Facts I Learned From Valerie Hansen's The Open Empire

Chinese history is wild

In 1899, Beijing was suffering from a malaria pandemic. Many people used the traditional remedy: a soup made from powdered dragon bones. As there was a mysterious shortage of actual dragons, merchants sold cattle scapulas and turtle shell undersides as dragon bones. One customer's relative, a historian, happened to glance at the dragon bones and discovered that they were covered with ancient Chinese characters.

The historian tracked the bones to the town of Anyang. In Anyang, peasants were digging up old bones to sell as dragon bones. They rubbed off the characters because they thought it would make them less saleable. The horrified historian bought up all the bones with characters on them immediately.

Within ten years, historians had identified over five hundred characters on the bones (called “oracle bones” because they were used to divine the future). Since then, of four thousand distinct characters, fifteen hundred have been identified. We have learned an enormous amount about the Shang dynasty—which was considered mythical before the oracle bones’ discovery. It’s sobering to think how many of the oracle bones we lost, and how easily they could all have been destroyed forever.

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We have oracle bones that are student copies of a model text. We know they were student copies because their handwriting was terrible.

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Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian records various astronomical events that occurred around the time that the Zhou Dynasty conquered the Shang. Because Sima Qian was writing nearly a thousand years later, he had no idea when the conquest happened. However, using modern astronomical knowledge, we can date the conquest to a five-year period: somewhere between 1050 and 1045 BCE.

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Before the invention of paper, Chinese books were written on slips eight to thirty inches long, which were cut from wood (usually bamboo). Holes were punched in the slips, and then they were laced together with strings. It looked like a placemat.

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In the Spring and Autumn Period, Chinese armies generally fought using chariots. But chariots are really bad for fighting in mountains, so people began to move to the mountains to be more robust against invasion. Therefore, over the course of the Warring States Period, rulers began to switch to infantry.

Infantry was significantly more egalitarian than chariots, because you can be a great infantryman without training from childhood. Therefore, social mobility increased. Because infantry generals were often promoted out of the (as it were) general infantry, rulers started to seek expert generals, which created a market for books about how to do warfare properly.

Infantry armies also required more people (sometimes hundreds of thousands), so rulers began to tax the peasants directly instead of making land grants. The number of literate people rose sharply after 400 BCE, probably to assess taxes. Literacy also lead to private contracts.

I’m just fascinated by how much is downstream of military tactics.

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Lord Mengchang asked one of his retainers, Feng Xuan, to collect the debts his peasants owed him and then use it to buy what his castle was missing. Feng Xuan forgave all the debts. Lord Mengchang asked what Feng Xuan had bought. Feng Xuan said that Lord Mengchang’s castle was full of valuable goods, his stables full of horses, his harem full of beautiful women. The only thing that was missing was loyalty. This, Feng Xuan had bought.

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During the Warring States Period, people used miniature bronze shovels and knives as money.

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The Qin state established population registers which showed who lived in which house. The registers also divided people into groups of five or ten people, all of whom would be responsible if one of their number committed a crime. Failure to report criminal activity was punished by being chopped in two at the waist.

The harshest punishment was decapitation, which was thought to leave you headless even in the afterlife. Hard labor was punishment for medium offenses: men built walls, women pounded grain. If a crime was somewhat more severe, the person would still be sentenced to hard labor, but with their nose severed or foot cut off. Head shaving, beard shaving, and tattooing were common punishments for minor offenses. Throughout most of Chinese history, body modification was a cause of great shame.

In spite of this, archaeological evidence generally suggests that much of the Qin’s reputation as brutal and ruthless is Han slander. People who absconded or failed to report to labor service were beaten, not killed. If the laborers were six to ten days late, the official in charge would be fined only one shield; more than ten, he would be fined a suit of armor. The Qin legal code stressed the importance of following judicial procedures exactly, and that everyone should receive the same punishment for the same crime. It carefully instructed magistrates in how to tell apart manslaughter and murder.

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The Qin abolished all hereditary titles. Promotion and demotion was based solely on merit. For example, military promotion occurred based on how many severed heads you turned in to your superiors.

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In 213 BCE the Qin emperor ordered a massive book-burning of all books that weren't about agriculture and divination. The Confucian classics and historical annals were preserved in the oral tradition.

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One Qin-era divination text specifies which days are lucky for which things. If you marry a wife on an unlucky day, she'll have a long tongue (and so be talkative) or be stingy, sickly, ugly, or infertile.

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The Qin emperor wanted his first son to inherit. An official, Zhao Gao, wanted the second son to be the ruler, so he forged a letter ordering the first son to commit suicide. Zhao Gao then murdered the chancellor so he could become chancellor. He forced the second emperor (who was mentally ill) to commit suicide. The third emperor murdered Zhao Gao and then surrendered to the Han.

I include this not because it’s particularly interesting but because it’s typical. I had thought that my vague understanding of Imperial Chinese court politics was probably exaggerated for literary purposes. If anything, the people I’d read downplayed it. Everyone is murdering each other all the time. As far as I can tell, the two most common causes of death for an emperor are murder and poisoning himself by drinking mercury to become immortal.

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The first Han emperor, Liu Bang, was one of only two emperors from a commoner family. He was so rude that he pissed off everyone he met, but inns let him drink for free because everyone bought more alcohol when he was around.

Liu Bang promised that he’d eliminate the entire Qin law code and only punish people for murder, assault, or theft. In the way of politicians everywhere, he immediately broke his campaign promises upon assuming office.

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One of the first student protests in history occurred in the Han, when eunuchs took power from a consort family. As many as thirty thousand students protested, chanting the names of the consort families they supported and eunuchs they despised.

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Han sex advice books offered explicit advice to men about how to bring women sexual pleasure, including drawings of female anatomy, sexual positions, and "the five noises women make when excited.”

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Sima Qian (whom I mentioned a bit earlier) was convicted of treason. He submitted to castration rather than honorably committing suicide so that he could finish Records of the Grand Historian.

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I don’t know if it would seem more normal if I’d grown up with Daoism, but from an outsider perspective historial Daoism is the griftiest religion. Laozi is continually appearing to people and telling them either:

1. Everyone should rebel against the government and install you as emperor and then society will be a utopia.

2. Everyone should give you lots of money and then you can make them immortal.

But the immortality only works if you keep all the secret techniques secret. If you tell anyone then they’ll stop working. If other people want to be immortal they also have to give the teacher lots of money. There’s even sometimes prosperity-gospel-style “if you’re sick it’s because you did something wrong, so you’re definitely not sick, right? Wow, our magic really does cure all illnesses!”

Sometimes the immortality is posthumous immortality. You gotta die first and then you’ll be immortal. Yes.

Confucian skeptics made arguments such as “if Daoists can fly, why doesn’t anyone see Daoists, like, jump really high even? It really seems like if you can actually fly we would be able to notice.”

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Another Confucian skeptic argument: “guys, I don’t think propitiating the earth does anything. We’re scattered across the earth and we take valuable things from the earth, like lice are scattered across our bodies and take our blood. But if a bunch of lice got together and performed rituals to keep us from punishing them for stealing our blood, we wouldn’t notice. They’re too small and we don’t speak Lice. So therefore the Earth doesn’t notice our rituals either.”

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Everything was aligned for Buddhism to be unpopular in China: it was foreign; all the religious texts were in Sanskrit; and it required celibacy, which was alien to Chinese sensibilities—how could you make children if you didn't have sex? However, Buddhist missionaries did a good job appealing to Chinese people: they adopted local deities and were flexible about whether people went to the underworld when they died. The first Chinese converts saw the Buddha as a powerful foreign god. He performed miracles like being immortal, flying, and emitting light, so probably he was stronger than local gods and could help with their problems.

Missionaries also appealed to regional rulers by emphasizing that a "wheel-turning" Buddhist king would have a well-functioning state. A key appeal of Buddhism to illiterate rulers is that it didn't make them dependent on literate Confucians.

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Daoism and Buddhism influenced each other so much that it's often hard to tell whether a practice was originally Buddhist or Daoist. For example, Daoist art of the Six Dynasties and Southern and Northern Periods looks strikingly Buddhist. Importantly, normal people—including the vast majority of both Buddhist and Daoist clergy—had no idea what the difference between Buddhism and Daoism was. They were just like "we cure the sick and rescue people from bad afterlives. We have some gods. There's going to be an apocalypse someday."

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The early translations of Buddhist texts were bad. Many used very simple vocabulary and syntax, which implies that they were transcriptions of talks by missionaries who didn’t speak Chinese very well. Translators didn't mention kissing or hugging, because the Chinese were more sexually conservative than Indians and the translators were worried it would put Chinese people off. “Gusband supports wife" was translated as "husband controls wife", and "wife comforts husband" as "wife reveres husband." All Buddhist concepts were translated as their closest Daoist equivalent: for example, "nirvana" was translated as "wuwei".

The first actually accurate translation project occurred when a king kidnapped a Buddhist monk, Kumarajiva, to work on his translation project. The king also forced Kumarajiva to father children so that the children would have his "dharma seeds."

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Buddhist monks and nuns were widely criticized for not paying taxes, hiding criminals, making loans at high interest rates, and not actually knowing anything about Buddhism.

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One Buddhist monastery dug a cave, carved copies of important Buddhist texts onto stones, put the stones into the cave, carved one thousand different Buddhas onto the pillars holding it up, and walled up the cave. Over the next four hundred years, they would create eight additional caves, before switching to burying copies of the texts. This process was intended to preserve Buddhist teachings when the apocalypse hit.

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Some Daoists believed that dead people could sue not only other dead people but alive people in the underworld courts. Bad luck was often due to judgments from underworld judges. (Of course, the Daoists would intervene for you if you gave them lots and lots of money.)

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The first Sui emperor placed his own son under house arrest for building an illegally expensive palace.

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The second Sui emperor decided to build a canal. This was a good idea, because the Grand Canal was a major reason for China's wealth for the next two thousand years and continues to be used in the present. This was a bad idea because building the canal was incredibly expensive, the dynasty didn't have enough money for its foreign wars, they lost, and the dynasty fell.

The Grand Canal continues to be the longest canal in the world even today.

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The second Tang emperor got into power by murdering his brother, watching his other brother get murdered, and then forcing his father to abdicate in his favor, so like that was a good omen for the dynasty.

According to legend, the King of the Dead summoned him to account for himself. He defended himself, saying that “a great sage will destroy his family to save the kingdom.”

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The protagonist of Journey to the West is, like, an actual guy? Who existed? (The monk, not the monkey.)

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Wu Zetian is the only empress who ruled in her own right in Chinese history and she did absolutely nothing wrong, ever, in her life.

One of her adventures: Wu Zetian fell in love with a cosmetics/drugs merchant. She appointed him as a Buddhist abbot so she could keep screwing him. He wrote a new commentary on the Great Cloud Sutra, a Buddhist sacred text which prophesied that a female goddess would be born as a queen in south India and be loved for her beauty and turn her kingdom into paradise. The commentary declared that this person was actually Wu Zetian. Wu Zetian ordered the building of a monastery in each prefecture in China, which would lecture on the Great Cloud Sutra. Considering this insufficient, she later declared herself the Maitreya Buddha who rules over a future paradise.

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The Tang law code is the first law code to survive in full. It was revised every ten to fifteen years. It was adopted by many subsequent dynasties and also Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.

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The Tang equal-field system divided all land into personal share land and perpetual holdings. Each family received a grant of personal share land, sized in accordance with the number of members it had; the grants were adjusted every three years. Because silk required long-term investment, mulberry tree plantations were perpetual holdings, which would stay in one family forever. While silk was the primary perpetual-holding crop, other crops that required long growing times were grown in perpetual holdings. Buying, selling, or renting land was illegal, but contracts show that people did it constantly anyway.

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The Tang government paid Buddhist monasteries to run hospitals. They got a bonus if fewer than a fifth of their patients died.

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Many people were buried with contracts and other documents so that they would have all the right documents when they faced the underworld courts.

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According to folklore, the underworld courts often accidentally make people stand trial for crimes committed by other people with the same name.

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Prices at markets in Chang’an, the capital city, were set by the market supervisor and changed once every ten days.

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One Buddhist teaching story explained the pointlessness of sacrificing food to the dead. Instead, you should pay for the copying of sutras or donate to monasteries, which is much more effective at getting your relatives out of the hells.

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According to Steven Pinker in Better Angels of Our Nature, the An Lushan Rebellion was the worst atrocity in history (in terms of dead as a percentage of world population). It was also an extremely stupid war that happened for no reason.

In the 740s, Emperor Xuanzong, who took over from Empress Wu Zetian, fell in love with Precious Consort Yang, the wife of one of his sons. She left her husband, temporarily became a Daoist adept, and then married the emperor. (He was almost sixty at this time.) Precious Consort Yang was close friends with a general named An Lushan and adopted him as her son. Later historians presume that An Lushan and Precious Consort Yang were fucking, but there's no evidence of this.

An Lushan was accused of plotting revolt, but Xuanzong believed he was loyal. He tried to make An Lushan chief minister, but couldn't because An Lushan was illiterate. Instead, over time, An Lushan came to be head of 30% of the Tang army.

In 755, An Lushan refused to attend Xuanzong's son's wedding and refused to stand in the presence of the emperor's envoy. Four months later, he rebelled. An Lushan quickly beat Xuanzong in early battles. The soldiers threatened to mutiny unless Precious Consort Yang was strangled. Xuanzong, grieving, ordered it done.

Xuanzong was forced to abdicate in 756. An Lushan died in 757. However, the war continued until 763.

The An Lushan Rebellion left the government in shambles. In order to maintain order, the emperor had to share power with the military governors. The emperor appointed rebel generals as military governors because so many people had died that, if he tried to only appoint loyalists as governors, many provinces would have no governor at all.. The rebel generals stopped paying taxes and seceded. The Tang lost a quarter of its area. Even governors who didn’t secede mostly ignored the emperor. The golden age of the Tang was over.

I have no idea why anyone in this historical event made any of the decisions they did.

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After the An Lushan rebellion, the government was no longer able to take censuses, so it couldn’t effectively tax its subjects. The tax base was a third of what it once was. The emperor appointed special commissioners for taxation whose job was to figure out how to get more revenue. After trying "selling offices, speculating with the money supply, and taxing trade," they landed on the salt monopoly. Salt was only produced in a few areas, so it was relatively easy to monopolize. By 779, half of the state's money came from the salt monopoly.

At this point, in my opinion, the Tang dynasty is really stretching the definition of “a government”. It’s more of a salt company with an army.

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A recurring theme in Chinese history is people making very bad mistakes, because they don’t know anything about economics, because The Wealth of Nations wasn’t going to be written for a few centuries and was in English anyway.

The Song invented paper money, realized this was great, started printing enormous amounts of paper money, and then flailed around in confusion when they suffered from hyperinflation.

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The two factions in the Song Dynasty of the 1000s were the historicists (who wanted small, gradual reforms) and the classicists (who wanted to return to the ways of the sage-kings). The historicists wanted small, gradual reforms; sharp limits on the monetary economy; and the preservation of traditional rich-poor relations. The classicists wanted to return to the ways of the sage-kings. They wanted government action to create more wealth and expand the monetary economy. The classicists supported a national school system to teach people about the Dao, so they would understand how to create wealth. Historicists opposed classicist "educational uniformity" because it would eliminate freedom of expression.

One signature classicist program was the Green Sprouts, a program which loaned money to peasants during the planting season that they could pay back after the harvest. That way, peasants wouldn’t be taken advantage of by landlords and moneylenders. Unfortunately, officials noticed that they could charge high interest rates to peasants and make more money. To pay back their loans to the government, farmers had to borrow from landlords and moneylenders—the exact people the program was supposed to route around. The classicists promoted them because they'd earned a lot of money. Meritocracy! Eventually, the peasants were all so in debt none of them could afford to pay anything, and the program collapsed.

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In 1078, China produced 3.1 pounds of iron per person—a level Europe only reached in 1700. The iron workshops were at a scale equivalent to the early Industrial Revolution, though without steam. Silk production was also fairly industrialized, with some technologies similar to the early Industrial Revolution.

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Sima Guang was the first Chinese historian to include different interpretations of the same events.

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Chinese artisans actually invented not just the printing press but also movable type. Movable type didn’t become popular, because Chinese has so many characters that it doesn’t save money compared to woodblock printing. However, books were usually cheaper in China than in the West. Because each character was a word, the books were much shorter and therefore cost less to make.

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Cheating on the civil service exams was widespread: bribing officials, copying other people's answers, paying someone to take the exam for you, smuggling in notes. Woodblock printing made cheating more economical, as bookstores sold tiny volumes of notes with characters the size of a fly's head. By the twelfth century, exams were anonymous, and the exam papers were recopied so that the grader couldn't recognize the examinee's handwriting. However, it was still possible to make yourself known to the examiner by using weird turns of phrase.

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Shrines to worthy men were common, especially in schools. Local "statesmen, officials, generals, famous loyalists, or writers" were commemorated with shrine tablets. These shrines were supposed to inspire people to excellence. They were a subject of worship and offerings of food and incense. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, people began to worship non-local worthy men: they built shrines in areas where the worthy man hadn't been born, hadn't worked, and in many cases hadn't visited. Many Confucians opposed this practice because people were supposed to venerate their local worthy men.

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"Colophons" are comments written directly on a painting by its owner or viewers. They were very common.

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"Cathay" and the Russian word for China, "Kitai", both refer to not to the Han but to the Khitan people, steppe nomads who ruled north China for two centuries.

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The Khitan people had the dumbest haircut in history:

By circa 12th century CE painter on Wikimedia.

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The Khitan leader Abaoji, the first emperor of the Liao Dynasty, was a pandaboo. He was Confucian and trained his sons in Chinese art, literature, music, and medicine. He ordered the creation of an ideographic script and a phonographic script. He built an imperial capital, even though he and his entire court were all nomads. Abaoji used Chinese-style mandatory labor service to build the capital, but he didn't know enough about how labor service worked to know that you weren't supposed to call the laborers during the agricultural season.

Throughout the Song, the Liao continued to be pandaboos: Civil service exams! Wearing Chinese robes at court! Honoring Confucius! They were also pandaboos in a less benign way, i.e. everyone in the imperial court spent all their time murdering each other, ordering each other to commit suicide, having ill-advised affairs, taking revenge on people they don’t like by mutilating their corpses, and so on and so forth.

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Abaoji's empress was supposed to have been executed when he died, but she preferred to be alive, so she arranged for the new custom to be that she chopped off her hand instead.

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The Song had this fantastic approach to foreign policy. Having a strong army was a bad idea, because the generals might get notions about the current location of the Mandate of Heaven and do a coup and then the emperor’s already short life expectancy would be even shorter. However, the Song were also very rich, and had all these silks and tea and porcelain that the steppe nomads really wanted. So why didn’t they just bribe the steppe nomads not to invade?

Naturally, the steppe nomads often reinvested the tribute into improving their armies so they could threaten the Song and get more tribute, and then eventually they invaded anyway. But it worked pretty well until then!

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Complete Self-Realization Daoism was founded after a guy saw a vision of the Daoist immortals. I have been harsh about Daoism, but Complete Self-Realization Daoism actually seems very nice.

Complete Self-Realization Daoism synthesized Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, which it saw as the three legs of the tripod. It promised inner peace through meditation. Followers were celibate, fasted regularly, and didn't eat meat or drink alcohol. Some monks and nuns lived lives of great asceticism: wearing only paper clothes, eating only a single meal of fruit, and not sleeping. Others lived basically normal lives. Complete Self-Realization Daoism organized orphanages for those who had lost their parents in the wars between the Song and the steppe nomads.

Complete Self-Realization Daoism was particularly popular among women, because it helped women whose husbands had died in the wars and because they could become fully ordained nuns once their children grew up. About a third of Complete Self-Realization Daoism clergy were female. Complete Self-Realization Daoism allowed men and women to interact freely, female teachers to teach men, and both men and women to study under the same teacher, all of which were unusual.

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Plays in the Jin Dynasty were often very horny. One play includes a long sequence where the protagonist plays the zither. Because "zither-string" was slang for the labia minora, it was maybe about fingering women. It definitely said that he was so good at playing the zither that it moved the woman's clitoris.

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Confucian scholars worried about teaching to the test and students failing to acquire true learning, just test-taking skill.

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Men in the Song were supposed to be virtuous, beautiful, graceful, and skilled in painting, music, calligraphy, poetry, and essay-writing. The ideal was quite effeminate. (Yes, The Open Empire explicitly says that.)

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A Mongol leader's personal supporters had to obey him only during war. At peacetime, the supporter only had to not work against the leader's interests. The armies were also paid in loot from successful battles. These created an incentive for leaders to always be at war.

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The Mongol army was about 130,000 people. Each soldier had several horses, so he could ride for three or four days. Each riderless horse had a "dummy soldier" on top, which made the army appear four times as large as it was. The Mongols put captives in the infantry, usually in front so that the enemy would have to shoot people from their own country. The Mongols adopted the iron stirrup from a different tribe of steppe nomads and the iron-tipped arrow and gunpowder from the Chinese. They not only had firebombs but even made a sort of primitive gun.

The Mongols behaved cruelly as a deliberate battle strategy: if they were sufficiently terrifying, cities would surrender without them having to fight. Mongol armies actually weren't great for siege warfare—their advantage was going fast. So they incentivized quick surrender through gruesome, brutal tactics: slaughtering everyone in a city including the cats and dogs, then sorting the heads into separate piles for men, women, and children; lining up everyone and killing everyone over a certain height; cutting off every resident's ears and piling them up.

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According to an apocryphal story, the Mongols wanted to kill everyone in China and use the land as pasture for their horses until an official explained to them the concept of “taxes.”

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Marco Polo's book is full of inaccurate information, in part because Polo used a ghostwriter who was used to writing romances. The ghostwriter self-plagiarized his own Arthurian romance for Marco Polo's Travels.

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An Italian woman, Katerina de Vilione, was buried in Yangzhou. This is all we know about her.

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The Mongols kept most of the bureaucracy as-is but set up new offices that ruled over particularly Mongol concerns, such as the Section for Retrieving Lost Animals.

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Mongol practices required the emperor to give lavish gifts to his royal entourage, but there was no plunder to give, so they printed huge amounts of paper money and then there was hyperinflation. The Wealth of Nations can’t come soon enough.

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"Encyclopedias" aimed at ordinary literate people were popular. They included sample contracts for various purposes, forms to sue someone for breach of contract, and sample letters to send to your child's fiance's parents.

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Judge Bao was a detective, who was based on an actual historical person, a famously incorruptible prefect of Kaifeng. Many mystery plays were written where he solved crimes.

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A Chinese painter, Ni Zan, was famously germophobic. He spent a night with a famous courtesan. Scared that she was dirty, he asked her to wash herself over and over again. Dawn came, and he sent her home without ever actually having had sex with her.

Ni Zan also painted bamboo and a tree in the evening. In the morning, he saw that they looked nothing like bamboo at all. He laughed and said, “Ah, but a total lack of resemblance is not an easy thing to achieve.”

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Zhu Yuanzhang, the Ming founder, is the only founder of a Chinese dynasty born to a poor peasant family.

Zhu Yuanzhang thought that society was good now that he was in charge, so there should be no social change. He had everyone register their occupation with the authorities, who would then require that man's family to work the same job forever. He assigned particular families to jobs for the imperial household, like making wine or growing lotus roots or sweeping tombs. He didn't collect taxes to pay those people because he assumed that the same amount of work would be required indefinitely. He forbade overseas trade.

My kingdom for an economist.

None of this worked. For example, successful examination candidates came from families assigned to agriculture, the military, producing salt, and artisan jobs, so we know there was some social mobility and people didn't stick to their assigned occupations. Many families paid other families to do their labor service obligations for them.

Zhu Yuanzhang alternated unpredictably between periods of leniency and violence. Corruption scandals or challenges to his authority sometimes led to the death of tens of thousands of people.

Zhu Yuanzhang thought that the usual practice of submitting blank tax reports, to be filled in at the capital, made corruption easier. So he dismissed ten thousand bureaucrats for submitting blank tax reports. He asked for criticism. One official pointed out that it was impossible for ordinary officials to know how much grain would reach the capital (since grain could be lost and people besides that specific official could steal it), so Zhu Yuanzhang had dismissed many innocent men. Zhu Yuanzhang sentenced the official to forced labor.

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The Yongle Emperor ordered the creation of an encyclopedia, which contained passages from nearly all writing that existed at the time. It was twenty-two thousand chapters long, too long to be printed, and so the few copies that existed were handwritten. Only a few thousand pages survive; the rest were destroyed in several nineteenth-century fires.

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Admiral Zheng He was a great Chinese explorer: he went as far as Africa. The ships were 200 feet long, the longest in the world. The fleet had 28,000 men. They ate freshwater fish that were kept in separate water-filled compartments in the ship. Zheng He also, unlike European explorers, knew where they were going: he had a remarkably accurate map of India and Africa.

However, the voyages were cancelled after Zheng He's death. The reason given was to save money: the voyages didn’t make a profit because foreign trade was illegal. However, they probably were actually ended to reduce the power of eunuchs at the court.

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The Ming particularly sought out exotic animals, which they viewed as auspicious beasts that indicated that the emperor was blessed by the Heavens. Giraffes were particularly prized, because they were seen as unicorns.

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The Mongols briefly kidnapped an emperor, which caused little trouble. The kidnapped emperor was just named "Grand Senior Emperor" and a new emperor was picked. The Mongols eventually returned the kidnapped emperor and a eunuch-backed coup gave him back the throne. But this was frightening enough that Ming foreign policy reoriented totally around defeating the Mongols.

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Chinese people’s primary objections to Christianity included:

1. Monotheism and the necessity of giving up one's traditional gods.

2. Chinese images were considered "graven images" but somehow Jesuit religious images weren't.

3. Jesus dishonored his parents because his body, which his parents gave him, was mutilated during the crucifixion.

4. It was weird that they were supposed to honor their fathers and mothers but not supposed to do ancestor worship.

5. They were only supposed to take one wife? Even if their wife hadn't produced an heir?

6. Priests should be celibate? Instead of producing heirs for the family?

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About 7.5% of Spanish silver wound up in China.

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The Ming ultimately fell in the stupidest way possible. The Wanli Emperor stopped going to court, because he didn’t want to and he was all-powerful so no one could make him. Only he could fill government posts, and ultimately 50% of government posts wound up vacant. The procedure for dealing with official wrongdoing was that the accused official would resign, and then the emperor would take the chance to clear his name. The Wanli Emperor ignored all such resignations: one Grand Secretary submitted 120 resignations with no response.

Things went on like this for nearly forty years. Eventually, the Wanli Emperor died. Although the Ming limped on for another 24 years, the affairs of state the Wanli Emperor had neglected—particularly the Manchus at the northern border, who would become the Qing—doomed the Ming Dynasty.

This is what happens when you don’t murder your emperors.

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The first emperor of the Qing appointed himself emperor when he was in no way in charge of China. He was just doing some Law of Attraction shit. Name it and claim it.

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The Qing initially wanted to make all Chinese men wear the queue hairstyle and all Chinese women stop binding their feet, but decided that they couldn’t get both and the queue was a higher priority.

Men with queues. Lai Afong, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

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The Qing briefly allowed the Jesuits to worship in their own churches but banned Christianity when they realized that the pope thought that he ruled over all Christians, even Chinese Christians.

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Tobacco was sometimes called "dry wine."

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In 1713 the emperor concluded that the country was as prosperous as it had been in the golden age of the Ming, and froze taxes at the 1713 level so that the government wouldn't tax people too much.

Wealth of Nations soon!

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The Qianlong Emperor decided that he wanted the greatest encyclopedia in all of Chinese history, even greater than the Yongle Emperor’s. He asked everyone in China to submit their books to the government. No one did, until he announced that the government would return all the books and not punish anyone for their choice of reading material. At that point, they received over ten thousand books. The final set, the Imperial Library in Four Treasuries, consisted of 3,461 books and was eight hundred million words long. Wikipedia only became longer than the Imperial Library in Four Treasuries in 2010. Seven hand-copied sets existed.

The Open Empire: A History of China to 1800 by Valerie Hansen. Published 2015.