clan, that being his sister's clan who was married to a Mu husband. By this point Liu Wenxiu and Li Dingguo had spread a ton of fear into the populace with their campaigns in the east. Despite Yannanfu having a tiny garrison within it, the city was simply falling apart because of low supplies as Sun Kewang's army simply surrounded it and waited. Thus after a few months the gates of Yunnanfu opened and Sun's forces entered the city. Soon Sun Kewang began to proclaim all those who fled the city should come back, or they would soon be killed as rebels. All the wives within Yunnanfu who lost husbands were given to Sun's men. Then he began to force the children to work cutting grass and collecting firewood. Girls of the age 10 and up were forced into drama troupes, some put into brothels. Boys 12 to 20 years of age were castrated. The adult men were killed and their bodies were tossed into the wilderness. Many former Ming officials were killed or they themselves committed suicide. To restore a semblance of order, Sun began practices employed by Zhang Xianzhong such as prohibited fires at night amongst many other rules which could earn a citizen of Yunnanfu a beating or execution depending on the rule. Yunnanfu was basically becoming a Chengdu 2.0, but perhaps not nearly as bad. Then Sun sent his armies to scour the countryside of the city killing many. It was estimated that perhaps half the population of Yunnanfu was dead. It was even alleged that coffin makers ran out of wood in Yunnanfu. Within a month, Sun's forces began to conscript laborers to cultivate enough food for the army to survive. Many homes around the city were razed to make for space for Sun's army training grounds any who resisted were killed. Sun eventually established order through fear, but realized that in Yunnan you required the support of the Tulsi system to truly control the province, so he soon began to establish relations with all the chieftains. Those who resisted of course were threatened.    Sun then began calling himself Ping Dong Wang “Prince who pacifies the East” which was met with animosity from his adoptive brothers. Sun began to place royal titles on everyone, but kept his position elevated from his adoptive brothers who were supposed to all be equal. The 3 other brothers all recognized Sun Kewang nominally as the leader, but had agreed they should all have equal rankings.  Li Dingguo began to argue they should all be equal as things were with Zhang Xianzhong, which angered Sun. Sun then publicly punished Li Dingguo, though Liu Wenxiu and Ai Nengqi would manage to get the punishment lightened. Regardless Li Dingguo was livid stating ““We are brothers. How dare you strike me? Since the death of our father we have been like hands and feet with no ruler among us, yet now we are to honor you as superior? If this is how things are going to be from now on, how can we live together in peace?”. It is alleged Sun went to Li in private and told him he had to do it publicly because if not there could be a mutiny. Sun then tried to make amends with Li, tasking him with hunting down and killing Sha Dingzhou who was on the run.   Sha had run to Lin'an and had held out against the forces of Liu Wenxiu for quite a few months. When Li Dingguo's force showed up the defenders of Lin'an showered them with gunfire, but Li being a veteran commander easily broke their walls in no time using gunpowder. Sha's forces were shocked by the speed and efficiency of Li's army as they quickly overwhelmed the city. The entire city was torched in a single day, it is said 78 thousand were massacred. Sha and his family managed to escape to a nearby town called Ami. After the massacre at Lin'an, Li Dingguo was noted to not again perform such horrible acts against civilians, it seems he was trying to build himself a reputation afterwards that he was not like Zhang Xianzhong or Sun Kewang. In early 1648, Li Dingguo surrounded the town of Ami, cutting off its water supply. After 20 days, the defenders with Sha Dingzhou ran out of water and Li began sapping Ami's walls. Li then invited Sha to a fake banquet making it seem they would allow Sha to defect and take up a grand position in the new regime. The effect led many of the defenders to defect who soon simply opened the gates to Li's men. Li was brought to Sha and his family and instead of the banquet he promised he had the entire household brought to Yunnanfu and flayed alive. Li's successes were extravagant, showing his extreme capability as a military leader. Unfortunately they also bolstered Li Dingguo as a great leader and Sun Kewang began to become quite jealous of this.    Once Sun Kewangs army had secured enough food to sustain themselves for a year, they began government building efforts. Taxes began, agricultural reform, mines were opened, weapons manufacturing, the works. The weather proved great during that year and the harvests did very well, mines produced salt, gold, silver, iron and copper and the faith in the government rose up. In fact Sun had done better than some of the former Ming officials had in the past and he soon began to mint coins, print paper notes and open new roads, which all helped reduce conflict in the province. Within a year Sun's government was gathering much praise and the people were quite content. Things were really looking good and Sun began to explore the idea of formally uniting with the Ming to resist the Qing. Sun had heard the reports about how well the Loyal and True bandits had done under the Ming regime and thought his regime might benefit from this relationship as well. This would help Sun and his inner circle gain legitimacy and at the time it looked like the Ming were doing well. However old dogs can't learn too many new tricks, and Sun's administration still held some Zhang like favorites, like harsh punishments such as decapitation, flaying and flogging. Though Sun disregarded the policy of rewarding soldiers for body counts, so there was that.   But Sun Kewang was not content, he continued to make it more apparent that his position was more and more elevated compared to his adoptive brothers. He began to erect an ancestral temple for Zhang Xianzhong and referred to him as Taizu and linking himself to Zhang. Then he asked Emperor Yongli to invest with the Ming title of prince of blood “qin wang”. Ai Nengqi was perplexed by this and said ““I can name myself prince. What's the point?” Li Dingguo also added, “We haven't conquered an inch of territory, so how can we accept enfeoffment from the court?”. Sun explained to them that only an investiture from the Ming court was legitimate and that after he was invested with the title they would all refer to him as “you highness”. As you can imagine this would also most certainly help Sun alleviate himself over another rising star, Li Dingguo who was highly popular as a field commander. Li was appointed with the major responsibility of training the troops and was noted to share hardships with the men and always led from the front gaining their respect. Li was what you call a soldier's soldier. Li Dingguo soon established 5 rules for his army; done kill people, dont commit arson, dont commit rape, dont steal livestock and dont take money from peasants. Given how soldiers usually acted in this time in history, the response of the populace was ecstasy.    In the summer of 1649, Sun dispatched his court official Yang Weizhi as his emissary to Yongli's court to ask for the investiture of Prince of Qin and offered to fight the Qing on their behalf. By this time Sun had relocated his operations in Guizhou as it was more centrally located, leaving Li Dingguo in Yunnan to train the military. For Emperor Yongli's court the request was quite disturbing, to make Sun a blood prince might put him in line for the throne. Many in the Ming court had no illusions about Sun Kewang, they thought he was trying to vie for the dragon throne himself.  The title of Prince of Qin was normally reserved for the royal family. The court was divided, Qu Shisi called for Sun's execution, many argued Sun was nothing more than a bandit. But they were in a terrible situation, suffering many military defeats at the hands of the Qing. Eventually the court consented to giving Sun the lesser  title of Duke of Jingguo. Yang Weizhi was terrified of relaying the response to Sun who might simply execute him for failing to get the title Sun wanted and made a stop at Wuzhou before returned to Guizhou. In Wuzhou Yang met with Du Yinxi who advised him to simply forge a document to make Sun think he received a better title than what he had been given. Thus with Du Yinxi's help they forged a document stating Sun was invested with the title of Prince of Pingaliao. Meanwhile another official in the Ming court forged another document stating Sun was being invested with the Prince of Qin title he had originally asked for. Turns out that official, named Chen Bangfu wanted to curry favor with Sun.  All of this was done without the awareness of Yonglis court of course.    Thus the first to arrive in Guizhou was the envoy with Chen Bangfu's forgery and Sun was absolutely delighted upon seeing it. Then Yang Weizhi showed up with his forgery of the Prince of Pingliao title, enraged Sun Kewang. Then yes as you might imagine, a real envoy from Yongli's court arrived and Sun found out the truth that he actually received the Duke of Ingguo title, really really pissing him off. To add insult to injury, his 3 other adoptive brothers were also given titles by that envoy of Yongli   In his rage, Sun  sent more emissaries to Yongli who offered him the title of Prince of Yi, but Sun refused this, demanding the title he originally requested. In the meantime Ai Nengqi died as a result of a poisoned crossbow bolt while he was pacifying a rebellious region. He had been ambushed in a forest and his army was significantly battered. He had managed to return to Yunnanfu, but the doctors there could do little to nothing to stop the poison. His army was handed over to Sun Kewangs command, significantly increasing his power. Thus the first of the adoptive children of Zhang Xianzhong was dead, and he would not be the last. Now all the way back in Sichuan the struggle raged on between the Ming loyalists and the Qing. The Qing had sent commander Li Guoying into Sichuan on a pacification campaign and as he entered the wasteland that once was Sichuan he said “For a thousand li there is no smoke [from cooking fires] and on account of the depredations of the bandit gangs, the value of rice is greater than that of pearls.”. His forces occupied Baoning in northern Sichuan where he was attacked multiple times by bandit armies such as the Kuidong bandits, Tan Hong and others. Li eventually rode out of Baoning and attacked the bandit armies fast and hard sending them fleeing into the countryside. Soon his army took Shunqing and he began to stock up supplies in preparation  for a gradual march south. In spring of 1647 he marched into Chengdu and lamented at the ghastly scene, he said to those around him“Chengdu has been down a hard road. Where are all the people?”. Bones were strewn everywhere, and there was no sign of life to be seen. He was given reports that the people of Chengdu had first fled to Yazhou and ate grass and wild plants until they starved so much they resorted to cannibalism. Li left Zheng Desheng as commander of Chengdu which must have been the worst appointment ever, but soon his troops starved, killed their commander and fled back north. Li got a report that 1330 of the 1390 men assigned to Zheng Desheng died of starvation or disease. Even Li himself was quite ill through 1647-1648 and he was hampered by bandit attacks and a very stretched supply line. Reports flooded in that every fortress was ridden with hundreds of sick and starving troops. All the garrisons the Qing commander would set up in Sichuan amounted to a few hundred starving men. The starvation did not allow him to perform a sufficient offensive, the situation became so dire most of the Qing forces had to withdraw from Sichuan with a meager force left occupying Baoning. It was not just the starvation and disease alone they had to worry about, anywhere the Qing set up shop, bandit armies emerged to harass them.    Later on in 1650, the pacification commissioner of Sichuan Zhang Chun made a report that gives quite a lot of insight. He began by describing Sichuan as a den of tigers and that of the Yao-Huang bandits. One could travel for a great distance without seeing any smoke from cooking fires. He estimated that 2-3% of the population in Sichuan was still alive. He laid blame upon the destruction caused by the Yao-Huang bandits, while leaving out that of the Qing's actions and goes on to talk about man-eating tigers found everywhere. People in Sichuan were  terrified to travel just because of tiger attacks. He claimed that in one distinct of a previous population of 506, 228 people were killed by tigers, 55 died of illness and 223 were left alive. He ended the report stating “Many people escaped the clutches of bandits only to end up in the mouths of tigers”. Wow I am just trying to imagine, surviving the horrors of Zhang Xianzhong, then the war between the Qing and Ming and now you got tigers everywhere eating people yikes.   Li Guoying immediately began demanding assistance, and Qing emperor Shunzhi began to promise supplies would be on their way from places like Shaanxi. But all supplies were quickly used up and Li still had little in terms of soldiers. Li kept arguing that as his enemies grew larger in Sichuan his forces grew smaller. The problem was the supplies and men quickly starved and got sick because there was no foundation within Sichuan to feed them. Basically it was like putting bandaids upon bandaids upon even more bandaids for a large wound that needed a doctor to fix it. Thus the situation forced Li to develop a new plan which was “tuantian” “to nourish the troops, soothe the people, and allow for both offensive and defensive warfare”. He sent Qing officials into the countryside to investigate and promote agricultural productivity. As for his army he sent them throughout the north and east of Sichuan, killing and capturing thousands of bandit armies, many part of the Yao-Huang bandits. But like always, bandits could run and hide in mountains, and thats just what they did.  It was estimated by Li that upto 100,000 Yao-Huang bandits could be in Sichuan.    By 1649, Li was promoted to minister of war and vice censor in chief of the right with jurisdiction over the armies of Sichuan. He had multiple victories, one was dislodging Liu Wenxiu from Chongqing where he killed many Daxi.  If you remember way back when, Emperor Yongli dispatched a distant family member named Zhu Rongfan to Sichuan in 1647. Zhu Rongfan began parading around as a Prince of Chu, though in reality he wasn't and amassed 100,000 followers forming a base in Kuizhou. His forces fought the Qing and scored quite a few victories, but in reality they were just a bunch of opportunistic bandits. Then Zhu Rongfan picked a fight with the Ming loyalist commander Yang Zhan who brought the Ming attention upon him. As you might have guessed, he was preparing to proclaim himself emperor as one does and South Ming officials began to investigate the situation. When pressed by them Zhu claimed to be acting on behalf of Emperor Yongli and that he was merely suppressing bandits. They also accused him of trying to claim himself as an heir apparent despite not being a prince of blood. Zhu then tried to make a getaway but was caught by other officials in 1649 who executed him.    Meanwhile the situation in Sichuan kept growing worse and worse. Just because the tyrant Zhang Xianzhong was dead did not mean his lasting effects on the province were gone. In the midst of the war between bandits, Qing and Ming, the common people were starving and dying. Rice was selling at unbelievably inflated rates. Dogs ate human flesh and lurked in city streets. Most cities were empty though because tigers and wolves were prowling them. It was reported that bandits were robbing graves and that people were resorting to cannibalism en masse. Many people fled to mountains away from the threat of other people or tigers. Lighting a fire became like a death sentence inviting anyone to attack you. Disgusting euphemisms began to be said because of all the cannibalism such as “poor man's broth / xia geng” “surplus lamb / yang rao” “scorched bones  / gu yang”. On top of the famine were the terrible diseases which there were many. “Big head plague” as it was called was when one's head erupted in red boils, it was associated with the chills, fever, swelling of the head and neck and was very contagious. There was a similar disease known as “frog fever” where the boils were more so on the shoulders and back. Then there was “horse eye” a sickness when one's eyes became big and yellow. It is also assumed the Qing brought smallpox with them and this invested the south.   By autumn of 1649 most of north and western Sichuan was pacified and a quarter of the province under nominal control of the Qing. In Southern Sichuan the South Ming loyalist Yang Zhan had held control for quite awhile, aided greatly by the hoard of treasure he salvaged from Zhang Xianzhong's naval catastrophe in 1646. He was capable of feeding his own troops and thousands of refugees who stormed over to him. Despite all his good fortune, he had to contest with warlords in Sichuan named Li Qiande, Wu Dading and Yuan Tao. The 3 warlords  invited Yang to a banquet, its always a banquet eh? And yup, they poisoned his wine, typical. After killing Yang they divided his treasure and troops and southern sichuan yet again fell into chaos.    As this all went down, word spread and Sun Kewang, similar to how he took the opportunity with Yunnan's turmoil came back to Sichuan when he heard the south was fractured.  Sun seeking to put further pressure on Emperor Yongli to invest him as a Prince of Qin, sent Liu Wenxiu and Bai Wenxuan with 200,000 to avenge Yang Zhan. Sun's forces made quick work of the warlords and bandit leaders in southern Sichuan taking several cities.Yuan and Wu were captured and sent back to Sun who mocked them saying he would enroll them as regular soldiers in his army. Wu actually did end up serving in Sun's military and for quite a long time. Yuan managed to escape and flee but was caught and killed by Liu Wenxiu. Li Qiande drowned himself when Liu Wenxiu caught up to him. Sun's forces killed countless warlords, bandit leaders and such. Now Sun's army even had elephant cavalry from Yunnan. Many simply submitted to Sun Kewang joining his forces and growing his power.   Meanwhile Li Guoying had initially profited heavily from the death of Yang Zhan, but saw with horror the force of Sun Kewang sweep through the province like a swarm. Li Guoying pleaded with Emperor Shunzhi for more troops to combat the warlord in the south and was promised a mix of Han and Manchu troops under the control of Wu Sangui. Yet even with the extra forces, now the Loyal and Trust, Kuidong bandits, Yao-Huang bandits and other groups were flocking to Sun Kewangs banner and the south of Sichuan was just a minefield of trouble.  Sun asserted his control from Guizhou and began building it up similar to what he did in Yunnan and in a short time the southwest of Sichuan became an armed camp designed specifically to resist the Qing.    Kong Youde was made prince in charge of rectifying the south in 1649 and alongside the Manchu prince Jirgalang both were dispatched and in 1650 they took Longhu, Wugang and Jingzhou. Through their efforts they took 50,000 surrendered Ming troops and many officers and moved to take Quanzhou and then entered Guangxi. Qu Shishi tried desperately to rally troops to defend Guilin, but all efforts were in vain and no significant numbers came. Qu refused to leave as all his colleagues urged him to do so. In november of 1650, Kong Youde's army surrounded Guilin. To help defend the city, Qu Shishi was aided by the Ming official Zhang Tonchang a who had served the Shaowu Emperor and aided in defeating Zhu Rongfan. He had a Fu Manchu style mustache, was loved and respected by his men for being fearless in battle. When Zhang arrived Qu said to him “I have been entrusted with staying to defend [Guilin]. So I should die here. Those without such responsibilities can flee. The frontier has already been lost. How can I think of easily fleeing?” Zhang replied that he was impressed and called Qu a true gentleman, requesting permission to die alongside him, saying, “If it's to be death, then we die together.”Qu was delighted, and the two shared wine. Qu gave his seals of office to another official to send to Yongli. So a sort of bromance if you were.   Kong Youde repeatedly offered Qu and Zhang the chance to defect, but both men refused. Kong then wined and dined them, trying to win them over but to no avail. Zhang spat back at Kong “You are no more than a dog or a sheep. You disgrace the former Sage, and you deserve to die for your crimes!” You're nothing more than the slave who used to carry a bedpan in Mao Wenlong's house! How dare you sully the name of the Sage.”. For this Zhangs feet were severed, but Kong still did not kill him. He kept insisting the Qing were better for all and gave stories of his 20 years as a soldier. Then Kong tried to have their own family members come and talk sense into them, but still it was to no avail.  Both men were eventually  imprisoned and wrote depressing and falistic poems during the captivity before being executed outside Windy Cave at the foot of the celestial crane peak in what is called today, Diecai Shan (folded Brocade hill) public park. Kong Youde allowed proper burials for the two and soon took up residence in the mansion of the former Ming Prince of Jingjiang. Now Guilin and nearby Pingle were in Qing hands. Kong Youde sought to secure Guangxi by 1651, but he was also itching to face Sun Kewang in the west.   In the wake of Qu and Zhang's deaths, Yongli fled to Nanning, hahahahaha this guy. With a more vulnerable Emperor Yongli now in Nanning, Sun Kewang saw an opportunity to establish greater control over him. Sun Kewang sent him welcoming parties, offering him military protection and boasted of how powerful and wonderful he was.    After annoying Yongli enough he was finally invested as the Prince of Qin, though he had already taken to calling himself “guozhu” “ruler of the realm” and had been making appointments on his own authority at Guiyang. Once a bandit, always a bandit as they say. He was absolutely delighted by the news and renamed Yunnanfu Kunming and Yunnan as Yunxing province. Then he dubbed his personal troops the “jiaqianjun” “royal vanguard”. Li Dingguo and Liu Wenxiu retained their old titles and sat at Sun's left and right side begrudgingly.  Yang Weizhi, the poor guy who had to bear bad news and was punished harshly for it managed to become grand secretary at Emperor Yongli's court and would subsequently try to impeach Sun. Sun responded by having his thugs bring Yang to Guiyang and upon his arrival screamed “Traitorous bandits like you will never be anything else.”. Sun had Yang beaten and dragged through the streets and was trampled to death by horses. His loss was felt heavy by many, particularly by Li Dingguo and Liu Wenxiu who had become close friends with him. They took his corpse and buried him with a ceremony. With Yang well out of the way, Sun began to construct an imperial palace in Guiyang and used imperial forms of address in his decrees and instructions. Any officials who resisted him were trampled to death by horses. Only Liu Wenxiu and Li Dingguo were exempt from calling Sun “guozhu”. He minted his own coins and constructed more ancestral temples, making further links to Zhang Xianzhong. Sun then declared his state the “Later Ming” regime. His ascension ceremony was attended by 100 officials on July 3rd 1651.   Meanwhile the Qing captured Pingle and Qingyuan as well as other towns along the Huguang-Guangxi border. Jiao Lian was captured by the Qing who tried to persuade him to join them, but he opted for suicide. Emperor Yongli feeling pressured, you guessed it, fled Nanning. This time he and his court debated whether they should flee to Fujian or Vietnam. Most wanted to go east arguing they should join up with Sun Kewang. But Emperor Yongli thought the coast was too distant and the travel too dangerous, for the time being they would camp at Xixing. But as the Qing took Nanning, Emperor Yongli fled again, almost being caught by the Qing who were within just a few miles of his entourage. This prompted Emperor Yongli to accept Sun Kewangs offer of protection. At the beginning of 1652, Sun ordered his subordinate Lt. Genge Sanpin with 3000 troops to escort Emperor Yongli to Anlong. By the time Emperor Yongli arrived his entourage was down to 2900 members. Sun figured the location was convenient for the court of Yongli as it lay in conjunction with Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangdong provinces. It was also close enough to Guiyang for Sun to keep an eye on the Emperor. Sun then set himself up as Yongl's military protector, but refused to personally greet Yongli on the principle that quote “2 dragons cannot see one another”. Thus Anlong became the ostensible Ming capital, but in reality it was just a safe place where Sun could keep the Emperor while he pursued his own objectives.   I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me.  So the great and horrifying father Zhang Xianzhong is dead, but his 4 adoptive sons quickly took over the family business and are causing mayhem. Sun Kewang emerged the largest brother and soon built himself an empire, matching that of  the fleeing Emperor Yongli. Now Kewang had Emperor Yongli basically under house arrest, or better said kidnapped, all was his for the taking, what stood in his way, but the might of the Qing dynasty?

Red Silk: Class, Gender, and Revolution in China's Yangzi Delta Silk Industry (Harvard UP, 2020) is a history of China's Yangzi Delta silk industry during the wars, crises, and revolutions of the mid-twentieth century. Based on extensive research in Chinese archives and focused on the 1950s, the book compares two very different groups of silk workers and their experiences in the revolution. Male silk weavers in Shanghai factories enjoyed close ties to the Communist party-state and benefited greatly from socialist policies after 1949. In contrast, workers in silk thread mills, or filatures, were mostly young women who lacked powerful organizations or ties to the revolutionary regime. For many filature workers, working conditions changed little after 1949 and politicized production campaigns added a new burden within the brutal and oppressive factory regime in place since the nineteenth century. Both groups of workers and their employers had to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. Their actions--protests, petitions, bribery, tax evasion--compelled the party-state to adjust its policies, producing new challenges. The results, though initially positive for many, were ultimately disastrous. By the end of the 1950s, there was widespread conflict and deprivation among silk workers and, despite its impressive recovery under Communist rule, the industry faced a crisis worse than war and revolution. Robert Cliver is Professor of History at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. He has published widely on the labor history of modern China, including in Labor History and Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review. Ghassan Moazzin is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the economic and business history of 19th and 20th century China, with a particular focus on the history of foreign banking, international finance and electricity in modern China. His first book, Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Red Silk: Class, Gender, and Revolution in China's Yangzi Delta Silk Industry (Harvard UP, 2020) is a history of China's Yangzi Delta silk industry during the wars, crises, and revolutions of the mid-twentieth century. Based on extensive research in Chinese archives and focused on the 1950s, the book compares two very different groups of silk workers and their experiences in the revolution. Male silk weavers in Shanghai factories enjoyed close ties to the Communist party-state and benefited greatly from socialist policies after 1949. In contrast, workers in silk thread mills, or filatures, were mostly young women who lacked powerful organizations or ties to the revolutionary regime. For many filature workers, working conditions changed little after 1949 and politicized production campaigns added a new burden within the brutal and oppressive factory regime in place since the nineteenth century. Both groups of workers and their employers had to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. Their actions--protests, petitions, bribery, tax evasion--compelled the party-state to adjust its policies, producing new challenges. The results, though initially positive for many, were ultimately disastrous. By the end of the 1950s, there was widespread conflict and deprivation among silk workers and, despite its impressive recovery under Communist rule, the industry faced a crisis worse than war and revolution. Robert Cliver is Professor of History at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. He has published widely on the labor history of modern China, including in Labor History and Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review. Ghassan Moazzin is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the economic and business history of 19th and 20th century China, with a particular focus on the history of foreign banking, international finance and electricity in modern China. His first book, Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Red Silk: Class, Gender, and Revolution in China's Yangzi Delta Silk Industry (Harvard UP, 2020) is a history of China's Yangzi Delta silk industry during the wars, crises, and revolutions of the mid-twentieth century. Based on extensive research in Chinese archives and focused on the 1950s, the book compares two very different groups of silk workers and their experiences in the revolution. Male silk weavers in Shanghai factories enjoyed close ties to the Communist party-state and benefited greatly from socialist policies after 1949. In contrast, workers in silk thread mills, or filatures, were mostly young women who lacked powerful organizations or ties to the revolutionary regime. For many filature workers, working conditions changed little after 1949 and politicized production campaigns added a new burden within the brutal and oppressive factory regime in place since the nineteenth century. Both groups of workers and their employers had to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. Their actions--protests, petitions, bribery, tax evasion--compelled the party-state to adjust its policies, producing new challenges. The results, though initially positive for many, were ultimately disastrous. By the end of the 1950s, there was widespread conflict and deprivation among silk workers and, despite its impressive recovery under Communist rule, the industry faced a crisis worse than war and revolution. Robert Cliver is Professor of History at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. He has published widely on the labor history of modern China, including in Labor History and Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review. Ghassan Moazzin is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the economic and business history of 19th and 20th century China, with a particular focus on the history of foreign banking, international finance and electricity in modern China. His first book, Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Red Silk: Class, Gender, and Revolution in China's Yangzi Delta Silk Industry (Harvard UP, 2020) is a history of China's Yangzi Delta silk industry during the wars, crises, and revolutions of the mid-twentieth century. Based on extensive research in Chinese archives and focused on the 1950s, the book compares two very different groups of silk workers and their experiences in the revolution. Male silk weavers in Shanghai factories enjoyed close ties to the Communist party-state and benefited greatly from socialist policies after 1949. In contrast, workers in silk thread mills, or filatures, were mostly young women who lacked powerful organizations or ties to the revolutionary regime. For many filature workers, working conditions changed little after 1949 and politicized production campaigns added a new burden within the brutal and oppressive factory regime in place since the nineteenth century. Both groups of workers and their employers had to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. Their actions--protests, petitions, bribery, tax evasion--compelled the party-state to adjust its policies, producing new challenges. The results, though initially positive for many, were ultimately disastrous. By the end of the 1950s, there was widespread conflict and deprivation among silk workers and, despite its impressive recovery under Communist rule, the industry faced a crisis worse than war and revolution. Robert Cliver is Professor of History at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. He has published widely on the labor history of modern China, including in Labor History and Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review. Ghassan Moazzin is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the economic and business history of 19th and 20th century China, with a particular focus on the history of foreign banking, international finance and electricity in modern China. His first book, Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Red Silk: Class, Gender, and Revolution in China's Yangzi Delta Silk Industry (Harvard UP, 2020) is a history of China's Yangzi Delta silk industry during the wars, crises, and revolutions of the mid-twentieth century. Based on extensive research in Chinese archives and focused on the 1950s, the book compares two very different groups of silk workers and their experiences in the revolution. Male silk weavers in Shanghai factories enjoyed close ties to the Communist party-state and benefited greatly from socialist policies after 1949. In contrast, workers in silk thread mills, or filatures, were mostly young women who lacked powerful organizations or ties to the revolutionary regime. For many filature workers, working conditions changed little after 1949 and politicized production campaigns added a new burden within the brutal and oppressive factory regime in place since the nineteenth century. Both groups of workers and their employers had to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. Their actions--protests, petitions, bribery, tax evasion--compelled the party-state to adjust its policies, producing new challenges. The results, though initially positive for many, were ultimately disastrous. By the end of the 1950s, there was widespread conflict and deprivation among silk workers and, despite its impressive recovery under Communist rule, the industry faced a crisis worse than war and revolution. Robert Cliver is Professor of History at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. He has published widely on the labor history of modern China, including in Labor History and Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review. Ghassan Moazzin is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the economic and business history of 19th and 20th century China, with a particular focus on the history of foreign banking, international finance and electricity in modern China. His first book, Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Red Silk: Class, Gender, and Revolution in China's Yangzi Delta Silk Industry (Harvard UP, 2020) is a history of China's Yangzi Delta silk industry during the wars, crises, and revolutions of the mid-twentieth century. Based on extensive research in Chinese archives and focused on the 1950s, the book compares two very different groups of silk workers and their experiences in the revolution. Male silk weavers in Shanghai factories enjoyed close ties to the Communist party-state and benefited greatly from socialist policies after 1949. In contrast, workers in silk thread mills, or filatures, were mostly young women who lacked powerful organizations or ties to the revolutionary regime. For many filature workers, working conditions changed little after 1949 and politicized production campaigns added a new burden within the brutal and oppressive factory regime in place since the nineteenth century. Both groups of workers and their employers had to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. Their actions--protests, petitions, bribery, tax evasion--compelled the party-state to adjust its policies, producing new challenges. The results, though initially positive for many, were ultimately disastrous. By the end of the 1950s, there was widespread conflict and deprivation among silk workers and, despite its impressive recovery under Communist rule, the industry faced a crisis worse than war and revolution. Robert Cliver is Professor of History at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. He has published widely on the labor history of modern China, including in Labor History and Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review. Ghassan Moazzin is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the economic and business history of 19th and 20th century China, with a particular focus on the history of foreign banking, international finance and electricity in modern China. His first book, Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

En 1862, Armand David, jeune prêtre lazariste, réalise son rêve : partir en Chine pour étudier sa faune et sa flore. Sa curiosité sans limite le conduit loin des villes, sur les pentes raides des montagnes du Sichuan. Sur les traces du mythique ours-chat, il découvre de nombreuses autres espèces étonnantes qui rejoindront les collections du muséum d'Histoire naturelle de Paris.

En 1862, Armand David, jeune prêtre lazariste, réalise son rêve : partir en Chine pour étudier sa faune et sa flore. Sa curiosité sans limite le conduit loin des villes, sur les pentes raides des montagnes du Sichuan. Sur les traces du mythique ours-chat, il découvre de nombreuses autres espèces étonnantes qui rejoindront les collections du muséum d'Histoire naturelle de Paris.

With the Yuan Dynasty reduced to an ever shrinking area of land around Dadu in north China, to tell the story of the expulsion of the Mongol rulers in 1368 is to tell the story of Zhu Yuanzhang, a peasant turned monk turned warlord turned emperor. Today, we give  you the rise to power of Ming Taizu, the Hongwu Emperor, his great victory at Lake Poyang and the Rise of the Ming Dynasty,  and the final Yuan efforts to hold onto their dynasty. I’m you host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.       Our last two episodes took us through the period of Mongol rule in China from Khubilai Khan’s death in 1294, through his many successors until the reign of Toghon Temur Khan, who took the throne in 1333. Toghon Temur was largely a puppet to his chancellors; first Bayan of the Merkit, and most notably Bayan’s nephew, Toghto. Though faced with a colossal economic and environmental crisis which spawned a series of uprisings in 1351, the Red Turbans, by the end of 1354 Toghto had nearly crushed the movement and restored order. But Toghon Temur Khan made the foolish decision to banish Toghto in January 1355, a decision which signalled the death blow to the Yuan Dynasty. Toghto was the last actor who could have arrested the fate of the Yuan or controled the dynasty’s resources. Within months of Toghto’s dismissal, the rebellion picked up with new energy, and the power of the Yuan court became restricted to the very north. The rest of the empire became subject to various warlords, some with nominal allegiance to the Yuan, and some seeking nothing but its utter destruction.   A few points should be emphasized. The lack of interest Toghon Temur had in governing ensured that there was no individual in the Yuan court who could step into the role of Toghto. The strengthening of the regional rulers during the chancellorship of Berke Bukha, followed by mass mobilization in Toghto’s last years left provincial, regional and local rulers newly empowered and at the heads of much stronger military forces. The famed Mongol army was one of conquest, not garrison duty: there were simply not enough Mongols to garrison all of China, leaving a light Mongol presence past even the Yellow River. Most actual Mongolian and Turkic cavalry were kept in a few strategic areas, largely centrered around the capital and the steppes. Southern China had been poorly integrated into the Yuan, where Song dynasty structures had often been hastily co-opted. With most of the Yuan government and armed forces in the north, in the south’s countryside banditry became a real problem, as years of flood, famine, locust plagues and other environmental catastrophy annihilated farmland, the local economies and regular support networks. Unable to rely on the Yuan army for protection, regional and local leaders organized local defense forces for protection against bandits, the Red Turbans or even the undisciplined newly mobilized Yuan troops, which militarized and armed the population. It must have seemed apparent that the Yuan had lost the Mandate of Heaven, the right to rule China.   In the years immediately after Toghto’s dismissal, three warlords emerged within the Red Turban movement as the most powerful, all along the Yangzi River: Zhang Shicheng, the former salt-worker who became a warlord, declared himself emperor and was nearly crushed by Toghto during the chancellor’s final campaign; Chen Youliang a former fisherman, then office clerk who became leader of the southern Red Turbans and declared his own Han Dynasty with himself as emperor; and a peasant, turned monk, turned warlord, Zhu Yuanzhang.    Born into a destitute family of tenant-farmers in 1328, Zhu Yuanzhang grew up surrounded by famine and uncertainty in central Anhwei. His grandfather had fought against the Mongols for the Song Dynasty in its final years, and Zhu grew up listening to his exploits. In summer 1344, he lost most of his family to famine within three weeks. Unable to feed him, his surviving family gave him away to a Buddhist monastery for labour. With the monastery also unable to feed him, he spent a few years wandering before the twenty year old Zhu returned to the monastery, where he learned to read and write. There he may have happily stayed, until a local battle between Yuan forces and Red Turbans in 1352 resulted in some of the Chinese troops in the Yuan army sacking and looting Zhu’s temple. Once again having lost everything, Zhu went to the only place he could: he joined a nearby Red Turban group. For a starving peasant turned monk, Zhu showed a surprising aptitude for war and gained the attention of the local Red Turban leader, Kuo Tzu-Hsing. Under Kuo’s tutelage, Zhu rose in the ranks, and within a year was given his own command and married Kuo’s adopted daughter, the future Empress Ma. By the start of 1355 Zhu was leading an army of about 30,000 men and building his own staff of educated men around him, most notably the scholar Li  Shanchang, who encouraged Zhu’s ambitions, urging him to take the city of Nanjing on the Yangzi River. His first attempt in summer 1355 was a failure, but it resulted in the deaths of Kuo Tzu-Hsing’s sons and heirs, leaving Zhu Yuanzhang in sole command of the local Red Turbans.   Gathering his strength, in April 1356 Zhu finally took Nanjing, making it his capital. This brought him to the attention of the figureheads of the Red Turbans in the north, Liu Futong and his puppet “Song Emperor,”  Han Lin-erh. The young Han Lin-erh acted as a sort of symbol for the movement, a Manichean-Buddhist saviour in addition to apparently being a descendant of the Song Emperors. Together, they had redeclared the Song Dynasty, and soon after Zhu Yuanzhang took Nanjing he was appointed governor of Jiangxi province by Han Lin-erh. This placed Zhu at the forefront of the northern Red Turbans on the Yangzi, but Zhu was careful to maintain official subordinance to this ‘Song Emperor,’ who Zhu became the most powerful defender of. In this time Zhu began developing his administrative apparatus, and under the supervision of the scholar Li Shanchang, began cultivating a reputation as a refined, dignified ruler concerned for the safety of the common people. Always he sought to have his armies minimize the destruction they caused, in contrast to the Yuan government forces and the often wild damage caused by other Red Turbans. He gained valuable administrative experience as the governor of Jiangxi, and it is not hard to imagine he was drawing his eye already to the loftiest of aspirations.   All the while, Zhu was eyeing his two powerful neighbours: Zhang Shicheng to the east, who, after a nominal submission to the Yuan government was now happily expanding along the Yangzi River, and to Zhu’s west, the warlord Chen Youliang, the major figure of the southern Red Turbans. Zhu, Zhang and Chen had before even the end of the 1350s were among the most powerful men in China, the three Yangzi lords having wealth and resources beyond any of the minor warlords or Yuan loyalists south of the Yangzi river. To the north it was a slightly different story, where the major powers after the fall of Toghto were the Yuan aligned warlords Chaghan Temur and his nephew, Koko Temur.   Chaghan Temur was a fourth-generation Naiman commander based in eastern Honan, a region his great-grandfather had helped conquer in the early thirteenth century. Both Mongolized and sinicized, having sat for civil service examinations, since the late 1340s Chaghan Temur had been fighting rebel forces with his own army. His victories over them in the early 1350s brought him rewards and titles from the Yuan court, and his power began to expand. Within a few years he was the most powerful force serving the Yuan, doing his best to stay out of the court intrigues and defeat the rebels. In the latter, Chaghan Temur had more successes. In 1358 when Liu Futong and his Song Emperor Han Lin-erh rode triumphant into Kaifeng, once the capital of the Song Dynasty, it was Chaghan Temur who drove them and their armies back, bringing the city once more under Yuan control. By 1362, Chaghan Temur and his allies had managed to restore Yuan Rule from Shanxi to Shandong, and even former enemies like Zhang Shicheng and the pirate Fang Guozhen were sending a token yearly tribute of grain to the capital of Dadu.   Of course, it is difficult to amass such power without making enemies, and Chaghan Temur’s tendency to ignore court orders, make his own appointments and strengthen himself did him no favours. Chaghan Temur was challenged by a rival, Bolod Temur, another powerful commander and father of Toghon Temur Khan’s empress. The court intrigues between the two hamstrung the ability of the Yuan to resist the rebels, and Toghon Temur Khan, in typical fashion, was totally unable to control them. In 1362 officers claiming to be serving the dynasty assassinated Chaghan Temur while he besieged  a rebel city, apparently doubting his commitment to the dynasty- and promptly fled to the same rebels they had been campaigning against. The court then confirmed Chaghan Temur’s will, granting his military and civilian positions to his adopted son, Koko Temur.   While Koko Temur’s name means ‘blue iron,’ in Mongolian, it may surprise you to learn that the final effective figure of the Yuan Dynasty was not a Mongol, but a Chinese. Born to a Chinese father and Koko Temur’s sister, his birth name was Wang Baobao, but he had been officially adopted by Chaghan Temur and in 1361 awarded his Mongolian name by the Great Khan.  Recognized as a true and loyal servant of the dynasty, Koko Temur seems to have preferred the ideals of steppe life more than his Confucian education, and carried himself in the image of a Mongol ba’atar, and had fought valiantly beside his stepfather. Immediately assuming his late stepfather’s command post, Koko Temur completed the siege, caught the men who had assassinated Chaghan Temur, and in a decidedly un-Chinese ceremony,  cut the assassins’ hearts out and sacrificed them to the spirit of Chaghan Temur.   Under the efforts of Chaghan Temur and Koko Temur, most of China north of the Yangzi was secured by the 1363, the Yuan having managed to survive a few serious scares. Rebel forces sent by Liu Futong and Han Lin-erh had raided as far as Liaodong and Shangdu, burning it in 1358, but since then the situation had somewhat stabilized. Bolod Temur continued to denounce Koko Temur, and the court intrigues did not stop. Toghon Temur Khan’s son and heir, Ayushiridara, seems to have wanted his father to abdicate the throne, as the Khan had shown utter incompetence and no leadership throughout the crisis. In alliance with his mother, Toghon Temur’s Korean empress Ki, and the chancellor, they sought to undermine Toghon Temur by convincing him to dismiss one of his chief ministers. The minister fled to Bolod Temur, who was then declared a rebel for housing the minister. Tension raised, Bolod Temur attacked Koko Temur, was defeated and fled to Dadu. At Dadu, Bolod took control of the capital in 1364, putting the chancellor to death and nearly got his hands on Ayushiridara, who fled to Koko Temur. Ayushiridara stayed there under Koko Temur’s protection until Bolod Temur’s  cruel treatment of the court resulted in his assassination in August 1365, and Koko Temur marched Ayushiridara back to Dadu.   Koko Temur was rewarded with royal titles, and ignored Ayushirirdara’s efforts to have him remove Toghon Temur. Koko Temur was by then by far the most powerful man in the north, but had no love for court politics and wanted to continue the war against the rebels. Given overall command and a large army, Koko Temur finally set out in 1366 to clear the rebels off the Yangzi, only to find that some of the Chinese commanders and former allies of Bolod Temur in his service resented this upstart and attacked him. Forced to waste time in a pointless civil war, the final chance for the Yuan to even retain the north was lost as Zhu Yuanzhang unified the south.   China’s future was decided with the opening of hostilities between Zhu Yuanzhang and Chen Youliang. While Chaghan Temur rose and fell, the Yangzi warlords quickly moved past any pretenses of ‘peasant uprising to expel the Mongols.’ By the end of the 1350s, it was a battle for imperial power between the three most likely claimants to succeed the Yuan, or at least establish a regional kingdom: Chen Youliang, Zhu Yuanzhang and Zhang Shicheng. By 1357, Chen Youliang had taken control of the Red Turbans south of the Yangzi, Zhu Yuanzhang was the preeminent member of the northern Red Turbans and the protector of the puppet Song Emperor Han Lin-Erh, and Zhang Shicheng nominally recognized Yuna overlordship, though he was clearly building his own kingdom along the coast. Chen Youliang’s state had expanded dramatically, but his eastern expansion down the Yangzi was blocked by Zhu Yuanzhang, and to the north by the effective armies of Chaghan Temur and Koko Temur. Needing more strength before he faced then, and not trusting his Yangzi rivals, Chen decided to deal with the Yangzi foes first. In summer 1360, Chen Youliang sailed down the Yangzi with 100,000 men aboard a great navy. Armies of the early 1360s were built upon peasant troops, but since the 1350s had become operationally much more sophisticated and experienced, with river warfare a key component. Since the early years of the uprisings city walls had been repaired, forcing combatants to resort to lengthy blockades or costly assaults. There is little evidence to suggest Mongol military techniques of the thirteenth century were adopted by the Chinese, cavalry taking only a minor role in these battles.   Chen Youliang’s 1360 attack utilized ships with high sterns which allowed his men to climb onto city walls. This brought him some initial success, and made him so overconfident he had a puppet emperor he had been controlling beaten to death, and had himself proclaimed Emperor of a new Han Dynasty. Chen urged Zhang Shicheng to open another front against Zhu, then sailed for Nanjing. Tricking Chen into disembarking much of his fleet north of Nanjing, Zhu Yuanzhang ambushed Chen’s army and captured much of his navy, forcing Chen to retreat. Due to conflict with Zhang Shicheng, Zhu struggled to immediately exploit this victory. The next year, 1361, Zhu Yuanzhang finally led a naval assault on Chen Youliang’s territory, but was only marginally successful, as rebellion forced him to return to his territory in early 1362. Before he departed, Zhu’s forces took Nanchang near Lake Poyang.    While Zhu struggled with treason and rebellion in his territory, Chen Youliang built another armada. The sources indicate this was a  massive effort, totalling 300,000-600,000 men, with large, red painted ships with iron covered turrets for archers and high sterns to once again climb over city walls- the same tactic which had worked so well for him in 1360. In June 1363 his fleet was outside the walls of Nanchang, and Chen believed its fall would lead to the submission of other nearby cities. Unfortunately for Chen, the walls of Nanchang had been reinforced, and his boarding tactic was unsuccessful. Chen was forced into a siege, ruining his plans and taking away his element of surprise. His forces suffered heavy losses, and as the siege dragged into summer the water levels began to lower, risking the large ships which made up the core of his fleet.    Zhu Yuanzhang did not appear to learn of this until August 1363, during which time much of his forces were occupied near the border with Zhang Shicheng. Rapidly reassembling his forces at Nanjing, he sent an army overland to relieve Nanchang, while he prepared a fleet to confront Chen Youliang. Zhu was outnumbered, with perhaps 100,000 to 200,000 men aboard much smaller ships. Further, he risked opening his flank to Zhang Shicheng and rebellion as had happened in 1361. This operation was a great risk, yet he threw all of his weight against Chen Youliang.    His fleet departed Nanjing on the 15th of August 1363, arriving at the entrance to Lake Poyang on the 24th. There he constructed fortified positions to prevent Chen’s fleet from breaking out of the lake. On the 28th, Zhu’s fleet entered the lake, and a startled Chen was forced to lift his 85 day long siege of Nanchang, suddenly realizing he had been trapped. Late on the 29th, the two fleets met off the island of Kanglang shan, where they waited until sunrise the next day. So started the battle of Lake Poyang, the most famous, and largest, naval battle in Chinese history.   On the morning of August 30th, Zhu deployed his fleet into 11 groups, taking the center with his heaviest ships and stationing his lighter vessels on the wings, likely mirrored by Chen’s larger fleet. Zhu’s wing commanders were experienced and had the wind on their side, and their catapults wreaked havoc on the enemy wings, setting ships and men aflame. In the center Chen’s larger ships pushed back Zhu, his own flagship coming under threat. Zhu was forced to retreat to shallower water where Chen’s fleet could not follow, grounding several of Zhu’s ships in the process.   The first day of battle was disappointing, and Zhu sent his top commander Xu Da back to Nanjing with the damaged ships. The next morning Zhu executed some of his officers to get them to line up for battle, but once again the fight went poorly, Chen’s numbers, larger ships and densely packed fleet proving superior in close combat.  High ranking officers were lost, and by midday Zhu had to pull back, aware that they were playing to Chen’s strengths. Finding inspiration from the fire used by his lieutenants the previous day, Zhu filled some smaller vessels with reeds and gunpowder, and with the wind shift in the afternoon sent these fireships into the densely packed enemy fleet.    Chen Youliang lost several hundred ships, 60,000 men, several squadrons and two of his brothers in the ensuing conflagration, while Zhu Yuanzhang only lost 7,000 men for the two days. The outcome was still undecided however, as Chen stil outnumbered Zhu greatly. September 1st was spent repairing and resting the fleets, and fighting resumed on the 2nd. Chen put his forces into a more open formation as defense against fireships, which allowed Zhu’s smaller vessels to isolate Chen’s ships, even sailing through Chen’s line at one point. However, Chen’s numbers were telling, and by noon Zhu withdrew, under pressure to depart from the lake by his commanders. The army he had sent by land had now relieved Nanchang, the goal of the campaign achieved. That night Zhu sailed out of  Lake Poyang, Chen following the next morning only to find himself confronted with the fortifications Zhu had constructed.    It was clear to everyone that Chen Youliang had been outmaneuvered, and several of his generals defected to Zhu. For nearly a month, Chen waited before the fortifications, trying to determine the best course of action, while Zhu goaded him with antagonizing letters and his food supplies ran lower and lower.   Finding a weak position, Chen ordered his fleet to storm it and take it. But this was part of Zhu’s plan. As Chen was making his way onto the Yangzi  river with his tightly packed fleet he sailed into another trap. Zhu was positioned upstream of Chen with more fireships, which were once more sent into Chen’s fleet. The ships that weren’t destroyed fled back down stream, and with order lost Zhu’s ships chased and captured them. Groups of ships locked in combat sailed down river, where forces Zhu had stationed also joined in. In this chaos Chen Youliang attempted to cross between ships in a smaller vessel, when he was killed by an arrow in the eye. News spread rapidly, and with it the last vestiges of resistance collapse. The following morning around 50,000 men and most of the fleet surrendered to Zhu Yuanzhang.    The victory at Lake Poyang was greater than Zhu could ever have hoped. With the death of his main rival and absorption of much of his army and fleet, he quickly annexed Chen’s former territory. By 1364, Zhu was the strongest single power in China, with double the manpower and resources of his next greatest rival, Zhang Shicheng. Zhang had failed to take advantage of Zhu’s war with Chen Youliang, and despite throwing off the pretense of submission to the Yuan Dynastyand  proclaiming himself the Prince of Wu in February 1364, his domain was easily swallowed by Zhu’s forces. Zhang was captured in 1367, and later died in prison. Zhang’s defeat freed Zhu to commit to conquering the rest of China and crush the Yuan, while the deaths of Liu Futong in 1363 and the Song Emperor Han Lin-erh in 1366 left Zhu to assume supreme command.   In January 1368 Zhu Yuanzhang proclaimed the Ming Dynasty with himself as emperor, taking the era name Hongwu, meaning “overflowing martial accomplishment,” and began the campaign to push the remnants of the Yuan from China. The Hongwu Emperor did not take part himself, sending his skilled general and boyhood friend Xu Da to do it for him. Victory had already been determined; the Hongwu Emperoe had merely to stretch his hand and seize it for himself.   The Yuan failed to react to the rise of the Ming. The strongest warlord aligned with the Yuan, Koko Temur, had spent the last years battling other Yuan warlords. When Ming armies began to advance in 1368, Koko Temur refused an order from the court to repel them due to regional concerns, and for this was declared a foe of the court, open for all to attack. Koko Temur soundly defeated all of the foes sent against him until he was finally reinstated to his position, but by then it was simply too late. The Yuan could offer no counter offensive as Ming armies crossed the Yellow River in August, general Xu Da approaching Dadu in September. Toghon Temur Khan and his heir Ayushiridara fled the city to Mongolia only days before the arrival of the Ming armies, and on the 20th of September, 1368, Dadu came into Chinese rule for the first time in over 400 years. The city fell without a fight, only a few holdouts being executed. The Hongwu Emperor renamed the city to Beiping, meaning ‘pacified north.’ In time the city became the capital of the Ming Dynasty and was renamed to Beijing, the name it holds today.   Over the next two decades, the Ming incorporated the rest of China. In distant Yunnan, the Mongol prince Basalawarmi held out against the Ming until 1382. The fleeing Toghon Temur Khan and Koko Temur were pursued into the steppes and pushed from Inner Mongolia in 1370 after a humiliating defeat, where Ayushiridara’s son Maidiribala and 50,000 Mongols were captured by the Ming forces. Khan Toghon Temur died soon after, a man broken and humilated, lamenting the loss of his capitals, his empire, yet never understanding how it had happened. Ayushiridara finally became Khan and escaped with the remainder of Yuan forces across the Gobi desert into their ancestral homeland, almost exactly a century after Khubilai Khan had declared the Yuan Dynasty. The Ming continued to probe the border, looking to hunt down the new Khan who had not  abandoned claims on China, despite Ming diplomats urging their submission. Threats, promises of support, using Ayushiridara’s son as leverage, to a rapid completion of a  dynastic history of the Yuan with its glowing portrayal of Chaghan Temur in an attempt to persuade Koko Temur, did nothing to assuage the defiance of the Mongols. This dynastic history, by the way, is the Yuan shi we have referred to so many times over this series, and its rapid completion by the start of the 1370s is part of the reason it’s full of so many errors and even repeated entries.   With Ayushiridara refusing to submit, the Ming pressed the advance. Xu Da inflicted a major defeat on Koko Temur in the Gansu corridor  which assisted Ming expansion in Sichuan and the west. In 1372 Xu Da marched with a massive army into the steppes, well over 150,000 men and torched the old capital of Karakorum, but Xu Da learned how dangerous the Mongols were in their homeland. Koko Temur simply manuevered around Xu Da for a month, exhausting the Ming army in marches into seeming nothingness, before falling upon his disillusioned foe. Xu Da’s army was annihilated, the great general forced to flee, and the impetus for Ming advance into Mongolia was broken. The Ming would never be able to conquer Mongolia, and were forced to step back to a defensive position along their borders. The only exceptions were raids and a brief period of Ming aggression during the reign of the Yongle Emperor, the Hongwu Emperor’s  son, who led a number of campaigns into the steppe. Over time, this border became entrenched and fortified, particularly in the 15th and 16th centuries, into the Great Wall of China as we know it today. Though border walls had existed prior in much earlier dynasties, it took for the Ming Dynasty for them to develop into a single connected fortification across China’s northern border, and the famous brick structure we know it as today. The Yuan did not relinquish their claims on China, though we generally call the exiled court the Northern Yuan. Confined to Mongolia, aside from raids it would not be until the 1450s and the Tumu crisis that  the Mongols would again form an existential threat to the Ming. After the death of Koko Temur in 1375 and Ayushiridara in 1378,  the northern Yuan lost their unity, falling into infighting with the Chinggisid Khans becoming puppet rulers for non-Oirat Chinggisids. It would be many years before Chinggisid unity would be reformed, albeit only briefly, in Mongolia.   So the Nothern Yuan and the Ming would form uneasy neighbours for the next centuries, sometimes at war, often conducting trade, each taking advantage of the other at various times. So would be the relationship until the 1600s, when both Ming and the northern Yuan were finally subsumed by a new enemy-  the Manchu Qing Dynasty, the descendants of the enemies of both the Mongols and the Chinese, the Jurchen. But that’s  a story for another day.       So ends the period of Mongol rule in China. We will return to the later history of Chinggisid Mongolia, but our next episodes bring out attention westwards, to the fates of the Chagatai Khanate, Ilkhanate, and Golden Horde, so be sure to subscribe to our podcast to follow. If you enjoyed this and would like to help us keep bringing you great content, then consider supporting us on patreon at www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. This episode was researched and written by our series historian, Jack Wilson. I’m your host David, and we’ll catch you on the next one. 

“In the world there is the spirit of righteousness, taking many forms,  bestowed on the ever-changing things. Below they are the rivers and mountains; above they are the  sun and stars, With people it is called the spirit of honour and fearlessness, so vast it fills the universe. When the empire is tranquil one pours forth harmony in the splendid court. When times are extreme true fidelity is seen, and goes down in history case after case.”       So goes a poem written by one of the last defenders of the Song Dynasty, Wen Tienxiang, as translated by Feng Xin-ming. Held prisoner by Kublai Khan after the fall of the Song Dynasty, Wen Tienxiang wrote this poem as a part of his refusal to accept to Mongol rule before his ultimate execution. Such defiance was a surprising hallmark of the final years of the fugitive Song court, reduced to a collection of hardliners and loyalists unwilling to peacefully surrender the Mandate of Heaven to the house of Chinggis Khan. Today, we look at the flight of the fugitive Song court after the fall of their capital of Hangzhou in 1276. We will follow brave men like Wen Tienxiang, Zhang Shijie and Lu Xiufu in the final days of the Song Dynasty, a hopeless struggle culminating in the bloody waters of Yaishan in 1279. I’m your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.       Our previous episode brought us to the early months of 1276 with the surrender of the Song capital city of Linan, modern day Hangzhou. The child emperor, Gong of Song, and the elderly Empress Dowager, were brought into the hands of Mongol general Bayan, who escorted them north to bow before Kublai Khan. Organized Song resistance seemed broken, and while the Mongols would need to ensure the official submission of the southernmost regions of Song China, such actions were a mere formality compared to the effort needed to seize the Yangzi River cities. Most of the Mongolian army returned northwards soon after, intent on sparing Mongols and their horses from the worst of the south’s summer heat and humidity. There was but one issue: two of the Song Emperor’s young half-brothers had been smuggled out of Hangzhou under a small guard of soldiers. Bayan had sent riders to pursue them, but the fugitives escaped them in the mountains south of Hangzhou. Fleeing to southern Zhejiang province, they made it to Wenzhou, a city on the coast. From there, they took ships to Fuzhou, just across the straits from Taiwan, where they were joined by other loyalists who had abandoned Hangzhou in the days leading up to Bayan’s arrival. These included the general Zhang Shijie, who had repeatedly fought with the Mongol fleet on the Yangzi in the last episode; Chen Yizhong, the former Song chancellor who had succeeded Jia Sidao; Wen Tienxiang, Yizhong’s brief successor who was temporarily held captive by the Mongols before escaping; and other courtiers and generals, like Li Xiufu and Xia Gui. News of the gathering at Fuzhou spread across the south and brought other hiding loyalists to come out of the shadows in early summer 1276, encouraged by the Mongol withdrawal back over the Yangzi River.       By June 1276, the older of the two half brothers, the five year old Zhao Shih, was declared the 17th emperor of the Song Dynasty, temple name Duanzong of Song. The enthronement prompted a wave of loyalist uprisings in the south and over the summer, growing into an actual offensive against the Mongols. Citizen armies retook cities in Guangdong and Jiangxi provinces. Most of the south and southwest of the Song realm were still outside of Mongol control, and in Sichuan those still resisting found new heart. At Fuzhou, the court built a new navy from those ships which had escaped destruction on the Yangzi, some provided by patriotic ship owners in the south, and some which were forcibly seized from private hands. For a few weeks, there was actual momentum against Mongol rule.   By the fall of 1276, this momentum had largely burnt itself out. The infighting which had been endemic to the Song court reared its head in this fugitive court. Chen Yizhong, who had only come out of hiding after the royal boys had arrived in Fuzhou, had again been made Chancellor, despite the fact his performance as Chancellor in Hangzhou was generally ineffective. Once more the Song Chancellor, Yizhong immediately fought with the others for influence over the young emperor, a stupendously stupid act when all of their energies should have gone against the Mongols. His conflict with Wen Tienxiang forced the latter to abandon the court to fight on his own in his home region of Jiangxi, raising troops there to resist the Mongols. From his base in Jiangxi, Wen Tienxiang led hit and run attacks against the Mongols as far as Lake Poyang. With Tienxiang out of the way, Yizhong butted heads with the most important and capable military leaders left in the fugitive court, Zhang Shijie and Xia Gui. Xia Gui grew so frustrated that he defected to the Mongols, bringing with him a number of districts in Huainan. The infighting predictably hamstrung the already limited capabilities of the Song court. With a mere boy as emperor, there was no one to mediate over Yizhong’s actions, causing them to hemorrhage much needed men they couldn't afford to lose.    And of course, the Mongols were not keen to allow these fugitives to claim legitimacy or strike at such newly taken territory; though they held by now no hope of truly overthrowing Mongol rule. News came of the fall of the Yangzi cities of Yangzhou and Chenzhou after prolonged resistance to the Mongols, soon followed in the autumn with a Mongol invasion of the south. More accurately, we should describe this as a Yuan invasion. While serving the Mongol Khaghan, often commanded by Mongols and Central Asians and with a core Mongol cavalry, the main body of these troops were Chinese, largely northerners but a great number of former Song soldiers and levied southerners. In large part, this was due to the conditions and environment; the climate of the south was difficult on those used to the drier and cooler north, and much of the geography was simply unsuited to large scale cavalry warfare, though Mongol horsemen were employed when appropriate. Under the command of the Uighur, Ariq Khaya, the armies of Kublai’s Yuan Dynasty came in a great pincer movement towards Fuzhou late in 1276. By the end of the year, the boy emperor and his court took to the sea to escape Fuzhou, which soon fell to the Yuan armies.    The young emperor and court had begun what was to be a dreadful pattern. Their ships would find some coastal city to make their new sanctuary, only to be forced to flee in a matter of days, weeks or months as Yuan armies or ships converged on their position. From the last days of 1276 to until 1278, this was the wretched life the court lived, a constant fear for when the banners of the Yuan would arrive on the horizon. From Fuzhou they stayed in Quanzhou, perhaps the wealthiest port in the world and a gateway to the seatrade of southeast Asia. Here, the court sought to ally with their former subject, Quanzhou’s Superintendent of Maritime Trade, the immensely wealthy Fu Shougeng. A highly talented fellow, Fu Shougeng was a descendant of Arab traders, his wealth, influence and veritable armada of ships making him a powerful ally for anyone seeking to control the southern Chinese coast. Both Kublai and the Song court sought to gain his support, but the Song had little patience for carefully cultivating a relationship. The Song general Zhang Shijie attempted to sidestep Fu Shougeng and just commandeer ships and resources for their purposes. Alienated, Fu Shougeng tried to trick the boy emperor into following him in order to capture him for the Mongols, but the ruse was spotted and the court escaped. With their flight, Fu Shougeng officially declared for Kublai, who rewarded him by making him the military governor of much of Fujian and Guangdong provinces. As revenge, Zhang Shijie blockaded Quanzhou’s port late into 1277 until Yuan ships drove him off. Fu provided his ships and resources to the Yuan, enlarging their growing presence on the South China sea, while Fu encouraged other holdouts in the region to submit to the Khan.    As the Song court moved from port to port along the southern coast over 1277, the Yuan continued to strengthen their hold on the mainland. Ariq Khaya focused on holdouts in the south in a methodical campaign; not a great tidal wave of destruction like Chinggis Khan had unleashed upon Khwarezm nearly 60 years prior, but a thorough effort which instituted civilian administration as he went. The area Ariq Khaya took was immediately brought into the Yuan Empire, rather than left a ruinous buffer. Another general, Sogetu, meanwhile pursued the Song along the coast, mirroring their movements from the land and falling upon any city which gave shelter to the emperor. The Mongol advance even encouraged local uprisings against the Song; one fellow leading such an uprising in the interior of Fujian was caught and executed by the loyalist Wen Tienxiang, but it was a minor success as the Yuan hold on the south grew. Wen Tienxiang and his army was forced to the coast, and over 1277 and 1278 Song territory along the southeast was reduced to a few well fortified but isolated coastal holdouts. In the first month of 1278, while in the midst of once again sailing to a new port, the Song fleet was caught in a storm, sinking several ships. The young emperor was among those who fell into the cold waters. Though he was rescued, the poor lad fell ill.  The stress of the flight coupled with illness rapidly eroded his strength. In May of 1278, Zhao Shih, temple name Duanzong of Song, succumbed, not even 9 years old by the European reckoning. The fact the disillusioned Song court did not immediately dissipate is due to Zhang Shijie and Lu Xiufu, who rallied them around the late-emperor’s even younger half brother, the 6 year old Zhao Bing, who they quickly enthroned. It was not enough for some, and no one was happy to fight for the third child-emperor in a row, when most of China was now in Mongol hands. Chancellor Yizhong suggested the court could find refuge in Dai Viet in northern Vietnam, the kingdom known to the Chinese as Annam. Yizhong offered to go himself as an envoy, but the reception among the court was cool. He left for Vietnam anyways; judging by summons by the Song for him to return, this may have just been him abandoning the cause. Yizhong never returned to the fugitive Song court, spending a few years in Dai Viet before fleeing to the Kingdom of Sukhothai in Thailand for the last years of his life.   In June 1278, the Song imperial fleet, now largely under the thumb of Zhang Shijie, settled on Yaishan, some 120 kilometres west of modern Hong Kong. Yaishan was a difficult to reach island nestled in the Chinese coast; surrounded by rivers, mud flats sides and mountains. The island has access to the sea via a narrow waterway, a lagoon on its south side which cuts between two steep cliffs, from which the area’s name is derived. It was a defensible base and large enough to hold the considerable population they brought with them. The sources speak of 200,000 aboard over 1,000 ships: soldiers, ships crews, families, court officials.  Zhang Shijie ordered them onto the island, where they immediately built a small city, cutting down trees for palaces and barracks. The river systems around Yaishan led deeper into Guangdong province and to the city of Guangzhou, from which the Song court was supplied. Zhang Shijie had had enough of running, and was intent on making Yaishan the location from which they would retake the Song realm, or make their final stand.    As the Song settled on Yaishan, the remnants of their empire fell to the Mongols. The western end of the Yangzi River in Sichuan was, after decades of effort, finally subdued over 1278. New offensives into Yunnan, Guangxi and Guangdong strengthened the Yuan hold over China’s southwest, bringing them dangerously close to Yaishan.   Just as Bayan had been placed in supreme command in 1274, Kublai wanted a supreme commander to control the Yuan forces operating in the south and bring them all to bear on wherever the Song court was hiding. In June of 1278, the same month that the fugitive court took shelter on Yaishan, Kublai appointed Zhang Hongfan to be this commander. Zhang Hongfan was a man of northern China who had never served the Song; yet, in one of those twists of fate, he was related to the Song’s great general, Zhang Shijie. Zhang Hongfan had led in the river warfare along the Yangzi, and now Kublai wanted him to personally supervise the Yuan’s new ocean fleet as well. This also highlights the nature of the Mongol Empire of Kublai Khan: an ethnic northern Chinese was, for the first time, being placed in supreme authority over Mongol, Central Asian and Chinese forces in order to destroy the remnants of a Chinese dynasty. A diligent and loyal subject of the Great Khan, Zhang Hongfan worked with great speed. The offensive he led at the end of 1278 swallowed up what was left of the Song Dynasty. In an arc from east to west, Zhang Hongfan led his ships along the southern coast, collecting men and ships as he went and turning over every stone for the Song emperor. Assisting them were many former Song commanders and their ships who had thrown their lot in with the Mongols, eager to demonstrate their loyalty to their new masters. Zhang Hongfan’s second-in-command, a Tangut named Li Heng, led the second prong of the assault on land, linking up with Zhang Hongfan’s fleet for those coastal sites still holding out. In the first weeks of 1279, Li Heng surprised and captured the brave Song captain, Wen Tienxiang, handing him over to Zhang Hongfan as prisoner at the start of February.    From there they advanced west, making their way to perhaps the most significant city still resisting Mongol rule, Guangzhou. The Yuan commanders did not know it yet, but Guangzhou was only a few kilometres north of where the Song court was hiding at Yaishan. Guangzhou had thrown off a few Yuan assaults before finally falling to a combined effort by Li Heng and Zhang Hongfan. Twice, ships came up the Xi River in an attempt to relieve Guangzhou. On the second attempt, ships under the command of Omar, grandson of the Yuan governor of Yunnan Sayyid Ajall, followed them, tracking the Song ships right back to Yaishan.  Quickly, Omar confirmed it was the Song hideout and sent messengers back to Zhang Hongfan. It was time to prepare the final battle against the Song.   At the end of February 1279, Yuan ships began to join Omar outside the sea entrance to Yaishan, a 1.5 kilometre wide lagoon protected by steep cliffs on either side. Over the following days, the rest of the Yuan fleet joined them. The news prompted panic on Yaishan, and many demanded Zhang Shijie organize another escape. But Shijie was done running. “Lo these many years we have voyaged on the seas. Now we must decide between us and them the victor and the vanquished.” Setting fire to the palaces and buildings of Yaishan, he ordered everyone aboard the ships. The plan was simple. From reports his scouts had gathered, his fleet outnumbered the Yuan greatly, perhaps 1100 Song vessels to 300 for the Yuan. Shijie also considered his men the superior fighters at sea. But morale was low, and in open water the men could find it more persuasive to flee rather than fight. Figuring the Mongols would gamble on an immediate assault to put an end to the campaign, Zhang Shijie needed to make best use of both his greater numbers but worse morale. He settled on chaining his ships together in a great, fortified line. Not at the entrance of the lagoon, where some ships might be able to slip away, but situated deeper down the waterway, where their flanks were securely protected by the steep cliffs. Anchors were dropped, and ramparts and towers were built on the ships, a massive, immobile floating wall. The young emperor, Zhao Bing, was placed in the largest ship at the centre under a secure guard. To protect against incendiaries, the ships were coated with mud and provided long poles to push away fire ships. Finally, catapults were set up to send projectiles at any approaching vessel. Set up, Zhang Shijie prepared for the expected attack.   Shijie’s Yuan counterpart, Zhang Hongfan was no fool and recognized a frontal attack against this entrenched position was very risky. He sent first a small ship with negotiators, among them the captive Wen Tienxiang, who Hongfan hoped would convince Shijie to step down. Tienxiang refused however, and negotiations went nowhere. An effort to send fire ships into the Song line was likewise repulsed, the poles of the defenders keeping the fireships at bay until they burned themselves out. Zhang Hongfan then did the unexpected. He waited.   In doing so, he had the one tool which Shijie had no defence against. Locking the Song ships into place as he had done gave all the mobility, and the initiative, to the Yuan fleet. With so many men and families aboard the Song ships, they quickly used up the food and freshwater that they had brought aboard. Destroying their island buildings and pulling all troops onto the ships meant they had no land forces to scavenge for them or fall back to. Quickly, Yuan scouts found a small creek the Song had considered impassable for ocean vessels. The Yuan instead sent smaller craft up this creek, coming out behind the Song line and surrounding them. Zhang Shijie sent out small sorties to attempt to get through the Yuan lines and acquire supplies, but each time these were pushed back. Unintentionally, Zhang Shijie had settled on the plan that left the remnants of the Song trapped in place.   The two fleets sat in place for two weeks. Running out of freshwater and firewood, the Song soldiers resorted to drinking seawater and eating uncooked meals. Dysentery, sickness and starvation ravaged them. Zhang Hongfan sent one final letter to Zhang Shijie, imploring his kinsman to surrender. Three times letters were sent to Shijie, carried by Shijie’s nephew Han, who alongside Hongfan served the Mongols. The letters carried by Han told Shijie of the rewards that awaited him if he surrendered, but warned of the destruction that awaited him if he refused.   Zhang Shijie’s reply, as recorded by Yuan Dynasty sources, ran thus: “I know that if I surrender I would have life, and also noble titles and riches, but my ruler lives and I cannot desert him. If you wish me to surrender, lift your blockade and permit me to sail out.” But Zhang Hongfan knew he could not trust this. For the next five days, Hongfan and his officers made the final plans and moved ships into place. At dawn on the 19th of March, 1279, anchors were weighed and the Yuan fleet advanced onto the Song from both north and south. Zhang Hongfan led his flagship against the most dangerous section of the Song line. The Yuan ships crashed into the larger Song vessels, the Yuan soldiers climbing aboard to fight on the Song decks, Mongol archers picking off Song defenders. The decks ran red with blood, men locked in combat fell into the churning waters and were crushed between ships. Spears pushed climbing Yuan soldiers back into their ships; grasping hands pulled Song defenders off the decks. Zhang Shijie’s catapult crews fired until they ran out of projectiles. The Song fought with courage, battling for every metre. It was a full day of fighting, but the sickness and hunger of the Song troops was a knife in their backs. Dropping from exhaustion, the Yuan soldiers stepped over their bodies as they steadily advanced along Zhang Shijie’s makeshift wall. Unexpectedly, one Song ship dropped its colours, the signal to surrender. Then another, and another. Such an order had not been given, but in the confusion of battle it could not be undone. The Song began to surrender en masse. Zhang Shijie desperately ordered troops to withdraw to the centre ship housing the emperor, but it was clear the day was lost. As fog rolled in that evening, Zhang Shijie ordered some ships to be cut loose to break out. 16 out of the 1100 Song ships escaped Yaishan with Zhang Shijie, evading the Yuan pursuers in the fog and the confusion. The Emperor, Zhao Bing, was not among them, the imperial barge too large and too slow to break free.    The courtier Lu Xiufu stayed close to the boy emperor, but there was now no escape left on those bloody decks. The last emperor of the house of Zhao would not fall into these barbarian hands, Xiufu decided. Tearfully, Xiufu forced his own wife and children to jump into the sea. With Zhao Bing still in his royal robes and clutching the imperial seals, Lu Xiufu took the 7 year old Son of Heaven into his arms, and carried him beneath the waves. Yuan sources assert 100,000 distraught Song loyalists followed in a mass suicide, the lagoon red and filled with bodies. Whoever still lived surrendered along with some 800 ships. The Song Dynasty’s 300 year rule was over.    Zhang Shijie did not flee far: not long after the battle, while sailing to seek shelter in Vietnam his small fleet was caught in a storm and sunk, and he joined his emperor beneath the waves. Zhang Hongfan commemorated the battle with a simple stone inscription at Yaishan, stating “here the great Yuan general Zhang Hongfan destroyed the Song,” and was richly rewarded by Kublai Khan for his victory. He could not long enjoy his spoils. He died the next year, an ailment brought on by the heat and humidity of the south. Later nativist Chinese historians ravaged Hongfan’s reputation as a Chinese “betraying” the Song to serve northern barbarians. But Zhang Hongfan and his family had never been Song subjects. Their native area had been controlled by the Khitan Liao Dynasty since 939, before the Song Dynasty had even been founded. In fact, Zhang Shijie had briefly served the Mongols, making him the traitor to his emperor.        Wen Tienxiang outlived both Zhang Shijie and Zhang Hongfan, offered a respectable position in Kublai’s empire. But Tienxiang refused again and again, unwilling to betray the memory of the Song. Spending his last years imprisoned, he wrote poetry and proudly denied Mongol offers, until finally executed in the early 1280s, the last patriot of Song.    Yaishan was perhaps the largest naval battle in Chinese history after Lake Poyang in 1368, if the sources are accurate with their numbers. It was a major and decisive victory. While some regions in the south still needed to be fully incorporated into the Yuan Empire, and there would be local uprisings, organized resistance against Mongol rule was broken. The Song Emperors were dead, the loyalist infrastructure crushed. Kublai Khan had unified China for the first time since the fall of the Tang Dynasty almost 400 years prior, and was the first non-Chinese to do so. Kublai was now the ruler of All Under Heaven, master of China and the single most powerful man on earth. Those Song loyalists who had escaped to the Vietnamese kingdoms of Dai Viet and Champa would need to be pursued, and Kublai was not a man to believe China was the limits of his empire.  Even as the last Song Emperor disappeared beneath the waves at Yaishan, Kublai’s eyes darted to those kingdoms on his horizon, revenge against Japan plotted and his relatives in Central Asia punished. More battles were planned beyond the waters of Yaishan; but not many of them would be victories.    Before we discuss Kublai’s further military ventures though, we must discuss Kublai the man, and the actual empire he built in China, so be sure to subscribe to our podcast. If you’d like to help us continue to produce great content, please consider supporting us on patreon at www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. I’m your host David, and we’ll catch you on the next one!

With the loss of control over the western half of the Mongol Empire, Kublai Khan was left to direct his considerable energies against the single strongest holdout to Mongol rule; the Southern Song Dynasty, dominating China south of the Huai River since the early 1100s. An immense economic and military power, the conquest of this dynasty would be no small feat- trying to do so claimed the life of no less that Kublai’s predecessor the Grand Khan Mongke in 1259, as covered in episode 31. The completion of the conquest of China was to be Kublai’s greatest accomplishment; but first Kublai needed to overcome the mighty walls of Xiangyang, the key to Song China. I’m your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.       As discussed in episode 31 and 32, at the end of 1259 Kublai was forced to withdraw from his campaign against the Song, returning to his residence in Inner Mongolia where he declared himself Khan in the first months of 1260. The led to war between Kublai and his brother Ariq Boke for the throne, culminating with Ariq’s surrender in 1264 and Kublai securing his title as Khan of Khans. However, the upheaval of this conflict broke Mongol imperial unity, and by the mid 1260s the Mongol Empire was irrevocably broken into independent Khanates. Kublai had little authority over these western Khanates, his effective power only with difficulty reaching to the Altai Mountains and the Tarim Basin.        Unlike the previous Khans whose power centres were in Mongolia proper, Kublai’s very legitimacy was tethered to his Chinese territory. Aside from his own personal interests in Chinese culture, it had been the resources of northern China which had allowed him to overcome his brother Ariq. Abandoning Karakorum in Mongolia, which was exposed and difficult to support, Kublai moved his capitals south: first at Shangdu, in what is now Inner Mongolia on the very border of the steppe and China; and then at the site of the former Jin Dynasty capital of Zhongdu, where modern Beijing sits. This was Dadu, the “great city” in Chinese, or as it was known to Turks, Mongols and Marco Polo, Khanbaliq, the Khan’s city. The indications were clear from the outset; Kublai was not just a Mongol Emperor, but Emperor of China- though the specifics of this political aspect we will explore in a future episode.        As a part of this, Kublai needed to bring the Song Dynasty under his rule. Kublai, much like his brothers, was a firm believer in the eventuality of Mongol world domination.  It was not a debate of if, but when. Kublai may have cultivated an image as a more humane conqueror than the likes of Chinggis or Mongke, but he was a conqueror nonetheless. The Song Dynasty had to accept Mongol overlordship or be destroyed. For a man also trying to overcome his ‘barbarian’ origins to show himself as rightful ruler of China, having a rival dynasty claiming to be the heirs of the illustrious Han and Tang Dynasties was a major hurdle to his legitimacy in the eyes of many Chinese. The flight of refugees from north China to the Song Dynasty was considerable throughout the thirteenth century, and any revolt within Kublai’s domains could see Song aid, financial, moral or military.       The subjugation of the Song to solidify his rule as both a Mongol Khan and a Chinese Emperor was, in Kublai’s mind, absolutely necessary. The problem was actually doing that. Warfare with the Song broke out in 1234, months after the final defeat of the Jin Dynasty. Thirty years later, in 1264, the frontier had hardly shifted. The Mongols controlled the territory across the Song’s northern and western frontiers, including Tibet and the Dali Kingdom in Yunnan. Even the northern Vietnamese Kingdom of Dai Viet, known to the Chinese as Annam, now paid tribute to the Khan. Advances against Song were difficult; western Sichuan was under a tenuous Mongol hold, unmoved since Mongke’s death in that province. The Mongols had found they could often easily penetrate the Song border, but holding territory was another matter. Unlike northern China, marked by the relatively open North China Plain, the south was a myriad of thick forest, mountains, rivers and canals, the available space covered in rice paddies and other agriculture. This was not the open terrain so suited to Mongol cavalry warfare. The humidity and heat grew ever more oppressive the farther south one travelled, spreading diseases the Mongols and their horses struggled against. It was also home to the largest cities in the world. The Song capital of Linan, modern Hangzhou, held well over one million people- about the population of Mongolia when Chinggis Khan unified the tribes in 1206. The Song fielded a regular army of at least 700,000, supported by a large navy. The many huge cities built along the Yangzi River could be resupplied by naval support, an area in which the Mongols had little experience. The thoroughly planned campaign of Mongke in 1258-9 had wrought much devastation but little gain, and on the Mongol withdrawal at the end of 1259 the Song reoccupied most of the lost territory.       A military conquest of the Song was an immense task, and something Kublai wanted to avoid. Soon after declaring himself Khan in 1260, he sent an emissary with terms. The Song Emperor, Lizong of Song since 1224, could continue to reign as a client of the Khan. They had merely to recognize Kublai as the Son of Heaven and they could continue to rule, with of course yearly tribute and prayers in the name of the Khan. It was, from Kublai’s point of view, a chance for them to enjoy great prosperity and avoid the many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives that would be lost by further fighting.  Since it didn’t involve extensive retribution as punishment for thirty years of fighting, Kublai must have thought it a very generous offer.       Kublai’s envoy, one of his top Chinese advisors named Hao Ching, was promptly imprisoned. He would not be released for 15 years. Hao Ching had run afoul of the man now in charge of the southern Song, the infamous Jia Sidao. To some, Sidao was the last intelligent man in Hangzhou, deftly guiding the dynasty against an indomitable enemy, outmaneuvering his foes and a political mastermind let down by a corrupt and rotten dynasty. To others, Sidao is the archetypal “bad minister,” overconfident and inept, downplaying the Mongol threat and hiding the truth from the emperors until it was too late. For some, he is best known as the ‘Cricket Minister,’ who liked to train the insects to fight each other. Sidao’s role in the fall of the Song is complicated, though his 15 year mastery of the Song court saw the loss of the final chance to avoid disaster.       Unlike the majority of the court officials, Jia Sidao was no graduate of the Examinations from which most bureaucrats from the Tang to the Qing were chosen. Born in 1213 to a military family in Zhejiang province, Sidao’s father Jia She was a respected Song military commander in Shandong, and Sidao followed in a variety of military and civil positions in strategic areas along the Yangzi River. Sidao’s good fortune was helped by his talent and the fact his sister was a favourite consort of Emperor Lizong. Lizong and Sidao did not meet until 1254 when Sidao was Associate Administrator of the Bureau of Military Affairs, and immediately struck up a friendship. Promotions quickly followed. The relationship seems to have been genuine; contrary to the Netflix series where Sidao’s rise is due to his sister’s influence, Sidao’s sister had died in 1247, leaving Sidao to ascend on his own charisma and competence.        In Sichuan when Mongke attacked in 1258, Sidao returned east after the Khan’s death. His timing was good; the removal of the Chancellor of the Right, Ding Daquan, left an opening at the top of the Song court, which Lizong replaced with his buddy Jia Sidao at the end of 1259. One of Sidao’s first acts was to play up Kublai’s withdrawal, acting as if Sidao had won a great victory. It was Sidao who imprisoned Kublai’s envoy, Hao Ching in 1260. Acting as sole Chancellor from 1260 onwards, Sidao wished to fervently resist the Mongols, something in which the court was in agreeance. How to do it was another matter. For Sidao, an important step was fiscal reform to strengthen the dynasty. The economic cost of the war was immense. A massive standing army, destruction of valuable regions across the frontier, alongside rampant corruption and hyperinflation of their paper currency put the Song court in a precarious economic position. Sidao ordered land surveys in 1262 to find those avoiding taxation. In 1263, he ramped this up with his Public Fields Measures, wherein officials with tax exempt status had  their excess lands confiscated. The government was supposed to purchase the land from the owners, but they were largely paid in the increasingly worthless paper money, or the land was outright seized.  Sidao hoped to use this land to grow the foodstuffs necessary for the Song army, but his effort had the side effect of creating a large body of Song officials and elite highly antagonistic to Sidao.        Sidao also set up letter boxes to anonymously report corruption and official offensives. It was a fine sentiment, though it turned out many of these corrupt officials also happened to be the ones Sidao didn’t like. Removing and at times executing those who stood in his way, Sidao appointed his own men to their positions. The polarization of the court was intense, though Sidao could overcome this as he had the strong support of the Emperors. Lizong died suddenly in November 1264, succeeded by his 24 year old nephew Zhao Qi, known by his temple name Duzong of Song. Duzong, if anything, had an even closer relationship with Jia Sidao, who had been his tutor. Duzong was much more interested in extravagant feasts and women than affairs of state -hardly the image of austerity expected when facing the threat of the Mongols, when other lordly men were required to give up lands and sons for the cause. The new Emperor was immensely loyal to Sidao, and in some depictions subservient to him. In 1269 when Sidao played with resigning from the court, Emperor Duzong came on his knees begging and crying for Sidao to return, which Sidao did with the dismissal of more of his court foes.       While this was going on, Sidao was putting substantial investment in defense, especially around the region of Xiangyang, which we will get to shortly, and in improving the walls of the capital. Diplomatic efforts were at their lowest with the Mongols since the outbreak of war in the 1230s, and even though Kublai Khan routinely released captured Song merchants and prisoners in an effort to build goodwill, Jia Sidao did not budge. And since Sidao controlled the court and policy of the Song, the Song court did not budge either.       Aside from retaking some cities and border skirmishing, Jia Sidao did not take any larger offensives against Kublai during his occupation with Ariq in Mongolia. Sidao likely recognized that, with their well-built walls and defensive weapons supported by rivers and ships, the Song’s defense could stick up to the Mongols. Yet on the offense, especially in the more open territory of the north, the Song armies would suffer the same results they had on every other northern expedition in the Dynasty’s 300 year history; a dismal defeat against the cavalry based armies.  Perhaps the most notable effort at undermining Kublai’s rule in north China was by encouraging a Chinese warlord in Shandong allied to the Mongols, Li Tan, to revolt. Despite both he and his father, the Red Coat warlord Li Quan, having fought the Song for decades, Li Tan was not feeling like he was favoured under Kublai. Encouraged by Song promises and Kublai’s conflict with Ariq, in February 1262 Li Tan declared for the Song and threw off Mongol rule.        It took about a month for Mongol forces to arrive and defeat Li Tan’s rebels in the field. Li Tan was caught in August 1262 and executed. The Song had provided no direct aid for Li Tan, whose small forces were quickly overcome by Mongolian and Chinese under Shih Tienzi, a Northern Chinese whose family had loyally served the Mongols since the late 1210s. Jia Sidao may have wanted to see if the Chinese of the north would rise up against the Mongols, but the Mongol response was quick enough to violently put a stop to any talk of rebellion. The most significant outcome of the rebellion was upon Kublai himself. Not only had Li Tan, a Chinese warlord considered a loyal subject of the Khan rebelled, but Li Tan’s father-in-law Wang Wentung was found to have been complicit. Wang Wentung was the Chief Administrator of Kublai’s Central Secretariat, and one of the most influential figures in Kublai’s administration. Executed only weeks after Li Tan’s initial revolt, it was a blow to Kublai’s trust of the Chinese in his government. In the aftermath, Kublai decreased the power of many of the Chinese in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy, replacing them with Central Asians, Muslims, Turks and Tibetans. Many of the Chinese warlord families who had served the Mongols since Chinggis Khan saw their holdings reduced or forfeited. The family of Shih Tienzi, a man noted for his loyalty to the Mongols over many decades of service, ceased to be feudal lords, though this was partly on Tienzi’s urging in order to not lose the trust of the Khan.  Such was the effect of Sidao’s effort to undermine Mongol rule in North China.       Kublai’s first years as Khan were focused on consolidating and establishing his governing apparatus of northern China, and for the first half of the 1260s conflict with the Song was relegated to border skirmishes. Aside from diplomatic efforts to encourage a surrender of the Song Dynasty, Kublai also offered great rewards and lands for defectors in an effort to encourage desertions. Here, Kublai had some successes, perhaps the most notable early on being Liu Zheng, who became one of Kublai’s staunchest supporters and the ardent proponent of a navy. Liu Zheng and other like minded men convinced Kublai that the key was not multi-front attacks, but seizing control of the Yangzi River, the backbone of the Song realm where the Dynasty’s most prominent cities sat. To do this, the Mongols needed to build a navy and take the stronghold of Xiangyang.       If you look at a topographic map of China, three river systems should stand out to you, running in three lines from west to east. The northernmost and the longest is the Yellow River, which curls from the foothills of Tibet down into the Ordos desert, where it forms its great loop before cutting across the north China plain to spill out into the sea by the Shandong peninsula. This was the barrier which the Jin Dynasty moved their capital behind in an effort to protect themselves from Chinggis Khan. South of the Yellow River is the Huai, the shortest of the three rivers here, which marked the border between Jin and Song for a century, and now served as the Mongol-Song border line. By Kublai’s time, the Mongols had failed to hold it, the area south of the Huai a mess of canals and smaller rivers serving agriculture, terrain unsuited to cavalry maneuvers. Our third river on the map is the Yangzi, a wide and fast flowing river which was the natural defense against any northern invader. The most populated cities in the world were clustered along it, including the Song capital of Hangzhou, a short trip south from the River’s eastern end on the ocean. The Yangzi could only be crossed with difficulty, and the Song used it as a highway to reinforce and resupply cities, ferry troops and generally prevent a Mongol conquest. Lacking any beachheads on the Yangzi, the Mongols had nowhere to build up a navy and begin to challenge Song authority there.       That is, except for the Han River. Nestled between the mountains of Sichuan in the west and end of the Huai river to its east, runs the Han River, cutting north to south to intersect with the Yangzi at what is now Wuhan. The Han was the strategically vital access point, one where the Mongols had the potential to build up a river fleet in security before assaulting the Yangzi. Kublai knew this, and so did Jia Sidao, who for this reason spent huge amounts improving the defences of the twin cities of Xiangyang and Fancheng, which today are the super-city of Xiangfang. Sitting on opposite sides of the Han River, the two cities stood at the edge of the Song Dynasty and the Mongol Empire. Xiangyang and Fancheng were both huge, well fortified with wide moats, well provisioned and guarded by large garrisons and a variety of counter siege weapons. With both cities right on the river, they could continually be resupplied and deny the Mongol advance. Liu Zheng and the other Chinese defectors argued that Kublai should forget the favourite Mongol ploy of vast pincer movements. The Song had resources and moral enough to withstand these. Instead, the defectors argued, Kublai needed to throw his total might against Xiangyang and Fancheng.        Preparations began in the second half of the 1260s with the creation of a river fleet. In 1265, the Mongols won a battle at Tiaoyu Shan in Sichuan against the Song, capturing 146 boats. Koreans, Jurchen and Northern Chinese were put to work building more ships; in early 1268, officials in Shaanxi and Sichuan were ordered to construct another 500 vessels. By the last months of 1268, a large force of Mongols, Turks and northern Chinese converged upon Xiangyang and Fancheng. The Song defector Liu Zheng was placed in charge of the Mongol fleet, blocking off the Han River south of the cities to cut them off from the Yangzi. Aju, Subedei’s grandson, was entrusted with the siege of Fancheng; Shih Tienzi, the Chinese warlord long in service to the Khans, held overall command outside the walls of Xiangyang. A frontal assault was dismissed; the wide moats and thick walls were all but impervious to the catapults the Mongols brought with them. Attempting to storm the cities would result in heavy losses. No, they would need to be starved out. To do so, the Mongols erected walls and defensive works around the cities to cut off land access, while Liu Zheng and his fleet prevented Song reinforcements from the river.        In December of 1268 the garrison made an attempt to break out before the cordon could be tightened, but this was repulsed. The Song commander in Xiangyang, Lu Wenhuan, was a steady hand and kept moral up. They probed the Mongol besiegers continuously, trying to find the weak point in the lines. By March 1269, Shih Tienzi requested another 20,000 reinforcements from Kublai for this reason. The large cities and river access made closing them off a great challenge.       While Jia Sidao has often been accused of hiding the details of the siege of Xiangyang from the Song court, this is a baseless accusation. Duzong of Song may have taken little interest in military matters, but it was beyond the skill of Jia Sidao to hide the massive efforts going on outside Xiangyang; everyone along the Yangzi River would have known of it. The court was very much aware of the siege; the annals of the Song Dynasty, the Song shih, describe the court heaping rewards onto the defenders of Xiangyang in order to encourage their resistance. The court was still united in the opinion of resisting Kublai, even if the how was not agreed upon. Sidao sent multiple armies to relieve the defenders, some of them led by his own brother-in-law, Fan Wenhu. In August 1269, the first of these relieving forces sailed up the Han River to Xiangyang, but was defeated by the Mongol fleet and their boats captured.        In March of 1270 another attempt by the garrison of Xiangyang to break out was defeated and another Song relief fleet was repulsed. Though by then the city was largely closed off by the ever expanding Mongol fortifications, the Mongol commanders needed more men: 70,000 men and 5,000 more ships were requested, giving an image to the scale of the task to really surround these cities. Xiangyang was a whirlpool pulling in men from across the Mongol and Song empires, neither side willing to budge. Several times in later 1270 and 1271 Sidao’s brother-in-law Fan Wenhu led fleets up the Han River to assist Xiangyang, and each time the new Mongol navy proved victorious. The skilled Mongol fleet commanders, most notably the Chinese Liu Zheng and Zhang Hongfan, were adept at this river warfare, luring the Song into ambushes and developing a lengthy system along the Han to detect approaching fleets and communicate response. Jia Sidao ordered attacks on Sichuan, along the border and even a naval attack on the Shandong peninsula. His hopes these would divert Mongol resources were dashed, as most of these were inconclusive, won only minor victories or were outright disasters, as with the Shandong attack. All Sidao achieved was the wasting of Song resources while the noose tightened on Xiangyang.       Though the Mongol navy had a good chokehold on Xiangyang and Fancheng, the cities stood defiant. Well stocked and moral still high, any sort of frontal assault would still result in high losses and possibly allow the Song to break the siege. In 1272 one relief force actually pushed through to reach the city, albeit with heavy losses of most of their men and resources.  Kublai needed something to bring the siege to an end, and reached out west to see about acquiring some news tools.       In 1271, Kublai’s nephew Abaqa sat on the throne of the Ilkhanate. Abaqa was Hulegu’s son, and unlike his cousins in the Golden Horde, still recognized Kublai as the nominal head of the empire. When Kublai’s envoys arrived in 1271 asking for something to assist in the siege, Abaqa had just the ticket. Abaqa sent two Muslim siege engineers, Ismail and Ala al-Din, experienced in the newest advancement in projectile weaponry; the counterweight trebuchet. Developed in Europe in the early thirteenth century, it spread to the crusader kingdoms by the end of the 1250s, where Hulegu may have utilized them in his campaign in Syria in 1260. They were pretty nifty; instead of manpower, as required by the Chinese catapults the Mongols used, the trebuchet used its counterweight and gravity to hurl projectiles with greater accuracy, power and distance.        By the last weeks of 1272, Ismail and Ala al-Din arrived outside the walls of Fancheng and began to build the machines. In December, the first shots were launched into the walls of Fancheng. Within days, they were breached, the Mongols in the city and Fancheng was overrun. A massacre was conducted on those found within, ensured to be visible from the walls of Xiangyang. Still, Xiangyang held out.  Carefully, the trebuchets were disassembled and transported across the river. In the first weeks of 1273, the weapons were carefully set up at  the southeastern corner of Xiangyang. The trebuchets were carefully calibrated and launched a projectile supposedly nearly 100 kilos in weight. The first shot hit a tower along the city walls, a crack like thunder heard across Xiangyang. Panic set in, Xiangyang’s formerly untouchable walls now under real threat.       One of the Mongol commanders, a Uighur named Ariq Qaya, rode to the walls and called for the city’s commander, Lu Wenhuan. He commended Wenhuan on his skilled resistance, but now it was time to submit; do so now, and he would be rewarded by Kublai. Resistance would meet the same end as Fancheng. Lu Wenhuan recognized there would be no relief force from the Song for him now. On the 17th of March, 1273, Lu Wenhuan surrendered Xiangyang to the Mongols. After a 5 year siege, the battle was decisely won in the favour of the Mongols, and the Han River could now become a veritable shipyard for the Mongol advance on the Song.       The fall of Xiangyang sent shockwaves across the Song Empire; Jia Sidao’s authority was greatly undermined, though Duzong of Song’s confidence in him was not shaken. He had  now to prepare for a full river and land invasion of the Song heartland. For Lu Wenhuan, the Mongols kept their promise; siding with the Khan, he would now lead the Mongol spear thrust against the Song. Xiangyang was perhaps the decisive victory in the Mongol-Song war, its fall ensuring the Mongols had a route to truly conquer the dynasty. So great was the story that Marco Polo retold it time and time again on his return to Europe; either through his own ‘enhancing’ of the story, or that of his ghost-writer Rustichello, the account was shifted to remove the Muslims’ role from the siege. Instead, Polo, his father and his uncle became the ones who shared the knowledge of the trebuchet with Kublai. Considering that the siege ended in early 1273, and Polo did not arrive in China until 1274 or 5, we can rather safely dismiss that. However, Polo, the Chinese language Yuan Shi compiled around 1370, and Rashid al-Din, writing in Iran in the early 1300s, all include the story of Kublai gaining his siege equipment from westerners.  Polo just happened to be the only one indicating it wasn’t a Muslim.     Kublai Khan was now poised to end the forty year long war with the Song Dynasty, completing the conquest of China begun by Chinggis Khan some sixty years prior. Our next episode will look at the fall of the Song Dynasty, so be sure to subscribe to our podcast. If you’d like to help us continue bringing you great content, please support us on patreon at www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. I’m your host David, and we’ll catch you on the next one. 

Now that we’ve taken you through Hulegu’s campaigns during Mongke’s reign, it’s time we cut back east to Mongke himself, and the Mongol invasion of the Song Dynasty, the great and immensely wealthy masters of southern China. Among the largest and most thoroughly planned of Mongol campaigns, it was one cut suddenly short with drastic consequences for the Mongol Empire. I’m your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.   Planning a war against the Song Dynasty was no easy task. All of Mongke’s actions of his reign from 1251-1258 can be understood as him making preparations for it: cataloguing the resources and manpower of the empire, strengthening the central government and securing his various flanks. Mongke had valuable experience to use to determine his strategy; since 1234, the Mongols had fought rounds of inconclusive warfare with the Song; penetrating deep into the Dynasty’s territory, routinely defeating armies and taking cities, yet never able to make substantial gains and frustrated by Song tenacity, all in an environment almost tailor made to hampher cavalry armies.   To understand the war with the Song, it’s  necessary to introduce the Dynasty and its ruling house of Zhao- but what a task that is! In its 300 year history the Song were among the most complex and fascinating of all of China’s imperial dynasties, a period when Chinese culture reached staggering new heights. To summarize it with any accuracy requires an entire podcast series to do so-  the Cambridge History of China managed to get it down to two volumes totalling over 2,000 pages. The Song emperors oversaw a period of amazing economic, technological, agricultural and cultural achievements. Urbanization increased; the southern Song capital of Linan, modern Hangzhou, had a population in the 13th century conservatively estimated at 1.5 million. Paper money, a massive expansion and improvement of farming and rice cultivation, foreign and overseas trade, gunpowder, porcelain… the list goes on and on for either innovations or improvements the Song undertook. The wealth of the Song was immense, and it is rightly considered a Golden Age.    The Song were a dominant force in China since the 960s, emerging in the decades after the fall of the powerful Tang Dynasty, a period of disunity called the 10 Kingdoms and 5 Dynasties.  Through great effort the Song swallowed up the other kingdoms of southern China and marched up into the north China plain, where they butted heads with the Khitan ruled Liao Dynasty. Rounds of warfare followed for the remainder of the 10th century, but a pattern which became all too routine emerged. The northern, largely cavalry based armies could outmaneuver and often annihilate the Song armies, whose offensive performance was poor even at their height. Yet the Khitans were frustrated by the defensive ability of the Song, and were unable to hold gains made against them- particularly when a giant Song crossbow speared the Khitan leader in 1005. Weeks later, the Song and Liao came to terms for the infamous Chanyuan Treaty, marking their borders and requiring the Song deliver a massive annual tribute of silk and silver to the Liao.   Part of the reason for the often criticized poor offensive military performance of the Song goes back to its founder, Zhao Kuangyin (kuang-yin), Taizu of Song. Zhao was a military man, as was his father and grandfather. Zhao owed much of his rise to the military- and also blamed it for the dissolution of the Tang Dynasty. Often, new Chinese dynasties structure themselves on what they perceived to be a key weakness of the preceding dynasty. To Zhao Kuangyin, the breakup of the Tang Dynasty came from military leaders and generals who grew too powerful, ignoring the imperial court to seek their own power, such as An Lushan in the 8th century. To Zhao, internal stability of the dynasty could only be secured with the military on a tight leash. Soon after consolidating power, the military leaders who had helped Zhao rise were eased into retirement and the army placed under permanent civilian command, the Bureau of Military Affairs. While often lambasted by later commentators, especially in the Youtube comments section, it wasn’t a horrible idea. The Song Dynasty was never beset by warlords seeking independence and still succeeded in seizing most of China. The fact the dynasty went up against some of the fiercest military powers of the medieval world could not have been predicted.   While an uneasy status quo was reached with the Khitans, in the early 12th century a major upheaval arose in the form of the Jurchen and the Jin Dynasty. In a few short years the Jin crushed the Liao; the Song allied with the Jin in an effort to seize Chinese territory and failed miserably. The alliance between Jin and Song hardly outlived the Liao Dynasty. In 1125 the Jurchens’ fearsome heavy cavalry tore through the Song; by the end of the 1120s the Song capital of Kaifeng was taken, the Song Emperor Qinzong,  whose father who had recently abdicated,  and most of the imperial family and court, were all captured. Northern China was taken,  the Song Dynasty was in turmoil and nearly collapsed. The ninth son of the abdicated emperor managed to flee south, and recentre the Dynasty around Linan, modern Hangzhou, a coastal city at the mouth of the Yangzi River. This much reduced dynasty is usually termed ‘the Southern Song,’ to distinguish from the ‘Northern,’ when it ruled most of China. Over the 1130s leadership issues among the Jurchen, difficulties campaigning in south China and renewed defensive vigour by the Song halted Jin expansion, and a treaty in 1141 marked the Huai River as the boundary between Jin and Song. The Treaty of Shaoxing reimposed similar annual tribute demands as that of the Chanyuan treaty, thousands upon thousands of taels of silver and bushels of silk to be delivered to the Jin, and the Song had to recognize the Jin Emperor as the Son of Heaven- traditionally reserved for only a single ruler of China. The treaty was a humiliation and economic burden, on top of having to lose northern China. The peace was tense, and every few decades war resumed between Jin and Song, with neither able to make gains beyond the Huai.    Relations were somewhat cordial from the 1160s to the end of the 1180s, during the long and stable reigns of Shizong of Jin and Xiaozong of Song, something of a golden age for both states, though neither abandoned their territorial claims. Their successors were not nearly as capable and lacked the will, ability or the interest to direct forces within their courts. In the early 1200s, as the Jin were distracted by the northern steppes and ecological disasters, Song revanchism reached a new height. Seeking to take advantage of perceived Jin weakness, the Song launched a surprise invasion in 1206:  before the end of the year, the Song were sending peace overtures to the Jin. Song forces were largely repulsed, the top military commander in Sichuan defected to the Jin, and the Jin counter attacked with a massive, nine pronged assault along the entirety of their 2000 kilometre long border. Despite this massive expenditure of manpower, the Jin made no gains, Peace was reached by 1208, the Song providing an increased annual tribute of 300,000 ounces of silver and bolts of silk, and heads of the ministers seen as responsible for promoting the war. Humiliating as it was, the Song at least did not have to make territorial concessions.    Perhaps the greatest consequence of that brief round of warfare was that it distracted the Jin and occupied its considerable resources from the trouble brewing on their northern frontier; the unification of the Mongol tribes under Chinggis Khan. In 1211, Chinggis Khan invaded the Jin Empire, as covered far back in episode seven. The initial Song reaction was somewhat mixed; no tears were shed in Linan for the suffering of the Jin, but whether this was something the Song should take advantage of was another matter. Either way, in the aftermath of the peace in 1208, for the next 25 years the Song court was largely dominated by the Chancellor Shih Mi-yuan, a man who urged stability and moderation rather than progress or reform. No risky military escapades would be undertaken on his watch.    The Song were unable to provide their annual tribute due to the fighting from 1211-1214. Many voices in the court loudly argued against continuing it all, for what was the use in sending it to a dying dynasty? Demonstrating his often indecisive policy making, Chancellor Shih Mi-Yuan did not actually stop the tribute, but held the allotted tribute in storage. He may have secretly resumed it in 1214, hoping to keep the peace with the Jin while avoiding angering more voices in the capital. The fact that even the Tangut and Korea had halted their payments to the Jin was not lost on Shih Mi-Yuan’s detractors. Neither was this appeasement even successful, for in spring 1217 the beleaguered Jurchen, having lost most of the northern half of their empire to the Mongols, attacked the Song. The intention was to restore both some dignity to the dynasty, and further space for the Jin court to flee from the Mongols if necessary. The result was not what they anticipated. Shih Mi-Yuan, while openly favouring the status quo and not mobilizing armies, had also ordered border defences improved and gave regional commanders greater autonomy with little interference from the central government. Song defensive forces responded quickly, and Jin offensives were not just actively repulsed, but in some cases led to successful Song campaigns into Jurchen territory. For the Jin it was a great shock, a blow to morale and resources at a time where they had little enough of either to spare. The Song and Shih Mi-yuan in particular had a new confidence against the Jin, spurning their envoys and in 1219, cutting off all diplomatic contacts with them.   About this time, in 1221, the Song sent their first diplomatic mission to the Mongols, notable in that it was recorded in a written account still accessible today, the Mengda beilu. The initial Song perceptions of the Mongols, as described in an excellent article by historian Chad Garcia, presents the Mongols as a ‘different kind of northerner.’ Contrasting them to the deceitful and malicious Jurchen of the Jin Dynasty, the Mongols are something of “noble savages;” honest, straightforward, physically strong if not attractive. Chinggis Khan is described in heroic characteristics fitting the archetypal Chinese emperor, with a large, broad forehead and long beard. No mention is made of them as especially terrifying or cruel.   As we’ve mentioned no shortage of times in the past, the absence of Chinggis Khan in the west against the Khwarezmian Empire and death of Mukhali, the commander in the Chinese theater in 1223, resulted in a great reduction of Mongol pressure on the region. The deaths of the Tangut, Jin and Song rulers over the following years allowed new voices to come to the fore. This is dealt with more fully in episode 14 of this series, but the result was a general ceasefire between them. While a brief respite, it was no more than a breath before the plunge; episode 14 also details the destruction of the Jin Empire in the early 1230s during the reign of Chinggis’ son and successor, Ogedai. Song Chancellor Shih Mi-yuan sought to stay out of the conflict and maintain Song neutrality- though the Mongols penetrated the Song border and raided in order to outmaneuver Jin forces, while also demanding an alliance against them. There was a minority of voices within the dynasty warning of the danger of the Mongols. Once the Jin no longer stood as a buffer between them, what then? Shih Mi-yuan may have been mindful of this, but was dead by autumn 1233. In the weeks before his death, as age reduced his presence in the court, the Song had agreed to assist the Mongols in the final attack on the Jin, reduced to a strip of  land along the Song northern border. The Mongols needed to ensure the Jin emperor, Aizong of Jin, could not flee into Song territory. In return for this aid, the Song were given vague promises of land to be restored.   In the first months of 1234 the Jurchen Jin Dynasty was destroyed, its last emperor killed fighting in the streets. Yet, the promises of land did not materialize; Kaifeng, once the capital of the Song Dynasty, still remained in Mongol hands. Angry and belligerent voices, particularly among those who had only fought rebels with no experience of the Mongol way of war, were particularly loud in their complaints on the matter. Seeking to restore what was ‘rightfully theirs,’ and anticipating the local Han Chinese population would gladly rise up to join them, several Song armies marched over the Huai river in the middle of 1234… and promptly found a desolated, war torn landscape, a population unable to feed these armies let alone take up arms. The Song armies began a disorganized retreat, which turned into a rout when Mongol forces returned. Foolishly, the Song had just begun a 45 year long war.   Ogedai Khaan sent armies under his sons Kochu and Koten to lead raid the Song. Generally, these were in two regions: along the central frontier on the Huai River, and more westerly in Sichuan. Sichuan, where we’ll spend much of the rest of the episode, was, before the permanent incorporation of Tibet, Xinjiang and Gansu, the westernmost part of China. Roughly a bowl surrounded by mountains cutting it off from the rest of China, the Sichuan basin juts up against the eastern reaches of Tibet. Fertile, is one of the most densely populated regions of China, the Yangzi river which flows through it providing ample moisture for rich cultivation of rice, and a route to connect with the rest of southern China. Hot, humid and famous for its thickly forested mountain slopes, Sichuan saw more than its share of it fighting in the coming decades.   In both 1235 and 1236, attacks were led upon the central border and Sichuan; Koten led a particularly large, multi-ethnic force into Sichuan in 1236. The damage was immense. By the end of the year, only 4 of Sichuan’s 58 prefectural capitals still stood and Chengdu, the regional capital, was taken. The sudden successes were soured with the death of Kochu in November 1236 and retreat of most of the forces. Attacks in the rest of the 1230s were repulsed, often by the star Song general of the period, Meng Gong.  Whether the Mongols actually wanted to fight the Song at the time is unclear- certainly in 1234, they were not planning on it. In 1238, they sent envoys to the Song for a ceasefire, which the Song rashly brushed off. Deliberately they were choosing not to hold cities. In 1241 Hanchou fell to a general massacre, followed by a sudden Mongol withdrawal. Such actions may have been a reaction to a necessity of fighting against the Southern Song. The Song had no lack of manpower to fall upon, and the trouble with any rapid assault was that it would need to be able to reliably hold onto any territory taken. Mongols could rapidly penetrate the border defenses, but the threat of being surrounded was quite real. At the very least, without sizable garrisons any city could be quickly retaken by Song forces when the Mongols moved on. The generally hot, humid weather of southern China strained the Mongols and their horses, disease spreading quickly among troops unused to the climate. The general preponderance of rivers, mountains and forest made large cavalry operations difficult to effectively operate. On top of all of this, while the Song are often derided for some sort of innate military ineffectiveness, the most pressing issue was the fierceness of the Song defenders. Resistance was strong, and it was not unusual for the Mongols to find a campaign suddenly held up by valiant defenders in one city, locking at least a portion of the Mongol army in place for months and, in some cases, years.   By the time of Ogedai’s death at the end of 1241, no major gains had been made, though the Song had suffered a good mauling. Little effort was made over the remainders of the 1240s, the Mongols dealing with the political issues relating to the regencies and short reign of Guyuk Khan. Diplomatic discussions took place in 1247, which went nowhere. The Song could in the meantime prepare border defences, repair walls and mobilize men, though at great cost. Printing yet more paper money to solve inflation did not, it turns out, do so. Taxes made it back to the capital in smaller and smaller amounts as regional governors and commanders seized them to pay for the war effort. Sichuan suffered so terribly that it apparently provided no revenue to the capital after 1234. For the Song, the yearly cost to simply keep their armies mobilized was immense. Drought, flooding, epidemics, fires and locusts struck often over the 1240s-50s, another layer of cost which, through augmenting the destruction of farmland from Mongol attacks, further strained government resources. An ever growing bureaucracy brought more corruption, more cost and more issues. The emperors of the thirteenth century showed less and less interest in governing, leaving an ever-more divided imperial court to run things. After the death of Shih Mi-yuan and the last of his followers in 1251, the Song court was hamstrung by fighting between eunuchs and bureaucrats vying for power. Despite their vast wealth, they were under immense pressure threatening to collapse the dynasty, just as Mongke Khaan prepared to hurl the weight of the Mongol Empire upon it.   Mongke knew the assault on the Song was an immense task. In 1252, sending his brother Hulegu to the far west to subdue the rest of the Islamic world, Mongke ordered his other brother Kublai to take another army against the Song. Rather than throw men at the well defended Song northern borders- a strategy so far ineffective- Mongke sent Kublai to subdue the independent kingdoms along the Song’s southwestern border in what is now China’s Yunnan province, where Song defences were much weaker.   Kublai had not yet commanded armies in person before this campaign, so Mongke provided him a guiding figure: Uriyangqadai, the son of the mighty Subutai. Setting out in late 1253 from forward bases in Gansu, the former territory of the Tangut, Kublai’s army marched in three columns; an eastern column under the Chinese defector Weng Dezhen, which marched through Sichuan, the main army under Kublai and the western column under Uriyangqadai, both marching hrough the eastern edges of Tibet. Tibet’s conquest by the Mongols is a bit of a shadowy thing, difficult to reconstruct due to only brief mentions in the sources. By the early 1250s, most of the Tibetan tribes were subdued or paying tribute to the Mongols, who had sent repeated armies into the region over the previous two decades. By the mid-1250s, Tibet was largely under Mongol authority, though it would need to be reimposed and strengthened later in the century.    Cutting through the mountains of Tibet, Kublai’s army fell upon the hills of Yunnan and the Kingdom of Dali. Founded in the 10th century, Dali controlled the valuable trade between the Song Dynasty and the kingdoms of  Guizhou, Tibet, Vietnam and the rest of Indochina. Relations with the Song were amicable, and Dali became the Song’s major supplier of horses with the loss of Northern China; but Dali was independent and somewhat isolated from the affairs of the Chinese. Central authority of the Dali kings had declined by the thirteenth century, their actual rule hardly extending beyond their capital, also called Dali. By the time of Kublai’s invasion in 1253, the Dali King was puppet for his chief minister, who had ordered the deaths of Mongol envoys. Dali’s army would be no match for the Mongol forces, even under an inexperienced commander like Kublai. Crossing a river on sheepskin rafts, Kublai’s army surprised and destroyed the main Dali army under the Chief Minister, who fled back to the capital. In the last days of 1253, Kublai’s three armies converged on Dali City. In Chinese sources, Kublai’s confucian teacher Yao Shu convinced Kublai to spare the city’s inhabitants, and in January 1254 Dali submitted to the Mongols. The victorious Kublai returned back to north China, where he was appointed administrator and got up to other problems, as detailed in episode 23.  Uriyangqadai was left to subdue the remaining local powers and prepare for the great assault on the Song, as well as recruit locals to serve in the army. He moved against the independent kingdoms of China’s modern Guizhou province, the intermediate area between Song and Dali. He returned briefly to Gansu in early 1257, but in his absence revolt broke out in Dali, bringing Uriyangqadai back into the region. His efforts eventually led him to ride into northern Vietnam, Dai Viet, called Annam in Chinese sources. His envoys were killed, and Uriyangqadai attacked the capital, Thang-long, modern day Hanoi. Thang-long was greatly damaged, the king forced to flee to an offshore island, and send a son as royal hostage to the Mongols as well as tribute. Dai Viet was now vassal of the Mongol Emperor.   Though the Yunnan-Guizhou region would not be fully pacified until the 1280s, it was secure enough to act as a staging ground for the assault on Song. With affairs in order and resources from across the empire pooled, Mongke felt confident to launch the final war on the Song. The total force was immense: as many as 600,000 in some sources to attack Song from several directions. Mongke gathered his forces in the Liupan mountains in 1258, not far from where his grandfather, Chinggis Khan, had died some thirty years prior. Mongke was to take his force against Sichuan; a second army under his cousin Taghachar, was to strike east from the Liupanshan to the Song metropolis of Xiangyang, which controlled access to the vital Song river routes; Kublai was to take a third force from north China to the central regions of the Yangzi river, focusing on the city of O-zhou, today’s Wuhan. The fourth army was under Uriyangqadai, who from Yunnan would hammer the Song from the west and link up with Kublai and Taghachar along the Yangzi.   The idea was twofold. By striking the Song along so many frontiers, they would be unable to converge against a single army, while the Song empire could be split in half. With the capital and administration based on the far eastern edge of the Song realm, the Mongols could isolate it and perhaps drive a mammoth wave of refugees to it.    In the Autumn of 1258, Mongke’s host descended upon Sichuan. 100,000 troops had recently been sent by the Song to reinforce it, but frustratingly little else had been done by the central government to help repair fortifications of that western region. During the march on Dali some five years prior, much of Sichuan was occupied, but the major population centres stood defiant. The Grand Khan himself was now taking the field against them. Sichuan’s capital, Chengdu, a population of almost one million, quickly fell and it’s plain was soon in Mongol hands.  Initial successes were significant, but as 1258 turned to 1259, Mongke found himself bogged down in sieges in eastern Sichuan. Outside of the plain of Sichuan, the province turns to rugged mountains and valleys. Recently constructed mountain tops fortresses proved difficult to take; Chongqing, one of the major cities along the Yangzi in the region, was turned into a network of fortresses. Defenders fought tooth and nail, knowing defeat meant slaughter for them and their families. Mongke’s problems grew as he sought to take Ho-chou. For five months, the city resisted his efforts,  heavy losses frustrating him. By June, rain became incessant. Humidity and the climate proved an effective weapon. Disease spread rapidly among the Mongols and their horses. Even troops levied from northern China were unused to it, and progress halted. Mongke fought the rest of the summer in the hills around Ho-chou, trying to keep up the army’s momentum. Precisely how things went in August is not agreed upon in the sources. Mongke seems to have been drinking heavily, perhaps recognizing the water spread foul diseases to his men. His judgement and reflex may have been impaired, perhaps his own fortitude suffering. The sources speak of an arrow from the defenders of a local fort, or a projectile launched from a catapult. Others, of cholera or dysentery brought on by the conditions. No matter what it was, on the 11th of August, 1259, Mongke Khaan was dead.   His army ground to a halt. Messages were sent to the other armies, and Mongke’s son Asutai quickly took his father’s body back to Mongolia for burial. According to Marco Polo, the army killed everyone they came across as they hauled his corpse. News spread quickly, the Song found new heart: the great Khaghan was dead! Taghachar Noyan’s army had already floundered outside the walls of Xiangyang. Kublai, delayed by his severe gout, had not yet even crossed the Yangzi River when he learned the news of his brother’s demise. Only Uriyangqadai had made progress, perhaps due to a greater number of locally raised troops from Dali suited to the climate. From Dali or Dai Viet, he had marched through the modern provinces of Guangxi and Hunan to reach Kublai on the Yangzi, allegedly fighting 13 battles, killing 400,000 Song soldiers and capturing several major generals.    On learning of Mongke’s death, Kublai continued to campaign for another two months, initially dismissing it simply as a rumour, then stating he had been ordered south by the Khaan, and it was his duty to carry out his will. Crossing the Yangzi, he succeeded in taking O-chou, modern Wuhan. Perhaps the desire to get something done on the campaign drove him, or perhaps a thought crossed his mind: he didn’t have much for a military reputation. Taking a major city like O-chou would alleviate that, and make him a better candidate for the leadership to succeed Mongke. Doubtless, he imagined it would be months before an election would be held, giving him ample time to score some victories for his resume.   Therefore, he was quite surprised when messages came from his wife, Chabi, in late November 1259, warning that Kublai’s youngest brother, Ariq Boke, was making moves to become Khaan. Ariq had been left as regent in Karakorum while his brothers were on campaign, and now looked to declare himself Khaan before the families had all assembled. For Kublai, this was an opportunity he could not afford to lose. Thus he departed Wuhuan in winter 1259, the Song, under their new chancellor Jia Sidao, warily watching the frontier and seeking to reclaim the lost territory. Little could they have predicted, but the age of the unified Mongol Empire had just ended. Providing no designated successor, Mongke’s death opened a vacuum, one which would tear every fracture within the empire to the surface.  Civil war across Eurasia was about to follow, and the Song were offered a brief respite from the Mongols.  Our next episodes look at the great civil wars of the Mongol Empire, so be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more. If you’d like to help us keep bringing you outstanding content, please consider supporting us on patreon at www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. I’m your host David, and we’ll catch you on the next one.

Speakers: Clark ALEJANDRINO, Trinity College Chris COURTNEY, Durham University Xiangli DING, Rhode Island School of Design Yan GAO, University of Memphis Moderator: Ling Zhang, Boston College About the Speakers: Clark Alejandrino teaches at Trinity College. Clark finished a Ph.D. in East Asian Environmental History at Georgetown University. He specializes in the environmental history of China, especially its climate and animal history, covering the fifth to the twentieth century in his research. He is currently preparing a book manuscript on typhoons in the history of the South China coast and preparing to embark on a new project exploring the history of migratory birds in East Asia. At Trinity, he teaches courses on Chinese history, environmental history, world history, and Pacific history. Chris Courtney teaches at Durham University (UK). Chris is a social and environmental historian of China, specializing on the history of Wuhan and its hinterland. His previous research focused upon the history of nature-induced disasters in the 19th and 20th centuries. His monograph The Nature of Disaster in China examined the history of the 1931 Central China Flood. It was awarded the 2019 John K Fairbanks Prize. Chris has also published on topics including the history of environmental religion, fire disasters, and Maoist flood (mis)management. His current research focuses on the problem of heat in modern Chinese cities. Using a combination of archival and oral history he is examining how people coped with extreme temperatures through a period of rapid cultural, political and technological change. He explores how emergent technologies such as ice factories, electric fans, and air conditioning transformed the cultural and social landscape of urban China. Xiangli Ding teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design. His research interests focus on the confluence of nature, technologies, economy and political forces in modern China and how that confluence has changed Chinese people’s lives and their relationship with the natural environment. His first book project, Transforming Waters: Hydroelectricity, State Making and Social Changes in 20th-Century China, examines the rise of hydroelectricity in modern China and argues that political powers aided by hydro-technologies consumed not only the natural resources at an unprecedented pace and scale, but also marginalized local communities in the making of the modern hydropower regime. Yan Gao teaches at the University of Memphis. Yan specializes in social and environmental history of late imperial and modern China, and her research focuses on water management of the central Yangzi region. She obtained her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University and held a few research and teaching positions around the world. She was a Carson fellow at the Rachel Carson Center of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, a visiting post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and a Research Associate at the Global Asia Initiative of Duke University. She has published several scholarly articles. Yan is finalizing a book entitled “Yangzi Waters: Transforming the Water Regime in Late Imperial China.” Part of the Environment in Asia series at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University

Introducing TPAC InsideOut's "Warming Up With" series! In this series, we talk with artists about their training and experiences in the performing arts, and learn how they care for their instruments and prepare for performances. First up is Helen Huang, a Chinese-born soprano with a wide range of musical interests, spanning from baroque to the present day. Below is the song Helen performs in this episode. You can learn more about Helen at HelenHuangSoprano.com    我住长江头 (I live at the source of the Yangzi River)    我住长江头， 君住长江尾。 日日思君不见君， 共饮长江水。 此水几时休?  此恨何时已?  只愿君心似我心， 定不负相思意   I live at the source of the Yangzi River You live at the tail of the Yangzi River.  Every day I think of you, but I don’t see you.  We drink the same Yangzi water. When will the river stop running? When will this torture end? All I want is for you to think of me too, So I won't love in vain. 

For somewhat unfortunate reasons, many more people in the world now know about the existence and location of a city called Wuhan than was the case at the start of 2020. But most of these likely remain unaware of just how pivotal a role Wuhan has played in many events in China's recent history. Almost 90 years ago the city was at the epicentre of a major flood which, while being quite a different kind of disaster from today's pandemic, similarly laid bare the complexities of the society which sought to deal with it. Chris Courtney's The Nature of Disaster in China: The 1931 Yangzi River Flood (Cambridge University Press, 2018) takes us deep into the world of Wuhan during this cataclysmic period, exploring the flood from numerous different angles – environmental, social, cultural and institutional to name a few. These different perspectives on an event of such vast scale are revelatory in their own right, but also shed light on Chinese and global affairs at a fascinating and important juncture of history, and offer us a way of looking at disasters right up to the present day. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups.

For somewhat unfortunate reasons, many more people in the world now know about the existence and location of a city called Wuhan than was the case at the start of 2020. But most of these likely remain unaware of just how pivotal a role Wuhan has played in many events in China’s recent history. Almost 90 years ago the city was at the epicentre of a major flood which, while being quite a different kind of disaster from today’s pandemic, similarly laid bare the complexities of the society which sought to deal with it. Chris Courtney’s The Nature of Disaster in China: The 1931 Yangzi River Flood (Cambridge University Press, 2018) takes us deep into the world of Wuhan during this cataclysmic period, exploring the flood from numerous different angles – environmental, social, cultural and institutional to name a few. These different perspectives on an event of such vast scale are revelatory in their own right, but also shed light on Chinese and global affairs at a fascinating and important juncture of history, and offer us a way of looking at disasters right up to the present day. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For somewhat unfortunate reasons, many more people in the world now know about the existence and location of a city called Wuhan than was the case at the start of 2020. But most of these likely remain unaware of just how pivotal a role Wuhan has played in many events in China’s recent history. Almost 90 years ago the city was at the epicentre of a major flood which, while being quite a different kind of disaster from today’s pandemic, similarly laid bare the complexities of the society which sought to deal with it. Chris Courtney’s The Nature of Disaster in China: The 1931 Yangzi River Flood (Cambridge University Press, 2018) takes us deep into the world of Wuhan during this cataclysmic period, exploring the flood from numerous different angles – environmental, social, cultural and institutional to name a few. These different perspectives on an event of such vast scale are revelatory in their own right, but also shed light on Chinese and global affairs at a fascinating and important juncture of history, and offer us a way of looking at disasters right up to the present day. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For somewhat unfortunate reasons, many more people in the world now know about the existence and location of a city called Wuhan than was the case at the start of 2020. But most of these likely remain unaware of just how pivotal a role Wuhan has played in many events in China’s recent history. Almost 90 years ago the city was at the epicentre of a major flood which, while being quite a different kind of disaster from today’s pandemic, similarly laid bare the complexities of the society which sought to deal with it. Chris Courtney’s The Nature of Disaster in China: The 1931 Yangzi River Flood (Cambridge University Press, 2018) takes us deep into the world of Wuhan during this cataclysmic period, exploring the flood from numerous different angles – environmental, social, cultural and institutional to name a few. These different perspectives on an event of such vast scale are revelatory in their own right, but also shed light on Chinese and global affairs at a fascinating and important juncture of history, and offer us a way of looking at disasters right up to the present day. Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices