Hi there!

Thanks again very much for asking me on, and accommodating my just-about-perfectly-mirrored schedule of yours!

I just wanted to also throw up a bit more "background" for the topic of the show that I never did quite get around to filling in on-air. We start in on Cao Cao, and who he was... but where did he come from.... i.e. what was the circumstance that enabled his ascension? So, here's a few "background" points that I hope shed a bit more light on the situation as we picked it up at the beginning of your show...

First off let’s hit the build-up to the 3Ks, since even starting with Cao Cao outright is kind of dropping us off in the middle of things. The Han Dynasty had stood as a bastion of strength and stability for almost 4 centuries, starting in the early 3rd century BCE, and with the exception of one really strange 20 bender under a usurper called Wang Mang, had been just the hugely important bedrock Han Chinese and East Asian culture altogether.

It was because of the Han rulership that China had remained stable and unified long enough to expand out of its cradle – the Yellow River Valley in N. China – and colonize much of East Asia south of the Yangtze River, and even set up garrisons along the Silk Road into the Far West of central Asia. But even after the Han’s restoration after Wang Mang, its leadership had rather quickly fallen back into complacency, glut, and overreliance on their officials. All of this led over time to an overall decentralization of authority as it was divested from the throne to the various court ministers, dukes, and imperial princes… who all began to behave more and more autonomously – basically like kings without any oversight

This, in turn, led many of them – and infamously a cabal of eunuchs (a class of people the Chinese historians just love to hate on right after women with power) who had saved the Han Emperor, and had been essentially granted blanket immunity to wring every last cent out of their fiefdoms in any way they pleased. All this was so flagrant, so open, that in 159 an official really stuck his neck out by including in a petition about this topic to the sovereign the rhetorical question, “Has the emperor been blinded?” You might imagine how that went for him… arrest and execution, forthwith!

Now all of this might have been alright if the imperial throne was in the hands of someone strong and trustworthy… however that obviously was not the case. Instead over the course of the late 2nd century the throne would pass to ever-younger “monarchs” – in 168 the 36 year old Emperor Huan died, and his wife chose their 11 or 12 year old son to assume the throne. This lack of leadership at the top would all the cabal of eight eunuchs to storm the palace and seize the imperial seal – effectively giving them de facto command over the entire imperial apparatus. The long-suffering people didn’t take this lying down (again it was just way too easy to blame eunuchs for all life’s problems) and in 180s a group that was being crushed by predatory tax burdens rallied around a prophecy saying that the sky would turn yellow and the cycle would renew itself and bring an age of prosperity. “The Blue Heaven has perished, and the Yellow Sky will soon rise! The cycle of years begins anew, and with it shall come renewed blessings and prosperity!” This was the so-called Yellow Turban Rebellion.

This is where the Romance of the Three Kingdoms begins. Though the Yellow Turbans were pretty quickly squashed and on their own don’t amount to much, they were the first drop of a flood... In this case, a literal flood… the Yellow River, or huang He... it's a love/hate relationship between the Yellow R. and the Chinese... it's the cradle of Chinese civilization – but perhaps more accurately known across time as “China’s Sorrow” or “The Scourge of the Sons of Han”. So the Yellow River floods in 183, which is just the final nail in the coffin as far as most of the peasantry is concerned – natural disasters are a sure sign that the ruling house has lost the Mandate of Heaven… full scale rebellions

On other bit while I'm thinking of it… just what is the Mandate of Heaven? Well, It’s at its most basic China’s “Divine Right of Kings.” Heaven and its own sovereign the Jade Emperor – in mythological times literally gave rise to the fist emperors of China who reigned for thousands of years and were essentially either gods outright, or at least demigods. It was actually put in place when the first guys to successfully rebel against a dynasty – the Shang unseating the Xia way back in the second millennia BCE – decided to try to simultaneously justify and seal up the exact way they’d just taken to power… “we may have militarily rebelled against the Xia, but they had it coming, Heaven said so! You can tell because we won and they lost!” It’s basically the ultimate self-serving right to rule thing – the winner was chosen by heaven, and the loser was obviously destined to lose from the outset; thus the affectation of all emperors: TianZi, the Son of Heaven

So please, if thre's any other questions on this period (or others, for that matter) I'd be thrilled to field them :)

And, of course, shameless plug here...

Please feel free to check out my very own baby podcast at The History of China Podcast's website | [iTunes] (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-history-of-china/id741606139?mt=2) !

Have you played or heard of Dynasty Warriors, a fairly popular game series based off of RoTK? Do you know how accurate the series was in portraying what really happened during this time period?

Will definitely have a listen!

I didn't know you guys did this.

Thanks for answering questions, /u/cthulushrugged. The Three Kingdoms era of China can be definitively nailed for me as my start of love for history, starting in high school with playing the Dynasty Warriors video games and the forum-based SimRTK role-playing game, then reading San Guo Yan Yi (which remains one of my favorite novels that's read once a year), and finally digging into the real history behind the legends and fiction whenever I can find good translations. I'll definitely be listening to the podcast later tonight after I get off work.

As for questions:

1. Professor Rafe de Crespigny is known to be the definitive western authority on Three Kingdoms-era China and the end of the Han dynasty. Having read "Generals of the South" and, recently, "Imperial Warlord," his works have been extremely illuminating. But, beyond that, there doesn't seem to be any other decent English-translated works on the topic beyond general Chinese history books that treat the Three Kingdoms era as an almost minor footnote. Given that Professor de Crespigny's works are extremely expensive and hard to get a hold of (I lucked the heck out getting a copy of "Imperial Warlord" for $165), are there any other English language works available that cover any topics concerning the Three Kingdoms era?

2. Beyond the general history, another tough point of research are topics such as clothing, housing, sundries, armour and weapons for the military, and other material details of Later Han culture. Being a sometime historic-recreator through the SCA, I've had a dream of recreating a Later Han era persona under Cao Mengde, but sources are exceedingly sparse, partly due to the PRC's general crackdown on literary research becoming public and also due to a general lack of solid translation efforts by Western authors. Do you know of any good works on the topic of material culture within the Later Han/Three Kingdoms that would cover one's bases for historic recreation?

To start of the questions, I want to return to a topic we briefly touched upon in the episode, and that is just how awful it must have been to live through this period of time. Do we have historical records, or works of art or literature, which are not focused on the elite dynasties, but instead portray how more common folk lived during this time of constant warfare? Particularly for those people who were living on the borders of these states, which saw invasion after invasion, what do we know about how they coped (or fled)?

Thank you :)

Hey /u/ucthulhushrugged, I know I'm pretty late to the party, but would you have any recommendations for video games based on Chinese history? There's so much unrealized potential in the West for it.

I'm pretty late, but I want to make a correction about when Cao Pi died. He died in 226, actually before Zhuge Liang's campaigns against Cao Wei. Cao Pi did try to enforce his imperial ambitions, but it was not the counterattack into Shu as said in the podcast, but a campaign across the Yangtze River into Wu, which failed.

Sima Zhao never became emperor of Jin himself. His invasion of Shu Han was so he can have the prestige to name himself emperor, but he never quite made it. Two years after the fall of Shu, Sima Zhao's son Sima Yan takes the throne from the last Wei emperor and named himself the Emperor of Jin. He then finishes the job by demolishing Sun Wu in 280.

If Zhuge liang couldn't make any progress invading north against Wei, why didn't he instead focus on conquering the Wu before moving north?

TIMEZONE NOTE: Just a reminder, our guest is currently in the only timezone the PRC needs, so responses to your questions may be delayed.

Special thanks to Elm, Mark K., Vlad, Max M., Will R., Sarah G., Bill R., and Richard B. for their generous support of the podcast through the AskHistorians Patreon.

Special mention to Matt F., for boldly being our first supporter, Andy B. for putting us over the top in meeting our first funding goal, and Bill R. for getting us to our second funding goal.

And, of course, a big thanks to /u/cthulhushrugged for spending his morning talking on the podcast. If you would like to hear more from him about the Three Kingdoms period, you can go to the History of China podcast and start with Episode 37: Things Fall Apart.

Finally, here are the selection of books that our lucky winner will be able to pick from following next episode's giveaway:

• Matthew Restall - Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest

• Hans van Wees - Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities

• John Hagedorn - The Insane Chicago Way: The Daring Plan by Chicago Gangs to Create a Spanish Mafia

• Herbert Butterfield - The Whig Interpretation of History