Thanks, appreciate the support! I'm working on a lot more right now, and looking forward to uploading them once they are done.

Thanks again for your thoughtful feedback as usual. I agree this is definitely a topic I should delve more into, especially with the Medieval Chinese History series I'm currently working on. I'll probably slowly introduce more and more discussions on these topics in the series, and in the future I can work up to doing a few videos on specific topics like polearms, siege engines, city wall construction, etc...

You’d be absolutely right. I don’t even watch the Chinese movies to have that fuzzy idea you describe.

@@gatesofkilikien I would also love to see this!

Thanks, glad you've found it helpful, and appreciate the feedback! I love geography and feel that being able to visualize it it is such a fundamental part of understanding history, so hopefully this video and future ones, especially with the topographical maps, can provide more context on why certain patterns of development or political events panned out the ways they did.

That's quite cool you have a connection to this area, and I hear the food there is incredible (hearty, spicy, if that's your thing). So many Chinese cities like Xuzhou, as with elsewhere in the world too, still have these cool local names that provide connections with the past.

@@gatesofkilikien the local specialty of 地锅鸡 is fantastic, I always make sure to eat some when I go there or an area near by. Xuzhou food just has the perfect mix of spicy and numbing spice 辣和麻辣. I live in shanghai now for work and honestly you can’t find any proper shandong or xuzhou food it’s sad.

Thanks, glad you've enjoyed it!

astronesian languages people. that's why now japanese people are very chinese in DNA

The CCP is not the China this vid is referencing, the CCP is a foreign socio/political cancer that has systematically obliterated almost every trace of actual Chinese history and culture, unlike Taiwan..

Thanks! Yes the historiography of China goes back far enough that just about any random spot in this region could trace its history back thousands of years, and the amount of information available (almost all solely in Chinese) is overwhelming. Xuzhou in particular is extremely famous, and with this video I've only just scratched the surface of everything that took place around it. Appreciate the support, and I'm currently working on various other videos on Chinese history too.

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it!

Yes I suppose it would have been possible, and that's essentially what happened in the 1800s when the Yellow River flooded again and this time took the course of another preexisting river. The central issue though was that the Ming and Qing Dynasties were focused on keeping the Grand Canal open, and any northward disruption of the Yellow River would jeopardize the Grand Canal. So they basically forced the Yellow River to keep its southerly course at all costs. The other factor to consider is that they could have just shipped grains from the Yangtze Delta to Beijing by sea, foregoing the need for the Grand Canal completely. But due to a lot of political reasons the priority was to keep the Grand Canal open at all costs, even if ocean navigation was orders of magnitude cheaper. But to keep the Grand Canal open all kinds of suboptimal decisions had to be made regarding the Yellow River and the Huai River, leading to an ecological disaster across the entire region that's still being felt today.

If you're going to watch it again, or again after the second time, that'll be definitely more then once.🤔

Yeah Xuzhou and Xiangyang are basically 1a and 1b in terms of most fought after cities in China, although Xuzhou probably edges out Xiangyang since a lot of battles fought near Xuzhou get lumped in together with it, and Xuzhou was a lot more significant in the 20th Century than Xiangyang was. I've started to write a draft for a video on Xiangyang, but am still some ways off from finishing it.

Thank you!

It's something I can talk about eventually as I get to the Song/Yuan dynasties. There's been a ton of changes to the geography in the region with the way the Yellow River changed its courses, so would be a pretty complicated/technical subject, but still good to discuss given how famous it is.

Thanks, I try my best to make good accurate maps, glad to hear you like them!

@@gatesofkilikien I'm no cartographer but I'm autistic and have loved maps since age 3 lol it's honestly the best I've seen for understanding the general implications of topography on human society. I also really like M. Laser's maps, they're quite similar to yours in that regard

Yes I've also been working on videos for ancient Greece and Rome and have 2 uploaded so far, although lately Chinese history has taken most of my time so I haven't been able to work on them as much.

Thanks, and great thought - it's certainly something that's happened many times in Chinese history. In this case though the reason was much more boring and technical, basically during the Sui and Tang Dynasties the commanderies (with names like "Pengcheng") got converted into prefectures (with names ending in "Zhou", like Suzhou, Hangzhou, etc...). There's a lot of reasons behind the change and I'm planning to explain it in a different video on how Chinese administrative divisions work. My early draft for this video on Xuzhou had a partial explanation but it was just too complicated to include with everything else for this video.

Chinese city names could also be a good video too. Heck, you can make it into a long series. That's because Chinese cities can get renamed a lot throughout history.

Pengcheng is the name of this city, and Xuzhou is the name of the province where it is located. In thousands of years of language habits, people gradually became accustomed to calling the city Xuzhou, and it became the official name.

Thanks, I'm really glad to hear you've found this info helpful. I plan to do a whole series on medieval Chinese history. I'm in the middle of the period of disunity from 100s-500s right now, but after that the next sections in the series would be the Sui and Tang Dynasties. I'm also in the planning stages for a concurrent series on ancient Chinese history that takes place from the early beginnings to the fall of the Han Dynasty, so between these two series and some additional projects I want to work on in the meantime it might be some time before the series reach the Tang Dynasty, especially the latter half of the Tang Dynasty. In the meantime I can include more snippets about the Tang Dynasty in videos like the geography videos. The first half of the Tang Dynasty can be a bit boring unless the narrative delves deeper into court politics, and the second half is by far one of the most chaotic, convoluted periods in Chinese history, but even then there should be plenty of topics I can fit into the geography videos. Are there also any specific topics about the Tang Dynasty that you'd be interested in my discussing down the line?

Definitely, will do!

Thanks, will do!

It's not about Xuzhou in particular, although I'm reading the book "Medieval Chinese Warfare 300-900" and so far it seems quite good. Most of my research has been in Chinese though, so in general it's hard for me to recommend English books, although I'm beginning to make a list of good English books that perhaps I can eventually compile into a recommended books list.

Thanks!

Most sources I've read suggest he did mean to hold on to the conquered territories, especially since he left his son plus an all-star lineup of generals in charge. It took some self-destruction of epic proportions for the Jin army to lose Guanzhong. Fighting Northern Wei on the open plains Hebei would have been Liu Yu's biggest challenge, but then the local elites on the North China Plain may have preferred to collaborate with him rather than the Tuoba Xianbei, not to mention that had he kept Guanzhong and reinforced his presence there, plus kept his experienced generals and soldiers alive, it would have put him in a much better position to attack Northern Wei. Ultimately though he would just have to have had lived 10 more years.

Haha thanks, glad you've enjoyed the content and found it helpful :)