Last year I read a lot of Chinese history. I didn't expect to find it so interesting! China's history has now become a passion of mine. I want to tell you how I fell down this rabbithole, and why I stayed.

How it started

In 2025 I read these books on Chinese history (taken from my reflections on 2025 blog post):

• Empress Dowager Cixi (Jung Chang)
• China and the Manchus (Herbert A. Giles)
• Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of Kang-Hsi (Jonathan D. Spence)
• Tea Horse Road (Michael Freeman, Selena Ahmed)
• Imperial China 900-1800 (F.W. Mote)
• Silk, Silver, Opium (Michael Pembroke)
• The Search for Modern China (Jonathan D. Spence)

Why? Why did I spend all this time on such a strange historical niche? The short answer is that I love history, and I discovered that I had a huge historical blind spot around China and Asia more generally. I've loved history ever since I was a kid, when my grandfather got me Age of Empires on CD-ROM for Windows 98 (I later received a second copy of this game from a box of Nutri-Grain, as did all Australian 90s kids). It got me really interested in history, and I was lucky enough to find a really good history teacher, Ruth Phillips (then Ruth Targett) who helped stoke this fire. I read all the Greek myth books, Greek history retellings, etc that kids like to read. I got interested in Egyptian history too, but my main love was Roman history. I got to know the history teachers at my school pretty well, and they got me into Roman history with a copy of Colleen McCullough's "First Man in Rome". This completely captivated me. Over the next few years I worked my way through all McCullough's "Masters of Rome" novels, which are incredibly well-researched novelizations of Roman history, from Julius Caesar's grandfather until his successor. Roman history became my favourite subject. I loved reading about these other times and lost worlds.

When I went to university, philosophy took over as my primary interest among the humanities. I fell in love with philosophy and put history away for a decade or so, until recently. During the COVID pandemic in 2020, I couldn't do very much and became fairly depressed. One of the few things I could still do for entertainment was read, and browse eBay. This meant I wound up buying a fair few books, including my old favorites. I re-read The First Man in Rome and remembered how thrilling it was. Each year I reread another of McCullough's Rome novels. At one point, Lucius Cornelius Sulla mentions China, and explains to a legate that China was already an empire for thousands of years before Rome was even a dream in Aeneas's mind. This really shocked me. I hadn't realized how old China was, that even ancient Rome considered it old. So I filed that little fact away.

Later, I took Mandarin 101 at the Austin Community College, because I discovered that learning foreign languages is fun, and I wanted to be able to text my Mandarin-speaking friends in my broken little sentences. You can't really learn a language without learning a little bit about its culture, so I had my first bits of exposure to ancient China.

This all really came to a head when I listened to an interview with Jung Chang on the Dwarkesh podcast. She told so many interesting stories that I knew I had to read a book of hers. A few weeks later, my friend Sabelo -- probably the most widely read man in New Orleans under the age of 50 -- took me to a bookstore, and I found several of Jung Chang's books there. I picked up a copy of Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China. All I knew about Cixi was that she was a controversial figure who lived through a lot of historical drama and had caused a fair bit of it. So I picked it up and got reading.

The book absolutely captivated me. It was a really well written drama. This was as thrilling as any medieval tale, any sword-and-sorcery fantasy or Arthurian legend I read as a kid. It was full of intrigue, betrayal, clashing of civilizations and philosophies. I loved it. The book left me with a lot of questions, though! I was particularly curious about the Manchu, the non-Chinese rulers of China. To the Europeans, the Manchu were indistinguishable from the Han Chinese majority. But within China, they were (sometimes) hated alien oppressors. So I decided to read more about them. I picked up a copy of China and the Manchus, which again, answered some questions and posed lots more. Who was this strange Wu Sangui figure, who helped the Manchu take over China, only to lead a rebellion against them decades later? To find answers, I had to dive deeper into the history and learn more about the Qing takeover.

At this point I just gave up and dived fully into Chinese history, roughly working back through time as I went.

Why is Chinese history so interesting?

I like reading history for the same reasons I like reading science fiction: learning about alternative ways to organize society. The advantage of sci-fi is that it can be more imaginative and not limited by reality. The advantage of history is that, well, it actually happened. So everything is plausible, implying more possibilities for actually applying these lessons to our contemporary society.

I think Westerners like myself tend to overweight Western history when looking for inspiration or solutions to problems, and underweight foreign countries. During COVID-19, I was very frustrated with our inability to take inspiration from countries like Japan and Taiwan that were finding innovative ways to manage the pandemic. I wanted to learn more about other cultures and how they think, to help inspire other ways to solve problems in America or Australia, the two countries I call home.

There were so many interesting things I learned from reading Chinese history. Here are just a few:

Cyclical vs. linear

You can view history as a linear progression, from stone age (primitive) to the Greeks (good) to the Romans (better) to the englightenment (even better) to the scientific revolution (oh yeah baby!!!) You have to ignore the Dark Ages, but that's not hard. This linear model of history is, of course, false, but it's a useful way of thinking sometimes. Even when you know it's false, it's somewhat common to Western thought, and it's hard to shake it off sometimes. It does tend to linger in the background of your mind as a baseline cultural narrative if you grew up in the West.

Well, Chinese history is really not like that. It's much more cyclical. Romance of the Three Kingdoms famously begins, "The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been" (話說天下大勢．分久必合，合久必分). A promising emperor founds a dynasty. The people prosper. The empire grows. After generations, the empire begins to rest on its laurels. Eventually, a bad heir is chosen, and becomes a bad emperor. A bad emperor makes bad choices, including choosing a bad heir for the next generation. Eventually, the empire falls into decline, and is taken over by another young dynasty founder. The empire might split into two or more, until eventually one dynasty is strong enough to unite China again.

This cyclical view of history was weirdly inspiring and hopeful, given how unstable the world feels right now. If, in the background of your mind, you have this linear history narrative, then the idea that the world has been taken over by evil thuggish brutes is very threatening. It feels like we're about to end the chain we've been slowly, painstakingly building for generations.

On the other hand, I think Pu Songling or Zhang Dai, writers who lived through the fall of the Ming dynasty, would look at this current period of history and say, "Yeah, empires do decline and choose insane, evil leaders who start and lose pointless wars. Is this really a new idea to you? First time here, mate?" So reading about these horrible chaotic periods of civil war and cultural decline was weirdly reassuring, because the fall was not the end. Civilization continued, and it got better. I think I was born into a golden age for our civilization, and it pains me to think that I might see its end. But in Australia, we're used to seeing fires burn down a forest, which clears out dead growth and lets the forest regenerate and come back stronger. Even if it's very painful and takes a long time. Things have a way of regrowing. For every catastrophic Qing takeover, and the suffering it caused, there eventually comes a wonderful period of peace like the Kangxi emperor.

At least that's what I'm telling myself. Maybe that's cope. Maybe civilizational decline and nuclear weapons together is actually not something you can come back from. But my brain chemistry can't really spend too long on the worst-case scenario, so I'm going to keep thinking that even if we're living through a period of dynastic decline, something new and better will emerge. Eventually.

Horse People and Farmers

I really enjoyed "Imperial China, 900-1800" for its treatment of the various tribes north of China. At multiple points in history, North China was conquered by steppe nomads (the Khitan, the Mongols, the Manchu). The latter two pressed on through the South and ruled a unified China. Maintaining China's north border was a tricky business, and if you failed, all of China could be conquered.

The book was a great lesson on the various Northern cultures that I knew nothing about, except vaguely that they lived in the desert and used horses. I was struck by the dynamic of "involuntary codependence". My understanding of that concept is that both groups, farmers and horse nomads, have to live with each other. The horse nomads are free, they have all the food and land they want, but they depend on the farmers for complex goods that only a stable civilization can produce (e.g. complex metallurgy, water-intensive farming, silk, porcelain). And the farmers, well, they don't depend on the horse nomads, but they also can't get rid of them. The horse nomads can't get silk and swords if they kill all the farmers. So they all have to find some way to coexist.

This horse-nomad vs farmer dichotomy reminds me a lot of the native American plains tribes (like the Comanche) and their sedentary farmer enemies (the Texan settlers). A lot of the same dynamics seem to reoccur! It's possible that Horse Nomad vs. Farmer is one of the great cosmic battles that our people are destined to repeat again and again. The similarities between the American Wild West and the Chinese "Wild North" are shown in this amazing duet by Abigail Washburn and Wu Fei: "The Roving Cowboy / Avarguli (阿瓦尔古丽)"

The emperor and the state

Giles points out the difference between an emperor who rules and one who merely reigns. The former is involved in governing, the latter is just a symbolic figurehead. China had a very developed central executive (and no equivalent of the judiciary or legislative branch) in the Imperial palace. Ideally the Emperor was a devoted scholar who cared about his people. But if he wasn't -- if he'd rather spend his time fighting, or writing bad poetry, or feasting, or in his boudoir -- then China would continue, because he had a huge staff of scholars and eunuchs to ensure that the country would still run. He'd just rubberstamp everything. The actual work of governing could be deferred to the palace bureaucracy if the emperor wasn't interested.

This worked because China had a good supply of qualified scholars, thanks to the Imperial examination system. Without something like this, you'd have no ability to reliably find intellectual talent for all the ancient Chinese equivalents of "laptop jobs".

This pattern has apparently been observed in other societies (my friend Judah points out "Viziers in Iran, the Mayor of the Palace in France, the Japanese emperor's court and the parliament in monarchical Britain"). But I think it worked better in China because of the examination system. When the whole country agrees that the highest, best-regarded jobs require studying philosophy and history for years so that you can pass a test, become recognized as one of the smartest people in the country, and go work for the imperial palace, reading documents all day and writing up plans, well, that kind of respect for bureaucracy is really necessary to have a functioning administrative state.

Succession failure

It is very difficult to find a leader who can unite coalitions and get stuff done. Keeping a coalition of people together is difficult. Few leaders can do it. When that leader dies, their coalition usually falls apart, because there's no obvious successor, and even if there is one, that successor probably isn't skilled or charismatic enough to keep the coalition together any longer.

So often, a group is poised to totally conquer and dominate. Then the leader catches a flu and dies, and within a year the entire army/empire falls apart. Genghis Khan is the best-known example of this. You can do everything right -- conquer most of the world, assimilate dozens of different powerful civilizations under your banner -- and you can still die of a fever after falling in a lake, then have all your sons immediately tear your empire apart fighting for the throne. Even if you specifically choose a successor and make all your other sons swear to respect your chosen successor. In fact, that might actually make succession failure more likely, because it breeds resentment among the other sons! Family is hard, and dying doesn't make it easier.

As an aside, this did make me Update My Priors (please applaud): I think once Trump dies, his coalition will collapse pretty quickly. I think Trump is a once-in-a-lifetime generational talent at coalition-building. I don't like the man at all, but you've gotta admit, he's got a magic ability to somehow form coalitions from very different groups who should hate each other (rich VCs and CEOs in Manhattan and San Francisco who hate the poor, poor people in rural America who hate rich CEOs, pro-rape redpill YouTubers and kooky antivax feminist moms like Naomi Wolf, etc etc). I don't think there's any deep lesson to Trump's success here. I think every now and then you just get someone charismatic enough to align all these different groups, and as soon as he dies, it all falls apart. There's no potential heir who could replicate this.

Shenzhen is not new

People in my weird politics-wonk internet bubble are always talking about Shenzhen and China's ability to build: can we Reindustrialize America, should we even try, etc etc. Why can the Chinese build so much of the world's top hardware?

I'd invert this picture: Shenzhen and its innovation factories with EVs, solar panels, etc are actually regressing back to the historical mean. Shenzhen's solar panels are the 21st century equivalent of south China's porcelain goods: the crazy advanced Chinese stuff that the West can't get enough of. My impression is that, historically, all the Cool Stuff came from China. The Romans were crazy for Chinese silk. The Europeans were crazy for Chinese porcelain. China had the most advanced manufacturing in the world for a really huge part of world history. There's been a slight inversion recently, where the West outpaced them in technology and industry for 2 centuries. Time will tell if we return to the historical pattern or not.

Why I'll keep reading Chinese history

Firstly: it's incredibly entertaining. The stories from Chinese history are just as interesting as any Arthurian legends, Greek myths or Norse sagas. For entertainment value alone, they deserve to be better known in the Anglosphere.

Secondly: it's fascinating learning how very different countries dealt with the same problems in different ways across history. I hope that reading more history will help me understand the present.

Lastly: in today's declining America, with rising xenophobia and demonization of anything foreign, I believe that becoming a weeb can be a radical act of love and service to the human spirit.