Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 256 - The Taiping Rebellion Part 1: Jesus Christ's Little Brother

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

A man fails a civil service exam, loses his goddamn mind, and leads China into the deadliest civil war in human history. Part 1/4 Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: Johnathan Spence. God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. Stephen Platt. Autumn in the heavenly kingdom Jian Youwen. The Taiping Revolutionary Movement

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the

Legion of the Old Crow today. And now back to the show. Hello and welcome to Lines Up by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me again trapped in the content minds is Nate for another series. How you doing, buddy? I'm doing very well. I really wish we would actually have real spring in the United Kingdom. But if you're in the UK right now, it's March 9th when we're recording this. You know, it sucks. And I just don't like riding my bike and sleet. So I'm working from home today. Hopefully it doesn't sound too bad. Passing up the opportunity to record in the nice Trash Shooter studio because I fucking hate being cold. Yeah. I mean, it's not cold here anymore. The worst of our winter is definitely over,

but now it's shitty and raining out. Spring is still too far away to truly enjoy it. But I will take being able to walk outside without the air hurting my face. It's all about the little victories. And also, I think let's be real here. I need to keep it in perspective. It doesn't really get that cold here compared to the Caucasus. It's just that it feels cold because houses are drafty and things along those lines. It's just you feel it more here. But I'm being a baby.

It's really like hovering around freezing right now, which is no fun, but that's a lot different than like, you know, 20 below. I think I've said this before on the show that like, after going through two winters here now in the caucuses, um,

you'd, you'd expect the winter to be really, really bad. Um, but coming from the Midwest, our winters in the Midwest are significantly worse. So I'm doing great. I've been kind of pressured socially from people, not my friends or anything. But when I'm walking to the gym, everybody is still wearing winter jackets, even though it's not that cold.

It is 48 degrees Fahrenheit right now, which as you know, in the Midwest, we'd be wearing shorts again. Yeah. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Um,

like I put on my jacket today and went outside to go to the gym. Like it is not even fucking cold out. Uh, but Hey, I am trying to, uh, uh, assimilate into weather norms by wearing too many clothes.

And then I'm walking back from the gym, putting all my clothes back on. I'm like, fuck, I'm sweating. This sucks. Yeah, well, see, lucky for me, our gym is cold as shit because they are keeping the heat as low as possible to save on exorbitant energy costs. So I don't have that problem. exorbitant energy costs. So I don't have that problem, but I do have the problem that the last time I went to the gym,

there was no water running in the urinals in the men's room. So you can imagine how much that smelled. But when you wash your hands, the water is freezing cold because they didn't have hot water turned on. They did for the showers, thankfully, but not for the sinks.

And it was just like, man, we are definitely... The fact that we're going through this full-on rationing because of energy costs, and it's fully self-inflicted, would be extremely funny if you didn't have to live through it. But when you are living through it, you're like, it's just annoying. And that I feel like is a great summation for life in the United Kingdom in 2023. But we're not talking about the United Kingdom in 2023. We're talking about 19th century Chinese history,

if I'm not mistaken. Unfortunately, we will have to talk about the United Kingdom at some point here. But yes, we have talked a lot about civil wars over the years on this show, though obviously we are both Americans, despite the fact that we've immigrated elsewhere, and we have an overwhelmingly American audience. The Civil War that probably comes to mind to most

people listening is the American Civil War. One of the most apocalyptic events in American history. At the end of the war, around 600,000 people were dead, making it, so far, the most deadly war in American history. The country lay in ruins, and foundationally, it would never be the same again. Now, Nate, what if I told you the Civil War we're going to be talking about over the next couple weeks has a death toll 30 times higher than that, and it can very easily be considered the most deadly Civil War in human history, and I need to add a caveat to this, unless I am punished for my hubris, the most deadly Civil War in human history. And I need to add a caveat to this unless I am punished for my hubris. The most deadly civil war in human history so far. So far. I would believe you because

every time that I have looked at things like idly browsing Wikipedia for things along the lines of list of most deadly terrorist attacks or something like that and you'll get to one from a different rebellion in china in like the 1500s or something and it'll be like oh yeah rebels intentionally destroyed a dam flooding a river valley and killing 300,000 people and it's just like oh okay they're on a different scale like these does happen at some point here oh my god i don't think it's the same one. That's the funny thing. No, it's happened a few times. It's happened a few times.

Yeah, I'm sure it's a separate incident in which people intentionally destroyed a dam to terrorize the civilian population. And it did like, I don't know, Indian Ocean 2004 Christmas tsunami levels of damage to one community. Like it's unbelievable but that's yeah that's that's what that that that is for better or worse the thing that i take away as a complete

non-expert whenever i encounter uh pre-modern chinese history and i don't know if this would count as pre-modern but let's say pre-20th century chinese history and that's not to like exoticize the chinese. It's just to say that in Chinese history, in some of these situations, you have such massive forces arrayed against one another that invariably the scale is just so much larger than the events that dominated, for example, American history aside from like, you know, if we're taking out the 20th century, then at least like outside of things along the lines of the Revolutionary War, like lots of Americans died in the Revolutionary War, but it wasn't in the millions. There weren't

even millions of people in America at that point. Yeah. Like a good comparison. Honestly, we just did King Philip's War. And that is a percentage-based apocalypse scenario rather than raw numbers. We're talking about the Taiping Rebellion. And we're going to be talking about massive scales, like a massive scope of human suffering. And what is very common during war, like we've talked about before,

like during this war and wars of the past, is the vast majority of deaths that occur have nothing to do with combat. It's a very destabilized country already, very prone to famine for reasons we will talk about soon. And that will happen again. Very prone to rebellion during the same era, like the Taiping Rebellion is by far not the only rebellion happening in China at the same time. So it is the scope of human misery that comes with complete chaos and destabilization. We often see this during the collapse of the Russian Empire, just because the area is so large, the populations are so large, and there's so many different variables that can lead to mass death and human suffering. And one thing I would throw in there too also is that the

standard of living in the 19th century in general across the world is not great for the average person. But when you factor in what you were just describing, the overwhelming majority of deaths in these stories tend to be not from combat, but rather from starvation or disease, that people were really living in such precarious circumstances that a disruption over the course of a harvest or a year could absolutely kill a huge portion of them. And similarly, oftentimes, their nutrition, their access to food, when I talk about standard of living, was so poor that the disruption of a huge military action, the loss of food supply being forced to flee would kill people because quite frankly, we talk about a lot of people in the United States and the United Kingdom being basically one

missed paycheck away from homelessness. And imagine this on a much more severe scale that these people in a lot of times were one disruption of the food supply away from mass starvation. Yeah. I mean, the area of China, specifically the South during the mid to late 1800s, around the same time of the US Civil War, actually, they are one bad season of weather away from whole villages dying. And this is before over the course of over 10 years between 1850 and truly 1871 would be the last rebel army that would finally be snuffed out. But the, the, the peak of the rebellion ends at 1864.

Um, this is all caused by a man who loses his fucking mind after failing a Chinese civil service exam, but begins to believe himself to be Jesus's literal brother, and launches a genocidal war against China's ruling Manchu population. It's estimated that these actions directly caused the death of 30 million people while committing crimes that would make ISIS step back and think, I think you've gone too far. That's unreal. Yeah. I mean, I do find it very interesting too. And I hope we get to talk about

this in more detail, the degree to which Christianity, Christian evangelism, missionary action in China, in East Asia in general, creates some very, very strange sort of syncretic beliefs. And this is, in a way, a story of a kind of like Christian dominionism, not the exact same kind that we talk about in the United States in the modern day, but rather like this is a kind of messianic offshoot of Christianity sort of using the language, using the theology of Christianity, but in a very, very distinctly regional way and specific to its time. And that makes it like, you could also make the argument if you wanted to be a real dickhead

about like, well, there are some examples of similar things happening in the United States in terms of like, hmm, 19th century messianic interpretation of Christianity that's completely localized. I have never, ever heard of that in America. But it's interesting to see how this plays out and what the consequences of this are in a place so ripe for conflict. I do have to say that the Taiping Reiping rebellion is formed around a guy um who we'll talk about obviously in depth but the religion that he creates is functionally christian um but it's called taiping christianity and his beliefs were so strange which again we will we will talk about i have read so many of the the the bible scriptures that this guy

wrote himself because again he believes he is the son of god the literal son of god um along with jesus he's jesus's little brother um that the christian missionaries that he did come in contact with thought he was insane um uh for instance uh i don't want to give away too much off the bat. This happened almost independent of the evangelicalism and the spread of Christianity through China. This happened kind of, I don't even want to say secondary to it, almost like tertiary Christianity. Because he also hated almost every other kind of christian um so this was the taiping rebellion uh of course we have to go back quite a ways to see the real seeds of war and how the fuck so many people fell in line with a guy who was functionally a total

failure but styled himself as the heavenly king um for, we're going to talk about our sources for this series because there's quite a lot. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom because Heavenly Kingdom is what he called his area by Stephen Platt is probably the most easily accessible and readable, but there's also

one called God's Chinese Son, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xinkuan by Jonathan Spence. Now, if you really want to get into one called god's chinese son the taiping heavenly kingdom of hong xin kwan by jonathan spence now if you really want to get into um the theology and the actual written words of hong xin kwan the man who would be style himself heavenly king god's chinese son is where to do it i will tell you though it is fucking dense and pretty unaccessible. That has nothing to do with Jonathan Spence. That has everything to do with the fact that he is translating the words of Hong Xinhuan, a literal insane man. And finally, the Taiping Revolutionary Movement by Jian Yaowen.

This has more to do with the egalitarian nature of the revolution, because there's a lot of people who consider the Taiping revolution to be proto-communist, to include Mao Zedong. And I have to say, I vehemently disagree with this for reasons we'll talk about later. And as for names I'm about to mispronounce, and names I probably already have, I did my best. Please leave me alone. I do not speak Chinese in any form of Chinese. Now, China in the beginning of the timeline we're talking about here is ruled by the Qing Dynasty. Its emperor, Jianfang, is the seventh emperor of the dynasty.

And the Qing are Manchu. Sorry, you said the last thing I heard was you said the Qing were Manchu. So they're descended from Eastern people who came to China from beyond the Great Wall. And they're a group of people who the rest of Chinese different ethnic groups would consider them barbarians for a very long time. At least until the Ming Dynasty collapsed and the Manchu took power via the Mandate of Heaven, or the idea that the Chinese emperor had been divinely chosen to be the ruler of the Chinese people. And as, as weird as that might sound, this is functionally the same idea that European Kings also had,

um, you know, that, that they were divinely chosen by God, uh, to be elevated people over the peasants. Like it's, it's nothing that didn't happen in Europe as well.

And I mean, functionally, it's manifest destiny as well. The Manchu themselves were a very tiny minority made up of the elite of this new Chinese society at the time. They kept their own language and customs. They lived in their own walled-off towns and cities. And over time, the people had gained their power by being the most terrifying, fearsome warriors to ever invade China, became fat, rich, and spoiled by their own newly created aristocracy. And this is even more true for the Chinese emperor. The emperor rarely, if ever,

would leave his palace, which was more like a city than what you think of as a palace. It contained everything he would ever need, had landscapes recreated within its walls so the spoiled emperor could pretend he was out of his palace doing normal people things like hunting and other stuff like that. He effectively lived in his own world. He was so spoiled, he had his own color of cloth that only he could wear, his own pronouns that only he could refer to himself by. There's even a special kind of ink that only he could write in. He was divorced from reality. We have often said on various shows that we're on, Nate, that reality bends around someone when they get a certain amount of money.

Yes. I have never seen reality bend so much around a single person than the Chinese emperor. And a quick thing I would throw in there too, just so people understand this, is that Manchu people being historically from the area of China or East Asia referred to as Manchuria, which becomes more prominent during the initial part of World War II. But just to understand that this is like north of the Korean peninsula into like areas of what's now Far East Russia as well, and then also into Inner Mongolia in Northeastern China. So completely, completely different language.

Actually, the language is written vertically from top to bottom. It's completely different language actually the language is written vertically from top to bottom uh it's it's completely different from i mean china is you can't talk about china especially back then as having any kind of like unified homogenized culture because there's so many different languages cultures etc but like this is a very very distinct culture traditions etc culture, traditions, et cetera, from all of... I mean, you actually could separate out Chinese, what we perceive of as Chinese versus this in the sense that it is just so incredibly different from what the average Chinese imperial subject would be experiencing. Yeah. And I would say, because we're about to talk about it, the only real unifying force, if you want to call it that amongst chinese society was the aristocracy because they created one this was mostly via a massive army of civil servants these people were chosen by an intensely rigid civil service

exam system that took literally your entire life to study for people would men of course because for a long time was only men, would start at four or five years old and then test when they're almost 20, sometimes later. This is a system that had a pass rate, depending on where in China you took it and when, in what year, of around 1%. It is generally thought of by historians to be the hardest test ever devised by a man. You could retest an unlimited amount of times, mind you. But depending on where you live and again, what era, because this civil service exam existed for a millennia, a very, very long time. You could take once per year or sometimes once every three years.

So and not to mention this is studying for this test is a full-time job. Most people who are studying for the test will maybe work as teachers, but you live a life of poverty while you're doing this. And it gets worse. The exam system was actually considered revolutionary, at least for its time, because it was invented to create an actual meritocracy, right? To test people on their knowledge in a series of subjects for a job within the government, rather than simply hiring them because you fell out of someone and they were important, right? Hypothetically, it was not supposed to have anything to do with your birth. And we should jump in here to point out a thing that has been one of my personal... The British use the term bugbear, but let's just out a thing that has been one of my personal uh the british

use the term bugbear but let's just call it thing that annoys me which is that the term meritocracy is something that was when it was coined was described as something derisive like that this would be a bad thing of course but but at the same time we have much like australians with the term the lucky country that term was used to describe something that was bad and now has been like, I believe it was Donald Horn said that Australia is a lucky country, but ruled over by second rate leaders who do not share its luck. But everyone's like, oh, we're the lucky country. It's been repurposed to be positive. Similarly, the ugly American. If you've ever read the book, The Ugly American, it's trash repurposed to be positive similarly the ugly american if you've ever read the book the ugly american it's trash it fucking sucks but i will say that it's it's so incredibly uh like

just i can't describe how incredibly patronizing it is towards people in the developing world but if you do understand having read the book you actually want to be the ugly american because he's the guy who manages to by eating fil eating Filipino food and playing the harmonica, hypnotize Filipino people, or rather people in a fictional country that's supposed to look like the Philippines, hypnotize them like the Pied Piper of Hamelin into not being communist. So you do actually technically want to be the ugly American. And finally, so meritocracy here, bad, but as Joe just said, in a situation where if you pass an exam, you are able to enter into this class of civil servants is at least revolutionary versus the way it was typically done, which is like you're a courtier because you are royalty or aristocracy by birth.

Yeah. And you could see why the old world or whoever would see this as a bad system because you're giving plebs power right um now these exams were insane um there was a series of them the exams served to ensure a common knowledge across the board of everybody within the civil service of uh being able to write the same way a very specific kind of professional writing, Chinese classics, calligraphy, imperial edicts, government decrees, judicial rulings, language skills of this would eventually be bent and tests would be given in Manchu language for reasons we'll talk about. It also required you have a near encyclopedic knowledge of Confucianism. You had to memorize, I believe, seven or eight different books for this exam. Now, this is also on top of being a good idea to create a functional

government, hypothetically, it made for a unification tool because like we talked about, China is huge, countless cultures, different languages. And this is the one through line to at least bring the government all together. Now, I need to put a massive asterisk next to this. This is all hypotheticals. This obviously did not work forever. Like we said, test takers took years studying for it. They had to memorize multiple books just to have, again, a 1% or less chance of passing. And this would be almost a lifelong process. Though not everybody was able to sit for these exams. The obvious ones that probably shouldn't surprise

anybody were criminals and slaves cannot sit for the exam. However, where things get kind of funny is that actors also couldn't test, which, you know, fine. I'm also going to include stand-up comedians with that because you know why you shouldn't be able to test for this, as well as prostitutes and the children of prostitutes.

And for a time, like I already pointed out, women were just straight up not allowed to test. Eventually, that was changed. And on exam day, there were several different levels that you had to take, and they got harder as you went on. And it was an all-day event. It absolutely broke kids mentally and physically. And at the end, because depending on what year, it's 1800, 1700, whatever, you sometimes have to wait a month to get your exam results back. So during that month, it was common for just people to go into hibernation. And suicide was not uncommon,

should someone fail it? Because at that point, it's like, I've wasted my life. I have made my family penniless for putting me through this. And so they kill themselves. For an example, here's a firsthand witness account of one by a man named Pu Sung Ling. He says, quote, when he first enters the examination compound and walks around panting under the heavy load of his luggage, he is like a beggar. Next, while undergoing the personal body search and being scolded by the clerks and shouted at by the soldiers, he is just like a prisoner. When he finally enters the cell, the cell is where you take the actual test, and along with other candidates, he stretches his neck to peer out. He is like the larva of a

bee when the examination is finished at last he leaves his mind in a haze and his legs tottering he is just like a sick bird that has been released from a cage that sounds pretty miserable yeah yeah and you know once upon a time this system kind of worked but at the at the point of we're telling it had been going on for thousands of years or more. And it was really starting to show its cracks. Over the years, elite academies were formed to tutor the rich, while the poor were left on their own to figure out how to pass. By the time the king came to power, they messed with the test. Like I said, they're giving out tests in Manchu.

And they made it so their Manchu men could pass them and enter the government system and into the aristocracy. Eventually, an official quota was put in place to make sure no matter how well a Han Chinese person did on the test, more Manchus would be given passing grades by simply giving them extra points for being Manchu. There's also horrible corruption in a lot of cases where the rich and powerful just pay their way for their idiot kids to get a passing grade, which I'm sure everybody assumed was happening already before I even got to this point. I also want to say when people describe the American education system, particularly admissions to elite institutions as a meritocracy, you definitely see the exact same thing happening over and over and over again. It's almost like people aspiring to be elites who have money simply do not want there to be a level playing field ever. And it's almost like this plays out throughout history. So that's my little rant to derail things. I won't go on too long. But I mean, you can just pick any country that has a system like this. A great example of a system comparable in terms of a big exam, determining what you are going to study, where and when is the way it works in France. I don't know the intense details of it, but a friend of mine who's French once described it as if you take the exam, basically on the science track, the top people in the top tranche become doctors and surgeons and the people on the bottom tranche might be allowed to become veterinarians or physical therapists, but that's

it. It's a similar kind of thing. But what you're describing in China is so much worse, so much more open to corruption, partially because of just the way in which it's administered and the degree of personal interference involved. But also, I think that same kind of age-old trend of it's a, you know, scare quotes level playing field, but actually people with money, resources, and proximity to power will bend it so that their mediocre children can get a thing that even the hardest working and most skilled, most talented person from the non-elite echelons or elite adjacent echelons of society cannot get, no matter how hard they work. Yeah. I mean, to be completely honest, I think if you have any system that's as important as any kind of civil service exam,

which China still does to this day and has functionally still the same problems. I think the US has one too. I mean, yeah, the US does have a civil service exam. I'm not sure about the federal government level completely. I know that New.S. has one, too. I mean, yeah, the U.S. does have a civil service exam. I'm not sure about the federal government level completely. I know that New York City definitely has one because you have to study for the test to be a subway driver or to be a cop or whatever. I used to be a paramedic and a firefighter, and I had to take a civil service exam. But it's regional, right? And I truly don't see how you'd cheat on those exams because they're much smaller. And if you fail it, it's like, whatever, you can test again probably next month or whatever.

It's not so light. You didn't study since the age of five. You didn't go to a specified academy to learn this for 10 years. Now, this entire process became something of a feedback loop. The test was rigid, but it demanded memorization, not actual understanding of anything that you were studying. It also enforced an unbreaking conformity against state apparatus, as well as forming an elite that all of these people, an incredibly small segment of the population, mind you, belong to. This elite ran everything and fundamentally ran the country without much of an input from the isolated aristocracy, including the emperor. It was in everybody's best interest that this test system and the culture around it did not change. Because if it did, it would invalidate their testing,

which would invalidate how they obtain their power and thus themselves. So yeah, it's in their best interest that this just continues on. So in the meantime of all of this, China is falling apart. Now, I can't exactly explain fully why that is the case. And I'm not saying that China is at itself at fault for all of this. Obviously, they're being picked apart by other imperial powers, et cetera, et cetera. However, having a competent and maybe more centralized government able to respond to various crises as they happen, rather than having a bunch of dudes to memorize Confucius led by a man who never left his house, would have certainly made things at least a little better. There was, of course, a massive importation of opium that was forced on them at the barrel of a gun by the British. Having an epidemic of uncontrolled opium use is never a good thing to have in your country. But another thing that the British did was force even more unfair trade agreements down the throats

of the Chinese government. And the second opium war is coming at some point during this series, unfortunately. Both of these things are only made worse by the massive military defeat the government had suffered during the first opium war which obviously delegitimizes government makes them weaker etc etc and then there were all of the famines um famine is an unfortunately common occurrence in china especially certain regions of china for thousands of years with the first one being recorded during the Shang Dynasty in the 16th century BC, with others happening, let's just say more recently and move on, shall we? Sounds good to me.

That series is coming, I promise. These were normally most common in the North and Northwest due to changing weather and the resulting crop failures. Things were bad even for this back in the early 1600s, eventually leading to the collapse of the Ming Dynasty, one of the many reasons the Ming Dynasty collapsed, all the way into the 1800s. The 1800s in particular were very, very bad, with famine occurring nearly every year to five years, all the way up until 1850 when the rebellion starts. And then more after that, which we'll talk about when we get there. So you can see how things would be not so good with decrepit government,

outside interference, and famine. You could see how this would lead to further destabilization and rebellion. Exactly, yes. Now, the King Dynasty were not exactly the best administrators on earth, but they did come up with a decent reserve system to stockpile food. In the case of famine, it did happen, which could then be distributed to people who needed it. However, because I can't point out one good thing on this show

without several thousand people immediately dying afterward, China happened to be going through something of a population boom at the time, and a pretty goddamn big one. Exact censuses aren't great, but for what people can tell, the total population doubled between 1766 and 1833. But the amount of cultivated farmland did not increase at nearly the same rate. This meant that the reserve system was not nearly up to the task of feeding this new population when the next famine hit,

which of course it did. Several of them did, leading to uncalculable mass death. I mean, I'm just thinking about what it was that we said previously about the precarity of most people. And it's like, well, sounds like things are being set up for a very, very bad social situation across the board. Yeah. And nobody's entirely sure how many people these killed due to population migration, death, people dying without anybody seeing it or recording it. But it's thought that this killed and displaced at least 45 million people. And by I say displaced, I mean, they ran away to the point they no longer registered in the census. And again, nobody's sure if they died and nobody noticed or they ran away. The complete question mark. But 45 million people dead or displaced,

it's going to completely destabilize any region on earth, right? Now, with all these compounding crises the power of the central government failed pretty much entirely rather than be overthrown they were simply worked around regional governors and secret societies formed they built their own armies to combat the rapid problem of banditry that was born from this destabilization and deprivation because that does tend to happen when people are desperately poor and don't have food to eat. They're going to do what they have to do, right? However, these governors and societies and the other functionaries around them would also just occasionally go to war against one another.

So amidst all of that, Hong Zhukuan is born in January of 1814 in Canton in southern China. He is born to a, sometimes it's put as like a decently well-off family because his family, like his father is the elected headman of the village, which was a rule normally only selected or given to people who were pretty powerful landlords. However, he was of Hakka origin, which is a subgroup of Han Chinese with their own language and cultural traditions and were generally pretty discriminated against.

So other accounts have his family being quite poor. And the poverty aspect of it, I tend to believe because of what's about to happen. Hong was something of a bright kid. And despite the fact his family being maybe middle to upper class, as much as those categories existed in this era and region, they didn't have extra cash to send him to one of those academies for rich kids to start training for the Imperial Civil Service exam. civil service exam however he was such a good student by the age of four that the teachers in his village began tutoring him without uh without being paid assuming hong would eventually go past uh these exams and the benefits would trickle downwards right uh when he became a government

official you hope yeah uh now the entire extended family of hong uh Hong pooled all of their money together to eventually send him off to a specialized academy. So that's why I don't believe he was particularly well off, because his entire family had to chip in to send him to one of these places. Hong eventually traveled to the testing center for the first round of exams in 1827. And this time area between going to the exam or going to the academy, going to the exam are kind of just a blank spot. But he bombed this fucking exam. He did really well on the first part of the exam because there's so many different parts. He actually placed near the top at the first part of the exam and then bombed the fuck

out afterwards. That really sucks. You know, it's like you're doing pretty well on the first part and then, you know, you realize you've completely misread the brief on the second one. I have had similar experiences in military training

schools where I was doing real well and then I completely fucked it. I won't go into detail, but humbling experience. And I didn't have the entirety of my village basically pulling extra duty to get me prepared for an exam. It reminds me of... There's this very good book called Tokyo Vice written by a guy named Jake Adelstein. And they turned into an HBO show, but it's like a completely separate thing. It almost has nothing to do with the book so far.

But he's a white guy from the united states that took uh the effectively the civil service sensor exam the employment entry exam to write for i believe the asahi shimbun one of the larger japanese newspapers in japanese and he was doing incredibly well um like to the point that his written japanese was commented for being very very good by the exam board but he completely skipped over one of the pages. He was so nervous. He didn't check the back page of one of them and completely left it blank. Whoops.

Yeah, whoops. Now, for reasons that are not entirely clear, Hong waited nine years to retake the exam. I think this had to do with the fact that he was not doing great mentally. He was living in extreme poverty, having to spend every waking moment either poring over these books

to retake the test, and then working part-time as a teacher. He finally retook the test in 1836 and bombed him again. Now, remember, at this point, his entire Finally retook the test in 1836 and bombed him again. Yeah. Now, remember, at this point, his entire family has spent their life savings putting him into that school. So the pressure is building on him.

Obviously, the idea like his family weren't like altruistic people. The idea is because when he gets elevated elevated he takes his family with him you know uh like they would he they would also be elevated socially and would reap the benefits of all of those things but you know the pressure is mounting in hong's head like i am a failure to my family i need to take the test again so he did in 1837 and failed again. Um, yeah, things aren't going great for Hong. Now it's bad after failing them this time, he completely collapsed and had to be carried home. He told his entire family that his life was over. He apologized for wasting their time and money and then completely lost his

fucking mind. Um, he began having fits and visions. Um, yeah, most people, scholars that read into this will say that he had a like in a psychotic episode i guess is a good way of putting it uh his visions had him being carried away to a quote a beautiful luminous place by a tiger a dragon and a rooster there he was was hand-washed by an old woman to remove his sins.

They cut open his body, removed his organs, and replaced him with new ones. And then, of course, he met a deity-type being, a man on a throne wearing all black robes with a golden beard. Now, this man told Hong that the people of Earth worshipped demons and thus had given him a sword for the purpose of teaming up with this deity,

which Hong will eventually decide that this is God, to team up with Hong's celestial brother, which is this man's son, which he will then eventually come up to decide this is Jesus Christ, to kill demons with this sword. And this son taught him how to do it. So he learned how to kill demons with a sword by Jesus.

Jesus taught him the way of the sword, I guess. And with the added warning that he should never kill his brother or sister with it, which, sure, I guess. And with the added warning that he should never kill his brother or sister with it, which sure. I guess when he woke up, he told everyone about his visions and then passed out again. This mental breakdown replete with constant hallucinations of gods, demons,

divinity, all of these things would continue on nearly unbroken for a full month. His family thought he was going to die. He was like pissing and shitting on himself, not like barely eating. You know, at one point during his month long hallucination, he saw this being, which you would eventually decide is God, literally physically beating the shit out of Confucius. is God literally physically beating the shit out of Confucius, at which point he decided, or Confucius would admit that he was wrong for everything he did to the Chinese people, and everybody should submit to this God being.

And then Hong would wake up at various points, say things like he was Jesus Christ, he was God, he was the emperor of China, and then pass out again. Now, I should say that he was not simply saying these things he's from a very small village and he would just sit up and scream them so everybody had heard about this everybody had heard the lunatic screaming about

dragons and sword fighting Jesus and stuff everybody had heard about this now he was ranting and raving and soon everybody was coming it was lining up outside of his house to come see the crazy local man to the great shame of his family. Now, eventually he recovered. And according to his cousin, an account we can absolutely not believe in for reasons that we will go into. When he awoke, Hong was a different man.

He was better looking. He was smarter and even had better skin. different man he was better looking he was smarter and even had better skin uh if you're taking requests on where you can have these uh messianic delusions that make you look better i'd like to get put on the wait list yeah same i mean i i could go for a a nice rejuvenation uh celestial mental breakdown you know um i feel like that's something that gwyneth paltrow's magazine might offer yeah or whatever it's called yeah goop but hopefully you don't get a staph infection you know you're not it just involves you know the right kind of meditative practice to achieve it you don't have to insert a foreign object made of jade into your orifices well nate now i'm out now uh after this ordeal he just went back to studying for his exams

uh in 1843 he sat for them for the fourth time and failed um now his cousin a man named hong ring gun uh the guy who said that he he woke up from his mental breakdown uh a complete smoke show with better skin uh gave him a book uh that he had found in hong's house hong had actually been giving it's like a pamphlet um and the book pamphlet whatever happened to be a chinese translation of a of a of a different group of bible passages. It wasn't the entire Bible. It was like a traveler's version or whatever. That he had been given a while back from a Christian missionary that came to Canton, put it on his bookshelf, forgotten about it. Ran gone, thumbed through it, said he didn't really get it, and he gave it to Hong.

Hong fucking devoured it, reading it back and forth countless times for weeks on end he decided that all of these things in there god jesus you know all that stuff was the person perfect explanation for the visions that he had you know the man on the throne the black robes that was god his brother this man's son was obviously Jesus Christ. And since this man on the throne told him that he was his celestial son, that makes him the little brother of Jesus Christ, the man who taught him how to sword fight demons. Yeah. Yikes. I mean, I really do not know what you're supposed to do in a situation like this, but I would presume the answer is not join this man's crusade. And yet I have some bad news about who his first convert is. Now, more specifically, in the passages were these things about idolatry. Right. Hong made the connection that these demons were idols right and

anything you believe in that runs contrary to god and jesus christ is an idol right like it specifically confucian and buddhist temples those are all idols which means there is explicitly demonic and must be destroyed with his and jesus's swords um now this is where like this massive disconnect occurs between him and christian missionaries he actually goes and speaks to one at some point and never gets baptized the man refuses the bapt the missionary refuses to baptize him which might be the first time i've ever read about that happening. Um, but Hong runs out and baptizes himself, uh, which is sure.

He chucks all of his confusion related stuff in the trash. Um, and which mind you includes all of his study material for the civil service exam. He is fucking done with that. Uh, and his first, his first convert is of course his cousin,

Hong ring gun. Um, they then also go and convert a, of course, his cousin, Hong Ringun. They then also go and convert a few of their neighbors, which just imagine how this would happen in your neighborhood now. Like, did you know, by the way, I'm Jesus Christ's little brother. He taught me how to fight demons with a sword. Don't ask me to see the sword. It goes to a different school in Canada. You would never have seen it.

Fair enough. Now now they also ran into the local schoolhouse where they both worked at and threw everything they considered idols and the fire which was anything to do with confucian thought which is kind of most things at this time right um now i might be jumping to conclusions here about hong's state of mind but uh i'm getting the feeling that his sudden rejection of anything to do with confucianism to to equate it with demons might have something to do with the fact he just spent his entire life memorizing confucius texts to fail a test four times and had a mental breakdown and impoverished his family and was now on a kind of revenge mission.

But that's just me editorializing, I suppose. Yeah, fair enough. Others may differ in their interpretations, but I think that the case is solid. This is one of the reasons why I fundamentally disagree that this is a proto-communist revolution because this is where this starts

right is this is the this is the seed of the uh of the ideology that will lead to a militant militant movement um the egalitarianism is kind of tacked on later um and it's never central a central theme at all um for reasons that will become abundantly clear later on in the series. Now, his flock began with three whole people who then began to attempt to convert others, mostly their immediate family and neighbors, which must have been annoying as hell. I assume this is what it's like being related to a Jehovah's Witness or something.

Also, Rengen's brother, like Rengen went home to convert his family his brother could not get him to shut the fuck up about their crazy neighbor who's now insisting that he was the son of god he beat the shit out of him with a stick um which yeah why not that probably shut him up i don't want to encourage people to you know use corporal punishment on their children but i can imagine if they have an annoying teenage cousin who's proselytizing about Andrew Tate, the urge has struck to perform the same disciplinary procedure. Now, I'm not saying you should.

It's very bad. I'm just saying it's an option. I understand the urge. I should also point out that all of these guys are at least in their 20s. Yeah, and that also kind of implies, I guess, by my comparison, that Hong is therew tate of 19th century china um yeah i mean actually yes i read the bible because that's rich guy shit yeah actually it becomes weirdly sexualized so you

might you may have kind of never know never know i I mean, let's take it as a loose comparison talking about social contagion in the face of bad circumstances. You never know. Yeah. Now, by 1844, Hong and another believer named Fang hit the road to try to convert other nearby villages,

and Rangan couldn't go because his parents forbade him. Well, I can't go save people's celestial souls because my mom doesn't like Jesus' little brother. Sucks. It really fucking sucks. Seemingly overnight, Hong had hundreds of converts. After he left the village,

those people would then go around and convert others independent of him and had dubbed themselves the Society of God Worshippers with Hong as their leader and again Jesus Christ's little sword wielding brother. I cannot state that enough. Hong's mission of conversion went

on for about a year and when he returned to his home village he had turned into a massive fucking racist, lacing his newfound divinity with how much he really, really hated the Manchus. You see, in his version of Christianity, only true, quote unquote, true Chinese could be saved.

And remember, don't use this sword on your brothers. Aha. He conceived only true Chinese were his brothers and therefore sisters as well. And wouldn't you know it, Manchu were by this strain of thought, not Chinese. And therefore, by God's definitions, they had to be demons. This is because they had something to do with government repression, which had been pushing back against Christian mercenaries. And this did result in quite a few crackdowns amongst normal Christians and the society of God worshipers, leading to several of Hong's followers ending up in prison for proselytizing.

So if you're stopping the spread of the true true Hong thought you must be in league with the demons and therefore the government and therefore all of the Manchu people everywhere. Sounds bad. So of course within two years Hong had thousands of followers. Now these were almost entirely

from the Hakka people in the south of China. So now with numbers on their side, they unleashed a wave of vandalism against Buddhist and Confucian temples, which again, they thought were literal demonic sites. The movement was also rapidly making itself more extreme as they went on.

This is something that like a lot of cults go through, like an independent lurch to the extreme, kind of without the lead of Hong. Hong's own edicts, he was making some, of course, but he seemed to be making edicts to keep up with his own congregation. up with his own congregation. Congregations of believers, the Society of God Worshippers, all these little independent cells, whatever you want to call them, began speaking in tongues all on their own, which

was not a part of Hong's belief before then. But then when they started, which they probably picked up from some other Christian sect, they then went to Hong and be like, well, what does this mean? So Hong was like, oh, that is the language of heaven. And only I can understand it because I've been there and I am God's son.

Um, so like things like that kept happening where he'd be like, oh, uh, uh, shit. Let me think of something real quick. Uh, only I know where these golden plates are. Uh, nevermind. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Now, with the converts spreading really without Hong,

all of them slowly looking towards their prophet, Hong, for answers to all of their problems, a plague ripped through the region. Now, we don't know what this plague was. I've heard it. In some books, it's called a plague and there's, it's called a pestilence. Uh,

in short, it was pretty bad. Uh, so the thousand strong new faith looked for, you know, son of God, Hong for help. And again,

seemingly on their own, people began to tell each other and others who had not converted yet. If you pray to Hong and touch him, you will be saved from the plague. And obviously this didn't work. Thousands of people died, but the ones who didn't credited Hong's divine magic for saving them. This made for even more people, probably thousands and thousands of more, to flock to him. Now, a better reason why the death rate within the congregations was less is because it was kind of like a commune. People shared everything. So while people were short on food or whatever, and the government's redistribution system was

failing, the church took care of one another. So rather than being... Kind of like now when they say that older people live longer if they go to church and people like oh it's because of you know this divine intervention because they're believers when reality it's because you're a member of a community that looks out for one another kind of kind of the same thing happened here like it must be specifically hong that saved everybody yeah exactly it's like there's all these sort of intangible things that come along with a sense of community and purpose. And like you said, just the access to groups of people who are invested in you. But yeah, I guess if you want to interpret that as

the divine powers flowing from his fingertips, then there you have it. Yeah. And that's kind of what happened., though none of this created what would eventually become an army of fanatical zealots. What did was land rights, kind of. Now, the Haka, which still made up a majority of Hong's church, had moved into Canton much later than the Han did, leading to what was effectively a racism version of a Mexican standoff. Both sides hated one another. The Han saw them as outsiders swooping in to steal everything, while the Hakka saw the Han as vindictive

landlords, hoarding all of the good land, the heritable land and water for themselves, while forcing the Hakka into poverty. There's also like banditry movements. There's a lot of bandits and um the church kind of absorbed them like went out and talked to them brought them into the fold and when they wouldn't the other people that they'd absorbed into them murdered the bandits so they're

slowly becoming more militant and very open to violence. And more specifically, this Hakka population, maybe a lot of whom were not believers, saw that, look, that Han guy might be kind of nuts, but he's getting shit done. Bandits aren't fucking with us anymore because they either saw the light of God or because they got their heads smashed with a rock. Who cares, right? Now, in 1850, this exploded into violence with the Han burning down several Hakka homes, though sometimes this is written as villages. So it could have been a pretty big swath of racist violence. The Hakka, still unbelievers,

turned to the Society of God Worshippers for help. Now, they turned specifically to the Society of God Worshippers, not the local government. Skipping over them completely. Now, at this point, this scared the shit out of the local government because they're like, oh, fuck, these cultists are forming a parallel

government in a parallel society. And the local government was already very, very suspicious of them, mostly because of all of the vandalism and violence. Now, they saw them as sowing discord and causing problems within the region. And because of the Society of Godwishers

being majority Hakka, that meant the government blamed the Hakka for everything because they didn't like the church and because the majority of the population that runs the government is not Hakka, right? Now, this violence continued to spread. So the government, still seeing the Hakkas as the cause of all this, sent a unit from the Imperial Army to arrest Hong and Feng. Feng generally being considered and will be considered kind of like the second in command of the church. A church member learned of the government's plans and soon a congregation

armed themselves with swords, machetes and farm tools and marched off to confront the soldiers. Now, these are hundreds of members of the church and there's only a couple dozen soldiers leading to a motherfucking massacre and the survivors of the imperial army running off.

Now, this is where the government seriously fucked up. Now, some parts of the church army running off now this is where the government seriously fucked up now some parts of the church had already some members of the church had already been repressed they've been thrown in prison uh it was pretty clear the government didn't like them but they didn't like any christian sect really they were they were really trying to push back on missionaries and they saw hong as another missionary however this violent attempt to repress them gave them what every cult needs in order to turn into what they would become, violently, violently wild, a persecution complex. Exactly. Now you have this narrative that the government is suppressing the truth

and therefore on the side of evil. And remember, the government is literal demons. The Manchu are not Chinese. They're not of this world. They're from hell. And this is only underlying that like, well, they must be demons. They're trying to snuff out the true word of God, me, his son, you know? Exactly. And Hong put word out to all of his followers.

We're all going to congregate together this is the first time this is ever going to happen because remember all these these congregations kind of exist in villages independent of one another they might meet up but everybody's going to meet all in one place all at one time now of course since the majority of his followers were desperately poor and spread across a rather large region, this required them to get rid and sell all of their earthly belongings to afford making the journey and going to the mass gathering, which is, again, another thing that the cult needs is complete control because now you have nowhere to go back to. Right. Soon, around 30,000 followers of Hong massed together in a town of Zhintai. Now, at this point, the government was scared shitless

at the growing numbers of these guys. Not to mention, they were all fucking armed. At this point, there was no secret that like, hey, you should probably also bring a weapon. So like, ah,

of course, the collection of weapons is quite diverse. not all of them are actual weapons yet um and so the government terrified that you know 30 to 50 000 people depending on where you read came together in order to do violence in the name of jesus christ's little sword wielding brother they launched an attack on the town once again and this will happen quite a lot hong was warned ahead of time now of his 30 000 or so followers he organized a fighting force of around 14 000 uh men and women were both soldiers but strictly segregated based on gender um it's it's weird um now they were moved into a

military structure which remember is something he would have memorized from his imperial exams. So on the 11th day of the first lunar month of 1851, which also happened to be Hong's birthday, the Taiping Rebellion officially began when Hong declared the creation of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, sometimes translated as, and the title I prefer more, the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. A title that he will not live up to. I see. Again, despite the fact this is often labeled as a proto- each of the carnal directions, northeast, south, and west, and also wing for some reason. I'm not entirely sure what that's supposed to mean. These were all God's cousins, by the way, or God's nieces and nephews, because they had to be related. So there's this concept of the celestial family.

because they had to be related. So there's this concept of the celestial family, um, for every, every member of this new heavenly aristocracy, they had to be able to trace their quote unquote bloodline, celestial bloodline back to God himself. So all of the, the directional Kings,

uh, would become Hong's cousins and therefore related to God celestially. Um, these are things that he just was thinking of on the fly, of course. Hong's cousins, and therefore related to God celestially. These are things that he just was thinking of on the fly, of course. Now, the imperial detachment that was sent to take them out was, again, badly outnumbered. This is because Hong's was actually one of two rebellions going on in the exact same province, the other being led by a secret society called the Hongmen. So the provincial army,

the imperial army of China at this point is incredibly regional. Provincial armies are virtually the entire thing that they have. That will change later on in the rebellion. The provincial army in this area is called the Green Standard Army. And it was already very weak

from general mismanagement and other rebellions. And so now it was already very weak from general mismanagement and other rebellions and so now it was forced to split up to handle the two rebellions going on at once. The entire detachment was destroyed. The detachment's Manchu commander was beheaded and his body was crucified.

Now officially in rebellion in the name of Jesus Christ's idiot brother the army began to march east. Soon the other rebellion, led by the Hongmen, joined their ranks. However, this movement east was checked by imperial armies

who managed to block their way by taking the high ground. Faced with an encirclement, the heavenly army turned and marched north towards the Hunan province. Now, during this whole way, they began to pick up new converts,

thousands upon thousands of them. Though I should point out here, this is where the number of true believers begins to get diluted. It's really not known who was an actual convert to Hong's church and who really hated the fucking government. And it's a good reason to believe that during this March was especially with the secret society Hong men involved. A lot of these people just really fucking hate the government and it's very person depending. A good reason for this was Hong began preaching things that would really appeal to these poor farmers that had been long left to rot by the government.

For example, abolishing the exam system, abolishing the exam system, abolishing the aristocracy, though that would be replaced by his own version of aristocracy. He talked about how men and women would be equal despite the fact they were not in his own ranks and that all property should be commonly held and distributed based on need rather than social standing. So yeah, you can see how this would become very popular. Of course, yeah.

Sure, a lot of people, especially in the early days, absolutely were true believers. I'm going to go on a limb and say that's going to steadily trend downward from here on out. However, once he's on the march in an open rebellion, the peasantry was much more likely jumping on fuck the emperor train rather than the I totally believe this guy is Jesus's little brother one.

So I know I was making fun of the idiot cultists earlier, and those points still stand, but I do believe saying that over and over again can be seen as a bit too reductive. Like I'd already talked about people call this a proto-communist revolution, though remember what the core tenets of the rebellion were, a pseudo-Christian cultism, and the egalitarianism was tacked on much later on in order to attract people into its ranks, which again, was an army led by a man calling himself the Heavenly King. So yeah, soon the rebels, however, would find success as they marched northeast. First, they fell onto the city of Yongan. Yongan was surrounded by walls, which should have been easily defended, but due to the disorganized

and decentralization of the king government, nobody had warned the city that they were coming. There's actually a good idea the government itself had no idea where they were, or where they were going as well. Either way, by the time the rebels got there the defenders were not prepared at all first the rebels confuse the defenders riding horses around the city walls with baskets full of stones tied to them which you may think sounds really familiar to the monty python coconut bit um because

it kind of is uh. The rocks would clap together in these baskets and make it sound like there was more horsemen than there really were because they didn't actually have that many. Then, after surrounding the city, they rained fireworks down onto it. I don't actually mean destructive fireworks because these were absolutely weapons of war.

Those kind of fireworks were. But these are regular celebratory fireworks, but they were loud and bright and kept the entire town up all night as early in the morning as they could. The rebels brought the few cannons that they had, blew open the city's gates, and stormed the walls.

Now, the defenders did have firearms, something the rebels had in very short supply at this point, very much still making do with farm utensils and shit but uh as the defenders were were shooting down on the rebels the rebels brought with them an icon of theirs coffins they upturned coffins and were marching under them and using them as shields to protect themselves from gunfire with the idea of holding these coffins on long poles over their head would show how willing they were to die for their cause. you ascend. So not only were they showing off to the defenders how willing they were to become Shahid for Jesus's little brother, but the coffins were thick enough

to actually stop the out-of-date muskets that the provincial army had there. But soon the city fell, 800 militia were dead, and the rebels took no prisoners because remember, the government is literal demons. Yep, the devil itself, so there you have it. The violence was so shocking that the people who were still held up

further in in the city, like soldiers, officers, government administrators, saw what the rebels were doing. They were butchering people, crucifying them, beheading them, setting them on fire, shit like that, that they killed themselves rather than fall into their hands christ yeah i mean it it starts out a little bit comedic but gets worse and worse and worse and worse and now it's just full-on yeah mass murder and it's it's shocking how quickly it turned into this within two years of like i mean the the he had been preaching for a few years now but within two years of like i mean the the he had been preaching for a few years now but within two years of of heightened extremism this is what they turn into uh but on october 1st 1851

haun walked in and claimed his first city officially he immediately ordered his soldiers to not to murder or steal from the people of the town which they actually didn't assuming you were not a member of the government or a soldier or anything. Then you were absolutely fucked, because you gotta kill all the demons with the Jesus sword. He also didn't force anyone to adopt his religion or serve in his armies.

Landlords, who by definition were functionaries of the government, had all their wealth confiscated by the Heavenly King, and their fields were harvested. Yes, I know, we all find that cool. You do not, in fact, have to hand it to hong um now here's a problem though hong didn't actually believe in this common property thing he believed in this thing called a sacred treasury of god which was not wealth redistribution as much as it was wealth centralization, because it's not like he was redistributing all of these things to the desperate people.

He was simply taking them for a common treasury that he himself would control. And his own God-ordained aristocracy simply supplanted the old one. So yeah, not exactly this people's revolution that they're often framed as. Yeah, I mean, it does sound like some opportunism and taking a line that's going to get you traction with landless or impoverished people. But even at this point early on, it's pretty obvious what the underlying intention or consequences of this movement is. And yeah, looks bad i will say at this point hong is smart enough to know what appeals to people um that will begin to fade after a while

and since all of this off the cup off the cuff egalitarianism sounds a little too normal for this guy he there's some more weirdness. He invented his own time and calendar system and forced everybody to adopt it. Good luck. Figure it out. As according to Hong, the old ones were demons scheming to deceive and delude mankind. He came up with a very strange,

incredibly long list of awards and titles. For example, for people who showed bravery in battle, they'd be allowed to wear a sick dragon robe with a horned helmet. That does sound pretty badass. That's fucking rad. Personal titles got weirder. For example, Hong Sun

Tian Gui, who's two years old at the time, was named the Young Monarch of 10,000 Years. Officers and administrators are given celestial titles as well. And this went from generals down to sergeants, with sergeants being

called Your Worship. Yeah. The rebels began increasing the city's defenses, but they had taken some pretty serious casualties in their first real battle. And in the months before this, during their march here, because as we often say on this show,

this is not the time to go camping with 10,000 of your homies in the woods. Facing them was the rest of the provincial army, numbering on 46,000 soldiers. And though the quality of these soldiers is pretty bad most were local militias without any standard

training or equipment to speak of corruption was also endemic within the ranks as many of the officers and soldiers all openly walked over to rebel held towns and traded with them because they wanted food so with these forces arrayed against the

heavenly rebellion and them holding their first town, the government would launch their counterattack two months later. And that is where we will pick up on part two of the Taiping Rebellion. All right. How are you feeling so far about our people's hero, Hong? It's pretty grim. it's it's pretty grim i mean i expected it because of the sort of macro summary that we talked about earlier before we really got into detail but now as the details get more and more explicit you come to realize wow this is this is a big old mess and it goes on for like 21 years so whoops look all i'm saying is i might fight for a guy who gives me a dragon robe with a horned

helmet like i mean i'm sick as hell let's be honest i we we as people who were dumb enough to join the u.s army absolutely understand the appeal of uniform flair and cool hats so i cannot criticize under any circumstances now i wouldn't necessarily be on board for the whole put entire villages to the sword and or cities to the sword, but like a cool hat and some cool uniform flair. Yeah, Roger. Okay, hear me out, Nate. What if I give you two dragon robes? I'm wavering.

Nate, thank you so much for joining me in part one. And thank you, everybody, for listening. This is the area where you can plug your various amounts of shows that you're involved in for everybody's ear holes. I just want to say that if you're interested in hearing more from me, I wanted to plug What a Hell of a Way to Die. It's a show that I do with friend of the show, Francis Horton. Basically can be summarized as why you shouldn't join the military. But we talk about our experiences, his as a 20-year reservist and me as seven years active duty. We also just tell dumb stories and react to things. And I've now transitioned into more like how to go about living your life as you approach middle age sort of content. We have a Patreon that's $5 a month. It's patreon.com slash hellofawaytodie.

And at $5 a month, you get every single bonus episode we've ever done going all the way back to 2017. So if you are interested in hearing more from me, since Lions is the only podcast at this point that I'm on regularly besides Hell of a way definitely go and check that out because uh we have lots and lots of content out there for you to listen to yeah and if you like this show consider supporting us on patreon much like hell of a way to die you can get all of our bonus content going back to 2018 yeah i believe for five dollars you also get access to every episode we have early now, including entire series early. You get our premium series,

which are different kinds of history. Maybe some serious ones, some absolutely ridiculous ones, and you get access to our discord, which is a lovely little community that you should come and join. Or if you don't, that's fine. Consider leaving us a review on wherever the hell it is.

You listen to podcasts because it helps us measurably. And it always, thank you for listening. Tune in next week for part two of this madness. And as always, I don't know, put on a sick demon robe or dragon robe.

I don't fucking know. Fight demons with Jesus. I don't know how to end this one. All of the above. But thank you for listening and we'll talk to you soon.