Thanks for your support, and looking forward to making more videos like this in the future!

This channel is way underrated. Should be way bigger. I hope he gets the recognition he deserves soon

Glad it was helpful! Yes this period is pure chaos to write about, although quite rewarding too.

Thanks! The next video will be on the Battle of the Fei River, one of the great battles in Chinese history, and I'm excited to finally get to it.

Thanks, it's definitely a very complicated period, and I've had a lot of fun making this video (and learned a lot too in the process).

Glad you like them, appreciate the support!

Glad you like them!

Welcome, glad you've found it helpful!

Thanks, appreciate it!

Thanks, appreciate it, and glad you found this helpful! I was a huge history buff growing up, so it's nice to finally be able to go back to my roots and share my interests with others.

Thanks, and it’s always great to discuss these ideas in more detail with you. Yes, the historiography of this time period, especially in the north, is quite messy. The main standard account comes from the Book of Jin, which was not compiled until the mid-600s and made use of many preexisting history texts, pretty much all of which has been lost. And since the Book of Jin was a government-sponsored book, it likely had a lot of biases that reflected the political realities of the 600s. I’ll talk about it more when I get to the Northern Wei Dynasty in the 400s, but there was a major political incident in which Cui Hao, a key Han Chinese politician, was executed and his supporters purged, and the official reason was because the version of Northern Wei history he compiled had put its early rulers in an unfavorable light. Afterwards, the original version of the book was destroyed and a new account was created. Rewriting history doesn’t get more blatant than this. For my research on Ancient Chinese political events I try to start with Chinese books written by serious modern historians who have already critically examined the original sources, and then only reference ancient texts like the Book of Jin or the Zizhi Tongjian to confirm some of the more outrageous things mentioned in the modern writings, otherwise it’s quite easy to get bogged down summarizing one outrageous political event after another. And if the Later Zhao murderous tyrants were bad enough, just wait till the 400s and 500s - the tyrants become worse by orders of magnitude. My personal suspicion is that some of these actions had to have been exaggerated, but who knows to what extent, and the sad reality was that in Ancient China deranged tyrants could get away with lots of brutal stuff as long as they didn’t hurt the interests of others in power. Many of these brutal stories are quite famous in the modern-day Chinese-speaking world and make up a part of how Chinese people see their past, and so I think it’s important to include at least some of them in the narrative without turning the video into a Hannibal Lecter biopic. Some of Later Zhao’s brutality may have been exaggerated, but there were still rebellions toward the end of Shi Hu’s reign that point to instability. Regarding Murong Ke, Former Yan did manage to conquer most of northern China under his leadership, and Former Yan did fall apart almost immediately after his death, so his accomplishments were likely to be mostly real. The Former Yan leadership was also known to be very welcoming towards Han Chinese scholars, so it’s certainly possible that Han Chinese scholars lionized people like Murong Ke, but the support also went both ways.

Another factor to consider is that Yan was eventually conquered by Northern Wei, and it's hard to see historians with pro-Northern Wei biases to be too keen to excessively eulogize members of the rival Murong family.

Glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks for your support - I'm glad you've found it helpful. I include a ton of information in these videos, and my goal is for viewers to be able to work through them slowly and then use them as a reference in the future. Regarding the pinyin tone markings, are there specific categories you're thinking about, such as geography, personal names, or the idioms? I can think about how to add them, and at the very least can try to add them in the video description section along with the Chinese characters to serve as additional reference materials as long as KZfaq formatting lets me include the tone markings. For the videos itself though with the way I'm making the maps now it might be tough to add in the markings, and I'm also worried the markings could make the videos too cluttered, which I'm concerned they already are. Another option, which I'm thinking about doing down the line anyway, is to just create a website or blog where I can include stuff like tone markings as reference materials.

Thanks for your continued support - it's been a fun learning process so far!

@@gatesofkilikien You ever review the Three Kingdoms tv series from 2010? It's all on KZfaq. I won't lie, SOME of the acting is awful but the majority is good. Fights are bad though

@@Sean12248 I've only ever watched the Three Kingdoms series from the early 90s, which is generally considered the best version. The props aren't as elaborate and some of the fighting scenes are pretty bad, but the acting, dialogue (which doesn't matter as much when translated into English anyways), and attention to detail are all superb.

@@gatesofkilikien All that matters to me is a good story. You can have a mediocre set and tell an amazing story. Babylon 5 is a great example. It didn't have the best sets but it was very good especially after season 1. Is Three Kingdoms 90s on KZfaq?

@@gatesofkilikien Wait never mind it is! I'll finish 2010 and then watch the 90s version. It looks good

Thanks!

It was only the emperor Liu Yao that was drunk at the final battlefield. He was recorded as a drunkard and may grew overconfident from his many minor victories against Shi Le. As he was drunk he made a grave mistake of fighting enemy cavalry with infantry in open terrain, and also badly injured himself falling from his horse on the retreat, thus being captured.

Extremely difficult to answer. The people coming off of central asia were far too nomadic and left too little records or archaeological evidence for us to reconstruct events with accuracy. Many also intermingled with other tribes so the ethnicity differentiation can get murky.

"Race" isn't real

Yeah so many crazy events in Chinese history, and no anticlimatic ending either lol

The "two-legged sheep" story is almost certainly fabricated, since it didn't emerge in the historical records until many centuries later, which is why I left it out of the video.

@gatesofkilikien There just wasn't enough food back then, not to mention meat. They wouldn't eat horse and cow, cuz they were banned by tribal leaders. The only things left were dogs and certainly 2 legs beings wherever the barbarians went to conquer. One tribe was said to be too barbaric that made others too angry, eventually this tribe got exterminated.

@@lionerniec856 of course food was scarce back then, and certainly cannibalism could have happened. It's just that the story of the "two legged sheep" in particular was a later invention. This is just a general observation on my part and not backed by academic articles, but it does seem like as time went on in Chinese history, stories of cannibalism became more frequent, so I wonder if at some point it wasn't just a propaganda device. The rebels Huang Chao and Zhang Xianzhong were both said to have engaged in mass cannibalism, and the accounts are so ridiculous they're very like fabricated. But at the same time these kinds of stories were much rarer, or at least less dramatic, from earlier periods in Chinese history. I wonder if the turning point in this narrative was the Siege of Suiyang with Zhang Xun during the An Lushan Rebellion - the systemic cannibalism there was so extreme and out of the ordinary that after the battle the concept gradually entered public consciousness, if only as a rhetorical device for propaganda purposes.