Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 258 - The Taiping Rebellion Part 3: The Chicken King

Episode Date: April 30, 2023

Trouble in the heavenly kingdom! part 3/4 Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys

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Legion of the Old Crow today. And now back to the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Lion's Head by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, and with me today is a fellow brother of the taiping heavenly kingdom hong christ nate what's up buddy that's correct it's me nate how's it going it's going uh i am doing a lot of work at the moment for future episodes uh and i recently uh finished the rough draft of a manuscript so i'm now having to edit that. So I officially have sore fingers like the old lady from Billy Madison, which is outstanding. Oh, sorry. I think that was Happy Gilmore. That was Happy Gilmore. Yeah. I was going to say all those Adam Sandler movies kind of blend together almost by design. I think the fact that he called his production company Happy Madison was kind of like

foretelling the future in the sense that it all just becomes this blur of Adam Sandler-ism. So yeah, you're not too far off. Yeah. Oh, and I do have to say before we start, we have two episodes of this series out right now. This is part three of the Taiping Rebellion. I've heard your complaints. It is in fact pronounced Ching, not King. I'm sorry. Look, there's a degree to which we'll try. We absolutely try and we don't say this out of any disrespect. It's just that it's a challenge sometimes because even trying to approximate stuff, neither one of us speaks Chinese or really understands the romanization system used for Chinese names. And so we will absolutely do

our best. And if we are saying something fucking wrong, then absolutely, please like, let us know. We will try. We promise we will try. But there's a degree to which like, it's always going to sound fucking weird. And this is speaking from someone who I've tried, I really have. But I remember a friend of mine who speaks Cantonese as his first language trying to teach me how to say basic stuff in Cantonese. And like, I'm pretty good at learning languages, but that's my limit. Like, the sound that I'm saying wrong sounds like exactly the same as the sound that I'm saying that he says I'm supposed to be saying to sound right. I just don't get it. My ears aren't good enough. This is absolutely a case of just Chinese superiority. Your ability to pronounce this

stuff is far beyond our tiny brains. And yeah, we will try and we don't mean any disrespect whatsoever. It's just that we are morons with CTE. The only person I mean to disrespect my mispronunciation of the Chinese is the long dead emperor of China. So unfortunately, he's not hearing me. And Hong, let's be honest. Hey, whoa, whoa. You leave Jesus' little brother alone. He didn't do anything wrong.

He's just misunderstood. Jesus' little brother alone. He didn't do anything wrong. He's just misunderstood. This is the elaborate ruse of this whole series that by the end it swerves around and Joe actually reveals that he's a disciple of Hong. Yeah, I'm actually Jesus' little brother's

eighth cousin's little brother once removed. And I'm restarting the typing Christianity here in Armenia. I'm sure that'll go really, really well. I'm sure there's nothing that's going to stand in the way. So you know what? I figured let's get on to the topic so you can go about your business of proselytizing the good word. So when we left you last time, the rebellion of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom had ground to a halt during the botched attempt

to march in the Chinese imperial capital of Pekingking only to make a small detour to get lost starve and freeze the death which is something of the holy trifecta of this podcast um very rarely do we have a series where someone doesn't get lost starve and freeze the death um so checking all the blocks yeah i was gonna say you know you do a little soviet afghan war little napoleon's invasion of russia you know you're planning on doing one on Stalingrad. Like, yeah, we always do wind up tight. Tannenberg was in the summer, so we didn't really have a problem. But, you know, I'm sure somebody was cold, like getting rained on, you know, during like night watch, freezing in the summer. They weren't freezing, but they were starving and thirsty. So we do get two of those. but they were starving and thirsty. So we do get two of those.

We got, like Meatloaf says, two out of three ain't bad. So, you know, there's a general spectrum here. Venn diagram overlap. You want to hit the middle, but sometimes you just get two. Yeah. Little known fact,

famed German Imperial soldier, Meatloaf. You know what? He's not, I can't remember what his actual name is and it's extremely not German at all he's extremely american but there's something germanic about the iconography on bad out of hell like all the artwork around it just feels it feels like it could be like a german metal band uh i will not derail the episode with my fandom of bad out of hell bad out of hell fucking whips ass though and it's very funny i'm just gonna say this it is very funny that literally no record company would take a chance on it except some tiny ass like regional label and i want to say michigan and then they sold like 20 million copies of that album michigan doesn't succeed very often but when we do you know exactly it's via derviet meatloaf uh yeah no dude yeah uh we'll

talk about i i think meatloaf has bad politics i I think he's a dickhead. I think he is, yeah. I think him and Jim Steinberg working together in the 70s making that album unbelievable, untouchably amazing. So just that's my fandom. I like that out of hell. Let's continue talking about something completely fucking different. The imperial forces at this point had actually figured out a pretty good way to counter the Taiping rebels. But it wasn't in the way that people would think. And we did talk about this a little bit in episode one.

The rebels, driven by either religious fervor or fear of strict punishment if they didn't had said religious fervor, had become incredibly good at digging in whenever they stopped their advance for even an hour, sometimes just a day. So as soon as they would stop, they would work without any breaks, sometimes for hours and days at a time until defensive pickets and defensive works were done. So whenever the Taiping army stopped, they would just frantically start digging NPCs from a Rome Total War game until things were done. I was going to say, this reminds me of how I treat they would just frantically start digging like npcs from like a rome total war game and i was gonna say this reminds me of how i this reminds me of how i treat my villagers in age of empires four so you know like exactly it's like yeah just palisade walls digging mining you know making

farms harvesting sheep harvesting deer harvesting stone gold etc you know what add it just do it they never asked for they never asked for rest yeah I assume they don't need it. Yeah, exactly. And unlike the video game villagers, these guys are just fueled by a deep belief in Jesus Christ's little brother or fear of what happens should they not have that deep belief. Now, for a little while. So it's now May 1864. Um, and the Imperial forces had surrounded what remained of the original rebel Northern force, the one that had lost, starved and frozen to death, uh, which is around 50,000 men or so. Uh, and rather than try to lay siege, uh, on their camps or assault them frontally, which they had been doing mostly,

imperial military commanders had a better idea. Now, better is a relative term because nearby was the Grand Canal, which is a great natural weapon if you happen to be completely insane and have an unlimited supply of laborers on hand, which the imperial government was and did. So after noticing the rebels had camped out an old dried out river bed, the imperial commanders ordered their laborers to begin digging a massive ditch to divert the waters directly into it. Now, this took over a month of working around the clock.

And when they finally succeeded, the results were, in short, apocalyptic. Because when you divert the Grand Canal, and I cannot describe how massive it is. You can look up a picture of it. Fucking huge. When you divert something that large, you can't control it. A tidal wave washed into the area, completely sweeping away the rebel camp, as well as several dozen nearby villages. Whoops. Yeah.

I remember hearing stuff vaguely alluded to, and I can't remember if it's the Taiping Rebellion or if it was something else in Chinese history as an example of... It might have been in the Guinness Book of World Records, reading it as a kid, but hearing stories about things like, yeah, diverting entire rivers, blowing up dams, things along these lines tends to happen. And it's just like, oh, collateral damage. We'll think about that. You haven't advanced to a far enough age in AOE4 to think about collateral damage. You just fucking do it. And it's very bad. Extremely bad. Yeah. Yeah, this is not the only time that a canal or

river is diverted for military purposes in Chinese military history. I will say this is probably not the worst of those times. Now, most of the rebels are killed outright, but a few manage to climb onto some nearby high ground, sometimes on top of village houses, hills, whatever.

And we actually do not know how many civilians are killed in this because they probably just washed away never to be seen again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I remember an estimate for another one. It wasn't this. Thinking back on it now, it wasn't this. They estimated like 300,000 people died. It's like I don't think that many people died in this one,

but quite frankly, you could imagine tens of thousands might have. Easily. Yeah, easily. Tens of thousands of rebels, tens of thousands of civilians. And now these small groups of rebels

were like huddling together away from the floodwaters. And then Imperial soldiers just kind of paddled over to them on boats and started killing each group one by one. Nobody is sure. Inadvisable, I guess. But I mean, just thinking about this, like you've just gotten hit by like flood attack.

And now you try to try to, you know, stow away in a boat anything that'll float to get out of it. And then folks are just coming down in boats, just picking you off. Yeah. I mean, they're dickheads, but still everyone involved in this is a dickhead except innocent civilians. So like this is, yeah, it sucks. You've survived the apocalyptic flood huddling on top of a nearby house. Like, hey, look, a boat.

I hope they're coming to help us. Fuck. Exactly. And then ominous music just starts playing. Yeah. Nobody's sure how many people died in all of this,

rebels or civilians alike. But what's more important than this is river banks and river beds, dried ones, areas around rivers are incredibly important to growing crops and irrigation

of farmland. The material losses in both of those things are incalculable. It's safe to say it's steep, especially when we get into the later years, especially part four

of the series, and even later on in this one. Famine's coming, which I'm sure everybody already kind of figured, and this does not help in that aspect. Now, it turned out either drowning or being stabbed to death while

huddled on top of a nearby house was a better fate than what happened to those who happened to be captured by Qing forces. The rebel leader, Li Kaifeng, was one of the men who got captured. He surrendered. And he was sentenced to die by something called Ling Chi, the lingering death, sometimes known as a death by a thousand cuts, which sounds bad. Yeah, it's a death by a thousand cuts which sounds bad yeah it's like death by a thousand cuts i always hear about this is sort of like a metaphor i didn't realize it was a real thing i mean i should have assumed it just get invented as like a cute phrase but oh yuck

yeah uh so it's difficult to figure out accurate details of how the ling chi executions took place because they actually varied quite a bit, depending on how big of an asshole the person doing it was and how much they hated you. But generally, it consisted of cuts to the arms, legs, and chest, sometimes amputation of the limbs very slowly, followed by decapitation or a stab to the heart in case they were, I assume, a vampire.

In short, it was a really bad time. If you were lucky, it could take 20 minutes, but sometimes you're not so lucky, and this was something measured in days. So, yeah. Oh, yikes. Yeah. The worst way to go.

You should have just dove into the river, it turns out. Yeah, I mean, just imagining getting hauled out of the river and be like, sweet, I survived. And then it's just like, getting hauled out of the river and be like sweet i survived and then it's just like oh yeah by the way like we're sharpening a lot of weird knives that no one ever takes out of their case except for this one reason we're gonna turn you know what the reason is it sucks we're turning you over to a guy we call jimmy little knives uh he's got shit you can only describe as a fantasy future axe, and he's sharpening that thing really, really good. He's the guy that nobody really likes to hang around with

because of what he does for his job. Now, this spelled the end of the Northern March of the Heavenly Kingdom. At the same time this was happening, there's also a Western advance by the rebels, which was also a failure, but more of a success than the northern was they once again failed to take cheng shah their invasion of hunan ran smack dab into a local military competence for the first time because like i've constantly repeated i say like imperial army to make things easier but generally the taipings are fighting what is more, I guess, accurately called a decentralized warlord army.

And these were all very different in their competence level, most of them bad. In the Western advance, they rendered some real competence. This led to them retreating. But they did manage to capture Wuchang with an army led by an 18-year-old general, Chen Wu Chang. So, yeah. What were you doing when you were 18? Were you taking over a large Chinese city? I think not.

No, I was discovering and then recoiling from the combination of whatever those Jack Daniels Alco Pops they sold in 2003 were. Oh, God. whatever those Jack Daniels Alco Pops they sold in 2003 were, like the sort of mixed Jack and Cokes and Jarm Black Clove cigarettes, which the combination of the two things will give you among the worst hangovers you've ever had in your life. It's just the early 2000s, there were so many nice, delicious, get people hooked on alcohol, sweet beverages, which are disgusting to me now.

But as a kid, I was like, sick, these are great. And not only are they awful and very insidious, but they really give you bad hangovers. You should just stick to the basics. Stick to the stuff that kind of tastes gross at first, but then you get used to it. And then you don't have to look back with regret at the times when you were puking out the side of a car because you drank too many Mike's Hard Lemonades or whatever the fuck. You're just describing the aroma of a Hot Topic store. Yeah. I mean, look, man, we were there. Whatever people

try to evoke the ambiance of it for a Tumblr meme or a thing on Twitter or anything on social media, even for a show on TV, on Netflix, they get most of it right. They get some things right, but there's always anachronisms. Me and Joe were there. We lived it. We know what it's fucking like. We were that guy running at you really fast with like a thousand keys fucking hanging from a carabiner on the side of his belt loop because he thinks you stole his cd wallet full of like burned cdrs of terrible hardcore like that was basically us actually it wasn't basically that was us yeah uh chen bu chang is uh wearing an invader zim shirt chain smoking close oh god my first girlfriend in high school was into Invader Zim.

God, that's like a negative reverie right there, just fucking bringing it all back. Yeah. Fucking imagine now, backpack with Invader Zim quotes written on it in whiteout. If you know, you know it. It's bad.

Naruto running directly into a Chinese city to take it over. I think Naruto running might actually be an anachronism. I think that may have come later, but I don't know. I don't really know anything about anime. I anime i think you're right yeah uh i mean i enlisted in the army when i was 17 so 18 year old me was just fucking miserable yeah i joined the army technically i mean i signed up for my first foray to the army when i was 18 and signed the real contract when i was 19 so yeah also an idiot yeah uh i clearly should have

joined the rebellion i would have been promoted faster. Exactly, you know? Now, they come up with a pretty smart way to capture the city of Luzhou. After several months of failing, they would dig two tunnels, one on top of the other,

and they would blow up the first one, which after that, obviously, like, they'd blow up the walls tunneling underneath them. And the Imperial defenders and, of course, a lot of civilians would run out to repair this damage to hold off the invading forces. And then a time-delayed bomb in the second tunnel would go off, killing everybody who came up to repair the damages,

then opening an even bigger hole, which you know is kind of a tactic i'm personally familiar with um yeah i know nothing about this i've never encountered this strategy uh it's entirely foreign to me also i have to say joe like once again with all the caveats that everybody involved is a dickhead you have to admit it's kind of a little bit badass which i can imagine the people that were blowing us up also felt the exact same way. They're like, fuck these guys. They should get out of our country. They're pieces of shit.

But also, this is badass. I make a hole with a bomb. And then when they come to fix it, I make a bigger one that blows everyone up. Yeah. It's probably, if you're the guy pushing the fucking, connecting the batteries, it's like connecting a long strain of alternator wire that's been stripped out of a shitty shitty like waz or kamaz russian truck and is blowing shit up that's probably cool that's probably sick as hell i've never done it i've just been blown up by it i mean in the last episode they had fucking dog-blooded horse shit ieds like these dudes fucking rule i mean they don't but you know in a vacuum in certain situations.

For the record, I was never blown up really close. It just was shit that went off nearby or they missed or controlled debts with EOD. So just in case you're wondering, all of my problems and all of my inabilities stay on topic. That's just my own brain. That's just me being fucked from birth. That's got nothing to do with the valiant majahideen warriors of afghanistan that's to say nothing of the uh the the in utero ieds which are becoming a problem i'm not i'm not gonna make a joke even it would be a joke about my own mother okay that's one thing i won't do on this podcast. They also captured a few more things in Jiangxi Providence. It's called tequila.

I think that's also how I was born. After teaming up with, again, the local mafia and secret societies, despite all of these gains and advancing thousands of miles, because remember, this has been thousands of miles of advance, north and west they have been barely managing to hold the heavenly capital as the government continued

to counter attack them as close as 40 miles away from the city to the east other places imperial soldiers were only a few miles away in forts that the rebels had simply never bothered to take out.

And nobody is sure why, uh, I assume they were just, I don't know, too busy making sure nobody was getting their dick sucked in the city walls or something like the fuck secret police were, were, were too time consuming to go do their jobs.

I'm not entirely sure. Yeah. That was really a thing they were into. Wasn't it? We talked about this last time, just the sheer volume of like how into policing people's sexual behavior they were and it felt like yeah that really became the like the the primary expenditure of energy for them was like are you are you fucking in a biblically correct way and also no one can fuck in a biblically correct way but also jesus's little brother has a harem and he can fuck however he wants disregard that

yeah they were like literally militant incels uh the supreme the supreme gentleman hong shu kuat oh man it's just like 19th century chinese manosphere. Now, of all of the directional kings of the rebellion, only one who I guess is not technically a directional king because he started getting more and more kings. His celestial family is rapidly ballooning. A guy named Shi Dekai, who is

by far his most competent general at this point, who is the wing king, which immediately jumped to my mind like a chain of hot wing restaurants um like he's not like the king of the north the west the south or he is the wing king uh wing yeah okay yeah like he's selling you chicken on the side for sure um now he was actually still commanding armies in the field and he's the only king doing that at this point. Hong included are everybody else is inside the heavenly capital.

Hong had completely removed himself from public life, rarely appearing at times outside of his palace and only communicating to anybody in vaguely worded religious poetry. poetry um like someone pointed out that that most people within the heavenly capital the only reason why they know that hong was doing anything is that when he went to pray they would fire cannons so like all right all right i guess hong is uh going to talk to dad again i don't know um now historians for example jonathan spence uh the author of God's Chinese Son, argue that at this point, Hong effectively no longer controlled his own rebellion. All of his kings kind of were doing whatever they wanted. However, the most control and real control of the kingdom fell to the East King, Yang Zhuqing or Zhuqing. yang zhu king or zhu qing um he decides to start speaking publicly as the voice of god which remember up until this point only hong could do that um he also shit talks hong in private and even tries to steal some of his harem which again even speaking of hong's harem was enough

to get you executed and this dude is is like turning into uh i don't know mr steal's harem was enough to get you executed. And this dude is like turning into, I don't know, Mr. Steal your harem or whatever. Yeah. It feels like this is a crack in the edifice in terms of like what people are used to getting away with versus this guy kind of pushing it. So, you know,

I don't know what's Hong going to do. Is Hong going to lay the law down or things just becoming too fucked up for him to manage? Now, here's an interesting question where do people believe that Hong actually believed his own bullshit or was he only saying all this as a mechanism and leverage of power?

And this is where I think it is both because in meetings with other kings, Yang says God had ordered the heavenly king to take 40 blows from the rod due to his dereliction of duty. So the East King is saying Hong needs to be physically punished due to the failure of the Northern advance. And Hong submits to this. Really?

Yes. Okay. He also spends a lot of time trash talking Hong's four year old son and heir to the throne. That could very easily be explained as competition, right? Yeah, I mean, but also three-year-old son, cool, man, congratulations, but also

isn't it basically illegal? Isn't it basically against the Bible for people to fucking have kids? Weird it out a little bit. This is three years within the time frame of what's going on, so it's within the establishment of the of the heavenly kingdom etc it's just sort of like yeah doesn't everybody have basically an invalid marriage except you who isn't married to now your concubine the celestial family have been fucking like crazy most of them have multiple

wives harems whatever um and nobody seems to care within their circle it's only anybody outside that quote-unquote celestial family that has to do like impromptu semen retention yeah yeah yeah exactly you know what like that being said those people are definitely like the reason they can work day and night building palisade walls and digging tunnels is that they're retaining so much of their vital fluids everybody's stacking blocks on top of another to build another palace like man i wish i was fucking instead of building this shit exactly uh yang also begins to take over huge swaths of the government as well as most importantly anything that can involve the use of the death penalty which again is pretty much every criminal case from murder to smoking opium

all the way down to getting your dick sucked at this point. And before this, this was only the purview of Hong. Hong controlled life and death, and Yang was slowly pulling that away. He also wrote his own edicts that overturned edicts that Hong had passed,

which is effectively heresy at this point. Yeah. I mean, it does seem as though this is putting old Hong in an interesting position where he's going to have to enforce his shit or he's going to have to reveal that he doesn't actually believe or care. And Hong promotes him. So, ah, all right.

Well, like I said, I figured it could go one of two ways. And I guess it went the other way than what I was expecting. Now, rather than immediately having his head cut off, Hong bestows a new title on Yang Wind of the Holy Spirit, which in typing Christianity is effectively the Holy Ghost. So, you know, the Holy Trinity, despite the fact they fucking hate Catholics, they use the Trinity in different words. And there's something a lot of people aren't sure of about Yang at this point, whether this is a power play by Yang. And Hong understood that at this point he had centralized so much power onto

himself that if he killed Yang, he'd face some kind of rebellion. Or if Hong was so truly so far gone to the depths of his own insanity at this moment and i say moment because we're going to get to the point where he snaps out of it he was being manipulated um his yang is also a massive opium addict uh so there's a lot of things going on here um and before long all of the directional kings are plotting behind one another's backs because they see that you know hong is kind of weak this ends in one faction accusing another group from another faction of engaging in an orgy

between themselves and their wives um so yeah. Some eyes wide shut shit happening. Ending in several of them. And their wives all being beheaded. I really fucking hate it. When I get portrayed by my directional kings. It's just one of those things. You sort of assume you've got. The whole field covered.

When you appoint four directional kings. You figure they've got. Their fields of fire covered. 360 degrees everyone's on your side and yet you get betrayed by them when they have an eyewise shut party hong walks in to see his celestial family and just walks in on a pile of like writhing bodies all fucking one another's like oh man this isn't what's supposed to be happening exactly this is not what i said i wanted all right i to do this, but I didn't want

you to be allowed to do this. This is people not reading the fine print. Now, in another situation, Yang flexes harder because the British show back up at the Heavenly Kingdom or the Heavenly Capital to make official trade of coal, to buy coal from them and sell them most likely guns the british were pretty open selling selling them guns and ammo at the time now yang greets them and refuses to allow them into the city unless they answer a quiz which he hands them on paper and it all has to do with theology it features such questions as how tall is god how large is god's abdomen what kind of clothes does god wear and can god compose verse um uh i feel as though every answer is going to trend in a sort of like hong direction as regards size height weight abdomen shape verse composition abilities you know what

i mean like i just feel so like it's just like hmm i feel like i've heard about a variety of these characteristics before in one specific guy yeah uh i ask you british traveler can god compose sick bars uh it's like with no comment to the quality of them well sure i suppose he can i mean i don't necessarily know if i'm gonna want to listen to him but yeah you know what it's like why not so god can compose verse a whole bunch of like really tired annoyed british traders having to sit down and listen to hong's miape. Like, fucking Christ. Okay, fine. I feel like people who are aware of some of the just incredibly fucked up weird shit that's going on in Britain these days would absolutely know where I'm coming from on this.

Like, well, it's not exactly a common thing. It's definitely, it does happen periodically that like some insane transphobe group is going to like go to some insane campaign thing and they all get on the train and decide to just like bother people on the train and just randomly ask them like, do women have penises? And I recall a friend describing a guy just basically who seemed like a sort of chill dude in his 50s on the train being bothered or asked this question. And the guy was like, yeah, probably walked away. And it's like, that's how I imagine british energy of trying to sell coal or buy coal

from these dickheads and having to answer all these questions it's just like yep i get it it's your thing this is just your thing you talk about you talk about god's abdomen and he's exactly the same height as this random guy got it is god thicker than a snicker uh now this paper test had 50 questions in total and they had to answer all of them correctly they fail of course and they're forced to go back to Shanghai which at this point is

locked in rebellion of its own due to Taiping supporters and local mafia and secret societies though how and when Yang instituted these tests seems to be arbitrary as the heavenly capital was full of Western traders as well as mercenaries. The mercenaries are by far my favorite group of people here. Now, some are mercenaries and others were true believers, but we're going to get to these guys in a second.

All right. Because Western powers are openly trading guns and mercenaries were helping or were attempting to train the rebel army. And like they were selling them off the books, gunpowder labeled as snuff and guns labeled as umbrellas. Now, the foreigners who flock to Taiping as true believers are probably some of my favorite people in this story that we have the least amount of information on. One was an Italian guy who was reportedly armed with a 20 pound sword who would lay down and play dead. And then when Imperial soldiers came up to him, he would spring up and start attacking them. And there was... I feel as though this would work like once.

Right? Like, Giuseppe's doing his fucking trick again all right i'm just also imagining 19th century cyano weebs who are absolutely into this idea that like god has now taken human form in you know imperial china yeah it's really easy to win over he just played them techno and gave them cocaine. I don't know if that's a thing. I don't think that's a thing in China. No, it's not. It's not. I feel as though techno may be in a really bad,

like a really safe for hotel bar sense, perhaps. Maybe it's crazier. Who knows? But the hard drugs thing, I feel like China's pretty strict on that. Now, if it's homegrown methamphetamine, sure, but I don't really think they grow coca leaves in China.

So like, yeah, I bet you it's hard to get coke in China. Look, Nate, be the change you want to see in the world. That's what I said. Well, like I said, I mean, I am a British citizen. And if there's any one thing

British citizens know, it's bringing hard drugs into China to profit themselves and hopefully get the entire population hooked on it. Which is why Nate only goes to Thailand once a year. You know what? That's the best reason that someone who looks like me and is from Britain could be going to Thailand once a year. I've got to be honest with you. That is absolutely true. You want to be like, I'm here for drugs. Drugs only. Disregard any other stereotype of what a guy who looks like me with my passport is doing

in this country once a year just drugs whoa that's it whoa whoa guys i'm not some kind of freak i just have heroin shoved up my asshole i promise and everyone's like well i mean yeah all right cool i was a little worried about you but yeah all right i can accept that that. Now, he was by this Italian guy, was not the only random believer. There was quite a few foreigners who came there. But my favorite group was a group of Irishmen who showed up, swore allegiance to the Hong Christ and acted as the Taiping executioners, which is something everyone seemed weirdly okay with. Wait, so their executioners were a bunch of Irish

guys? Yeah. What the fuck? I'd like to do an Irish accent and just imagine the scene of getting your like, your man's getting his fucking head lopped off, but like, I know that's wrong and Tom is editing this and he's like dude

you sound like an idiot like what if a Scottish guy was not Northern Irish but like lost in the Irish Sea somewhere I get it I know I can't do the fucking accent but still that's a very funny mental image Tom's gonna claim ancestral Chinese citizenship because one of his long

lost relatives was a typing executioner God that's so nice I'm sorry like you could have this is one of his long lost relatives was a Taiping executioner. God, that's so... I'm sorry. This is one of those instances where I was like, all right, a bunch of foreigners flocking to China to join the Taiping rebellion. I can imagine a bunch of weird... This is generally the era of stuff like the fucking miracle at Lourdes and stuff like that in France and people seeing visitations of christ and people seeing stigmata statues crying shit like that statues crying blood etc etc like but i guess i just wasn't expecting the irish that's that's weird that's that's that's that's a real like like shock you know flash to bang moment right there there are there's also some americans uh one of whom is is kind of

an insane person which we'll talk about in a little bit um now it's early 1855 shit is bad famine is rapidly setting in uh now this is not all the faults of the taiping or even the government um but it was mostly again due to weather changing uh like weather patterns changing and and you know rain not coming and whatever however after years of war scorched earth looting badly managed collectivism of resources and more than one man-made flood things were much worse than they originally would have been. Not to mention armies of hundreds of thousands, sometimes half a million people are coming through these provinces

and just eating everything that a human body can digest. So a famine, which almost certainly would have happened and it wouldn't have been even notable in the history of Chinese famines, becomes one of the worst. Yeah, God, I can only imagine. Yeah. Now, the Imperial Army has managed to maintain a huge force just east of the city.

Now there is something of a battle of the fake jesus's inside in the meantime the birth rate in areas controlled by the rebels would you have guessed it has dwindled down to virtually zero um because you know fucking gets your head cut off i mean you kind of there's this thing you kind of have to do to make a baby and unless there's an immaculate conception, which has apparently in the belief system of the people involved here happened once, but just once, just once, you can't really count on a thing

that your belief system tells you has happened one time in human history to happen a bunch. You kind of have to fuck. And if you're not allowed to fuck, there's probably not gonna be any babies. Yeah. And there's any there's some bold people fucking be like you know what like no this is this is this is an immaculate conception i i'm a virgin i've never had sex none of us has had sex this baby just got materialized i found this baby outside when i was

praying uh yeah now they did they did finally allow people to get married one uh like again um but they still weren't allowed to live together uh and fucking out of wedlock still gets you a visit from the uh the local irish execution squad can you imagine it's like you've been caught in flagrante delicto you know you've just got like like triplets on the way you've just been busting a ton and it's like fuck i'm caught i'm caught and it's like you're whatever it is you're expecting it just it is not a bunch of irish dudes you know like the fucking shamrock squad showing up with a battle axe well it's like the isis is the beatles so these are i don't know the rubber bandits like yeah exactly you have uh i can't even remember what they called that guy.

There was a nickname for the British ISIS guy who, it wasn't Jihadi John, I can't remember. But yeah, like you were saying, the Beatles, the dudes who were the head cutters, the throat cutters. And it's like, you have the Irish version of that. You have the Blarney version of that. You're sitting around praying to a guy who claims to be jesus's little brother in your weird commune controlled by like a 17 year old sergeant who you have to call your worship and you accidentally get someone pregnant you're like man my day could not get

any worse and then like three irish dudes fucking fergus and denal show up just just just whistling a reel yeah exactly it's like fuck me man bad way to go now yang the guy who was pretty much running the government at this point as much as anybody who's actually running the government is comes down with what people call an illness now this what actually what it was probably nobody can say for sure was opium withdrawal um now ah from what anybody can tell is he'd go on massive fucking benders of opium um because when he smoked opium he believed he talked to god which sure he's not the first person to believe you can get ripped out of your gills and speak to some celestial being. But then he would attempt to get clean and go through horrible withdrawal,

because, you know, opiate withdrawal is fucking terrible, which he would then relapse over and over again. So he would just end up staying in bed, sweating his fucking ass off, then getting ripped out of his mind, telling people he's talking to God, and then whatever his hazy opium dreams come up with then becomes law. And anybody who doesn't treat his opium hallucinations

as the word of God gets beaten with sticks by Irishmen. This seems inadvisable. This seems like not a great way to live your life like I just you know I I feel as though we already have enough bad 1960s and 70s lyrics from you know the boomer am radio

classics and like what now constitutes classic rock to understand that like okay I don't think the lyrics to fucking i am the walrus should be made into law that's enforced with capital punishment like this is a bad idea it's just like a tired chinese guy who's just sick of fucking working all day bowing to someone trying to remember the newest edict like cuckoo can you say goob goob goob goob to this guy i was like fuck shit i can't keep this shit together uh god damn it the angry irishmen are gonna visit me again uh l and if that didn't

work he ordered his squad of irish executioners to make people become quote heavenly lanterns which is exactly what you think it is he so let me guess cutting people's heads off and then fucking hollowing out their heads and getting their skulls and putting a light inside it actually that's way more inventive he just chucked oil all over them and set them on fire while they're still alive oh i thought the head became a lantern you know because like you know it's like the common freak shit despotic history whether it's whatever era of human history of like putting people's heads on spikes and stuff like that kind of like advertising their their head you know it's like a hey don't you know guess what you fuck around this is what we do to you etc and i was

thinking what's the more depraved insane thing you could do but you're right that's a lot of work though like actually getting a skull from a live person like getting the skull skull out takes a lot of work it is a lot easier to just douse them in oil and light them on fire. That's that famed Irish work ethic. Yeah, exactly. They're like, find us a way around this shit that still meets the intent. I am simply not boiling and excavating heads all day. Now, Yang spreads this punishment far and wide, even down to palace attendants and members of his harem who smell bad, according to him, or talk too loud while he was laying in bed being dope sick.

So basically, like, it's the withdrawal scene from train spotting and like everyone gets put to the sword after you leave like your local shop or whatever. You see people running around in circles on fire oh yeah they uh they pissed off the king while he was uh he was coming down whoops yeah shit you know what fucking normally it's just vomiting in the shakes and really bad fever but i guess now it's like it gets manifested in bizarre ways so you know what it's not the worst case of withdrawal. Whatever you've experienced or whatever someone close to you has experienced is not the worst case of withdrawal ever.

It's probably this guy just by the knock-on effects of like it turning into basically, you know, that horrible German children's book, Der Stuhl wird paid out, where like the girl gets lit on fire because she plays with matches. It's like that times a million. Of course, it's a fucking German children's book. Oh no dude it's a digression

I don't want to take too much time but I got given this book like it was a normal gift when I was six and I didn't really speak German because I just moved to that country and like it's an 1800s children's illustrated book about like don't be a bad kid because bad things will happen to you like for example if you suck your thumb this guy with huge scissors will come out of nowhere and cut your thumbs off it's a fucking terrifying book

extremely German. Jesus Christ It's called Der horrible peter and uh i i i can't it's early enough to end the day that i don't want to try to spell a german word on the fly and have it be on recording but like yeah book up german children's book horrible peter and you will find it uh this podcast brought to you by horrible peter uh Get it today, your local Barnes and Noble. Now, Yang had centralized so much power onto himself that nobody was safe, including Hong. Now, remember, Hong, per his own ideology, made all of his kings part of his celestial family of heaven, meaning they were all technically related to God and therefore could speak to him kind of but it was supposed to be hong's job to interpret the word of god yang in a fit of insanity drug-induced haze or just good old fashioned power play said god had told him hong and every other king other than himself

had displeased god and once again needed to be flogged. Hong, once again, submitted. This is getting a bit ridiculous. I mean, at a certain point, it's like there's, you know, it's like everyone is kind of wrapped up in the same charade here, but at a certain point, you must be like, okay, I think this guy might not actually be talking to God.

I think this might be an issue here. I think he might be making it up. And some of the other kings were like, yeah, no not gonna do that like i'm good like i didn't piss off god fuck him you know i imagine this must happen a lot in cults yeah like i've never been involved in one and and i don't plan to be and uh and if if you are related to someone who has been i'm very sorry and you have my deepest sympathies but i just i get this must happen like there must be some moments where people are like, you know,

wait, I can just make shit up and fucking say it's the word of God. And it's like, oh yeah. But only that guy's allowed to do that. I mean, that's effectively what happened in Scientology when old LRH was doing nothing but doing pills and dying in a trailer in the desert.

Like everybody realized, we can just do whatever the fuck we want now. Look, man, no matter what the origins of Burning Man are you have to respect it as a valid expression of creativity now in

order to secure the heavenly kingdom because at this point Yang's like I'm you know I'm effectively the heavenly king in all but name he wanted to secure it for good. So in order to do this, he orders the generals he deemed to be most loyal to Hong still to go off on different military campaigns. And once they are gone, he tells Hong that he believes that he deserves the same title that Hong had given himself, which was the Lord of 10,000 years, which is admittedly quite sick um that is a good name

yeah that's one thing you can say a lot about the tai pings but they had titles down uh they didn't you know food not so much but titles absolutely this it seemed finally snapped hong out of it he sent runners out to his generals that Yang had ordered away, begging for them to return to the heavenly capital. Soon they do, and other kings, namely Wei, Chenghui, and King Rangon, who had been getting shit on by Yang for years at this point, order their soldiers to go on a goddamn rampage. The Hong loyalists storm Yang's palace palace and before he even has a chance to do anything he's cut down as are his entire family however hong's orders them are just to kill yang he only wanted yang to die however this rapidly turned into a massive uh account of like settling old scores

and they went on a killing spruce in the heavenly capital and the violence spiraled out of control for three goddamn months and killed thousands of people now this is when the she decai the wing king chicken connoisseur appears in the city he was a hong loyalist and was like hey guys why are you killing so many people the heavenly king only wanted us to kill one guy so what the other two kings we and king declare him a traitor forcing him to flee the city at which point he rallies his own army of around a hundred thousand soldiers seeing their political opponent get away the other two kings simply murder Shi's entire family, who was still living in the city in his palace. Now, Shi is by far the most popular and arguably the most accomplished of all the Taiping kings,

as he was the only one out still leading his army from the front, and if you're a true believer in the Taiping ideology, that is very, very important to like, you know, suffering brings you closer to God. Hence why it took him so long for him to answer Hong's plea for help back in the capital. Now the heavenly king, facing down a four-sided civil war, asked Xi to come back.

And Xi responds that he would only come back to the city if the other two kings were executed and their heads were delivered to him. So Hong orders his personal bodyguard to do just that takes them both out she returns and uh the heavenly capital greets him with throngs of cheering civilians and uh he is named commander of the entire army of the rebellion but now hong didn't fucking trust, especially anybody with power that could rival himself, and especially not the commander of his entire army, despite the fact he's the one who just made him that powerful. In order to counter the last remaining celestial king, Hong appoints his actual blood-related brothers to the vacancies of the other directional kingships, which is a pretty big nail in the coffin of his religious ideology.

Remember, previous to this, the kings couldn't die. Now they were dead and they were replaced. Not only were they not replaced by celestial family members, because those kings had sons and stuff who would technically also be related to God. Instead, he points

his own actual brothers, completely voiding his ideology i was this is just starting to seem like the old divine right of kings as applied to just this one guy and his his family his blood relatives so yes yeah a little a little bit of a rehashing of a familiar theme yep so with the heavenly kingdom tearing itself apart you think that the imperial government would be able to sweep in and finish them off once and for all, right? Nope.

Not even a little bit. Well, to make a long story short as to why, the fucking British, because this is when the second opium war starts. Aha. Yeah. Roger. Now, I'm not going to go into the opium wars too hard

because one day that is a series unto themselves. But at the end of the first war, the British were granted free reign over several trading ports as well as Hong Kong. British trade supremacy led to an obvious anti-British attitude in many parts of China among the Chinese who were being forced out

into physical confrontations between Chinese civilians and British people. Eventually, this pissed the Brits off as they believed they should be able to do whatever the fuck they wanted without any repercussions. so they invaded Canton, attacking forts along the Pearl River. The British demanded free reign over all of China's ports rather than the ones they had secured at the end of the First War, which would also include the free trade of opium throughout all of China. At this point, opium was freely traded. However, only in the specific ports that the Brits controlled. This would make it freely traded throughout all of China.

Eventually, this blew up into another war with France joining in on the side of the British, who were then joined by the Americans and Russia. The Americans are a very, very outlying power here because look at the years, the civil war happening they really have nothing to give um this war lasts for four years and china ended up giving a lot more in order for it to end in short it's really bad um and you know it it ends up bringing all these european powers also into the taiping rebellion um now this point, the majority of the centralized imperial army for what it existed was pretty much ruined, though it hadn't really been doing well even before the Second Opium War.

Instead, the only thing keeping the government going was individual commanders leading smaller militias and provincial armies virtually independent from any kind of government control. One of these, probably the most important, arguably, is the Hunan army, which had just finally been pushed away from the heavenly capital during the fallout of the Opium War. The army was commanded by Zhang Gaofan, who had raised the goddamn thing himself, which he funded by diverting toll road fees, which I assume those fees were really high.

Eventually, his army grew to half a million soldiers, and slowly he began pushing the rebels back. Though, this is where things get weird. The Hunan army was not alone, and probably the most famous part of the imperial army was known as the Ever-Victorious Army, was much, much different. This was started as a foreign army of mercenaries

supported by thousands of local Chinese originally commanded by an American named Frederick Townsend Ward. Have you ever heard of this? Have you ever heard of this guy? That name is weirdly familiar, but I absolutely could not tell you why. Well, he wasn't a soldier, but he was a merchant sailor

who was a fucking asshole. So much so at one point his own crew chucked his ass overboard. Though where he really comes into prominent being in history was as a filibuster once working with the notorious William Walker. William Walker. Absolutely. Yeah, I was going to say I would love to do a series on the filibusters and specifically on William Walker if we could. Oh, yeah, me too. Quick potted history on that is that basically these were Americans who would just go to countries primarily in Central America and just claim them as states, territories to then be annexed by the United States with the intention of primarily Walker was doing this because he believed really hardcore in slavery and wanted to

he took over nicaragua yeah and wanted to make nicaragua into a slave state um they they wanted they had this idea of something they call i want to say like the golden circle like the kingdom of the golden circle or something like that where they basically the goal was to eventually annex all of central america and make it into slave states. And if I remember correctly, Walker took over Nicaragua and wasn't necessarily completely hated at first, but then made some insane decisions and also banned the Spanish language and said everything had to be done in English. Yeah, of course.

And was a bit of a challenge for Nicaraguans in the 19th century. And so basically Central America, which hadn't really had wars of independence, they just got granted independence from Spain in the 1820s, I believe, because the Spanish crown basically controlled that whole area. Long

story short, Central America's main war of independence was like the sort of alliance of nations that united to invade nicaragua and beat walker's ass and they kicked him out he tried again but the british caught him in what's now belize and handed him over to hondurans and they just fucking shot his ass so he's buried in the city of trujillo in i think the northern coast of honduras and it just says on his gravestone uh he was killed in 1860 and it just says like william walker this date shot now working with william

walker is when he actually got like on the job training as an as a soldier because he wasn't one before this um he parlayed this somehow into a French army commission during the Crimean War, which is a job he was not good at and was fired. So at the end of the war, he went back on a trade ship, which eventually landed him in China and in the middle of the Taiping Rebellion. Ward pretty much acted as his own hype man to build a mercenary army out of any white guy he could find in Shanghai who knew how to fire a gun, which to be fair, was most of them. He then sold this idea to the government as a highly trained crack Western military force. He managed to get the Western backing and funds after the second opium war because that's when the British began heavily supporting what they called anti-banditry measures. And the Taipings at this point were considered bandits because this whole rebellion thing was really bad for business

now that they controlled so much of China, you see. However, as any Gulf state can attest, money and guns do not make an army, and at least not a good one. Well, the early version of the victorious army did have well victories they were still largely untrained but they were better equipped than anybody else in china so that did make up some of that gap uh ward asked for more time to train locals but the government decided that they didn't have time for that shit so they chucked him into a large battle, largely unprepared, and Ward got clapped with a cannonball,

which, you know, rest in piss, fuck him. And the command of the army is passed on to a guy named Henry Andre Bergwein, who was somehow worse than Ward. Yikes. I mean, that's definitely a name that screams type of guy. So I'm interested in hearing about this. Now, he was also American, but he was also a crippling alcoholic.

And an alcoholic by the mid-1800s standards is a level of alcoholic that we today cannot comprehend. And he was also a vehement fucking racist who had an undying hatred for chinese people like uh not good he only addressed chinese people with racial slurs while also being blind drunk all the time and at some points he would get drunk and just shoot at random passing chinese people on the street in the middle of Shanghai. Look, I just want to point this out that to stand out for your anti-Chinese racism as an American in the 19th century, you've got to have been on a level that is beyond human conception. human conception because america and the west in general the you know sort of european and like settler colonial states settled by europeans in general were awful but america in particular was fucking insanely bad about this so the idea that you like stand out even more than your average american in terms of anti-chinese racism like it racism. That's saying much like his alcoholism. That's saying

a lot. Yeah. To the point he was so drunk and so racist that the imperial government, despite being so badly in need, fired him. Then he switched side to the Taiping. I see. Nobody is sure why. We don't have a lot of information during

his time with the Taiping. And it's not even sure if he actually managed to make it over to them because Bergwijn is eventually captured by the government. Instead of executing them, they deport him back to the US, who Bergwijn then somehow gets on a boat before he goes back to the US, a different one, goes back to China, and then is mysteriously murdered, almost certainly by the u.s a different one goes back to china and then is mysteriously murdered almost certainly by the government they're like oh this guy's fucking back again we're not doing this again just fucking shoot him in the face this is genuinely this is genuinely the the william walker treatment yeah um this is like they're like we kicked his ass out we forced him to flee nicaragua and he comes back and tries it again and And they're like, dude, at a certain point, we do have guns and we do shoot people. We're going to have to do that. And that's what winds

up happening. One quick aside thing that's very, very funny. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan appointed an ambassador. I think it was George H.W. Bush appointed an ambassador to El Salvador, whose name was William Walker. And no one u.s government could understand why the fuck everyone was so mad about it and it's like listen if there's one name you don't want to have in central america as an american it's william walker they do remember even if we don't even if americans don't they do remember i mean who can forget the the austrian ambassador to germany adolf schickelroover you know yeah yeah i mean like that's the thing it's it's not i wouldn't it's not quite hitler but like it's genuinely it's it's like imagine some

villain some some you know yeah exactly uh italy's ambassador to to fucking the united states benito mussolini or something it's along those lines it's not nice to talk about the current italian prime minister's cousin that way. Exactly. Now, and I think a lot of the reason why he was deported, of course, rather than being immediately murdered is because America was also helping the imperial Chinese only a little bit, again, because they didn't have a lot to help at the time. So they're like, if we fucking kill this guy, the Americans will be mad at us. Exactly.

He is their citizen. And it's like, this is one of the things where if he were just a Chinese citizen or a citizen of a country that didn't matter to the imperial government, they absolutely would have shot him immediately. Yeah. Second time's the charm, baby. Yeah. He had a little bit of leverage by virtue of being an American citizen. And that absolutely went in one alcohol pickled ear and out the other. Yeah. So now command fell to a guy named Charles George Gordon.

He was a former British military officer, meaning he was the first guy they picked to an actual military experience. And he volunteered for service in China out of boredom and was named commander. And Gordon, despite being British, we have to begrudgingly admit, was good at his job. Though at this point, this is a very low bar. He made joining the ever-victorious army a good career prospect for people, which is a first in the entire Imperial Army at this point, to the point that more people volunteered than he had guns for them. The reason for this was it was never a lack of funding, but the other two commanders just fucking stole everything. So now Gordon, being generally an honest person, cleaned out the loyalists of the other two men who were still insanely corrupt and stealing things and actually paid people on time.

He drilled his army to British military standard, which even at a much accelerated pace, which is what he was doing because he didn't have a lot of time, was much better than a lot of parts of the Imperial Army at this point. And not to mention, they were still flush with untold amounts of British cash. They also were very well armed. They got modern artillery, modern rifles, everything. They even got modern machine guns, as much as they existed at the time, like Gatling guns and stuff like that. I mean, something that I point out too is that this isn't meant to be just like a sort of Euro-supremacist vision. Britain had developed military tactics so that it could do imperialism.

Britain had developed military tactics so that it would be better at both fighting various iterations of Napoleon and his descendants and other things along those lines but also in order to contest and control its imperial possessions because this is squarely within the victorian era and britain is britain's control is fucking expanding around the globe at this point so like it's not to say oh yeah of course they bring in a white guy like they brought in other white guys who sucked at their jobs because they were fucking insane but britain had a military culture that was advanced for the time it was one of the better militaries in europe at the time and this is partly because of the fact that like they used their military to gain outsized levels

of influence and control given that this is a relatively small island in the north atlantic and it basically ran the world at one point. And this was in the waxing period of the empire. Yeah. And not to mention, I mean, this is the type of conflict that was built for. I mean, the Taipings fought well against the imperial government, but only because it was ruined by rampant warlordism and division and decentralized control.

So, yeah, it's a low bar for success here. Now, the foreign mercenaries are not the only foreigners involved in the war because the British, French, Americans, and Russians all deployed soldiers, like actual uniformed soldiers, not mercenaries. Though, again, the Americans didn't really send much of anything. Not only were they much happier letting the British and the French do the heavy lifting here when it came to military matters, it was still the Civil War just a few months before. They didn't have a lot of shit to give.

What was the U.S. military was busy ripping itself apart. However, this is also a very important time for the Empire of China. The emperor died and was replaced by his five-year-old son, which meant he would have to have a regent. The emperor died and was replaced by his five-year-old son, which meant he would have to have a regent. This ended up being two different empresses, one of whom, Cixi, a legendary empress in Chinese history, mostly for the reformation campaign that she would launch. Now, this is an attempt to duct tape the broken imperial government back together and rejected Western forms of government in favor of keeping the old imperial system, but did toss open the doors for military and technological reforms to prop the whole thing up. So she welcomed the outside world into the Chinese government, unlike ever before, so they could pump guns and training into the imperial army, which they desperately,

desperately needed. So these foreign soldiers had two purposes they were supposed to train and try to reform the battered imperial army though in many cases they would just straight up lead them into battle they were also supposed to protect things they believe important to their national interest of course namely shanghai which had been first captured by a secret society known as the Small Sword Society in 1853, and then the Taipings in 1860, who only held it for a few months before withdrawing. In 1861, the Taipings had mustered an army of 100,000 and were marching in the city again, and they did have some limited success, landing 20,000 men by boat and seizing a district of the city. Previous to this, the imperial government had asked the Westerners to remain neutral due to the bad PR of having to have their asses

pulled out of the fire by Westerners. After this, though, the government asked for assistance and they got it. This is where the ever-victorious army appears in earnest for the first time, as well as actual uniformed soldiers. This turned out would be very, very bad for the rebels. For the first time, they would not be fighting towards what was a warlord army with largely

untrained militiamen. They would be fighting a professionally trained and armed army that now had rifles and artillery that far outrange anything that the Taipings had at their disposal. The Westerners, along with the Imperial Army, shattered the rebel force, which had now had a path of retreat cut off by the ever-victorious army. Around half of the rebel army was able to escape, but the other half was not so lucky. At this point, Hong called off the attack, and the rebels wouldn't threaten Shanghai ever again. Though most importantly, this is where the rebellion of the heavenly kingdom would enter what I call a death spiral. Southern China, that being the area still held largely by the heavenly kingdom, was collapsing

into uncontrolled famine and disease, both of which were made significantly worse by the war waging all around him. Rather than try to do anything about it, the heavenly king, Hong, had become a germaphobe demanding everybody rinse their mouths out and wash their hands before they come near him. Again, he had largely stopped trying to rule over his kingdom and dedicated himself to rewriting the Taiping version of the Bible yet again. Garrisons and civilians starved as what little food they had ran out. People began foraging for weeds and grass to stave off death,

and cannibalism was reported in every single city that the rebels controlled. Now, Western powers had opened the floodgates for the imperial government in the form of guns, training, and, probably most importantly, food. And that is where we'll pick up next time on the conclusion to the Taiping Rebellion. Yeah, I mean, stuff's not going great. But at the same time, there was this question that was always looming in my mind

of like when you talk about the dissension and the betrayals and the executions and general insanity, why is the Imperial Army not exploiting this? And it seems that, well, they had problems of their own. They really couldn't, yeah. But as they were able to remedy

that and bring in, you know, deploy the resources that they were able to get their hands on and also, you know, deploy these various alliances and, you know, new additions of foreign actors, that now they are able to engage with it in a way that's going to take advantage of the fact that these guys are,

you want to say a clown show, but a clown show that's been successful and also killed a lot of people. It's a clown show ran by Pennywise. Yeah. And like, remember we talked about in the other two episodes, the building wave of the typing rebellion was, you know,

the universal theory of fuck that guy. People were joining in. Yes. Some out of religious belief, but the vast majority because the Qing government was so bad. And now a lot of people were seeing that, holy fucking shit, this is much, much worse. So they don't get these massive recruitment drives of 50,000 people, a hundred thousand people like they're getting anymore. Like, and the people that they did have, they've been throwing haphazardly,

badly developed military plans or, you know, having them be washed away by the grand canal or freezing to death or getting lost. Like that's why I call it like the death spiral. There's no coming back at that point. They had no food, no leadership administration at this point they had no food no leadership

administration at this point hardly exists the high water mark is way far beyond them and finally the qing government has the ability to take advantage of this because they were so badly led themselves uh i mean even in the beginning of all this if we're looking at the same qing government as we're looking now at the end of part three the rebellion dies in its womb you know um when they first attempted to take out the taipings when they gathered in the one place in the very beginning of all this but you know i guess 10 years later is better than never yeah and i as i recall as we'll get into the in the terminal episodes it does go on for a while in terms of like remnant groups so it's like the the tide is turning but it's a it's a very very

slow rotation and and i mean we we've been making the the isis comparison frequently because it's easy but you know yeah it's gonna go on for years in multiple different countries like a small simmering, largely unimportant group of assholes who refuse to admit that they've lost. Now, Nate, thank you so much for again joining me here at the altar

of Hong Christ at Part 3. Use this area to plug whatever shows, the multiple shows that you work on, if people aren't already listening to them for some reason. I am the co-host of what a hell of a way to die show that i do with francis horton friend of the show about why you shouldn't join the military and we also talk about uh lots and lots of strange military culture and news veteran culture and news and you know sort of arcana of that nature and we also just just tell dad chat stories because we're old

and that's what we talk about gardening. I am the producer of a show called Kill James Bond, which started as a review all the Bond films and now has become a review movies podcast hosted by three trans people who are extremely funny. Their names are Alice Caldwell Kelly, Abigail Thorne, and Devin. I just did three nights of live shows for them and those recordings will be coming out soon so it might be a good time to pick up to understand what the whole dynamic is about and why people like this show I also am the co-host and producer

of a show called Trash Future which is a podcast about primarily the tech industry, British culture, but the tech industry from the perspective of finding the dumbest examples of tech optimism and making fun of finding the dumbest examples of tech optimism and making fun of them. So if any of those shows sound interesting, aside from this one, which is I'm now doing more on recording with, if any of them sound interesting to you and you want to hear

more of me or stuff that I'm involved in, those are all available on every podcasting platform you can think of. So just check them out. And everybody, thank you so much as always for listening to the show. If you like what we do here, consider supporting us on Patreon, where you get bonus episodes, like five years worth of bonus episodes at this point. You get access to our Discord. You get stickers.

You get books. You get all sorts of other stuff. And if you don't want to, that's fine. It's your money. Do with it what you please. But leaving a review wherever you listen to podcasts is free so we'd appreciate if you did that because it's nice to hear kind words about the effort we put into the

show and until next time don't get visited by the squad of typing Irishman yeah I'll try to avoid that see you next week everybody yep bye