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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioral discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi. Hi. Hi. America podcast. Robert Evans behind the ********. Yeah, we're we're coming in. This this one's been rough. There's been a lot of disasters behind the start of this episode behind The ******** podcast. We talked with worse people in all of history, First off. They got the time wrong. Our, our, our guest. Today we're doing a reverse ******** where someone reads me a story about a terrible person. It's another coup. We have a lot of Coos. We're like you know Guatemala. Most of Latin America throughout like the 60s to present day. Actually we're a lot like all that. And and my cough guest today is is our our friend Christopher from worst year ever. You know him on Twitter as ice must be destroyed. Guy has it going. Christopher. It's it's it's going pretty good. I have, I have successfully come out, come out in charge of this, this warlord struggle. Yeah, successfully, successfully taking control of Beijing if they will hold it for about 2 hours, which is about the average time that people hold Beijing in this. Very excited. Well, you've given us a little bit of a hint about the episode for today. I want to start this by noting that you are in Chicago, which I thought meant you were in the Eastern Standard Time, because I assume everything east of Arizona exists in the same time zone, unless it's Texas, and that is apparently not the case, which I'm furious in Texas are the same time zone, which makes absolutely no sense. I think, yeah, I haven't spent much time in in southern, in southern Illinois. But you know, I I think, I think if you broke off a bunch of southern Illinois there for a little while. Yeah, I mean they're not like that different. I just want to let the listeners know that as we were testing our levels for this recording, I went whose air is there something, is there an airplane flying over somebody's house right now? And it was just Roberts foot massager and he thought he could use while we recorded this podcast and it was worth the shot, Sophie? It was worth a try look. Impressive. Horrifying. It wouldn't be the first time I keep doing things that curate odd noises. Like a couple of weeks ago he had an episode where there was like a clicking sound. The whole episode and people kept being what is it? It was a moon clip of 44 + P ammunition for my gigantic revolver that I was playing with as a desk toy. I removed that and then I got the foot machine. So it's just. Just a disaster over here at all times. You're a professional, but, you know, I'm a professional. This is literally the only thing I do for money. Now. Today, you're not our host. Today, I'm not. So, Christopher, do you want to tell us what we're talking about? To get started here? Yeah. Yeah. Robert, I want to ask you something. How do you feel about warlords? Oh, I'm very pro. I hope to be one someday. The healthcare seems to be **** but usually don't live long enough for that to really matter. I already own a Mauser C96, which a lot of my favorite warlords were during the Chinese civil wars, and that was a popular gun there, so I feel like I'm already halfway to being a proper warlord. Yeah, it seems like a good time. I don't. I don't really know any downsides to being a warlord. Well, sometimes you get assassinated by Japanese, yes, which it seems seems seems to be the biggest one. I'm already very worried about that. So yeah, it's like it's a constant problem in the field. Alright, so this, this this week we are doing drugs Wong Chong, who is? You know, he's probably trying his most famous warlord, but he's 100% the warlord who is having the most fun in this. Oh, hell yeah. That's the guy I like then. Yeah. Yeah, he's he's having a ball. He's going to make history work for you, you know? Yeah. And what was that name again? Chang, Chong. Chong. Chung. Chung. Chung. Chung. Chung. Chung. Yeah. OK just go on. John. John there. And and I'm. I'm pretty good on John. OK yeah. I can do this. We can do this. Yeah. He's also known as the dog Meat Warlord, which I don't know. We don't know if I like that part with three dogs in the room with me right now. But yeah. OK. So we will get to this. But it's not he doesn't eat dogs. This is this is entirely unrelated to the consumption of dogs, which is again, pretty incredible considering that he's called the. Dog yeah, yeah, yeah. I was assuming me general some eating dog meat. Probably played on not from the eating dog meat. Yeah. OK. OK, well, yeah, let's let's get into this. All right. Chong was born on February 13th, 1881, in a rural village in Shandong province. His family was incredibly poor. Later in life, Jungle claimed not to have known what a pillow was growing up. And Jesus, yeah, you know, I mean, John, John is a character where there's, there's approximately 10 billion sort of myths floating around about him, but I actually believe this one, like his, his family is poor by the standards of 1800s world China, which is, you know, not a great place to be in the beginning. That's a whole new benchmark for poverty. Is like what is the pillow? It's so. Well, I'm OK. Jesus. All right. His father, his father played trumpet at funerals and worked as sort of a Barber who shaves people's head for religious ceremonies and his mugging. Why? He was poor. Yeah. Well, yeah. And, you know, and his mom does like small time ritual magic for money. Yeah, and you know, as you can pick up on, work is incredibly unstable and infrequent for both of them. Now, now, this is the era of child labor. And I mean, OK, it's still the error of child labor, but it was really the era of child labor back then. And this means that Jiang started his first job when he was either 12 or 13, and he has his first job is it's kind of cute. He he he would accompany when when his dad would play trumpet at funerals, he would be like go along with him and play symbols. OK, OK. Getting into the family business, which is ****. Given to the terrible family business, it's just not pay enough for pillows. Good call. Good call. Yeah, the other other than the sort of whole crushing poverty part. We don't know a huge amount about his family life. Other than that he absolutely adores his mother. Which seems to be why when his mother left his father to moved to Manchuria, Jong goes with his mother. And it's sort of unclear why this happens, but what what's most likely seems to happen is that the family just wasn't making enough money to support the three of them. So Chang's mother took him to the provincial capital to go look for work there. This is the first similarity between this Chinese warlord and doctor, Phil, and I'm curious as to whether or not it will be the last. Yeah, I, you know, I was thinking about that, about that when I was writing this and. I don't know. There's there, there, there's. There's a little bit there, there's a little bit there except. I don't know different. Doctor Phil doesn't end up in the Army, and I think that's the big difference here. I mean, I can imagine him as a bandit, but. I can imagine Doctor Phil is abandoned for sure. He is a kind of bandit, a spiritual kind, though. I think this guy's actually going to work out to be much more ethical than Doctor Phil. Well, we'll see. We'll see about that, OK? All right, so he moves with his mom to Manchuria. Yeah, and and while he's there, he's about 15 at this point he starts working as a servant in a gambling house, which gives him his first exposure to this class of petty criminal that's most of his youth is going to be special forwarding with these people and this ****** off the local Gentry. And they just expel him from the city. Him specifically, not the criminals he's like hanging out with. Why did he know more than? These other people, yeah, my, my, my, my guess on that is that so the actual local criminals probably have some kind of political power, and he just doesn't. And so I can't really do anything to them, but they just like, yeah, we'll kick, we'll kick you out of town. OK, so, OK, so once, once there, he does the thing that most young men do when they have no jobs and throwing in the countryside, he becomes a bandit. Hell yeah. All right, so so this this guy, this guy's moving up in the world, he's doing better than his dad already. Yeah. Now we for someone obvious reasons, we know very little about what he was doing as a bandit. But we do know that as a mother who's now, who's now completely on her own started starts to sort of data series of men for the financial support. And eventually a guy she was dating murderous, her previous ex, and the guy got sent to prison. But because this is, and I can't emphasize this enough, an incredibly ****** ** patriarchal society, she also gets exiled from the city for the murder, even though she had no involvement in it. City leaders just went. Yeah, we're excelling. You too. Yeah, your boyfriend murdered somebody. You gotta get the **** out of here, all right? So that's the kind of society. OK, don't worry, it gets worse. That was basically the whole world at this point, so yeah. OK. So yeah. So once she's kicked out, she she dates like she's able to date one more guy and she scrapes off enough money to go back to Chang's father. But when she gets back to him, he's flat broke and sells her to a grain merchant for some Millet, which is apparently a thing you could do at this time. Wow. You could you could just sell your wife to a grain birchett from it. I would condemn him for this. But this is the this is the best financial investment he's made in his life as it. I mean, it was a wholesale merchant, so maybe you got a good deal. Yeah, I don't really needed that ******* Millet. Yeah. OK, I shouldn't be laughing. This is horrible. But like, well OK, so this is just like such a bleak story. Well, OK, so this point John's mom just disappears from the social record for 20 years. But but don't worry about her. She is the only person in this story who's getting a happy ending. And like, frankly, after all of this **** she's like one of the people who deserves it the most. Yeah. So yeah, I Chang's mother will return later. Now Chong is bandaging for about 2 years, but eventually he's able to get a relatively stable job in Manchuria in 1899. And because Manchuria is going to play a pretty big role in this story, I'm going to give it sort of brief introduction to it. Manchuria is geographically, it's in the very far NE part of China, like it's kind of like it's China's version of New England, except imagine if instead of border in Canada it bordered like Russia, Korea and was 5 minutes away from Japan. Hmm. So you know and and and when being in the middle of. China, Korea, Russia, and Japan means that there's just basically every empire is constantly fighting for control over it. And this also means that that all of the empires wind up putting just an enormous amount of capital into Manchuria, sort of manufacturing belts and railway systems. And. Jeong. Chang's never able to get one of like the the really highly paid stable jobs in in Metrius arsenal which is one of the largest sort of weapons manufacturers in China. But what he is able to get is a job on the Chinese Eastern Railway. Now the Chinese, the Chinese Eastern Railway is is a Russian concession. It's one of the concessions that sort of the Ching dynasty. Has been giving out to like the various empires that it loses wars to and this sort of 19th and 20th centuries. And the way these things work is that, like, OK, so when we leave the session to a country, you get, like, if you're, if you're like, say, like Britain, you get, you get a chunk of land and you just control that. Like that part of China, like just under your control, you get your own. You can impose your own legal system. They have their own police force. And in Germany does this too, to one of their port cities. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this happens all over the country and there's, there's. There's a there's a really big and famous like French concession that's just like 1/3 of Shanghai. This this is all going to become important later, when the sort of just absolutely horrific treatment of Chinese workers in these concessions boils over into just full scale conflict. But for right now, the most important thing about Chang's job on the concession is that it gives him gives him his first real contact with Russia. OK now for for all sort of like lack of education and and it's it's really questionable whether Jiang. Really? Ever got more than like 2 years of schooling? He's extremely good at learning languages. And he he like almost immediately was able to learn Russian and is able to very quickly leverage this job once a sort of railway where it dries up to become the chief foreman and a gold mine in Siberia, which was basically because he was the only Chinese worker who speak Russian. And the Russians trusted him enough to give him a gun, which would turn out to be great for Jiang and an absolute fiasco for literally every other human being in China. But it goes great for him. I mean that's that is a story you see a lot in this colonial period is like the folks who make bank and are really successful and often wind up basically owning huge chunks of the world are usually polyglots. And it's the same with the Imperial powers too, like all of these British colonizers. Like the dudes who are actually doing the colonizing tend to be people who just like pick up language because it's like your number one asset in this period of time, other than shamelessness and sociopathy. Is being able to talk to everybody that makes sense? Yeah. It's really like if you're Chinese working this. This is one of this, or being a really good bandit. Are basically like the only two real ways you could even sort of work yourself up in the world. And you know junk said Chung is doing does pretty well for himself here he yes but you know 111 day he's working at this mining camp and there cause attacked by a bear and OK I don't know if you know about this Robert. I'm I'm just psyched that a bear attack is coming into this story. This is everything that I want in a story so far. So please I don't know if you know this Robert Bears they're really big. Yeah they're pretty, pretty sizable. Yeah, they're they're extremely strong and and they're mass means that unless you have a very, very large gun, you're not going to bring it down with one shot. Yeah, I have a bear gun, and it weighs like 4 1/2 pounds. It's a handgun. Yeah. What? Yeah, I just could. You might need to shoot a bear. Sophie, do you want me to not be able to shoot a bear if a bear attacks? I. Christopher Barrett look, Barrett bears can tip over 700 pounds steel like dumpsters and it is not even that much effort for them. They my previous is only like 700 pounds, Sophie. I'm still scarred from the the guy who's running in the recall election in California, who's been using a bear as a prop and his ads. So I'm triggered. That's all I'm saying. So this bear comes into camp. Song Johnny, OK, He is this incredibly dinky 1800s rifle and she just easily kills this bear. So he's got a really homely nailed it through the heart or the eye or something. Yeah, which I couldn't find a description of it, which is sort of wild. It's probably if it's a mid 1800s gun, I'm certain like the best it could be is probably something like a Dreyse needle gun, which is kind of an early pre cartridge bolt action rifle if it is a cartridge rifle, I mean if it is a cartridge rifle, the good news is that it's probably a fairly large round because most of the IT was usually like some kind of like 30 out six or somewhere in that ballpark. But I'm gonna guess the fact that this is the late 1800s in China means that he's not using like there's a decent chance it's a black powder anyway. Yeah, it's that that. That's a heck of a thing to be able to do with the kind of weapon he probably was packing. Yeah, and this, you know, this, this has a fairly predictable reaction. Everyone else there. And she, she just immediately gets this, like cult following among the workers because he just, you know, murdered this bear, like extremely easily. And, you know, this is, this is sort of a point where you start to see the things are gonna make a really good soldier because, I mean he's, he's remarkably calm under pressure. He's an incredibly good shot. And he's also incredibly charismatic, which is important for a guy who is an estimate very here. This dude is somewhere between 6 foot six and seven feet tall. Holy ****. Yeah, he's tall as ****. Like he's. And he's tall. He's that tall, growing up impoverished in rural China in the 1800s, which is wild. Unbelievable. That's huge for people who grow up in the United States with access to all of the protein they could possibly want. That is. Oh God. It's absolute monster. And yeah, you know, like, like, at this point, like, it's kind of hard not to be sympathetic to him. I mean, this is, you know, she's bears. He's a giant. He's a bear shooting giant bandit. Polyglot. He's pretty rad. Yeah. He loves his mom. Like, it's great. And, you know, because this is behind the ********. This is where everything immediately starts to go to ****. Hell yeah, let's do it. Yeah, this is this is like the moment where Saddam is, is, is robbing his or is threatening his high school principal at gunpoint for Saddam turns bad. This is this is the part where you like. With something bad? Yeah, let's go. So in in 1911, a revolution toppled the ruling Qing dynasty and replaced it with a Republic led by Run Shikai, a man whose sole qualification for this job is that he has the largest army in China. When the fighting stops, I mean, what other qualifications would there be for this job? Well, you know, for for for exactly one day, Sun Yat Sen, a man with actual, real political qualifications, was in charge. And then he was like, this guy you're on, is the only person with an army large enough to hold the country together, so we're going to give it to him. And so, yeah, you're on what's up writing this country. And he. It's a it's a disaster. He, you know, he starts in 1911. He's basically lurching from crisis to crisis. There's multiple rebellions against him until, in late 1915, he makes one of the most baffling and disastrous decisions anyone has ever made in human history. He convenes an assembly to declare himself emperor. Now again, this is a guy who was in power. Literally the only reason he's in power is because of a revolution, the sole point of which was getting rid of the monarchy. And you're on looks around at the countries collapsing around him and he goes, I know what will unite the nation behind me declaring myself Emperor. Yeah. Completely scans no flaws with this plan. Are you going to tell me this doesn't go well now? To his credit, Yoan did briefly unite the entire country, because basically all of it immediately goes into revolt. The drive of Mount. And you know, he he kind of remarkably holds on for about 3 months before deciding that he wasn't going to be emperor after all and politely asking everyone to please stop revolting so we could go back to the business of running the country. And, you know, kind of sad that we don't know whether this would have worked or not, because three months after he abdicates, he dies of an Hermia. OK. And with his death in 1916 begins what is known in Chinese history as the warlord. Yeah, this is what that game where you stab a bunch of people to death was about, right? Umm, that. No, that's that's that's the warring States. Oh, that's the Warring States. Blue Boo Boo is earlier. Yeah, right. Because nobody had guns. Everybody was stabbing each other. OK, this is this is that but. Significantly this message. That's the name, yeah. This is the. This is this. This is the kaiserreich special. Yeah. OK. That. Yeah. That that makes sense. Yeah. This is by the way, why we're bringing you on and we'll increasingly have you on is because I attempted to do several stories about China and other parts of Southeast Asia and very quickly realized that, like when I'm doing like Europe, you know, or or or the United States or even parts of Latin America, just because it's a place I'm closer to and have spent more time and I have like a certain base of historical understanding that I can build on. And I don't know anything about this. So I'm, I'm, I'm fascinated and grateful to you for studying this part of the world for years and years. Yeah. Well, OK, you know, here, let me, let me, let me, uh, let me resuscitate your reputation because there there is something that you do, in fact, know significantly more about than I have. You have been in way more civil wars than I have been in a couple of civil wars. So I'm going to run my, my simple model of the two kinds of civil wars passed to you, and we'll see what you think about it. OK? OK. So on the one hand, you have one kind of civil war where half the country starts fighting the other half, this is like the American Civil War. You very rarely see this. And the other hand, you have civil wars where the whole country fragments into a million pieces and every single one of them starts fighting each other. Yeah. We call that doing Assyria. Yeah. Yeah. Or Yemen or Yemen or a lot of places. It's kind of the modern way of doing civil. Yeah. Yeah. And it's also, it's also what's going to happen in this. Except this war. Like I you know, when I was looking at, when I first looked at the control map, I like my brain shattered. You know, I've never recovered sense and like I, I've never. I've never longed for the simplicity of the Yemeni Civil War before, but this war there are over 1000 warlords in yeah. In the period between 1916 and 1928, they fight 700 different wars. That's that's too many different wars. Like you gotta. If I was in there, what I would say is like, we can cut that down to 203 hundred at the most, like. I feel like, I feel like I could have helped, like, consolidate the wars. What they needed was a consultant, a guy to be like, look, you guys are fighting the same war that these guys are fighting. Let's bundle that into one big war. And then we got less wars to deal with. It's my pitch. That's my pitch to China 150 years ago. Great. I mean, look, I'm. I'm all for it because it makes the history it would make. It have made the history, like, incomprehensibly easier. Like there are there are 20 pages of this script. That's just me trying to explain two different factions taking losing control of Beijing. That have been just there's just not here anymore because it's yeah, this is, this is, this is maybe the messiest conflict ever encountered and we're about to dive into it. Yeah. First it's time for products and services. You know what? Won't fragment China into hundreds of different warring. Quasi state militia. Things. These ads? They will not. They will not. I feel, I feel confident saying none of the people who advertise on our show have the kind of like flex to to destroy the Chinese state and launch a new civil war. Fair enough. Yeah, I I just I don't think *** **** pill guys have that much weight to throw around. We hope not. I really hope. God, God, OK. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. 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Visit betterhelp.com/behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com. Slash behind better helcom behind. Hey, Robert Evans here. It's been like two months since I got LASIK laser eye surgery and my vision is still 2020. So many things about my daily life has changed. I don't have to worry about putting on a mask and my glasses fogging up. I don't have to take out contacts at night or put them in the day. I don't have to like, worry all the time when I'm traveling. Like, how many contacts do I have by go swimming at the lake during the summer? Something I like to do, go to the beach or whatever. I don't have to worry about losing a contact or. You know, bringing swimming glasses or something with me, everything is just easier. And getting it done was easy too. You know. I went in, I had my consultation, they told me I was a good candidate and then I went back in couple of days later about it being about a boom. You know, my eyes were perfect. So LASIK Plus is a leader in laser vision correction in the United States. They have over 20 years in the industry and more than two million treatments performed. If you want to start your LASIK plus journey, you can get $1000 off when treated in September. That's 500 per eye so visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation now. We're back, all right? Let's get going. OK, so before before we fully launch into this for reference purposes, we need to stop and do the briefest, most basic and most halfassed Chinese geography lesson in human history, because this is the point where Chinese geography becomes very important in the story. So we're going to, we're look, we're only going to give you. Two cities. So I think we could do this. So at the very South of China there is Hong Kong. Umm. It's it's it's controlled Hong Kong control by the British. At this point it's it's it's separated basically from the province of Guangzhou, which is very South of China. Shanghai is kind of in the middle of China, NS, which is on the East Coast and then Beijing is further north of that and then the very far north along the border with Korea's Manchuria. And there's, you know, all of the different sort of Willard clicks in this. Because this whole thing is the greatest proof I've ever encountered. The high school never ends. There's a, it's all clicks, B all the clicks form for just incredibly petty reasons, like one of the most powerful clicks. A click that, like, takes Beijing and rules most of China for four years happened because one click of officers thought the other click wasn't promoting them fast enough. And and to make it worse, all of these people are classmates because they all, they all either went to sort of a military couple of military academies either in China or Japan. Yeah. This is like, I mean, this is the same as a lot of European history, to be honest. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's just it's just it's high school with more guns, which is fairly impressive considering how many guns high school guns than an American high school to be. You know, these people have a lot of guns. They too like. It's it's yeah, it's pretty impressive. I was taking a cheap shot. Please, please continue. So it's sort of unclear what Jiang was doing during the sort of revolutionary upheaval in 1911. And this is another thing with John. Every account basically conflicts on what he was doing. But we know for sure is that by 1913 he ended up as a division commander in the army stationed near Shanghai. But in 1913 the Nationalists who are known in the US, The KMT, for reasons that ****** me off to no end. But I will not get in here stage stage of disasters revolt. And after that revolt fails and sort of late 1913, John gets politically sidelined and tell the formal start of the world. Now, another person sidelined after the failed 1913 revolution was the famous nationalist general. And this guy, like my mom, had heard of this guy. And who had not heard of basically anyone else in the story except for the main character. So he's, he's, you know, he's, he's an important figure in in, in the KMT and the sort of nationalist party. He's also an extremely important organized crime guy. And we will get into in the next episode. Why? He's both a KMT general and a crime boss. This man's name. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's a it's a wild story, but. Yeah, for for now. This guy's name is Chen Chi Mai. When when when the nationalist revolt fails, Chen does something that I think bassdrop listeners would recognize immediately. He flees to the early 1900s, China's version of Mexico, which is Japan. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Good, dude. Good, great. Yeah. Solid. Alright. Yeah. Fingerprint Japan just it's Japan is it's it's literally just Mexico now you know, when we just grew up in China and the army comes after you fled to Mexico and what, you flee to Mexico or now you flee to Japan and you know, while you're in Japan you have two choices. You can either just sort of live out your life client quietly or you can plot your triumphant return to China. And the second thing is what China ends up doing in 1916, Chen Sol Sol's opportunity and returns from Japan to Shanghai to start another revolution against the government. And this is where Jiang takes his first real action of the brave new world of warlordism he has China assassinated. Which this this has a number of sort of effects 1 the nationalist at this point just sort of crumple and they're not going to be a real political force for a while in China this. The second important thing is that this is how John gets us in with. A couple of very, very powerful political patrons. The most important person here is this dude named Lupe Fu, who is also known as the Jade Marshall who is. He is universally regarded as the world period's greatest strategist and he he runs one of the Wilder clicks. And, you know, he he rewards Jong for his loyalty and having his national guy assassinated and Chong. Like moves up in the world really quickly, he he briefly becomes the vice president's personal bodyguard. And then, eventually, he he's given a new command in the army of his own random now. Yeah, it's this whole period's politics. It's really weird because. All basically all career advancement has to do with like which click you're able to please. And so you know, if you do something for one click, give you something, if you fail, then they kick you out. It's it's high school. Yeah, it's high school. A bunch of people are dying. Yeah, or more people are dying. I'm like, so, like American high school. Like, Robert. Yeah. Yeah. You should look what I'm getting here. We're all familiar with this. We all we all understand the source material here. Yeah, you know. Unfortunately, these people are incredibly fickle and Chong. Managed to lose his entire army in an incredibly minor sort of border dispute war and this gets him just kicked back into the political wilderness. Do they get killed or do they just kind of like peace out from him? It's unclear. This is one of those things where serious about their 700 wars, right? So most of them this war I can literally the only reference I can find to its existence is that Jiang like lost his army in it, but it's really unclear. What happened? And so there's two stories of it. One of them is that, like, they all died, and then he goes back to Beijing and tries to bribe one of hopeful's allies with just a bunch of these tiny golden lions to get the unit assigned to him. But who finds out about this and kicks him out of the army? And, you know, OK, bribing a superior officer with a bunch of tiny golden lions is like, exactly the kind of thing he would do. But, like, the sourcing is not good because, again, this, this man's life is just this incredible haze of stories there. There's some other sources that say that. So she loses this war, and then his army is absorbed into another warlord army, and then that warlord also subsequently loses a war and collapses. But either way, what we know is that he fleed sort of broke and completely alone back to Manchuria in 1922. OK and OK, this is this is this is the point we have to make another. Brief announcement, which is that there are two completely unrelated dudes in the story named Jiang. This is largely because one of the early Chinese dynasties essentially got ****** ***. The people in villages didn't like they were trying to tax, didn't have last names, and so they just came in and gave everyone last names. And yeah, and they have like 100 of these names. These are called like the old 100 names and they do this so they can get tax records, get better tax records. Now every like everyone in China has the same last name because they just force names on people. Yeah. OK. Those two of the main characters in this, in this are of the same name as what you're telling me. Yeah. So, so there's two big chungs. If I just say Jong, I'm talking about our hero, Chang Chong Chong. Who is the dog beat? Woolard? I OK. The second John is the guy we're going to meet now whose name is Chong Drilling. She's the warlord of Manchuria. If I talk about him, I'll say his full name, or I'll just say his last name so he's no confusion. Unfortunately for all of history and for us trying to get through the story. The the like. Basically, the moment he gets to Manchuria, Jiang decides to try to join Drilling's army. And this is another one of those things. There's a very weird story here. Which is? So his attempt to get into the army seems to be that drilling throws this massive birthday party for himself. Because, you know, so if you're a warlord, right? Like, yeah, you're going to have some pretty wild *** birthday parties for sure. Yeah, yeah, this is what it what is else is the point of being a warlord if you don't know? That doesn't even require explanation, absolutely. Yeah, now, now the weird part about this. So everyone else shows up to it. OK, so we're meeting the warlord, right? You show up to a birthday party with incredibly expensive gifts. John just doesn't show up at all. What he does instead is he sends these two empty Cooley baskets, which are those, like, you know, those baskets that, yeah, that are being cared like a Cooley is like what the British called dudes in India. They would pay to carry **** for him. Yeah. Yeah, baskets. People carry **** in. Yeah, they have like there's like a pole that you hang them off of there. There's a lot of people use them in China. So Chong just like gives him these two empty baskets. And trolling is extremely confused by this because. You know, OK, this guy doesn't show up to my birthday party and then just gives 2 baskets. Yeah, kind of a weird flex for the warlord whose army you want to be in. Yeah, yeah. You know, apparently, though, what what John appears to have been applying and what drilling like, somehow figures out through the powers of deductive reasoning that I don't have and I don't understand. But apparently what John is saying is that the baskets are emptied to to represent that he would shoulder any burden that drilling would give him. Which is weird, but this actually works. That's but that's like a weird like he's doing symbolism ****. OK, yeah, but you know, this works, and Jiang like is given a minor post in the army, which. You know, we'll we'll we'll take it. And really, fortunately for Jiang, a few months later, there's there's there's a revolt in Manchuria, and Jiang is person who puts it down. And for that, he's given a much like a. I don't know. I don't know if field grades like the right term for this, but he's given like a fairly superimposition. Yeah, he gets to choose for motion and this, this, this one decision is going to turn Jiang from a minor military commander into the most feared and despite warlord in all of China. That makes sense. Yeah, and you know this this sucks for the rest of China, but for drilling this is this promotion should not be an incredibly good idea in in 1922, drilling brings John Witham to negotiate with a group of Russian emigres who become trapped in Mongolia. The country gained independence from China in 1921, and we're trying to get out because Mongolia has aligned itself with the USSR. And these Russians were former members of the Pro Rs White Army, which? As as as as as we know from the show had been defeated by the combined efforts of great Hero Pot alum Nestor Machno's Anarchist Black Army and the Bolshevik Red Army in the Russian Civil War. So there's a bunch of these Russian dudes in Mongolia, and because Chang's incredibly fluent in Russian, she's able to just sort of extract them and convince them to convince these people to work for him. And this is where Jiang starts building up the core of what's going to be a very dangerous and incredibly formidable army. He's, he gains about is like 3000 Russian infantry, infantry men who are, you know, they're well trained, but you know, they're sort of infantrymen. The big deal here is that he gets 1000 Russian cavalrymen who armed with lances, your favorite Mauser pistols, and these just enormous **** *** swords become basically just the backbone of John's New Army. Yeah. And these guys are Cossacks, basically, right? I don't, I don't actually think they're Cossacks. II think they're just tabloid then. Yeah, I think, I think it's just regular Russian Calvary, which is, you know. Still just absolutely terrifying. Like, yeah, like, these people just fought through the Russian Civil War, which is, like, one of the worst wars in history. Yeah. They've been they survived dying. Yeah. And they're just, yeah. They're just a bunch of, like, broken, dangerous monsters and every everyone, everyone in China is terrified of them. And all the accounts are, like, kind of racist about it. But it's like, yeah, like, OK, if you were confronted with the group of people who, like, have been killing continuously for, like, 10 years now and, like, who probably read the protocols of the Elders Zion to their children as bedtime stories. I too would be afraid. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, no, that they sound terrifying. I'm certain they were. They probably have a couple of ethnic cleansings under their belt by the time they get to China. Now the White Russians also importantly bring another piece of technology from the Russian Civil War armored trains. Oh hell yeah. Yeah. There's a good under train stuff here. There is not a *** **** thing I love more in the world than a good armored train story. Yeah, there's there's some sadly I can't get into full thing, but there's one of these trains. Is absolutely wild. Like, one of these trains was like a train that the Czech Legion had taken to like, flee to. They'd like taken it across half of Russia to like flee and it ends up in the hands of the Japanese and then John gets a hold of it here and then. He starts incorporating into his army, and this is also great because so the the Chinese ruler. This is like the other great armored train war than the Russian Civil War. Now these trains, these trains are and they they perform extremely well in this war, which is sort of weird because normally they don't perform that great because they have this problem where like. OK, so if you just cut the tracks. In front of them, they're kind of useless, but that is the downside of trains. Yeah, but you know, when they don't do this, you get essentially is a troop transport, a tank and artillery battery roll up into one. And. This combined with the Russian cavalry makes Chang's army incredibly fast and this speed gives them like just a really deadly edge against a sort of slower and worse trained warlord armies that are going to sort of serve John well in the upcoming war. Now, OK, we've talked about the Russian cavalry. We've talked about the armored trains. So I think it's time we induced we introduced Chang's third secret weapon, the baby squads. OK, all right. I'm I'm, I'm excited to hear about this. Yeah. So the baby squads are Jiang Special Army of Child soldiers. Who are commanded by his son, who is also a child. Now when we say child, are we talking like Garrison child or are we talking like child, *** child, you know? So the estimates vary on this. They they seem to have been in their early teens. OK, OK. Like 1415, well, like 11. OK. Yeah, it's it's, you know, but you know, it's interesting. Yeah. I mean some of them are child, child, some of them are like older tweens. Yeah. And you know what's interesting about them though is so they they get their own, like incredibly fancy uniforms and they get trained with these. Jeong has custom made German rifles that can be handled by children like imported like he, he he breaks a weapons embargo to get these custom made German rifles that children can use. I mean, you know, you know what I always say, if you're going to arm children, you got to go with German guns. Nobody knows arming small children and sending them into war like the Germans, you know, that's just, that's just historical fact. You have historical speak experience combined with quality craftsmanship. I mean, they just got through a war that with where they participated in a battle called the slaughter of the innocents because they sent so many children off to die. You know, I I they're the right people to go to for child rifles is what I'm saying. Yeah. You know, it's a good choice and and you know, I OK so interestingly. So as far as I can tell, the baby score just sort of like a pet project that John gives to his like teenage son. But they're, you know, by all accounts they're extremely well paid and well fed, which makes them one of like 3 units and John's entire army that is like paid on time and fed. So, you know, to be fair to strong also, every, like literally every faction in this war is also using child soldiers. And it's notable that Jiang spends like a huge amount of effort trying to, like, kick people out of his army. Who he doesn't think are fit to fight. So, like in 1925 he he kicks like 30,000 troops out of his army for either being bandits, bad soldiers, like being too old or too young. Yeah, that is. That's a lot of. That that's OK yeah. Well, this is another thing. These armies, the world armies are massive, like, and and, you know, they and they kind of swell dreaming when battles were happening as sort of this, like mass conscription. They, like, recruit bandit groups. But like, I mean, there are battles in this war where there's, there's, there are single battles with 400,000 troops like, this is. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, but somehow the baby squads never get cut up in this downsizing and so they they seem to have been there until the end of the war, which. You know, All in all, it's not the worst use of child soldiers I've ever seen, but it's also not the best. So. Chang Chong Chong, mid level child soldier user. Yeah. OK, that seems good. I mean, you know, look, look, it's we've always said on this show, using children to fight wars for you is as much an art as it is a science. You know, and it sounds like he was pretty good at the science part, but maybe he could have been a little bit more artful in his use of minors as as death troopers for sure. Yeah. Nobody's perfect poddies nerfed, you know? You know, it's it's Speaking of that though, right? Like we're we're going to get here's something. All right, we're I'm going to attempt to redeem Jeong after his child soldier army. So this is also the point in the story when Chang's mother reappears. And it's not clear if they'd like found each other. Sometime in between like. When? When when she was sold off for grain and when he joined the army. But by 1922, they've reunited and Jiang just like. He he like loves his mom, like they they they literally travel everywhere together. Like every time he goes out to the field, she's on the train. She just like lavishes her with gifts and meals and attention and. You know, and she, she lives out the rest of her life in luxury. So, you know, good for her. She deserves it. It's take care of your Mama for sure. Yeah, yeah. It's just kind of a shame how we're sun turned out? I mean, look, you know, you you don't you don't make a happy mom omelet without breaking a couple of other people's children eggs. Yeah, yeah. And really, what are other people's children but fodder for the baby squads? Well, I mean the the benefit of using children as your soldiers is that it's very easy to make more children. Yeah. People have been doing it for forever. Yeah. It's it's it's it's like cutting down trees when they're when they're young. Yeah. Just plant more trees. Yeah. That's why we have so many trees. Yeah. So so in 1924 a war starts between Ufu and his click which is based out of Beijing and Chong shillings click which is based out of Manchuria. And this begins a massive series of setpiece battles on what is the greatest set piece on Earth, the Great Wall of China. And this whole war is fought along like this is the famous part of the Great Wall like this is this is this is the part you've all seen pictures of it. It's the part that was built by the Ming dynasty to keep the Manchus contained in Manchuria. You know, and and this means that in order to get from Beijing dementia and Chang Chong is in Manchuria attempting to invade Beijing, you have to go through one of these sort of very small number of heavily guarded passes and it's these passes at the Great Wall of China was sort of built to fortify. So each of their armies sort of mass and their respective side of the Great Wall, and they try to prepare to force away the fight. The sort of forced away the passes. Now while everyone else was fighting this just like incredibly bloody pointless stalemate at one of the largest passes, John moves up to attack another smaller pass, hoping to sort of flank Woofus army. And Chong immediately realizes the pass is way under defended and just stormed his way through. But realizing that he was just sort of alone on Whoopee Foo side of the mountain, he said he sits in the entrance and he waits for his chance to strike. And that chance is going to come after what I can only describe as an absolute clown **** from one of hope. Food subordinates cost him everything. So another very crucial mountain pass. Is held by. The worst commander in UFO's army. This is a guy? Yeah, this is a guy who? He's a general. But he's been given a general just like because his brother is the president. Now, whose assumption is that this past? It is literally impossible to group defending the defending it because it's narrow and there's an artillery unit. And so we'll put your unit there assuming that, OK, if anyone comes to the past, you both with artillery. And who's, who looks at this guy is like, OK, so we need to keep him out of the fighting because you put him anywhere where he can command troops, he's gonna screw everything up. So we're going to put him in this pass. It'll be fine. You can't possibly not not hold it. This would become the single greatest mistake of RuPaul's entire career. His quote UN quote general, and I'm using this term incredibly loosely, develops this like incredibly elaborate scheme where he's going to send his troops through the past to lure the enemy army back through it so that he can shell the enemy army after learning the minute, you know, this is like if you study any military history at all, it's like, OK, this plan is incredibly, incredibly convoluted. There's no way it's going to work. What happens instead is that. We'll pay for his generals troops. OK, so they go out and they retreat back into the past. But this guy mistakes his troops for the enemy and kills them all with his own artillery. Excellent solid general ****. Yeah yeah yeah. Great stuff. And the the guy in the other on the other side of the pass. The commander on the side of the pass is Guy named Han and Han watches his opponent blows up, blowing up his entire army, rips his shirt off and just like charges into the past, bare chested into the passes minefield. Now. Between 4:00 and 5000 of Hans troops die in this attack, but by what I can only describe as just an actual act of God's hand, just like survives this. And, you know, this is he disappears into the fabric of history, having won a war by just doing a parody of dudes rock by charging shirtless into a minefield. Yeah, he just ******* Leroy Jenkins. His way to victory. Absolutely incredible. And what happens next? So, so Whoopi Fu hears about this charge and is like, OK, this morons charging through the past. It's fine. We have the artillery unit there. What he doesn't know is that the artillery has used all of their ammo showing their own troops. So Hans troops take the pass and the rest of John Julie's army just floods to the Great Wall. And it's at this moment where Puppey Fu is betrayed by one of his subordinates and everything falls apart. And so we'll be food makes. He makes one last desperate attempt to sort of like regroup. And for for a very brief moment, it looks like this is going to work. But unfortunately for him, Chung Chung Chung sees his, sees his chance. He's been sitting on their side this past for the whole battle. He sees his chance and he makes it he he launches an attack that splits open food remaining army in half and with just a single attack and Superfuzz career. Or, you know, OK, so this is what you would think would happen in a normal war, when you lose your entire army, all of your territory, and all of your political support collapses. However, welcome to the warlord. Where the rules are made-up, the points don't matter, and whoopee fu somehow, after literally losing everything, will be back in Part 2. God, this whole war? Hell yeah. Why not? Look, I I don't believe in this cancel culture ********. So, look, if I I feel like as a warlord, you're not really getting good until you've lost two or three armies, right? Just you gotta you gotta. You gotta yeah, it's it's it's it's like riding a bike, right? You're gonna fall a couple of times, you're going to lose a couple of armies, you're going to get 10s of thousands of people killed. Like that's just, you know, there's no avoiding it. Yeah, and you know the the product of this is that if you look at the full history of this. Like it is basically a comic book plot. Like there there are dozens of characters who lose everything and then reappear and lose everything because just no one, no one ever dies until you see a body. And even then, like, yeah, it's like a Marvel movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's incredible, except it's somehow less coherent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's one of those things. The lesson here about all these guys who lose everything repeatedly and keep coming back to lose more things and then some cases eventually win, is that what determines winners and losers in history is that the the winners lose just as often as the losers, but they have no shame about it. It's true. And you got to keep that in mind. So never ask about how your actions affect other people. Use them as tools and walk into the pages of history like this guy. Yeah. And the other really important thing here? Betray your allies at the first opportunity. Oh yeah, that goes people. All the people who do well on this war immediately betray all of their friends. And they get they get rewarded for it. Betray their friends. I will, Sophie, because as soon as the dogs in your house barked, I threw you under the bus. 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Chong makes out like a bandit from this war, so in he is a bandit. Oh yeah, I mean, she, she she she is now the Supreme Bandit, which is really what being a warlord is. You know, she, she tries to take Shanghai as sort of late 1924, but another warlord gets there first. And they do this really awkward dance, or both of them occupy parts of the city. And everyone in Shanghai is like, oh God, they're gonna fight a battle here. Please go fight somewhere else. Don't destroy our freshest city. And so eventually, like, and this winds up involving a bunch of foreign governments, and there's this huge set of negotiations and eventually the the, the two warlords work out an agreement where they're both going to pull out of the city. Now the other warlord abides by the agreement, pulls his army out. Jong just doesn't leave. She just stays there and occupies the city. And you know, so several months in the 1925 he finally gets an order to leave Shanghai. But. He's only he's only sort of. Convinced to leave the city after he's given full control of his home problem with Shandong, as well as the really, frankly delightful title that we should bring back. Bandit extermination, commander? Hell yeah, I like it. Yeah, he gets that for like a couple other provinces and and and it's it's in this moment as he as he sort of takes Shanghai and is given control of his home province of Shandong. That he really becomes the dogmeat general. Now, Chong was never like, the best dude, even before he was given absolute power over an entire province and an enormous **** *** army. I mean, you know, to to repurpose the old anti Nixon song. Power corrupts. We know that by heart. But you have to admit, Jiang had a head start. And all right, just just the moment. She takes real power. She goes wild. And one of the immediate products of this is he just starts collecting just this unbelievable pile of nicknames. His most famous is corojo Anjing, or the Dogmeat General, a title he gains because of his reputation for playing a Chinese gambling game. It's like domino based and for some indescribable reason, people in Manchuria call this game eating dog meat. I don't know why this is. Like, the best I could come up with is that one of the words kind of sounds like dog. Who knows? Now, confusingly, I've also seen claims that he did actually eat dog meat because he thought it would make him more virile. But good dogs do **** a lot for sure. Yeah, but you know, the sourcing on this is not great and and it's it has no relation to why he's called the dog meat general. So I don't make it clear he's called the dog made general because this dude, he spends so much time gambling, like half the descriptions of him. That you read are just like from some diplomat or from like some high society person just ran into him at a gambling den. Now I'm just going to read out his list of the rest of his nicknames because, like Lord Almighty, this dude has more nicknames than any other person I've ever heard of. OK, use nicknames. The tiger, big tongue, blue sky, the dragon bearded bandit tongue. We we got a yeah, we have to take a second here. Why? Why? Why? Big time. Half of these? I have no idea. OK, like it it's really weird. He just every source has like a different thing of nicknames. Yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll we'll explain some of them. He yeah, he has the dragon. I think the dragon is because he has this like the. The I don't know. He has some sort of complicated relationship to the Dragon Emperor that we're who's a mythological figure we're gonna get to in a little bit. He's called the red start that, start that list again. The tiger, big tongue, blue sky, the dragon. The red bearded bandits, the monster, the linky. Linky, general, the three doesn't knows. Warlord 72, Cannon Jeong, the general with three long legs, old 86, and the long leg in general. Yeah, OK, we're going to get that part in a second, but so his second most sounds like he *****. From those nicknames, it sounds like he *****. Yeah, OK. You know, we'll we'll, we'll we'll we'll do this. OK so. Old 86. That one. Yeah, so you, as you've gathered, three of these are the last three. These ones are just about as **** old. 86 is the most interesting one because supposedly it's because *** **** is as long as a stack of 86 Mexican silver pesos. That's amazing now because that that just brings up so many questions because we're again in China. So why is the peso anyone's go to for the size of the sky? So, so Mexican silver pesos have long been used in hard currency, and China dating back to the 1500s when the Mings insatiable demand for silver formed the base of the Ming currency system that results in them. Importing a huge amount of the silver that's removed from Spanish controlled mines in Latin America. So yeah, being dynasty, they do great things for quality of life. Are also kind of responsible for all the genocides in Latin America. Not great. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, to be fair, they didn't know where it was coming from, but yeah, they just needed to measure people's *****. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, as sort of various currencies collapse in the world. People keep using Mexican silver like pesos as coins are just worth their weight in silver. I'm. I'm just I'm still, I'm I'm still working through in my head the wow, the boss has a **** ****. Hey, get some of that silver. I wanna I wanna I want to figure out exactly how **** **** shakes out in pesos. So so one of my one of my friends who has experience with Mexican coins from this. Calculated that 86 pesos stack on top of each other means that this dude **** is 8.8 inches long. OK, that's that's believable. Yeah. And, you know, this is this is the kind of thing that, like, you'd expect. OK. This is like the kind of mythmaking you'd expect to get from warlords, but like. Stunningly, this, like, seems to be true. Yeah, I mean, 88.6 inches, if we're, if he was like, yeah, he's got like a 1415 **** ****. I'd be like, OK, well, this sounds like some some Rasputin nonsense, but 8.6 is like, yeah, it's pretty good sized ****. But that's not like we're not talking outside of the realm of possibility here, especially for a dude as big as this. Like, 8.6 inches for a near 7 feet is just kind of like. Yeah, that sounds like sounds about right. Yeah. And he, you know as as as as you guess this dude just ***** all the time. I yes, I I had gathered that from his nicknames. I'm pretty sure the tongue one is about ******* too. Yeah, I think so. There's another one that's like famous, which is about. The three doesn't nose general. Which is because so so his his most famous quote is that he doesn't know how many, he doesn't know how many troops he has, he doesn't know how much money he has, and he doesn't know how many women having sex with at any given moment. This is the most warlord **** ever. I mean, you're not making being a warlord sound like a bad gig. Yeah, you know, and and this, this this seems like as good a time as any to mention that this is the period where Jiang starts traveling around with special train cars for his 42 concubines, the names of which he just didn't know and thus referred to by assigned number lines. Yeah, yeah, you're a warlord. I don't expect you to know anyone's name. Yeah, you know, you know, so, so, contrary to Jean, I spent a pretty good amount of time trying to figure out who these women were. And there's that is nice. There's just, like a really depressing lack of interest in these women's lives, just like across the whole academic literature. What I was able to find out about them was that half of them are Russians who came with the White Army and the rest of them are just sort of Chinese, Japanese or American. But we don't really know how Jiang that's got his hands on them. These are a lot of foreign. Yeah. And that's like one of the big things that all of the sort of, like, media people pick up on is like, wow, he has, like, white prostitutes. And it's like, OK Oh yeah, I'm sure that makes the news back in New York. Yeah. Yeah. Now, it's possible that some of these people have been sex workers in Shanghai. But it's also possible that. Chang's troops and the White Russians do this literally all the time. I just literally grab them off the street at random because, you know, if if, if there's this, we're starting to get the downside of the boiler. Which is that like. Yeah. So if you're like a woman, like a woman in the street of China, someone can just, like, grab you off the street and your concubine now. But you know, what I think is really depressing about this is like. Like, we don't know what their relationship to him was. All of the sources they don't even agree as to like. Like half of the sources call them concubines and half of them call them wives. And like, we don't know if they're against their will, we don't know if they're getting paid. We just we don't know anything about them. And it's extremely frustrating, especially because. Chung appears to have had kids with some of these women, but we don't know what happened to them. We don't know happened to the women. We don't have to the kids. And, you know, and there's a lot of other very weird stuff here. I I saw some evidence that some of the dudes that. John was sleeping with men, which implies that, like, he's by. But again, this is one of those things. Also, when you're that kind of powerful person, it's almost less about sexuality and more about just like power. Like, you just **** people because they can't not **** you because you're the warlord. I think that is. Some of these dudes like. It it's almost not worth kind of trying to box them into a sexual category. It's kind of like how rape is less about sex than about power. For this kind of person who power is everything for, it's just like he can he just *****. Yeah, and there's a sort of interesting consequence of this, which is that like. If you look at like Jung's life, he kind of just turns into this, just like. Like, physical embodiment of structural forces is like, OK, so like, what is the patriarchy, right? It's like, well, here is this dude whose whole thing is that he's like, he literally physically reduces women to numbers. And you, you you get this with sort of in in various different ways with like state violence, like the banking system, where like a lot of what Jiang sort of reveals is that it's just all of these systems are just a dude with a lot of guns. And yeah, yeah, you know, if you just give me like. We're watching **** go down in Gaza right now. Yeah, all of the systems today are still just dudes with guns. Yes, we dress it up more and less. Yeah, really, the only difference between the is is the amount of legitimacy you have. And. Yeah, you know, this legitimacy problem is like, this is a big thing for all of the warlords, and Chong just doesn't try to solve it, which is what makes them unique. Everyone else is doing this like, oh, I do, I plant gardens, I do public works, and just like, Nah, I'm just going to have fun. Now, OK, yeah, yeah. The consequence of this though is while while John's like jet setting around with a train full of like maybe sex slaves, what's happening in Shandong the province just been had to control over is. Oh boy. So some of it is pretty funny. Like, so when when he leaves his office every day when he's in Shandong, he he has like, all the streets cleared and then he has a bunch of people like sprinkle clean water on the road to prepare, prepare, like prepare for him to walk on, which is just like this is some great petty dictatorship like you. Also, you know, he does a thing a lot of your kids do, which is he starts issuing his own paper currency. Hell yeah. Hell yeah, as his face on it. What? So this is I I couldn't find much about it because and the reason is for this is she just gets bored of it and stops printing it. And then after that she starts making everyone use military steps as money. Man. I, you know, I'm on board with 80% of this guy. Everything but the probable rape. Really? Yeah. You know, and I think this is this is, this is what puts him like the fact that he's not using his own currency, that he's using military stamps. This is like what puts him like a tier above the rest of the World Lords because the rest of the world is like a. Whatever, I'll print my own money. But John's like, OK, so these stamps are made in Manchuria, which means I don't have to pay for them, I just get set them so. So if I use these stamps as money, I don't have to like spend the money to like, make your own fake paper currency. Hey, look, you don't you don't get an army, lose an army and then get another army and then lose another army and then get another army. Unless you're pragmatic, yeah. And, you know, and we, we can, we can see some examples of pragmatism. So there's, there's a famous story of like at one point a merchant. It's just like, these are stamps. This is not money. So Jong has to do taken out of his shop, beaten and shot. Which, you know, funnily enough, this is how states forced originally forced people to use money. And it like worked because, yeah, yeah, it's like money money. Money is the thing that like when when the state asked you for it, you have to give them like like, give it to them. Yep, and he also. So the other thing he starts doing in this. Is he starts. Going to banks and just like pulling out guns and telling them to give them loans. Which, yeah, that's I mean. I look. I am currently in the process of wanting to buy a house, but a lifetime of **** credit is making that difficult and I might do the same thing. That seems like a pretty good idea, to be honest. This is one of his best ideas and it's great because I will pay the loan, but I am going to get it at gunpoint. This ******* credit. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And the only the other funny part about this, so there's like a bunch of banks in Shandong that have been open for like like, like a lot like a couple 100 years and he drives like six of them out of business. Because he's just like takes all of their money and loans. Well, unfortunately now we have to come to the really bad stuff. Oh yeah, yeah. We've been having fun, but oh boy, I hate it when people do this to me because I normally do this to people. Yeah, it only took us like 14 pages. Yeah. So one of the most famous accounts of what's happening in changing this Shandong from this. Comes from a guy named Joseph Stilwell, who, OK, I need to mention at the outset, Stillwell. Enormous racist, huge ***** ** ****. He's a white guy in China in this. Yeah, yeah, you know, you're naturally did tell me. But like, naturally, because he's incredibly racist and ***** ** **** she goes on to be an incredibly important American general in World War Two who fights in the, like, the China and India Theater. So that's great. He's like still beloved. In the US for reasons. But you know, his accounts, his account of it, like matches with other stuff I've seen, so I'd start with that. So stillwells their skills in Shandong in 1927. And what he describes is this. Huge swaths of the population, made homeless by war, huddling together desperately in pack city streets without even a tent, shelter them at night. Bodies begin to pile up on the streets, but there's no one to take them away, and the corpses stayed where they fell as famine ravaged the province. Chung, solution, if it could be called that, to this problem of famine is industrial waste. O one of Manchuria's chief exports in this. Where soybean cakes, which is, it's basically like it's a bunch of mass of soybean that's been smushed together. And I want to say at the outset, so when I call these cakes, right, these are cakes in the sense that like cakes of uranium or cakes like, they're not food. This is an industrial product and you know what you do with them, with them is that. You, you know you you shipped, you shifted the somewhere else and then you squeezed the oil out of them. And that that oil is used to make like it's using an like a number of like important industrial processes and what would at least behind is this even worse like quote UN quote cake. That's waste material. People use it as fertilizer sometimes use it to feed pigs. And this is what Jiang starts to import from Manchuria and used to feed the refugees. Yeah, we did. Like, I need to reiterate this. This is not food. This is an industrial waste product. It's edible in the sense that it will fill your stomach and temporarily stop hunger pangs without actually providing you with nutrition. And it might just poison you because again, like, these things are being just taken from a factory, right? Like, you know, this is this is what's happening to the people that he's trying to help. The people that he's not trying to help. So I I think that the best way to sort of. Understands how brutal his army is in this. Is that? Everywhere his army goes, it starts to change the league, the language of the provinces, because every time they find a new way to murder someone, it gets popular, like people have to come up with a new term for it. So, for example, one of the things in the beginning of this is there's an expression that becomes popular called to cut apart, to catch the light. Which means like taking a skull, splitting it in two, and like exposing the insides of it to the sun. OK, yeah. And, you know, The thing is like that that that, you know, you, you, you split, you split enough skulls, it's like, OK, whatever. And so the troops get bored. And when they got with that, they come with another one, which is they would split schools in half, like fully clean in half. And then they they'd find a telephone pole that's like connected by a wire trailer telephone pole. And they'd hang the skulls on each end of the telephone pole at opposite ends of the wire with their ears like press up to the things that look like they were listening to the telephone. And this becomes so widespread. The phrase he'd been made to listen to the telephone becomes like another popular expression in the province. Jesus, that's dark horse. Yeah. It's, you know, this whole reign of terror became known as the steel sword policy after John's policy of just decapitating his political opponents and splitting their heads with swords. And when I say that, one's pretty straightforward. But, you know, when I say this is his policy, right? I mean, he is literally, personally doing this. Like, he is the guy holding the sword, chopping people, skulls open. Yeah. He's a man of action. Yeah. Yeah. And you know when, when you when you're when you're 6 foot. Having you have a bunch of really sharp swords, like, yeah, you can. I mean again, he's making a lot of calls I too would make in his situation. Yeah. And there's, you know, there's, there's, I I think I think you will also appreciate this one as a member of the press. So very early on, when he first started takes power, one of the earliest instances they said the steel sword policies. There's an editor of a newspaper who, like, publishes an article criticizing him. And that's not a good idea. Yeah. Yeah. So Jiang has the newspaper editor dragged out of his office and shot in the street. And then, like, you know, after that, all the newspapers sort of stopped criticizing him. Now, I should mention this, what John and his men are doing here. Is not just random violence. Chong has the same legitimacy, legitimacy problem that every other warlord does, and his solution to it, essentially, is to cut the Gordian knot and kill anyone who opposes him in ways so public and so violent that no one would ever dare to do it again. OK, and this has a devastating effect on the population in Shandong. The effects of constant warfare, bandits, droughts and locusts combined with the sheer brutality of John's extraction of wealth to leave 4 to 9 million people like including my family by the way, who are in this province in the period on the brink of starvation, which luckily that parts not red. You know what? Yeah. But, you know, was to have a family connection to a story. Yeah, yeah, I discovered it in the middle. And, like, we have some records from that. And I was like, I'm not going to read these, like, I'm just not. Yeah, it seems like it would be pretty good. Yeah, yeah. And so while while the mass is 8 fertilizer to stay alive, Jong was partying with an endless succession of local sycophants who laughed at his every word for a chance to turn a chunk of his favor into a chunk of his stolen wealth. He was gambling ******* constantly. Just completely wasted. Literally all the time. Like driving around with this like person personalized Belgian dining set and this personalized train with a bunch of women taken from like who knows where he's having the absolute time of his life. Yeah, and that that's the image I'm going to leave you with today, Chang Chong Chung living out as wild as in the kings. Yeah, while the people of China died in droves around him. And in Part 2, we're going to see what happens when an increasingly out of touch ruling class leaves people to die in Buddhism in the streets when they protest, because in Part 2, those ordinary people are going to start to fight back. Well. That's your foot, Robert. I was off the Internet for a while. Look. Well Chris, this has been a great episode. Umm, I'm still more on this guy's side than not because I love me a warlord and it sounds like he's doing he's doing the right thing, right. He's he's living it up, committing horrible crimes against humanity, drunk off his ***. Just just just being a being a king about it. So I don't know. I'm excited to see where this guy goes. Yep, and do you have any plug cables to plug? Yeah, so I guess I'm I'm it me Chr 3 or the essence be destroyed dude on Twitter. Umm. Yeah, I have a sub stack called. With the long 21st century, which I I I swear I do occasionally post to it, and I'm also not a turf. Yeah. Great, great. All right, well, we will be back with more of this guy. And more. A horrible war crimes, I'm gonna guess. More horrible war crimes, Chris. Yeah. If anything, they get worse. Yeah, well, check in for that. And remember, if you're gonna be a warlord, you kinda gotta go all the way. Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of her eye just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then, after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioural discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Life on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.