Oh wow I’ve finally finished writing the Chinese history series. I wouldn’t have dreamed of finishing it when I started the series 3000 years ago. If you ask me, can you write sustainably on a topic over a long time, now I can proudly tell you: yes, badly.
The series started as a stupid message thread in iMessage. It was originally shorter and written in Chinese. And full of puns like 洛杉矶胡人 and 荆州勇士. Then my friend said, you should turn this into a blog post. But the puns didn’t work in English. So I rewrote the post from scratch in English, with a different set of cultural references and stuff. That became part 1. Then parts 2, 3, 4. And the rest is… you know.
We know about all the ugly parts of that history because Chinese historians had an unusual tradition. They were supposed to write down what actually happened. Without that tradition, history would just be propaganda and Excel spreadsheets.
There was a minister who murdered the king. He told the historian, no, don’t write that down! The historian refused. The minister killed him, and the next historian still refused. The minister killed him too, and the next still refused… until the minister gave up. And the historian wrote that down as well, which is why we know about it today.
The most famous example of this is probably Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian. He was castrated by Emperor Wu of Han (AKA Liu Che in part 2 of the series). So he was like, you dared chop off my balls, so I’ll dare write about your ancestor kicking his children off a cart.
Here’s another story from the book. Once, a lobbyist in the Warring States era got beaten up by some people. When he got home, his wife said, if it weren’t for your lobbying, you wouldn’t have been beaten like that. He asked her, is my tongue still in my mouth? She said yes. He laughed and said, that’s enough.
Did the lobbyist really say that? We don’t know. Sima Qian probably didn’t know either. But is it something the lobbyist could’ve said? Yeah, probably. Anyway, I’m just telling you this because I didn’t invent the format. I was just copying some dude from 2000 years ago.
And here are all the parts of the series in one place:
- Part 1 (Zhou – Warring States)
- Part 2 (Qin – Western Han)
- Part 3 (Xin – Eastern Han)
- Part 4 (Three Kingdoms)
- Part 5 (Jin – Sui)
- Part 6 (Early Tang)
- Part 7 (Wu Zetian – An Lushan rebellion)
- Part 8 (Late Tang – 5 Dynasties and 10 Kingdoms)
- Interlude (On absolute power)
- Part 9 (Early Northern Song)
- Part 10 (Late Northern Song)
- Part 11 (Southern Song)
- Part 12 (Yuan)
- Part 13 (Early Ming)
- Part 14 (Middle Ming)
- Part 15 (Late Ming)
- Part 16 (Early Qing)
- Part 17 (Qianlong – Daoguang)
- Part 18 (Opium War – the fall of Qing)
The history of China continues. But dear reader, forgive me, for I must stop here. If I had kept writing, they would’ve gotten me and put me in a little dark room.